National Geographic: Beyond the Movie - The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) - full transcript
This documentary explores through provoking questions for viewers who want to go beyond the richly fanciful film into the world that started it all.
It is, perhaps,
the best-loved story of the modern age...
The fantastic tale
of an epic quest
to save a world in conflict.
The literary trilogy,
"the lord of the rings,"
comes to life in the first
of three films
from new line cinema.
The film is a mythic quest
to destroy a ring,
which will rid the world
of a great evil.
There are markings...
It's some form of elvish.
I can't read it.
There are few who can.
At first glance,
the movie conjures up
a world completely different
from our own.
Yet, this world is under threat
in a way that
is strangely familiar.
Is it secret? Is it safe?
If you ever read
"lord of the rings,"
you feel as if it could
have actually existed.
Who created
"the lord of the rings?"
And what real-life events
inspired him?
He's brought
a lot of his experiences
of the horror of war
into the story, and, you know,
it's important to us
that we portrayed it
as a very destructive,
very horrifying experience.
How does
this imagined world
shed light on mysteries
about our own ancestral past?
And how did a
vanishing tradition on earth
inspire one of the movie's
most amazing features...
A race of elves
with their own language?
One of my
favorite elvish lines is:
Laow hier nein, uga li hidu,
anyoch nidu gwano ud gwienhin.
Does this quest
to rid the world of evil
reflect our
contemporary struggle?
The journey that Frodo
takes is to undo a huge evil.
Could we do that
in this modern day?
Could we knowingly
unmake something
that we know should never
have come into being?
I wish
none of this had happened!
Join us now
as we go beyond the movie,
to explore
the surprising connections
between our own world,
and the fictional realm
of "the lord of the rings."
You... shall not... Pass!
"The lord of the rings"
takes place in a mythical world,
with great kingdoms spread
across a vast continent.
In this place
called "middle-earth,"
all is not well.
This world is going through
a change of epochs.
The forces of good and evil
clash in an epic battle
that will determine the future
course of middle-earth.
But one small spot is isolated
from the conflict...
Its inhabitants
blissfully unaware
of the dangers
beyond their fertile fields.
It is the town of "hobbiton,"
a village in the idyllic land
called "the shire."
Here, a wizard named Gandalf
visits a small race
known as the hobbits,
who have been blessed
with peace for centuries.
The creator
of this mythical place
was visionary author
j.R.R. Tolkien.
His imagination spawned
"the lord of the rings,"
an epic tale that some have
called "the story of the century."
I think it's an incredibly
philosophical story
and in a lot of ways meditations
on friendship and courage
and humility
and in not shying away
from the darkness of one's soul,
as well as the lightness.
Most fantasies
are sort of "in the air."
They haven't got a base.
Publisher rayner unwin
shared a lifelong friendship
with tolkien.
Now tolkien's fantasy
is unique insofar as
it was rooted in realities.
What are the real-life
roots of "the lord of the rings?"
Tolkien's story began in
the English Hamlet of sarehole.
The rural landscape
surrounding his village
played a critical role
in shaping tolkien.
He not only developed
an intense love of nature,
but the deep sense of
responsibility to protect it.
Tolkien came of age
in an insular world,
where people felt safe
and far removed
from the turmoil about
to break over Europe.
This is a great area
for childhood adventures,
the village and
the surroundings of sarehole.
There's the mill behind us
where tolkien and his brother
climbed over to annoy the Miller
and look at what was going on.
There was the woods,
the mosley bog,
just a few hundred yards
to our left there.
I think landscapes have
a powerful effect on any writer.
You can see quite close
connections between, say,
the sarehole area and
what comes out of the books.
"The lord of the
rings'" director, Peter Jackson,
chose to film the movie version
of middle-earth
in his homeland of New Zealand.
But finding the perfect spot
to depict hobbiton wasn't easy.
Hobbiton was a very
important location for us to find.
There was a difficulty in that.
New Zealand does not have a lot
of that English rural landscape,
with the hedgerows
and the green rolling fields,
and the type of image that
you definitely have of hobbiton
so we explored the country
north, south, east, and west
and found this little pocket...
and one of the scouts
had located a piece of land
on the back of
a farmer's huge, huge place
and we walked in and thought,
"my god, we've just
come to the shire."
And I just sat down
and started drawing ideas
because the landscape itself was
suggesting where things should go.
One of the things
that's essential with hobbiton
is that this place
has to look like
hobbits have lived here
for hundreds of years.
And so we actually started
to plant vegetables
in the gardens of hobbiton about
a year before our filming,
and we had to plant cabbages and
Brussels sprouts and carrots,
just allowing hobbiton
to sort of germinate and seed
and become a real place.
"The lord of the rings"
is a mythology,
it is a fairy tale;
It's an adventure story.
It never happened... Except
somewhere in our hearts.
And yet, there was hobbiton
in three dimensions,
and smoke coming out
of the holes
where they live underground...
And I believed.
Who are the "hobbits"
that Gandalf is so enamored of?
And do they have
a foundation in reality?
It's wonderful
to see you, Gandalf!
Hobbits are a breed
of people from the shire,
which is kind of the rural, sort
of countryside of middle-earth,
really gorgeous
and kind of untouched.
And hobbits are rural people,
you know, people
of the land, farmers.
They don't know what's going on
in the rest of middle-earth.
At the center
of the story
is an unusual hobbit
named Frodo Baggins.
Frodo is very curious
about the outside world,
unlike the rest of the hobbits.
Hobbits, at nature, tend to
want to stay in the shire.
They don't want
to leave the shire.
They want to be safe; They want
to be where they're comfortable.
The hobbits
are actually quite close
to the people that tolkien
grew up with as a child
in the, um, this rural area
just outside Birmingham.
And he kind
of treasured memories
of these more simple folk,
and, um, kind of recreated them
in the hobbits.
I particularly like
Gandalf the grey
playing around with the hobbits,
who he likes very much,
mainly because
they like a good drink
and a good chat and
a good feed and a good smoke.
They love the earth. They
love life. They love to eat.
You know, if they can have
six meals and a good drink
at the end and have a song, then
the hobbits will be quite happy.
I think it's very important
to show at the start of the movie
that there is
a part of the world
which is worth saving, you know?
All the things
that we go through
are worth doing because of this
amazing place called the shire.
Go on!
While life
in the shire seems secure,
beyond its borders,
evil creatures commanded by a dark lord
are enveloping the countryside.
By the time tolkien
reached his teens,
his childhood home
was under a comparable threat.
The tentacles of industry
had spread to sarehole.
Tolkien was horrified
as he saw the destruction
of his cherished landscape
by rampant development.
England's industrial revolution,
which peaked a century before,
had enslaved children
in factories.
Families and farmers
were sent into coal mines,
to feed the insatiable hunger
for fuel.
'Till the time
that tolkien was here,
I think he was aware that
the city was getting closer.
It was something that
he felt very sad about.
He could see the city
creeping up the hill
and beginning
to surround the area.
We can see many of the great contrasts
in "the lord of the rings"...
The contrast between
the green of this area
and the black beyond it.
People were
trying to grapple with
how this can
affect the human experience.
And so he was hearkening back,
in a way, to a community,
this "utopia," if you will,
that's really under threat.
It's being attacked
from evil forces.
Tolkien's england
was about to be swept up
by an even more
destructive force.
World war one would also
have a dramatic impact
on the hobbiton
of his imagination.
In the film, the wizard Gandalf
recognizes the danger,
embodied in
a simple band of gold.
In "the lord of the rings,"
Gandalf has come to warn Frodo
about a ring that
the hobbit has inherited.
There's nothing.
Rings are powerful things,
and there's no end to a ring.
It goes round
and round and round,
and within it
can be contained, I suppose,
great evil as well as
great positive force.
There are markings.
It's some form of elvish.
I can't read it.
