A long-forgotten Russian version of JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings resurfaced on YouTube recently. The Soviet-era TV adaptation, titled Khraniteli, which means “keepers” or “guardians”, was uploaded by Russia’s Channel 5 on YouTube on March 27.
Fans had been trying to find this 1991 adaptation, albeit unsuccessfully, ever since 2012 when the Russian sci-fi website World of Fantasy published a list of forgotten Tolkien adaptations.
Tolkien fans were in for a delight this last couple of weeks. Based on the first book of the renowned trilogy by the British fantasy writer, the Russian production was broadcast only once on television. Per the YouTube video’s comments section, the version was broadcasted for only a regional channel and most Russians don’t even know of its existence. The adaptation had aired for the first and the last time in the same year that the Soviet Union was officially dissolved.
“Fans had been searching the archives for a long time, but for decades, they could not find the film,” the post on World of Fantasy said. It is no surprise then that despite being in a foreign language and without translated subtitles, the two-part series uploaded on YouTube has already garnered nearly 900,000 views in total.
Filmed at the Leningrad television studio three decades ago, the adaptation was shown on TV just once before it seemingly disappeared without trace.
The Lord of the Rings movie series has been trending during the lockdown, especially after the quarantine cast reunions and due to the upcoming billion-dollar spinoff series from Amazon. Fans who thought the Amazon series was the Tolkien novels’ first jump to the little screen, now know that their beloved fantasy book series had already made its TV debut back in 1991.
The adaptation was based on the Russian translation of Tolkien’s novels by Vladimir Muravyov and Andrey Kistyakovsky. It starred Viktor Kostetsky as Gandalf, Georgy Shtil as Bilbo, and Valery Dyachenko as Frodo. According to a comment on the YouTube video, it was a shooting of a staged theatre play, a popular format in the Soviet era.
The decades-old Russian version obviously stood nowhere close to the technical superiority of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings and Hobbit trilogies, which first hit the theatres only 10 years after the Russian version. But the student video vibe seems to be charming the fans nonetheless.
YouTube comments on the video were filled with varying versions of “trippy” as a description of the video—probably referring to its techno colors and unique background score—and requests for an English translation.
Viewers also appreciated how Jackson’s LOTR was, in some parts, a scene-by-scene adaptation of this Russian theatre-TV movie version. They also noted the presence of a character written out of Jackson’s version.
Tom Bombadil
On an ironical note, this bootstrap budget TV movie adaptation will be followed by a billion-dollar Amazon Prime adaptation also for the TV. In stiff competition with Netflix, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos shelled out $250 mn for the purchase of rights to the LOTR spinoff series. With two seasons already ordered, the overall production cost of the series is expected to touch $1 bn. And to think it all started from such humble origins.
About The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is an American TV series, based on the novel by J.R.R. Tolkien, developed by J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay for streaming on Amazon Prime.
Set 3,000 years before the events of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, the show will be set in the Second Age of Middle-earth. Beginning with a time of peace, the series will follow the rise of the Dark Lord Sauron and the forging of the rings of power.
The cast includes Robert Aramayo, Owain Arthur, Nazanin Boniadi, Morfydd Clark, Ismael Cruz Cordova, Markella Kavenagh, Joseph Mawle, and Dylan Smith among many others.
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