“I was awake before the breaking of the first silence. Since that time, I have had many names.”
Upon these words, a hundred thousand Twitter feeds around the globe lit up on the evening of Oct. 14 like a Pentagon computer system tracking a group of incoming Russian ICBMs. There’s a cheery thought!
And the Twitter alerts did not cease. Not for an entire week.
It’s not often that a snatch of dialogue from a prestige television show can elicit worldwide hysteria, but when the character speaking these lines is Sauron, Dark Lord of Mordor, finally revealing his identity to the principal heroine of Amazon Prime’s “The Rings of Power” and an audience of 25 million, we can perhaps forgive hardcore “Rings” fans for running amuck.
After all, Friday the 14th of October was a day many longtime fans of J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy epic “The Lord of the Rings” and its associated movie adaptations never thought would come. In that sense, Greymantle exaggerates only slightly when he compares this cinematic “reveal” with the hope devout Christians hold for the Second Coming.
Like I said – I am exaggerating. But only just a little.
A DAY OF RAPTURE FOR TOLKIEN FANS
Tolkien’s fans have long had mixed feelings regarding movie adaptations of his novels. The first two hit the big and small screens alike in the 1970s with Rankin-Bass’s made-for-TV version of “The Hobbit” followed by Ralph Bakshi’s “Lord of the Rings” — both animated. The films elicited mixed reviews from fans, and film industry ‘wise men’ opined that Tolkien’s novels were simply un-film-able.
Peter Jackson’s live action “Lord of the Rings” films of the early 2000s proved the cinematic wise men were wrong: with computer animation and enhanced special effects, the “Rings” novels could be adapted to the big-screen, though with some loss of linguistic quirkiness and bittersweet romance that set the novels apart from the rest of 20th century literature.
After Jackson’s “The Hobbit” adaptions were completed a decade later, global Tolkien fandom retreated into winsome nostalgia. Sure, the Peter Jackson movies had been entertaining and visually spectacular, but no filmmaker was ever going to fully capture the world of Middle Earth! Film was simply the wrong medium for such a unique legendarium, they said.
Back in the early 1990s, Greymantle and his college friends used to joke that the only way to adapt Tolkien properly to the screen was for some eccentric billionaire write a blank check to an aspiring Stanley Kubrick and allow him to film “Lord of the Rings” as a TV series with a budget of around $1 billion. “Ha, like that would EVER happen” we guffawed.
Well, lo and behold! Along came Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man as of 2019, and his wish to launch Amazon Prime as a competitor to other streaming services with a big-budget prestige TV drama…and the rest is history. It turns out that Jeff Bezos loves Tolkien. And that, dear readers, is why the first two seasons of “Rings of Power” out of a planned five seasons have a budget of…you guessed it: $1 billion.
It really shows in the visual style of the series, too. Numenor, Khazad-dum and the Sundering Seas have been recreated for the screen in a way that is simply breathtaking. Even the series’ many detractors have been stunned by the look of the show. “Completely cinematic” and “the most gorgeous thing ever broadcast on television” are fairly typical reactions.
And for hardcore Tolkien fans, it has been a dream come true to travel back to the Second Age of Middle Earth and see the arch-villain Sauron before he was burned and mutilated. Before he was the fiery all-seeing “Eye”.
EUCATASTROPHE VIA HIGH-SPEED INTERNET
J.R.R. Tolkien and his fellow Inklings – an informal literary society of Oxford and Cambridge dons who read each other’s work aloud at weekly gatherings in the 1930s and 40s – coined the term “eucatastrophe“. Simply put, “eucatastrophe” means the occurrence of an event that is well beyond one’s most hopeful imaginings. When it happens, it lifts a person up and saves the self and the beloved from some dreadful fate.
It’s easy to confuse a eucatastrophe with a miracle, but the two types of events share some critical differences. A miracle is not always or even usually looked for, whereas a eucatastrophe is something urgently desired and even prayed for, but very unlikely to happen. When it comes, it is sudden and unlooked-for, and changes the course of a life or nation.
Now, Greymantle doubts that any television program can change the course of history, and “Rings of Power” is unlikely to have any such effect. But the new “Rings” show does contain some elements of eucatastrophe, in that old and new Tolkien fans alike had low expectations for “Rings” and many older fans fretted that the show would be a travesty mired in contemporary US cultural conflicts (and some still do).
The sweet surprise, then, that the series is passionately true to the original stories and its major characters and reflects the philosophical under-pinning of Tolkien’s legenderium to a much greater extent than Peter Jackson’s films. That has generated a reaction well beyond ordinary fan approval. “Rings of Power”, Season 1, has presented Tolkien fans with an unlooked-for surprise, one that has more than dispelled doubts. It has lifted hearts.
