Here I may say that I fail to see why the time-scheme should be deliberately contracted. It is
already rather packed in the original, the main action occurring between Sept. 22 and March 25 of
the following year. The many impossibilities and absurdities which further hurrying produces
might, I suppose, be unobserved by an uncritical viewer; but I do not see why they should be
unnecessarily introduced. Time must naturally be left vaguer in a picture than in a book; but I
cannot see why definite time-statements, contrary to the book and to probability, should be made.
....
Seasons are carefully regarded in the original. They are pictorial, and should be, and easily
could be, made the main means by which the artists indicate time-passage. The main action begins
in autumn and passes through winter to a brilliant spring: this is basic to the purport and tone of the
tale. The contraction of time and space in 2 destroys that. His arrangements would, for instance,
land us in a snowstorm while summer was still in.
The Lord of the Rings may be a 'fairy-story', but
it takes place in the Northern hemisphere of this earth: miles are miles, days are days, and weather
is weather.
Contraction of this kind is not the same thing as the necessary reduction or selection of the
scenes and events that are to be visually represented.