In the common tongue, it says,
"one ring to rule them all,
one ring to find them,"
"one ring to bring them all,
and in the darkness, bind them."
The one ring
is a talisman, isn't it?
It's an instrument of power.
A brilliant idea
because rings, of course,
have definitely been involved in
all history, and in all legend,
and in all myth, with
ultimate, almighty power.
They've
reached the shire.
They will find the ring...
And kill the one who carries it.
Sauron
needs only this ring
to cover all the lands
of a second darkness.
Gandalf tells Frodo
that he must take the ring
away from the shire, before the
terrible forces searching for it
find him there.
So Frodo sets off to remove
the danger from his homeland,
accompanied by
three hobbit friends...
Sam, merry, and pippin.
I think it's important
that it is, you know,
this very small kind
of humble race of people
that live in this tiny community
that actually provide the hero
that's able to go off and
make this fantastic journey
and defeat all these
powerful forces.
Powerful forces were
also marching toward conflict
during tolkien's
early adulthood.
1914... great britain
joins her allies
and enters the first world war.
Like tolkien's
map of middle-earth,
the political boundaries
of Europe are shifting
in a deadly powerplay
by the central forces.
The result is dubbed
"the war to end all wars."
By 1916, tolkien and most
of his Oxford classmates
are sent off to the front lines, to join
an alliance against a great common enemy.
It was a glorious thing
to lead your men,
and, if necessary, to die
for your king and country.
Paddy king
served along with tolkien
in the lancashire fusiliers,
seen in this rare film footage.
As they reached the front line,
the young men's
heroic image of war
clashed with the horrific
reality of the battlefield.
Their vivid impressions were
expressed in reports sent home.
In front of us
was a line, 20 miles d
entrenched and fortified,
defended by masses machine-gun po
no chance for cavalry.
... Phillip gi
The average life
of an infantry soldier was...
We were lucky if we lasted
six weeks, I should think.
The front line
was a terrible scar
running across green,
rural, hilly fields.
It was a scar composed of mud
and blood and blasted chalk.
Tolkien arrived
at the front in June 1916.
It was his regiment's
first combat assignment.
The soldiers anxiously
prepared for a major assault
near a river called "the somme."
Before dawn,
there was a great sile
we spoke to each other in
whispers, if we spoke at a
then, suddenly, our guns opened
in a barrage of fire
with colossal intens .
Phillip Gibbs.
The somme was the major
battle in the western front,
in the sense that
it lasted four months,
and it involved
huge numbers of men.
Some of the very
earliest writings of middle-earth
that tolkien created were done
in pencil on a notebook
while he was in the trenches
in the first world war,
and that's where
middle-earth was born.
In tolkien's view,
the rigid class boundaries
separating English officers
and their subordinates
began to evaporate
amidst the horrors of war.
The structure of the army
in britain at that time
was very class-based.
Officers were selected from men
who would had been to university,
men like tolkien.
The infantry, "the other ranks"
as they were known,
were your "ordinary bloke."
In the case
of tolkien's battalion,
they were miners
and weavers from lancashire.
The contrast exists
in "the lord of the rings."
Frodo is a well-to-do,
educated, middle-class hobbit.
And Sam is his gardener.
If I take one more step,
it'll be the farthest away
from home I've ever been.
He's
a country lad, effectively.
Come on Sam.
Whatever bond is there
between them is a reflection,
as tolkien said,
of the bond he saw
between officers
and ordinary men.
While the bond he felt
with his wartime comrades
certainly influenced
his future writing,
the images of war had, perhaps,
an even more striking impact
on tolkien's vision.
At night,
everything around them,
apart from the sky,
would disappear,
and they would advance
towards this terrible noise.
The sky that was lit rather
like the sky is lit in mordor,
by the flickering of mount doom.
He's brought a lot of his
experiences of the horror of war
into the story and, you know,
it's important to us
that we portrayed it as a very
destructive, very horrifying experience.
Frodo and his friends
undergo just such an experience
in an underground realm
called "Moria."
At the battle of the somme,
tolkien and his comrades
found themselves pitted against
the monstrous war machines
of the industrial age.
Tanks... poison gas...
And machine-guns
literally mowed men down
in a brutal onslaught.
By the end of
the first day of battle,
38,000 British soldiers
had been wounded
and 19,000 killed.
It was the deadliest day
in British military history.
But numbers alone cannot express
tolkien's sense
of personal devastation...
Among the dead was one
of his closest boyhood friends.
His memories of the somme,
and his writings in the trench,
would eventually find their way
into "the lord of the rings."
The mythology
was evolving in his mind
to a point where,
when he returned home,
he was ready to launch into a
very ambitious piece of writing.
After world war one,
tolkien began to teach,
eventually earning a coveted
position at Oxford university.
Here, the scholar built
on his youthful passion
for ancient languages
and history.
Tolkien said he didn't
"invent" middle-earth...
He "rediscovered" it.
And he found his greatest source
in the culture, history,
and languages of
the early middle ages.
In the movie, Gandalf
goes to an ancient library,
where he seeks
to confirm his suspicion
that the ring is the evil
creation of the dark lord, Sauron.
Gandalf, early on, recognizes
that they have got
the one, true ring.
And he discovers it by going to
the great library in minas tirith.
And by looking up in books,
discovers the truth,
so Gandalf the academic...
Tolkien was an academic himself.
I think there's a lot
of tolkien in Gandalf.
Gandalf's discovery
at the great library
prompts a gathering
of representatives
from across middle-earth to
discuss the fate of the ring.
Here, Frodo volunteers
to be the "ringbearer,"
and carry the ring
to mount doom,
where it must be destroyed.
Eh! Mr. Frodo's not
going anywhere without me.
You'd have to send us home
tied up in a sack to stop us.
Eight individuals offer
to accompany Frodo on his quest.
You shall be the
"fellowship of the ring."
The newly formed
fellowship undertakes an epic journey
over a landscape
steeped in history.
The ruins strewn across
middle-earth can be likened
to england's ancient ruins...
The archaeological remains
of multiple cultures...
From the mysterious neolithic
monument of stonehenge...
To the ruins left from
four centuries of Roman rule.
Tolkien was clearly
feeding off the landscape
and culture that he knew so well
in the middle of england.
The era that tolkien knew best
is called
the anglo-Saxon period,
which gave rise to one of today's
most dominant languages... English.
The word "england," is the
land where you find the angles.
Professor Martin
carver of the university of York
is an eminent archaeologist
familiar with the terrain
of anglo-Saxon history.
The angles spoke "anglish,"
so that's why we speak it.
The angles and saxons
were germanic seafaring warriors
who sailed to britannia
in the fifth century.
They fought as mercenaries
in a period of great migration
and tribal battles
all over Europe.
There's a big period
of change, massive,
in the fifth and sixth century,
tremendous change.
During
this change of epochs,
the anglo-saxons
settled in england.
Since they
were mostly illiterate,
the sagas about their
heroic seafaring ancestors
were passed down
through story and song.
There's
a roaring fire, and the mead,
the ale, is going round.
People are singing
and out of those songs
and out of the conversation
comes all the shared values,
all the things that people
want to perpetuate.
Most of these
mythic tales were lost
after the Norman conquest
of england in the 11th century.
As anglo-Saxon culture
was eclipsed,
their great oral tradition died.
Tolkien felt the English people
had been robbed
of part of their roots
with the loss
of these oral tales.
He was inspired to write
a new mythology for england.
The mythology
that tolkien created
is absolutely astonishing.
I think he said that he wanted
to provide the United Kingdom,
which doesn't have many myths,
to establish
a national identity.
It's a sort
of condensed version
of anglo-Saxon European history.
And, therefore, it's got
the density, the reality,
and the importance that
any real myth and legend has.
One of the few sources
tolkien could turn to
for clues about
anglo-Saxon mythology
was their great epic poem,
beowulf.
