The smashing success of the first two installments of the filmed version of JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy points up a fundamental irony in the story: the movies could not pack the emotional and visceral punch they do without the use of state-of-the-art digital technology, but Tolkien, a vehement Luddite, would undoubtedly have despised the computer-generated effects. “Tolkien’s hatred of technology was central to his conception of Middle Earth. The good hobbits are classic old English villagers, content to cultivate small plots of land and smoke their pipes… The evil wizard Saruman, by contrast, is a kind of demented Henry Ford, with a ‘mind of metal and wheels’.”