While waiting for the Amazon Prime series to drop later this year, the Soviet LOTR has become an internet hit, racking up more than 2 million views between the two parts. There are no subtitles, and even the description is in Russian only, leaving fans in the rest of the world wondering where the latest version of LOTR comes from.
A Movie Made For Russian TV
The made-for-TV movie was made and aired for the first and only time until recently in 1991. It went from the airwaves straight to the storage bin, and that’s where it sat for decades. 5TV, a Russian-government operated station that took over from Leningrad Television, posted the film to YouTube in late March without any notice.
The movie features music composed by Andrei Romanov, known for his work with the seminal rock band Akvarium (Aquarium). In the opening song, he sings a Russian version of the song that Gandalf sings to Bilbo about the Three Rings of Power.
The movie has been released in two parts, totaling just under two hours. What LOTR fans love about them isn’t the high-tech special effects. The budget was low, and many of the sets look more like a high school theater stage than Middle Earth. What it lacks in production values, though, it makes up for in a trippy, psychedelic kind of sensibility.
Part One (A Long Expected Party to the Barrow Downs):
On social media and in online discussions, many fans have commented on the differences between the versions. The Soviet LOTR, for example, includes Tom Bombadil, the mysterious forest-dweller left out of Peter Jackson’s $93 million movie, and his wife Goldberry. They’re made to look huge in contrast to the hobbits.
Saruman is a human, and Elrond has a beard. There is a narrator, a common device on Soviet movies, who smokes a pipe as he tells the story. When Gandalf falls with the Balrog in Moria, for example, the whole scene is reduced to the aftermath, where the rest of the Fellowship burst into tears.
Being shot in Russia, some of the scenes were shot in the snow, including the beginning of the story when the hobbits leave the Shire. Rather than the big bare feet of Jackson’s hobbits, the Soviets wear tall furry boots.
Part Two (The Barrow Downs to the Breaking of the Fellowship)
Russian artist Irina Nazarova, someone who saw it on TV the first time around, and was a part of the arts scene in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), was interviewed by the BBC. “Computer graphics had only just come to Leningrad TV and there was nobody who could put them to professional use,” she explained.
Peter Jackson’s version, universally considered the gold standard, was released just a decade later.
A History Of Obscure LOTR Adaptations
Many fans of Peter Jackson’s trilogy and the prequel Hobbit trilogies are also aware of the 1978 animated version that featured a young John Hurt voicing Aragorn. There have been Finnish, Swedish, and other lesser-known versions of the Tolkien classic that largely date back to the 1970s.
The first Russian language translation of Tolkien’s Fellowship of the Ring came out in the 1960s, but due to the heavy censorship of literature in Soviet Russia, there were considerable changes and cuts made to the original story. The concept of a group of freedom fighters opposing a totalitarian regime that comes from the East was seen as problematic by some. Underground copies circulated in literary circles, and an official translation was published in 1982 (only of Fellowship of the Ring).
In 1985, there was a bizarre and ultra-low budget live TV version of The Hobbit that featured ballet dancers and a narrator who took the role of Tolkien. It was called The Fantastic Journey of Mister Bilbo Baggins, the Hobbit, and somehow didn’t include any elves or trolls. It was the only known Soviet LOTR before the 1991 TV movie.
It wasn't until the fall of the Soviet regime in the 1990s that Tolkien became common in translation. Tolkien fandom grew at the same time, which seems to have led to the TV version now on YouTube.
Production has begun on Amazon’s Lord of the Rings series, expected to begin streaming in late 2021.
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