Never underestimate the fury of amateur film-makers outraged that their heroes’ long-gestating artistic endeavour didn’t turn out quite the way they had hoped. The Jar Jar Binks-jettisoning Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Edit, which purported to deliver the version of George Lucas’s film everyone actually wanted to see, is probably the most famous example of the form. But a quick peek at the fanedit.org site reveals there are a lot more disgruntled and determined individuals out there. Current projects include curtailed versions of such hubristic ventures as Heaven’s Gate, Lost and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End.

There are more than a few attempts to cut down Peter Jackson’s Hobbit movies, though none quite so ambitious in scope as a new edit that has raised its small-but-perfectly formed head above the parapet this week. The anonymous tolkieneditor version promises to reduce the New Zealand film-maker’s interminable nine-hour-plus fantasy trilogy to a far more manageable single movie of just over four hours. In other words, someone has taken it upon themselves to transform the big-screen version of JRR Tolkien’s cosy fantasy fable into something more closely resembling the original, 250-page children’s novel, as opposed to the triptych of epic, all-action, interspecies romance-fuelled blockbusters that eventually made it into multiplexes.

Gone are most of the Azog the pale orc scenes, the White Council’s investigation/attack on Dol Goldur and several of the Laketown scenes involving Luke Evans’s Bard the Bowman. Also removed is the prelude with Ian Holm as the elder Bilbo, which nicely tied the new films to the Lord of the Rings trilogy but (combined with a lot of dwarf singing) also meant it was at least 20 minutes before we got out of Bag End’s front door. And, naturally, Tauriel the she-elf’s utterly bizarre proto-romance with hunky dwarf Kili is banished back to the pitch-black corner of Mordor from whence it came.

Intact are the elements from Jackson’s films that sprung from Tolkien’s original tome and which showcase Martin Freeman’s best work as Bilbo: the bravura “riddles in the dark” sequence, the majestic Smaug scenes inside Erebor and the frenetic battle with Mirkwood’s ’orrible giant spiders. One has to assume that tolkieneditor has also kept the Goblin king scene from under the Misty Mountains, the early encounter with the trolls turning to stone, and the visit to Beorn’s house, since these are all drawn from the novel.

Writes the editor:

Let me start by saying that I enjoy many aspects of Peter Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy. Overall, however, I felt that the story was spoiled by an interminable running time, unengaging plot tangents and constant narrative filibustering. What especially saddened me was how Bilbo (the supposed protagonist of the story) was rendered absent for large portions of the final two films.

So far so good, you might suggest. But surely some of Jackson’s alterations must have been worth retaining? For a start, the new edit sounds like a right old sausage-fest, as (to be fair) was the original book. Tolkien doesn’t seem to have been all that interested in female characters, Galadriel, Arwen and the odd Sackville-Baggins aside. Evangeline Lilly’s Tauriel ultimately turned out to be one of the trilogy’s more magnetic figures, even if the character was plucked from thin air by the film-makers. Likewise, I enjoyed some of Radagast the Brown’s early investigations of Mirkwood, which seemed to expand the narrative in a manner fitting Tolkien’s original vision.

On the other hand, the addition of Tauriel means the inclusion of scenes involving Orlando Bloom’s utterly superfluous Legolas – not to mention the aforementioned preposterous interspecies romance with Aidan Turner’s Kili. And Radagast’s inclusion only makes sense if the Dol Goldur scenes are retained. Perhaps there are even fans of Azog and Bard out there who will wonder why all their scenes got cut.

• How much of Jackson’s Hobbit would make it into your final cut, and which parts should never have been included in the first place?

• The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies - review