Fellowship & Fairydust

Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies have been compared to all kinds of other films, particularly other epic projects like David Lean’s historical epics or the action-packed adventure movie Braveheart. However, one often underdiscussed influence is a horror filmmaker who inspired Jackson’s early work, and made a fantasy movie with surprising parallels to the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Before diving into this neglected influence, it’s important to consider what makes Lord of the Rings a unique fantasy.

Lord of the Rings: A Fantasy for the Little People

Before J.R.R. Tolkien published The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, there were fantasy stories that featured the little people becoming heroes. Yes, there was a strong tradition that partnered heroism with noble blood. Arthur may be King Uther’s illegitimate son, but that still qualifies him to rule Camelot. Beowulf is both a great fighter and a prince. Whether you read Richard Wagner’s operatic take on the Siegfried legend or the older Norse Völsung saga, each version agrees that the hero is a king’s son. Robin Hood may steal from the rich and give to the poor, but (at least from the 1500s legends onward), he is the Earl of Huntingdon.

However, there was also the folktale traditions where villagers like Hansel and Gretel went off to have fantastic adventures. Millers having surprising visitors who offer hidden treasures. Woodsman who meet goblins. Younger sons who leave the family home to make their fortune and get more than they expected.

However, contemporary responses that many early fans saw Tolkien as exposing them to a kind of fantasy story they had not discovered: a story about little people winning the day (Ciabattari 1). The fact that Lin Carter’s book on Lord of The Rings devotes his discussion of pre-Tolkien fantasy to talking about Gilgamesh, Amadis of Gaul, and other stories about knights or chieftains having heroic quests, gives an idea how pervasive this notion had become. Fantasy stories were (for many readers) about noble being noble things. Hobbits were seen as an innovation.

Certainly, many readers saw what they were already hungering for: Peter S. Beagle described The Hobbit as a breath of fresh air for readers like him who were appalled at how “the industrial society had become paradoxically unlivable” (The Hobbit iii). Many young readers in the counterculture scene were tired of seeing stories about heroic nobles who win by force, and found Frodo more interesting than Aragorn.

The Disney films, which appeared 30 years before Lord of The Rings was published, and which Tolkien disliked for being too cute or juvenile (Letter 13, 107), may have played another part. The Disney movies retold many fairy tales, but particularly ones about princesses, perhaps solidifying the idea that a fantasy story had to follow someone royal (or who becomes royal by marriage, anyway). Roughly a decade before Disney released Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, Robert E. Howard began publishing his sword-and-sorcery stories where barbarian heroes win by force (“By This Axe I Rule!” was the title of his final Kull the Conqueror short story), redefining how many American magazine readers saw fantasy. Noble heroes, winning by force, or nobles heroes who win by using force, defined how many early twentieth-century readers viewed fantasy.

Whatever the reason, early readers saw Tolkien as exposing them to something new, or at least resurrecting what they had overlooked. A story where, yes, forgotten prince Aragorn’s story is one of the central narratives, but the primary heroes are the hobbits—who have no warrior history, no claims to kingship, and no noble lines. Hobbiton may have a social structure of respectable families versus the eccentric ones, but no serfs-and-nobles structure.

Granted, these little people don’t always seem like the heroic types. In The Return of the King, Gandalf describes Pippin’s younger years as “birds-nesting and playing truant in the woods” (Lord of the Rings 737). Many times, Pippin still behaves like a young fool. In fact, The Lord of the Rings is filled with comedy arising from how little the hobbits know about the outside world. Sam accidentally tells Faramir about Frodo’s secret mission (Lord of the Rings 665). Pippin swipes the Palantir from Gandalf to look into it and nearly gives Sauron vital information (Lord of the Rings 577-580).

Other characters’ reactions to the hobbits show how childish and small they seem. Rohan soldiers initially think Aragon is joking when he says he’s looking for kidnapped halflings, which they think only exist in children’s stories (Lord of the Rings 424). Understandably, they are shocked to see halflings at Isengard (Lord of the Rings 543). The hobbits’ height, manner, and lack of warrior experience make them the last persons most readers would expect to receive a great heroic task. It’s like seeing Rat, Toad, and Mole from The Wind and the Willows enter a Wagnerian opera.

