The Little-Known Hobbit Adaptation that Is Superior to the Peter Jackson Films

Even though JRR Tolkien's classic The Hobbit is one of the most universally beloved children's books of the past several centuries, still to-date there has only ever been one feature-length adaptation of the book.  This sole adaptation was produced in 1977 by the Rankin/Bass studio.  This same studio gave us masterpieces such as the stop-motion Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reinder, the animated Frosty the Snowman, and The Flight of Dragons.  Their adaptation of The Hobbit was originally a made-for-TV movie, so it has a reduced length (77 minutes), and clear jump points meant for commercial breaks.  It is also meant for children.  And because it is meant for children, it captures the themes of the original perfectly, in beautifully hand-drawn scenes, with perfect musical settings for the many songs throughout.

Perhaps no one has ever tried to adapt The Hobbit since then, because Rankin/Bass did an essentially perfect job.  It could only have been better if it were three hours long.

Nevertheless, there are two other films worth mentioning.  The first, which most people are aware of, was a trilogy of major motion pictures based on a Lord of the Rings fanfic written by Guillermo del Torro, and directed by Peter Jackson.  This adaptation borrowed heavily from other fanfics of the era, like Legolas by Laura, and worked in a lot of Legendarium
material.  It is worth mentioning in this category at all because the films are set during the same timeframe as The Hobbit, so that Bilbo is out on his quest while the events of the movies are taking place.  These films are feature-length adaptations.  But they are not adaptations of The Hobbit.

The second, which very few people have heard of, was created in 1966 by a nearly-unknown (to me) Czech animation studio.  This is an adaptation, but not feature-length.  The animation company had early on acquired the movie rights to a tiny children's book no one had ever heard of.  In the 1960s, suddenly, Tolkien's writings skyrocketed in popularity, and this company found they held rights to a major property.  In order to maintain those rights, per the contract, they needed to use them.  They needed to produce and air an actual version of The Hobbit.  They had very little time or budget to do so.  You can read the first-hand history of its creation here.  And you can view the entire thing on YouTube.

What was produced is a short, less-than-twelve minute film that I think encapsulates the heart and charm of The Hobbit, in its short, hastily-produced format.

I had first become aware of this version a decade ago, and I have returned to it now because my three-year-old keeps asking me about Gandalf and Bilbo who are on the posters and box covers all over my house.  People like to malign it, but I want to defend it.  This movie is The Hobbit.  But let me lay some groundwork.

Firstly, The Hobbit is a book for children.  I first read it in elementary school, which is when children should first read it.  The Lord of the Rings is for young adults, teenagers or older.  But The Hobbit is for children.  It is told by a strongly present narrator, whose voice is that of a kindly old man, likely by a fire, telling you this tale.  It's not quite meant for a child who needs an adult to read, but also a child not quite old enough to read this sort of book without an adult's presence.  The imaginary elements and features of the world are free-flowing, and alternate from wondrous places, friendly figures, and horrible monsters.

Secondly, The Hobbit is not a lore dump.  Though there are aspects of The Hobbit that will be included into the larger Legendarium, this book is not intended to present the lore.  It was not originally written with any of the lore in mind, either, but had to be worked back into the Legendarium that had already been planned.  Fans of The Lord of the Rings, or The Silmarillion, or the rest of Tolkien's writings, will often try to view adaptations through the lens of consistency the lore.  It's all about the lore, and representing all the deep connections, and exactly pronouncing Quenya names.  And this is a tension that has always existed in Tolkien's writings, because The Hobbit does not care about the lore.  The Hobbit does not care about who the Necromancer is, what Bilbo's ring is, about how dragons swallowed the seven dwarven rings, or that Gandalf's sword Glamdring was forged by Elven lord whats-his-face, the thirdborn son of so-and-so, or about the balrog that technically is there somewhere in the goblin caves during this book, or that Gollum is actually a deformed hobbit bent by the ring's power, or that Gandalf is a Maiar named Olorin.  The Hobbit doesn't care.  While those elements are relevant to the larger Legendarium, they are entirely irrelevant to The Hobbit, or the intended audience of The Hobbit, or the enjoyment of The Hobbit.  For The Hobbit, all of the fantastical elements are only about the wonder and adventure they present in this book, unmoored to the rest of the Legendarium.

