Check out the BBC radio version.
I own it and love it. "They cannot conquer forever." - Ian Holm's delivery of that line as Frodo brought me to tears. I'm so frustrated that they cut the whole climax of "Journey to the Cross-Roads" from the theatrical editions of the movies, and even when included in the Extended Editions, they didn't use that line. Frodo became a lot less 3-dimensional of a character in the films versus the book and the audio-play as they focused on his burden and descent into madness. Just because he has those doesn't mean he can't have wisdom and insight alongside it.
I admit I forgot about that, but I'd call it "secondary canon" at best--an idea Tolkien may have had at one point but didn't necessarily keep to.
It post-dates the Lord of the Rings, at any rate. These writings were in his assemblage of The Silmarillion, but that book was never assembled by him because he couldn't get the texts to align. His son Christopher (who did more good for Tolkienology than the movies ever will, and got a lot of flack for his hate of them, though I disagree with his assessment) put The Silmarillion together by frankensteining writing periods that had no business sitting side by side and getting a friend to fill in gaps where there just wasn't material to make it work. He himself said this was a mistake. Tolkien's unpublished Later Silmarillion writings, as annotated in "Morgoth's Ring," "The War of the Jewels," and "The Peoples of Middle-earth," alongside the "Unfinished Tales," are just as important as anything written in "Lord of the Rings" and "The Silmarillion" when it comes to Tolkien's canon thoughts. Yes, sometimes they disagree. So does "The Lord of the Rings" and "The Hobbit," and so do "The Silmarillion" and "The Lord of the Rings." It's the nature of the beast. There are issues that are irreconcilable because Tolkien never reconciled them. That doesn't make them "secondary canon." It makes the canon as a whole more nebulous.
I'm just salty because they thoroughly messed up my favorite part of the books (everything to do with the Stewards of Gondor). Well, except that they did a great job with Boromir, but then he came across as the best member of his whole family, which is also a problem... I blame Philippa Boyens and her obvious raging crush on Aragorn.
While I love what Boyens & Walsh did with the Aragorn character (essentially pulling his conflict out of the Appendices and into the forefront main story of the books (at the cost of his surety of character), I felt that the Boromir-Faramir-Denethor family was failed in part by not sticking true enough to the books. The Extended Editions do much to alleviate the "evil Faramir" issue - which I believe was Boyens and Walsh trying to push back against Tolkien's "Aragorn-lite Faramir" and make the pull of the Ring more evident and menacing - they did so in a way that made Denethor just look like a raging donkey-sphincter, rather than a flawed and broken man. I understand him being awful in RotK since he's heartbroken at Boromir's death. But he's just so awful to Faramir from the get go and so praising of Boromir. It makes it look like his madness isn't much of anything new.
Given that the Return of the King film had 45 or so false endings (at least, that's how it felt in the theater), the only thing I think the movies are really missing is the Sharkey sequence. But, to me, the Lord of the Rings is mostly about the hobbit people and coming into their own, which the Sharkey stuff completes.
100% agreed. The hobbits are in-part stand-ins for people learning to become responsible adults in their own right. That doesn't mean they're stand-ins for children; there's this weird idea that once we get to 18, or 21, or finish college, or have a real job, or complete an advanced degree, or have a kid, then suddenly we'll understand how to be an adult and manage everything competently and not flail about feeling helpless in the face of adversity. The story for the 5 main Hobbits is that by going there and back again, by surviving the adversity and playing their part in the Great Stories, they can now better come back to their "normal lives" and take charge of it without needing to rely on Rangers or Gandalf or Tom Bombadil or Elf or Dwarf companies to protect them. Gandalf purposefully leaves the 4 Hobbits at Bree to go chat with Tom Bombadil while knowing they'll have to deal with a Saruman who still has at least one crooked tooth left. In any other story, Gandalf and Aragorn and the other "big folk heroes" would have chased down this loose end and dealt with Saruman themselves. But here, the whole point of the narrative is that the Hobbits have to learn to manage these problems on their own. And they do. Hobbit bounders are able to do what they always thought they were doing (they weren't because Rangers and others were dealing with the bigger threats before they got to the borders of the Shire).
This is why Frodo and Sam can become Mayors and why Pippin can become the Tháin and Merry the Master. They're not that just because they're POV characters and thus we get some sort of fanservicey leadership roles for them, no it's because they learned the necessary skills over their adventures to be competent leaders for their communities, and to help others in the community better themselves. They've transformed what it means to be Hobbits, for the better.
I love the "Scouring" and the movies failed in a very, very, very big way by leaving it out. I mean, I love Tom Bombadil but you can have the themes he reinforces without him. But without this "final test of what they've learned", we get the sense that Aragorn, Legolas, Gímli, Éowyn, Gandalf, etc were more important to the tale after all. Sure, Frodo and Sam completed the quest, but only because Aragorn et all redirected Sauron's eye, and only because Gollum happened to slip after beating them. Frodo failed at Mt. Doom. He succeeded earlier by sparing Gollum's life, but we need to know why that's important not just to the world around him but to him as a person. He's a better person, if a broken one, for going there and back again, and we need to see that.