A FEAST FOR NERDS
After a decade in which the “Game of Thrones” TV series based on George R. R. Martin’s “Song of Fire and Ice” dominated the airwaves, it has been a real pleasure for Tolkien fans to encounter an adaption that both surpasses “Thrones” in visual sumptuousness – which is really saying something, as “Thrones” is cinematically spectacular – while reveling in odd kernels of Tolkien lore both to advance the storyline and (seemingly) and to make fans absolutely wriggle with delight.
Tolkien fanatics knew they were entering into deep communion with fellow devotees about five minutes into the first episode, when the camera cranes over the crest of a grassy hilltop and spies an immense valley beyond, the horizon of which is lit, not by the mid-morning sun, but by two immense trees with glowing leaves rising tall as mountains in the distance.
Deep fans of Tolkien’s legendarium immediately recognized that the “Rings of Power” show-runners had taken us all the way back to ancient Valinor before the destruction of the ‘Trees of Light’, a core plot point in Middle Earth’s history introduced in 1977’s “The Silmarillion”.
The unveiling of the “Trees of Light” was especially surprising, given that fans are well acquainted with the hard-bitten reputation of the Tolkien Estate and the legions of lawyers it employs for one purpose: shutting down unauthorized adaptions of Tolkien’s works. The ‘Holy Grail’ of the Tolkien Estate is “The Silmarillion”, which Tolkien’s last will and testament mandated must never be adapted into other art forms.
A Norwegian ballet based on “The Tale of Beren and Luthien” from “The Silmarillion” was shut down by court order in 2014 two weeks before its premiere, to give one example among many, and the makers of numerous fan films, musical compositions and other Tolkien-derived works have been served with ‘cease and desist’ notices well into production in order to protect the legal sanctity (and integrity) of Tolkien’s works.
Given all that history, fans watched agape as the “Trees of Light” heaved into view on the glowing Valinorian horizon, and jaws continued to drop as one dissolve after another revealed a vast armada of Elven ships sailing across the Sundering Seas from Valinor to Middle Earth, shifting again to armored brigades of Elves exchanging sword strikes with legions of Orcs, to a final dissolve into a frozen image from ‘The War of Wrath’.
How did those crazy show-runners, J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay, manage to pull this off? That was pretty much the gist of many Twitter exchanges in the days after the series premiere in August.
A STORM OF CONSULTANTS
As it turns out, they pulled it off by consulting deeply with Tolkien scholars widely respected by the Tolkien family and Estate, including Tom Shippey, Verlyn Flieger and J.R.R.’s grandson, Simon Tolkien, and by hiring a few lawyers of their own to parse the intricacies of copyright law. And with the very deep pockets of Jeff Bezos and a billion-dollar budget on their side, they were able to hire a lot of expertise.
As it turns out, Tolkien’s last will and testament only covers the text of “The Silmarillion” itself. References to events in “The Silmarillion” contained in other works by Tolkien, including the appendices to”The Lord of the Rings”, “The Book of Lost Tales”, “Akallebeth” and the multi-volume “History of Middle Earth” compiled and editing by Tolkien’s son, Christopher, don’t fall under the Estate’s prohibition. Neither do lines of dialogue from “LOTR” and “The Hobbit” that reference those same events.
And…voila! There you have ample legal and narrative justification for construction gorgeous images of never-before-seen passages from Tolkien’s legendarium delivered on the small screen.
FANBOYS GONE MAD?
Now, while it’s clear that Payne and McKay made adroit use of their access to the Tolkien family and academia’s foremost Tolkien scholars (and an ample legal budget), it’s been a bit less clear why Payne and McKay and the script-writing team for “Rings of Power” made the exact artistic choices they did in Season 1.
There has been a great deal of heated debate surrounding the casting diversity of “Rings of Power” versus earlier film adaptions of Tolkien’s works, but far less debate and inquiry directed at why the show-runners chose to delve so deeply into sheer geekiness.
The new series dives pretty far down into the strange apocrypha of Tolkien’s world including the social customs of dwarves, Middle Earth’s unwieldy geography, and numerous references to “the Powers of Arda” – the godlike Valar who watch over and protect Middle Earth from the powers of evil – that never found their way into prior films.
Granted, the references to the Valar in “LOTR” are pretty scant, so it’s not surprising that Peter Jackson chose to cut out those references, as they don’t add much and would have slowed down the pace of storytelling. Still, it’s really striking how much ‘deep Tolkien mythology” has found its way into the new series, and it’s worth pondering why that is.