So sure, the stone trolls have the sword of the Elf-lord Turgon stashed in their mud cave.  Why not?

Thirdly, The Hobbit is properly a book about... a hobbit.  It is about Bilbo Baggins, the Baggins of Bag-End, and a descendant of the great Bull-Roarer Took who rode a horse into the Goblin Wars.  The story is a classic story structure, of the normal everyman going into the unknown and growing by overcoming obstacles until he becomes a hero.  Bilbo begins as a timid country gentleman accustomed to comfort and frequent meals.  He begins gradually learning how to use his wits to defeat monsters far larger and stronger than himself, until before long he is single-handedly confronting a small battalion of gigantic spiders with taunts and dagger stabs, striking from the invisible air, sending them running in fear.  By the end, Bilbo sneaks alone straight into the lair of a gigantic fire-breathing dragon and snatches a treasure right from under its nose.  That is what The Hobbit is about.

One minimum requirement to being an adaptation, and counting as an adaptation, is that you have to actually be about the same thing that the book is about.

While Peter Jackson's movies are about heroic dwarves and vengeful orcs and love triangles with Legolas and confronting the Necromancer (Who is revealed to be Sauron in disguise! It's a tie-in!), the 1966 Czech adaptation is actually about the same thing The Hobbit is about.  It's about a hobbit.

People critiquing this film on the basis of the changes are largely looking at it from a Legendarium lens.  There was no princess of Dale!  Dale had been burnt nearly two-hundred before the events of the story, not just a few months ago!  Thorin Oakenshield wasn't a human general, he was a dwarf!  The monsters weren't tree-ogres, they were stone trolls!  Bilbo didn't use the Arkenstone to shoot down Smaug!  It was Bard, the great-great-great grandson of the former king of Dale, using only a long bow and his last arrow!  ... okay, the last one is a poetic note that is rather important thematically... but still.

But I'm looking it at from the standpoint of my three points above.  This is a movie for children.  It has a short length, it's even less scary than the 1977 Rankin/Bass adaptation, it has the same kindly narrator, it makes use of the same free-flowing imagination (such as the liberal changes).  This is also ultimately about a hobbit named Bilbo on a hero's journey, overcoming challenges through wit and courage.

People also critique this film on the basis of the production values, which are really low.  Though produced  by professionals, it is not incorrect to say this has the same quality as a student film.  Today, this could be made by most elementary school classrooms.  But the fidelity of an adaptation is a different issue than the quality of an adaptation.  In terms of fidelity, the low-budget illustrations succeed in capturing the fairy-tale imagination of the original book.

Is it a great movie?  As a short film adaptation of a children's book, with imaginative artwork, for children too young for the real adaptation (Rankin/Bass 1977), yes.  Otherwise, it's maybe a fun curiosity for adult audiences.

Is it a better adaptation of The Hobbit than the Peter Jackson films?  Yes.  Because Peter Jackson's films are not even an adaptation of The Hobbit.  The Jackson films get the lore right.  But again, from the standpoint of The Hobbit, the lore is the most irrelevant part.  They get nothing else right.  The Jackson films are not for children (far too scary and violent).  They deliberately downplay the childlike imagination, taking instead the stance of "serious elf movie."  They include heavy and boring lore dumps everywhere, with excessive over-pronunciation of Quenya words.  They are focused on everything except for the main character, the hobbit of the title.  Bilbo remains essentially the same timid hobbit by the time he goes into Smaug's cave, as he was leaving his hole in Hobbiton.  These movies adapt something else, some other set of material, which had been granted the rights to use names and ideas from the book.

That isn't to say that the Peter Jackson movies aren't better as movies.  Going on only metrics like production values or acting talent or cinematic experience, they arguably dominate the other two.  But when ranked as adaptations of The Hobbit, they don't make it onto the list for consideration.

