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Other Minds and Hands

fI strongly feel that anyone with an opinion (positive or negative) on The Rings of Power and/or Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films should listen to Other Minds and Hands, a subseries of the Tolkien Professor podcast specifically aimed at studying adaptations. There’s a lot of undeserved vitriol recently around The Rings of Power, and a lot of unreflective, purely positive nostalgia about the Jackson films as the ideal form of adapting Tolkien, and these two scholars do a great job of covering the nuances between the extreme poles of opinion.

The podcast is hosted by Dr. Corey Olsen of Signum University, formerly of Washington College, a professor who’s spent decades of academic work on Tolkien studies and medieval studies; and Dr. Maggie Parke, who did her doctorate on adaptations and the many challenges of translating a story from one medium to another. Together, they’re striving to create a new set of criteria and terminology for effectively and critically evaluating and classifying adaptations, since the way people discuss them is often reflexive and unthoughtful, based primarily on nostalgia.

(In case you don’t get the reference the title is making, it’s to one of Tolkien’s letters in which he imagines describes Middle-earth and its stories in their ideal finished state, “and yet [leaving] scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama.” In other words, Tolkien expressed hope that other people would add to the legendarium in other ways and in other mediums.)

Together, these two have been discussing adaptations of various works, from The Rings of Power to A Christmas Carol, from Dune to the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings trilogy. They have future plans to cover other adaptations as well, like the new Dungeons & Dragons and Barbie films, among others. But the episodes I think Tolkien fans should listen to in particular are the ones about Peter Jackson’s trilogy. In the hands of these two very thoughtful scholars, they discuss how Jackson actually took quite a few significant liberties with the story, and not just the ones everyone always talks about (Faramir and Treebeard, for example).

To show how fairly and unbiased they are, there have been moments when they’ve made disclaimers of “We’re not saying the Peter Jackson films suck!” and moments when they’ve had to say “We’re not saying the Peter Jackson films are flawless!”

Below are the episodes I’ve found particularly relevant (I’ll try to update this list as new episodes are released):

#34: The adaptation of Elrond in the Peter Jackson films.

#36: The adaptation of Galadriel in the Peter Jackson films.

#37: The adaptation of Aragorn in the Peter Jackson films.

#39: The adaptation of Legolas and Gimli in the Peter Jackson films.

#44: Tolkien’s own continually changing ideas about dwarves.

#45: The adaptation of Sauron and the Nazgul in the Peter Jackson films.

#46: The adaptation of Saruman and Orcs in the Peter Jackson films.