A new foray into Middle-Earth: The Rings of Power
A Game of Thrones–ification of Tolkien? More Hobbit trilogy excess? Though not without missteps, Amazon’s ambitious Lord of the Rings prequel series gets off to a fairly promising start.
The term “legendarium” — first used by Tolkien to describe those writings in which he labored for much of his life on the mythopoeic backdrop to The Hobbit and, later, The Lord of the Rings — suggests a literary collection of folkloric accounts, often from different hands and of varying historical value. As this term suggests, Tolkien’s role in his creative process, imaginatively speaking, was less as a creator or author than a curator or literary scholar: a role which, in time, passed to his son Christopher, who edited, emended, and ultimately published several works of Tolkien’s legendarium, including The Silmarillion and The Book of Lost Tales.
To put it another way, Tolkien imagined himself not so much telling a story as assembling a library of disparate texts from various hands. The Hobbit he saw as the memoir of Bilbo Baggins, who also began the work on The Lord of the Rings before leaving it to his nephew Frodo to consolidate and complete it, with some additional work by Samwise Gamgee. Some materials from The Silmarillion and The Book of Lost Tales are presented as Elvish tales collected and translated either by a tenth-century Anglo-Saxon mariner called Ælfwine (also known as Ottor Wæfre and Eriol) or by Bilbo himself.
Perhaps that’s a helpful point of entry to a project like The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, the ambitious new Amazon Prime Video series from creator-showrunners JD Payne and Patrick McKay. Set during the Second Age in the build-up to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, it’s a fundamentally new narrative woven around historical background from the appendices and the works themselves (but not from The Silmarillion or other works of the legendarium, the rights for which Amazon wasn’t able to obtain). The Rings of Power might be imagined, then, as an adaptation of some previously unpublished text from the diverse literature of Middle-earth, partly overlapping with known material, but also partly diverging from it. It is not meant, for example, as a literal portrayal of the Second Age, for the plan is to conflate events unfolding over thousands of years into a much shorter period of time. If it doesn’t all feel like something Tolkien himself might have written — and, based on the first couple of episodes, at least, it seems to me a mixed bag on this point — perhaps even serious Tolkien fans might keep an open mind whether that’s necessarily a bad thing.
Whose Middle-earth?
The Lord of the Rings ranks for me among the greatest literary works of all time. Along with The Hobbit, I’ve read it more times than I can count, from childhood to several readings aloud, complete with character voices, to successive subsets of my children. It would be hard to overstate the influence of Tolkien’s moral universe and cosmology as well as his aesthetic and cultural sensibilities on my thinking and imagination. This doesn’t prevent me from acknowledging limitations and areas of concern in Tolkien’s work with respect to areas like racial issues (in spite of Tolkien being personally antiracist and working antiracist themes into his work) and the portrayal of women. It’s not just that the noble Elves, for example, are fair-skinned while orcs are “swart” (dark-skinned) or “sallow” (an ambiguous term that can mean either “dark” or “sickly/yellow”). Even among strains of humans, the noble, wise, long-lived Númenóreans are tall and fair, while lesser, more suspect groups of men who allied with Sauron include the dark-skinned Haradrim (also called “Swertings” or “Swarthy Men”) and the swarthy/sallow Easterlings.
It might be noted in this connection that the literary perspectives in Tolkien’s library are overwhelmingly those of Elves and of Hobbits closely associated with Elves. One might reasonably wonder, then, what stories and memories of Middle-earth’s history might be passed down among other races like Dwarves and Men, particularly the humans of lineages other than the Númenóreans. In a not unrelated vein, the literary perspectives represented in Tolkien’s mythopoeia are overwhelmingly though not entirely male. (Exceptions include “The Tale of Tinúviel,” the earliest version of the story of Lúthien and Beren, told to Eriol by an elf-girl named Vëannë; Lúthien herself is arguably the story’s protagonist. Holly Ordway alerted me to a poem of Dwarvish provenance, strangely known in German translation: “The Complaint of Mîm the Dwarf.”)
Considered from this angle, there are encouraging signs in the early episodes of The Rings of Power. The perspective of Hobbit-kind in this tale is represented primarily through the eyes of a high-spirited young woman of the Harfoot folk (one of three strains of Halfling in the Second Age) called Elanor “Nori” Brandyfoot (Markella Kavenagh), along with her more cautious but loyal best friend Poppy Proudfellow (Megan Richards). Dwarf women are at last not just a punchline but a vital presence in the formidable person of Disa (Sophia Nomvete), the wife of the proudly irascible Durin IV (Owain Arthur). The main human point of view may be that of a woman healer of the Southlands named Bronwyn (Nazanin Boniadi) who is romantically involved with an Elven soldier named Arondir (Ismael Cruz Córdova).
Racially diverse casting includes Córdova, who is Puerto Rican, as Middle-earth’s first Black Elf character, and Nomvete, an English actress whose casting makes Disa the first Black Dwarf character as well as the first woman. There’s also Lenny Henry as a Black Harfoot elder named Sadoc Burrows. All of this is as it should be. If Tolkien meant to create a mythology for England, England is not populated solely by light-skinned peoples, nor was it in medieval or ancient times. In any case, Middle-earth has long since come to belong to a wider fandom, and the demographics can and should change in retellings, as the demographics of the Round Table changed with the passing of Arthuriana from one culture to another.
