The Lord Of The Rings: The War Of The Rohirrim

Helm Hammerhand's story was one of the apocrypha of The Lord of The Rings. Though his name may have been given to some famous places, the locations where he is named are more obscure. It's in Appendix A of The Return Of The King that we learn some of his story, that he was last of his line of kings, that his sons Haleth and Hama were lost in conflict with the wildmen of the Dunland. That longstanding struggle saw Freca declare that his son Wulf would marry Helm's daughter, but does not record her name.

It is Hera. Voiced by Gaia Wise, she draws from the same traditions that Tolkien drew from. She joins a succession of warrior princesses from Merida to Khutulun to Mononoke. They are versions of other stories that echo other stories, stories which are echoed themselves in yet others.

Some two centuries before the War of the Ring, these are stories whose details have been differently assembled before. One version of them as told by The Lord Of The Rings Online shows the instrument whose sounding heralded doom for many and meant Helm's Deep also had its Hornburg. Middle-Earth: Shadow Of War suggests he was a revenant, driven by vengeance and its costs, and eventually one of the Nazgul, who number at once nine and two-score in the various tales. Some tales even suggest, by sculpture or artefact, that the hammer of his hands was not metaphorical, but mithril, or at least other than mythologically mighty.

The War Of The Rohirrim chooses both. Not just for Helm, but wherever it can. Helm is voiced by Brian Cox. When he shouts "Is there no one left?" it's an echo of his presence as Agememnon at the walls of Troy, just as Tolkien's lone fighter carried echoes of Achilles or the un-named soldier of King Harald who held Stamford Bridge. There are nods to deeper elements of the legendarium of Middle Earth and to the merchandising of its nooks and crannies.

If you are so tempted after seeing it you can purchase a starter set for The Middle-Earth Strategy Battle Game, that would let you recreate the Battle of Edoras with 56 plastic miniatures, warbands led by the three princes named and General Targg. Those faces will seem familiar, and staff at Games Workshop contributed ensemble voices. The cycle of influence is such that Games Workshop's fortunes owe debts to Tolkien's work at several repeating removes.

They initially imported Dungeons & Dragons whose early versions used Hobbit until lawsuits forced a change to Halfling. That's a word harder to trademark since it's from old Scots. Their financial position was stabilised by games that drew from Peter Jackson's version of the saga. In countless interviews with the huge creative teams that brought Middle-Earth to screens they'll mention the influence of D&D and GW on their interests. To feast upon ones own tales might seem self-defeating, but Jormungand could only dream of being so nourished.

Those armies of creatives are well represented in TLOTR:TWOTR. That feels enough of an equation that one is tempted to cancel it to L:W which is itself a way of listing victories and losses. One hopes in the contract negotiations not too many were the latter, as I counted something around 50 animation and effects firms and some dozen sets of compositors. The credits feature art that appears of watercolour and parchment and photograph at once, what might be model reference sheets. There are landscapes that are already known, painted now to reflect places once made physical from drawings that it would take more than a thousand words to reconstruct.

That mass of drawing, painting, sculpting, engineering, produces something thrilling. Stephen Gallagher's score can borrow from Howard Shore's and Kenji Kamayama's direction can bring a compelling anime flavour to events but it is the mixture of them and the actors and action that transports as swiftly and as surely as the grasp of a great eagle.

Kamayama's possibly best known for Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex, a franchise whose tellings and re-tellings were part of a complicated legacy well before Scarlett Johansson got involved. The action sequences are thrilling and the film's willingness to embrace the shortcuts of anime character design is an excellent use of a blurry gap between genre and medium. Throne Of Blood moved Macbeth miraculously but this cousins' war is perhaps more Ricardian than Shakespearean.

To mix courtly and cavalry intrigue requires stable footing and the film is well poised. I would usually argue that the quality of a film is inversely proportional to the number of credited writers but this isn't a case of too many cooks. Instead of gruel thin enough to be broth this is hearty stew, the odd bit of lumpiness forgiveable in a tale that's already in the re-telling. Jeffrey Addiss and Will Matthews transmuted The Dark Crystal to streaming, Phoebe Gittins has numerous connections to Middle-Earth, working again with Arty Papageorgiou here, and Philipa Boyens has shown a willingness to swim against current and canon since her work on the screenplay for The Fellowship Of The Ring.

That film did suggest that properly directed collective effort could achieve wonders, and so does this. I enjoyed it enough that I'm already planning to see it again. That may sound faint praise, but film scheduling is not a field that fosters fondness. This delivers adventure and action in spades, and anyone put off by its animation style likely wouldn't enjoy it in live action, even if that weren't so often a fiction itself.

I was on board from the first stir of strings. I have read enough books with maps as frontispiece that I was following its course from the off. I have enough joy from the films that hearing Miranda Otto as Eowyn tell me of Hera. "Do not look for her in the old songs," she says, as she tells us the tale instead. Hers is not the only familiar voice, and while at times that verges on the disrespectful those ghosts pale against later references. Some of the nods are more heavy-handed than Helm himself, but this is still a tale of the Rohirrim and not the Eorlingas, it is not pitched at those who know there's something about Maura. To thread a course this fine through a tapestry as well worn as Middle-Earth is no mean feat, but this is something to feast upon.