AN EXPANSIVE NEW VISION OF LOTR

Sophia Nomvete, Ismael Cruz Cordova in LOTR:TROP

 

As a huge Lord of the Rings fan I can’t wait for the debut of the new television series “Lord of The Rings: The Rings of Power” on Amazon Prime September 2. A return to that intricately drawn world of elves, dwarves, long-lived men and mythical creatures is just the antidote I need to escape this drab world of plague and war.

The fantasy series is set in Middle Earth’s Second Age, thousands of years before the events we’re all familiar with from J.R.R.Tolkien’s books and Peter Jackson’s films involving the Fellowship of the Ring and their fight against the evil Sauron. In fact, this story is all about how the trouble began, with the forging of the rings of power, some of which, you’ll remember, were gifted to the elves, some to the dwarves and some to the kings of men. The One Ring, however, was forged in secret to rule them all, which came back to bite everyone in the proverbial butt in the Third Age. Some of this Second Age world we’ve only seen previously in ruins—like the caverns of Khazad-Dum—and some beloved characters only exist in this age in ancestral form (hobbits were “harfoots,” for example).

Most of this tale is only set out in the detailed backstory author Tolkien developed for his LOTR trilogy. When the first book came out, readers were so fascinated, they demanded to know more about his world. They wanted maps, histories, languages, genealogies. Fortunately, he had a lot of that in his notes, so he added appendices to the last book, some of which were drawn from a longer history of Middle Earth called The Simarillion that his publisher had rejected. (Peter Jackson’s co-writers on the film trilogy, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, used one such appendix to create the love story subplot for Aragorn and Arwen. Some of the lines in the film are taken word-for-word from the book.)

In 2017, the Tolkien estate decided to release much of this historical material in a separate auction. Though HBO and Netflix were in on the bidding, Jeff Bezos, himself a huge LOTR fan (are we surprised?), and Amazon won out with a $250 million bid. Production costs for the first season of the series on location in New Zealand have been estimated at $462 million. Eventually the series is slated to run 50 hours. So this is on track to be one of the most expensive television projects ever.

Showrunning duties have been handed off to two relative newbies, Patrick McKay and J.D. Payne. They got the job partially on the recommendation of industry star J.J. Abrams, who had worked with them as writers on one of the Star Trek films. McKay and Payne are longtime fans of both Tolkien and Jackson and are feeling the pressure here. “We felt like hobbits,” Payne told Vanity Fair. “We felt like two very small people in a very big world who had just been entrusted with something that meant so much to so many different people. Patrick and I will often look at each other in challenging moments of the show and say, ‘I’m glad you’re with me, Sam.’”

The creative team behind LOTR: TROP has worked hard to be true to Tolkien’s vision, while expanding on the world he only outlined in the appendices. Stories need characters and plotlines and themes, after all. And writers have had to condense the events of thousands of years down to a contiguous timeframe so things make storytelling sense.

Middle Earth might also look a little more like the world we know. This was a conscious choice. “It felt only natural to us that an adaptation of Tolkien’s work would reflect what the world actually looks like,” says Lindsey Weber, executive producer of the series. “Tolkien is for everyone. His stories are about his fictional races doing their best work when they leave the isolation of their own cultures and come together.”

Of course, when the news hit the Internet that a Black woman (Sophia Nomvete) had been cast as a Dwarf princess and a Black man (Ismael Cruz Cordova) as an Elf, not to mention various other people of color in other major roles, the trolls (and I don’t mean the kind you find in The Hobbit) came out to spew all manner of racist and sexist vitriol about how there are no POC in LOTR or fantasy. (I say sexist because the worst of the criticism was apparently aimed at Nomvete and other female actors of color.)

As a lifelong fan of Tolkien and LOTR I call bullshit. First of all, as Weber so clearly points out, the whole concept of the Fellowship of the Ring is that five (if you count wizards) diverse peoples come together to fight a common enemy. They overcome their differences (which are significant and longstanding—remember Legolas and Gimli) to destroy a greater evil.

Secondly, this is fantasy we’re talking about. When you’re writing or filming fantasy you can make your characters white, black, green, blue or any color of the rainbow. Tolkien was writing in the first half of the 20^th Century in a generally white-and-male-centric British upperclass world; he was very creative with just about everything else in his world of Middle Earth. I’ll give him a pass for not consciously including any characters of color. But he did say he expected to “leave scope for other minds and hands” to expand his work, according to a letter to Milton Waldman. So, okay, the Amazon LOTR: TROP creative team is expanding on his work to reflect a more multicultural, open-minded consciousness.  I say good on them. The rest of us should follow their example and populate our spaceships and alien planets and castles and forest glens with characters of all colors and cultures (and of all sexual orientations and gender designations, too).

Cheers, Donna

*Information for this post provided by:

“Amazon’s Lord of the Rings Series Rises: Inside The Rings of Power,” by Anthony Breznican and Joanna Robinson, Vanity Fair, February 10, 2022. https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2022/02/amazon-the-rings-of-power-series-first-look

“The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power Has People Of Colour, Get Over It,” by Ben Sledge, TheGamer.com, February 12, 2022. 

https://www.thegamer.com/the-lord-of-the-rings-the-rings-of-power-has-people-of-colour-get-over-it/