So when it comes to adaptations of The Hobbit to film, the short Czech animated adaptation is in second place.  Which it takes almost by default, as there is only one other contender.  The first place goes to the Rankin/Bass adaptation, which still remains the only feature-length adaptation of The Hobbit to this date.

It is possible, if I had to rate this movie without knowledge of the Peter Jackson films for comparison, I'd probably be much more negative.  But also probably not; for showing to my son, it's perfect.  I don't like that it changed so many things for no apparent reason.  I think it's silly a princess is there, and the other characters (Thorin and the watchman who fell asleep) are completely undeveloped in this ten minute film.  I don't like that they left out the spiders, or the elves and the barrel ride, or the battle of five armies, or the visit to Rivendell.  Those are all great scenes.  I do think the switch from trolls to "groans" was kind of cool.  And I love the artwork used in the animation.  Or what passes for animation... which is a camera rotating on a sequence of still images.

It would be nice if someone with as much love and attention for the original book that Jackson held for Lord of the Rings, could produce a movie adaptation with as much care as Rankin/Bass did, but longer, to include even more of the places and people of the book.  Until then, the Rankin/Bass adaptation of 1977 remains the only (and the greatest) feature-length adaptation of The Hobbit.

Generative AI and the End of Chesterton's Fence

Chesterton's Fence is a principle of caution, that is especially important in engineering, and especially software engineering.  The principle originates with GK Chesterton, in the form of a parable, paraphrased as follows:

Suppose you arrive in a new town, and find that the central street of the town has a fence stretching across it.  This seems like a very dumb thing, and you can't think of any reason why anyone would put this fence here.  So you decide, it would be best if you remove the fence entirely.  Chesterton says, no.  If you don't know why the fence is there, then you should not take it down.  Find out why it is there first, and then you can take it down.

Or more succinctly, don't change a system until you know why it was put in its current condition.

In software engineering, this "fence" is often some class or method written in a confusing manner, or some algorithm that seems less than optimally implemented.  There is a temptation to always complain about code, and to always want to refactor everything, especially things that seem obviously wrong or suboptimal.  But if we try to refactor a block of code without understanding the original intention, we will likely only make things worse, or break something more complicated than we understood at first glance.

To really understand the principle, you have to recognize that things like fences, software blocks, or legal policies, are not the kinds of things that just happen.  People make them.  If a man builds a fence stretching across a street, he has to be pretty intent about doing so.  If he is intent on doing so, then he has some idea in his head that putting this fence here is a good idea.  If he didn't, he would not have built the fence.  So there must be some reason, even if we don't know it.

If a software dev writes 200 lines of spaghetti code with jumps and labels, then he must have an idea in his head that this is a good idea.  There must be some reason, even if it doesn't seem obvious.  Now, maybe we can accomplish the same goal without the gotos.  But to do that, we have to know the goal.  If we don't know why the dev thought he needed gotos, then we can't make the code better.  It will only become worse.

Finding out should take the form of tracking blames, looking at notes in old PRs or tickets, or asking the original author.  But you should always take the time to find out.

Now here is the actual point:  In the world of ChatGPT and LLMs and AI-generated code, we can no longer apply Chesterton's Fence to any code written after 2023.

Prior to 2023, if you saw a block of code, you had to assume that a human typed those characters with some intentionality aimign at some purpose, and that therefore there was some reason for them, however so vague or misinformed.

Since the arrival of AI-generated code, you cannot assume that.  Maybe a person wrote this for a good reason, or a bad reason.  Or maybe an LLM wrote it for literally no reason at all.

The problem of hallucinations in the generative AI that many software engineers have come to rely on means that there is no actual agency or intentionality behind the creation of code.  The AI that writes the code is never trying to do whatever it is the engineer intends; the AI is instead always and only and ever trying to fill in a word that is most likely in the situation.  Often, that word leads to properly functioning and sensible code.  Maybe.  But it doesn't have to.  And once an LLM has started spouting nonsense, then the next most likely word is also nonsense, and so on.

