"The Rings of Power" Vanity Fair article

[Huinesoron]

Amazon’s Lord of the Rings Series Rises: Inside The Rings of Power (https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2022/02/amazon-the-rings-of-power-series-first-look)

As a big, chunky first-look at the series (they seem to have watched the first 3 episodes), I figure this will probably need its own thread - not least because I'm going to analyse it to death. To give a very quick start:

- We get faces and names for 5 of the posters revealed a few days ago. Looking at this collage (https://mobile.twitter.com/Dr_Dimitra_Fimi/status/1489300149302136835), the woman with the armour and Two Trees dagger (row 3, left) is Galadriel, the one with a sceptre on the same row (second from right) is Elrond, and the last three on the bottom row are new characters Arondir and Disa, and Durin IV.

- There are also several other characters who I can't match up. New mortal characters Halbrand and Bronwyn are probably on there; the unnamed pair of nomads probably aren't (though one could be the apple-holder). Two "Harfoots" are assigned actors, but not shown or named; Isildur's actor is named but not shown.

- Locations shown include the entrance to Khazad-Dum, a very Shire-like green hill, "the [mortal] village of Tirharad", Lindon, and an apothecary in "Middle-earth's Southlands".

- There's a lot of plot discussion which I hope to dig into, but the big one, and the one that will have all you skeptics laughing through your teeth:

They have compressed the entire Second Age plotline down to the life of Isildur.

"If you are true to the exact letter of the law, you are going to be telling a story in which your human characters are dying off every season because you’re jumping 200 years in time, and then you’re not meeting really big, important canon characters until season four. Look, there might be some fans who want us to do a documentary of Middle-earth, but we’re going to tell one story that unites all these things."

So Sauron's rise from nothing - the forging of the Great Rings - the fall of Eregion - the darkening of Numenor - Ar-Pharazon's rise and glory - the Akallabeth and the Last Alliance - all of it happens in a timeframe which allows Isildur (and presumably Halbrand, Bronwyn, and the Harfoots) to witness the whole blessed thing.

... hmm.

EDIT: A couple of other Vanity Fair articles appeared over the week that followed, plus the first teaser trailer:

Teaser Trailer 1 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7v1hIkYH24) (Superbowl Trailer)
Secrets of 'The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Teaser' Trailer (https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2022/02/the-lord-of-the-rings-teaser-trailer-amazon) (Vanity Fair)
10 Burning Questions About Amazon’s 'The Rings of Power' (https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2022/02/10-burning-questions-about-amazons-the-rings-of-power) (Vanity Fair)

hS

[Huinesoron]

https://i.imgur.com/StqW4IU.png

So what's up with Galadriel? The article talks about her a lot, but I think that might be because she's the only name movie fans will recognise. It's certainly why they start with her.

- She's named under this photo as "commander of the Northern Armies". Of Lindon? Of Eregion? Of Nargothrond? Unclear, but probably not the latter. Honestly, it's not out of character for Artanis Nerwen to run about playing soldier.

- "As the series begins, Galadriel is hunting down the last remnants of [Morgoth and Sauron's] collaborators, who claimed the life of her brother." ... ... ... um, I think they killed all her brothers, actually, but none in a context which would lead to that phrasing. Maybe it's just a clumsy way of saying "she's really angry at the Enemy because of her family's deaths in the War", but if they muck about with Finrod's death (we all know it'll be Finrod), I'm going to be really cross. :(

- She's implied to be the only one who suspects Sauron is returning. This fits with her portrayal in the Hobbit movie (though hopefully she'll do less teleporting and flirting with wizards here), and also with her status as the one who turned Annatar away at the gates of Lindon in the Legendarium - an act that mirrors her uncle's rejection of Melkor, come to think of it. The first episode seems to be named for this - it's called Shadow of the Past.

- For some reason, "her warnings set her adrift, literally and figuratively". The implication, I guess, is that she probably gets sacked from the army and goes wandering, until:

- In Episode Two, she winds up half-drowned on a raft in the middle of the Great Sea, with a scruffy mortal. His name is Halbrand, which is probably Sindarin, and hilariously could mean "Tall, really tall".

- They describe a scene that I think takes place on the raft: "We’re doing this close-up where Galadriel’s face fills the screen and she cries, and she decides: I have to fight." Not gonna lie, that doesn't sound great, but that could just be shoddy description.

