Interlacing in The Lord of the Rings

Interlacing and interconnections presented Peter Jackson with a complex challenge in translating the book to a narrative suitable for his The Lord of the Rings film trilogy.

[1][3] Rather than seeking to make a story as clear as possible with a main plot and subsidiary storylines as in a modern novel, the interlaced medieval tale aimed to reflect the confusing flow of events that people perceive in the world.

The Tolkien scholar Richard C. West gives as example the 13th century Queste del Saint Graal, where the holy grail is just one goal, while the knights Bors, Galahad, Gawain, and Lancelot all pursue their own adventures, for readers to compare and contrast.

[2] The early reviewer William Blissett wrote in 1959, just a few years after the book was published, that The Lord of the Rings, given its medieval theme and structure, was "perhaps the last literary masterpiece of the Middle Ages.

[11] Holmes states that Tolkien "uses this medieval technique in a decidedly modern way, closer to [Virginia] Woolf and [William] Faulkner than to Thomas Mallory [in his Le Morte D'Arthur] or Chrétien de Troyes".

[15] The first two books are almost single-threaded, as they follow Frodo from his home in the Shire with the other Hobbits to Rivendell, and then south as the nine companions of the Fellowship of the Ring, through Moria and Lothlorien to the River Anduin.

[16] Interlacing allowed Tolkien to weave an elaborately intricate story, presented through the eyes of the Hobbit protagonists, "underscoring [their] frequent bewilderment and disorientation".

[14][16] The bewilderment of the reader is minimised by the use of synchronising 'narrative landmarks', such as the brooch dropped by Pippin and discovered by Aragorn, and by having different characters observe the same event, such as a full moon, at different points in the narrative.

"[18] More subtly, the leapfrogging of the timeline by the different story threads allows Tolkien to make hidden connections that can only be grasped retrospectively, as the reader realises on reflection that certain events happened at the same time.

[19] This can appear, Shippey writes, as luck, where in daily life it is uncertain whether this is "something completely humdrum and practical or something mysterious and supernatural", just like the Old English word used for the same purpose in Beowulf, wyrd.

Further, West writes, the evident sense that the novel is a part of an immense mythology, encouraged both by mentions of ancient events in the text and by the extensive appendices (which cover Kings and Rulers, Chronology, Family Trees, Calendars, Writing and Spelling, and the Languages of Middle-earth),[21] creates in the reader's mind a feeling of openendedness, "whereby the reader has the impression that the story has an existence outside the confines of the book and that the author could have begun earlier or ended later, if he chose".

[24] Peter Jackson and his scriptwriters chose to flatten out the book's complex interlacing and back-and-forth timeline to create a much more direct narrative suitable for his The Lord of the Rings film trilogy.

Kisor concluded, unlike some Tolkien scholars, that Jackson had succeeded in producing comparable effects in "emotional and thematic content" and so in remaining true to the book.