Adaptation challenge 3: The journey to the Trollshaws
As noted above, the literal differences and contradictions between the two worlds are largely contained in the two paragraphs early in Chapter 2 that relate the journey from Hobbiton to the Trollshaws. So what story should a Hobbit movie tell here? Remember, whatever solution we come up with must play equally well to those who have already seen LOTR, and to younger or future audiences who are seeing The Hobbit first. Each movie has a journey from Bag-End to the clearing where the trolls are turned to stone, and the journey in The Hobbit needs to not only work as a narrative chunk of its own movie, but to make sense as an alternate version of the journey in LOTR.
One thing is easy: a stop in Bree needs to be inserted. In the world of LOTR it is the one major settlement on the way east, and it is the locale of a long and eventful scene in the existing trilogy. Its omission would seem odd to at least some viewers now; we don’t want them saying to themselves, “Hey, where’s Bree? Hmm … I guess it must not be on the road that Bilbo is taking, and therefore must have been a bit out of the way for Frodo” when in fact it is on the road and was not out of Frodo’s way. And for those who will see The Hobbit first, if it’s omitted, its unexpected appearance in LOTR will seem at least as puzzling. Tolkien came to the same conclusion, by the way: in his failed 1960 attempt to re-write The Hobbit to make it factually and tonally consistent with LOTR (the former proved to be impossible, and he was discouraged from doing the latter), he expanded the two short paragraphs of the journey into four longer ones, and devoted four sentences to Bree and mentioned The Prancing Pony.
But solving this problem leads to a bigger one. If you insert Bree, doesn’t something have to happen there? Because if nothing happens there, why would you show them stopping? (Think of viewers seeing The Hobbit first who have no expectation of seeing Bree.) In other words, that something happens in Bree in one movie almost demands that something happen there in the other. It’s good storytelling to make the two journeys at least approximately parallel.
And this explodes us into a much bigger and thornier dilemma, one we mentioned in Part 1. In FOTR, a huge amount of incident happens between Bag End and the trolls—pursuit by Black Riders, Bree, and Weathertop—and as previously noted the journey fills nearly 25 minutes of screen time. Do we let Bilbo cross all that territory without having an adventure of some sort?
I’ve already argued that Jackson will answer that question by inserting “Fog on the Barrow-Downs.” But that’s not the only way of solving this problem, and thus finding something to happen in Bree. You can further flesh out the journey from Hobbiton to the trolls with one or two brief, seemingly ordinary travel and camping-out mishaps or adventures.
The challenge, of course, is to create episodes as entertaining as the rest of the story, which is why I’m not going to embarrass myself by offering my own lame examples (e.g., the ponies wander off and need to be rounded up). I’m guessing something happens in Bree, then something else happens while camping, then the barrow (near Weathertop), and then after a bit to establish Gandalf’s absence and the others’ growing discomfort, the trolls.
A further, optional challenge is to make at least one of the new episodes relevant at some point later in the story, rather than being ultimately inconsequential. And I think you want to do this in a way that turns out to be unexpected. The story doesn’t really need the extra dramatic tension you’d get if, say, the audience were aware that the group had unwittingly lost some key piece of equipment. But if you could come up with something happening that seemed to be innocuous to both the party and the audience, but proved to be consequential (probably to an expanded storyline in Laketown, which we’ll get to in Part 4) —that would be nifty plotting. As I said, it’s a challenge.
The main reason I like this idea is that the added episodes can also serve as a set of introductions to the dwarves and their distinct characters and expertises, thus functioning as a portrait of the quest party as a working group. Why are there 12 dwarves accompanying Thorin? And just as importantly, how do we tell them apart? The answers go together quite nicely. Giving Thorin 12 companions makes sense if each is particularly good at something and hence has a specific role to play in the ensemble. And the easiest way to quickly differentiate the dwarves in viewer’s minds is to give them not only distinct looks (which we’ve seen in publicity stills and the trailers) but such roles.
John Callen, who plays Oin, has revealed that he’s the medic (“do-it-yourself surgeon” and herbalist), and since no one in the book needs medical attention until the Battle of Five Armies, that supports the idea that Jackson et al are thinking along these lines. So does the report that Bombur is a master cook — that makes great sense (more so than Tolkien’s own aside that Dori and Nori were the most interested in eating well) and provides a rationale for bringing the otherwise difficultly large Bombur along.
Tolkien gives us a few more of these roles: Balin is always the lookout, Fili and Kili are scouts, and Oin and Gloin man the tinderboxes. Someone else could be particularly good with animals and wrangle the ponies (and perhaps deal with Roäc the raven, if that storyline is expanded). Other possible roles include night watchman, bard, and tour manager. In any case, we would see these roles in action during the added episodes, which thus serve the dual purposes of personalizing the dwarves and making this leg of the journey feel as substantive as its FOTR counterpart.
