I have a confession that will surprise absolutely no one who has spent more than five minutes with me: I have opinions about Lord of the Rings. Strong ones. The kind that come out unprompted at dinner parties when someone innocently mentions they “should really read the books someday.” I usually manage to restrain myself to a single sentence before someone changes the subject.

But here is the thing about Peter Jackson’s trilogy that I want to sit with for a while, because it deserves more than a dinner party sound bite. These films are, by any reasonable measure, one of the great adaptation success stories in modern filmmaking. They took a nearly 500,000 word novel that plenty of smart people had called unfilmable, and turned it into something that won armfuls of Oscars, made a permanent mark on how fantasy gets made for the screen, and introduced Tolkien’s world to millions of people who might never have opened the books otherwise.

And still. Still, there are choices in there that I want to talk through. Not to tear the films down. I love these movies with the same intensity I love the source material, which is to say completely and a little irrationally. But adaptation is always a series of trade-offs, and looking closely at what got cut, changed, or invented tells you something interesting about what a film needs that a novel does not, and vice versa.

So let’s take the trilogy apart a little, book by film, and talk about what got left on the cutting room floor and why it matters.

The Fellowship of the Ring: Losing the Old Forest

If you have only ever seen the movies, you may not know that Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin do not go straight from the Shire to Bree in a tense dash from the Black Riders. In the book, they take a shortcut through the Old Forest, where they run into a malevolent tree called Old Man Willow who traps Merry and Pippin inside its trunk. They are rescued by one of the strangest and most beloved characters in the entire legendarium: Tom Bombadil, a merry, singing, seemingly immortal figure who lives with his wife Goldberry and who the One Ring has no power over whatsoever.

None of this made it into the films. Not even the extended editions touch it. Jackson has explained over the years that the character did little to move the plot forward and risked bloating an already massive story, and actor Christopher Lee, who played Saruman, once noted that cutting Bombadil freed up time to develop Saruman’s capture of Gandalf instead. That is a defensible trade. Bombadil’s chapters are genuinely a digression, a strange and lovely pocket of safety in the middle of a chase, and pure narrative momentum was never really the point of them.

But something real is lost here too. Bombadil represents a kind of power in Middle-earth that has nothing to do with armies or rings or ambition, and his complete indifference to the Ring’s pull is one of the more haunting details in the whole book. Cutting him also meant cutting the Barrow-downs sequence, where the hobbits are captured by an undead wight and rescued again by Bombadil, who gives them the ancient blades that later prove essential against the Nazgul. In the films, Aragorn hands out those same blades instead, without any of the mythic weight behind where they came from. It works fine as a practical solution. It’s just quieter than what the book was doing.

Glorfindel Becomes Arwen

Here is a smaller change with a bigger ripple effect. In the book, after Frodo is stabbed on Weathertop, the elf lord who arrives to rush him to Rivendell ahead of the Nazgul is not Arwen. It is Glorfindel, a legendary Elven warrior with deep roots in Tolkien’s wider mythology, going all the way back to the fall of Gondolin in the First Age. He is the one who puts Frodo on his horse and outruns the Black Riders to the Ford of Bruinen.

Jackson’s team gave that entire sequence to Arwen instead. The reasoning tracks pretty cleanly once you consider what Arwen’s role looks like in the source material. In the book, she barely appears. Her romance with Aragorn is confined mostly to the appendices, and she spends most of the story as an absent, idealized figure he is loyal to from a distance. For a film trilogy that needed its audience to actually feel that love story in real time, giving her Glorfindel’s rescue was a reasonable way to establish her early and give her something to do besides wait.

I understand the logic. I even like Arwen’s expanded role in the films most of the time. But I will admit a small soft spot for Glorfindel fans who feel shortchanged, especially since the films kept his name attached to Rivendell lore without ever giving the character his moment. It’s the kind of change where the practical filmmaking math works out, even if something specific and cool gets quietly erased in the process.

The Two Towers Invents a Warg Attack

Not every change in this trilogy is a subtraction. Some of the most memorable sequences in The Two Towers were invented from scratch. The clearest example is the Warg attack on the road to Helm’s Deep, where Aragorn fights an orc named Sharku, gets dragged over a cliff, and is presumed dead for a stretch of the film before his horse Brego finds him and brings him back. None of that happens in the book. The journey from Edoras to Helm’s Deep is comparatively uneventful.

Jackson added the sequence for reasons that make sense from a screenwriting chair. Aragorn’s arc needed a beat of his own in the middle film, something that tested him physically and emotionally while the story cut back and forth between Frodo and Sam, Merry and Pippin, and the buildup to the siege. It also gave Arwen and Aragorn’s romance a dramatic hook, with her dream-vision kiss reviving him by the riverbank. Is it in the spirit of the book? Not exactly. Tolkien’s Aragorn does not need a near-death experience to prove his resolve. But as pure cinema, it earns its place. It buys tension the book gets through internal narration, which does not translate well to a screen.

Faramir Gets Tempted

A more controversial change, and one that fans still argue about, is what happens to Faramir. In the book, when Frodo and Sam stumble into his company in Ithilien, Faramir has every opportunity to seize the Ring and refuses almost immediately. Tolkien uses him as a deliberate contrast to his brother Boromir. Where Boromir is undone by the Ring’s promise of power, Faramir passes the same test without much visible struggle at all, and it is one of the clearest signals in the book that not everyone who encounters the Ring is doomed to be corrupted by it.