- Eventually she winds up back in Lindon, where she has a "reunion" with Elrond. I think we see three different costumes for her through the article, so at least they're not keeping an identical look everywhere she goes.

~~~

Looking at this through the lens of the time-compression they've talked about, there's nothing too outrageous here. Galadriel in the days of the Trees is an impetuous young woman who will happily ignore everyone's advice to do what she wants/what she thinks is right. Galadriel in the late Third Age is a dignified Elvenqueen of great power who rarely leaves her borders. The story "The Rings of Power" is telling is how she got from one to the other - and, of course, how she wound up as the very first person to be gifted a Ring.

The one big red flag is the implication of exile. It's possible they're actually describing something else - maybe she's trying to sail to Tol Fuin to investigate something to do with Sauron - but if she is kicked out... what are the odds that a Gil-Galad of any possible lineage would drive out the eldest remaining member of the House of Finwe? I don't like that implied plot point, and hope I'm misreading.

And yes, the other big flag is the "her brother" mention. I've seen rumours that Finrod is in the first episode, hence my concern; but set against that we have the teaser image of the Trees, plus rumours about the Helkaraxe. It's possible that the first episode includes a compressed retelling or flashback(s) to the First Age, and that Finrod's death (done correctly) is a part of that.

hS

[Legate of Amon Lanc]

When I saw the article (I have not been keeping tabs on the news at all, but there are people around me who tend to keep up more with the pulse of the time), I knew this might be the time 'Downs might liven up a bit and decided to take part in the anticipated trend.

I will try to be brief (good luck to me...). My reaction to the article can be summed up succintly like this:

Seeing the pictures of Galadriel and other Halbasomethings: knee-jerk reaction that this is going to be terrible. The Dwarf and Pseudo-Aragorn are straightaway unimaginative copies from PJ, while Galadriel & Disa look like generic fantasy women from a D&D handbook illustrations (something like human [!!] paladin/dwarf fighter or maybe cleric, respectively). Elrond may be the only one who seems okay (but also kind of "meh", nothing in particular either way). But seriously Galadriel's armoured look must be the most "why?" to me (to be fair, her "water" look too. My first reaction upon seeing the article's featured photo was "do they have Goldberry?!??"). Like Hui said, Galadriel being young and somewhat more in-action and even brazen and all is very much in character, but the first impression is... not like this, PJ's Haldir of Tarth.

But.

But these are all aesthetics and we all know that aesthetics differ, and *I* know that *nothing* will ever be up to my aesthetics, likely. It could likely be worse. (But it could be more imaginative, if nothing else.)

Upon reading the text, however, my impressions became... better? Mostly because they seem like they are trying hard and there was the reassurance that this won't become "a Game of Thrones", plus various things fans have feared (even here). At the same time, it will, inevitably, be "a Game of Thrones" at least in the "generic fantasy nowadays" (my assumption), "political plotting" (actually stated in the article)-sense.

Still. It can be good, it can be bad. Very little to judge, objectively, and I emphasise once again, considerably LESS threatening than I anticipated. Those who know my absolute aversion to all adaptations may wonder what that means. I am wondering too. Or perhaps I am getting soft.

- She's named under this photo as "commander of the Northern Armies". Of Lindon? Of Eregion? Of Nargothrond? Unclear, but probably not the latter.
I am very curious about it, and sounds like some sort of haphazard generic name invented for the purpose of providing the show-viewers with some simple blanket term for the "good guys". I also think, given that it aims at the past, it may simply mean "Beleriand" (but also that "commander" may not mean "THE commander", but simply "one of the commanders").

"As the series begins, Galadriel is hunting down the last remnants of [Morgoth and Sauron's] collaborators, who claimed the life of her brother."
Not a bad plot, per se, and this is what actually made me do a semi-Legate 180 after first seeing the pictures and then reading the first few paragraphs of the article. Certainly a start on the more original side of things, while not totally off-spirit and all.

... ... um, I think they killed all her brothers, actually, but none in a context which would lead to that phrasing. Maybe it's just a clumsy way of saying "she's really angry at the Enemy because of her family's deaths in the War", but if they muck about with Finrod's death (we all know it'll be Finrod), I'm going to be really cross. :(
I hope it will be okay. I guess we'll have to see. (Wait, since when am I talking like I am actually intending to watch it? This sounds disturbing.) As for the potential reduction of brothers to one... well, of all things I would not be *that* disturbed by it, I mean, the films have always been reductionist. Especially if the brothers in question are dead, and if it is mentioned like once in the show... But I also at the same time think that while it is not a problem, I think "dumbing down for clarity" is not really something one should do - especially if it doesn't really matter. (But maybe also the article-writer just really didn't "get it", and may be exactly the victim of not-dumbing-down.)

- She's implied to be the only one who suspects Sauron is returning. This fits with her portrayal in the Hobbit movie (though hopefully she'll do less teleporting and flirting with wizards here), and also with her status as the one who turned Annatar away at the gates of Lindon in the Legendarium - an act that mirrors her uncle's rejection of Melkor, come to think of it. The first episode seems to be named for this - it's called Shadow of the Past.
Absolutely agreed on this - this seems like a decent move and if they were to reduce Galadriel to one archetypal quality or function, this is pretty much fine.

- In Episode Two, she winds up half-drowned on a raft in the middle of the Great Sea, with a scruffy mortal. His name is Halbrand, which is probably Sindarin, and hilariously could mean "Tall, really tall".

"Really, why" was my reaction, but... well, of all people, I am okay with that it's Galadriel who might not have problems hanging out with a mortal (but at the same time, young Galadriel, again, I would imagine to be a bit more... well, sticking rather with her own kind than Men?).

Sidenote: I wonder how many people are going to "ship it", especially those who don't know about Celeborn.

- They describe a scene that I think takes place on the raft: "We’re doing this close-up where Galadriel’s face fills the screen and she cries, and she decides: I have to fight." Not gonna lie, that doesn't sound great.
No, that sounds absolutely terrible. But to be fair, THIS was to be expected. Sadly.
When the era comes that movies won't be full of these terrible "Hollywood pathos"-quotes, I will rejoice.

***

Which incidentally brings me - and this is a more major sidenote - to one realisation, with which I could conclude: the PJ films, for all that I disliked about them, even The Hobbit, had one tremendous advantage. Large part of the script were things quoted straight from Tolkien, written by Tolkien himself. This TV adaptation won't have the same advantage at all. It likely might attempt to emulate the FILM way of speaking, for that matter, at best. Unless of course Mr. Bezos managed to dig up some blessed talent, but somehow I am not holding my hopes high.

[Thinlómien]

I started writing a commentary on the article on the other thread, but I'll post my scrambled rant here instead:

Galadriel’s world is a raging sea. Far from the wise, ethereal elven queen that Cate Blanchett brought to Peter Jackson’s acclaimed films, the Galadriel played by Morfydd Clark in Amazon’s upcoming series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is thousands of years younger, as angry and brash as she is clever, and certain that evil is looming closer than anyone realizes. By episode two, her warnings set her adrift, literally and figuratively, until she’s struggling for survival on a raft in the storm-swept Sundering Seas alongside a mortal castaway named Halbrand (Charlie Vickers), who is a new character introduced in the show. Galadriel is fighting for future; Halbrand is running from the past. Their entwined destinies are just two of the stories woven together for a TV series that, if it works, could become a global phenomenon.It probably shouldn't have started with this particularly brainrot inducing snippet. Is there a lot to Galadriel's story we don't know? Yes. Can I imagine her castaway on the sea with some random human guy with whom she shares an entwined destiny? Yikes... Also a young and angry Galadriel is an interesting concept, but we're already in the Second Age. She's thousands of years old and has been through a vast number of things. I am... skeptical about this take on the character.

Tolkien, like space travel, is a personal obsession for Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who’s among the richest people in the world. This is a big-ticket business venture that will allow him to create the most expensive, elaborate TV series ever made.Yikes #2

Their series will juggle 22 stars and multiple story lines, from deep within the dwarf mines of the Misty Mountains to the high politics of the elven kingdom of Lindon and the humans’ powerful, Atlantis-like island, Númenor. All this will center, eventually, around the incident that gives the trilogy its name. “The forging of the rings,” says [showrunner] McKay. “Rings for the elves, rings for dwarves, rings for men, and then the one ring Sauron used to deceive them all. It’s the story of the creation of all those powers, where they came from, and what they did to each of those races.”I was intrigued enough by this...

...until I read this:
The driving question behind the production, he adds, was this: “Can we come up with the novel Tolkien never wrote and do it as the mega-event series that could only happen now?”
No, please no, the obvious answer is NO.

