In a famous letter to publisher Milton Waldman, probably written in late 1951 (No. 131 in The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien), Tolkien wrote:
Do not laugh! But once upon a time (my crest has long since fallen) I had a mind to make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy story … The cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama. Absurd.
Despite the objections of purists, then, Peter Jackson’s films of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, and the ongoing Amazon Prime TV series The Rings of Power, carry the imprimatur of the creator, whatever one might think of their intrinsic artistic merits.
As for creation, Tolkien, who was deeply religious, also had very specific views. Creation, as in authorship, is really what he termed ‘sub-creation’, for all, he believed, stem from the action of the Creator. As such, an author should hold on to their works but lightly, and not become too enamoured of their beauty. The relationship between authors and their works is a central theme in Tolkien’s legendarium — what became The Silmarillion, from which The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are, effectively, spin-offs. The whole thing is driven by the covetousness of the Elven-smith Feanor for his own creations, the Silmarils, whence the entire saga of apocalyptic disaster in which the elves are utterly defeated by the forces of evil. The theme is reprised in the story of the creation of the rings of power. A cautionary tale, indeed, and on the grandest of canvases.
All of which justifies, amply in my view, adaptations of an author’s works that do not adhere strictly to the author’s own beliefs or intentions, still less those of that author’s admirers. This is especially true in Tolkien’s case, given the evidence for how he wished his myth-making to propagate. For all that there will be some who find it hard to take, there can be no adaptation of Tolkien that is not in the canon, by definition.
This need not apply, however, to one’s aesthetic judgements of the works in and of themselves. Although there were some aspects of Peter Jackson’s adaptations I found irritating, my unease rested with choices made by the scriptwriters rather than the fact that the films had been made, still less that they deviated from the books. Mostly, I loved them. With an adaptation, one must first own that books are different from films. Books leave a great deal to the imagination of the reader, but in films, everything must be shown. And because ‘everything’ accounts for an awful lot, a great deal must be left out. Characters are merged or cut entirely for the sake of the narrative. Time is compressed.
There are other problems, too, thrown up by the fact that Tolkien chose to ‘tell’ as much as ‘show’. In The Lord of the Rings, as in The Hobbit, we are told of events that happened long ago, or going on simultaneously but elsewhere. The action frequently stops so someone can recall an ancient tale, or sing a song of days gone by. And in Elvish, to boot. That, of course, is part of the charm. Tolkien acknowledged that glimpses of distant vistas enriched the reading experience. For those readers who wanted more, he added, there were appendices to The Lord of the Rings, more than 100 pages of background to the events and personalities of Tolkien’s invented world between the fall of Morgoth, the Great Enemy, at the end of the First Age (or ‘Elder Days’) and the matter of The Lord of the Rings itself, at the end of the Third. Because the appendices (I am so tempted to call them ‘Supplementary Information’) are nearly all by necessity telegraphic and annalistic, they leave plenty of room for ‘other minds and hands’ to fill in the gaps.
The makers of The Rings of Power have seized this opportunity with both hands. Even though they have invented a great deal, both in plot and characterisation, they have remained true (more or less) to the story told in the Supplementary Information Extended Data Appendices to The Lord of the Rings. They have also explained a great deal that Tolkien left vague or contentious.
For my reflections on the first episode of the first series of The Rings of Power, see here and, notwithstanding inasmuch as which, for the entire first series here, where you can remind yourself of events and brush up on the necessary background. From here on in there are spiders spoilers (and, yes, also some spiders).
I’ve watched the first three episodes of the second season series of The Rings of Power, and here is a recap of the story so far. In no particular order, as they say on all the game shows, the Numenoreans return home after their ultimately disastrous intervention in the ‘Southlands’ (that is, Mordor), during which Elendil’s son Isildur is lost, and the Queen-Regent Miriel is blinded. When they arrive, they find that the ailing king, Tar-Palantir, has died. The population turns toward her cousin and chancellor Pharazon, already a wily power-player, convinced that Tar-Palantir, and by implication Miriel, are too close to the elves. (This rings true to Tolkien’s conception. As the centuries wear on in the history of Numenor, the elves became less and less trusted until only a few ‘faithful’ had any dealings with them).
Back in Middle-earth, the refugees from the Southlands who have not switched sides to Adar’s orcs have converged on Pelargir, a small port once established by the Numenoreans but seemingly abandoned, the wood and thatch hovels of the Southlanders built amid the ruined stonework. Isildur makes his way there, helped by his faithful horse (echoes of Peter Jackson’s Aragorn-horse relationship in the film of The Two Towers) but he’s missed the boat home. During his adventures, Isildur escapes from the captivity of giant spiders (no Tolkien story is really complete without giant spiders).
Elsewhere, Elanor Brandyfoot, the harfoot (that is, proto-hobbit) has thrown in her lot with the Stranger, and is eventually joined by her best friend Poppy. They are slogging across a desert in Rhun (the East) looking for the constellation, or asterism, that the Stranger seeks, which will give him some clue to what he’s supposed to be doing. This looks like a major boo-boo to me. To look for unfamiliar stars, you have to go south, not east. Tolkien explicitly says at one point in The Lord of the Rings that Aragorn had once journeyed to Harad (the south, much further than the ‘Southlands’), ‘where the stars are strange’. As they go, Elanor and Poppy are trying to give the Stranger a name, and come up with various preposterous archaic-English or gothic-sounding names of the kind that hobbits would eventually call themselves, but seem to circle around the word ‘Gand’. This discussion has important resonances with Gandalf’s encounter with Bilbo at the start of The Hobbit, in which Gandalf expounds on the sometimes strained relationship between names as and of themselves, and the things to which they refer. ‘I am Gandalf’, he says, ‘And Gandalf means “me”‘. Names, as Tolkien (being a philologist) would have been the first to understand, are important. The Stranger himself has recurring dreams about finding a wizard’s staff (the ‘gand’, or ‘wand’, in Old Norse). The wanderers come to the attention of a sorcerer living in Rhun. I wonder whether this is one of the two so-called ‘blue wizards’, unnamed in the Lord of the Rings, who went east and fell out of the tales? Gee Minima reminds me of a fan theory that this sorcerer might end up as one of Sauron’s Ringwraiths, perhaps the Witch King of Angmar.