The film version of Faramir does not get that grace. He takes Frodo and Sam captive and marches them toward Osgiliath with the intention of bringing the Ring to his father, only changing course after Sam’s plea and after seeing firsthand what the Ring’s pull does to Frodo. It is a meaningful character shift, and it was not made carelessly. Jackson and his co-writers have talked about needing dramatic stakes in the middle of the story, some sense that the Ring’s danger extends beyond the named villains. Structurally it makes some sense. Emotionally, for readers who loved Faramir as the one person who simply says no, it stings.

The Ents Take Their Time, Differently

Merry and Pippin’s arc with Treebeard and the Ents also shifts in an interesting way. In the book, once Treebeard hears what Saruman has done to the forests around Isengard, the Ents convene an Entmoot and decide fairly directly to march to war. In the film, the Ents initially decide against getting involved at all, and it takes Pippin manipulating Treebeard into walking past the devastation Saruman has caused before the Ents change their minds and attack.

This is a case where the film is doing something the book structurally cannot. Tolkien can let the Ents deliberate for days off the page and summarize the outcome. A film needs an active decision point, ideally one where the hobbits themselves have agency rather than just being carried along by the plot. Giving Pippin a hand in provoking the Ents into action gives him something to actually do in a stretch of story where his book counterpart is mostly a passenger. It is a smart solution to a real problem, even if it slightly rewrites the Ents’ resolve as more reluctant than Tolkien intended.

Denethor Loses His Complexity

By the time we reach The Return of the King, Denethor, the Steward of Gondor, undergoes one of the more significant character changes in the whole trilogy. In the book, Denethor is proud, grim, and ultimately broken by grief and by his secret use of the palantir, a seeing-stone that lets Sauron feed him a slow diet of despair. But Tolkien is careful to establish that Denethor was once genuinely great, a capable and even wise leader whose will was strong enough to resist Sauron’s direct influence even as the visions wore him down. His downfall is tragic because you can see the man he used to be underneath it.

The film gives us almost none of that groundwork. Denethor, played memorably by John Noble, comes across as petty, cruel, and cowardly almost from his first scene, more interested in eating a hasty dinner while Faramir rides to his apparent death than in leading his city. The palantir gets a passing visual reference but little explanation of how it corrupted him over years, not days. It makes for a striking villain in a film that needed a clear obstacle standing between Gandalf and the defense of Minas Tirith. It also flattens a character Tolkien clearly wanted us to pity as much as condemn.

The Scouring of the Shire Never Happens

And now we arrive at the big one. If you asked a hundred serious readers of the books what the single most consequential omission in the entire trilogy is, I would bet the overwhelming majority say the Scouring of the Shire. This is the penultimate chapter of The Return of the King, and it does not happen anywhere in the films, not even in the extended editions.

In the book, Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin return home after months of war to find the Shire has not been spared after all. Saruman, stripped of his power and calling himself Sharkey, has taken over with a gang of ruffians, and the hobbits have to rally their neighbors and fight one last battle, the Battle of Bywater, to take their homeland back. It is where Saruman finally dies, at Bag End itself, betrayed by Wormtongue in the very shadow of Frodo’s front door.

Jackson has said in interviews that the sequence felt anticlimactic after the emotional peak of Sauron’s defeat, and from a pure pacing standpoint, it is hard to argue with him. The films had already stacked up multiple endings by the time Frodo sails from the Grey Havens, and a full additional battle sequence probably would have tested even the most patient audience. The films do preserve two pieces of it. Frodo’s vision of a burning Shire in Galadriel’s mirror hints at what might have been, and Saruman still meets his end at Wormtongue’s hands, just relocated to the ruins of Isengard instead of the Shire.

But something thematically important goes missing along with the sequence itself. Tolkien’s whole point with the Scouring is that war follows you home. The hobbits cannot simply return to an untouched, idyllic Shire and pretend nothing happened, and Frodo in particular never fully recovers even after the battle is won, which sets up his eventual departure to the Undying Lands. The films give us a Shire frozen in gentle, unbothered peace, which makes for a lovely, quiet ending, but it also means Frodo’s final sadness, and his choice to leave, land with less weight than they do on the page. He seems tired rather than permanently changed.

What Adaptation Actually Means

Looking at all of this together, I keep coming back to the same conclusion. Every one of these choices, even the ones I personally would have made differently, comes from filmmakers taking the medium seriously rather than treating the book as sacred text to be transcribed. A novel can afford digressions, internal monologue, and chapters that exist purely to deepen theme rather than advance plot. A film runs on a clock, and every scene has to justify its place against everything else competing for that runtime.

None of that makes the losses less real. I still wish we had gotten five minutes with Tom Bombadil. I still think Denethor deserved a scene or two establishing who he used to be before the war broke him. And I will defend the necessity of the Scouring of the Shire until the day I die, because I think Tolkien knew exactly what he was doing when he made his hobbits fight one more battle before they were allowed to rest.

But I also think the films earned the right to make these calls, because in nearly every case, the choice served the story they were actually telling rather than the story on the page. That is what a good adaptation does. It does not ask whether it matched the book beat for beat. It asks whether it captured what the book was actually about, and told that story in the language a different medium requires.

I would love to know where you land on this. Which change bothers you the most, and which one do you think actually improved on Tolkien? Drop it in the comments. I promise not to talk your ear off about Tom Bombadil for more than one paragraph in response.