Entire purposeless code structures can appear in this way, unrelated to any actual function of the program, simply because once it starts making it, it makes the most sense to finish it.

With a mechanical agent that builds things for no reason simply because a stochastic process got it started, the principle behind Chesterton's Fence can no longer apply.  You can look at code written since 2023, and in some cases you might be exactly correct to conclude that there is no reason for it to exist in the way that it does.

Or not.  Maybe it was written by a human for a reason you don't understand.  Who knows.

LLMs really should not be used to create any code that is expected to work correctly.  If the code is only supposed to work qualitatively, maybe for the purpose of a demo, then an LLM can be helpful.  If the code is only supposed to show how to use some API call, then an LLM can be helpful.  And for languages like C++ requiring lots of boilerplate (like filling in rule of 3/5 in classes), an LLM can cut down on a lot of excess typing.

Just please do not mindlessly commit the output of an LLM to a real working codebase without making sure it's doing what you want it to.  If for no other reason, then because you'll break Chesterton's Fence.

The Shroud of Turin, The Image of Edessa, and Why Neither Belongs to Jesus

The Shroud of Turin is back in the news.  Many of the content creators I follow have been claiming the Shroud is real, in light of recent studies using x-rays to analyze the plant fibers of the Shroud.

I think the most egregious is the "face of Jesus" made by asking a generative AI to create a face based on the Shroud of Turin.  If you ask a generative AI to generate an image of a face, it literally must create an image of a face.  And that's what they got.  They got an image of a face.  It'd be curious to see, if they kept asking it the same thing, how different the faces would be.  I'm guessing broadly similar, but notably different.  Especially if you asked Google's Gemini.

I have always been dismissive of the Shroud.  My point has been, the eyewitness evidence of Jesus' burial and resurrection is inconsistent with the Shroud of Turin, so that even if the Shroud is miraculous and from the 1st century, it just means it's a miraculous 1st century burial shroud of some other guy.  I want to stress, this is a rhetorical position.  The Shroud is not miraculous, and is not 1st century; I'm simply emphasizing that I do not need to know its date or means of creation to know it is not the burial cloth of Jesus.

I made a kind of flippant post recently.  However, the Shroud of Turin is actually a highly studied religious artifact, and maybe warrants more than such a brief dismissal.  So I thought I'd take some time to go into more depth on it.

I am going to again state the case against authenticity.  That is, that the Shroud is not the burial cloth of Jesus.

The argument I am going to make does not in any way rely on the carbon dating data, on modern replication attempts, on historical records from medieval France calling it a forgery, nor on any modernist, naturalist, or anti-supernaturalist viewpoint.

My argument will only be based on, firstly, the eyewitness accounts of the burial and Resurrection of Jesus that we have in the New Testament.  Secondly, on the historical descriptions of the Image of Edessa, the most likely historical candidate for the Shroud's pre-Turin existence, taken out of the patristic sources.  These are the sources Christians should look to.  Based on careful analysis of these, and these only, I will show that Jesus was not covered in a shroud at the moment of his Resurrection, and that the Image of Edessa is a later accretion to the original legend of King Abgar V.

Me and My Life

My name is Reece.  I am a PhD in physics, a father of two, and a husband (to one).  I have been authoring this blog irregularly since 2012.

When I began blogging, I was an unmarried graduate student who spent most of his time reading books, solving math problems, and programming computers.  I had a lot more time to write, but also more interesting things to write about.  And maybe I felt more cocksure about posting any silly thing that came to mind.

Now I have two children and a career.  I don't really have time to write, and even when I do I have to write other stuff instead.  I have even less time to read, and even when I do, I have to read other stuff instead.

I'm not going to turn this into a rant about not having free time.  I instead just want to leave a note for the handful of people who might read this: I'm sorry I can't post any more.  These are the things I would post about, or started writing posts about, and never finished; but at least you can see what they were.

Firstly, now that I've finished graduate school, I spend a lot less time thinking about ideas in fundamental physics.  Most of my day is spent programming computers that process data from a national laboratory.  So ideas about probability swords or alternate spacetime geometries occupy fewer of my own compute cycles.

