Every major Tolkien screen adaptation after The Lord of the Rings has run into the same structural problem in different forms.
The Rings of Power attempts to compress vast stretches of the Second Age into a unified narrative timeline. That compression does more than simplify chronology—it alters causality itself. Events that were written as separated by centuries become adjacent, and with that collapse, Tolkien’s defining sense of historical depth is weakened.
The Hobbit moves in the opposite direction. It expands a tightly structured journey into a sprawling trilogy, adding invented subplots and extended conflicts that dilute the proportional logic of the source material. The result is scale without necessity: more event, but not more structure.
Even more restrained adaptations, such as War of the Rohirrim, reveal a subtler version of the same issue. Not all parts of Tolkien’s legendarium are equally suited to cinematic translation. Some histories sit too far from the narrative gravity of the War of the Ring to feel organically connected. They exist within Middle-earth, but not within its narrative pressure system.
The underlying problem is not fidelity, scale, or tone.
It is selection.
The Structural Problem of Tolkien’s History
The success of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy came from a crucial alignment: Tolkien’s novel is already a bounded narrative. It has defined stakes, causal progression, and resolution. It behaves like a modern novel in the strictest sense.
But much of the wider legendarium does not.
The First and Second Ages, and large portions of early Third Age history, are not narratives in the same form. They are compressed mytho-histories—accounts spanning centuries, often delivered in retrospective summary, where vast stretches of time are collapsed into a few decisive moments.
Kings rise and fall in paragraphs. Wars unfold over generations but are recorded in fragments. Civilizations are defined more by their endings than by their lived duration.
To adapt this material into film, something must be added that the source structure often does not contain:
- continuous character arcs
- sustained interpersonal causality
- emotionally legible throughlines
- compression of historical distance into present-tense experience
But the more these elements are imposed, the more the adaptation risks erasing the defining quality of Tolkien’s historical writing: distance.
At the same time, a second problem appears when material sits too close to the War of the Ring. It risks redundancy—becoming either an explanation of what audiences already know or an appendage that competes with the central narrative rather than expanding it.
So the adaptation problem is not simply expansion or compression.
It is that most Tolkien material is not structurally film-shaped in the first place.
The Hidden Constraint: Not All History Is Adaptable in the Same Way
A common mistake in adapting Tolkien is treating all canonical events as if they share the same narrative properties.
They do not.
Some sections of the legendarium are literary summary: distant, compressed, and intentionally incomplete. Others are already structurally cinematic: bounded in time, driven by escalation, and defined by a clear resolution.
The failure mode occurs when these categories are confused.
- Mythic history resists expansion; when expanded, it distorts
- Narrative novels already contain structure; when over-expanded, they dilute
- Certain historical events already contain cinematic structure; these require translation, not invention
The real constraint, then, is not adaptation technique.
It is curation.
Perspective as the Translating Mechanism
Film cannot sustain pure mythic summary. It requires a point of view anchored in lived experience.
In Tolkien’s work, that function is most often associated with hobbits—but not because they are simply “relatable protagonists.” Their role is more structurally specific.
Hobbits occupy a position at the edge of historical legibility. They are not central agents of large-scale events, nor do they possess full access to the meaning of the histories that surround them. Instead, they exist in a preserved margin of the world where older political structures have already faded into partial memory.
The Shire is not merely geographically remote. It is epistemically remote. It exists in a condition where the scale of earlier ages is no longer fully intelligible, only partially preserved in story, name, and cultural residue.
This creates a specific narrative function:
Hobbits are not interpreters of history. They are what remains of historical legibility when political and military scale exceeds the capacity of lived memory.
They encounter history not as a coherent system, but as fragments—ruins, rumors, and inherited language whose original context has already eroded.
This is crucial. It means their role is not to “translate” history into something smaller or simpler. It is to register the degraded traces of larger histories that are already beyond any single perspective’s ability to reconstruct.
That is what makes them structurally useful in adaptation: they preserve Tolkien’s epistemology of distance even inside a cinematic frame that cannot otherwise sustain it.
The Case of Fornost: A Film-Shaped Event
The Battle of Fornost is one of the clearest examples of a Tolkien event that already contains cinematic structure.
It occurs at the end of a long political collapse in the North:
- Arnor has fractured into competing successor realms
- Cardolan has already been erased
- Rhudaur has fallen under Angmar’s influence
- The Witch King sits on the throne of Arthedain
What remains is not a stable political entity, but its aftermath: scattered Dúnedain, abandoned fortifications, and a landscape shaped by long erosion rather than continuity.
