Amazon goes insane: LOTR prequel series incoming

[Ajidica]

But then again....
...thou, Melkor, shalt see that no theme may be played that hath not its uttermost source in me, nor can any alter the music in my despite. For he that attempteth this shall prove but mine instrument in the devising of things more wonderful, which he himself hath not imagined.
—Ilúvatar in Ainulindalë

 

[Gelion]

But then again....

The "uttermost source" works well with the previous quote

...thou, Melkor, shalt see that no theme may be played that hath not its uttermost source in me, nor can any alter the music in my despite. For he that attempteth this shall prove but mine instrument in the devising of things more wonderful, which he himself hath not imagined.
—Ilúvatar in Ainulindalë

And yet:

"The Light of the Trees has passed away, and lives now only in the Silmarils of Fëanor. Foresighted was he! Even for those who are mightiest under Ilúvatar there is some work that they may accomplish once, and once only. The Light of the Trees I brought into being, and within Eä I can do so never again. Yet had I but a little of that light I could recall life to the Trees, ere their roots decay; and then our hurt should be healed, and the malice of Melkor be confounded."
<...>
Then Manwë bade Yavanna and Nienna to put forth all their powers of growth and healing; and they put forth all their powers upon the Trees. But the tears of Nienna availed not to heal their mortal wounds; and for a long while Yavanna sang alone in the shadows. Yet even as hope failed and her song faltered, Telperion bore at last upon a leafless bough one great flower of silver, and Laurelin a single trait of gold. These Yavanna took; and then the Trees died, and their lifeless stems stand yet in Valinor, a memorial of vanished joy.

 

[Gelion]

https://boundingintocomics.com/2022...ghts-to-the-silmarillion-or-unfinished-tales/

The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power Showrunners Admit They Don’t Have The Rights To The Silmarillion Or Unfinished Tales

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power showrunners JD Payne and Patrick McKaye admitted their show does not have a number of rights that depict events from the Second Age of The Lord of the Rings world.

Speaking with Vanity Fair, Payne revealed they only have the rights to The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, The Return of the King, the appendices, and The Hobbit.

Is this true?

 

[Takhisis]

Hmmm, that site is a bit weird. It does suddenly veer into complaining about ‘SJWs’ in another article about LotR which until that point wasn't doing that badly.

 

[Gelion]

I have no idea about that website, I was just wondering if the news are true. Google came up with this link among the first.

 

[Ajidica]

Correct, Amazon only has rights to Second Age material contained in FotR, TT, and RotK.

Consider this. In a follow-up audio interview with the authors of the Vanity Fair article “Amazon’s Lord of the Rings Series Rises: Inside The Rings of Power,” Joanna Robinson was asked straight-up about what rights Amazon has for this show. This was her answer, and she starts by quoting the showrunners directly.

“We do not have the rights to The Silmarillion, to the Unfinished Tales, to the History of Middle-earth…. We have the rights solely to The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, The Return of the King, and the Appendices, and that’s it. And The Hobbit.” Basically this exploration of the Second Age, as you know, is not just in those Appendices but in a few chapters, like “The Council of Elrond,” or Gandalf speaking to Frodo, or in songs or in poems, or any of those nooks and crannies where they could dig out that Second Age information, they did.

On the one hand, as a book fan, that means all that extended Tolkien legendarium material is “safe” from getting adapted for now.

But on the other hand, it’s also kind of devastating. If they have no Silmarillion rights, how can they stay true to the events related to, for example, the Akallabêth—that is, the actual full story of the rise and fall of Númenor. Does that mean the new series has to reinvent the whole Númenor story, along with most of the plot of the Second Age (from “Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age” at the end of The Silmarillion“)? Ostensibly. And that’s kind of horrifying. But then it was pointed out to me that there are place names on the Amazon maps that are not named at all in The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit. Like Belegaer (the Great Sea), Ost-in-Edhil (the capital city of Eregion where the Rings of Power are made), or Lórinand (the early name for Lothlórien). So that means Amazon has got to have some kind of rights to some bits and pieces beyond LotR—how much, we won’t know until we see it.

https://www.tor.com/2022/02/17/the-...r-has-put-middle-earth-back-in-the-limelight/

Honestly, I wish they had just created a series set in the early 3rd age in the north east of Middle Earth. The Northmen (Fram and Eorl), the first Kingdom of Dale, the Elvenking, Dwarves of Erebor and the Grey Mountains, etc. They could get a real barbarian/lost history thing going. Given how tentatively Tolkien sketched events out, basically anything could happen and nobody could say it didn't occur like that.

 

[EvaDK]

The most interesting of the Comic Con panels, enjoy:

For those really interested, there's footage shown from the event (not in the new trailer) depicting Morgoth destroying the two trees; very likely prologue footage. It can be found on various twitter feeds.

