A Soviet-era adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring has finally seen the light of day after 30 years of obscurity. Produced for Russian television in 1991, the adaptation aired only once and was long believed lost.
“Fans have been searching the archives but had not able to find this film for decades,” Russian Fantasy publication World of Fantasy wrote about the movie. Their search has now ended thanks to Russian network 5TV, which posted the film in two separate parts to its YouTube channel. 5TV is the successor to the movie’s original producer, the Soviet-era Leningrad Television.
Titled Khraniteli in Russian, the Soviet-era production adapts the first volume in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy — something that wasn’t always easy to find during the Soviet era. It took decades for the books to see published translations behind the Iron Curtain.
Khraniteli also premiered ten years before Peter Jackson’s Oscar-winning film adaptation of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, which released in theaters from 2001 to 2003. Besides the obvious differences in budget between the two projects, Khraniteli includes a version of the eccentric character Tom Bombadil, whose omission from Jackson’s movies remains a point of contention for many Tolkien fans.
Amazon is currently developing a Lord of the Rings TV series set before the events of Tolkien’s trilogy. The show’s full synopsis reads,
Amazon Studios’ forthcoming series brings to screens for the very first time the heroic legends of the fabled Second Age of Middle-earth’s history. This epic drama is set thousands of years before the events of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and will take viewers back to an era in which great powers were forged, kingdoms rose to glory and fell to ruin, unlikely heroes were tested, hope hung by the finest of threads, and the greatest villain that ever flowed from Tolkien’s pen threatened to cover all the world in darkness. Beginning in a time of relative peace, the series follows an ensemble cast of characters, both familiar and new, as they confront the long-feared re-emergence of evil to Middle-earth. From the darkest depths of the Misty Mountains, to the majestic forests of the elf-capital of Lindon, to the breathtaking island kingdom of Númenor, to the furthest reaches of the map, these kingdoms and characters will carve out legacies that live on long after they are gone.
Khraniteli can be seen now on 5TV’s YouTube channel.
Source: World of Fantasy, via The Guardian
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