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  • From Hobbits to Hollywood: Essays on Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings”, and: The Lord of the Rings: Popular Culture in Global Context
  • Kristin Thompson
From Hobbits to Hollywood: Essays on Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings”, edited by Ernest Mathijs and Murray Pomerance . Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006. xviii, 403 pp. € 85.00 / $115.00 (hardcover) ISBN 9042016825; € 40.00 / $54.00 (trade paperback) ISBN 9042020627. Contemporary Cinema 3.
The Lord of the Rings: Popular Culture in Global Context, edited by Ernest Mathijs . Foreword by Brian Sibley . London: Wallflower Press, 2006. xviii, 341 pp. £45.00 / $75.00 (hardback) ISBN 1904764835; £16.99 / $25.00 (trade paperback) ISBN 1904764827.

In May of 2003, news circulated on the internet that Professors Ernest Mathijs and Martin Barker, both then based at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, were launching an international study of the media coverage of and fan reactions to the third part of Peter Jackson's film adaptation of The Lord of the Rings. The results, culled from over twenty thousand questionnaires, have been announced as forthcoming in 2007 under the title Watching "The Lord of the Rings." At the time of that study's inception, Mathijs planned an anthology of essays about the film trilogy. Instead, two anthologies containing a total of nearly forty essays have appeared. From Hobbits to Hollywood (hereafter From Hobbits) focuses on interpretive studies of the film itself; The Lord of the Rings: Popular Culture in Global Context (hereafter Popular Culture) turns to examinations of the historical background of the franchise and of fan reactions. (Some of the essay-authors worked on the international study).

The purpose in these books is to bring together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to cover the various aspects of a multifaceted phenomenon. The result is a profoundly disappointing pair of collections [End Page 244] of essays. The contributions do not cohere into an overview of the subject. Many of the authors apparently have relatively little knowledge of or even interest in Peter Jackson's trilogy of films; they seem more concerned with their own methodologies than with the subject. Clichés of interpretation abound, and inaccuracies crop up frequently.

Although ostensibly the books are linked to a reception-studies approach, most of the authors focus on the "myths" or "discourse" around the film, its distribution, and its ancillary products. The result is that they do not discuss (or need to research) actual historical causes and circumstances. They talk primarily about the ways in which these factors are represented in the culture.

Nearly all of the essays follow a familiar path. The author discusses a method, citing a number of theorists, from Walter Benjamin and Frederic Jameson to some less familiar media scholars. This takes up a few pages, followed by a brief look at the topic at hand before a return to the methodological conclusions. All this discussion of theory and method tends to make the ideas about Rings that the essays put forth sound far more complex than they are. The result is a frequent formulation something like this: "Here we have an example of what So-and-so called 'X.'" For example, in "Fixing a Heritage: Inscribing Middle Earth [sic] onto New Zealand," Stan Jones remarks, "This process is related to what David Morley called 'indigenisation'" (Popular Culture 290), as if simply labeling a phenomenon on the authority of another author illuminates or strengthens it.

The stress on discourse leads to precious little factual information being put forth. For example, Jonathan Gray's "Bonus Material: The DVD Layering of The Lord of the Rings" (in the Popular Culture volume) expends much verbiage to make the fairly evident point that the supplements to the extended editions transfer the film's quest and fellowship imagery onto the filmmakers. He never, however, mentions Michael Pellerin, the producer and director of the supplements, or how he and his team created the individual documentaries and galleries. Similarly, he is not interested in New Line Home Entertainment's and other companies' roles in making the DVDs or in DVDs' significance in the film industry, which changed considerably during the years Rings was being released. Gray is more concerned...

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