Fans of J.R.R. Tolkien's world of Middlearth have been waiting for two years for the final installment of the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy. And now that it has arrived there is a for many of its fans a sense of sadness as well as catharsis. The movie is visually lovely, the great saga that it brings an end to is told in terms both grand and human, and the spirit of the books is never compromised. Indeed, in some ways the movies are arguably truer to the ideas that Tolkien developed than his own books, for the technology that was available to Director Peter Jackson has allowed him to create a vision of Tolkien's world (http://www.aslan.demon.co.uk/lotr-movie-review.htm).
A number of critics of this movie and of movies in general argue that books are inherently better than film because they allow for an individual agency on the part of the reader that is simply never available to the viewer of a film. But to argue that books should always be privileged over film is to argue that there is only one satisfactory way to tell a story, and this is simply not true: When we read Beowulf, is our experience not fundamentally compromised by having to read it rather than listen to it? It may be that each story has one best way to tell it, with some stories more authentically told on the written page and others only possibly told around a campfire by a shaman adding his or her understandings and nuances to an ancient tale.
Lord of the Rings draws upon a number of pre-literate sources of inspiration, both in terms of the specific characters and traditions that Tolkien (and Jackson) include as well as in terms of the narrative traditions of the book. A number of key plot elements in the book come to us as readers in terms of songs; this is less true in the film versions but is also less important in the films because the entire story is presented to us orally. There is a conceit running throughout the films that the story is not really Tolkien's a...