“Everyone was crowding around the monitor as we’re doing this close-up where Galadriel’s face fills the screen and she cries, and she decides: I have to fight,” says McKay. As soon as the scene ended, the soundstage erupted in cheers. “It’s a perfect example of how Tolkien and Middle-earth have a way of finding you, even in the darkest and most uncertain moments,” says Payne....does this sound like a Tolkien-y scene? Nope. Yikes #3

McKay says the goal was “to make a show for everyone, for kids who are 11, 12, and 13, even though sometimes they might have to pull the blanket up over their eyes if it’s a little too scary. We talked about the tone in Tolkien’s books. This is material that is sometimes scary—and sometimes very intense, sometimes quite political, sometimes quite sophisticated—but it’s also heartwarming and life-affirming and optimistic. It’s about friendship and it’s about brotherhood and underdogs overcoming great darkness.”I think this is ultimately going to be IT: whether the show manages to reach a tone that resonates with Tolkien's writing, or whether it falls flat. At least for me personally that's going to be the measure of whether I'm going to enjoy it or not.

We will finally see the full glory of Khazad-dûmStrangely enough, this tidbit was the most exciting thing in the whole article for me. I am perhaps looking forward the most to see fresh visual depictions of Middle-Earth. I am very conscious they may fall short of my expectations, though...

It will also bring the elven smith Celebrimbor (Charles Edwards) to life, as his skill with metals and magic lead to the forging of the rings. And a canny young elven architect and politician named Elrond (Robert Aramayo) will rise to prominence in the mystical capital of Lindon. Another story line will follow a sailor named Isildur (Maxim Baldry) years before he becomes a warrior and cuts the soul-corrupting ring off Sauron’s hand, then falls victim to its powers himself.I have so many questions about this. Are these the interpretations of the article writer, or new show canon? Will Elrond be a wily politician? Will Isildur's background still be royal, or will he be just an ordinary sailor?

In the novels, the aforementioned things take place over thousands of years, but Payne and McKay have compressed events into a single point in time. It is their biggest deviation from the text, and they know it’s a big swing. “We talked with the Tolkien estate,” says Payne. “If you are true to the exact letter of the law, you are going to be telling a story in which your human characters are dying off every season because you’re jumping 200 years in time, and then you’re not meeting really big, important canon characters until season four. Look, there might be some fans who want us to do a documentary of Middle-earth, but we’re going to tell one story that unites all these things.”And funnily enough, this is the creative choice I'm the least suspicious about. It's very understandable - yet I guess we'll have to wait and see how it works out. Will Sauron be constantly zigzagging between Eregion and Númenór and various kingdoms of men where he is corrupting the future nazgûl?

Furthermore, I'm not sure what to make of the Estate's involvement in this. They seem to have made a full 180. Did they finally get so much money? Has the estate board changed? Or are they adapting to a new era and new ideas? I have to say I haven't been following the Tolkien Estate at all recently, but as a (relatively ;)) old school fan their enthusiastic seeming involvement in this baffles me.

[Huinesoron]

So what is the scope of this series? Weirdly, Vanity Fair repeat a claim that I think can't possibly be true:

[In 2017, the Tolkien Estate] were selling the rights to the Appendices that outlined what the author had referred to as the Second Age of Middle-earth, along with any references to that time period in The Lord of the Rings itself.

Ummm... I think we can probably admit that they're also drawing on UT and the Silm, don't you? :D

Whatever the source material, this series is going to have a broad scope. They have 22 "stars"; even allowing for many of them to appear in pairs, that's a lot of storylines to play with. (It's also a weird number, because there are 23 character posters; is one of them a duplicate character? Did they really like a minor character's design?) The list of locations spans most of Middle-earth: Numenor, Lindon, presumably Eregion, Khazad-dum, and various undefined places that are probably further east.

And then there's the plot. I've already noted that they're condensing everything down to one mortal lifetime. That... yeah, that sounds bad, but what does it actually mean?

- Celebrimbor lives at the same time as Isildur. It's wrong, but I don't think it impacts either of their stories. Numenor was happy to go about its business basically ignoring Lindon; I doubt they'll care that Eregion is suddenly there too.

- Sauron isn't on the world stage until after Numenor is already overshadowed, OR the shadow grows over Numenor very rapidly. The former would be absolutely fine - the whole point of the Numenor tale is that the darkening has nothing to do with the Dark Lord (at least until they bring him there). The latter would be very annoying - it smacks of the darkening of Mirkwood in The Hobbit movies, which happened so suddenly that a hedgehog got injured by it.

- Galadriel's quest against "the last remnants" of the evil armies looks quite daft, OR the Second Age is only a century or two long. Again, the latter would be really irritating, but the former might work quite well. If Galadriel's activities as described in the article aren't against the participants in a war that just finished, but consist of her scouring the countryside for Orcs and going on about shadows three thousand years after the War of Wrath... then I can understand a little better why nobody listened to her.

- And... that's... it? The various stories of the Second Age (forging of the Rings, Numenorean settlements in Middle-earth, Akallabeth) don't actually interact with each other much, so I don't think things will break too much by running them all concurrently. Though it does annoy me, not gonna lie.

So... in that context, what are they doing with the plot? They say that it's all about building up to the forging and gifting of the Rings, with the goal being to establish who the various cultures who received them actually were. So I imagine we'll see a lot of disparate plotlines at first, in different corners of Middle-earth, all of them eventually converging on Celebrimbor's forge.

And yes, that means some of the mortal characters will almost certainly become Nazgul. Halbrand and Bronwyn are the two mortals named in the article (and Isildur, but please, no); I bet at least one of them gets a Ring.*

(*"But the Nazgul are all male!" Yes, and Galadriel is an elven-king under the sky.)

And then there's the weirdly disconnected bits of plot. There's a photo of two nomad hunters wearing giant antlers on their back in a landscape filmed a lot cooler than the other images. There's talk of two Harfoots finding a mysterious stranger "whose origin promises to be one of the show’s most enticing enigmas". How does this fit into the larger plot? Presumably it will, but it's hard to guess how.

Actually, the Harfoots ("HarFEET!") sound like fun; they're described as "play out a kind of [I]Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead story in the margins of the bigger quests". So they're there, but have no actual plot relevance - they're just witnessing larger events and not really knowing what's going on.

And just for fun, the pull-quote that's going to have us all pulling our hair out:

The driving question behind the production, he adds, was this: “Can we come up with the novel Tolkien never wrote and do it as the mega-event series that could only happen now?”

No. No you can't. Nobody can write a Tolkien novel except Tolkien, and he's busy being dead. :(

hS

[Thinlómien]

Eventually she winds up back in Lindon, where she has a "reunion" with Elrond.Which incidentally looks like this (https://media.vanityfair.com/photos/62019b3b41f168f94e9f9d8a/master/w_1600,c_limit/lord-of-the-rings-009.jpg). Which makes me wonder about the protrayal of their relationship. I always imagined it as cordial but distant in a dignified manner. Which is what one might expect between a guy and his mother-in-law who is a legendary queen thousands of years his senior. (Not to downplay Elrond's achievements, but seriously...) Also wondering if Celeborn and Celebrían will make an apperance, and how old is the latter one going to be.

I've seen rumours that Finrod is in the first episode, hence my concern; but set against that we have the teaser image of the Trees, plus rumours about the Helkaraxe. It's possible that the first episode includes a compressed retelling or flashback(s) to the First Age, and that Finrod's death (done correctly) is a part of that.I'm not thrilled about First Age flashbacks. So many chances to set the whole thing up wrong...

Side note: is all this stuff about Galadriel and drowning going to explain why she got Nenya? If yes, I'm going to facepalm very hard. I'm already visualising her doing some kind of "water magic"... :eek:

Which incidentally brings me - and this is a more major sidenote - to one realisation, with which I could conclude: the PJ films, for all that I disliked about them, even The Hobbit, had one tremendous advantage. Large part of the script were things quoted straight from Tolkien, written by Tolkien himself. This TV adaptation won't have the same advantage at all. It likely might attempt to emulate the FILM way of speaking, for that matter, at best. Unless of course Mr. Bezos managed to dig up some blessed talent, but somehow I am not holding my hopes high.Yeah, I think the dialogue will easily be the dealbreaker: if it doesn't sound like Tolkien could have written it, the show won't have a Tolkien-y feel. And I'm somewhat afraid that maintaining Tolkien's complex, often archaic and very English way of writing dialogue has not been the screenwriters' priority.

(Side note: George R.R. Martin is no wordsmith like Tolkien, but you could just tell which episodes of Game of Thrones were written by him by the very recognisable way the characters spoke. Those episodes were much closer in tone to the books. Tolkien didn't write any episodes of The Rings of Power. I don't have high hopes for anyone else getting the tone right. Think of the PJ movies. Some of the added dialogue fits in quite seamlessly - at least in the ears of a fan who is no English language scholar - while some feels like a slap in the face. Tolkien would not have made Aragorn say "Let's hunt some Orc". That particular quote is probably a deliberate stylistic change of register for effect, but the thought of a whole Tolkien series sounding like a Hollywood blockbuster makes me suffer.)

