FILM PURISTS tend to regard any book upon which a film is based as at best an irrelevance, insisting that a film be assessed on its own cinematic merits. Part of this attitude is indicative of an anxiety that film might still be...

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Peter Jackson and New Line Cinema have reached agreement to make J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Hobbit," a planned prequel to the blockbuster trilogy "The Lord of the Rings."Jackson, who directed "Rings," will serve as executive producer for "The Hobbit." A director for the prequel films has...

The world still has a taste for tales about Middle-earth.Two weeks after the publication of J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Children of Hurin," an unfinished novel edited by the late author's son, Christopher, more than 900,000 copies are in print worldwide, nearly double the original total, according...

If you read the critics, you might not suspect that J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, the first true epic to come along since Milton revitalized Homer's and Virgil's genre, was a monumental work. That its followers, as with Abraham's seed, are as numerous as the sands. That there are people who meet each week to play Middle-earth games. That maps, calendars, pictures, puzzles, and deluxe editions of the trilogy sell in the millions year after year. I suspect that the critics an...

The Lord of the Rings has been made almost exclusively for Tolkien devotees. In adapting the long, unwieldy saga, the filmmakers have settled for The Song of Bernadette axiom: "To those who believe, no explanation is necessary; to those who do not believe, no explanation is possible." When I saw the film, the audience cheered each introduction of the books' stars as if it were the opening night of Gone with the Wind. They were celebrating their own fond literary memories, not the charac...

"The Lord of the Rings" is both numbing and impressive. Yet it would be difficult to recommend this movie to anyone not wholly absorbed by the uses of motion-picture animation or to anyone not familiar with Tolkien's home-made mythology, which borrows liberally from various Norse myths, the Eddas, the Nibelungs and maybe even Beatrix Potter. In the way of grand opera sung in Urdu, "The Lord of the Rings" is likely to be total confusion to someone who doesn't speak t...