Khazad-Dum, the kingdom of the dwarves, has hit on hard times. Hot-headed Prince Durin has fallen out with his father, King Durin III. An earthquake, possibly sparked by the eruption of Mount Doom, has shaken its structure, such that the giant windows in the mountain-walls the dwarves use to admit light (and grow crops) have collapsed, and all is dark. Here we meet Narvi, the dwarf who (in The Lord of the Rings) collaborated with Celebrimbor to make the Doors of Moria — prefigured in the graphics that accompany the opening titles.
The Three Rings of the elves, having been forged by Celebrimbor, return to Lindon. Elrond is convinced that they can only lead to bad things, given that Halbrand (now exposed as Sauron) was involved in their forging, but Galadriel and Gil-Galad, with the help of the wise old ship-builder Cirdan, convince him that Sauron never touched them (it’s a point of ring-lore that the Three remain pure und uncorrupted by Sauron’s touch). Indeed, when the elves invoke their power, the fungoid decay that appears to afflict Lindon goes away and the Sun comes out. Which is nice. It’s fairly clear, though, that the rings are addictive. Clearly, there’ll be trouble at t’mill.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the first three episodes is the development of Sauron as a character. In a flashback to the very start of the Second Age, just after Morgoth’s defeat, Sauron tries to rally the remaining orcs to his banner, but the orcs, led by Adar, rebel, and ‘kill’ him. But Sauron cannot be killed so easily. Although seemingly crushed to a pulp, Sauron’s blood, gore and general squishy goo slowly reassemble until they become a kind of animated ball of black worms (imagine wet spaghetti soaked in squid ink) that slithers around the landscape for centuries, before ambushing a human and thus reassuming human form. Clearly, Sauron needs a method of domination that goes beyond mere persuasion. This is where the idea of rings of power come from, and why Elrond is so suspicious of the three rings made so far, even if Sauron had never touched them. But back to Sauron: we follow his progress until he meets Galadriel at sea, taking up the story in the first series.
Sauron needs more rings, though, and returns to Celebrimbor in Eregion, revealing himself as a divine figure, Annatar, Lord of Gifts (this part is true to Tolkien’s conception). Crucially, he lets Celebrimbor assume that he is a messenger sent from the Valar to assist people in Middle-earth combat evil — the exact purpose, as it happens, of the wizards, or Istari, of which the Stranger is (or seems to be) one. Annatar does not tell lies, as such, but he steers others to imagine things that aren’t true, playing on their own vanity. (The two-handers between Annatar and Celebrimbor are masterpieces of scriptwriting and acting). As Galadriel says in another scene, Sauron (as Halbrand) had played her ‘like a harp’, telling her the things she wanted to hear.
Lastly, about Adar. This character does not appear in Tolkien as such, but helps resolve the vexed issue of the origin of orcs. Tolkien is explicit that orcs reproduce in the usual way, and in this series we actually meet girl orcs and baby orcs. But there seems to be a great deal of variety among orcs, and, elsewhere it seems clear that orcs can be manufactured from base matter (articulated very well in film by Peter Jackson in The Lord of the Rings); and, again, that orcs were elves, captured and tortured by Morgoth. If that were true, there would have to have been an awful lot of captured elves. This caused Tolkien a lot of problems, and in some very late writings he spilled a lot of ink wondering if orcs had souls, or were capable of independent agency, and other matters. The scriptwriters of The Rings of Power have resolved all of this. Adar is quite plainly one of a relatively small number of captured and corrupted elves, who then propagate orcs in a variety of ways — he refers to his orcs as his ‘children’. They plainly do have independent agency to some degree, and are not necessarily slaves of Sauron. It is this that Sauron seeks to resolve by use of the domination that the use of rings imposes.
There is more to come. We are yet to meet Tom Bombadil and the barrow-wights, characters from The Lord of the Rings, excised from Peter Jackson’s films for perfectly good reasons of pacing. There’ll also be some ents, and also stoors — cousins of the harfoots, the river-bank-loving proto-hobbits stock whence Gollum emerged.
It’s plain, at least from the first three episodes, that the makers of The Rings of Power have upped their game. It’s just as beautiful, but this time the acting and writing have risen to match it. Morfydd Clark (Galadriel), Robert Aramayo (Elrond), Owain Arthur (Prince Durin) and especially the gorgeous Sophia Nomvete (Durin’s redoubtable wife Disa) are as outstanding as they were in the first series, among a cast too strong and numerous to describe individually, but this time Charles Edwards (Celebrimbor) has risen in stature — possibly because the writing is better. But the star turn has to be Charlie Vickers as Sauron. Everyone loves a good baddie, especially a baddie as complex and conflicted as Sauron who, as Tolkien says, started out as one of the good guys.
The best bit, though, is the score, by Bear McCreary. He takes the mood established by Howard Shore in his fabulous scores for The Lord of the Rings films (Shore also wrote the main title for The Rings of Power) but makes it all his own, especially with his use of brass and voices. McCreary, like Shore, uses leitmotifs, and after a couple of listens you’ll be humming Galadriel’s theme without knowing it. But beware Tom Bombadil’s theme, which has become something of an ear worm which I find myself humming as I wake.
