This past Sunday I took my family to see The Hobbit at the multiplex. I'm not going to give a full movie review here -- the blogosphere is full of self-appointed cinematic geniuses explaining how they would have done things better. (I even do that myself sometimes, just not today.) If you're interested: I liked it.
I did notice one intriguing little bit of movie stuff which made me chuckle. The film includes a couple of scenes with the eccentric wizard Radagast the Brown -- he's a character mentioned by name in the book, but he never actually appears in the story. To bulk out the movie to trilogy weight, Peter Jackson and his coauthors gave Radagast a speaking role, and cast the always-entertaining Sylvester McCoy to play the part.
When I say Radagast is eccentric, I mean he's really weird. He lives in a sort of treehouse in the forest surrounded by hedgehogs and voles and whatnot, and even keeps a nest of birds under his hat.
He reminded me forcibly of another eccentric fictional wizard: Merlyn, in T.H. White's The Sword in the Stone. If you haven't read that book yet, go find it and read it -- food and sleep are not important, find the book.
If you have read it, you'll remember that when young Arthur (still known as Wart) encounters Merlyn for the first time, the great wizard lives by himself in a little cottage in the forest surrounded by hedgehogs and voles and whatnot, and even lets his owl nest under his hat.
I'm curious, and if anyone knows the answer I'd love to hear it: did the makers of The Hobbit decide to make Radagast a sylvan shut-in with personal care issues because they wanted to give a tip of the hat to England's other great mid-century fantasy author? Or did they do it because White's depiction of Merlyn has become the "default setting" for fantasy wizards?
Think about it: why are fictional wizards so often reclusive and unkempt? You'd think knowing how to do magic would make it easier to win friends and stay clean. I can do those things and I don't know any magic at all except for the "one-ahead" mentalist act.
I guess the idea of the scruffy wizard draws from older traditions of religious ascetics, denying the world and mortifying the flesh. By contrast, the Devil-aided wizard Faust is definitely interested in luxury living and Hot Babes. So showing a person of great power who chooses to live like a bag lady is a way to indicate to the audience that this is one of the Good Wizards.
Of course, now I'm strongly tempted to write a fantasy about an obsessively tidy and sociable wizard, just to do it.
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