"Really you know," said Bilbo in his best business manner, "things are impossible. Personally I am tired of the whole affair."
"In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit," J.R.R. Tolkien legendarily wrote one Oxford summer, while "laborious[ly]" grading papers for some always welcome side money. He could have added, "And both of us, will be stinking rich someday.
Some might argue that day has arrived, now that , Peter Jackson's first installment of 's film trilogy, officially scored its inevitable cool billion worldwide. But "whether he gained anything in the end" -- the famed philologist wrote in The Hobbit of middle-class slacker Bilbo Baggins, although he could have been speaking of himself, and us -- is still up for debate.
The same greed war that's gripped readers of since its unassuming publication in 1937 has gone viral outside of its postmodern canon. From 's talented filmmakers and canny copyrights to the spiritually exhausted Tolkien estate, everyone's fighting for Tolkien's Middle-earth legendarium as if their economies counted on it.
If they didn't before, they do now. New Zealand scored nearly $12 million in 's local premiere alone. It's not for nothing that the (breathtaking, beautiful) nation changed its slogan from "100 % Pure New Zealand" to "100 % Middle-Earth" -- or that its laborers and overlords battled over compensation for 's sprawling production.
But New Zealand is Hobbit-sized compared to the economic and political might of America's grey havens, which is likely why Jackson sued for back pay before he agreed to embark on 's blockbuster returns. The result so far is a serviceable but also surreal first film which, it bears repeating, scored a historical billion.
The first installment from Jackson, parent corporation Warner Bros. and Saul Zaentz's Middle-earth Enterprises -- once formerly, and ironically, known as Tolkien Enterprises -- could have happened to a more loyal adaptation. Thanks to Jackson's raiding of appendices, exiled king Thorin Oakenshield and his hardy dwarf diaspora are transformed into more heroic warriors. While Tolkien's own "dwarves are not heroes, but calculating folk with a great idea of the value of money," 's band of brothers are fierce fighters hunted by the Orc nemesis, Azog, who Tolkien killed off before takes place.
But as much as their impressive CGI heroics try to upgrade 's sparse warfare, what Tolkien would likely call its sinful avarice can't help but escape 's frame and envelop us, 3-D style. Because the greed war over Tolkien's lucrative market -- which has spoken, as the aphorism goes -- has become as much a part of his legendarium as its author. His estate and 's rebooters are already fighting in court, as you read this, over its billion dollar benchmark.
But to what end? In both Tolkien's and Jackson's , the lust for recovering lost revenue inexorably leads to dragon sickness, what Bilbo describes in the book as the fierce desire "to sit on a heap of gold and starve." It also leads to a cash-hungry anticlimax called The Battle of the Five Armies, one of many examples of what Tolkien derisively called a "'War to end wars,' that kind of stuff, which I didn't believe in at the time and I believe in less now."
And he meant it: The Battle of Five Armies pays back the broken bonds and internal strife over Smaug's golden hoard with heaps of dead bodies and wasted time. Much like 's phantasmagoric Battle of Azanulbizar -- which Jackson adapted from 's appendix, "Durin's Folk" -- it wasn't worth it. ("If this is victory, then our hands are too small to hold it," Tolkien, once a soldier, beautifully wrote.)
But while the fantasy visionary knew that greed wars make for historically engrossing and morally enriching reading material, he did not foresee how sensorium adaptations of his remixed mythography would generate Smaug-sized piles at the malls. Or casinos, taking into account Zaentz's recent countersuit against the Tolkien estate, which seeks one jury ruling to rule them all for blanket permission to spin Tolkien's legendarium into golden slot machines.
All of these quite well-off armies are locked in a more postmodern vortex. Except the choice of weapons is pointed litigation deciding just who gets to reboot Tolkien's instantly recognizable works and characters to sell not just more blockbuster films but fast food, plastic gyre fodder and worse. And you're likely to find as much fellowship between 's dwarves, elves and orcs as you are between Zaentz, WB and Jackson, whose cumulative film and animated adaptations of and have already clocked over $6 billion.
None of this is to say that Tolkien's own haul hasn't unearthed an Erebor hoard. While reliable numbers are as hard to come by as heroic dwarves, The Hobbit has sold somewhere between 35 to 100 million copies. (Adjust for inflation at your infinitely regressive peril.)
So who's right when Zaentz and WB's countersuit argues that "the fame and goodwill developed" in Tolkien's Middle-earth "marks, products, goods, and services" is "largely the result of the dedicated efforts of Zaentz and its licensees (including Warner Bros.) over the past four decades"? Which is to say, not Tolkien, or however many books he wrote or sold.
"These are indeed all very interesting questions, that unfortunately given the complicated state of affairs we are not at liberty to discuss," Adam Tolkien of the Tolkien Estate told me, before well-wishing me on my journey down 's hyperreal hole.
Despite the Tolkien estate's reticence, it's clear that Zaentz has thrown quite the claim grenade. At the estate of a former soldier and cryptographer who served in World War I's Battle of the Somme, no less. (For the record, the Somme cost around one million lives, with zero to no return on its tragic investment.)
Zaentz and WB's countersuit is aimed more squarely at Christopher Tolkien, who has spent most of his 88 years with the Tolkien estate bringing his father's unfinished legendarium to market. First conceived and fleshed out by J.R.R. Tolkien in WWI's fevered trenches, his Middle-earth legendarium was later exhaustively compiled and rebooted by Christopher as the sprawling epic, The Silmarillion. But the greed wars over Tolkien's legendarium have evidently cost Christopher's labor of love much more than expected.
"Tolkien has become a monster devoured by his own popularity and absorbed into the absurdity of our time,"Christopher told last year during a rare interview. "The chasm between the beauty and seriousness of the work, and what it has become, has overwhelmed me. The commercialization has reduced the aesthetic and philosophical impact of the creation to nothing."
Although he wouldn't comment at length for my analysis, Christopher's son Adam did make time to disabuse me, and Middle-earth fandom in general, of any fantasies we might harbor of becoming the Next Big Tolkien Trilogy in Hollywood, or New Zealand. "The licensing rights to are retained by the Tolkien Estate, and we have no intention of releasing these rights in any foreseeable future!" he shouted from England.
But who can blame the Tolkien estate for their frustration, and their legal remedies? The commercialization, and wasteful hyperconsumption of and now 's product lines have arguably polluted the real earth that Tolkien loved perhaps more than his heirs. On the other hand, the blockbuster rebooters making billions are arguably doing what Tolkien did himself, according to his excellent biographer Tom Shippey. Which is taking "the fragments of ancient literature, expand[ing] on their intensely suggestive hints of further meaning, and ma[king] them into a coherent and consistent narrative."
And money. Don't forget the money.
Read the further adventures of Bilbo The Billionaire, costarring The Beatles and Mr. Spock, at Morphizm.com.