 

[EvaDK]

 

[Evie]

Oh man, seeing the Two Trees and Morgoth (and very likely the Silmarils and maybe even Feanor, they are mentioned a few times in LOTR.

The latest trailer has me increasingly hyped.

 

[Ajidica]

Oh man, seeing the Two Trees and Morgoth (and very likely the Silmarils and maybe even Feanor, they are mentioned a few times in LOTR.

The latest trailer has me increasingly hyped.

I thought they weren't covering any of that, as the show takes place in the Second Age? Ungoliant had sucked dry the Two Trees by then, Morgoth was evicted from Arda*, the Silmarils were lost or bound to Earendil's brow, and Feanor was long gone to Mandos (and unlike Finrod Felagund, Feanor's spirit had not been rebodied).
After learning they don't actually have any Silmarillion or Unfinished Tales materials, instead only having the LotR appendices, and are having an Noldor (kin of Galadriel?) fighting alongside orcs, the show is increasingly getting a pass from me.

*To the extent he could be, having made Arda his Ring.

 

[Evie]

The Two Trees and Valinor (they're mentioned a few times in LOTR and appendices), are very, painfully obviously in the teaser trailer from about two weeks ago, and the opening of this trailer is Galadriel walking through gigantic mounds of the slain talking about how they tought Evil was defeated (roughly how Elrond described the War of Wrath in LOTR).

I'm 98% positive the series, like the movies (which opened on a recap of the second age), will open on a "how did we get here" prologue covering first age elements that are mentioned in LOTR. The first age comes up more than you'd think: in the appendices we get a broad outline in the Numenor section of Appendix A, a bit more in the Durin's folk section of the same, more about the end of the First Age at the start of the Tale of Years, details about the kindred of Elves and Thingol's kingship in Beleriad, and GAladriel's relations are in the language part. Then you add in Aragorn's song of Beren and Luthien, Bilbo's song of Earendil, Elrond's talk of the Elder Years at the Council, Galadriel's song of Valinor.

Which...is a very solid amount. All of the following can at least be named and a fair number shown: Valinor, Doriath, Nargothrond, Gondolin, Nogrod, Belegost, the Encircling Mountains and Thangorodrim; Feanor, Finarfin, Thingol, Turgon, Melian, Finrod and Dior; Beren and Luthien; Idril and Tuor; Earendil and Elwing; Huor, Hador and Barahir; the trees and the Silmaril, Morgoth, Ungoliant and the Balrog...

Everything you need to have a prologue outlining the Silm and a number of later references.

 

[Evie]

I'm not sold about the quality of WOT as an adaptation yet, but it was an enjoyable enough watch and a reasonable use of my time.

Which is also a fair description of those books. They were no masterpieces, not even close, and my feelings about the entire series includes a lot of eye-rolling, but an enjoyable use of my time.

Sneering at imperfect adaptations seems like a far worse way to waste time than watching them.

 

[Kyriakos]

Hm, can this have more hate videos pending than Disney Star Wars? It might
I am no fan of Tolkien, but even to me it looks rather generic and soulless.

 

[Evie]

And so here we are and...so far, I quite like it. Far more convinced with it than I was with Wheel of Time two episodes in, for sure.

It's not going to work for purists, of course (nor for people who think the heroes being white males is important to the essence of Middle Earth, but, weeeelllll...should it work for them, really?), but all in all, within the limitations they were working with of trying to tell one cohesive story without having to change human characters every season and not a collection of loosely connected vignette with all different characters (which is the nature of a lot of Tolkien's non-Hobbit centric Middle Earth works - the Silm and UT very much so), this feels like a proper adaptation of Middle Earth. And I'm actually impressed by how much they still manage to put the Silmarillion (and the other texts they don'T have the rights to) between the lines of their story - what they are telling is not a Silmarillion story, but it's a story that definitely implies a lot of the things that happened in the Silmarillion, even if sometime simplified to avoid bogging down the story with details (Finrod did die as a result of confronting Sauron because of an oath he had made, even if it wasn't technically an oath to chase Sauron).

It's slow, true, but that's a comment that's been made of every single good PJ movie (remember "how many endings can one movie have?") and movies that tried to fill the steadiness with constantly moving action (Hobbit, The) were notoriously less successful. A stately pace is part and parcel of telling a Middle Earth tale. The Elves are smug arrogant jackasses, but these are Elves barely out of the Silmarillion, who are very much implied in Silm and other works to have had a "this is our era of dominion, Middle Earth is ours" phase up to the whole fiasco with the Rings - Silvan colonies in far-flung forests, expanding Elven realms eastward into Eregion, etc. Portraying them as distrustful of the men still in Middle Earth (remember, all the Edain have gone off to Numenor at this point), is very much on point, and portraying the men as fearful and resentful of Elves and the ilk likewise (The plot has nothing to do with it, but the vibe of Second Age Middle-Earth humans as portrayed in Tolkien's short-lived Tal-Elmar is very much present).

