JRR Tolkien was fine with leaving the story of War of the Rohirrim untold

For Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, screenwriters Philippa Boyens, Jackson and Fran Walsh took on the task of translating three massive novels into three live-action films. With the anime movie The Lord of the Rings: The War of the RohirrimBoyens and her co-writers took on a radically different challenge: expanding two pages of summaries into one two-hour animated film.

Polygon sat down with Boyens to discuss adapting the world of Middle-earth to another medium and what she learned about screenwriting, filmmaking, and JRR Tolkien himself. The War of the Rohirrim.

Boyens says she learned one important thing from a letter Tolkien wrote to his son, editor and archivist, Christopher Tolkien, that gave her a new appreciation for the professor. “He talked about how some stories (in his Middle-earth legendarium) are meant to remain untold, as if they were there to be discovered. (…) He was, I think, perhaps not afraid of the idea that he could leave some stories untold. And that they could be filled in – or excavated, perhaps is a better term – by other minds was interesting, especially the way he put it.”

That perspective is particularly relevant The War of the Rohirrimwhich is based on a story that Tolkien only loosely described. The War of the Rohirrimdirected by Kenji Kamiyama (Blade Runner: Black Lotus) and produced by Sola Digital Arts for Warner Bros. Animation, set 250 years before Frodo and the Ring Quest, is about the Rohirrim, a horse-loving people strongly influenced by ancient Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian culture, topics that are close to our hearts. Tolkien’s heart.

For the film, Boyens and her co-writers adapted the story of the Rohirric king Helm Hammerhand, which can be found in a more general summary of the Royal Rules of Middle-earth that Tolkien wrote for the background of The return of the king. War of the RohirrimHelm’s script turns Helm’s unnamed daughter into the protagonist, which certainly qualifies as “filling in” or “excavating” Tolkien’s writing.

The inciting incident of Helm’s downfall comes when he rejects a rival lord’s petition to join his son, Wulf, and Helm’s daughter. But despite all the tragedy that follows, as Wulf seeks revenge on Helm’s line and the throne of Rohan, Tolkien never mentions Helm’s daughter again. He never reveals whether she survived the fate that befell the rest of her family, and he never even mentions her name. She simply disappears from the story once Helm refuses to marry her to Wulf.

To further develop that daughter’s story, Boyens and her collaborators looked to historical and literary sources that they knew Tolkien would have known, such as the historical Æthelflæd – daughter of Alfred the Great, first king of the Anglo-Saxons – who ruled the English kingdom of Mercia in the early 10th century.

“She’s called the Lady of the Mercians,” Boyens said, “and that’s of course very close to Tolkien, so to speak. So I couldn’t help but think: Of course he would know about herthis daughter of Alfred the Great who defended her people.”

Another Rohan inspiration for Tolkien would probably have been the epic Beowulfof which he was considered a crucial scholar and translator. ‘Yesterday I was in Oxford,’ said Boyens, ‘and I spoke up Merton College between this wealth of real knowledge – real experts, real experts from the professor – and someone has brought up that comparison between the story of Helm and Beowulf, and there’s a lot in it. (…) I definitely think (they share) the flawed central character, the potentially almost all-consuming nature of Helm and Beowulf, but also their heroic redemption.

But Boyens warned that, in her experience, “although (Tokien) based the Rohirrim somewhat on Anglo-Saxon culture and its own roots, I think there was a different flavor to it that was, inherently and intrinsically, purely Rohirric. As much as we have used some sources from some histories of Anglo-Saxon culture to flesh out the stories, you always start to travel back to Professor Tolkien’s work and realize: No, this is a culture in itself, with its own traditions. Even though we only have a few pages in (The return of the king) for the story there is necessarily a wealth of history of Rohirrian culture that we can go into and that he wrote about.”

Unlike its live-action predecessors, Boyens’ War of the Rohirrim doesn’t have an extensive Ring Quest to follow. So the two-hour length (heavy, compared to the three-hour Lord of the Rings trilogy) spends a lot of time on the characters and themes of loyalty, betrayal and revenge. According to Boyens, the combination of epic action with personal focus was a perfect fit War of the Rohirrim‘s anime style and Kamiyama’s directorship.

“There is a great tradition within anime – and also (if you) look at the great Japanese filmmakers, like Kurosawa for example – where an epic nature is inherent in storytelling,” Boyens said. “But there’s also a way in which they can collapse and condense, almost in a claustrophobic way. The central conflict, even within the characters themselves, increasingly begins to tell the stories. Something that stood out (for us) was: You know what? This is actually the perfect story to tell in anime formof all Tolkien stories.”

Boyens enjoyed embracing a slower rhythm Rohirrim also. “The natural pace of anime will be different and rest at certain moments, especially in certain shots. The cut is different, but I like that. I feel like sometimes, especially in movies these days, it’s almost offensive, the way it comes at you. The brutality of that cutting might be a bit, I don’t know. Yeah, like I said, offensive – I’m not even sure if that’s a word. (laughs) If not, I just made it up. But if you know what I mean, that ability to absorb something at a different pace, I really love that.

Boyens doesn’t think her thought process for writing screenplays has changed much from live action to animation, at least not in the important ways — with one exception: “The difference with animation is that you really have to commit to those thoughts.” (laughs) Because you don’t get a reshoot!”

The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim is now in theaters.