The actor Benedict Cumberbatch, PBS’s modern Sherlock Holmes, unknowingly stirred up Tolkien purists last week when he hinted in an online interview with the British movie magazine Empire that he was going to provide the voice of the Necromancer in Peter Jackson’s “The Hobbit” films. The reason this is controversial is that the Necromancer — who rematerializes as the Dark Lord Sauron in “The Lord of the Rings” — doesn’t physically appear in “The Hobbit” book (but then nor do Galadriel, Legolas, and Saruman, who, played by the same actors, have also been imported into the new movies from Jackson’s “Rings”).
“The Hobbit” follows the odyssey of Bilbo Baggins, 13 dwarves, and Gandalf (before he leaves their company) from the Shire to the eastern Lonely Mountain where the rapacious dragon Smaug guards a hoard of dwarven treasure.
It’s long been known that Cumberbatch is creating Smaug. What he actually said to Empire was: “"I'm playing Smaug through motion-capture and voicing the Necromancer, which is a character in the Five Legions War or something which I'm meant to understand. [laughs] He's not actually in the original ‘Hobbit.’ It's something [Jackson]'s taken from ‘Lord of the Rings’ that he wants to put in there."
Cumberbatch is referring to the climactic Battle of the Five Armies, of which Tolkien wrote in the chapter “The Clouds Burst”: “Upon one side were the Goblins and the wild Wolves, and upon the other were Elves and Men and Dwarves.” The unseen Necromancer is referred to in the earlier chapter “Queer Lodgings” when Gandalf, responding to Bilbo’s reluctance to enter the forest of Mirkwood, says: “Before you could get round [Mirkwood] in the South, you would get into the land of the Necromancer; and even you, Bilbo, won’t need me to tell you tales of that black sorcerer. I don’t advise you to go anywhere near the places overlooked by his dark tower!”
The future Sauron is not yet in Mordor but making mischief in his stronghold of Dol Guldur in the south of Mirkwood. Leaving Bilbo and the dwarves, Gandalf sets off to raise the council of white wizards to drive the Necromancer from the forest, which he does, off the page, before the Battle of the Five Armies. “Yet I wish he were banished from the world!” Gandalf says, ominously, to Elrond at Rivendell in the last chapter, setting up “The Lord of the Rings.”
If, as Cumberbatch suggests, the Necromancer shows up, presumably at the head of the goblin army at the battle, in the second film, then Jackson and his writers, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, are taking a sizable liberty. They are doing it presumably with their legacy in mind, forging a stronger link between their “Hobbit” films, “An Unexpected Journey” (which opens December 14) and “There and Back Again” (December 13, 2013), and their “Lord of the Rings.”
Despite the inevitable grumbles, the latter triptych was as faithful to Tolkien as most devout readers could have wished for, but giving the Necromancer corporeal form, if that’s the plan, won’t enhance the aura of ultimate diabolical mystery he’d retain by remaining firmly in the shadows.