The story’s thousands of pages endured in the minds of readers for half a century before Philippa Boyens, Peter Jackson, and Fran Walsh’s painstakingly adapted smash-hit film trilogy brought it to moviegoers. He lived to see the Great Depression and a second devastating global war before he put the final touches on The Lord of the Rings, a sword and sorcery epic where hard-fought victories turn on the smallest choices.
He was an orphan married to another orphan, father to an infant son born in, as he would write in 1941, “the starvation-year of 1917 when the end of the war seemed as far off as it does now.” In the plague year of 1918, the author was 26, with a recurring illness keeping him in and out of the exact place the virus was at its hottest: army hospitals. It is a quirk of history that we didn’t lose J.R.R. So each Wednesday throughout the year, we'll go there and back again, examining how and why the films have endured as modern classics. 2021 marks The Lord of the Rings movies' 20th anniversary - and we couldn't imagine exploring the trilogy with just one piece.