This blog lacks both the influence and the space to resolve these questions. However, Greymantle will suggest an answer to ignite debate, in hopes that wiser minds will someday resolve it: The show-runners are passionate fan-boys themselves and, having ascended the slippery pole of Hollywood to take a place close to the top, and given a damn-near unlimited budget, they simply decided to “go for it”. To give fans a vision of Arda that they have secretly wanted, even if they were too scared to say so aloud.
Greymantle’s “Fanboys Gone Mad” theory is not likely to be the whole story, to provide the entire explanation. But it’s a good working theory to explain the slow pacing of Season 1, with its focus on arcane details and anecdotes such as the Hammer of Feanor, the falling leaves of the white tree Nimloth being ‘the tears of the Valar’, and mithril silver originating as the fruit of a battle between a Balrog and an Elf warrior “as faithful as Manwe” high atop the peaks of the Misty Mountains.
This is all pretty weird stuff, even for Tolkien. And it’s weirder still that the show-runners chose to include such great gobs of it in Season 1. Not that I am complaining. Far from it. It’s about time that the filmgoing and TV-watching public got a dose of the deeper wonders of Middle Earth available heretofore only to fans willing to slog through Tolkien’s lesser-read works.
A prosaic explanation for the show-runners’ approach is that the events of the seasons to come won’t be understandable unless considerable background into the workings of Arda and the motivations of Sauron is provided early in the series. Otherwise when, you know, whole continents get ripped apart and islands go sinking beneath the waves at the end of Season 4 (by my estimation), a lot of casual viewers might be excused for thinking “Now, why did that happen?” And, WHO made it happen?
A QUESTION OF CLARITY
There is probably a great deal of truth in the explanation provided above. Bringing to life the central story of Middle Earth’s Second Age was always going to be more challenging than adapting “The Lord of the Rings” to film. The moral and spiritual elements that underlie Tolkien’s tales set in the Third Age were always deep in the background, functioning as “smuggled theology‘ as C.S. Lewis remarked about his own “Narnia” novels.
That’s not really the case with Tolkien’s Second Age stories. The mythical and spiritual elements of those stories find their place more firmly in the foreground of the narrative.
Religious controversies among the Numenoreans form a critical plot point. Sauron initially struggles with an urge to redeem himself before reconciling with his own evil instincts. Dwarves confront their uncertain position as the “adopted children of Illuvatar”. The cult of Melkor plays a central role in the rise of Sauron and the downfall of Numenor.
For the plotting and drama of future “Rings” seasons to make any sense and to be emotionally gripping, there simply needs to be a lot of background, and it’s too complicated to be handled in a 10-minute opening narrative as in Jackson’s “Fellowship of the Ring”. The spiritual dimensions of the mythos are simply too intricate for that kind of hurried approach.
That’s not to say the Amazon and Hollywood could not have chosen to take a far more action-driven, superficial approach to the material. Such was probably discussed early in the pre-production process.
It’s to Payne and McKay’s credit, then, that Amazon chose to take a more winding and quirky path with the narrative. And that is a far riskier path given the short attention spans of many viewers. They surely had to argue for the practicality of the ‘slow and winding path’ versus pitching more sentimental reasons for taking that route.
Their early triumph – we’ve only seen Season 1, after all – lies in how they have combined the two approaches, balancing the careful building of narrative structure with juicy digressions into Tolkienesque weirdness.
A WORK OF GREAT LOVE
Another thing about the production team’s approach is also clear by the end of Season 1. For the show-runners, the writers, the directors, the set-designers and costumers, and the actors themselves, “Rings of Power” somewhere during the production process became deeply significant on an emotional level. There are some things you just can’t fake.
For Payne and McKay, that was likely the case from the get-go. McKay apparently starts every daily writers’ meeting with a quote from J.R.R. Tolkien. That’s fan dedication! That also seems to be the case for Ismael Cruz Cordoba, who plays the character of Arondir, who reportedly wept after seeing the first out-takes of his on-screen character.
But it’s unlikely most production members are hard-core fans. Their passion had to be engaged by their encounter with the material during the production process. Judging by the beauty of the imagery, the tender quality of the music, and the sincerity of the performances, Greymantle would state what should be obvious: for the makers of this TV series, the final product is nothing less than a labor of love.
It’s rare that artists have a chance to re-create a shared, imagined world that they have engaged with for much of their lives. The artistic truth revealed by the process reveals also the emotion at the process’s heart. From Valinor’s “Trees of Light” to the beauty of the Southlands before they became Mordor, to the sweet innocence of “This Wandering Day“, a song sung by the hobbit-girl Poppy Proudfoot, love is the strongest emotion in the final product.
Whether “The Rings of Power” be judged a success for a failure in the long term, one thing is already clear: it is a work of great love.
Until next time, I remain —
Greymantle