[Legate of Amon Lanc]

The driving question behind the production, he adds, was this: “Can we come up with the novel Tolkien never wrote and do it as the mega-event series that could only happen now?”
No, please no, the obvious answer is NO.
No. No you can't. Nobody can write a Tolkien novel except Tolkien, and he's busy being dead. :(


I completely glossed over that particular quote in the article, or took it as another basic cliché exclamation by filmmakers that one cannot take seriously, ever. But I am amused how strong reaction it caused :D

Strangely enough, this tidbit was the most exciting thing in the whole article for me. I am perhaps looking forward the most to see fresh visual depictions of Middle-Earth. I am very conscious they may fall short of my expectations, though...
I know that they will fall short of MY expectations, so... (Perhaps I oughta finally again change my signature. To that quote of Tolkien's from On Fairy-Stories about depicting bread.)

But seeing epically fully-crewed Khazad-Dûm, for sure! If it's done well...

I have so many questions about this. Are these the interpretations of the article writer, or new show canon? Will Elrond be a wily politician? Will Isildur's background still be royal, or will he be just an ordinary sailor?
I hope not!!! To be fair, the writer seems not-so-clearly-reading about some stuff (and even calls Khazad-Dûm a necropolis or whatever).

And then there's the plot. I've already noted that they're condensing everything down to one mortal lifetime. That... yeah, that sounds bad, but what does it actually mean?

And funnily enough, this is the creative choice I'm the least suspicious about. It's very understandable - yet I guess we'll have to wait and see how it works out. Will Sauron be constantly zigzagging between Eregion and Númenór and various kingdoms of men where he is corrupting the future nazgûls?

I am with Lommy on this, and it is also what I wanted to say - condensing the plot is the smallest thing I am worried about. It's literally what they say, either you'd have to switch human characters in every episode, or you have to cut the darkening of Númenor into a few decades (or less). For narrative purposes, I'm absolutely fine with this. It isn't the Tale of Years. For crying out loud, in the first promotional pictures they are depicting a Halsmowhatever and Brontosaurella sitting together in some Thurthobundlesville which doesn't exist, even though they have an entire Middle-Earth full of places they could have picked, even if they were sitting in Eryn Vorn!


Whatever the source material, this series is going to have a broad scope. They have 22 "stars"; even allowing for many of them to appear in pairs, that's a lot of storylines to play with. (It's also a weird number, because there are 23 character posters; is one of them a duplicate character? Did they really like a minor character's design?) The list of locations spans most of Middle-earth: Numenor, Lindon, presumably Eregion, Khazad-dum, and various undefined places that are probably further east.
Faithfulness to Tolkien etc aside for now... Purely as a series with a plot that one would want to enjoy watching: I wonder how well they can manage this task. It feels like a logical idea in terms of what they intend to portray, but is it too much? Can they? Will it end up being too disjointed? Every episode, one scene with Disa asking Durin about weather, one scene with Galadriel doing the same with Hallsbaldwagon, then wait until next episode to see what they replied?

Sidenote: I see that they are not yet showing Sauron/Annatar. Probably an intentional move and a good one, makes me only more curious. THAT may be one of the things that will determine whether it's good or not. (At least I hope he isn't going to be portrayed by Benedict Cumberbatch. But I think that time when you opened a cupboard and he was there has passed. It would be supercool if actually Sauron was played by multiple people, "outfitting" himself to seem more pleasant to the respective peoples he talked with. That would be - with a bit of an artistic license - canon, and pretty cool.)

So... in that context, what are they doing with the plot? They say that it's all about building up to the forging and gifting of the Rings, with the goal being to establish who the various cultures who received them actually were. So I imagine we'll see a lot of disparate plotlines at first, in different corners of Middle-earth, all of them eventually converging on Celebrimbor's forge.
Which is good. To be fair I'd be up for that plot being a series, with one season - not sure how much it will start to feel dragged-out if we have five...

And yes, that means some of the mortal characters will almost certainly become Nazgul. Halbrand and Bronwyn are the two mortals named in the article (and Isildur, but please, no); I bet at least one of them gets a Ring.*

(*"But the Nazgul are all male!" Yes, and Galadriel is an elven-king under the sky.)

That crossed my mind too, and I was wondering if Mr. Hallstadtsborn might. If we are already dealing with that, Bronwyn would be a cool idea (and I can sort of mentally spin a story based on the little we know about her).

And indeed as for female Ringwraith, the good ol' I.C.E. back in the 80s used to have a certain Adûnaphel as one of them, and I was fine with that pseudocanon.

But Isildur - please never! :eek:

[Huinesoron]

Which incidentally looks like this (https://media.vanityfair.com/photos/62019b3b41f168f94e9f9d8a/master/w_1600,c_limit/lord-of-the-rings-009.jpg). Which makes me wonder about the protrayal of their relationship. I always imagined it as cordial but distant in a dignified manner. Which is what one might expect between a guy and his mother-in-law who is a legendary queen thousands of years his senior. (Not to downplay Elrond's achievements, but seriously...) Also wondering if Celeborn and Celebrían will make an apperance, and how old is the latter one going to be.

Or potentially only hundreds of years older! Late-stage Tolkien - ie, NoME - actually fixes Galadriel's age when crossing the Helkaraxe at well under a century (of the sun), so she would only have about 600 years on Elrond. If this is 3000 years later, they're practically peers.

-- except that Artanis was born under the light of the Trees, which I have always pictured as the biggest generational shift in Elvish history.

They'd better not play a romance angle, though. :( I am actually weirdly excited to maybe see Celebrian; I'm not sure why!

hS

[Formendacil]

maybe see Celebrian; I'm not sure why!


If they really are going to condense the timeline of the 2nd Age into Isildur's lifespan AND if they're going for "young, impetuous, not yet wise old Galadriel" then, assuming I'm right that they won't want to start with Galadriel already being a mother, is to pull a "Renesmee."

I've got to say, I'm sort of relishing just how divergent things are already appearing (the time crunch is THE thing that has my goat here) and I'm kind of rooting for it to be a completely unTolkienian travesty. Which is not exactly *charitable* of me, but it's easy to root against Amazon and is a lot easier to mentally prepare for than hoping against hope it'll somehow accord with the Spirit of Tolkien.

[Galadriel55]

After I started writing and had to step away 3 times in a row, with my attempt at a post disappearing, I will quit trying to do anything lengthy. Besides, I feel like most things have already been said and reacted to, and, well, here's one more voice in the chorus.

I wish they had less canon in there - or, rather, didn't try to put in so mucb canon. They could have had a great show with mostly new characters and a couple Tolkien ones to keep the ties to the fandom. It wouldn't be Tolkien, but it would have the potential to be a decent story in its own right, using the legendarium as a fanfic landscape. But they had to have ALL the characters, and ALL AT ONCE, and doing ALL THE THINGS that are thought to pizzazz a show, and that just doesn't work. Instead of being cool, it ruins existing Tolkien. Don't force a square peg into a round hole, whittle yourself a round one.

I've got to say, I'm sort of relishing just how divergent things are already appearing (the time crunch is THE thing that has my goat here) and I'm kind of rooting for it to be a completely unTolkienian travesty. Which is not exactly *charitable* of me, but it's easy to root against Amazon and is a lot easier to mentally prepare for than hoping against hope it'll somehow accord with the Spirit of Tolkien.

I was holding out hope that it will remain obliquely Tolkienian. But this ridiculous time crunch (where Galadriel seems to be the worst affected), and the unnecessary pizzazzing (evil politician Elrond? Questionable romances?) - ugh, why.


I will not repeat what's been said, but something I noticed:

*the government of New Zealand has placed production expenditures at $462 million for the first season alone. That figure includes building infrastructure that will be used in later seasons


Does that imply they intend to have more seasons? And how strong is the intention? (Like, "if it works out, we will come up with more", vs "this story literally cannot be told in 1 season")?

Even the cast members were hired without being told which parts they would play.

Does anyone else think this is pushing the line?


Moosepeople. Moosepeople. Moople. Meople. What???

After news broke that Amazon had hired an intimacy coordinator for its New Zealand set, some fans feared that the production might have lost sight of what makes Tolkien Tolkien.

I think there has been enough proof posted on other threads for why sex in itself is not un-Tolkien, but 1) is there so much of it, or is it so unconventional, that it requires an expert advisor, and 2) how is "intimacy coordinator" even a job? Imagine having that as an answer for the age-old "what do you wanna be when you grow up?" :D

When Amazon released photos of its multicultural cast, even without character names or plot details, the studio endured a reflexive attack from trolls—the anonymous online kind. “Obviously there was going to be push and backlash,” says Tolkien scholar Mariana Rios Maldonado, “but the question is from whom? Who are these people that feel so threatened or disgusted by the idea that an elf is Black or Latino or Asian?”