Tolkien studied every line
of the heroic saga,
becoming one of the world's
leading beowulf scholars.
It tells the tale of a
monster-slaying Scandinavian king,
who dies fighting a dragon
others refuse to face.
One of beowulf's
most vivid scenes
describes a king's
solemn burial at sea
in the hold of his ship,
surrounded by treasures.
For centuries, it had been
considered merely a legend...
Then, a stunning discovery
was made in 1939.
At Sutton-hoo,
on england's eastern seaboard,
British archaeologists
unearthed an ancient ship...
The burial chamber
of an anglo-Saxon king.
The excavation site was filled
with amazing treasures.
Everybody
was very excited...
All these beautiful things
coming out of the ground.
This extraordinary burial
was, itself, a sort of poem.
People put together special
objects, in a special way.
Sutton-hoo started to look like
the reality behind, behind beowulf.
Tolkien would have had knowledge
of the Sutton-hoo discovery...
The great ship burial...
Because it was 1939,
just about the time
that he was starting to write
"the lord of the rings."
In the movie,
the fellowship reaches
the underground burial chamber
of a dwarf chieftain.
Sadly, the tomb
has been desecrated.
Yet, it reflects
the type of reverence
that anglo-saxons
felt for their leaders.
Here lies balin,
son of hundin, lord of Moria.
He is dead then.
Archaeological research
has continued at Sutton-hoo
for more than 60 years.
Because of its importance
in uncovering the lost world
of anglo-Saxon england,
it is considered a crown Jewel
of British archaeology.
A lot of our students
have read tolkien,
and now they want to do
anglo-Saxon archaeology.
They moved from
the fictional to the historical,
and want to know more about
what really happened
at that time... As we all do.
One of the most
spectacular treasures at Sutton-hoo
is the buried king's helmet.
The strong Ridge-piece
that goes right over
the top of the head,
which protects you from
a blow with a sword,
that's actually, it's a dragon.
And it has two little
beady garnet eyes,
which look out at you,
and then a snarling jaw.
The creatures depicted
on anglo-Saxon helmets
provide insight into the values
and beliefs held at that time.
Tolkien explains to us
that the monsters embody
people's hopes and fears.
I think that's a good way
of looking at it.
When we look
at anglo-Saxon metalwork,
and we see
these writhing monsters,
the animals are metaphors,
containing all sorts
of messages: Valor, loyalty...
Spite.
In a non-literary society,
the metalsmiths are the poets,
'cause they're the people who
give you something permanent.
Instead of a book, it's
something that'll last forever.
And this is where studies
of people like tolkien
were so helpful, particularly when
he let his imagination really run.
The filmmakers
of "the lord of the rings"
used tolkien's imagination
as their guide
in creating the movie's 48,000
pieces of armor and weaponry.
Culture, I believe,
is based in detail.
It's based in generations
of characters, of people,
of species building on top
of the past generation's work.
Every belt is,
in some way, hand-tooled
to feel like it has been touched
by the craftsmanship
of the species that wears it.
One of the most important things
to me was that we generated
a very strong feeling
of culture.
The shapes and forms
and details and fluting
that we were able
to get in the armor
can only be done by
the processes of the anvil,
the hammer, the Jenny,
the furnace...
That was generated
in times past.
You pick up a weapon...
My own happened to
be outrageously beautiful...
But anything around you
that you see,
the detail is just fantastic.
I mean, it's mind-blowing.
You just can't help but marvel
at the time and energy
and love that's been
put into all of it.
That attention to detail
is surpassed only by
the myriad layers of history
tolkien imagined when
he created middle-earth.
He's created
a mythological world
which has
the most extraordinary depth.
You could scrape away
the surface
and there is more information
that tolkien created
going back thousands of years.
Along his
journey, Frodo encounters
one of tolkien's most
captivating creations...
The elves.
Will you
look into the mirror?
What will I see?
Frodo meets Galadriel,
queen of the elves,
who offers him
a glimpse of the future.
For the mirror
shows many things...
Things that were,
things that are.
The elves' own future
entails a passage
to life beyond middle-earth.
Galadriel's
queen of the elves.
And the elves are passing over;
They are moving on
beyond middle-earth.
There's a sadness,
a bitter-sweetness,
about what she and her kind
are going through.
Of all middle-earth's races,
the elves were closest
to tolkien's heart.
They are the ideal beings...
Pure, beautiful, and immortal.
Tolkien devoted a considerable
amount of his creative energy
to conceiving
this ethereal race.
I think one of
the most amazing elements
of "lord of the rings"
is the elves,
and the fact that tolkien
created an existence for them.
He actually created a language.
The comprehensive and
elegant languages tolkien invented
are collectively
called "elvish."
One of my favorite
elvish lines is:
Laow hier nein, uga li hidu,
anyoch nidu gwano ud gwienhin.
One of tolkien's
primary inspirations for elvish
is a language that can be heard
today in viena karelia,
a remote region
of villages and lakes
spanning the Finnish
and Russian border.
Its residents are mostly elders,
whose children have moved away
to the modern world.
The epic song still heard here
is the kalevala...
"the land of the heroes"...
A voluminous work
considered to be the single most
important expression of Finnish heritage.
As a teenager, tolkien
was enthralled by the kalevala.
He taught himself Finnish
to better understand
this monumental collection
of ancient epic poems.
Jussi huovinen is Finland's
last great "rune-singer."
He has committed nearly
the entire kalevala to memory,
learning from his elders.
When jussi passes on,
it's gonna be the equivalent
of having a great library
burn to the earth.
And that's what it's like,
when an elder like him dies.
National geographic
explorer-in-residence Wade Davis
has traveled here
to listen to the kalevala.
He's an anthropologist
with a deep concern
over the loss of languages.
When you were born,
when I was born,
there were 6,000 languages
spoken on earth.
As we speak, fully 3,000
of those 6,000 languages
are no longer being whispered
into the ears of babies.
They're not being
taught to children,
which means that effectively,
unless something changes,
they're already dead.
Now a language isn't just
a body of vocabulary
or a set of grammatical rules.
It's a flash
of the human spirit.
And when we lose a language,
we lose a vital element
of the human dream.
Music instructor
pekka huttu-hiltunen
hopes to learn even a fraction of
the lengthy kalevala from jussi.
It was a
very important moment for me
about 10 years ago,
when I met jussi
and I first heard him to sing.
And I, I suddenly realized...
I had to hold my chair,
that he really is
sitting here, singing to me,
the voice of my ancestors,
thousands and thousands of years ago.
How did you
learn the cycle of songs?
I began to learn
when I was a little child,
and having heard the elders
sing the songs,
which come from
generation to generation,
I realized that
most of the events
that a person ends up
experiencing in his life
are in this poem.
The kalevala parallels
the real history of the Finns,
who migrated north
at the end of the last ice age.
Linguists believe
the origins of the saga,
and its language, date back
to a more nomadic time.
It goes back
to the time of the shaman.
It goes back to pre-agricultural
times of Finland.
It goes back to the time
when people had no written word,
when people lived by
the poetry of an oral tradition,
where, by definition,
the entire language
was the vocabulary
of the best storyteller.
It is said that
the kalevala's poetic meter
came from the rhythm of singing
while rowing
on the lakes of karelia.
The tradition of the kalevala
was almost lost,
when the Swedes began
their domination of Finland
in the late middle ages.
By the 19th century, most
educated Finns spoke Swedish.
Then, a country doctor
named Elias lonnrot
traveled to the wilds
of karelia in the 1830's.
This was the last place on earth
where the rune songs
were still being sung.
By writing down the words
of the rustic rune singers,
something the karelians
had rarely done,
lonnrot saved the tradition.
He organized the songs
into a linear story
and called it "the kalevala."
This mythology for Finland gave
its people a sense of identity,
which proved
especially significant
during the tumultuous
20th century.
If it wasn't for the kalevala,
Finland wouldn't have its
independence, its language,
and we would all be speaking
either Russian or Swedish.
