Earlier this month, I decided to give a listen to the radio play adaptation of the Fellowship of the Ring from the BBC in the 1980s. Having finished the first installment, I have a few thoughts.

On the one hand, it’s interesting to see how many common elements the radio play adaptation has with the later Peter Jackson film version. The two make some common choices in terms of major set pieces to omit (no Tom Bombadil) or acting choices (Barliman Butterbur has the exact same accent between versions—to the point that I had to look up the actor to see if they’re the same—they aren’t).

On the other hand, the radio play adaptation feels like it does a much better job of establishing the scope of time this first book covers. Some of this is due to heavily leaning on a narrator, in ways that most other radio plays don’t. Having the narrator gives a mechanism for explaining the distance traveled over the course of the story, or how much time has passed between Gandalf’s visits to Frodo in the Shire, or how long Frodo took to finally get up and leave.

That said, the radio play also tries to fit as much of the poetry and songs from the first half too, which does lead to some tonal weirdness. Tolkein’s prose serves to help manage the pacing between dramatic moment, to poetry reading, to angst over the possible fate of the shire, and so on. The radio play lacks all of that – we’re missing the descriptions of the mines of Moria, the flight from Bree to Weathertop, and from Weathertop to Rivendell. It’s not that those moments aren’t there, they are, but ironically those moments shedding the narration and relying more heavily on descriptive (and general conversational) dialog and sound effects to carry the story – providing a more conventional radio play – while keeping the musical numbers and poetry creates a frequent sense of tonal whiplash.

The bits that do work in this context are the ones that Phillipa Boyens and Fran Walsh kept in the film – the discussion of the tale of Berin and Luthien, “The Road Goes Ever On And On”, etc. It’s just that we also get Frodo’s full song from the Inn of the Prancing Pony, which just drags. Ironically, while we also get some of the bits of Hobbit society that the film cut, we don’t generally get the fun bits, like Bilbo’s going away presents and their array of various sick burns against the Sackville-Bagginses and others.

I did enjoy it, but ultimately I found it left me wanting to listen to the audiobook of the full novel more than going straight into the radio play version of The Two Towers. By comparison, when I watch the Peter Jackson Trilogy, I’m here for the long haul – from Fellowship to Towers to Return.

This isn’t to say I don’t like radio plays, I absolutely do – I’m a big fan of Old Time Radio. It’s just that I think, ultimately, of all the various methods of presentation of Lord of the Rings, perhaps The Radio Play version is the weakest.

All of this said, going on this journey has made me wish, quite a bit, that the Embracer Group’s ownership of the Lord of the Rings rights combined with owning Dark Horse had gotten us a graphic novel adaptation of Lord of the Rings – something I’ve wanted for years.

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