Lord of the Rings: How Faithful Are Peter Jackson’s Movies to the Tolkien Books?

In the film, Faramir follows up on the temptation to “show his quality” and decides to take the hobbits, with the Ring, to his father Denethor, to try to make his father proud. They get all the way to Osgiliath before an attack by the Black Riders results in Frodo trying to give them the Ring and Sam having to wrestle him to the ground and talk him out of it. Witnessing this, Faramir decides the Ring probably should be destroyed after all and lets them go.

The sequence gives Frodo and Sam more to do, as their major action scene from the book – the fight with Shelob the giant spider-creature – has been moved to third film (because they don’t have any major action scenes in the book of The Return of the King; their journey through Mordor to Mount Doom is covered in only three chapters). But there’s no denying this is the biggest deviation from the source material in the trilogy.

The sequence lets us see how far Frodo is being driven to despair by carrying the Ring, and it gives Sam a really lovely speech about how “there’s some good in this world, Mr Frodo, and it’s worth fighting for”. It does make Faramir a slightly less morally upstanding character than he is in the books, as he gives in to the temptation to take the Ring to his father for quite a while and nearly gets them all killed in the process. But it should be noted that Faramir does, in the end, let the hobbits go just as his book counterpart does, and his struggle is far more dramatic in the movie version, making him a more flawed, and possibly more interesting, character.

Galadriel’s Gifts, Sam’s Front Door, Frodo’s Age, Songs

These are a few of the major talking points, and of course there are smaller changes scattered throughout the films that might be irritating to some book fans. For some, for example, the fact that Galadriel doesn’t give Sam a box of earth from Lothlórien as a gift is annoying. For others, the final image of the movie is a huge irritant, as Sam goes into a hobbit hole with a yellow door instead of the green door of Bag End, which Frodo left to him and his family. There are also many fewer songs than there are in the books, in which the action quite frequently stops for a song about the Olden Days or a sung eulogy for the dead (though quite a few songs and eulogies do appear in the Extended Editions).

Frodo is also thirty years younger than his book counterpart. While this would seem like something that would affect his relationships with the other hobbits, it doesn’t really. Sam is Frodo’s servant and that has a more significant impact on their relationship than their respective ages, while Merry is the most sensible hobbit and Pippin the most foolish, so even though Pippin is no longer the youngest, the character dynamics remain unchanged.

The majority of the movies follow the action of the books pretty closely and much of the dialogue from the books is used. In some places dialogue has been a little bit modernised or moved to slightly different scenes, but much of it is lifted from the novels. Some events are compressed, most notably the time that elapses between Bilbo’s birthday party and Gandalf telling Frodo about the Ring (17 years in the books, a few weeks in the films). But most of the major plot beats are there and the story is clearly the same story, even with the changes.