Today,
a small portion of the poem
is sung at
Finnish sporting events...
And children learn
a few key verses at school.
The kalevala's themes pervade
the Finnish "festival of light,"
when this land
of interminably dark winters
celebrates the longest day
of the year.
J.r.r. Tolkien was inspired
by the kalevala,
and turned to it as he began inventing
the languages of middle-earth.
He was trying
to construct languages
which had a similar inner feel
to something he admired.
Quenya, the elvish Latin,
I think is quite clearly
based on Finnish.
He very much liked Finnish.
He very much liked the Finnish
literary tradition,
which attracted him
from an early age.
Tolkien was fascinated by
more than the kalevala's language.
He found eternal themes and
archetypal characters there as well.
The kalevala's hero is a wise
old leader with magical powers.
The
central figure is vainamoinen...
A great shaman, who casts spells
to achieve his goals
and improve his people's
social conditions.
The obvious parallel
is the wizard Gandalf,
who also employs
the power of words.
You...
Shall... Not... Pass!
"The lord of the
rings" and the kalevala
share another key element:
At the center of both stories
is a powerful forged object.
In the Finnish poem,
it's called the sampo.
Like "the ring," it brings
its owner great fortune,
but in the end,
is destroyed to secure peace.
What, ultimately,
is the lesson of the kalevala?
What I get most
from the kalevala poems
is their emphasis on
doing good for your people,
on doing things for their
benefit and their joy.
The themes
of loyalty and sacrifice
run deep through
"the lord of the rings."
Its so beautiful because,
for me, and, I think, everyone,
you can't do anything
without the encouragement
of your loved ones and friends
to help you through things.
In our modern world,
we Cherish the individual
at the expense of the community.
When I look at photographs
of karelia a hundred years ago,
I get very much the same feeling
that I did with jussi.
I mean, here I felt like
I was in the presence
of 15,000 years of history
in this one human being.
And I also felt a deep sadness
because I also felt
that I was at
the end point of that place.
I felt that in the village
that we visited,
it wasn't as much a village
as a shadow of its former self.
I mean, jussi was
the only person living there.
The kalevala,
like all mythology,
depicts the struggle
of good versus evil.
In creating
"the lord of the rings,"
tolkien was keenly aware
of this conflict,
having experienced it
first hand in world war one.
But he could not imagine
that an even darker
and more destructive force
was about to grip the world.
1939... Germany invades Poland.
The Nazis are waging a campaign
of terror against the Jews...
Britain declares war...
And j.R.R. Tolkien
has begun a manuscript,
which he now titles...
"The lord of the rings."
The first few chapters
were quite jolly.
Then we got to the war,
and then we had periods
when he hardly
could write at all.
It was a deeply depressing
war for him...
Well, for most of us.
But he had sons
exposed in battle,
and everything that he believed
in seemed to be breaking up.
I'm very taken
with the fact that tolkien
was writing "the lord of the
rings" during the second world war,
that tolkien's own son,
Christopher,
was serving in Europe,
fighting the "ultimate evil."
Tolkien clearly understood
the horrifying nature of evil,
which he personified
in some of middle-earth's
most powerful leaders.
The chief wizard saruman
is one such character.
He has created an army
of monstrous soldiers
in his bid to obtain
the world-conquering power
of the ring.
One of the halflings
carries something of great value.
There have been
many sarumans in my lifetime,
who started as men of genius
and great intellect and power,
who went wrong.
Kill the others.
The war is a factor.
His imagination
was his own, of course,
but there was this background
of something very much stronger,
more sinister, more dangerous,
which you get in the book.
In the summer of 1940,
Hitler ordered the bombing
of English cities.
For eight months, the British
people displayed remarkable courage
amid the constant barrage
of terror.
It's clearly articulated
by tolkien himself
when he said about the war
that often small people,
ordinary people,
are called upon to manifest
acts of indomitable courage.
And the fact that the English
had to suffer through
two wars during his lifetime
must have made him
very aware of the suffering
and the sacrifices
that the British underwent.
Although some literary experts
see the influence of world war
two on "the lord of the rings,"
tolkien denied
a direct parallel.
We have to realize that
tolkien himself was horrified
at modern analogies
being placed on his work.
I mean, he always
rejected the notion
that the stories
were based on world war two
and the rise of Hitler
and all that.
I think this is a story where
there's mythic qualities
and its humanity shines through
beyond any political beliefs
that could be assigned to it.
Tolkien likely drew on
all the events of his lifetime,
as well as his knowledge
of the past,
to create a new mythology
for the modern age.
"The lord of the rings"
gave a new twist
to one of ancient mythology's
most enduring themes...
"the quest."
Heroes of old usually
embarked on a journey
to gain something
for their people.
Tolkien's heroes seek
to rid the world of an evil
that threatens
ultimate destruction...
A quest with
chilling relevance today.
The journey that Frodo
takes is to undo a huge evil.
Could we do that
in this modern day?
Could we undo, could we
knowingly un-make something
that we know should
never have come into being?
Get off the road!
The idea of
the heroic quest has never died.
A curious modern parallel
to Frodo's journey
recently took place
in the vast African Congo.
It was a giant quest for me.
And the quest was, "let's think
about these ecosystems,"
"let's think about the fact
that they are more intact"
"than just about
any place else on earth,"
"and we are plowing them over
as fast as we possibly can"
"with no thought
of the destruction."
Michael fay is an ecologist
with the wildlife
conservation society.
Accompanied by
eight baaka guides,
he embarked on
a nearly impossible expedition.
Fay would attempt
to travel 2,000 miles
across a landscape
few humans had ever seen,
taking him all the way
through Congo and Gabon
to the Atlantic ocean.
Like Frodo's quest
to save hobbiton,
fay set out to rescue
a precious place.
He hoped to convince the world
to spare this rainforest
from logging
by gathering
detailed information
on its irreplaceable
plants and wildlife.
It was certainly the most
grandiose and impossible journey
that I could think of.
Okay, wow!
And the probability
of it succeeding was very low,
and I knew that from the outset.
Fay cherishes
this part of Africa,
where he has lived for 20 years.
As his passion for ecology
continues to grow,
he has come to appreciate
tolkien's myth
about saving
what is precious in the world.
That book took me very deep
into this great adventure
to a place where human beings are
not superior to anything else...
And that's certainly
stayed with me now.
The stakes
are just as high today
as they were in tolkien's time.
The evil fay wants
to save his world from
is unrestrained development.
The destructive power
of mechanized machines
are just... Orders
and orders of magnitude
beyond anything that ever
happened before they came around.
There's no doubt
that ecosystems on the planet
are disappearing much faster than the
human race has a capacity to survive.
15 months after he departed,
Michael fay successfully
completed his 2,000-mile trek
when he reached
the Atlantic ocean.
But his true quest
has barely begun...
To inspire in humanity
an increased responsibility
for protecting the earth.
The same conviction
infuses "the lord of the rings,"
a story that began with
tolkien's love for the land.
It is also the message delivered
by the queen of the elves.
She's handing
on the torch to humankind.
She's challenging
the viewers to say,
"what are you going to do
with the earth?"
"We've had this paradise,
so now you men, you humankind,"
"have the responsibility
of this earth."
I think it's
a very profound message.
Middle-earth
is a mythological place.
But it is rooted in reality,
having been imagined
by a man who witnessed the
very worst in human nature...
And understood humanity's
greatest potential.
By volunteering to be
the ringbearer,
Frodo shows that
an ordinary individual
can help guide humanity
through tumultuous times.
Tolkien's hero is an "everyman"
we can admire and emulate...
The type of hero
so needed today.
There are
groups of people who want,
who desperately want,
a decent world, a good world.
Right now, as we are speaking,
I think I'm probably right in
saying there are more conflicts,
and, in some cases, wars, than
there have ever been in history.
