On his Facebook page, Peter Jackson will be answering 20 questions about his adaptation of The Hobbit over the next couple of weeks. He posted the first question and answer yesterday, and it is one that strikes right to the heart of him fleshing out J R R Tolkien’s book into a two-part film with material found in the appendices to The Lord Of The Rings: The Return Of The King.
OFFICIAL QUESTION #1
VALERIA KEMENTARI asked, “Are we going to see the White Council attacking Dol Guldor?”
This was quite a popular topic, with JOHN LIDDLE, TOBY PHILLIPS and SETH DONALD, along with many others, asking variations of this same question.
I’m not going to say just what and when, but I will confirm that both the White Council and Dol Guldur will feature in the movies. And not just in one scene either. Just how to visualise it has been a challenge, but fortunately Alan Lee and John Howe went crazy with ideas, and it should look pretty cool.
For those of you not versed in Middle Earth lore beyond what you saw already in The Lord Of The Rings films, Dol Guldor is a fortress at the southern edge of the Mirkwood forest where Sauron hid while regaining his strength through most of the Third Age. When the Wizards of the White Council, which included Gandalf and Sauruman, became concerned over rumors of a powerful being residing there who was being called the Necromancer, they attacked the fortress and drove him out. Of course, Sauron fled back to his old digs in Mordor, setting in motion the events of The Lord Of The Rings. None of this is really mentioned in the text of The Hobbit, though Tolkien forwarded this as an explanation for Gandalf’s periodic disappearances in the book.
Jackson has long talked about using material found in the appendices to help flesh out his Hobbit films and to better connect them to the Lord Of The Rings films. Outside of what we can infer he’s doing with the casting of several actors from the Rings trilogy whose characters don’t actually appear in The Hobbit, this is the first concrete corroboration of at least part of the material he is adding in. This was pretty much expected, especially with the casting of Sylvester McCoy as another council wizard Radagast The Brown, but it is still exciting to get confirmed.
