Professor watches Tolkien-based film with critical eye.

Byline: REBECCA NOLAN The Register-Guard

Transplanting J.R.R. Tolkien's "Fellowship of the Ring" from paper to celluloid without damaging its essential character would require a script full of poetry and a film more than 100 hours long, says Martha Bayless, professor, fantasy writer and Tolkien fan.

"I think people would still buy it," she said.

And she's probably right. During the past six decades, Tolkien's work has inspired intense devotion among fans, some of whom study and master the "elvish" tongues spoken by his hobbits, dwarves and elves.

But, the nearly three-hour movie version released by New Line Cinema on Dec. 19 is already part of the largest production project in Hollywood history. Costs for "Ring" and its as-yet-unreleased sequels, "The Two Towers" and "Return of the King," totaled $270 million.

Despite the expense, Bayless, an associate professor of English at the University of Oregon and director of the school's Medieval Studies program, said Tolkien would be "rolling in his grave" at the sometimes clumsy pruning of his work.

Lost are the long stretches of landscape, poetry, languages and legends that made Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" trilogy so distinctive, she said. Film critics have made similar observations.

"The film is very much simplified, while the whole point of the book is its complexity," said Bayless, who saw the movie Sunday in a packed theater at Springfield's Gateway Cinemark.

Bayless often discusses Tolkien's books in class and will rely on them heavily during an upcoming winter term course called "Celtic Myth and Legend." Tolkien himself was a scholar of medieval and Anglo-Saxon languages and literature at Oxford.

Bayless admitted enjoying the visually sumptuous, sentimental, dramatic and action-packed film, like most people in the audience.

But afterward, she found herself returning to the book to see if things from the movie, such as hugging and kissing between hobbits, love scenes, and violence, appear in the text.

They don't.

And while she acknowledged that it's nearly impossible to create an exact replica of a book on film, she was disappointed.

"The more you love the book, the more you hope it will be the same, except in a different medium," she said. "The book is restrained, both dramatically and emotionally.

`Tolkien doesn't milk the action scenes."

People had similar complaints about Warner Bros.' recent interpretation of "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone," which excised some of the character development handled so deftly in the book.

Nevertheless, both films have enjoyed fantastic success at the box office.

For months before "Ring" was released, Tolkien's books sold like hotcakes. A bookseller friend told Bayless that people who couldn't get tickets for the movie bought the printed version at her shop instead.

The relationship between books and their movie versions is complex, Bayless said, and, in some cases, people who aren't wild about the film might be dissuaded from reading the books.

On the other hand, people who love the movie might be inspired to crack open the trilogy. But the images from the film will already be in their minds as they read, robbing them of the joy of exercising their imaginations, she said, and people who read the books before seeing the film might feel disappointed when the filmmakers' visual interpretations clash with their own.

But the commercial success of "Ring" has ended some myths about the fantasy genre, Bayless said.

People often believe fans of sword and sorcery are a fringe element - teen-age boys and young men who like role-playing, Internet chat rooms and comic books.

"Most of the people in the theater with me were women in their 50s and 60s," she said.