What makes a man turn neutral? Lust for gold? Power? Or were you just born with a heart full of neutrality?
There’s a lot of nervous Tolkien fans out there this week.
Some are anticipatory, excited, ready to witness a hitherto unrealised version of a (mostly) untold tale. The costumes, the casting, the subject matter, the clear reverence that many of the cast and crew have for the Legendarium, all of these have created a hope that this might be the next great Tolkien event. Others are worried, concerned, and bracing to witness a poorly-realised vision of a world through eyes that neither understand nor care about Tolkien’s concepts. The dialogue, the unproven creative team, the undeniable corporate cynicism, and above all the worry that this is not Tolkien.
And then there is me, caught happily in the middle, born with a heart full of neutrality – or maybe not, since I do care enough to write a blog post to try and lay out my hot internet takes.
Further, I’ll agree with one side of this debate on one thing before I see a single frame of The Rings of Power, though. This series, whatever else it might be, is not Tolkien. And that’s why I’m completely unconcerned by it.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ll be delighted if RoP is good. I really really hope it is, for many reasons, not the least of which being that it is based upon a world and story that I have a great deal of affection for. But I also hope it is good because it’s, well, good when things are good. And because, if it is to serve as a truly effective and useful ambassador for Tolkien’s works, the better it is, the better it will do that job. Oh, and finally, I hope it will be good because it is likely that I will watch it, sooner or later, and it’ll be much more pleasant for me to sit through something genuinely good.
But here’s the thing, the thing I realised months and even years ago, about these adaptations and modern visitations of Tolkien’s works. It doesn’t really matter if they are good or not.
To draw a direct comparison, one of the absolute worst films I have ever seen is also the latest Star Wars film, a universe that I also have quite some affection for (if not enough to call this blog The Blog of the Whills or something equally dorky). The Rise of Skywalker was and is incredibly bad. Almost everything about it is bad. It is a dreadful piece of narrative, that gets actively worse the longer you dwell on it.
And, by virtue of the powers that be, it is near-irrevocably a part of Star Wars now. Not just a part, one of the nine central films around which everything in Star Wars is based. Anything which takes place before TRoS has to leave room for the events (if not actively set up) that shape its story. Anything which inevitably takes place after will take place in a Faerie-realm where everything in TRoS actually happened, actually caused the galaxy to be as it now is.
I’ve argued before against the ‘importance’ of canon, to a point (and will come back to it here as well). But canon cannot be wholly discarded, either, canon is a tool to facilitate your entry into a sub-created world. And, in this age of stories that are commodified as media properties, there is a very strange and very real fear that a single misstep, a single bad choice, will lead to the utter ruin of whatever it is that you love. Some franchises, like Star Wars, seem to panic and take ten steps back to avoid referring to their failures (Solo, a film which I actually quite enjoyed, even if it wasn’t anything great, is another example of this – it did poorly with audiences, and has, to the best of my knowledge, been ignored just as TRoS has been ignored since its release). Others might actively try and rewrite their entries that have been received poorly, or double down and invent ever more convoluted ways to justify the poor storytelling choices of a single film after the fact, or double down and lampshade those poor choices in another film. But, whatever the strategy, the starting point comes from the same fear, the fear that a bad film or TV show or book or whatever will let the whole ‘team’ down in all these shared universes.
Tolkien, though, is different. Firstly, as I’ve explained before, I don’t really care about the canon of Tolkien, I’m much more interested in the myth, no matter where those myths contradict or rewrite themselves. I love the world, the prose, the stories and the concepts of Tolkien. I even know a little bit about them. But I’m not married to there being a ‘canon’ or anything like that, in having some encyclopaedic knowledge of the lore.
You might think that this would make me more excited for the show, not less, as we already know that RoP will not hew strictly to Tolkien’s canon. But such an assumption is missing the point of what I am trying to say here.
I don’t love the canon. But I do love nearly everything else. I do love these stories, for the language of them and the characters and stories told. And (and here’s the extraordinary thing), this love for these stories is not conditional. Tolkien has already written all the tales he could manage, and I have read a fair few of them. His works, his texts, exist, they are complete (in that they are finished, rather than meaning that he would call them so!), and billions of dollars cannot change that. The show cannot change my love for Tolkien’s world. So what is there for me to fear – or, conversely, why should I be excited for it? If Tolkien’s stories have already been told, how on earth is this series going to add to or diminish from the work he has already done?
I think that, if I did care about the canon more, maybe I’d also care about the show more, since it is either another chance for me to ‘engage’ with that canon, or will be a flagrant disregarding of a canon that is for some reason important. But I don’t, not really. It’s for much the same reason that I don’t engage with ‘lore’ videos or wiki pages (beyond sometimes checking dates with the latter), I’d much rather just sit down with the books and read that stuff myself, in Tolkien’s own words. Mind, too, I adore many of the academics and commentators who engage with the texts, who analyse and debate and explain elements that I have overlooked. I like to think that, on its best days, this blog provides some little analysis of that ilk. But I’m never gonna try and explain “Just WHO were the BLUE WIZARDS” or anything like that. Read it yourself if you care, or don’t. It’s not my job to write something that’s already been written, and I’m not gonna do it better than the Prof did anyway.
And, at the end of the day, that’s all this show is. A five season, 50-hour lore video. I hope it will be more than that. I hope it will be well-acted, will engage with the themes of Tolkien’s world with care and with passion, that it will look incredible, that it will be dramatic and funny and heartbreaking. But if it is not? It really could not bother me less, it’s not going to take anything away from something I already love.
So, having said all that, we are back where we started, with a position of aggressive neutrality. I will probably watch Amazon’s The Rings of Power…eventually. And I do have two hopes for it. My first hope, fully and genuinely, is that it is a good TV show. Not because it will make my life actively worse if it is poor, but because it is always better when things are good. If it can come somewhere near the quality of Jackson’s LOTR films, then I will be satisfied…frustrated, doubtless, by some choices, but overall pleased to have a new avenue to explore a world that I genuinely love. If it is bad, then it is no loss to me, I do not ‘need’ the show to be good. But I’ll be happy if it is, just as I’m always happy to see any good TV show or film…and doubtless, that happiness will be at least somewhat elevated by the fact that the characters and story are drawn from something that I love.
As to my second hope, this is related to the first, but also somewhat independent of it. I hope that the RoP will inspire at least some people, some new people, to pick up the books. Maybe someone who’s never thought of reading Tolkien. Maybe someone who tried the LOTR books once, back when the Jackson films came out, and this is the final push for them to explore a little deeper. Maybe even someone deeply versed in Tolkien ‘lore’, who’s never actually read the Akallabêth and who finally gives it a go, having only ever studied it through Tolkien Gateway and the like. I hope that the show will inspire people to explore the words and tales as told by Tolkien, and discover for themselves how rich, how deep and how masterfully crafted his writings are.
As for me? I’m lucky, I discovered that years ago. And The Rings of Power cannot change that. For me, I will always have the books. And that was enough ten years ago, and it will be enough ten years from now. I do not need more than Tolkien’s books, to love the books of JRR Tolkien.
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