Bridget RileyWhen the Tolkien estate announced in 2017 that it was seeking proposals for a “Lord of the Rings” spinoff show, a frenzied bidding war broke out between HBO, Amazon Prime, and Netflix over access to Middle-earth. And no wonder. Director Peter Jackson’s trilogy of “Lord of the Rings” movies, released in cinemas over three successive Decembers from 2001 to 2003, cost under $300 million to make, recouped nearly $3 billion, turned the actors (many of whom were unknowns) into household names, won multiple Oscars, earned Jackson a knighthood, revolutionized movie special effects, and even launched an entire tourist industry in New Zealand. The trilogy of Hobbit movies that inevitably followed, while not receiving the critical acclaim of their predecessors, earned a similar cave of gold for their stars, backers, and creators.
Amazon Prime won the bidding war with a simple pitch: to “chronicle the first five minutes of Jackson’s ‘The Fellowship of the Ring’ — the Galadriel-narrated prologue that told the story of the rings of power — during the course of five seasons.” Their submission was not the most financially lucrative offer made to the Tolkien family, but according to one executive, Amazon’s “collective passion and fidelity to Tolkien” was the deciding factor.
Showrunners Patrick McKay and J.D. Payne, who had been friends since childhood, had always dreamed of doing something based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s world. Their dedication to the source material, plus the backing of apparent Tolkien superfan Jeff Bezos, should ensure, one might imagine, that they would produce a show to delight all Tolkien fans. So great was the excitement that a teaser trailer created for the 2022 Super Bowl received a record 257 million views within 24 hours.
Yet although what would become “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” attracted 160 million viewers upon its release, Seasons 1 and 2 have received what can charitably be described as mixed reviews, with many fans eviscerating the project. Elon Musk weighed in, criticizing the show for depicting almost every male character as “a coward, a jerk or both.” There has also been anger over casting choices, leading observers to ask whether the show really is trying to be faithful to the source material, or if it has its own fashionably woke agenda, which Jackson had wisely avoided. Season 3 drops on Wednesday.
“The Lord of the Rings” remains my favorite book, and I write this as a fellow Tolkien superfan. One of the issues may be that nothing will ever quite be good enough for us. Nothing can return us to that golden age when we were discovering the story for the first time, and yet we remain hopeful that something might again evoke that sense of being under the spell of Tolkien, the master storyteller.
I remember my anxiety before “The Fellowship of the Ring” came out. Would Peter Jackson mess it up and commit an act of cultural desecration on the hallowed ground of Middle-earth? The relief when he produced a movie worthy of Tolkien was palpable throughout the cinema. Yet the main creative challenge for Jackson was compression. Given the vast source text, his screenwriters had no choice but to leave out crucial plot details. Entire episodes from the novel, most controversially perhaps the Scouring of the Shire, had to go because the story was too big for the screen. Yet it remained reassuringly Tolkienian since almost every aspect came straight from Tolkien’s text.
“The Rings of Power” faces the inverse problem. Its creators developed it not from a finished work but from chronologies, appendices, notes, drafts, and scattered references, many of them unpublished during Tolkien’s lifetime and assembled after his death by his son, Christopher. The result is that every genuinely Tolkienian character or plot point exists among large amounts of invented connective tissue. Storylines must stretch thin references into hours of television, producing episodes that can feel padded in a way Jackson’s trilogy rarely does. The further the show moves from Tolkien’s own work and into material it has created to bridge the gaps, the less it feels like Tolkien’s authentic voice and the more it feels, for all its spectacle, like a very expensive piece of fan fiction.
Key structural supports in Tolkien’s mythological world have disappeared for seemingly no reason. To give an example, names were never arbitrary labels for Tolkien but were rooted in specific languages and mythologies. “Gandalf” is therefore an Old Norse name meaning “wand-elf,” drawn directly from Old Norse poetry. Yet in Season 2 of “The Rings of Power” the name develops out of a hobbit nickname, “Grand Elf.” To replace a name built on genuine philology with a superficial joke seems an unnecessary deviation from the source material, not to mention a lack of appreciation of how language anchors Tolkien’s writing.
