Educational Media Reviews Online

Sir Ian Holm narrates this exploration of the places where J. R. R. Tolkien spent most of his life, including what was known as Mercia in the Middle Ages (today’s West Midlands of England), Warwick, Oxford, Lancashire, and the World War I battlefields and trenches of the Somme. Along the way, various experts describe Tolkien’s love and respect for, although not romanticization of, the natural world and his fear that it was being destroyed by encroaching industrialization.

The “Extra Features” portion includes “interviews of” (really monologues by) Tolkien scholars Helen Armstrong, who describes Tolkien’s interest in languages, especially the various forms of historical English, Welsh, and Finnish, and how this is reflected in the languages and place names of Middle Earth; John Garth, who has written about the effect of Tolkien’s war experience upon his writing; and Patrick Curry, who speaks of the sociology and cultures of Middle Earth. Stephen Raw, who drew the maps for the paperback editions of The Lord of the Rings when Christopher Tolkien’s maps proved unsuitable for the smaller page, talks about his enjoyment of mapmaking and his feeling that maps make sense of the geography described in the books. Mike Stringer, Mike Bates, and Richard Fortuna describe the problems with some of the silicon compounds used in making theatrical prostheses and describe how they got the job of doing this special kind of “makeup” for the most recent film version of The Lord of the Rings.

This is a technically beautiful work. My only quarrel with it is the same one that I have with many PBS specials: the overuse of the same stock images. There must be more than one photograph of Tolkien, and industrialization can be represented by more images than the same welder who is seen over and over again. Early in the program, Tolkien is quoted as expressing a dislike of allegory. This is ignored by the people who express opinions about Everyman and the battle between good and evil. The presentation is unabashedly one sided: the entire script reinforces the proposition that Tolkien’s Middle Earth was heavily influenced by the landscape and events that surrounded him from about the age of eight years through adulthood. This very interesting, well-written, information-rich documentary would be a useful addition to a course on the works of Tolkien, or for a program during a meeting of the Tolkien Society or a fan group. The pace is a bit slow for all but the brightest and most highly-motivated high schoolers, but this should present no difficulty to adults, including undergraduates.