"The world is changed. I feel it in the water. I feel it in the earth. I smell it in the air."
On the twentieth anniversary of Peter Jackson's The Fellowship of the Ring
For me, it will always be the voice — ancient, sorrowful, steeped in memory — that I remember best. Galadriel’s voice. It was the moment I knew everything would change.
The world — my world — would never be the same. The Lady of the Golden Wood had spoken; her spell was cast. We were all bewitched.
Of course, it wasn’t really Galadriel’s voice. Galadriel is a character in a story. A fiction. The real voice was Cate Blanchett’s, at the time a moderately-known Australian actor. But in that moment — in the opening frames of Peter Jackson’s The Fellowship of the Ring — Blanchett was merely the vessel for some other power. She and the real world and the Hollywood movie all melted away, and we felt ourselves in Middle-Earth, in the realm of the Eldar and the Maiar and the era of the Second Age.
It was an incredible moment. All the hopes I had for this film were realized; all the fears dissipated. As the prologue continued, I became more and more confirmed in my hope: this was, at last, The Lord of the Rings realized on film. This was everything I had waited for. Nothing that could happen in those next three hours could take this moment from me. My favorite book was being realized before my eyes as a larger-than-life cinematic event.
I was glad my college professor at the time had cancelled our exam that afternoon so we could all get home to see Fellowship. She had said as much: “Let’s just end with the term paper you turned in earlier this week and skip the exam. I’m sure we all have something better to do…” She had a glint in her eye. We cheered. What else could be expected from the students in a Celtic and Nordic Mythology class?
It was the start of the promised Golden Age. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone had come out a few weeks earlier. Fellowship, of course, was the main event. When these two movies came out, it really felt like a sea change: fantasy was now cool. For a girl who grew up in the 1980s and early ‘90s — self-conscious and embarrassed by her love of fantasy and science fiction — witnessing the moment when fantasy movies claimed legitimacy with wider audiences was like coming out of the shadows and into the light.
It helped that The Fellowship of the Ring was a cinematic triumph. Though I might quibble here and there with some of the filmmakers’ storytelling choices, as a fantasy film, it is a work of genius. It managed to adapt almost every epic and enchanting moment from the book and make not only a faithful rendition of Tolkien’s novel but also a great movie. And it was a fantasy movie. Jackson and his crew kept all of the magic, all of the wonder, all of the earnestness of the story: they took Tolkien’s novels seriously. Richard Taylor — supervisor of WETA Workshop, the artists responsible for costumes, props, and sets of the film — told his artisans to think of the film as historical: they weren’t making swords and armor and costumes for a fantasy world but for a long-ago historical reality. This dedication to the realness of Middle-Earth meant that the Lord of the Rings films didn’t descend into chintzy goofiness or tongue-in-cheek ironic winking. It’s this earnestness, this reverence for the spirit of the books, that makes the films so special. They aren’t slavish adaptations (like, unfortunately, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone often is); they are movies. They translate Tolkien’s prose into visual, theatrical storytelling.
And they get the tone right. They get the themes right. They get the experience of what it’s like to imagine oneself wandering the hills of the Shire perfectly right. They get the essence of the books right.
Because even though the film starts with Galadriel and the wars of the Second Age, it ends with Frodo and Sam — with their friendship and loyalty and love — and the simple hearts of two hobbits.
Twenty years ago, I sat in a darkened theater at midnight and watched The Fellowship of the Ring for the first time. It changed my life. I had been studying screenwriting and film-making at the time — as a sophomore in college — and I always knew I wanted to be a writer. But seeing Fellowship that chilly December night, being transported to Middle-Earth again as if for the first time, I found myself recommitted to writing fantasy, to joining my story and my song to that of Tolkien’s, and now to Jackson’s, and to the realm of everything I had ever loved since I was a child.
Twenty years later, so much in my life has changed. I’m married, I’m a mother, I’m an author. I write fantasy in the hopes that such stories can recover for us a sense of wonder about the world, a sense of magic. The world was in turmoil in December 2001, and it’s in turmoil again now. Twenty years on, we still need The Fellowship of the Ring. We still need friendship and loyalty and love.
Great art renews the spirit. It refreshes the soul. It inspires and enlivens. The Fellowship of the Ring — even two decades later — is great art, and I’m glad we can still celebrate its beauty.
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