Anyone brave or foolhardy enough to try to adapt Tolkien to stage or screen is going to come under scrutiny that will mostly not be friendly and it serves them right, especially if one of the scrutineers is your faithful and opinionated reviewer. To say that opinions vary when it comes to Tolkien really is the kind of understatement that you see when someone is saying that the government is having a few problems.
Tolkien tends to bring out the best and the worst in people, just as the rings did in his books. You could say that weird people like him or that liking him might make them weird. The enormous amount of backstory and the complexity of Tolkien’s whole Middle Earth/Arda/ Númenor project would need far more than a few series to do them justice and it’s not surprising that mistakes are made. It’s just that many of the mistakes are so weird, that maybe it’s a kind of madness that comes over people trying to do justice to the massive oeuvre.
In fans, the weirdness might manifest as talking in Elvish and wearing hobbit cloaks at Halloween, but in the more ambitious/deluded it might show up as making a series that occasionally gets things right-ish, but more often does such things as make reviewers crazier than usual. That said, I can say that there is a pretty good consensus among my tribe of Tolkien lovers that the latest series of Rings of Power is a real curate’s egg. Whether having some bits that are good among other bits that are on the nose is a conundrum that this viewer must sort out for herself. Do the bad bits ruin the whole thing?
I guess that the bad bits of The Rings of Power have really given me aesthetic-philosphical indigestion of the soul and made me a tad hard to live with while it’s on, even as I chase it for the good bits that make you feel like you’re experiencing Tolkien’s world more vividly. (I’m sorry, my dear family, for swearing so much at Gil-galad’s portrayal.) But among Tolkien devotees it’s rare to find consensus about what is wrong. To hear the geeky video-gamers community blaming the young actress playing Galadriel for the failings of the entire shebang is like blaming your cat for a mouse plague. Truth be told, Morfydd Clark does a decent job of being the regal young warrior who is said by Tolkien to be beautiful beyond even elven standards. She has a beautiful face and the only problem I have with the way she looks is that Tolkien tells us that Galadriel as really tall, like basketballer tall – he describes her as ‘man-high’, about six foot four. She is something like a demi-goddess or Valkyrie to behold. Clark’s petiteness never gives her a chance to look like that, so she has to be small and tough: she’s more of a Buffy type. Pity. But like my late Jack Russell, who was an Irish wolfhound in a 12-kilo body, she is sometimes able to project a sense of greatness and destiny even if her actual height is average. We don’t see quite the gravitas that Cate Blanchett brought to the role, but I’m inclined to give her a pass.
What I can’t forgive is that the scriptwriters are trying to create a semi-attractive buzz between Galadriel and Sauron, and even Galadriel and Adar, the king of the orcs (who, we need to remember but aren’t told in this version, are descended from destroyed proto-elves that were corrupted and tortured into evil minionhood by Morgoth, the satanic fallen Vala of Tolkien’s cosmology and Sauron’s original master). The Elves of Middle Earth are yearning to get back to the sacred land of the Valar in the ultimate far West; the end of The Lord of the Rings is all about the transition to the era of Men (and Hobbits). So to imagine the Elven queen Galadriel as being attracted to either the evil Sauron or the repulsive Adar is a travesty.
What the makers of the series get reasonably right is the appearance of the doomed and decadent city-state of Númenor. It’s obvious that they looked at Tolkien’s own illustrations and paid attention to his descriptions. And they are decent at portraying the machinations of humans, probably because history gives them so much to work with.
But oh dear me, some other stuff gets up my goat, as Kath would say to Kim. Take the hobbits. I get that they are early hobbits, but why are they so dirty? Why have them eating snails? I don’t get it. While the hobbits were often ignorant of the wider world in the books, they were more complex and intelligent than the way they’re portrayed in The Rings of Power.
'One day someone might take the time to make a version that doesn’t make a real Tolkien lover wince. But don’t hold your breath.'
Which brings me to a major beef: why the heck are the Dwarves all stupid-Glaswegian and why do they all act as though they’re about to headbutt each other over nothing? Tolkien’s Dwarves (never ‘dwarfs’) were the very first beings created by one of the Valar, Aulë, who was the patron of craft and building. In doing so, he overstepped the boundaries, and displeased the Creator, because his creations had no souls. But when he went to destroy them to make amends, Iluvatar mercifully breathed life into them and they became the seven Father-Kings of the Dwarves. They were put into suspended animation for aeons until Middle Earth was ready for Elves and Men. For the Rings of Power crew to make these proud and intelligent monarchs into dumb brawling bogans is an insult to their race. They were extraordinary craftsmen and architects, engineering geniuses like their maker. The Rings of Power team have obviously been reading Terry Pratchett, whose dwarves are funny and only a bit serious and certainly not creators of vast bejewelled halls of stone under mountains. They are more like the mining dwarves in Disney’s Snow White than the noble and ancient sovereigns of Khazad-Dûm. I love Pratchett, but his dwarves are a kind of satirical tribute to Tolkien and Disney. So, a big no from me about these not-Tolkien-enough dwarves. And before any Glaswegians get upset with me, I would refer them to The Rings of Power and invite them to get upset with J. D. Payne and Patrick McKay, Amazon Prime’s writers and showrunners for the series. And perhaps get upset with Jeff Bezos while they’re at it, to save time.
But my greatest ire is reserved for the idiotic imagining of the greatest Elven warrior king, Gil-galad. They have dressed the unfortunate actor in what looks like Nero’s party toga, complete with an utterly inappropriate golden laurel wreath on his head. The final wtf moment for me was when Gil-galad received one of the three rings of power, and we were treated to a lingering shot of pudgy beringed fingers that would not have been out of place in a portrait of George IV, whom Beau Brummel once insulted by saying to George’s companion ‘Who’s your fat friend?’, body-shaming being all the rage in Regency times. Gil-galad was the High King of the Elves in exile, and died bravely at Sauron’s own hands at the end of the Battle of Five Armies. He did not look like an EU banking executive after a long lunch in Brussels.
In the end, many people have tried, with varying success, to take Tolkien off the printed page and make his people walk and talk. Ralph Bakshi made a not-completely-terrible cartoon in the ‘70s. (Only mostly terrible.) Even The Beatles wanted to have a go: they wanted to make a musical with Paul as Frodo, John as Gollum, George as Gandalf and Ringo as Sam. Only the fact that United Artists already had rights to it stopped them. We should be grateful that Peter Jackson was allowed to make two decent films of The Lord of the Rings before the suits got in the way and insisted on ruining the third one with endless CGI battle scenes while making baffling cuts to the story. One day someone might take the time to make a version that doesn’t make a real Tolkien lover wince. But don’t hold your breath.
Juliette Hughes is a freelance writer.
Main image: Morfydd Clark (Amazon Studios/Prime Video)