In 1981, BBC Radio 4 broadcast the first episode of the serialisation of JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Brian Sibley recounts The making of the Rings.

It all began with a rejection letter. I had an idea for a radio dramatisation but, for reasons I’ve now forgotten, the BBC wasn’t interested. However, the then head of the Drama Script Unit, Richard Imison, obviously didn’t want to seem too discouraging, so he asked if there were any books that I was interested in dramatising for them.

Although I had written a number of radio features, I was still quite inexperienced in the craft of dramatising works of literature, having only ever adapted a short fantasy by James Thurber. Notwithstanding which, I immediately sent back a shopping list of suggestions – probably, for I was a hungry young writer, about a baker’s dozen in number. Then, as a postscript, I added that the one book I would really like to adapt for radio was JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.

This suggestion was not, as you might suppose, motivated by the thought that such a long book would require a good many scripts and therefore earn a good deal of money. I was simply in love with the book, having read it for the first time only a few years earlier.

I had been at school when I read The Hobbit (which was dramatised for radio in 1968) and had later enjoyed Tolkien’s short fantasy tales such as Farmer Giles of Ham and the book of verses about Tom Bombadil; but, being a phenomenally slow reader, I was repeatedly deterred by the length of The Lord of the Rings. Six weeks in hospital with a duodenal ulcer finally provided me with the perfect opportunity to get to grips with the matter of Middle-Earth. By the time I had read thirty-something pages, I was hooked.

Hence my enthusiasm to adapt The Lord of the Rings for radio. However, several weeks passed without any response from the BBC; then one day I passed Richard Imison in the corridor in Broadcasting House. ‘How did you know about The Lord of the Rings?’ he asked. ‘How did I know what?’ I replied, ‘How did you know that we were negotiating to obtain radio rights?’ Well, of course I didn’t, but they were and, when they had, I was offered the dramatisation.

They decided that the serial would comprise 26 thirty-minute episodes (half a year of weekly broadcasts) and that the adaptation should be divided between two writers. This was a sensible precaution in view of my inexperience and the fact that it would take on writer a long time to complete the project single-handed.

The writer chosen to work with me was Michael Bakewell, a former radio producer and a highly respected writer whose credits included the BBC’s radio serialisation of War and Peace. As a working partnership we were very much ‘Innocence’ and ‘Experience’ and I was to learn much from working with someone as talented and knowledgeable.

Contemplating the task ahead I realised that it was a daunting one – not least because I was uncertain how Tolkien’s many admirers would react. Tolkien, I knew, would have loathed the idea; after all, when the BBC had presented dramatised readings from The Lord of the Rings in 1955 and 1956, he had disliked the results and expressed the view that the book was ‘quite unsuitable for “dramatisation”’.

But the die was cast! Before we could even begin writing the scripts however, I had to prepare the story for adaptation by producing twenty-six synopses. This was a difficult task because Tolkien’s book contains such a variety of textures: parts of the story are rich in description, others contain lengthy historical resumes, and some have an abundance of dialogue, while others are almost entirely narrative.

Another difficulty arose from the fact that the story’s central section is divided between the adventures of Frodo and Sam and those of the other members of the Fellowship of the Ring. In order to keep the various strands of the story alive (and all the actors employed) in each thirty-minute episode, it was essential to establish a chronology that was rather different from that used in the books, but which remained true to history of Middle-earth. Tolkien had already thoughtfully drawn up a chronological listing of the events in the War of the Ring and this provided an excellent starting point, although some compressions and deletions still had to be made in order to ensure that all the major characters and themes were represented in each episode or simply to ensure that they had a suitable cliff-hanger ending.

Some incidents and one or two characters were lost together (to the understandable annoyance of the purists) but in some instances – for an example where a character had only a few lines to speak – this decision was preferable to the alternative which would have been to fabricate dialogue for them.

The most controversial decision was to eliminate the character of Tom Bombadil and the events that led up to Frodo’s meeting with him. Simple logistics show that even with thirteen hours of broadcast time, there was no way in which the story could be told uncut, and it was occasionally preferable to excise a large episode than to dramatically reduce several others.

In the case of Tom Bombadil I knew that Tolkien had created the character independently of The Lord of the Rings and had, by his own admission, found it considerably difficult to work Bombadil into the matter of the Ring. So, to the anger of many listeners, we said goodbye to poor Tom!

The division of labour between the script-writers might have posed some difficulties, but Michael graciously suggested I should choose whichever episodes I wanted to dramatise and give him the rest. It was tempting to take all those featuring Gollum (who was undoubtedly the most enjoyable character to write for), but common sense suggested I should give Michael those episodes for which he was far more experienced than I, such as the complex battle sequences which would prove difficult to stage on radio. Michael had faced similar problems when dramatising War and Peace and his individual approach to some of these episodes in The Lord of the Rings are among the most original things in serialisation.