So what are we
going to do about it?
Where's the ringbearer?
Captioning performed by
henninger digital captioning
the best-loved story of the modern age...
The fantastic tale
of an epic quest
to save a world in conflict.
The literary trilogy,
"the lord of the rings,"
comes to life in the first
of three films
from new line cinema.
The film is a mythic quest
to destroy a ring,
which will rid the world
of a great evil.
There are markings...
It's some form of elvish.
I can't read it.
There are few who can.
At first glance,
the movie conjures up
a world completely different
from our own.
Yet, this world is under threat
in a way that
is strangely familiar.
Is it secret? Is it safe?
If you ever read
"lord of the rings,"
you feel as if it could
have actually existed.
Who created
"the lord of the rings?"
And what real-life events
inspired him?
He's brought
a lot of his experiences
of the horror of war
into the story, and, you know,
it's important to us
that we portrayed it
as a very destructive,
very horrifying experience.
How does
this imagined world
shed light on mysteries
about our own ancestral past?
And how did a
vanishing tradition on earth
inspire one of the movie's
most amazing features...
A race of elves
with their own language?
One of my
favorite elvish lines is:
Laow hier nein, uga li hidu,
anyoch nidu gwano ud gwienhin.
Does this quest
to rid the world of evil
reflect our
contemporary struggle?
The journey that Frodo
takes is to undo a huge evil.
Could we do that
in this modern day?
Could we knowingly
unmake something
that we know should never
have come into being?
I wish
none of this had happened!
Join us now
as we go beyond the movie,
to explore
the surprising connections
between our own world,
and the fictional realm
of "the lord of the rings."
You... shall not... Pass!
"The lord of the rings"
takes place in a mythical world,
with great kingdoms spread
across a vast continent.
In this place
called "middle-earth,"
all is not well.
This world is going through
a change of epochs.
The forces of good and evil
clash in an epic battle
that will determine the future
course of middle-earth.
But one small spot is isolated
from the conflict...
Its inhabitants
blissfully unaware
of the dangers
beyond their fertile fields.
It is the town of "hobbiton,"
a village in the idyllic land
called "the shire."
Here, a wizard named Gandalf
visits a small race
known as the hobbits,
who have been blessed
with peace for centuries.
The creator
of this mythical place
was visionary author
j.R.R. Tolkien.
His imagination spawned
"the lord of the rings,"
an epic tale that some have
called "the story of the century."
I think it's an incredibly
philosophical story
and in a lot of ways meditations
on friendship and courage
and humility
and in not shying away
from the darkness of one's soul,
as well as the lightness.
Most fantasies
are sort of "in the air."
They haven't got a base.
Publisher rayner unwin
shared a lifelong friendship
with tolkien.
Now tolkien's fantasy
is unique insofar as
it was rooted in realities.
What are the real-life
roots of "the lord of the rings?"
Tolkien's story began in
the English Hamlet of sarehole.
The rural landscape
surrounding his village
played a critical role
in shaping tolkien.
He not only developed
an intense love of nature,
but the deep sense of
responsibility to protect it.
Tolkien came of age
in an insular world,
where people felt safe
and far removed
from the turmoil about
to break over Europe.
This is a great area
for childhood adventures,
the village and
the surroundings of sarehole.
There's the mill behind us
where tolkien and his brother
climbed over to annoy the Miller
and look at what was going on.
There was the woods,
the mosley bog,
just a few hundred yards
to our left there.
I think landscapes have
a powerful effect on any writer.
You can see quite close
connections between, say,
the sarehole area and
what comes out of the books.
"The lord of the
rings'" director, Peter Jackson,
chose to film the movie version
of middle-earth
in his homeland of New Zealand.
But finding the perfect spot
to depict hobbiton wasn't easy.
Hobbiton was a very
important location for us to find.
There was a difficulty in that.
New Zealand does not have a lot
of that English rural landscape,
with the hedgerows
and the green rolling fields,
and the type of image that
you definitely have of hobbiton
so we explored the country
north, south, east, and west
and found this little pocket...
and one of the scouts
had located a piece of land
on the back of
a farmer's huge, huge place
and we walked in and thought,
"my god, we've just
come to the shire."
And I just sat down
and started drawing ideas
because the landscape itself was
suggesting where things should go.
One of the things
that's essential with hobbiton
is that this place
has to look like
hobbits have lived here
for hundreds of years.
And so we actually started
to plant vegetables
in the gardens of hobbiton about
a year before our filming,
and we had to plant cabbages and
Brussels sprouts and carrots,
just allowing hobbiton
to sort of germinate and seed
and become a real place.
"The lord of the rings"
is a mythology,
it is a fairy tale;
It's an adventure story.
It never happened... Except
somewhere in our hearts.
And yet, there was hobbiton
in three dimensions,
and smoke coming out
of the holes
where they live underground...
And I believed.
Who are the "hobbits"
that Gandalf is so enamored of?
And do they have
a foundation in reality?
It's wonderful
to see you, Gandalf!
Hobbits are a breed
of people from the shire,
which is kind of the rural, sort
of countryside of middle-earth,
really gorgeous
and kind of untouched.
And hobbits are rural people,
you know, people
of the land, farmers.
They don't know what's going on
in the rest of middle-earth.
At the center
of the story
is an unusual hobbit
named Frodo Baggins.
Frodo is very curious
about the outside world,
unlike the rest of the hobbits.
Hobbits, at nature, tend to
want to stay in the shire.
They don't want
to leave the shire.
They want to be safe; They want
to be where they're comfortable.
The hobbits
are actually quite close
to the people that tolkien
grew up with as a child
in the, um, this rural area
just outside Birmingham.
And he kind
of treasured memories
of these more simple folk,
and, um, kind of recreated them
in the hobbits.
I particularly like
Gandalf the grey
playing around with the hobbits,
who he likes very much,
mainly because
they like a good drink
and a good chat and
a good feed and a good smoke.
They love the earth. They
love life. They love to eat.
You know, if they can have
six meals and a good drink
at the end and have a song, then
the hobbits will be quite happy.
I think it's very important
to show at the start of the movie
that there is
a part of the world
which is worth saving, you know?
All the things
that we go through
are worth doing because of this
amazing place called the shire.
Go on!
While life
in the shire seems secure,
beyond its borders,
evil creatures commanded by a dark lord
are enveloping the countryside.
By the time tolkien
reached his teens,
his childhood home
was under a comparable threat.
The tentacles of industry
had spread to sarehole.
Tolkien was horrified
as he saw the destruction
of his cherished landscape
by rampant development.
England's industrial revolution,
which peaked a century before,
had enslaved children
in factories.
Families and farmers
were sent into coal mines,
to feed the insatiable hunger
for fuel.
'Till the time
that tolkien was here,
I think he was aware that
the city was getting closer.
It was something that
he felt very sad about.
He could see the city
creeping up the hill
and beginning
to surround the area.
We can see many of the great contrasts
in "the lord of the rings"...
The contrast between
the green of this area
and the black beyond it.
People were
trying to grapple with
how this can
affect the human experience.
And so he was hearkening back,
in a way, to a community,
this "utopia," if you will,
that's really under threat.
It's being attacked
from evil forces.
Tolkien's england
was about to be swept up
by an even more
destructive force.
World war one would also
have a dramatic impact
on the hobbiton
of his imagination.
In the film, the wizard Gandalf
recognizes the danger,
embodied in
a simple band of gold.
In "the lord of the rings,"
Gandalf has come to warn Frodo
about a ring that
the hobbit has inherited.
There's nothing.
Rings are powerful things,
and there's no end to a ring.
It goes round
and round and round,
and within it
can be contained, I suppose,
great evil as well as
great positive force.
There are markings.
It's some form of elvish.
I can't read it.
In the common tongue, it says,
"one ring to rule them all,
one ring to find them,"
"one ring to bring them all,
and in the darkness, bind them."
