I was greatly disappointed in the third part of Peter Jackson’s makeshift trilogy based on The Hobbit. The Battle of the Five Armies was mostly, to use Milton’s words, tedious havoc. It was two-and-a-half hours of killing orcs, with little story beyond that.
But here is what artists who aspire to the genre of fantasy need to realize: a good fantasy evokes a sense of wonder, of the numinous. Jackson’s version of The Lord of the Rings had that; his version of the Hobbit did not. Tolkien’s novels have that on virtually every page.
The lines from Milton, the introduction to Book IX of Paradise Lost, his treatment of the Fall. He says that he had long wanted to write an epic poem, but found the traditional subjects–wars and over-hyped warriors–tedious. He wants to write an epic about “the better fortitude”–the greater courage–of patience, bearing suffering, and martyrdom:
- No more of talk where God or angel guest
- With Man, as with his friend, familiar used,
- To sit indulgent, and with him partake
- Rural repast; permitting him the while
- Venial discourse unblamed. I now must change
- Those notes to tragic; foul distrust, and breach
- Disloyal on the part of Man, revolt,
- And disobedience: on the part of Heaven
- Now alienated, distance and distaste,
- Anger and just rebuke, and judgment given,
- That brought into this world a world of woe,
- Sin and her shadow Death, and Misery
- Death’s harbinger: Sad talk, yet argument
- Not less but more heroic than the wrath
- Of stern Achilles on his foe pursued
- Thrice fugitive about Troy wall; or rage
- Of Turnus for Lavinia disespoused;
- Or Neptune’s ire, or Juno’s, that so long
- Perplexed the Greek, and Cytherea’s son:
- If answerable style I can obtain
- Of my celestial patroness, who deigns
- Her nightly visitation unimplored,
- And dictates to me slumbering; or inspires
- Easy my unpremeditated verse:
- Since first this subject for heroic song
- Pleased me long choosing, and beginning late;
- Not sedulous by nature to indite
- Wars, hitherto the only argument
- Heroic deemed chief mastery to dissect
- With long and tedious havoc fabled knights
- In battles feigned; the better fortitude
- Of patience and heroic martyrdom
- Unsung; or to describe races and games,
- Or tilting furniture, imblazoned shields,
- Impresses quaint, caparisons and steeds,
- Bases and tinsel trappings, gorgeous knights
- At joust and tournament; then marshaled feast
- Served up in hall with sewers and seneschals;
- The skill of artifice or office mean,
- Not that which justly gives heroic name
- To person, or to poem. Me, of these
- Nor skilled nor studious, higher argument
- Remains; sufficient of itself to raise
- That name, unless an age too late, or cold
- Climate, or years, damp my intended wing
- Depressed; and much they may, if all be mine,
- Not hers, who brings it nightly to my ear. (Book IX, lines 1-47)
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