Now, let me be very clear. There's still a number of ways this could go very badly off the rails, depending on how a lot of the open questions (who is Meteor Man? What is in that Dwarven box?) play out - not just what the answer is but where they go with that answer (there are ways they could make the dwarves having somehow retrieved a Silmaril or Olorin visiting Middle Earth an age early work, but there are definitely way they could try that and fail), But so far, the series has played its card well to build a story that could work as an adaptation of Middle Earth history.

 

[Ozbenno]

I'm going to wait until all episodes are released and try to get a month's Amazon subscription to binge watch it all. Good to hear it is better than Wheel of Time two episodes in but that wasn't a high bar to clear (even though I did end up watching every episode).

 

[RobAnybody]

Did... did they seriously have Galadriel swim across an entire ocean?!?

 

[Evie]

I mean, seeing as she spend most of the second episode on a series of raft and is found at the end by a likely Numenorean ship (so, probably not anywhere close to Middle Earth), no.

Whether she *thought* the whole thing off about jumping ship through, now that's another question. But this series' Galadriel is a bit on the brash side (which fits Tolkien's take on young Galadriel), and in any event, given Elven metaphysics, whether she stays on the ship or swim and sink, she ends up in Valinor anyway (dead elves receive new bodies there after a time. So the worst case scenario of jumping off is as if she had never left the ship. But that way she has a slim, impossible chance of avoiding Valinor.

 

[Edmund Ironside]

I've only watched the first episode so far, but it seems decent.

Apparently the series is getting review bombed though...

The cause is likely this kind of view I think:
"Morse is deputy managing editor of RedState, a conservative news site. He says “The Rings of Power” producers have cast non-White actors in a story based on European culture and who look wildly different from how Tolkien originally described them. He says it’s an attempt to embed “social justice politics” into Tolkien’s world."

When 'wokeness' comes to Middle-earth: Why some say diverse casting ruins the new 'Lord of the Rings' series | CNN

The new "Lord of the Rings" Amazon series has cast non-White actors in pivotal roles, ruffling some fans who say it betrays J.R.R. Tolkien's original vision. Others say a more diverse cast of heroes is overdue in a fantasy franchise that has been accused of implicit racism.

www.cnn.com

Someone I am friends with on FB posted this (I am not certain if their issue is with the above, or just with the lore) "Man I don't think I've seen a show so universally hated by fans like this show is just getting destroyed right now.....they quite literally destroyed the "lore" in 2 eps and that's just the least of it all besides interjecting ya know real world issue and **** like that into it which never fudging works bruh people don't go to watch movies to see real world issues they go for escapism from all that bullfeathers!"

For my part the casting seems for the most part fine, only one occasion where it seemed kind of out of place. I enjoyed seeing Lenny Henry in it (the only name I recognized in the cast).
I don't think the more diverse casting should be an issue in a fantasy series. Though some might argue that the casting should be more reflective of JRR Tolkien's vision, which was trying to recreate a lost Anglo-Saxon folklore destroyed by the Norman invasion. Similarly people might argue a more diverse cast in Black Panther (ie. white, asian, etc) would have been similarly wrong.

What do other people think? Is the lore being followed and respected? Are people making a mountain out of a molehill with regards to the casting (similar to the fuss there was over the casting in the ghostbusters reboot)?

 

[Evie]

I don't think the skin color of characters is critical to Middle Earth lore (others of course disagree). Other than that, the main problem is the timeline compression so they don't have to constantly rotate out the human cast - a defensible storytelling choice, as even just the story of the seduction of how the rings were made covers a massive 400 years.

One thing bugs me lore-wise and that's casting age - Elrond and Gil-Galad's casting should be flipped around! While Elrond is technically the youngest of our main elves, he spent his first several decades as a mortal, and should look like he stopped aging in his middle age or so. Gil-Galad on the flip side took the throne just out of his slow Elven childhood and is still young by Elven standards; Galadriel is a generation or two older than he is (and, quite possibly, his aunt or great-aunt). But that's overall a minor cosmetic, complaint, just like beards or the lack of thereof, and the lore otherwise runs deep and feels appropriate.

 

[Kyriakos]

I don't plan to watch the show, but the "fun" already has started with Amazon said to mass-erase negative comments in review sites. I suppose the issue with copyright limits (not allowed to present anything outside the era of Lotr?) is also damaging, but when you start with just using the brand without much of a tie to the material, the purists and other fans will be up in arms.
I am neither for lotr-Tolkien, so don't care; I am not watching because this doesn't look interesting to me.