You can make an Elf any race or colour you want, but at one point it's not gonna be a Tolkien Elf anymore. To reference GOT (should we call it the *true* source material?), a blonde Baratheon ain't a Baratheon. The article recites actors names and backgrounds like it's proving a point that this show satisfies the latest fashion criteria for diversity. We'll see what comes of it, but if it's diversity for diversity's sake, that often turns out even worse.

...Got to the picture of Halbarad... Halbard... Hal... with the T-shirt. Indeed, what's up with the T-shirt? And, speaking of costumes, I wasn't a fan of the faces on the Sylvan Elves's armour either.

“If you are true to the exact letter of the law, you are going to be telling a story in which your human characters are dying off every season because you’re jumping 200 years in time, and then you’re not meeting really big, important canon characters until season four. Look, there might be some fans who want us to do a documentary of Middle-earth, but we’re going to tell one story that unites all these things.”

Or you can do flashes of various points in that time, or carry two separate timelines, or have flashbacks. There are sooo many ways to avoid having a barely-out-of-her-teens Galadriel jump straight to Ringbearer just because you wanna showcase a mortal.

“We think the work will eventually speak for itself,”

It certainly will. The only question is - what will it say.

[Huinesoron]

Ummm... I think we can probably admit that they're also drawing on UT and the Silm, don't you? :D


So it seems I might be wrong about this! A seemingly independent confirmation (https://mobile.twitter.com/TolkienGuide/status/1491893226420142089) that the rights Amazon have are just... LotR+Hobbit. Which means the big deal that we were all convinced was over Christopher's objections was simply the same properties which were already out there. Amazon has nothing that Peter Jackson didn't also have.

If this is true (I'm still not entirely convinced), it's going to punch gaping holes through the plot.

- Amandil, Elendil, Isildur and Anarion are all named, and Elendil and his sons are "the last leaders of the Faithful" by the time of the Downfall. So it's clear something happened to Amandil - but there's no indication what.

- Isildur's story starts on a ship, borne on the wings of a storm. He is the son of Elendil, founder of Minas Ithil, overthrower of Sauron; he brings various things out of Numenor - the White Tree and the Stone of Erech, and a claim to at least one Palantir - and bickers with the men of the White Mountains. But there is no mention in any of those texts of his life in Numenor - or his rescue of the fruit of the White Tree.

- Ar-Pharazon's story is much as we know it, with one gaping exception: he isn't said to marry Tar-Miriel. In fact, Miriel gets exactly one mention in the Appendices, as the daughter of Tar-Palantir (he's basically there in full) from whom Pharazon usurps the sceptre. Her final attempt to appeal to Eru doesn't exist. Meneltarma is just a mountain from which you can see Tol Eressea.

- The last years of Numenor lack detail. There is no black temple; the Eagles of the Lords of the West do not fly overhead. Numenorean atrocities in Middle-earth are also downplayed - they just "[held] wide coast-tends in subjection. Atanamir and his successors levied heavy tribute, and the ships of the Númenoreans returned laden with spoil."

- The Two Trees make it in (they're at the beginning of the Annals of Numenor in Appendix A; and interestingly RotK claims that the ultimate ancestor of the White Tree was "a fruit of Telperion of many names, Eldest of Trees"), as do the Silmarils; but the First Age largely consists simply of "the
hopeless war of the Eldar and the Edain against Thangorodrim, in which they were
at last utterly defeated". Elrond at least makes it clear that Thangorodrim was also destroyed! The voyage of Earendil makes it in, but exactly what he accomplished is unclear - the Appendices speak vaguely of "help".

- Beren, Luthien, and Finrod get a decent treatment, so I wouldn't be surprised if we saw them. Obviously Aragorn sings and tells of the lovers' meeting, and gives a summary of the tale after that (including Luthien rescuing Beren from Sauron, by name), but he never mentions Finrod. Finrod is attested in the Appendices, as Galadriel's brother and king of Nargothrond, who gave his life to save Beren - but the circumstances of that saving are unmentioned. No Duel of Song, no desperate fight with a werewolf.

- Feanor doesn't die. XD He makes the Silmarils and the Palantiri while the Trees are lit, and goes into exile to try and retrieve the Silmarils from Morgoth. Celebrimbor is his descendent, and he wears a star. That's it. That's all you get. He has no named sons.

- Gondolin is a hidden city, ruled by Turgon; his daughter Idril marries Tuor, and their son Earendil is born in the city. It has walls - but also, per The Hobbit, its people hunted goblins in the hills. It fights the Goblin Wars, and falls, destroyed by goblins and dragons.

- I don't... think the world is flat? The entire description of the downfall of Numenor is: "But when Ar-Pharazôn set foot upon the shores of Aman the Blessed, the Valar laid down their Guardianship and called upon the One, and the world was changed. Númenor was thrown down and swallowed in the Sea, and the Undying Lands were removed for ever from the circles of the world. So ended the glory of Númenor." There may be some oblique reference in LotR itself, but I don't know what.

It's going to be interesting to see how they deal with the gaps. The Hobbit was obnoxious in its "sly" nod to the fact that it didn't have access to everything - "You know, I've quite forgotten their names" or whatever; I hope we don't get much of that, or at least that it's done better. (It might be funny to just interrupt anyone who tries to name Celebrimbor's father. ^_^) But I also hope they don't treat "we don't have the rights" to "we don't know" - for instance, by making up a different death for Finrod, or by keeping Feanor alive into the Second Age.

Ideally, they would carefully work around the gaps, drawing out every hint they possibly can from the books to fill them. For example, Bilbo's song of Earendil mentions the "Narrow Ice", and implies it's in the north; if you're wary with the dialogue, that lets you show the Exiles in transit, without actually saying what it is (they could just be crossing it for unrelated reasons!). It's a fine line to walk - I imagine you'd want legal advice on what's in-scope - but it would be better than just throwing it all out and saying "Feanor came to Middle-earth in a yellow submarine, and nothing we have says different!"

I understand there was a book, back in the pre-Silmarillion days, which tried to draw out all the details of the Elder Days contained in LotR. If they're smart, the writers should have found themselves a copy and stuffed it full of post-it notes.

hS

[Eomer of the Rohirrim]

Ah, hello everyone - nice to see you. And well met, Huinesoron! I can tell I will enjoy your posts. It seems there has been some activity over the last few years which I should catch up on.

More than anything I am inspired to re-read the Sil this year, just to ensure I'm completely prepared to make cranky posts about what the Amazon people did wrong. Because lord knows I'm not gonna do that on reddit...

[Michael Murry]

I didn't come across the Vanity Fair article itself but only indirectly by way of RT.com:

Amazon’s ‘Lord of the Rings’ series unveils new details
‘The Rings of Power’ won’t feature Game of Thrones-level sex and violence, according to showrunners

https://www.rt.com/pop-culture/548963-lotr-amazon-series-details/

First-look images and story details about Amazon’s upcoming ‘Lord of the Rings’ series have been debuted via Vanity Fair. The first season of ‘The Rings of Power’, which reportedly cost a staggering $462 million, will be a story about “friendship,” “brotherhood,” and “underdogs overcoming great darkness,” according to the showrunners.

While fans already expected the series to take place during the Second Age of Middle Earth, it has now been confirmed what locations and stories audiences can expect to witness in the series. The show will reportedly explore stories “from deep within the dwarf mines of the Misty Mountains to the high politics of the elven kingdom of Lindon and the humans’ powerful, Atlantis-like island, Númenor,” leading up to the forging of the rings of power.*

Showrunner Patric McKay says the driving question behind the production was this: “Can we come up with the novel Tolkien never wrote and do it as the mega-event series that could only happen now?”

It has been revealed that original characters from the ‘Lord of the Rings’ trilogy such as Galadriel and Elrond will make an appearance. Morfydd Clark will take on the role of young Galadriel, who is described as a warrior who is “angry and brash as she is clever,” while Elrond will be portrayed by Robert Aramayo, best known for playing a young Ned Stark in HBO’s ‘Game of Thrones’.

The series will also feature other characters and plotlines, many of which have been created from scratch. One such story is the “forbidden” romantic relationship between a human village healer played by Nazanin Boniadi and the elf Arondi, played by Ismael Cruz Cordova.

Instead of hobbits the show will feature their ancestor species – the harfoots – with Sir Lenny Henry portraying a harfoot elder while Megan Richards and Markella Kavenagh star as two harfoots who “encounter a mysterious lost man.”

Viewers will also get a look at the dwarven city of Khazad-dum inside the Misty Mountains, where a newly-created character – dwarven princess Disa, played by Sophia Nomvete, will “broaden the notion of who lives in Middle-earth” according to Vanity Fair.

The show will also tell the tale of the elven smith Cerebrimbor, portrayed by Charles Edwards, as he hones his skill with metals and magic, eventually forging the rings of power in tandem with Lord Sauron.

The show is being led by Patrick McKay and JD Payne, who describe the series’ narrative as being all about “the forging of the rings” and will delve into the “magic, warfare and mythology” that transpires.*

