Which Lord Of The Rings is the best?

Unless you’re a Tolkien freak like me, you may not be aware that there are actually three different versions of LOTR out there (2 film and 1 radio). As a public service, I have forthwith ranked them Bronze, Silver and Gold as follows:

The Bronze goes to… The Cartoon LOTR

Guess where this famous shot first appeared?

This animated version was released in 1978 complete with big-eyed Frodo, a badass Aragorn, and quite a few musical numbers, some of which are pretty catchy. It’s worth a watch if you’re an LOTR afficianado, or if you want to see how differently two film directors can reinterpret the same source material (or in some cases, how they can somehow choose the exact same shots!)

For me, the best part of this movie was Aragorn, pure and simple. No offense to Viggo, but in the books Aragon was no hottie, yet he was still super-attractive. The animated LOTR captures this concept handily. And why is that so important to me? Well, the cartoon below says it all:

And the Silver goes to… the PJ LOTR

Now, we come to what many consider to be THE non-print version of LOTR.

Don’t get me wrong, Peter Jackson and his interpretations of Tolkien will continue to separate me from my money for many years to come. And Fellowship of the Ring was freaking phenomenal. I saw it in the theaters 13 times, and caught something new each visit. Look at the little flowers in the Shire gardens! Oooooh, there’s the party tree! And WOW, the orcs look so cool! SQUEEEE!

If the next two movies had kept up that mind-blowing level of awesomeness, I would have been hard pressed not to give this one the Gold. But my favorite parts of the story were missing, and arguably there wasn’t much Peter Jackson could do about it (more on that below.)

Which means the Gold goes to… the BBC LOTR

In 1981, the BBC did a 13-part interpretation of LOTR as a radio play and MAN, does it ever KICK ASS.

IMHO, the reason’s because LOTR was partially inspired by epic poems of the Beowulf ilk, so they’re meant to be performed by a professional storyteller who sits before a roaring fire, weaving spine-tingling tales to an audience filled with mead, ill-gotten treasure, and huzzahs. There’s nothing like having LOTR spoken aloud to bring out those primal, epic roots.

And that, my friends, means a radio play.

The BBC script is also epic in terms of the scale and the skill of its writers. This radio play captures the bittersweet loss that was the underlying theme of LOTR in particular, and Tolkien’s generation in general: the onslaught of the new world over the old. In LOTR, it was the time of the elves and magic folk giving way to the age of men. In Tolkien’s lifetime, it included the Saruman-like wheels of industry that were tearing through the beloved British Shires of Tolkien’s youth. But that’s just for starters.

In LOTR, I think Tolkien was really trying to come to terms with the loss of innocence for an entire generation as a direct result of WWI. In fact, sections of LOTR were written by Tolkien as letters to his son as he served in the WWII-era Royal Air force (for more detail, check out the section entitled ‘Writing’ here.)  You can almost feel the text saying, ‘you’re not the first to lose your innocence to Mordor. No matter how impossible, the ring can be destroyed.’

Tolkien himself served as a Lieutenant in WWI (for details, see the ‘WWI’ section here). It’s hard to overplay the effect this experience had on his writing. For example, Gandalf’s famous ‘You shall not pass’ phrase was first said in WWI by the French General Robert Nivelle at the Battle of Verdun. Like Gandalf, it was bravado wording that ultimately ended in sorrow.

I almost hate to point this out, but the only flaw in the otherwise-perfect BBC LOTR is the choice of voiceover artist for Lady Arwen, who sounds like a geriatric Lucille Ball after a martini-n-smokes bender, rather than an otherworldly elf. That said, does any epic storytelling other than Lawrence of Arabia have any business being perfect? I think not.

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