Even so, something interesting happened when these hobbits became movie icons.

Film to Screen: Are Merry and Pippin Too Foolish?

An interesting element to Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies is how much he highlights the “little people” element by exaggerating Merry and Pippin’s foolishness. Tolkien gets a lot of traction from this juxtaposition, but he doesn’t make Merry and Pippin purely fools. By the early chapters of The Fellowship of the Ring, they are middle-aged hobbits who have outgrown (most of) their foolish ways. Merry and Pippin’s first scene in Jackson’s movie The Fellowship of the Ring – stealing fireworks, lighting one in a tent, then getting burned as it explodes – characterize them as still young, still foolish.

Throughout the film, Jackson either invents foolish actions for Merry and Pippin, amplifies their mistakes from the book, or assigns them foolish actions that other characters do in the book.

In the book, they discover Frodo’s quest and secretly plan to join him (Lord of the Rings 101). In the movie, they literally crash into Frodo while stealing vegetables.

In the book,  the Ringwraiths find the hobbits by slowly tracking them (Lord of the Rings 172-191), and because Aragorn commits what he admits to be a foolish movie: letting them stand too long on a hilltop (185). Aragorn then lights a fire that he thinks will ward the Ringwraiths off (ibid). In the movie, it’s the hobbits who give away their position (by lighting an unsupervised fire on the hilltop).

In the book, Boromir throws rocks into the pool outside Moria’s gates, and Frodo tells him off (Lord of the Rings 299-300); then, the rocks excite a monster that attacks Frodo (300-301). In the movie, Merry throws the rocks, Aragorn tells him off, then the monster appears.

In the book, Pippin alerts goblins by tossing rocks into a well (Lord of the Rings 305). In the movie, Pippin alerts the goblins in a more foolish way: he sees a corpse perched on a well’s edge, clearly not something to touch… and touches it, setting off a booby trap.

Tom Shippey may have a point when he wrote that the movies use Merry and Pippin “to appeal to the young teenage market” (Isaacs and Zimbardo 237). There are times when they seem just a little too silly. However, Jackson’s comedy does fit the comedy in Tolkien’s work: comedy generated by the fact that these characters aren’t heroic types, yet they are on a heroic fantasy quest.

Peter Jackson and Sam Raimi

Jackson’s use of comedy resembles a filmmaker he is often compared to. Before making blockbusters like Lord of the Rings and King Kong, Jackson cut his teeth making low-budget horror films Bad Taste and Braindead. These films’ style—particularly Braindead’s scenes of a man killing zombies with a lawnmower—mirrored the horror-comedy-gore that Sam Raimi pioneered in The Evil Dead, released six years before Jackson released Bad Taste. 

In an interview collected in Paul A. Wood’s Peter Jackson: From Gore to Mordor, Jackson’s collaborator Ken Hammon described how seeing The Evil Dead inspired Jackson to extend Bad Taste from a short film to a feature film. Hammon explains that Raimi’s work “convinced Pete you could make money with a 16mm semi-amateur horror movie” (16). Jackson and Raimi’s approaches to horror became similar enough that Kim Newman referred to “Peter Jackson/Sam Raimi territory” when reviewing 28 Weeks Later (563).

Of course, New Line Cinema plays a key role in both Jackson and Raimi’s careers. New Line Cinema, nicknamed “The House that Freddy Built” for its Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, distributed Raimi’s first Evil Dead film to theaters (Muir 53). Even before New Line Cinema collaborated with Jackson on the Lord of the Rings trilogy, they had a history. Producer Mark Ordesky notes that New Line Cinema hired Jackson in the 1980s to write an ultimately unused script for the fifth Nightmare on Elm Street film (“The House that Freddy Built”). Jackson moving from horror to fantasy with New Line Cinema behind him may be seen as him taking the mantle that Raimi had established, then taking it one step further. 