However, they also added that the story won’t be turning into a ‘Game of Thrones’ type of epic. According to Vanity Fair, McKay said the goal was to “make a show for everyone, for kids who are 11, 12 and 13, even though sometimes they might have to pull the blanket up over their eyes if it’s a little too scary. We talked about the tone in Tolkien’s books. This is material that is sometimes scary – and sometimes very intense, sometimes quite political, sometimes quite sophisticated – but it’s also heartwarming and life-affirming and optimistic. It’s about friendship and it’s about brotherhood and underdogs overcoming great darkness.”

‘The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power’ premiers on September 2 on Amazon Prime Video.

Not having a subscription to Amazon Prime Video, I await the erudite deconstruction of this entertainment offering by others far more knowledgeable about Tolkien's unpublished writings than myself. For the present, I can only hope that "young Galadriel, who is described as a warrior who is 'angry and brash as she is clever'," doesn't recapitulate that tedious Itaril/Tauriel killer elf-chick thing in The Hobbit movies debacle.

[Huinesoron]

"Really, why" was my reaction, but... well, of all people, I am okay with that it's Galadriel who might not have problems hanging out with a mortal (but at the same time, young Galadriel, again, I would imagine to be a bit more... well, sticking rather with her own kind than Men?).

I mean, she does have a Thing with a dwarf later... :D I suspect that they're going to be doing the Game of Thrones thing where different characters move between plotlines. Halbrand won't be a permanent fixture in Galadriel's story - just a chance meeting, as they say, in Middle-earth. Their 'entwined destinies' are because they're both part of the story of the forging of the Rings, as is everyone else.

... we’re doing this close-up where Galadriel’s face fills the screen and she cries, and she decides: I have to fight,” says McKay.

Lommy asked if this sounds like Tolkien, and it totally doesn't - but it might if it was better described. This is literally just "character falls down, character picks themselves back up", which, how many times does Frodo do that? (Not as many as in the movies, but still...) "She cries" may just mean "she has tears on her face", not "she bawls her heart out".

I think this is ultimately going to be IT: whether the show manages to reach a tone that resonates with Tolkien's writing, or whether it falls flat. At least for me personally that's going to be the measure of whether I'm going to enjoy it or not.

[...]

Yeah, I think the dialogue will easily be the dealbreaker: if it doesn't sound like Tolkien could have written it, the show won't have a Tolkien-y feel. And I'm somewhat afraid that maintaining Tolkien's complex, often archaic and very English way of writing dialogue has not been the screenwriters' priority.

I think I agree. I mean, I'll enjoy the visuals whatever, probably, but whether I'll love the show depends on the tone. It's good that they at least think they're trying to do it right!

Are these the interpretations of the article writer, or new show canon? Will Elrond be a wily politician? Will Isildur's background still be royal, or will he be just an ordinary sailor?

Elrond is a politician. ^_~ He's the Herald of Gil-Galad, a high-ranking noble. If Tolkien had written a full story about Lindon, Elrond would fit naturally into the Tuor role of "noble advisor arguing against obvious evil dude that nobody recognises is evil" - except he didn't, so there isn't an Evil Dude in Lindon to argue against. (It might be nice if Elrond is a convert to Galadriel's view that Sauron is still out there; would explain why he winds up setting up Imladris.)

I actually really like the idea of him as an architect. I mean... someone had to design the Hall of Fire, right?

Side note: is all this stuff about Galadriel and drowning going to explain why she got Nenya? If yes, I'm going to facepalm very hard. I'm already visualising her doing some kind of "water magic"...

Okay, but if they do this for Galadriel they have to do it for every single Ring. Each one gets an element - the elves get classical elements, the dwarves get metals, and the men get... I dunno, noble gases or something. Durin gets trapped in a collapsing nickel mine and winds up with the Ring of Nickel. Bronwyn spends an episode speaking really squeaky after inhaling helium and gets the Ring of Helium (it even has "heal" in its name!). Sauron trips over a gold brick and gets a thoughtful look on his face...

Purely as a series with a plot that one would want to enjoy watching: I wonder how well they can manage this task. It feels like a logical idea in terms of what they intend to portray, but is it too much? Can they? Will it end up being too disjointed? Every episode, one scene with Disa asking Durin about weather, one scene with Galadriel doing the same with Hallsbaldwagon, then wait until next episode to see what they replied?

So is this what they did with Game of Thrones? I never watched it, but I thought it was. My guess is that the characters go about in twos or threes (so maybe 10 plot threads), with each episode focussing on 3 or so plotlines. That'd be 15-20 minutes per plot, which is enough to get some stuff done.

If they really are going to condense the timeline of the 2nd Age into Isildur's lifespan AND if they're going for "young, impetuous, not yet wise old Galadriel" then, assuming I'm right that they won't want to start with Galadriel already being a mother, is to pull a "Renesmee."

Celeborn to be played by Robert Pattinson, you heard it here first. :D

I wish they had less canon in there - or, rather, didn't try to put in so mucb canon.

Wait, there was canon in there? ^_^ No, but seriously - other than the Harfeet, the only canon elements they've actually talked about are the ones tied directly to the creation of the Rings. I don't think the article names a single canon character who isn't a Ringbearer at one time or another.

Does that imply they intend to have more seasons? And how strong is the intention? (Like, "if it works out, we will come up with more", vs "this story literally cannot be told in 1 season")?

I think they've been approved for 5, and there's indications that the forging of the Rings won't even be in this one (a rumour about the posters suggested one was "Pharazon, not yet king"). So maybe we have S1 - look, characters! S2 - 'Brim makes some jewellery. S3 - Pharazon takes over, Sauron hands out goodie bags. S4 - Sauron takes a cruise and it ends badly. S5 - The Last Alliance.

Moosepeople. Moosepeople. Moople. Meople. What???

Right?! I almost wonder if they're Harfeet, with how ridiculously large the antlers are. Still wouldn't make a whole lotta sense.

how is "intimacy coordinator" even a job?

Basically: safety. Much like how showing a bird flying past requires a "No animals were harmed" statement, having any form of nudity really should require someone on hand to keep it from going badly wrong. There have been a lot of news stories about directors and actors being abusive in that sort of situation. I approve of this even if it's only for one fraction of a scene.

You can make an Elf any race or colour you want, but at one point it's not gonna be a Tolkien Elf anymore. [...] The article recites actors names and backgrounds like it's proving a point that this show satisfies the latest fashion criteria for diversity. We'll see what comes of it, but if it's diversity for diversity's sake, that often turns out even worse.

Does Tolkien ever describe a Silvan elf's skin or hair colour? The movie wanted Haldir to be blond, but I don't know that that's from the books.

Eitherhow, I don't think it's "diversity for diversity's sake" - I would say it's more "diversity because it gives you more options". It lets you tell different stories, with different resonances with the modern world - and it also lets you hire different actors! If all lead characters had to be white, male, and American, we really would have Benderbatch Cumbleface playing everyone again. (And in a show like this, hordes of white men with brown hair would make it impossible for me to know who anyone was; I'm rubbish at faces.)

The reason for highlighting it is that we've finally got society to the point where they will, just about, accept a diverse cast. Go back, what, two, three decades at most, and it becomes something a producer would never even consider, because they "knew" it "wouldn't sell". Well - now it will.

And well met, Huinesoron! I can tell I will enjoy your posts.

Greetings to you, and thank you very much. :)

For the present, I can only hope that "young Galadriel, who is described as a warrior who is 'angry and brash as she is clever'," doesn't recapitulate that tedious Itaril/Tauriel killer elf-chick thing in The Hobbit movies debacle.

Oh cripes, hadn't even thought of that.

(With all these quotes, I feel like I should be voting for a wolf around now!)

hS

[Rhun charioteer]

I’m honestly surprised at this thread. I would have expected people to be far more hostile and negative than they are. I have to say I’m disappointed. This show will be an absolute garbage fire(and honestly I’d probably rather watch a garbage fire) and you are acting as though it deserves any consideration at all?

[Formendacil]

I’m honestly surprised at this thread. I would have expected people to be far more hostile and negative than they are. I have to say I’m disappointed. This show will be an absolute garbage fire(and honestly I’d probably rather watch a garbage fire) and you are acting as though it deserves any consideration at all?

Even the Ents are fair to Saruman.

Plenty of time AFTER the show comes out to rip on the basis of known facts--there's no reason to do it on the basis of supposition.

[Galadriel55]

I understand there was a book, back in the pre-Silmarillion days, which tried to draw out all the details of the Elder Days contained in LotR. If they're smart, the writers should have found themselves a copy and stuffed it full of post-it notes.

Hey, I did that in my pre-Silmarillion days! :D I had a whole sheet full of scribbled notes and speculations. I didn't know someone published their reference sheet.

For the present, I can only hope that "young Galadriel, who is described as a warrior who is 'angry and brash as she is clever'," doesn't recapitulate that tedious Itaril/Tauriel killer elf-chick thing in The Hobbit movies debacle.

I have been so distracted by the fear of their misunderstanding First vs Second vs Third Age Galadriel (if there is an adjective for SA Galadriel, would you not go with "ambitious" over "brash"?), I have completely neglected this possibility. :eek:

