J.R.R. Tolkien was fine with leaving War of the Rohirrim’s story untold

For Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, screenwriter Philippa Boyens, Jackson, and Fran Walsh took on the task of translating three expansive novels into three live-action movies. With the anime movie The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, Boyens and her co-writers took on a radically different challenge: expanding two pages of summary into one two-hour animated film.

Polygon sat down with Boyens to discuss adapting the world of Middle-earth to another medium and what she learned about screenwriting, moviemaking, and J.R.R. Tolkien himself on The War of the Rohirrim.

Boyens says she learned one important thing from a letter Tolkien wrote to his son, editor, and archivist, Christopher Tolkien, that gave her a new appreciation for the professor. “He was talking about how some stories [in his Middle-earth legendarium] are meant to be left untold, as if they’re there to be explored. […] He, I think, was perhaps unafraid of the idea that he could leave some stories untold. And that they might be filled out — or excavated, perhaps, is a better term — by other minds was interesting, especially the way he put it.”

That perspective is particularly pertinent to The War of the Rohirrim, which is based on a story Tolkien only loosely described. The War of the Rohirrim, directed by Kenji Kamiyama (Blade Runner: Black Lotus) and produced by Sola Digital Arts for Warner Bros. Animation, takes place 250 years before Frodo and the Ring Quest, and concerns the Rohirrim, a horse-loving people heavily influenced by ancient Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian culture, topics near and dear to Tolkien’s heart.

For the movie, Boyens and her co-writers adapted the story of the Rohirric king Helm Hammerhand, which is found in a more general summary of Middle-earth’s royal lines that Tolkien wrote for the back-matter of The Return of the King. War of the Rohirrim’s script turns Helm’s unnamed daughter into the protagonist, which certainly qualifies as “filling out” or “excavating” Tolkien’s writing.

The inciting incident of Helm’s downfall comes when he rejects a rival lord’s petition to join his son, Wulf, and Helm’s daughter in marriage. But through all the tragedy that follows, in which Wulf seeks revenge on Helm’s line and the throne of Rohan, Tolkien never mentions Helm’s daughter again. He never reveals whether she survived the fate that befell the rest of her family, and he never even gives her name. She simply disappears from the story once Helm refuses to wed her to Wulf.

To flesh out that daughter’s story, Boyens and her collaborators looked to historical and literary sources that they knew Tolkien would have been familiar with, like the historical Æthelflæd — daughter of Alfred the Great, first king of the Anglo-Saxons — who ruled the English kingdom of Mercia in the early 10th century.

“She’s called the Lady of the Mercians,” Boyens said, “and of course that’s very much [Tolkien’s] neighborhood, so to speak. So I couldn’t help but think, Of course he would know of her, this daughter of Alfred the Great who defended her people.”

Another Rohan inspiration for Tolkien would likely have been the epic of Beowulf, of which he was considered a pivotal scholar and translator. “Yesterday I was up in Oxford,” Boyens said, “and I spoke at Merton College amongst this wealth of real knowledge — real experts, true experts of the professor — and someone brought up that comparison between the story of Helm and Beowulf, and there is a lot in there. […] I think certainly, [they share] the flawed central character, the almost overreaching nature of Helm and Beowulf potentially, but also their heroic redemption.”

But Boyens cautioned that, in her experience, “although [Tokien] based the Rohirrim somewhat on Anglo-Saxon culture and his own roots, I think that there was another flavor in there to them that was, inherently and intrinsically, purely Rohirric. As much as we did use some sources from some of the histories from Anglo-Saxon culture to flesh out the storytelling, you always begin to travel back to Professor Tolkien’s work and realize, No, this is a culture in and of itself, with its own traditions. Even though we’re only dealing with a couple of pages in [The Return of the King] for the story, per se, there’s a wealth of history of the Rohirric culture that we could go into that he wrote about.”

Unlike its live-action predecessor movies, Boyens’ War of the Rohirrim doesn’t have a wide-ranging Ring Quest to follow. So its two-hour length (snappy, compared to the three-hours-each Lord of the Rings trilogy) spends a lot of time with its characters, and themes of loyalty, betrayal, and revenge. In Boyens’ estimation, that combination of epic action with personal focus was a perfect fit for War of the Rohirrim’s anime style and Kamiyama’s directorship.

“There’s a great tradition within anime — and also [when] you look to the great Japanese filmmakers, obviously, like Kurosawa, for example — where an epic nature is inherently in the storytelling,” Boyens said. “But also, there’s a way in which they’re able to collapse and condense, almost in a claustrophobic way. The central conflict, even within characters themselves, begins to inform the storytelling more and more and more. Something that stood out [to us] was, You know what? This is kind of the perfect story to tell in anime form, of all the Tolkien stories.”

Boyens enjoyed embracing a slower rhythm for Rohirrim as well. “The natural pace of anime is going to be different, and rest in certain moments, especially on particular shots. The cutting is different, but I kind of like that. I do feel like sometimes, especially in films these days, it’s almost assaultive, the way in which it comes at you. The relentlessness of that cutting can be a little bit, I don’t know. Yeah, like I said, assaultive — I’m not even sure if that’s a word. [laughs] If it isn’t, I just made it up. But, if you know what I mean, that ability to just absorb something at a different pace, I actually love that.”

Boyens doesn’t think that her screenwriting thought process changed much from live action to animation, at least not in the important ways — with one exception: “The difference with animation is, you really need to commit to those thoughts. [laughs] Because you don’t get a reshoot!”

The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim is out now in theaters.