73. Don’t Misgender the Eagle!

Jared, Oriana and Ned discuss Ned’s choice of topic: the 1981 BBC radio adaptation of The Lord of the Rings. It wasn’t the first time through when it came to a radio version of The Lord of the Rings, even on the BBC itself, but Brian Sibley’s magisterial 13 hour version of the book became the most acclaimed adaptation in general of Tolkien’s work until Peter Jackson’s film sequence, and it remains for many both a generational marker and a gold standard for translating the text into another medium. Performances by the likes of Ian Holm, Michael Hordern, Robert Stephens and a young Bill Nighy remain among their most well-known and remembered, and the sheer depth that the series was able to dive into with its characters hasn’t been equalled by any other version of the book before or since. At the same time, it had to deal with the self-evident limitations of audio drama in general, while not all choices made were necessarily the most effective, even considering the original time and place of its creation. Are there problems with the medium itself which can potentially limit enjoyment or appreciation of what’s being done? What are the differences between the movie and radio adaptation in terms of showing quieter and more unsure moments among the characters from the original text? How did the dynamic between Holm and Nighy as Frodo and Sam play out the relationship between the two characters in this specific version? Can the musical score by Stephen Oliver have its place of comparison next to Howard Shore’s famed work for the Jackson films? And yeah…what IS with that eagle falsetto?

Show Notes.

Jared’s doodle. Radio, live transmission (well, taped).

The Crawford Award! Pretty awesome! Hurrah for Jared! Read The West Passage!

More on the Tolkien letters to Donald Swann going up for auction.

The 1981 BBC Lord of the Rings radio series via the Internet Archive; various other versions are floating around, on CD, cassette or streaming.

Our episodes on various earlier adaptations from that general time – the Rankin-Bass Hobbit, Ralph Bakshi’s The Lord of the Rings, and the Rankin-Bass Return of the King.

BBC Audio, the current home for their radio efforts and well beyond. Plenty to explore!

Wikipedia’s entry on the 1981 radio series. Separately, some more from there about the earlier BBC radio adaptations – the 1955 one, as well as the 1968 series adapting The Hobbit.

Brian Sibley’s page links to a wide variety of general efforts – take a spin! 

A few actor pages to explore: Ian Holm, Michael Hordern, Robert Stephens, Gerard Murphy, Michael Graham Cox, Peter Woodthorpe, David Collings, Peter Vaughan and of course Bill Nighy.  (Plus, on the technical side, Elizabeth Parker and Stephen Oliver.)

Skye Butchard’s essay in The Quietus on the series – this is paywalled for subscribers, we should note, but we do encourage you to subscribe!

The original Star Wars trilogy radio series! Not kidding! They’re a fun listen.

Bill Nighy as Slartibartfast, a great performance indeed. And all hail The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy in general in all its variations.

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