The premiere of ‘The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power’ has made me talk a lot about the work of Tolkien. A recurring theme is the multiple liberties that those responsible for the Amazon Prime Video series have had to take, but today I want to draw your attention to the fact that Peter Jackson introduced such important changes that until altered the original ending of ‘The Lord of the Rings’.
“Not my favorite part of The Lord of the Rings”
Those who have read the acclaimed novel will remember that ‘The Lord of the Rings’ had a kind of epilogue known as ‘The sanitation of the Shire’ in which Saruman had a lot of presence. However, there is no trace of it in ‘The Return of the King’ and this is how Jackson explained his decision to eliminate it in 2004:
We changed the books because Saruman’s death happens in a sequence called ‘The Cleansing of the Shire’, which takes place after the events with Frodo and the Ring have been settled. It’s a 70-page denouement, which I considered an anticlimactic sequence in the novel. It’s not my favorite part of ‘The Lord of the Rings’, so we had made the decision in 1998, when we were working on the scripts, that we weren’t going to have ‘Sweeping the Shire’.
The curious thing is that later Saruman did not even make an appearance in the theatrical montage of ‘The Return of the King’, since the scene of his death ended up being eliminated at the last minute and later included in the extended version of the film. Christopher Lee That decision was not taken well at all and he was at odds with Jackson for a while.
That said, personally I always believed that it was a great success to eliminate everything related to ‘El Saneamiento de la Comarca’, both because in Tolkien’s novel it remained as an unsatisfactory addition. It is true that this way he avoided the typical happy ending, but everything related to Saruman corrupting the Shire and the subsequent reconquest of it never ended up fitting too well. Jackson himself He also commented on the following in the additional content of ‘The return of the king’:
Getting to that point and then veering off into a completely different event and story felt anticlimactic to me, I guess that’s how I’d describe it.
And it is that most likely this would have loaded ‘Return of the King’ with an additional ending That perfectly could have gone an additional 30 minutes. In return, it was surely one of the many factors why Tolkien’s son hated his trilogy.
Of course, Jackson did not completely dispense with ‘The Sanitation of the Shire’, as he included a small wink in a vision in the Mirror of Galadriel in ‘The Fellowship of the Ring’ that did not fully conform to Tolkien’s idea either, but It’s the closest thing fans could see.