The Battle of Fornost is therefore not the fall of a kingdom.
It is the final reversal of a collapse already in motion.
It contains the core elements of cinematic structure without needing invention:
- bounded geography (the Northern plains and ruins around Fornost)
- coalition forces (Dúnedain, Gondor, and allies from Lindon)
- a defined antagonist (the Witch-king of Angmar)
- and a terminal resolution (the breaking of Angmar’s northern power)
In structural terms, it is already a complete causal arc. It does not require expansion to become coherent. It requires only perspective.
Hobbits as Late Witnesses
If hobbits are introduced into this framework, their role cannot be that of strategic participants or narrative drivers. That would distort both the event and their function in Tolkien’s broader system.
Instead, they function as late witnesses—but not in the simple sense of observers.
They are positioned at the margin of a historical process that is already exceeding interpretive capacity. They do not encounter events in their full causal form. They encounter only their residual effects as they pass through landscapes and ruins shaped by forces they cannot reconstruct in full.
Their experience of Fornost is therefore not one of understanding, but of proximity:
- abandoned settlements that still carry the shape of former life
- roads that no longer connect living political centers
- watchtowers that function more as memory than infrastructure
- and a landscape structured by the aftermath of decisions made elsewhere
They do not follow the logic of the war.
They move through its remnants.
This is the key correction that makes their presence structurally defensible: they are not inserted to scale down the story, but to preserve Tolkien’s epistemic constraint that most large-scale history is only ever encountered as fragmentary residue once its causal center has already exceeded lived comprehension.
The Battle Without Centrality
By the time they reach Fornost, the battle itself is already unfolding in full strategic coherence elsewhere.
The hobbits remain at the margins of the conflict:
- assisting movement through terrain others cannot easily traverse
- holding or observing unstable peripheries of engagement
- functioning as incidental participants in a larger operation they cannot fully parse
The decisive confrontation belongs entirely to the coalition forces and the collapse of Angmar’s remaining power.
The hobbits are not central to outcome.
They are central to experience.
That distinction preserves both narrative plausibility and Tolkien’s structural logic.
Return Without Resolution
Afterward, they return to the Shire with no stable framework for what they have experienced.
The event does not resolve into narrative clarity. It dissolves into fragments—partial recollections, inconsistent accounts, and cultural residue that slowly decouples from its original context.
Over time, what remains is not history in the strict sense, but degraded transmission:
- a name associated with loss or distance
- a half-remembered account of northern ruin
- and a faint cultural echo of violence that no longer has a stable referent
This is how large-scale history persists in the Shire: not as understood continuity, but as inherited fragments that outlive their explanatory structure.
Why This Works: The Selection Principle
The value of Fornost as a cinematic subject is not that it is unusually dramatic.
It is that it is structurally already suitable for film.
It avoids the two dominant adaptation failures:
- It does not require compression across centuries of mythic history
- It does not require invented connective tissue across loosely related chronicles
- It sits at a distance from the War of the Ring that avoids redundancy
- Yet it remains causally continuous enough to function as a self-contained narrative arc
It belongs to a rare category in Tolkien’s world: events that are already bounded in time, already structured causally, and already resolved in narrative terms.
Nothing essential needs to be created.
Only perspective needs to be chosen.
The Real Problem with Tolkien Prequels
The success of The Lord of the Rings films was not simply fidelity or scale. It was alignment between narrative structure and cinematic form.
Most prequels fail not because they misunderstand Tolkien’s lore.
They fail because they attempt to adapt material that was never structured for the same kind of narrative visibility.
Some parts of Tolkien’s history are too compressed to expand without distortion. Others are too diffuse to compress without loss.
A more faithful approach is not to force continuity where Tolkien wrote summary.
It is to identify the rare moments where Tolkien already wrote something structurally cinematic—and to select the correct distance from which to witness it.
Conclusion
The problem is not that Tolkien cannot be adapted.
It is that most adaptations treat all of his history as if it shares the same narrative shape.
But it does not.
Some events require invention to become film.
Others already contain their own structure.
And in those cases, the task of adaptation is not to construct coherence.
It is to preserve it by choosing the right perspective from which it can be seen.
The Battle of Fornost is one of those cases.
And that, more than scale or spectacle, is what makes it worth filming.
© 2026 Christian A. Larsen. All Rights Reserved.
Christian A. Larsen 
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