Like so often happens, when Hollywood gets its hands on a good story, it often takes liberties and makes major changes to create ridiculously profitable blockbusters.  Peter Jackson did this to the second Hobbit movie, “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug.” The movie itself had no right to exist since there is only one book, and yet Jackson decided to make the movies another trilogy, mimicking his initial success with the inherently longer and more action-packed “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy.
   Is this necessarily bad?  I do not think so.  Making a children’s story into an action movie trilogy can make for some bad cinematic moments, but it is not a fundamentally wrong thing to do. In fact, “The Hobbit” movies transcribed pretty well, though the story, characters and pace differ greatly from the book. One may justify differing from the source material for “The Hobbit,” not because infidelity is acceptable, but because, according to Tolkien’s own theory, “The Hobbit” is myth and myth lives, carries truth and the retelling reflects the story-teller and his audience.
   Tolkien, C. S. Lewis and some of their friends who gathered to talk about literature and philosophy under the group name “The Inklings” worked on the idea of myth as truth.
   “‘But,’ Lewis said, ‘myths are lies, even though lies breathed through silver.’
   ‘No,’ said Tolkein, ‘they are not… just as speech is invention about objects and ideas, so myth is invention about truth,’” reports Humphrey Carpenter in his book “Tolkein: A Biography,” who then identifies the essence Tolkien’s theory, “In expounding this belief in the inherent truth of mythology, Tolkien had laid bare the centre of his philosophy as a writer, the creed that is at the heart of (Tolkien’s books).”
   Tolkien wrote on the subject of myth and its connection with truth in an essay titled “On Fairy-Stories,” where he details the requirement that a fictional or mythical universe adhere to its own set of laws, lest disbelief rear its head and shatter the truth found within due to a violation of the laws of that secondary world.
   “(The story teller) makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter.  Inside it, what he relates is ‘true’: it accords with the laws of that world,” Tolkien said, “You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside.  The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed.”
    And so I would argue that Jackson in “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug” can justly modify his source material but is not justified in doing so since he cannot maintain the laws of that secondary world he tries to get the viewer to experience.  Tolkien would probably not like the changes to his characters and narrative flow, but what would upset him is the death of the temporary suspension of disbelief necessary for experiencing truth in myth.     
   Christopher Snyder, history professor at Mississippi State University, Tolkien scholar and dean of the Shackouls Honors College, explained in an email interview how Jackson’s narrative in the movies fails its secondary world.
   “The movies are departing more and more not just from the book, but from the storyline of the main character, Bilbo, and giving a lot of screen time to marginal or invented characters,” Snyder said, continuing to imagine how Tolkien would likely respond, “he would have lamented all of the medieval and mythic elements from his book that have been ignored in Jackson’s version of ‘The Hobbit.’”
   So we see that our principle concern is the deviation from the medieval environment and mythic attitude of painstaking attention to the internal laws found in the book.  Instead, Jackson has a band of anachronistic dwarves and a too-complicated yet too-simple hobbit go off to reclaim Thorin’s source of power, constantly clashing with other political powers in seemingly arbitrary ways.
   Essentially, Jackson missed the point of the story as myth, ignoring many chances to connect Tolkien’s universe together according to his own rules (the dwarf-elf romance and Gandalf’s capture with no permanent defeat as memorable violations), and yanked the narrative out of the realm of fairy-story and placed it in a merely medieval-smelling, political intrigue novel.