Elrond is a politician. ^_~ He's the Herald of Gil-Galad, a high-ranking noble. If Tolkien had written a full story about Lindon, Elrond would fit naturally into the Tuor role of "noble advisor arguing against obvious evil dude that nobody recognises is evil" - except he didn't, so there isn't an Evil Dude in Lindon to argue against. (It might be nice if Elrond is a convert to Galadriel's view that Sauron is still out there; would explain why he winds up setting up Imladris.)

I actually really like the idea of him as an architect. I mean... someone had to design the Hall of Fire, right?

I like the idea of Elrond as an architect, councilor (even war councilor / general), squire, herald (let's not forget that), librarian, and bunches of other roles. But I take issue with him as - how did Lommy put it? - wily politician. Numenor is a great setting for wily politics. Lindon? Perhaaaps... but to a much lesser extent. Just too many things that could go wrong with that.

So is this what they did with Game of Thrones? I never watched it, but I thought it was. My guess is that the characters go about in twos or threes (so maybe 10 plot threads), with each episode focussing on 3 or so plotlines. That'd be 15-20 minutes per plot, which is enough to get some stuff done.

Episode 1 of GOT was an introduction to the main characters, so it was basically that - a basic "this is who that guy is", switch plots, repeat. But the subsequent episodes would advance each plot in a similar manner a chapter in a book would - though that might be broken over several scenes over the course of the episode. The 2-second plot line was not the reason GOT tanked; it was rather the compression of too much plot into too little time in the final season, cut out too much of it and dropped plotlines, which made the whole thing not make sense.

Wait, there was canon in there? ^_^ No, but seriously - other than the Harfeet, the only canon elements they've actually talked about are the ones tied directly to the creation of the Rings. I don't think the article names a single canon character who isn't a Ringbearer at one time or another.

They're attempting to describe canonical characters and events. So yes, they are attempting canon - though I have every doubt that they will succeed at it. In fact, I have the full conviction that they won't - which is exactly why I wish they didn't do it.

Does Tolkien ever describe a Silvan elf's skin or hair colour? The movie wanted Haldir to be blond, but I don't know that that's from the books.

You know? That's a good question. I'm not sure. I wonder if Legolas is the only one with a sort of detailed description - and he is rumoured to have a special lineage, so he is not a proper candidate. But Silvan Elves still fall under the broader umbrella of "Teleri", and I expect physical traits would be similar too. Of course, by virtue of sampling, it's possible that "all purple-haired Teleri happened to remain in the East", thus depriving the western gene pool of that trait while allowing it to persist in the eastern population in, perhaps, larger percentages that it appeared in the original population... So yes, I suppose Silvan Teleri are not limited to the traits described for other Teleri tribes.

But the blonde Baratheon example was just an arbitrary reference and joke about why appearances matter, not that Silvan Elves need to have blonde hair. And I think you would agree that there still is a limit to how much you can mess with the outlines we do have before it becomes ridiculous. Like purple hair. Technically, nowhere in Tolkien does it say that it's impossible, but why.

(If you haven't seen/read GOT, here is the explanation, spoiler warning: a characters uncovers that every time a dark-haired Baratheon marries a blond spouse, their children are always dark-haired, which proves that the blond children of a current marriage are not legitimate children and heirs of the current Baratheon..

Eitherhow, I don't think it's "diversity for diversity's sake" - I would say it's more "diversity because it gives you more options". It lets you tell different stories, with different resonances with the modern world - and it also lets you hire different actors! If all lead characters had to be white, male, and American, we really would have Benderbatch Cumbleface playing everyone again. (And in a show like this, hordes of white men with brown hair would make it impossible for me to know who anyone was; I'm rubbish at faces.)

Lol, so am I. And you're probably right - I think I am just paranoid about it after a number of stories which did the opposite of benefit from diversity (*coughDoctorWhocough*). You are absolutely right that based on what we have so far, I don't have any great issues. But it's the tone of the thing that galls me, "we do diversity, you have to watch us now", it just rubs me the wrong way. Having a diverse cast does not make it a good movie/show, and rubbing in diversity simply to highlight it doesn't make it a good story (again, *coughDoctorWhocough*).

(With all these quotes, I feel like I should be voting for a wolf around now!)

++Halberband?
++Meeple?
...or...
++Bumblebee Cabbagepatch? ^.^

I’m honestly surprised at this thread. I would have expected people to be far more hostile and negative than they are. I have to say I’m disappointed. This show will be an absolute garbage fire(and honestly I’d probably rather watch a garbage fire) and you are acting as though it deserves any consideration at all?

Some people are disappointed that we are too negative, some are disappointed that we are too positive. *shrug* You can't suit everyone. And if it doesn't deserve any consideration at all, the response would not be to throw rotten eggs at it, but rather to ignore its existence. Personally, I prefer not to be overly negative over something so trivial as a TV show which I can quit watching the moment the cons outweigh the potential pros, so I don't let it spoil my appetite.

It probably shouldn't have started with this particularly brainrot inducing snippet. Is there a lot to Galadriel's story we don't know? Yes. Can I imagine her castaway on the sea with some random human guy with whom she shares an entwined destiny? Yikes... Also a young and angry Galadriel is an interesting concept, but we're already in the Second Age. She's thousands of years old and has been through a vast number of things. I am... skeptical about this take on the character.

You know what, this. They should not have started with that piece. I know they wanted to emphasize the familiar characters, but this was probably the worst thing to choose for a "first impression". I think that by the time I've walked around with the image of Life of Pi Galadriel spitting out cliches in my head for half a day before I could read the rest of the article, I didn't have a lot of sympathy for the whole thing. I feel somewhat less pessimistic about a bunch of stuff in there now, after sleeping on it, but Galadriel's piece still sticks out as brainrot which I cannot be reconciled with. Besides, she is a character in whom I have a certain personal investment. ;)


P.S.: as an expected but unlooked for benefit of the whole thing, I am very happy that it brought a number of Downers out of slumber even for a little while. So let it not be said that no good may come of evil. ;-)

[Boromir88]

I will perhaps have time to comment with some more thoughts later this weekend, but just popping in to...

Ah, hello everyone - nice to see you. And well met, Huinesoron! I can tell I will enjoy your posts. It seems there has been some activity over the last few years which I should catch up on.

More than anything I am inspired to re-read the Sil this year, just to ensure I'm completely prepared to make cranky posts about what the Amazon people did wrong. Because lord knows I'm not gonna do that on reddit...

*waves to Eomer* What an unexpected surprise! :D That's been the thing for me that I appreciate (and probably will appreciate) the most about the series being made. It sparked my interest to read The Sil again (and currently reading UT) because I wanted to be more familiar with the source material than I was when the LOTR movies came out. I got part way through Fellowship before I saw the first movie, and I think that's why I still am biased towards Boromir. Sean Bean is not Tolkien's Boromir, but he played the character just a touch different, where I can well imagine that somber scene between him and Aragorn in Lothlorien might have happened.

Anyway the buzz around the series, sparked an interest to read the source material again, because I was so unfamiliar with the 2nd Age characters. I think Isildur, Celebrimbor and Galadriel are fascinating and well-written characters. My hope is the series portrays them well. That would be fantastic. My suspicions are it's not much more than a Fool's hope, but I'm not Denethoring around about it. If it's poorly done, and not-Tolkien, then I'll stick with reading Tolkien when I have the interest. But I credit the series buzz for re-igniting my interest to read Tolkien's "earlier" tales.

Also, seconding your comment about Huey's posts. (Not to make him feel like this is a game of WW any more than he might already feel :p)

[Legate of Amon Lanc]

It's a fine line to walk - I imagine you'd want legal advice on what's in-scope - but it would be better than just throwing it all out and saying "Feanor came to Middle-earth in a yellow submarine, and nothing we have says different!"
This is literally my biggest fear about this. Especially if it is done out of spite, "you didn't give us rights to the Silmarillion? Okay! The world was created by Radagast's rabbit hatching an egg, ha! Now deal with it!"

Ah, hello everyone - nice to see you. And well met, Huinesoron! I can tell I will enjoy your posts. It seems there has been some activity over the last few years which I should catch up on.
I am verrry happy this thread seems to be bringing back more and more people! Welcome back after a long absence - and Form, too!

For the present, I can only hope that "young Galadriel, who is described as a warrior who is 'angry and brash as she is clever'," doesn't recapitulate that tedious Itaril/Tauriel killer elf-chick thing in The Hobbit movies debacle.
To be fair, Tauriel would be better (as long as she and some Dwarves weren't making whats-in-your-pants-joke *shudders*). She was at least a clearly made-up character. Galadriel is an existing character and she is no Tauriel.