Actually, in the time I have to think about anything, I usually think about questions of theology, not science.  Which means most of the things I have to talk about are related to religion, and in particular to Christianity.  Things like, should I baptize my children?  Or what is the meaning of the Lord's Supper?  While I think these are fascinating questions, probably most people don't, and people smarter than myself have already applied all of their brainpower to the issues.

I would love, though, to go back to the days of writing about the probabilities of alien life, of faeries in phase space, of interpretations of quantum mechanics, time travel, field theories and speculative physics and the rest.  I still have some things I've never said.

For instance, I have been planning since the 2010s a blog post titled "All the Multiverses" that walks through all of the different ideas floating around today that all go under the name "Multiverse" or speak of a "parallel universe", and try to clarify how these ideas are distinct.  I see way too much confusion on it, the most egregious being the confusion of Everett's many-worlds hypothesis with some sort of multiverse of counterfactuals, or confusing the quantum interpretation with time travel, or other things.

I have been planning since 2023 a blog post in the "Positions I Don't Hold" series about quantum interpretation, specifically about Everett's hypothesis.  I think the name of the blog and some posts maybe give the idea I hold to a many-world's view.  I don't, and I have reasons I don't, but the main reason I don't is that I favor the Bohmian interpretation of quantum mechanics, because I think it just makes sense.  So since the Bohmian view just makes sense, I don't bother with other views that are weird, quantum-woo-woo, mystical nonsense.

I have a blog post I started authoring in 2014 dissecting evolution, not particularly trying to prove or disprove it, but to illustrate the multiple ways that people who do believe in it misinterpret it to give a teleology to events, or see things from some view of a direction of human progress.  The main point was that just because someone claims to believe in an idea called "evolution," it didn't imply the person was actually any better educated on the actual science of evolution; usually it only means the person is willing to accept cultural norms from authority figures without really  thinking about them.  I have I think the entire thing written, but I never posted it.  I guess I felt it needed more editing, but I didn't want to do whatever was left, and it got forgotten.

I started another post in 2015 titled "On the Operation of DeLoreans" where I tried to actually examine the multiple-timeline theory of time travel from films such as Back to the Future, from the perspective of physics.  In physics, we know exactly how time travel would work and it'd work according to ideas in GR, which I've written about before.  But most people don't care what GR says and want to hear what Hollywood says, and Hollywood says timelines would bifurcate and you could change the past and etc.  So what would that mean, that timelines bifurcate?  And could it mean anything less than the creation of a new universe, with all of the mass-energy present in that new universe?  I wanted to flesh that out as a means of finally putting that idea to rest, in some place, that actually physically analyzed the concept.

I never spoke much about the actual science things that interested me.  Those relate to general relativity, and in particular to the emission of gravitational waves from compact stellar objects.  That was my thesis topic.  I generally jealously guard these ideas, as I think they might actually lead to publication and I want to be the one to publish them.  But also, if I'm honest, I don't have time and I never will. So why be so guarded?   These ideas would relate to novel methods of calculation, or potential measurements of gravitational waves from the interiors of stellar objects.

When I started the blog, I was actually mostly motivated to share theories about the Kingkiller Chronicles and A Song of Ice and Fire.  I actually re-read all of the ASOIAF books (that were then published, and, as it happens, which are still the only ones published) and took extensive notes in my kindle to use in the post and then... my kindle just lost all of the notes, to the great bit bucket in the sky.  I don't even remember what I had to say about ASOIAF, and all I'd have to say today is, don't read the books expecting a conclusion, and if you do read the books then consider it a trilogy and pretend the others after Storm of Swords don't exist.

I have no energy to write out speculation on what's going to happen, because it has become clear to me that Martin doesn't know what's going to happen and is just making it all up; or he does know, and it really sucks and is infuriatingly unsatisfying.

