Echoes of Tolkein in the opening ceremony of the Olympics

The Opening Ceremony of the Olympics on Friday night was spectacular and exciting, dark and bemusing. The story of Britain's history that made up most of the first part of the ceremony was particularly interesting and dark.

It seemed as if Danny Boyle had borrowed the overarching narrative of J.R.R. Tolkein's Lord of the Rings: the immense stage in the centre of the stadium began as an idyllic grassy countryside landscape with country folk dancing around maypoles and playing cricket. It had the peaceful hilly greenery of the Shire in Tolkein's Middle Earth. Even the people looked like hobbits from our zoomed out perspective.

As described in the words of the hymn, 'Jerusalem', which was played numerous times and in various forms during the ceremony, this 'green and pleasant land' was overtaken by the 'dark satanic mills' of the Industrial Revolution. It looked just like Mordor.

It was a horrible transformation, from the peace of the countryside to the pollution of industry. Was Danny Boyle expressing a Neo-Luddite, pixelled-wheels-type statement here, just like Tolkein was in the Lord of the Rings? In the Lord of the Rings, however, the evil of dark industry is destroyed and the countryside restored, whereas in the Olympic opening ceremony, the industry, though it is portrayed at first as having negative connotations, is a necessary evil, and leads to all the marvellous technologies of the 21st century. 

After the belching factories had destroyed the countryside greenery, Boyle focussed on the small stories of people who now live in the world produced by this industry; the mother driving her children home to their modern house; the teenagers in the discos, their texting. The polluting greed of the industrial revolution was worth it for our modern world and all its technological complexities. The dark mills were not satanic after all. Or Satan wasn't so bad after all.

The massive fiery Olympic rings looked like the One Ring of Tolkein mythology that, instead of being destroyed in Mount Doom, has been multiplied into five and has become even more powerful, and perhaps isn't as evil as we thought it was.