Why the Rings will remain popular

By EMILY WATT


Lord of the Rings fans are a curious bunch. They live much of their lives in a fictional universe and share a disdain for the real world and its troublesome pernickety details: parking difficulties, interactions with real people, that complex moral area between black and white.

Instead, they seek solace among like-minded folk on the internet, discussing the minutiae of elvish syntax, the semantics of whether Gandalf was really a wizard or was just called a wizard, and the many reasons that Legolas is the sexiest elf in Middle-earth.

These chatroom conversations can be bewildering to the first-time visitor and Tolkien neophyte. A typical discussion might go as follows:

"PLEASE can anyone tell me what Lembas taste like! Does anybody know?"

"Don't forget, Lembas is best eaten like Tim Tams. First you dunk it in your coffee, then, when its nice and soft, you eat it."

"Kinda like a pop tart."

"That must have been a real challenge on Mt Doom."

"What are Tim Tams?"

And only many, many entries later does someone point out: "Lembas isn't real, so none of us have ever had any."

It must be frustrating when reality intrudes like that.

This group of fans - let's call them the fanship - are varied in the focus of their passion. They are drawn to Tolkien for very different reasons. Those who love the story - the density of the tales, the characters and languages - might not share the sense of adventure enjoyed by the interactive gaming fraternity.

Those lured by the celluloid version and who dream of Orlando Bloom's tight tights don't necessarily get excited by the Norse and Anglo Saxon mythology and the beauty of the language in the novels.

And like their Middle-earth heroes, the fanship are a divided peoples, waging great battles to decide who has a superior cause.

Emily Foster-Brown, founder of the lotrfanzine website says the original fans who fell in love with the novels, perhaps at their parents' knees, can display a Gollum-like possessiveness of their turf and a distaste for the film adaptations. "There's a lot of diehard fans. A lot of them want it to be known that they liked it first."

But those newer fans, drawn to the works by Peter Jackson's cinematic magic, have it in numbers, and Foster-Brown, who moved to New Zealand to be closer to the Middle-earth action, says there's been a dramatic increase in fan numbers since filming began.

"It's really one of the hugest growths I've ever seen. It's just exploded on the net."

Erica Challis, "Tehanu" on theonering website and editor of a new book, The People's Guide to J.R.R. Tolkien, says the films have made the fanship more acceptable.

"What the films have done is to give people who love Tolkien permission to really indulge themselves. People are now proud to say, 'I'm a Lord of the Rings fan'."

She says the widespread use of the internet and relatively cheap air travel have also contributed to the growth in fan numbers. There's a virtual community that wants to meet in real life, and they fly around the world, attending conferences and visiting one another.

But what will happen to this crowd after the final movie is screened and all that anticipation, discussion and guesswork (not to mention the party planning) will be over. Other than countless DVD evenings, the post-mortem analysis, and perhaps the Oscars ceremony next year, is there really anything left to look forward to?

"There will be a sense of loss because this anticipation has lasted four years and of course there's no replacement for that, but that's just life," says Challis. "You live in anticipation and then you've got to find something else."

Some people's interest may be diverted by Peter Jackson's new project, King Kong, or C.S. Lewis' Narnia series, which is due to be filmed here by New Zealander Andrew Adamson. She thinks Narnia will appeal to many Tolkien fans. "A lot of people come to The Lord of the Rings through Narnia."

But for the loyal members of the fanship, there's still much to look forward to. The year 2005 marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Lord of the Rings, and no doubt there'll be many a celebration.

The British-based Tolkien society is holding a five-day conference in Birmingham in August that year, scheduled to follow Worldcon, an annual world science-fiction convention to be held in Glasgow.

And fans can still visit Middle-earth, with companies offering guided tours of the New Zealand highlights. Challis has set up her own such company, Red Carpet Tours.

"The Lord of the Rings is really a road movie on foot and even just hiking around New Zealand can recreate that whole sense of Middle Earth," she says.

Or they might consider studying the hallowed literature. Universities have been cashing in on Tolkienphilia, with English departments across the country swiftly establishing courses in the literature of J.R.R. Tolkien.

Claudia Marquis, who has been teaching Tolkien at Auckland University for the past 10 years, says enrolments in such courses have increased over the past few years. "It has a lot to do with Peter Jackson's films."

But she says Tolkien has been topping the most-read booklists for years. One of her students has read the books 40 times - and that kind of fervour won't be easily dissipated as the New Line Cinema marketing machine winds down.


* Return Of The King opens in New Zealand on Dec. 18.

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