The days of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy feel as innocent now as those little hobbits frolicking, unburdened, in the Shire – three films adapted with sincerity, before the disastrous Hobbit prequels, and before the modern resuscitation of the franchise. Andy Serkis is directing The Hunt for Gollum, which is scheduled for 2026, and this week we have Kenji Kamiyama’s The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, an anime film that takes place 183 years before Frodo Baggins. But despite offering us a different medium and a different era, the world of JRR Tolkien has never felt smaller.
The War of the Rohirrim draws from the appendices to Tolkien’s novels, a compendium of Middle-earth history, which mentions an old and ferocious ruler of the equestrian peoples of Rohan, Helm Hammerhand (voiced by a suitably grandiloquent Brian Cox). It imagines what pivotal role his unnamed daughter, here called Héra (Gaia Wise, daughter of Emma Thompson), may have played. The film’s villain is Wulf (Luke Pasqualino), leader of the Dunlendings, who takes vengeance after he’s denied Héra’s hand in marriage and watches his father die from a single punch by the notably beefy Helm.