The one ring
is a talisman, isn't it?
It's an instrument of power.
A brilliant idea
because rings, of course,
have definitely been involved in
all history, and in all legend,
and in all myth, with
ultimate, almighty power.
They've
reached the shire.
They will find the ring...
And kill the one who carries it.
Sauron
needs only this ring
to cover all the lands
of a second darkness.
Gandalf tells Frodo
that he must take the ring
away from the shire, before the
terrible forces searching for it
find him there.
So Frodo sets off to remove
the danger from his homeland,
accompanied by
three hobbit friends...
Sam, merry, and pippin.
I think it's important
that it is, you know,
this very small kind
of humble race of people
that live in this tiny community
that actually provide the hero
that's able to go off and
make this fantastic journey
and defeat all these
powerful forces.
Powerful forces were
also marching toward conflict
during tolkien's
early adulthood.
1914... great britain
joins her allies
and enters the first world war.
Like tolkien's
map of middle-earth,
the political boundaries
of Europe are shifting
in a deadly powerplay
by the central forces.
The result is dubbed
"the war to end all wars."
By 1916, tolkien and most
of his Oxford classmates
are sent off to the front lines, to join
an alliance against a great common enemy.
It was a glorious thing
to lead your men,
and, if necessary, to die
for your king and country.
Paddy king
served along with tolkien
in the lancashire fusiliers,
seen in this rare film footage.
As they reached the front line,
the young men's
heroic image of war
clashed with the horrific
reality of the battlefield.
Their vivid impressions were
expressed in reports sent home.
In front of us
was a line, 20 miles d
entrenched and fortified,
defended by masses machine-gun po
no chance for cavalry.
... Phillip gi
The average life
of an infantry soldier was...
We were lucky if we lasted
six weeks, I should think.
The front line
was a terrible scar
running across green,
rural, hilly fields.
It was a scar composed of mud
and blood and blasted chalk.
Tolkien arrived
at the front in June 1916.
It was his regiment's
first combat assignment.
The soldiers anxiously
prepared for a major assault
near a river called "the somme."
Before dawn,
there was a great sile
we spoke to each other in
whispers, if we spoke at a
then, suddenly, our guns opened
in a barrage of fire
with colossal intens .
Phillip Gibbs.
The somme was the major
battle in the western front,
in the sense that
it lasted four months,
and it involved
huge numbers of men.
Some of the very
earliest writings of middle-earth
that tolkien created were done
in pencil on a notebook
while he was in the trenches
in the first world war,
and that's where
middle-earth was born.
In tolkien's view,
the rigid class boundaries
separating English officers
and their subordinates
began to evaporate
amidst the horrors of war.
The structure of the army
in britain at that time
was very class-based.
Officers were selected from men
who would had been to university,
men like tolkien.
The infantry, "the other ranks"
as they were known,
were your "ordinary bloke."
In the case
of tolkien's battalion,
they were miners
and weavers from lancashire.
The contrast exists
in "the lord of the rings."
Frodo is a well-to-do,
educated, middle-class hobbit.
And Sam is his gardener.
If I take one more step,
it'll be the farthest away
from home I've ever been.
He's
a country lad, effectively.
Come on Sam.
Whatever bond is there
between them is a reflection,
as tolkien said,
of the bond he saw
between officers
and ordinary men.
While the bond he felt
with his wartime comrades
certainly influenced
his future writing,
the images of war had, perhaps,
an even more striking impact
on tolkien's vision.
At night,
everything around them,
apart from the sky,
would disappear,
and they would advance
towards this terrible noise.
The sky that was lit rather
like the sky is lit in mordor,
by the flickering of mount doom.
He's brought a lot of his
experiences of the horror of war
into the story and, you know,
it's important to us
that we portrayed it as a very
destructive, very horrifying experience.
Frodo and his friends
undergo just such an experience
in an underground realm
called "Moria."
At the battle of the somme,
tolkien and his comrades
found themselves pitted against
the monstrous war machines
of the industrial age.
Tanks... poison gas...
And machine-guns
literally mowed men down
in a brutal onslaught.
By the end of
the first day of battle,
38,000 British soldiers
had been wounded
and 19,000 killed.
It was the deadliest day
in British military history.
But numbers alone cannot express
tolkien's sense
of personal devastation...
Among the dead was one
of his closest boyhood friends.
His memories of the somme,
and his writings in the trench,
would eventually find their way
into "the lord of the rings."
The mythology
was evolving in his mind
to a point where,
when he returned home,
he was ready to launch into a
very ambitious piece of writing.
After world war one,
tolkien began to teach,
eventually earning a coveted
position at Oxford university.
Here, the scholar built
on his youthful passion
for ancient languages
and history.
Tolkien said he didn't
"invent" middle-earth...
He "rediscovered" it.
And he found his greatest source
in the culture, history,
and languages of
the early middle ages.
In the movie, Gandalf
goes to an ancient library,
where he seeks
to confirm his suspicion
that the ring is the evil
creation of the dark lord, Sauron.
Gandalf, early on, recognizes
that they have got
the one, true ring.
And he discovers it by going to
the great library in minas tirith.
And by looking up in books,
discovers the truth,
so Gandalf the academic...
Tolkien was an academic himself.
I think there's a lot
of tolkien in Gandalf.
Gandalf's discovery
at the great library
prompts a gathering
of representatives
from across middle-earth to
discuss the fate of the ring.
Here, Frodo volunteers
to be the "ringbearer,"
and carry the ring
to mount doom,
where it must be destroyed.
Eh! Mr. Frodo's not
going anywhere without me.
You'd have to send us home
tied up in a sack to stop us.
Eight individuals offer
to accompany Frodo on his quest.
You shall be the
"fellowship of the ring."
The newly formed
fellowship undertakes an epic journey
over a landscape
steeped in history.
The ruins strewn across
middle-earth can be likened
to england's ancient ruins...
The archaeological remains
of multiple cultures...
From the mysterious neolithic
monument of stonehenge...
To the ruins left from
four centuries of Roman rule.
Tolkien was clearly
feeding off the landscape
and culture that he knew so well
in the middle of england.
The era that tolkien knew best
is called
the anglo-Saxon period,
which gave rise to one of today's
most dominant languages... English.
The word "england," is the
land where you find the angles.
Professor Martin
carver of the university of York
is an eminent archaeologist
familiar with the terrain
of anglo-Saxon history.
The angles spoke "anglish,"
so that's why we speak it.
The angles and saxons
were germanic seafaring warriors
who sailed to britannia
in the fifth century.
They fought as mercenaries
in a period of great migration
and tribal battles
all over Europe.
There's a big period
of change, massive,
in the fifth and sixth century,
tremendous change.
During
this change of epochs,
the anglo-saxons
settled in england.
Since they
were mostly illiterate,
the sagas about their
heroic seafaring ancestors
were passed down
through story and song.
There's
a roaring fire, and the mead,
the ale, is going round.
People are singing
and out of those songs
and out of the conversation
comes all the shared values,
all the things that people
want to perpetuate.
Most of these
mythic tales were lost
after the Norman conquest
of england in the 11th century.
As anglo-Saxon culture
was eclipsed,
their great oral tradition died.
Tolkien felt the English people
had been robbed
of part of their roots
with the loss
of these oral tales.
He was inspired to write
a new mythology for england.
The mythology
that tolkien created
is absolutely astonishing.
I think he said that he wanted
to provide the United Kingdom,
which doesn't have many myths,
to establish
a national identity.
It's a sort
of condensed version
of anglo-Saxon European history.
And, therefore, it's got
the density, the reality,
and the importance that
any real myth and legend has.
One of the few sources
tolkien could turn to
for clues about
anglo-Saxon mythology
was their great epic poem,
beowulf.
Tolkien studied every line
of the heroic saga,
becoming one of the world's
leading beowulf scholars.