Furthermore, because of Tolkien’s own Christian faith, he constructed a specific moral world for his characters. As he explained: “Myth and fairy-story must, as all art, reflect and contain in solution elements of moral and religious truth.” The religious truths woven into Tolkien’s fiction continue to offer guidance in confronting modern and “real world” challenges.
Yet in choosing to personify Sauron, showrunners behind “The Rings of Power” seem more fascinated by the villain than by the virtues of courage, loyalty, humility, and self-sacrifice needed to defeat him, which were always Tolkien’s priority. In addition, and presumably as a tease to maintain audience engagement, much of Season 1 played a “Who is Sauron?” guessing game, a plot device more suited to an Agatha Christie novel than to Tolkien. Seeing the evolving project, I wonder if the Tolkien family is now getting a touch of seller’s remorse.
However, I also wonder if Tolkien himself had any inkling of the cultural juggernaut he would put in motion when he set himself the challenge of inventing a mythological origin story for his country. Tolkien’s biographer, Humphrey Carpenter, famously described Tolkien’s project as an attempt to create “a mythology for England.” Tolkien mourned the fact that England did not have its own legend comparable to the Finnish “Kalevala,” an epic poem compiled in the 19th century from existing folk tales. The “Kalevala” was not just a work of literature, but crucially became a touchstone for Finnish national identity, giving impetus to the emergence of Finnish language and culture as distinct from its two dominant neighbors, Russia and Sweden, and ultimately to the birth of Finland as a nation in 1917.
As he explained in a letter from 1951, Tolkien determined to give “an illusion of historicity” to his fantasy writing, that is, to produce something that felt historically true and real. And such was his imaginative, literary, and linguistic skill, he pretty much succeeded. In creating his peculiar hybrid, he was not simply writing a fantasy, nor simply a history. He was attempting something in between: a mythological pre-history, drawing on the Anglo-Saxon poems he knew so well from his work as an Oxford philologist. The name “Middle-earth” even comes from the Old English word “middungeard,” which is found in Caedmon’s Hymn, the earliest example of a poem written in Old English.
Those Anglo-Saxon poets Tolkien had studied looked upon the architectural ruins of a Roman Britain that had crumbled centuries before and tried to imagine the lost culture that might have built them. Their own culture was then decimated by the Norman Conquest of 1066, when French became the dominant literary language for centuries. Tolkien was trying to write something to bridge the gaps between that early Anglo-Saxon literature and his own time. As he explained in a response to poet W.H. Auden’s 1956 review of “The Return of the King”: “I am historically minded. Middle-earth is not an imaginary world. … The theatre of my tale is this earth, the one in which we now live, but the historical period is imaginary. The essentials of that abiding place are all there (at any rate for inhabitants of N. W. Europe), so naturally it feels familiar, even if a little glorified by the enchantment of distance in time.”
It should be no surprise, therefore, that the casting choices of “The Rings of Power” have proved so combustible. Beneath the superficial absurdity of minding about the skin color of a hobbit or an elf lies a fundamental and very current concern about a lost England. For Tolkien, Englishness seems to have been rooted in language, place, memory, and a sense of loss for a fractured and forgotten past. Peter Jackson avoided disturbing those underlying cultural foundations, but “The Rings of Power” seems to have awoken a cultural Balrog. Until we recognize Middle-earth for what Tolkien intended it to be — the deliberate creation of a mythical English identity — our modern attempts to flatten it into generic modern fantasy risk taking the battle for the rings into culture war territory.
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Bridget Riley studied modern history at Oxford and completed a Ph.D. in medieval history at the University of Reading. She writes on history, culture, and the philosophy of religion.
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