I also wanted to speculate on the King Killer Chronicles.  I have a few posts up, and my post on Dena and her Patron still gets some traffic.  I haven't gone back to it because... I wrote those posts 13 years ago and Rothfuss still hasn't updated the series.  Once, on a Reddit AMA someone asked about why he chose to give the map that he did,  and Rothfuss promised to write a blog post about it... but that was ten years ago and I never saw the blog post.  On a later AMA the next year I asked him why he didn't write the blog post, but he didn't answer that question (in fairness I probably missed his window of attention).  According to Rothfuss, the entire trilogy was finished before the first book was published.  So how does it take over 13 years to get the last one out?   Was he just lying?  Does he also not know what happens?  Or (worst of all) he does know, and he did have it written out, and devoted fans who were paying attention guessed or deduced a lot of details, and now he's trying to change everything.  Because that would be a sucky way to punish fans just for paying attention.

For instance, I really believe Rothfuss wanted the reveal about Bredon being Dena's patron to be a huge surprise.  And I think for most people it still will be.  And for the fans who paid attention, it will be a satisfying confirmation that they saw the right clues, and that the author had a direction.  If Rothfuss is delaying because he doesn't want to write that reveal anymore, then it's not worth reading even the books that were "good".

But I actually have two more posts I wrote at the same time as the original three (back in 2012), one about the nature of angels in the series, and another about the identity of the king Kvothe kills.  But I don't have the energy to continue with that series, either.  I've been meaning to write something explaining my theory for why Rothfuss hasn't finished the series, similar to my post about Martin, but since KKC isn't frequently in the news, I just don't even have the motivation for that.  

My theory for Rothfuss isn't the same as for Martin.  For Martin, I think he always intended an ending that will piss off fans, got a preview of how fans react with the TV series, and is deliberately stalling getting to that point.  But with Rothfuss, I think he's firstly milking the status of being an author, but also trying to find some "out" in a rewrite that will still have all the clues but point to different resolutions than the ones fans guessed.  But I don't have the time or motivation to explain why I think that.

I've written about some other book series, and sometimes do movie reviews, but actually, lately I don't even have time to watch anything.  That's about two hours on some specific night, and I don't even have that amount of time.

For a while I was on a DnD kick and posted some ideas related to that.  But I was never able to really get the game that I want, and with the lack of realization of it the ideas sort of dried up.  Maybe I should write a post about my difficulties finding a way to play my ideal game.  I actually feel like I'd have motivation for that.

But lately I mostly think about theological questions.  And for some reason, I feel some kind of guilt posting too many theological posts in a row.  But that's really all I have the motivation to think or write about.

I have two children, so the main issue I've been considering lately is about infant baptism.  I came to faith in the South, and down here even the Methodist churches are Baptist churches.  However, infant baptism is an ancient practice, and the majority of Christians historically, and the majority alive today around the globe, and the majority of Christian traditions, all practice it.  So it's probably worth seriously considering it, and looking at the arguments for and against.  And I did, from several traditions, and looked at it historically, and have conclusions. But I think it's only worthwhile to express my conclusions by also expressing the contrary views, and summarizing those views accurately.

Last August I started writing a blog post about the Shroud of Turin I think conclusively disproving its authenticity.  It was a more serious post than my others (this and that), which were pretty flippant; here I actually scrutinized the primary arguments for authenticity, including its historical provenance as the Image of Edessa (or Mandylion).  All I really have left is some editing and adding citations -- but I haven't found a lot of time to do that.

Most of my life is as a computer programmer.  I write software used at a national laboratory, unrelated to my thesis research.  When I get off work, I'm a husband and father.  I am a part-time student, studying theology -- I can take about 1 class per semester, barely, turning all assignments in late.  I usually go to bed around 2 in the morning, and wake up again at 8.  And while I used to blog about cool stuff, I just can't any more.  Something in my life had to give.  The blog was one of the first things.

I wrote this just to mostly update whoever reads it.  I do think about the blog, and have ideas.  I just don't execute.  But at the same time, in writing this out, I had some ideas for things I might be able to post with less effort.  Or this blog will just become a series of posts of me complaining about my lack of time.