A Soviet television adaptation of The Lord of the Rings that was thought to be lost in time was rediscovered and posted on YouTube last week, delighting Russian fans of JRR Tolkien.
The 1991 film made for TV, Khraniteli, based on Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring, is the only adaptation of his trilogy The Lord of the Rings that is believed to have been made in the Soviet Union.
Aired 10 years before the release of the first installment of the Peter Jackson film trilogy, the low-budget film seems to be pulled from another era: the costumes and sets are rudimentary, the special effects are ridiculous and many of the scenes look more like a theater than a feature film.
The track, composed by Andrei Romanov from the rock band Akvarium, also lends a distinctly Soviet feel to the production, which aired only once on television before disappearing into the archives of Leningrad Television.
Few knew of its existence until Leningrad Television’s successor, 5TV, abruptly published the film on YouTube last week [part one | part two], where it gained almost 400,000 views over several days.
“Fans have been searching the archives, but for decades they couldn’t find this film,” wrote World of Fantasy, a publication in Russian that wrote about the adaptations of Tolkien’s work.
“There should be a statue for the person who found and digitized this,” posted a commentator.
Previous adaptations and even translations of Tolkien’s work in the Soviet Union were hard to come by, with some convinced that the story of an alliance of men, elves and dwarves fighting against a totalitarian Eastern power had been blocked by the censor.
But another suggestion for the scarcity of translations was that Tolkien’s intricate plot and linguistic invention made it difficult to translate into Russian without tampering with the original or leaving the Soviet public with no idea what was going on.
However, the schlocky adaptation seemed to scratch a nostalgic itch for many who watched it.
“It is as absurd and monstrous as it is divine and magnificent. The opening music is especially lovely. Thank you to those who found this rarity ”, wrote another. In the opening song, Romanov sings a crude translation of Tolkien’s description of the origins of the rings of power, three of which are given to the elves, seven to the dwarves and nine to mortals condemned to death.
The Soviet version includes some elements of the plot left out of Jackson’s $ 93 million blockbuster, including an appearance by the character Tom Bombadil, a forest dweller cut from the English version because he was too wordy and failed to carry the plot forward.
The first Soviet samizdat translation of The Fellowship of the Ring was produced in 1966, more than a decade after Tolkien’s book of that name was published. And the first published translation came out in the Soviet Union in 1982, although its sequels, The Two Towers and The Return of the King, were only released years later.
In 1985, Leningrad Television aired its first version of Tolkien’s work, a low-budget adaptation of The Hobbit featuring dancers from what is now the Mariinsky theater and a mustache narrator representing Tolkien. The short production, entitled The Fantastic Journey of Mr. Bilbo Baggins, the Hobbit, jumps on trolls and elves in an hour-long prank that has long been considered Tolkien’s only finished adaptation produced during the Soviet Union.
According to World of Fantasy, a 1991 animated version of The Hobbit called The Treasure Under the Mountain was dropped, leaving only six minutes of footage available online.
Jackson’s adaptation of the trilogy was a success in Russia. Many young Russians watched a version dubbed by translator Dmitry Puchkov under the pseudonym of Goblin, which was notable for its swearing reinterpretation of the text. In this version, Frodo is called Fyodor Mikhailovich, Legolas has a pronounced Baltic accent and Aragorn shouts “Whoever doesn’t hit [an orc] it’s an ass, ”while his archers shot their arrows while defending Helm’s Abyss.