Angelus News | September 23, 2022 | Vol. 7 No. 19

NOW PLAYING RINGS OF POWER
TOYING WITH TOLKIEN?
The beauty of Amazon’s ‘Rings of Power’
captivates, but its philosophy does not.
BY STEFANO REBEGGIANI
Morfydd Clark as the elven
queen Galadriel in “The Rings
of Power.” | COURTESY
AMAZON PRIME VIDEO
Christopher Tolkien died in
2020. He was the son of J.R.R.
Tolkien, the author of “The
Lord of the Rings” and “The Hobbit.”
A longtime collaborator of his father’s
and editor of many of his posthumously
published works, he lived to be 96,
long enough to see the production of
Peter Jackson’s blockbuster “The Lord
of the Rings” trilogy. His reaction to
the New Zealander’s phenomenally
successful adaptation of his father’s
oeuvre was not favorable.
“The chasm between the beauty and
seriousness of the work, and what it
has become, has gone too far for me,”
he told French newspaper Le Monde
in 2012. “Such commercialization has
reduced the aesthetic and philosophical
impact of this creation to nothing.
There is only one solution for me:
turning my head away.”
A decade after that stinging review,
another Tolkien-inspired production
has arrived: Amazon Prime Video’s
“The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of
Power,” available on streaming Sept. 2.
The series brings to screens for the
first time the heroic legends of the
Second Age of Middle-earth, set
thousands of years before the events of
“The Lord of the Rings”: a time that
saw the rise and fall of the great island
kingdom of Numenor, the return and
first defeat of the evil Lord Sauron,
and the forging of the titular Rings of
Power.
This monumental production (with
a $715 million price tag, according to
The Wall Street Journal) is garnering
lots of attention, along with scorching
criticism from Tolkien experts and
diehards. Should we turn our heads
away?
I previewed the first two episodes of
“The Rings of Power.” It is visually
impressive, with gorgeous scenery;
the soundtrack is almost at the level
of Howard Shore’s legendary score for
the Peter Jackson trilogy, and the story
is told with an engaging script.
How close is the show to Tolkien’s
original writing? That’s impossible to
say. The history of the Second Age is
sketched out briefly in the appendices
to “The Lord of the Rings,” and some
additional elements from the era are
supplied by a few other of Tolkien’s
works.
That gave Amazon plenty of blanks to
fill, and filled them it has. While the
bare bones of the story and some of its
core characters (including the “Rings”
trilogy’s Galadriel, Elrond, Sauron)
are Tolkien’s, the rest is all up for
invention: events, individual plotlines,
28 • ANGELUS • September 23, 2022