The Low Culture Essay: Skye Butchard on the BBC’s 1981 The Lord Of The Rings Adaptation

In this month's essay, Skye Butchard remembers her dad's collection of cassettes on which he recorded the 1981 radio version of Tolkien's classic to reflect on memory, archiving, and how familial relationships and loss are intrinsically bound up with the culture we share.

Whenever I move flats, I think about the 1981 version of The Lord Of The Rings. Brian Sibley’s BBC radio dramatisation of Tolkien’s classic has become a comfort when I’m surrounded by newspaper, bubble wrap and cardboard boxes. It’s easily one of the strongest adaptations, matching the tone of the original text in its recreation of Middle Earth, from the bumbling and parochial Shirefolk to the bestial edge of Peter Woodthorpe’s Gollum. Condensed into tight thirty-minute episodes, it has an accessible pace that makes it ideal listening if you’re dismantling Swedish furniture. Its cast of veteran British stage actors is impossibly good, especially the definitive performances from Ian Holm as Frodo and Robert Stephens as Aragorn. 

Perhaps the high quality of this version comes because Sibley went directly to Tolkien’s son Christopher to help with his research. The script writing process took months, and included recording acceptable Middle-Earth pronunciations of words for the actors, building a world that felt realistic and inhabited rather than overly fantastical. The recording sessions were apparently occasionally long and frustrating for the cast, though none of that is audible in the finished version. Outside of some clunky audio cues, like the corny whooshing sounds accompanying Gandalf’s escape from Saruman early in The Fellowship Of The Ring, it’s hardly aged at all. 

I consume this incarnation of Lord Of The Rings in a digital version, but I wish I was able feel the satisfying ‘clunk’ of a cassette machine as I pressed play to listen to the tapes my dad recorded off the radio as a young man over the six months of broadcast, writing in each episode title by hand.