It tells the tale of a
monster-slaying Scandinavian king,
who dies fighting a dragon
others refuse to face.
One of beowulf's
most vivid scenes
describes a king's
solemn burial at sea
in the hold of his ship,
surrounded by treasures.
For centuries, it had been
considered merely a legend...
Then, a stunning discovery
was made in 1939.
At Sutton-hoo,
on england's eastern seaboard,
British archaeologists
unearthed an ancient ship...
The burial chamber
of an anglo-Saxon king.
The excavation site was filled
with amazing treasures.
Everybody
was very excited...
All these beautiful things
coming out of the ground.
This extraordinary burial
was, itself, a sort of poem.
People put together special
objects, in a special way.
Sutton-hoo started to look like
the reality behind, behind beowulf.
Tolkien would have had knowledge
of the Sutton-hoo discovery...
The great ship burial...
Because it was 1939,
just about the time
that he was starting to write
"the lord of the rings."
In the movie,
the fellowship reaches
the underground burial chamber
of a dwarf chieftain.
Sadly, the tomb
has been desecrated.
Yet, it reflects
the type of reverence
that anglo-saxons
felt for their leaders.
Here lies balin,
son of hundin, lord of Moria.
He is dead then.
Archaeological research
has continued at Sutton-hoo
for more than 60 years.
Because of its importance
in uncovering the lost world
of anglo-Saxon england,
it is considered a crown Jewel
of British archaeology.
A lot of our students
have read tolkien,
and now they want to do
anglo-Saxon archaeology.
They moved from
the fictional to the historical,
and want to know more about
what really happened
at that time... As we all do.
One of the most
spectacular treasures at Sutton-hoo
is the buried king's helmet.
The strong Ridge-piece
that goes right over
the top of the head,
which protects you from
a blow with a sword,
that's actually, it's a dragon.
And it has two little
beady garnet eyes,
which look out at you,
and then a snarling jaw.
The creatures depicted
on anglo-Saxon helmets
provide insight into the values
and beliefs held at that time.
Tolkien explains to us
that the monsters embody
people's hopes and fears.
I think that's a good way
of looking at it.
When we look
at anglo-Saxon metalwork,
and we see
these writhing monsters,
the animals are metaphors,
containing all sorts
of messages: Valor, loyalty...
Spite.
In a non-literary society,
the metalsmiths are the poets,
'cause they're the people who
give you something permanent.
Instead of a book, it's
something that'll last forever.
And this is where studies
of people like tolkien
were so helpful, particularly when
he let his imagination really run.
The filmmakers
of "the lord of the rings"
used tolkien's imagination
as their guide
in creating the movie's 48,000
pieces of armor and weaponry.
Culture, I believe,
is based in detail.
It's based in generations
of characters, of people,
of species building on top
of the past generation's work.
Every belt is,
in some way, hand-tooled
to feel like it has been touched
by the craftsmanship
of the species that wears it.
One of the most important things
to me was that we generated
a very strong feeling
of culture.
The shapes and forms
and details and fluting
that we were able
to get in the armor
can only be done by
the processes of the anvil,
the hammer, the Jenny,
the furnace...
That was generated
in times past.
You pick up a weapon...
My own happened to
be outrageously beautiful...
But anything around you
that you see,
the detail is just fantastic.
I mean, it's mind-blowing.
You just can't help but marvel
at the time and energy
and love that's been
put into all of it.
That attention to detail
is surpassed only by
the myriad layers of history
tolkien imagined when
he created middle-earth.
He's created
a mythological world
which has
the most extraordinary depth.
You could scrape away
the surface
and there is more information
that tolkien created
going back thousands of years.
Along his
journey, Frodo encounters
one of tolkien's most
captivating creations...
The elves.
Will you
look into the mirror?
What will I see?
Frodo meets Galadriel,
queen of the elves,
who offers him
a glimpse of the future.
For the mirror
shows many things...
Things that were,
things that are.
The elves' own future
entails a passage
to life beyond middle-earth.
Galadriel's
queen of the elves.
And the elves are passing over;
They are moving on
beyond middle-earth.
There's a sadness,
a bitter-sweetness,
about what she and her kind
are going through.
Of all middle-earth's races,
the elves were closest
to tolkien's heart.
They are the ideal beings...
Pure, beautiful, and immortal.
Tolkien devoted a considerable
amount of his creative energy
to conceiving
this ethereal race.
I think one of
the most amazing elements
of "lord of the rings"
is the elves,
and the fact that tolkien
created an existence for them.
He actually created a language.
The comprehensive and
elegant languages tolkien invented
are collectively
called "elvish."
One of my favorite
elvish lines is:
Laow hier nein, uga li hidu,
anyoch nidu gwano ud gwienhin.
One of tolkien's
primary inspirations for elvish
is a language that can be heard
today in viena karelia,
a remote region
of villages and lakes
spanning the Finnish
and Russian border.
Its residents are mostly elders,
whose children have moved away
to the modern world.
The epic song still heard here
is the kalevala...
"the land of the heroes"...
A voluminous work
considered to be the single most
important expression of Finnish heritage.
As a teenager, tolkien
was enthralled by the kalevala.
He taught himself Finnish
to better understand
this monumental collection
of ancient epic poems.
Jussi huovinen is Finland's
last great "rune-singer."
He has committed nearly
the entire kalevala to memory,
learning from his elders.
When jussi passes on,
it's gonna be the equivalent
of having a great library
burn to the earth.
And that's what it's like,
when an elder like him dies.
National geographic
explorer-in-residence Wade Davis
has traveled here
to listen to the kalevala.
He's an anthropologist
with a deep concern
over the loss of languages.
When you were born,
when I was born,
there were 6,000 languages
spoken on earth.
As we speak, fully 3,000
of those 6,000 languages
are no longer being whispered
into the ears of babies.
They're not being
taught to children,
which means that effectively,
unless something changes,
they're already dead.
Now a language isn't just
a body of vocabulary
or a set of grammatical rules.
It's a flash
of the human spirit.
And when we lose a language,
we lose a vital element
of the human dream.
Music instructor
pekka huttu-hiltunen
hopes to learn even a fraction of
the lengthy kalevala from jussi.
It was a
very important moment for me
about 10 years ago,
when I met jussi
and I first heard him to sing.
And I, I suddenly realized...
I had to hold my chair,
that he really is
sitting here, singing to me,
the voice of my ancestors,
thousands and thousands of years ago.
How did you
learn the cycle of songs?
I began to learn
when I was a little child,
and having heard the elders
sing the songs,
which come from
generation to generation,
I realized that
most of the events
that a person ends up
experiencing in his life
are in this poem.
The kalevala parallels
the real history of the Finns,
who migrated north
at the end of the last ice age.
Linguists believe
the origins of the saga,
and its language, date back
to a more nomadic time.
It goes back
to the time of the shaman.
It goes back to pre-agricultural
times of Finland.
It goes back to the time
when people had no written word,
when people lived by
the poetry of an oral tradition,
where, by definition,
the entire language
was the vocabulary
of the best storyteller.
It is said that
the kalevala's poetic meter
came from the rhythm of singing
while rowing
on the lakes of karelia.
The tradition of the kalevala
was almost lost,
when the Swedes began
their domination of Finland
in the late middle ages.
By the 19th century, most
educated Finns spoke Swedish.
Then, a country doctor
named Elias lonnrot
traveled to the wilds
of karelia in the 1830's.
This was the last place on earth
where the rune songs
were still being sung.
By writing down the words
of the rustic rune singers,
something the karelians
had rarely done,
lonnrot saved the tradition.
He organized the songs
into a linear story
and called it "the kalevala."
This mythology for Finland gave
its people a sense of identity,
which proved
especially significant
during the tumultuous
20th century.
If it wasn't for the kalevala,
Finland wouldn't have its
independence, its language,
and we would all be speaking
either Russian or Swedish.
