What Comes First? The Hobbit or the Rings?

Prequels pose a rather unique challenge to writers and filmmakers. Not only do they have to tell their own coherent stories, but they also have to adequately set up the events of the installments that came before them. Since they take place earlier in the series, they often can't include a lot of familiar elements from their predecessors, yet they still have to be similar enough to those predecessors to keep from alienating fans. What's more, most books, films, and so on are created without any prequels in mind, and this lack of accommodation can really plague a prequel's storyline and form plotholes and inconsistencies in the overall series.

Peter Jackson's Hobbit films add a layer of confusion to this. Not only are they prequels to a film trilogy that had been made without any prequels in mind, but they're based on a book that was written without any sequels in mind -- sequels which were eventually written and adapted into the Hobbit films' predecessors. It's the book-to-movie equivalent of the "chicken or the egg" question, and this leads many to wonder if the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings film trilogies can really function as one six-film series. Can future audiences view the films in chronological order without confusion, or are they better off viewing the films in the order that they were made?

There are a few inconsistencies between the two trilogies, but not many, so let's get those out of the way first.

Only two notable characters had to be recast throughout all six films: Gloin the dwarf and Bilbo Baggins the hobbit. Gloin's recasting in The Hobbit creates no conflict whatsoever, seeing how he's never identified or given any lines throughout his one scene in the Lord of the Rings films, but Bilbo's recasting is a different matter.

Even though Ian Holm was available to reprise his role for The Hobbit, playing a younger and more able-bodied Bilbo would have been too difficult for him, so Martin Freeman was brought in. Holm still plays the older Bilbo at the beginning and end of the Hobbit trilogy, and while this fits with the way he looks in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, it does create a bit of a plothole.

See, one of the powers that the One Ring possesses is immortality, which prevents its bearer from aging for as long as they carry it. This is said to be the case with Bilbo in The Fellowship of the Ring, but in the Hobbit films, he clearly doesn't look the same age sixty years after finding the Ring. In fact, if you listen closely to the dialogue from Fellowship that's replayed at the end of The Battle of the Five Armies, Gandalf's line about how Bilbo hasn't "aged a day" is omitted from it.

The argument could be made that the Ring in the movies doesn't stop the aging process so much as it slows it down; after all, Gollum's appearance doesn't stay the same throughout his time with the Ring. However, it's still apparent that having Bilbo played by two different actors was not in the equation at the time that The Lord of the Rings was filmed. This is evidenced by the fact that Ian Holm does play the younger Bilbo in a flashback at the beginning of Fellowship, where we see him finding the Ring.

This leads to some other minor issues. Not only does that version of the younger Bilbo look and dress differently from the one in the Hobbit films, but the entire riddle game with Gollum is removed in that flashback. The scene jumps right from Bilbo picking up the Ring to Gollum screaming that his "Precious" is lost, something that Gollum doesn't realize until after the riddle game concludes in An Unexpected Journey. Future audiences will probably be able to tell that both scenes are depicting the same plot point, but the inconsistencies between them are bound to be a little jarring.

Gollum is another character who differs between the trilogies. Since Peter Jackson's team was still perfecting CGI motion capture in the early 2000's, Gollum was mostly kept out of sight in Fellowship. By 2011 though, his scenes were pretty easy to shoot and render. As a result, people who watch the six films in chronological order will get a Hobbit film where Gollum is shown as clear as day, a Lord of the Rings film where he's suddenly shrouded in mystery, and then two more Lord of the Rings films where he's plainly visible again.

This doesn't really detract from watching the films in that order, though. It just slightly lessens the impact of Gollum's reveal in The Two Towers and makes it easier for viewers to tell which order the two trilogies were made in. Gollum's buildup in The Lord of the Rings might even still work, since viewers are given two whole films to forget what he looks like in between his appearances in An Unexpected Journey and The Fellowship of the Ring.

There are other things that can play out strangely to viewers, especially when watching the Extended Editions. It's odd to hear Bilbo calling for Frodo in Bag End at the beginning of Fellowship's Extended Edition when he clearly saw Frodo leave Bag End at the beginning of Journey, and it's ironic that viewers don't get a clear explanation of what a hobbit is until after the Hobbit trilogy is over. A lot of major characters like Radagast, Thranduil, and Tauriel disappear with no explanation halfway through the series, and no mention of Balin's conquest of Moria is given prior to the Fellowship's decision to go there in The Lord of the Rings. People who forget what Moria is from all the way back in Journey might get confused about this plot thread. Once again though, these are minor issues.

With that said, let's discuss how the two trilogies do flow into each other.

As I've said before, the Hobbit films do a very good job of making the book's story and setting more consistent with The Lord of the Rings. Showing things like the One Ring's effect on Bilbo and Gandalf's relationship with other authorities in Middle-earth go a long way in connecting the trilogies, as does the more fleshed-out Necromancer subplot that foreshadows Sauron's return. It's important to illustrate that such dark powers exist in a prequel that is meant to set up a story about those powers. The lack of resolution with Bilbo's "magic ring" by the end of The Battle of the Five Armies also makes a strong case for watching Fellowship soon after.