As senior producer for the series, the BBC chose one of its most experienced directors, Jane Morgan, who had an exceptional skill for creating dramatic realism and a flair for getting fine performances from actors. Since the task of directing twenty-six episodes was thought to be too demanding for one person, a talented young director with the Drama Department, Penny Leicester, was appointed as second producer for the series. The quartet of writers and producers were soon meeting regularly to brainstorm ideas about casting and music.

‘Dream-casting’ is an enjoyable game which directors and writers adore; it allows you to have any actor you want – regardless of where they are in the world, what they are doing and how much they would cost. In the early days we played that game quite a lot! Eventually, however, decisions are made on the more pragmatic basis of who was available when.

Many leading actors live working on radio because it can often be fitted in between theatre performances and film schedules. However, being cast as on of the leading characters in The Lord of the Rings meant a major engagement of two-months’ work which, not everybody who was approached was able to undertake.

The casting of Ian Holm as Frodo was inspired – his serious personality and his painstaking work as an actor reflected the dedication of the hobbit called upon to assume a superhuman task. Michael Hordern later said that the role of Gandalf was only offered to him because Ralph Richardson turned it down, but Michael’s performance (even though he repeatedly told people that he didn’t really understand Tolkien’s books) perfectly conveyed Gandalf’s power and mystery as well as his compassionate humanity.

About one role there was no debate – everyone was agreed from the outset that Gollum should be played by Peter Woodthorpe who had provided that character’s voice for Ralph Bakshi’s animated film version of the story. Peter, whose distinguished career had included the first London stage production of Waiting for Godot, had developed a slimy, sibilant way of speaking that exactly captured Gollum’s pathetic, tricksy ways.

That endearing veteran actor, John le Mesurier, was to play Bilbo and Gerard Murphy was to narrate the series. A somewhat controversial decision was the casting of Robert Stephens as Aragon. He was, for some, an unlikely choice; but for a great many listeners Robert’s powerfully idiosyncratic performance embodied a strong sense of Aragorn’s lost nobility.

Everyone realised that the music would play an important part in the serialisation and, since everyone was agreed that it must sound essentially English, a number of distinguished composers – popular and classical – were considered. I had a private recording of some music written for an open-air production of Alice Through the Looking Glass some years before. I thought it had a pleasing English pastoral quality, a view endorsed by Jane Morgan when she heard it. The composer was Stephen Oliver who, by the time he wrote the music for The Lord of the Rings, had received great acclaim for his music for the RSC’s epic production of Nicholas Nickleby.

The scripting took several months (with some horse-trading between Michael Bakewell and myself whenever episodes over, or very occasionally, under-ran). The completed scripts were then sent to France to be read and approved by the author’s son, Christopher Tolkien, whose help with the project included making a fascinating audio cassette of acceptable pronunciation of Middle-Earth words and names.

Then came the two months that the series was in studio with the relentless schedule of a day-and-a-half in which each episode was to be rehearsed and recorded. These proved times of mixed emotions: there was real excitement as, day by day, we experienced a sense of following Frodo’s quest from the peace of the Shire to the terrors of Mount Doom. But there was also the frustration at having insufficient time to make every scene sound exactly the way we wanted, and the depressingly constant demand for instantaneous cuts and rewrites.

There was also the thrill at hearing pure magic produced out of thin air – whether through the technical wizardry of Elizabeth Parker and the Radiophonic Workshop or the simple creation of Gollum’s flapping footsteps created by a technician slapping her bare thighs. All told, there was a lot of laughter, quite a few tears and a number of frazzled tempers before all twenty-six episodes were recorded and edited for transmission.

The first episode of The Lord of the Rings was broadcast on Radio 4 on 8 March 1981 and the Radio Times marked the occasion with a special cover designed by that master illustrator, Eric Fraser. Although the critics were divided, the series soon had a cult following with devotees wearing button badges that declared ‘Radio 4 is Hobbit-4-ming’.

In the years since The Lord of the Rings was first broadcast, it has acquired a reputation that none of us – writers, producers, actors, musicians and technicians – could have ever envisaged. It turns out that what we were making, for all its shortcomings and imperfections, was some kind of radio classic and that is a very satisfying thing to have contributed to – especially since it had all begun with a rejection letter…
Brian Sibley

The recording of the Rings - Jane Morgan, Director, The Lord of the Rings
The cast of the BBC dramatisation of The Lord of the Rings