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 20th 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/
