It’s not easy to adapt fantasy literature for the screen. As we witnessed with Netflix’s The Witcher and HBO’s Game of Thrones, there is a very thin line between the compromises necessary to bring a story to a different medium and doing wrong by the source material, and it seems that screenwriters and producers have forgotten how to walk on it in recent years. (Open the “Galadriel’s depiction in The Rings of Power" floodgates!) Meanwhile, 25 years after its debut, Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings has returned to theaters with overwhelming success, proving that to be faithful, an adaptation doesn’t necessarily have to be accurate.

I was reminded of this important distinction when, recently, I started reading The Fellowship of the Ring again, after finding a cheap copy in a second-hand bookshop (my massive edition of The Lord of the Rings, illustrated by Alan Lee, couldn’t follow me when I moved abroad). While I re-read The Hobbit and The Silmarillion often, my latest dive into Tolkien’s magnum opus was around the time Jackson’s films hit theaters. When I picked it up again, it was as if I had never read it. The influence of the movies (which I have watched several times in the last two decades) was so strong that they essentially rewrote the books in my head. It’s scary to realize how malleable our memory is, but at least I could experience this masterpiece (almost) for the first time, and be reminded of the numerous differences from the movies.

One scene in particular represents the biggest artistic license that Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, and Philippa Boyens took from Tolkien’s work: the Council of Elrond. This is a pivotal moment in the story; until that point, Frodo’s task of carrying the Ring has been mostly a matter of fate, rather than choice. Bilbo........

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