Lord of the Oscars

Middle Earth has been certified. The American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has fenced it in with a ring of golden statuettes. On Sunday night the roll call of honours for Peter Jackson’s The Return of the King, the closing act in his The Lord of the Rings trilogy, set numerous records. The film bagged 11 Oscars, it netted every award it had been nominated for, and it became the first fantasy film to snap the Oscar for best picture. In that last first lies yet another reason to celebrate J.R.R. Tolkien’s grand feat of invention and narration. Revisit the exploits of Frodo and Gandalf now because there are other universes opening up, universes deploying their own armies of daemons and witches to conquer the Oxford don’s hobbits and wizards. The vast acres of Tolkien’s imagination will always be on the pilgrim’s trail, but the Oscars for Jackson’s highly skilled cinematic rendition of his world coincides with the arrival of a new fantasy paradigm.

Psychoanalysts and professors of literature are best qualified to account for the current revival of the fantasy genre. Yet, at a time when non-fiction is threatening to outsell fiction, fantasy is the genre where the edges are being pushed by a feisty generation of storytellers — and in a set drill, their narratives are sure to be adapted for screening at a cinema near you. J.K. Rowling, more famous now for her millions than for the confrontations between Harry Potter and Voldemort, is its leading, though relatively feeble, exponent. Terry Pratchett has been selling quietly. India’s own Ashok Banker is recasting the Ramayana as a fantastic clash between good and evil in a modern-day retelling of the epic. But all of them for the most part are committed to the separation of good and evil that Tolkien and his Oxford friend, C.S. Lewis, adhered to.

Not Philip Pullman. In His Dark Materials trilogy, now adapted for theatre and soon to be presented on the big screen, comes the most skillful critique of Tolkien and Lewis. He is especially indignant about the presence of an all-knowing spirit, a supreme designer, in their works. Instead in his books, free will and agency are the pots of gold at the end of the rainbow. Perhaps, after Jackson’s phenomenal triumph, the next step would be a 21st century interpretation of Tolkien’s tale.