Ringing false

I have now seen Peter Jackson's Return of the King, and cannot complain. Extremely well done indeed. The battles in particular were astounding, and Legolas's attack on the elephant in itself worth the price of admission. That the near-final scene at the Grey Havens was all bathetic tweeness is a minor quibble. Shelob was a more serious disappointment. Everyone went on about how very realistic she was. They need to look more closely. Really now - a spider with two pairs of chelicerae? And a stinger?! And, though Frodo distinctly said her webbing was 'sticky', it sure had the look of cribellate silk to me (indeed, Shelob did have a generally amaurobiid appearance to her). Still and all, these are small defects when measured against the whole of the film.

And now, having conceded Jackson's work the praise it deserves, can we all agree that its source, Tolkien's trilogy, is really an astounding great steaming pile of shite? It's ill-written and far too long; Tolkien wanted a firm editor smacking his head every second paragraph. And it is, of course, a deeply conservative work, with all the hypocrisy and intellectual dishonesty that implies. But most fundamentally, it's a complete nonsense. Pompous warriors and insufferable elves and of course the deeply annoying hobbits themselves, all cut out of cardboard with the same dull scissors, all tremendously oppressed by Doom and Destiny, and all over a bloody magic ring. Everybody says that Gollum is the most interesting, really the only interesting character in the tale. And they're right, but they fail to recognise that this is a grave indictment.

Would only that Tolkien had kept to scholarly editions of sagas and Arthurian romances and the like, and never written the thing. It would have been vastly preferable had Jackson's film sprung, unsourced, from his own imagination. Think of it: not only would there have been no LotR books, but also none of their Ralph Bakshiisations, none of that whole puerile and contemptible genre of 'fantasy' novels, no Dungeons and Dragons. Tolkien has a lot to answer for.

UPDATE: Unlike me, Kevin Drum actually likes the swords-and-sorcerers genre, yet agrees with me that Tolkien is an old bore. Ha!