On July 7, 2012, the French daily newspaper, The Monde, published a four-page article on J.R.R. Tolkien including an interview with Tolkien’s son Christopher who was invited to express his views on Peter Jackson’s adaptation of The Lord of the Rings. Christopher clearly bemoaned “the gap between the beauty, the gravitas of the [original] work and what it had become” and added: “Such degree of commercialization reduces the aesthetic and philosophical impact of this creation to nothing” (my translation from the French).

Based on the results of a questionnaire sent to thousands of students of higher education in the City of Angers, France, this article attempts to shed more light on the subject and examines the impact of Peter Jackson’s films on the respondents’ appreciation of and interest in J.R.R. Tolkien’s written works.