Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings at 20
The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter need no introduction. Two of the most genre-defining works of literature turned into two of the most successful film franchises of all time with sequels, prequels, spin-offs, merchandise, set tours a-plenty, full-on courses in the languages and lore of the magical worlds, it’s hard to deny the impact of the two series.
The furore that surrounded J.K. Rowling’s public declaration of what she called “sex essentialism” and what the rest of us call transphobia led a lot of people to take a more critical eye to Rowling’s wizarding world. Her representation of LGBTQ+ characters, her characterisation of goblins and house elves with heavy overtones of racist stereotypes, her decision to name the only Chinese character “Cho Chang” and the only Jewish character “Anthony Goldstein”… It’s not exactly a glowing report. In fact, the more critically we look at Rowling’s work, the less comfortable a lot of us are with calling ourselves true “fans” of it.
But Harry Potter and the entire world was viscerally important to generations of children. As a bookish, anxious schoolgirl, with bushy brown hair and a maxed-out library card, I saw in Hermione Granger an idol. Hermione gave girls, particularly nerdy girls, permission to be unashamedly clever and proof that they were as complex and fanciable (vitally important age 12) as everyone else.
In the world of Tolkien, it’s not hard to identify some of the more, shall we say, problematic elements. The Orcs and Easterlings are variously described as swarthy and dark-skinned, with slits for eyes, and a brutish, animalistic nature that is inherent to their races. Elves, the functional ruling class of Middle Earth, in contrast, are pale and elegant. It’s easy to conclude that this shows that Tolkien’s beliefs lay somewhere between Victorian theories of anthropology (physique and mental qualities were intertwined) and straight-up racism, where the intelligent white race were naturally superior over the animalistic dark-skinned race. And that’s before we even mention the staggering lack of women doing literally anything apart from falling in love and looking sad in the original texts. Tolkien’s world was remarkable, but it is undeniably a product of its time, and the attitudes of the author himself.
But, again, Tolkien’s works are genre-defining and have had an immeasurable impact on individual readers. Almost every high-fantasy work since LotR shows the influence of Tolkien somewhere along the way. Tolkien is read at weddings, at funerals, his words are stamped on jewellery and tattooed on every conceivable body part. In much the same way as Dumbledore’s words transcend the messiness of “oh he’s gay, he just never acted on it or revealed it in any way”, Tolkien’s prose is powerful as a standalone as much as it is in context.
So how do we reconcile the fact that something we collectively consumed, maybe even loved, maybe even relied on as we grew up, is bad actually? In his 1967 essay, “Death of the Author” (original French, La mort de l'auteur), Roland Barthes argues that the author doesn’t have the most input into the meaning and interpretation of their works. The curtains, Barthes said, in a blow that disappointed English teachers the world over, might just be blue because the author liked blue.
This is a kind of poststructuralism, where things (like books and films) are separated from the context (structures) in which they were produced. Tolkien, for example, rejected any attempts to find allegory between his horror of war stories and his experiences in the First World War, namely at the infamously bloody Battle of the Somme. But as a reader/viewer, it’s hard not to see parallels between Tolkien losing his brothers in arms and the tears shed by Aragorn over Boromir’s body. Applied to Rowling’s work, the death of the author paradigm would mean that there is no deeper meaning behind enslaved house elves happily serving their masters or the prejudice against mixed-race wizards.
So when we put a literal adaptation of the author’s work into the mix, what happens? How closely can we link the authors themselves with the films based on their works? Can we really draw a direct connection between a film adapted, directed, acted and produced by an entire team who were Not The Author years or even decades after the original books were published and the author’s original intentions?
Part of the answer comes down to the author’s own presence in the adaptations of their work, and the circumstances of production. Some of the best book-to-film/TV adaptations in my opinion are the ones that kept the author involved as a consultant if not a writer. Louis Sachar adapted his own Holes, William Goldman adapted The Princess Bride, Emma Donoghue adapted Room and helped Brie Larson win an Oscar. Of course, good screenwriters make excellent adaptations of books all the time. Think of The Godfather, Jaws, Jurassic Park, all books first that lent themselves brilliantly to the visual medium of the silver screen.
It comes down to trusting the story. The best adaptations are already told; the stories are out in the world in full before the film comes along. Dune was published back in 1965 and it’s taken more than five decades to get the movie treatment. LotR almost had a fifty-year gap between the books and Peter Jackson’s film trilogy and Tolkien himself was resoundingly dead before the rights were sold. In contrast, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (book number four) was published a few months before the first film came out, and the last book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, came out ten days before the fifth film instalment. This meant that Rowling was closely involved with at least the public facing side of the Harry Potter films. She has stayed as closely linked to the franchise as possible, going on to write the (markedly less good) Fantastic Beasts films and was part of the writing team behind The Cursed Child.
Tolkien, being dead, was not involved with adapting The Lord of the Rings in the late 1990s. Peter Jackson and his co-writers Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens (plus Stephen Sinclair for The Two Towers) were presented with a fully complete, very well-loved story that takes place in a world with so much lore that Tolkien himself didn’t finish writing it down. Adapting Harry Potter, on the other hand, meant grappling with an unprecedented and very alive book series that was not finished yet. The boundary between Harry Potter as the books and Harry Potter as the films is much harder to delineate, and that confuses things when it comes to cultural impact.
To generalise, it is easier for us to reconcile problematic elements of beloved stories when we have a greater separation between the work and the reader. I saw a stage adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird a few years ago which took the uncomfortable white-saviour nature of Atticus Finch and leant into it. H.P. Lovecraft’s work has been adapted and absorbed into some of the creepiest cosmic horror whilst recognising that the man himself was staggeringly racist.
J.K. Rowling was still creating Harry Potter when the films began to come out. In many ways, Harry Potter is still being created (The Cursed Child film is apparently in the works) and Rowling is still directly affiliated with the franchise and the world. Whereas LotR has been filtered, adapted and interpreted again and again, Harry Potter is still Rowling’s and hers alone. Where Peter Jackson was able to adapt The Lord of the Rings in a way that worked for a modern audience – amping up the (still limited) role of women, making Orcs dark explicitly because they were pulled from the earth and the mud – Harry Potter is bound up with Rowling’s own views.
There’s almost a sense of pathos looking back at the cultural presence of Potter. For me, there is a sense of nostalgia, even innocence, for the child who bugged her parents to stay up until midnight to buy the book or see the film as soon as it released. Re-evaluating our relationship with Harry Potter has been a surprising moment of transition for a lot of us. Similarly, the fallout of The Hobbit’s production in New Zealand has drastically affected the general mood towards The Lord of the Rings films and fans (but that’s another article). Ultimately, it’s not a bad thing to be a little more critical about the films we love. It makes us more aware of what works, what doesn’t, and what we want to see from stories and films in the future. But knowing something isn’t perfect doesn’t mean we can’t still enjoy it. Whether it’s Hogwarts or the Shire, we can always find comfort in revisiting the worlds and rewatching the films we loved.