The Hobbit's mentions of characters from The Lord of the Rings further help to bridge the gap between the film trilogies. Some feel that those mentions can be forced at times, but they do help to establish those characters' relevance in the long run. In case we forget who the minor character Gloin is by the time Gimli is introduced as "Gimli, son of Gloin" in Fellowship, we might remember Gimli's name from its prominent mention in The Desolation of Smaug; in case it seems odd for Legolas to be such good friends with a non-elf like Strider in Fellowship after watching the Hobbit trilogy, we'll remember his father telling him to seek out Strider at the end of The Battle of the Five Armies. Screenplays have to be a lot more tight-knit than books, so it's usually good practice for films to elude to story elements that way.

Lastly, it helps that the Hobbit films get darker and more serious to match the tone of The Lord of the Rings as they go on. This was partly by design and partly by necessity, since the Battle of the Five Armies and all of the major character deaths that result from it really couldn't have happened offscreen in the films like it did in the book. Because of this, the Hobbit films give us a comfortable transition from their light-hearted source material to the more grisly Lord of the Rings films.

And that brings us to our final verdict. At the end of the day, it's pretty obvious that the Hobbit film trilogy, while having its own identity, was meant to be viewed in order with the Lord of the Rings and not as a stand-alone series. The inconsistencies between the trilogies are all fairly minor, and they cease to be a problem roughly halfway through The Fellowship of the Ring. 

It's doubtful that Peter Jackson will ever go back and make changes to Fellowship to better match it with The Hobbit, and most fans of the series likely wouldn't want him to anyway. And really, he shouldn't. As far as prequels go, the Hobbit trilogy is a strong followup that ties in very well with its predecessors, and its shortcomings in that regard should be left intact just to highlight how few of them there really are. If the perfect prequel is unachievable, then the Hobbit films are three of the closer attempts at reaching that.

That's What She Said

As a writer in the twenty-first century, I sometimes find myself worrying about innuendos. It seems like no matter what you say these days, someone always laughs at it because they've found a sexual double meaning behind it. Sure, innuendos can be funny when they're intentional, like in the Spinal Tap song "Sex Farm" or the "Schwetty Balls" sketch on SNL, but when they're not intended, they can ruin the effect of a scene by turning something harmless into a filthy joke to the audience. Having your work taken the wrong way is probably the biggest fear of any creative person, and with so many slang terms and metaphors for sex floating around in our culture these days, it gets harder and harder to avoid dirty entendres when writing.

Err, I mean, "it gets more and more difficult to avoid dirty entendres when writing."

What's more aggravating is that language is constantly evolving, so words or statements that used to have one particular meaning can develop others over time. Not only does this end up dating a lot of texts, but it can make them a bit awkward to read today. Take the word "ejaculate" for instance. That word was once used fairly often in literature as a synonym for "exclaim" or "blurt out." Since our culture has grown to associate it with another action though, it isn't used much in that first context anymore, or even used much at all. The same goes for words like "penetrate," "erect," or "cleavage." You can almost hear the readers snickering when you put those in a piece of writing.

It can be especially challenging to avoid innuendos when writing fantasy or certain period pieces, since those genres typically use older dialects to make their atmospheres feel more authentic or other-worldly. You don't really like to say the above mentioned words in such stories, despite them being used often with different meanings in the old days. This puts some writers, including myself, in the position of either using replacement words that may not feel as natural for the setting or using the original words with gritted teeth.

It can be even more challenging to come up with names for places and characters in those kinds of stories. As someone who grew up loving Lord of the Rings and who spent a lot of time on message boards and fanfiction websites, I've come across more "Gimli, son of Groin" jokes than I can count. Gimli's father, who appears in The Hobbit, is really named Glóin, but because that name loosely resembles the term for a private body part, that's all some people see when they read it. What turned this annoying fad upside-down for me was reading Tolkien's other Middle Earth works and discovering that...sigh...Gimli's grandfather is actually named Gróin.

Okay, it's not like Tolkien named the character "Gnotti Bitz" or anything like that, but he HAD to be aware that a name like Gróin was going to look odd to readers. I'm pretty certain that the term "groin" existed in England at the time when he wrote those books. Tolkien didn't seem like the type to intentionally slip raunchy humor into his work, and since that name apparently means "Growing One" in Old Norse, I'm guessing that its use is just a case of cultural differences in fiction; it sounds funny to humans, but not to dwarves.

With that being said, I guess finding an innuendo in something serious is really the audience's problem more than the writer's, and I say that as someone who's laughed at a lot of unintended euphemisms myself. As readers, we need to be able to set aside our "That's what she said" mentalities and look at certain things in a more mature mindset. In turn, we writers should still be mindful of the words we use, but not to the point that we labor over every sentence in an effort to sound squeaky clean. We can't please everyone, so we need to learn to get a grip on ourselves, suck it up, and not think so long and hard about it.

And if you laughed at that last sentence, then one or both of us probably did something wrong.