Amazon’s The Rings of Power dropped in early 2022 and the internet exploded on it. Nerds and fans of Lord of the Rings flocked from all corners of the fandom to articulate their opinion on the new adaptation. Youtube channels for Tolkien lore have never been more numerous or popular. And the consensus was… that it was utter garbage. Everyone and their mother had an opinion on why the show was objectively bad, and it seemed that the more verbosely you could ridicule Amazon’s new product the more nerd points you got. If you were a Tolkien fan who wanted to have an online presence and discuss the new content, you just had to hate the show - there was no other option. 

 

Which is a real shame if you’re me because I happen to be a huge Tolkien nerd who also absolutely loved the show. I’m not here to explain to you why, I’m not here to tell you that it’s objectively “good” or to convince you that you should like it too. The fact of the matter is that I thoroughly enjoyed watching it precisely because of its relation to Tolkien’s source material, and am continually disheartened that almost all of the discourse surrounding the show in fan circles both on and off the internet is still, to this day, centered around proving that the show is horrifically “bad”, or incredibly “good”. Very few people seem to want to talk about the show from an understanding that it was an adaptation of an unfinished part of Tolkien’s legendarium and are more interested in writing it off as garbage than trying to understand where the showrunner’s interpretations might be coming from. 

 

The show is different from Tolkien’s source material, and it is worse (you’re not gonna do better than the professor, sorry), but that does not mean that it has no merit or value. Having an understanding of the nature of Tolkein’s source material is essential to understanding adaptations of his legendarium that go beyond the completed story of The Lord of the Rings. Not only is the second age of middle earth (and the characters within it) the least fleshed out part of the entire legendarium, but it is also considered a dark age within the story itself. 

 

“Divergent versions need not indeed always be treated solely as a question of settling the priority of composition; and my father as ‘author’ or ‘inventor’ cannot always in these matters be distinguished from the ‘recorder’ of ancient traditions handed down in diverse forms among the different peoples through long ages (when Frodo met Galadriel in Lorien, more than sixty centuries had passed since she went east over the Blue Mountains from the ruin of Beleriand). ‘Of this two things are said, though which is true only those Wise could say who now are gone.’” (Unfinished Tales).

 

It’s essential to understand that the story which Amazon’s The Rings of Power is trying to tell was left unfinished and with numerous conflicting versions of characters within it (particularly Galadriel, but that topic deserves an entire post). Rather than try to fill all this in, Tolkien leaned into the unfinished nature of his works and chose to view them as bits of lost history from his sub-created world. Rather than having glaring gaps and inconsistencies in his story, he simply had a dark age of knowledge that had been lost. The result of this when trying to adapt his second age is that there is quite simply no dialogue or narrative structure in place to adapt off of, but rather historical outlines that span thousands of years. There are fragments of smaller stories within that timeframe that talk more specifically about Numenor such as the Tale of Aldarion and Erendis, or Akallabeth, but these stories still have too much of a mythic air to them to contain anything more than isolated lines of dialogue and a narrative that spans hundreds of years - and besides, the show doesn’t have the rights to these specific stories anyway.

 

I’m digressing a bit, but what I’m trying to highlight is the inevitability of having an adaptation that differs from the source material when it comes to Tolkien’s second age. All adaptations must change the story of a book in order to fit it into the short-form medium of a movie, and all adaptations are inherently another version of an existing story, but this is increasingly true for The Rings of Power because of the nature of the source material being adapted. In order to fairly judge the show we need to assess how well its new version of the story fits next to Tolkien’s. How does their interpretation of things line up with what Tolkien wrote? What do their versions of the unfinished and sketched characters add to the narrative? And what do they miss? They are providing us an interpretation of feigned history, not an adaptation of a completed novel.

Whether you liked the show or not, the interpretation they have provided supplies an incredible amount of interesting questions surrounding Tolkien’s legendarium that cut to the core of his unfinished characters, and provide an excellent lens to look into the second age. With this blog I’m not going to try to prove my opinion to you (though my opinion may interject itself occasionally). I’m not going to be concerned with technical details of cinematography, television show writing, or pacing. I don’t need you to like the show. What I am here to do is provide an absolutely copious amount of context from Tolkien’s wider legendarium in order to lay a foundation for understanding the show and its many adaptation decisions. I am going to lean into analyzing the show through the lens of Tolkein’s wider legendarium, examining quotes and bits of lore from texts that the show doesn’t even begin to have the rights to. I’m doing this because I continue to give the showrunners the benefit of the doubt and strongly believe that they have studied Tolkien’s wider legendarium and are adapting it with care - within the legal boundaries they’re constrained by. If my analysis and predictions are later proved wrong because of this assumption, then I’ll be wrong because the show strayed further from the source material than it should have. My hope is that as time goes on, more people will share my optimism for the show and see its merit as an adaptation regardless of their own personal tastes.