Today,
a small portion of the poem
is sung at
Finnish sporting events...
And children learn
a few key verses at school.
The kalevala's themes pervade
the Finnish "festival of light,"
when this land
of interminably dark winters
celebrates the longest day
of the year.
J.r.r. Tolkien was inspired
by the kalevala,
and turned to it as he began inventing
the languages of middle-earth.
He was trying
to construct languages
which had a similar inner feel
to something he admired.
Quenya, the elvish Latin,
I think is quite clearly
based on Finnish.
He very much liked Finnish.
He very much liked the Finnish
literary tradition,
which attracted him
from an early age.
Tolkien was fascinated by
more than the kalevala's language.
He found eternal themes and
archetypal characters there as well.
The kalevala's hero is a wise
old leader with magical powers.
The
central figure is vainamoinen...
A great shaman, who casts spells
to achieve his goals
and improve his people's
social conditions.
The obvious parallel
is the wizard Gandalf,
who also employs
the power of words.
You...
Shall... Not... Pass!
"The lord of the
rings" and the kalevala
share another key element:
At the center of both stories
is a powerful forged object.
In the Finnish poem,
it's called the sampo.
Like "the ring," it brings
its owner great fortune,
but in the end,
is destroyed to secure peace.
What, ultimately,
is the lesson of the kalevala?
What I get most
from the kalevala poems
is their emphasis on
doing good for your people,
on doing things for their
benefit and their joy.
The themes
of loyalty and sacrifice
run deep through
"the lord of the rings."
Its so beautiful because,
for me, and, I think, everyone,
you can't do anything
without the encouragement
of your loved ones and friends
to help you through things.
In our modern world,
we Cherish the individual
at the expense of the community.
When I look at photographs
of karelia a hundred years ago,
I get very much the same feeling
that I did with jussi.
I mean, here I felt like
I was in the presence
of 15,000 years of history
in this one human being.
And I also felt a deep sadness
because I also felt
that I was at
the end point of that place.
I felt that in the village
that we visited,
it wasn't as much a village
as a shadow of its former self.
I mean, jussi was
the only person living there.
The kalevala,
like all mythology,
depicts the struggle
of good versus evil.
In creating
"the lord of the rings,"
tolkien was keenly aware
of this conflict,
having experienced it
first hand in world war one.
But he could not imagine
that an even darker
and more destructive force
was about to grip the world.
1939... Germany invades Poland.
The Nazis are waging a campaign
of terror against the Jews...
Britain declares war...
And j.R.R. Tolkien
has begun a manuscript,
which he now titles...
"The lord of the rings."
The first few chapters
were quite jolly.
Then we got to the war,
and then we had periods
when he hardly
could write at all.
It was a deeply depressing
war for him...
Well, for most of us.
But he had sons
exposed in battle,
and everything that he believed
in seemed to be breaking up.
I'm very taken
with the fact that tolkien
was writing "the lord of the
rings" during the second world war,
that tolkien's own son,
Christopher,
was serving in Europe,
fighting the "ultimate evil."
Tolkien clearly understood
the horrifying nature of evil,
which he personified
in some of middle-earth's
most powerful leaders.
The chief wizard saruman
is one such character.
He has created an army
of monstrous soldiers
in his bid to obtain
the world-conquering power
of the ring.
One of the halflings
carries something of great value.
There have been
many sarumans in my lifetime,
who started as men of genius
and great intellect and power,
who went wrong.
Kill the others.
The war is a factor.
His imagination
was his own, of course,
but there was this background
of something very much stronger,
more sinister, more dangerous,
which you get in the book.
In the summer of 1940,
Hitler ordered the bombing
of English cities.
For eight months, the British
people displayed remarkable courage
amid the constant barrage
of terror.
It's clearly articulated
by tolkien himself
when he said about the war
that often small people,
ordinary people,
are called upon to manifest
acts of indomitable courage.
And the fact that the English
had to suffer through
two wars during his lifetime
must have made him
very aware of the suffering
and the sacrifices
that the British underwent.
Although some literary experts
see the influence of world war
two on "the lord of the rings,"
tolkien denied
a direct parallel.
We have to realize that
tolkien himself was horrified
at modern analogies
being placed on his work.
I mean, he always
rejected the notion
that the stories
were based on world war two
and the rise of Hitler
and all that.
I think this is a story where
there's mythic qualities
and its humanity shines through
beyond any political beliefs
that could be assigned to it.
Tolkien likely drew on
all the events of his lifetime,
as well as his knowledge
of the past,
to create a new mythology
for the modern age.
"The lord of the rings"
gave a new twist
to one of ancient mythology's
most enduring themes...
"the quest."
Heroes of old usually
embarked on a journey
to gain something
for their people.
Tolkien's heroes seek
to rid the world of an evil
that threatens
ultimate destruction...
A quest with
chilling relevance today.
The journey that Frodo
takes is to undo a huge evil.
Could we do that
in this modern day?
Could we undo, could we
knowingly un-make something
that we know should
never have come into being?
Get off the road!
The idea of
the heroic quest has never died.
A curious modern parallel
to Frodo's journey
recently took place
in the vast African Congo.
It was a giant quest for me.
And the quest was, "let's think
about these ecosystems,"
"let's think about the fact
that they are more intact"
"than just about
any place else on earth,"
"and we are plowing them over
as fast as we possibly can"
"with no thought
of the destruction."
Michael fay is an ecologist
with the wildlife
conservation society.
Accompanied by
eight baaka guides,
he embarked on
a nearly impossible expedition.
Fay would attempt
to travel 2,000 miles
across a landscape
few humans had ever seen,
taking him all the way
through Congo and Gabon
to the Atlantic ocean.
Like Frodo's quest
to save hobbiton,
fay set out to rescue
a precious place.
He hoped to convince the world
to spare this rainforest
from logging
by gathering
detailed information
on its irreplaceable
plants and wildlife.
It was certainly the most
grandiose and impossible journey
that I could think of.
Okay, wow!
And the probability
of it succeeding was very low,
and I knew that from the outset.
Fay cherishes
this part of Africa,
where he has lived for 20 years.
As his passion for ecology
continues to grow,
he has come to appreciate
tolkien's myth
about saving
what is precious in the world.
That book took me very deep
into this great adventure
to a place where human beings are
not superior to anything else...
And that's certainly
stayed with me now.
The stakes
are just as high today
as they were in tolkien's time.
The evil fay wants
to save his world from
is unrestrained development.
The destructive power
of mechanized machines
are just... Orders
and orders of magnitude
beyond anything that ever
happened before they came around.
There's no doubt
that ecosystems on the planet
are disappearing much faster than the
human race has a capacity to survive.
15 months after he departed,
Michael fay successfully
completed his 2,000-mile trek
when he reached
the Atlantic ocean.
But his true quest
has barely begun...
To inspire in humanity
an increased responsibility
for protecting the earth.
The same conviction
infuses "the lord of the rings,"
a story that began with
tolkien's love for the land.
It is also the message delivered
by the queen of the elves.
She's handing
on the torch to humankind.
She's challenging
the viewers to say,
"what are you going to do
with the earth?"
"We've had this paradise,
so now you men, you humankind,"
"have the responsibility
of this earth."
I think it's
a very profound message.
Middle-earth
is a mythological place.
But it is rooted in reality,
having been imagined
by a man who witnessed the
very worst in human nature...
And understood humanity's
greatest potential.
By volunteering to be
the ringbearer,
Frodo shows that
an ordinary individual
can help guide humanity
through tumultuous times.
Tolkien's hero is an "everyman"
we can admire and emulate...
The type of hero
so needed today.
There are
groups of people who want,
who desperately want,
a decent world, a good world.
Right now, as we are speaking,
I think I'm probably right in
saying there are more conflicts,
and, in some cases, wars, than
there have ever been in history.
So what are we
going to do about it?
Where's the ringbearer?
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