The Lord of the Rings was made a household name by Peter Jackson’s Hobbit and Lord of the Rings movies, but one 1991 adaptation has a lot to bring the franchise. Released in three parts between 1954 and 1955, The Lord of the Rings is J.R.R. Tolkien’s masterwork and the centerpiece of his sprawling legendarium. Jackson adapted a part of the novel per movie in his LotR trilogy but was beaten to creating the first English-language adaptation of the book. American director Ralph Bakshi did this in 1978. However, the most unique on-screen portrayal of LotR may spring from further afield.

Gene Deitch’s 12-minute The Hobbit can brag of being the first English-language Hobbit adaptation, beating Rankin/Bᴀss Animated Entertainment to it by a whole decade – though it can’t brag of much else. Deitch’s animated 1967 feature preceded Rankin/Bᴀss’s 1977 picture of the same name, giving way to Peter Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy, which launched in 2012. Rankin/Bᴀss also provided an intriguing Return of the King in 1980, but it is the Soviet Union that really stuns with 1991’s Khraniteli. Lord of the Rings’ Middle-earth never looked so earthy or in the middle of national collapse.

Leningrad Television Made A Lord Of The Rings Miniseries Called Khraniteli In 1991

Khraniteli Is The USSR’s Answer To Lord Of The Rings

On 13 April 1991, Leningrad Television released its two-part Lord of the Rings miniseries, Khraniteli. It was intended as a movie in two parts and broadcast once, directed and written by Natalya Serebryakova in Russian. It was considered lost until it resurfaced in 2021, posted by 5TV, Leningrad Television’s successor, to YouTube. There, it can be watched with English subтιтles. This Soviet spectacle is a psychedelic journey into the minds and hearts of its cast and crew, whose creative input appears fairly unbridled compared to the painstaking restraint applied by Peter Jackson in his movies.

Khraniteli means “The Keepers” and adapts part one of LotR, The Fellowship of the Ring. In this sense, it is comparable to Peter Jackson’s first LotR movie or Sweden’s live-action Lord of the Rings, opening with Bilbo’s birthday. But not before a bespeckled scholar narrates the story in a debatably necessary twist that rears its head again and again bewilderingly throughout the movie. Twinkling lights cascade across equally bewildering sets, while the echoing theme tune is Russian folk music at its finest. This entirely baffling adaptation is worth a watch for the mandatory “Guess the LotR character” game alone.

Why You’ve Never Heard Of Khraniteli

Khraniteli Was Made In Political Turmoil

The USSR’s ’90s Lord of the Rings miniseries was made eight months before the nation collapsed, which entailed chaos in every department of personal and professional life for many. As such, the original recording of the television play got lost, so it was effectively scrubbed from public record until its unearthing. The unique format is a relic of a bygone TV era, combining theatrical and cinematic production techniques. While TV, as an industry, was evolving, so were Russians. The Soviet Union gave way under the pressure of the Cold War and dissolved in December 1991, leading to earth-shattering change.

Bilbo Baggins actor Georgiy Shtil spoke to Variety about Khraniteli, confirming, “I did many films at the time that never got to see the light of day.” The makers of Khraniteli, Leningrad Television, and wider Leningrad all had bigger problems than the preservation of their work, which was pioneering at the time. Lord of the Rings had been censored during the Cold War as a Western novel, particularly due to its East v.s. West undercurrents. But repression only fueled the fire of creative Russians, who risked their lives to make unofficial (“Samizdat“) translations of works like LotR, which informed Khraniteli.

Khraniteli Did A Lot With Very Limited Resources

Khraniteli Was A Labor Of Love, & Its Cast Was Practically Unpaid

Khraniteli was quite advanced for a humble television play made in terrible conditions with next to no budget. This Soviet-era Lord of the Rings might fully resemble a high-school play if all its cast didn’t look about 40, and it wasn’t interspersed with “special effects.” Inevitably, Khraniteli is a product of its time. Working under the same parameters, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring movie would have struggled to pull itself together, too. Shtil recalled to Variety, “It was a very, very hard time when we were making the movie.“

Khraniteli’s green screen effects, however shocking they appear now, were uncommon for television plays and show the dedication of its small team. Set in the latter portion of The Lord of the Rings timeline, this Third Age story was made by a team paid a state-sanctioned salary under the Soviet system of nationalized theaters. The team filmed Khraniteli basically for free between morning rehearsals and evening theater jobs, earning a quarter of their monthly pay from it – or less. Despite Khraniteli’s many challenges, Leningrad’s art and music scene screams its way through onto the screen, for better or worse.

How Khraniteli Compares With Other The Lord Of The Rings Adaptations

Khraniteli Can Make Some Unique Brags For A LOTR Movie

Khraniteli is at once the most fun, the most unforgettable, and the most horrendous LotR adaptation ever made. Rings of Power season 1 made headlines, confirming the Amazon Prime Video series as the most expensive TV show in the world, but Khraniteli may be the cheapest. It is sincere, joyful, and bizarrely detached from reason, logic, or narrative, which could have any number of causes from Samizdat source material to shooting being limited to nine hours. Ample liberties taken in the translation of source material aside, Khraniteli is notable for adapting Barrow-wights and Tom Bombadil.

Peter Jackson was often criticized for leaving out these two key elements of The Fellowship of the Ring, which many long-term Lord of the Rings readers and fans were looking forward to seeing on the big screen in live-action. Peter Jackson cut Tom Bombadil as he couldn’t jam him into his feature-length movie while retaining dramatic tension and pacing, which he constructed carefully. Khraniteli’s Barrow-wights look like clowns wearing Venetian masks, while it flaunts Tom’s canonically blue coat in favor of an inexplicably red one. Nonetheless, The Lord of the Rings is blessed with this historical artifact of a production.

Source: Variety