Demythologizing the Elves
Less welcome, to me, is the characterization of a younger Galadriel (Morfydd Clark) as a headstrong military commander obsessed with seeking out any lingering signs of the presence of Sauron, widely supposed to have been destroyed in the great war in which Galadriel’s brother was killed. Nothing against Galadriel handily dispatching a vicious snow troll wreaking havoc on her company in some godforsaken northern stronghold or whatever, but the badass approach to writing Strong Female Characters is long since a tiresome cliché. To be fair, the show could be out to subvert the trope, particularly if Galadriel’s insane choice at the end of the first episode is ultimately seen as a disastrous mistake rather than a heroic gambit. Even then, it seems like a terrible storytelling decision. There’s a lot of time to make the character interesting and credible, but my initial take is that there have to be better ways of bringing a feminist perspective to Middle-earth.
The portrayal of Galadriel seems to be part of an overall tendency toward demystifying the Elves, who are less beatific here than in The Lord of the Rings. Even the legendary High King Gil-galad (Benjamin Walker), though gifted with foresight, seems untrustworthy. This is jarring, but may offer intriguing insights into the perspectives of other races. Humans generally seem to dislike or distrust Elves, and those of the Southlands particularly see the military Elves of their region, with their watchtowers and patrols, as an unwelcome occupying force, like Americans in some Middle-eastern country. Slurs like “knife-ears” and “pointies” are heard; more provocatively, racist attitudes are also found among the Elves. Disparaging the humans of the southern village of Tiharad, whose ancestors allied with Morgoth in the great war, Arondir’s superior officer tells him that “the blood of those who stood with Morgoth still darkens their veins.”
The second episode touches on the famous animosity between Elves and Dwarves, with an unexpected and poignant reason for the chilly reception of young Elrond Half-Elven (Robert Aramayo) at the Dwarven city of Khazad-dûm. Elrond thinks of Durin as a friend, but the different worlds that Elves and Dwarves inhabit can create blind spots and grievances.
Moral and religious themes
What about Tolkien’s moral and religious themes? The first episode opens with an extended, nearly Johannine meditation on “light” and “darkness.” “Nothing is evil in the beginning” is the promising first line of Galadriel’s opening voiceover, and we are told that the High Elves of the Blessed Realm of Valinor “had no word for death.” Yet the episode ultimately proposes that sometimes we don’t know which light to follow “until we have touched the darkness” — a conceit that might seem to point in a direction more Jungian than Tolkienesque.
Then there are the hints of Providence woven into Tolkien’s work, from Gandalf’s affirmation of “something else at work” in Bilbo’s finding of the One Ring that he “was meant to find” and that Frodo was “meant to have” to the seemingly accidental destruction of the Ring that no one could bring themselves to destroy. A pronouncement of this sort is prominently featured in the official trailer for The Rings of Power: “Ours was no chance meeting,” Galadriel says in voiceover, presumably to Halbrand (Charlie Vickers), a human with whom her story becomes entwined in the second episode. “Not fate, nor destiny — ours was the work of something greater.” This is so on point that Tolkien’s Christian fans might wonder if the line was highlighted in the trailer specifically to reassure them.
A similar sentiment is expressed in the second episode by little Nori, who feels responsible for the enigmatic stranger (Daniel Weyman) who fell like a meteor from the sky and landed practically at her feet. “He could have landed anywhere, but he landed here,” she says to Poppy. “It’s like there’s a reason this happened, like I was supposed to find him — me. I can’t walk away from that.” The ultimate weight of such pronouncements, of course, will depend on how events unfold, and whether these seemingly chance events still look providential in retrospect.
Spectacle and atmosphere
As spectacle, The Rings of Power is so far an unqualified triumph, from the capable direction of J.A. Bayona (Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom) to the rich production design, spectacular landscapes, and persuasive special effects. Every setting in Middle-earth has a distinct feel, from the elegant birch colonnades of the Elvish capital of Lindon to the rugged, geometric grandeur of Khazad-dûm. Small touches I love include the ornate, dovetailed trapezoid design of Durin’s flagon and the foliate-headed Green Man emblems on the tunics of the Elven soldiers. The camp of the Harfoots — rustic, nomadic ancestors of the respectable Shirefolk Hobbits — is a homespun delight, with shelters designed to vanish into the landscape at a moment’s notice. (Tolkien’s introductory remark about Hobbits having “little or no magic about them, except the ordinary everyday sort which helps them to disappear quietly and quickly when large stupid folk like you and me come blundering along, making a noise like elephants which they can hear a mile off,” is well honored here.) It’s a shame that the most challenging sequence, the Sundering Seas, also comes across as the most wrongheaded.
Some well-crafted dialogue adds to the atmosphere. Nori’s mother has a memorable speech about the freedom in the nomadic Harfoot lifestyle compared to the settled cares of other races. Elrond admires how the Dwarves “sculpt the rock as one cares for an aged parent” and listens appreciatively as Disa waxes poetic regarding the Dwarvish practice of singing to the mountain.
Payne and McKay say that the show’s planned five-year arc has been set since they first pitched it to Amazon in 2018. Early fears about The Rings of Power taking a raw Game of Thrones approach — or recapitulating the gilding-the-dragon excesses of Peter Jackson’s misbegotten Hobbit trilogy — aren’t borne out in the opening chapters, at least. Where will the series go from here? Will it build to the War of the Last Alliance? Will it end with Isildur’s failure at Mount Doom, his death, and the disappearance of the One Ring? Or will the showrunners find a way to end in Tolkienesque eucatastrophe — a “sample or glimpse of final victory”? The Rings of Power has my attention, at least for now.
Related
The Rings of Power at the end of season 1
Season 1 ended for me closer to the quiet end of the whimper-bang spectrum than I had hoped. Yet the highs of the season’s second half offer ongoing reason for sustained interest.
The Rings of Power: Season 1 at the halfway mark
Four episodes in, the lavish Amazon Prime series is delivering on at least some of its promise, but there’s room for improvement.
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