The debonair Basil Marigold's

It has taken a few long evenings, but I have now mostly caught up with the DVDs of the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings. I have found them very interesting. If you were to just watch the films and never read the books (but, why would you do that?) then you would probably enjoy them too. You would however be witnessing things that never happened in the books and these aren't merely minor things either they can be enormous plot changes. They have removed an entire ending plot from the book that involves Saruman. As the wizard who turns to the darkness of Sauron, Saruman is defeated by Treebeard and the Ents and his tower is taken. Treebeard takes pity on him and releases him into middle earth. At the end of the book when Sauron is defeated and the hobbits return to the shire to see it has been ravaged by a man called Sharkey. This turns out to be Saruman. The Hobbits revolt and finally defeat Saruman. You don't see this in the films because Saruman is killed by his henchman and

So, after many years I have been, finally, persuaded to watch two sets of films. They are the Hobbit & the Lord of the Rings. Oddly, as a single book, the hobbit has been transformed into three films. The LOTR was a set of three books converted into three films as well. However, the LOTR is a vastly larger book and had the film been produced last (the Hobbit was made last as a film, but it is set about 60yrs before the events in the LOTR), it would have been about nine films, or maybe more in fact! Considering all films are approximately 3 hrs long it’ll take me eighteen hours to watch them all: it is quite a challenge! I have loved these stories since I first read them when I was about 13 years old. I first bought an omnibus of the LOTR in a bookshop in Brixham called, the book warren. It cost me £5. It must have taken about a year to go through the entire book! It is long, it is complicated, and as Tolkien created a whole new language, some of the words were virtually unpronounce