Amazon’s ‘Lord Of The Rings’ Series Has Already Betrayed Tolkien’s VisionGrafting twenty-first century notions of racial diversity onto J.R.R. Tolkien’s prehistoric mythology is as nonsensical as it is unnecessary.
By John Daniel Davidson
February 16, 2022
If you thought the epic works of J.R.R. Tolkien could survive adaptation into a billion-dollar TV series by Amazon without being saddled with the dreary ideology of corporate wokeness, or without being marred by executives and show-runners who think they can improve on Tolkien’s vast mythopoeia, you were wrong.
So was the Tolkien estate, which in 2017 sold the rights to the appendices in “The Lord of the Rings” to Amazon for a reported $250 million. Those appendices outline the Second Age of Middle Earth, thousands of years before the events in the acclaimed “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, and are supposed to be the source material for this new show, which Amazon is calling, “The Rings of Power.”
But from what little we know about the series, which premieres this fall, it appears Amazon is planning to stray far from its source material. The show’s first teaser trailer aired Sunday during the Super Bowl just days after Vanity Fair ran an exclusive first look featuring promo photos of some of the main characters.
The trailer, photos, and article all suggest “The Rings of Power” will deviate drastically from Tolkien’s appendices, not only by introducing a racially diverse cast of characters that makes no sense in Tolkien’s mythology, but also by compressing thousands of years of Middle Earth history into a few truncated storylines, creating completely new characters, and introducing hobbits (nonsensically calling them harfoots, one of three breeds of hobbits) eons before any hobbits migrated over the Misty Mountains into Arnor.
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So when Amazon’s Lindsey Weber, executive producer of the series, tells Vanity Fair, “It felt only natural to us that an adaptation of Tolkien’s work would reflect what the world actually looks like,” in reference to casting a black elf and a black dwarven princess (without a beard!) and a black hobbit, because “Tolkien is for everyone,” it should set off alarm bells.
Why doesn’t a racially diverse cast of characters make sense in Tolkien’s mythology? Because this isn’t “Games of Thrones” or the “The Wheel of Time” or some other throwaway fantasy series that can easily be adjusted to reflect our myopic modern obsessions about race and representation. This is “Lord of the Rings,” a prehistoric fantasy epic whose purpose, as Tolkien himself explained in some detail, was to provide a legendarium for Britain, which Tolkien felt “had no stories of its own,” at least not like the legends of other lands: “There was Greek, and Celtic, and Romance, Germanic, Scandinavian, and Finnish (which greatly affected me); but nothing English, save impoverished chap-book stuff.”
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Source:
https://thefederalist.com/2022/02/16/amazons-lord-of-the-rings-series-has-already-betrayed-tolkiens-vision/