Army of Darkness: A Horror-to-Fantasy Model

Raimi moved from horror to fantasy about a decade before Jackson did, with his 1992 fantasy movie Army of Darkness. Originally titled Evil Dead III: Army of Darkness, this movie follows the same character as Raimi’s earlier Evil Dead films. In those stories, college student Ash Williams and friends visit a remote rented cabin. One of them finds a black magic book in the basement. Passages from “the Necronomicon” are read aloud, and spirits possess Ash’s friends one by one, making them into zombie-demon hybrids called “Deadites.” With running, fast thinking, and some outside help, Ash kills the monsters and tries to destroy the Necronomicon.

At the end of Evil Dead II, the book’s magic creates a wormhole, taking Ash to medieval England. Shortly after Ash arrives, he shoots a passing Deadite with his shotgun, and knights hail him as the hero who will conquer their enemies. The tone change is established: Ash will become a fantasy hero, whether he wants to be or not (he wails “Noooooo….” as the knights cheer for him).

Army of Darkness starts with Ash being taken to the castle of “Lord Arthur.” Arthur doesn’t think much of this grubby man but changes his mind when Ash kills another Deadite with his double-barreled shotgun. Ash dismisses Arthur’s court as “primitive screwheads” but agrees to find the Necronomicon so Arthur’s wise man (no other name given) can send Ash home. The wise man explains that once Ash finds the Necronomicon, he must clearly say a three-word spell to stabilize the book. Ash doesn’t pay attention when the wizard tells him the words. Once he finds the book, Ash says the first two words and deliberately mumbles the third. Instead of going dormant, the Necronomicon raises a skeleton army which chases Ash back to Arthur’s castle. Ash initially plans to flee but ultimately defends the castle and wins the day.

Ash, Merry, and Pippin: Fools with a Difference

The description above makes it clear Ash is not a smart character. When interviewed about playing Ash, actor Bruce Campbell said that Ash is “basically an idiot seventy percent of the time, but when it comes to fighting, he knows what to do” (Warren 146). However, like Merry and Pippin, Ash compensates for his flaws and delivers fatal blows to evil forces. The key difference is how he compensates.

Ash compensates for his failings with technical skills. In Evil Dead II, Ash loses one of his hands and retrofits a chainsaw to fit over the stump. In Army of Darkness (gasoline-power chainsaws not being much good in medieval England), Ash uses a blacksmith’s shop to fashion a mechanical hand with an air pump system. For the big battle, Ash shows the knights how to make gunpowder bombs and turns his Oldsmobile into a tank with a propeller for chopping up skeleton soldiers. 

In short, Ash’s great skill is not his inner virtue but the fact he can use machines. Sam Raimi’s brother Ivan co-wrote Army of Darkness and explained the story deliberately pits technology against the supernatural (Warren 143). The basic plot makes it obvious to compare Army of Darkness to Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court; the technology emphasis underlines that connection. Richard Scott Nokes notes that Twain’s hero Hank Morgan is just as arrogant as Ash, and for the same reason: Hank “assumes that his technological superiority equals some sort of moral superiority” (1).

Ultimately, Hank’s technical skills create new problems, starting a war between him and those who won’t accept his reforms (ibid). Nokes points out that Ash does grow more than Hank because Ash stays around long enough to see his actions’ consequences before returning to his time (ibid). However, as shall be seen later, this doesn’t mean that Ash grows into a hero with wisdom and moral substances.

Jackson has Merry and Pippin compensate for their foolishness not with technical skills but with cleverness and unexpected bravery. When they realize Frodo must leave, Merry and Pippin create a distraction so the orcs catch them instead. Pippin tricks Treabeard into walking past Isengard, showing Saruman’s carnage and convincing the Ents to fight back. Merry wounds the Witch-King of Angmar, giving Eowyn the advantage. Pippin realizes that Denethor’s son Faramir is wounded rather than dead and rescues him from the funeral pyre.

What Makes Fools into Heroes?

Raimi and Jackson both use “fools forced to be warriors,” but take them on different journeys. Merry and Pippin grow from their mistakes, becoming less accident-prone in The Two Towers and The Return of the King. Granted, they never become Aragorn-style men of valor. However, by the time they have returned to the Shire, they’re no longer the small-time thieves and delinquents from Bilbo’s party. They’ve returned wiser.

