Concerning “Concerning Hobbits”
There is, however, one thing in the trilogies that’s not going to work right once their optimum viewing order has finally stabilized, with The Hobbit first. The “Concerning Hobbits” segment of the FOTR Extended Edition (to use its DVD chapter title) will stand near the beginning of the fourth movie, when it clearly belongs in a similar position in the first. Leave aside any questions about the origin of the passage (which I’ll get to next.) It’s just plain, simple, narrative common sense: if you have six movies about fictional beings known as hobbits and an x-minute sequence explaining who they are and what they like, that sequence goes at the beginning, not in the middle. Unless you are creating a seriously postmodern narrative, “the introduction belongs at the start” is a good storytelling principle to follow. (And though it happens to be true that The Lord of the Rings is my favorite film of all time and Memento is my second, I really don’t want the logic of the latter invading the former. And if I don’t, then neither do you.)
Having established that, it is worth looking at the origin of “Concerning Hobbits,” and its relationship to both the opening pages of The Hobbit and to the Prologue of LOTR (from whose first section it borrows its title). All The Hobbit has to say about its eponymous denizens is contained in a mere four sentences, which interrupt the introduction of Belladonna Took on page two. Almost every phrase in this passage, however, is an echo of a more elaborate one in the first section of the LOTR prologue. According to this prologue, the published Hobbit is not “adapted” but merely “derived” from Bilbo’s memoir “There and Back Again,” which comprises the opening pages of The Red Book of Westmarch. In the Foreword to the First Edition of LOTR, Tolkien gives the reason for the loose adaptation: “Bilbo was not assiduous, nor an orderly narrator, and his account is involved and discursive, and sometimes confused.” Tolkien the translator thus took huge liberties with the material, not just to turn it into a story for children, but to organize it better. Meanwhile, the prologue, with its much longer version of the same material, is derived from “Hobbit-lore”—which would of course include the Red Book itself.
It’s reasonable to conclude that Bilbo’s memoir includes in its early pages a sustained introductory passage about Hobbits, as a discursion; that would explain why phrases like “a little people” and “inclined to be fat” show up verbatim in both The Hobbit (which is derived only from the memoir) and the LOTR Prologue. In The Hobbit, Tolkien hugely compressed the passage and amplified its discursive nature for comic effect by dropping it into the middle of a paragraph. Later, he incorporated it seriously and more fully into the LOTR Prologue, fleshing it out with material from other sources. When Jackson shows us Bilbo starting his memoir with such a passage, it’s thus not really an invention, even though the only phrases he borrows from the actual Red Book involve Hobbits loving “peace and quiet and good tilled earth” and the world “being after all full of strange creatures beyond count.” He is simply being more generous to Bilbo by giving him enough sense to start with the introduction.
How can Jackson accomplish the same thing with the six movies, when the introduction is currently in the middle? The solution is radical, but I think unavoidable. The LOTR 3D conversion will be part of an Ultimate Edition of all six films. And at that point, “Concerning Hobbits” can be lifted from its current location, tweaked (I’ll get to that), and moved to a corresponding one in the first movie. I believe that Jackson is already planning to do this, and what’s more, that this is the sole rationale for framing the new trilogy as a tale told by Ian Holm as Old Bilbo. The necessary introduction to Hobbits, the scene that must eventually stand at the beginning of all the films, has already been shot, and it has been shot in the form of an elderly Bilbo beginning to write his memoirs, and hence narrating the introduction. And that means that the new movie must be a flashback from that moment, showing us the contents of the memoir he is starting to write.
If Jackson et al weren’t planning to eventually move “Concerning Hobbits” to the other trilogy, they could have left Old Bilbo and Frodo out of the new movie entirely, and introduced the idea of Bilbo writing his memoirs at the start of LOTR, when it happens chronologically. Admittedly, including Ian Holm and Elijah Wood in The Hobbit has been viewed by some as a commercial move, but that seems hardly necessary given the enormous popularity of LOTR. In fact, hard-core fans tend to complain about such moves when they feel they’re pointless, which means that there was probably more downside than upside to bringing back Holm and Wood without a good reason. No, “Concerning Hobbits” needs to start all six films someday, and that means that Old Bilbo and Frodo were required in AUJ for a frame story, one that could ultimately be integrated with the transplanted introduction.
How might this work? How will the beginning of the Original Edition of AUJ be structured, how will it be modified in the Ultimate Edition (hereafter “UE”), and what will the UE of LOTR: FOTR look like once “Concerning Hobbits” has been removed? Let’s address these questions one by one.