Ash becomes braver but not wiser. Lord Arthur’s wise man eventually returns Ash home in the same way that Merlin returns Hank home: hibernation until he wakes up in his own time. The wise man gives Ash a sleeping potion that will work… providing he drinks just enough drops, and says the three-word spell correctly.

In the film’s original ending, Ash drinks too much potion and wakes up in a post-apocalyptic future. In the theatrical ending, Ash returns to the present and gets his old job as a stock clerk. After telling his adventures to a coworker, the coworker asks if Ash finally got the spell right. Ash mumbles, “well, maybe I didn’t say every single tiny syllable…”

Later, while Ash attempts to sweet-talk a female coworker, a Deadite appears in the store. Ash blows the Deadite away with something from the store’s gun section. Then he says, “hail to the king, baby” and kisses the girl.

The theatrical ending is happier but gives a hollow victory. Ash has messed up again and brought the Deadites back with him. In the follow-up TV series Ash vs. Evil Dead, viewers learn that Ash spends the next 30 years trying to stop the Deadites. Always failing.

To some extent, Ash’s unheroic journey may be rooted in Raimi having a different religious viewpoint than Tolkien. Tolkien wrote as a devout Roman Catholic who never pretended humans weren’t fallible, but his writings also showed a strong belief in people’s capacity for redemption (as seen by Pippin becoming a hero, and even Gollum accomplishing something good at the end). He never made a foolish character look like a saint, but he held out the hope each one might do something saintly.

Raimi and his co-writing brother were raised in Orthodox Judaism, and he has discussed how Jewish guilt informed his approach to the Spider-Man movies (“Spider-Mensch”). Human fallibility, people’s insecurities driving them to make foolish choices and then seek solutions for the problems they created, runs throughout a lot of Jewish comedy—particularly the Three Stooges, which multiple critics noted influenced Raimi’s slapstick comedy in the Evil Dead films. Jeremy Dauber attributes this pessimism to centuries of anti-Semitic persecution (2), as well as skepticism about whether personal or national redemption will ever come. From this perspective, Ash’s routine failure to become a real hero is a snarkier version of the story that many of Raimi’s Jewish filmmaking colleagues (occasional collaborators like the Coen Brothers, younger contemporaries like Andy Kauffman) were exploring in the 1980s-1990s: tragicomic tales about heroes failing to rise above their circumstances. Just three years before Raimi released Army of Darkness, Seinfeld would make this kind of story (sans the fantasy, emphasis on the situation comedy) iconic on TV.

Whether Raimi shares the nihilism of some of his Jewish contemporaries, he does use Ash’s story to make an interesting point. Army of Darkness may be an extension of the Ghostbusters idea of technology fighting the spiritual, but technology does not come out victorious. Whichever way viewers see Ash’s story (the theatrical cut or director’s cut of Army of Darkness, or alongside his later TV adventures), he’s still no hero. Technical skills aren’t enough.

Jackson similarly depicts technology as no substitute for wisdom and courage, although he uses less irony to make his points. Jackson underlines the scenes where Tolkien critiqued amoral industrialism. Treebeard observes that Saruman has a “mind of metal and wheels.” Saruman turns Isengard into a Mordor-like wasteland, inciting the Ents’ fury. Saruman and Sauron see natural resources as something to ignore or exploit. Merry and Pippin lack Saruman’s technical skills but win the day with bravery and folksy cleverness. They are not sophisticated warriors, but they have something inside that counts for more.

Contrasting Perspectives on Heroism 

Jackson and Raimi both present fantasy stories where certain characters are fools, apparently unfit for a great fantasy quest. In doing so, they both show that heroism is more than power. Raimi’s Army of Darkness makes a via negativa argument for heroism. He shows how tools and know-how without moral fiber always fall short. Jackson uses Tolkien’s story to make a positive argument for heroism, showing how apparent fools can become unexpected assets. In both cases, the point becomes clear: little people can be heroes, because heroism is more than brute strength.

Sources Cited

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