In fact, Halbenstein and Brontosaurella et al. are more or less whom I imagine to be basically some sort of semi-tauriels. In the sense that they will be wannabe-cool and hip made-up characters who might fit better into a D&D campaign. Well, I hope I am wrong and for instance the healer really remains a healer and not an "I am occasionally jumping on walls and throwing knives because that's what film characters do" or somesuch.

I’m honestly surprised at this thread. I would have expected people to be far more hostile and negative than they are. I have to say I’m disappointed. This show will be an absolute garbage fire(and honestly I’d probably rather watch a garbage fire) and you are acting as though it deserves any consideration at all?
Even the Ents are fair to Saruman.

Plenty of time AFTER the show comes out to rip on the basis of known facts--there's no reason to do it on the basis of supposition.
And if it doesn't deserve any consideration at all, the response would not be to throw rotten eggs at it, but rather to ignore its existence. Personally, I prefer not to be overly negative over something so trivial as a TV show which I can quit watching the moment the cons outweigh the potential pros, so I don't let it spoil my appetite.
Basically what Form and G55 said. I am known to be the most anti-adaptation person, but, I won't judge anything before I know more of it. That is, hum hmm, not a mark of the wise. What do we have so far? Five photos and ten sentences. What do they look like? Not particularly good, but who knows. Show me half of an actual episode and I can tell you something more concrete.

But yeah. Everyone gets riled up about something, these days it has become almost a hobby, but in my opinion, life is too short to spend it on just hating something. It doesn't leave anything behind.

I have been so distracted by the fear of their misunderstanding First vs Second vs Third Age Galadriel (if there is an adjective for SA Galadriel, would you not go with "ambitious" over "brash"?), I have completely neglected this possibility. :eek:
Ambitious, indeed!

On the same note: I have been thinking about Galadriel, and here is the thing - I realised why it was that the first image of the "Joan of Arc"-Galadriel caused such instant intuitive revulsion in me. Ought she be a warrior at all? Nerwen*, sure. But this elf-paladin-level-7? That answer is obviously negative.

*(Sidenote: I just realised that if there is any "contemporarily socially debated" topic they could tackle and throw half of the audience out of balance, it could be toying with Galadriel's gender identity. I mean, they would have absolutely genuine canon basis for it, and here they would have the creative space to explore it. I'm thinking stuff like her having this early-Second-Age phase where she would want people to address her as "him", generally dress up very "manlily" and such. Obviously eventually she would in the end settle on the LotR-era, more feminine side of herself. But it would be an interesting character trait. It might cause mixed feelings and not just among those who would have some knee-jerk reaction, but if done right, it could be even a good way to explore Galadriel's personality - and importantly, it would be based on canon.

But that is only in the Sil, is it...)

And more specifically about "young and brash". I would actually be happy if they took Galadriel's entire personality development arc and somehow stuffed it in here - it would be condensed, and therefore uncanonical, but ultimately faithful to the character. I mean the - what I consider to be the super-amazing thing about Galadriel - the development from her young self to the Galadriel we meet in LotR. Show us how she got there. From the young, "adventurous" voluntary exile to (and this already IS early Second Age) the "I am too proud to accept your forgiveness, I'm staying and founding my own elven kingdom, finally, when finally this Dark Lord is dead!" to eventually the Galadriel who will refuse the Ring.

I REALLY hope they keep that dynamic. And they can do it unsubtly and hammer it in our face for all I care, but it has to be there, else I don't see the purpose of making this series at all. But - and that is important at the same time - they should make THAT the focus, this internal dynamic (plus possibly some sort of back-and-forth pining "well perhaps I miss the Undying Lands, 'and by the strand of Ilmarin there grew a golden Tree'-style") and not push it aside for the sake of some "I will fight!!!" That's not Galadriel.

You know? That's a good question. I'm not sure. I wonder if Legolas is the only one with a sort of detailed description - and he is rumoured to have a special lineage, so he is not a proper candidate. But Silvan Elves still fall under the broader umbrella of "Teleri", and I expect physical traits would be similar too. Of course, by virtue of sampling, it's possible that "all purple-haired Teleri happened to remain in the East", thus depriving the western gene pool of that trait while allowing it to persist in the eastern population in, perhaps, larger percentages that it appeared in the original population... So yes, I suppose Silvan Teleri are not limited to the traits described for other Teleri tribes.
Sidenote, I recall one of the "Balrog Wings-type" threads here where people have been bashing each other with arguments about what colour Legolas's hair was supposed to be. I recall things like arguments about dark hair and others countering that it was described when his head was in the shadow etc. Overall, I think the hair of those we-do-not-belong-to-any-of-the-colour-coded-major-groups Elves is pretty much an open question.


(With all these quotes, I feel like I should be voting for a wolf around now!)

I propose having the right, once the series comes out and if there is need for it, to call a deadline.

[Formendacil]

I like the idea of Elrond as an architect, councilor (even war councilor / general), squire, herald (let's not forget that), librarian, and bunches of other roles. But I take issue with him as - how did Lommy put it? - wily politician. Numenor is a great setting for wily politics. Lindon? Perhaaaps... but to a much lesser extent. Just too many things that could go wrong with that.

Even beyond Lindon, I would say that "politician" just isn't really a dominant Elvish mode. The only things that you'd really call politicking among Elves happen during the exigencies of the Elder Days: Fëanor vs. Fingolfin under Melkor's influence, Celegorm & Curufin in Nargothrond, Maeglin once Tuor arrives, etc. It's always an explicitly bad thing, and while Elrond in his youth might not have been as much of a paragon of Elvish virtue as he was in 3018 T.A., there's also no textual evidence that he wasn't.

And, sure, politicking could happen in the Second Age (and I agree that Lindon is the LEAST likely realm for it, thus tacitly agreeing that it might be more likely in Eregion or Lórien or Mirkwood), but the nature of the Elves, i.e. that they are undying within time, combined with their preferred form of government, kingship, leads to a lot of political stability. The Elvish mode of government is that the King as Father of the Clan, and once an Elvish realm gets going and has peace, there aren't really examples of jockeying and conniving for the sake of power.

That might have been a bit different at the start of the Second Age, when Lindon was sorting itself out--Celeborn and Galadriel started there with some of the Sindar before moving on, but Elrond never does, and he should have had at least as much a chance, as the Heir of Turgon and Thingol to have done a similar thing if he were interested with a subsection of Elvish society, but Elrond explicitly DOESN'T: he remains with Gil-galad until the founding of Imladris and the his establishment there quite definitively never becomes a Kingdom or lordship, though given his lineage, you'd almost expect the establishment of a separate territory at a far remove to merit at least a "lordship," but that doesn't happen.

What does happen? Elrond is clearly still a deputy of Gil-galad, serving as his Herald even in the War of the Last Alliance. Admittedly, after Gil-galad's death, he does make what I call a very shrewd political decision, though it is one that is humble and peace-making: he decides the time of High Kings is over and does not take the title. This could be compromise, because he's not the eldest or most powerful of the remaining Finwëans--that's clearly Galadriel on both fronts--or because he's not a male-line Finwëan, being descended through Idril, or because he's Half-Elven (though that consideration doesn't seem to have mattered with Dior, who was actually mortal, or anywhere else in Elrond's life--and The Nature of Middle-Earth backs up this assertion, generally, in how it talks about his ageiing). I also think it could be a consideration of the fact that Elrond had no interest in going to Lindon and read the tea-leaves that Elvish power would wane, but it's also a political decision: staying in the colony rather than returning to the main homeland.

So... I think politician is a bad word to describe an Elf. It's a modern word and in the context of fantasy makes you think of the endless machinations of things like Game of Thrones, and is the kind of neo-Greco-Latinate word that Tolkien would avoid. But, despite that, I think Elrond is something of the ideal politician: a servant, consensus-builder, peace-maker.

But tell me that you think that THAT is what Amazon means.

X-ed with Legate, as we said in the Elder Days.

[Boromir88]

Actually what has me thinking could be one of the more interesting things the show-runners say they are attempting to is about the 2 hobbit characters.

I noted the show runners mentioned the two Harfoots are going to be similar to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern roles, from Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. If this is true, and they aren't just fooling us, this is an interesting and creative thing to do in my opinion. It's not something that I would call original, because it has been done before and can be fairly common in the fantasy genre, but I think it would be creative to have this in a Tolkien adaptation. What I mean is think about the roles C-3PO and R2-D2 play in Star Wars or the ghost brothers in Stardust. Their roles aren't directly involved in solving problems the protagonists come across. They stand off in the distance and act as commentators to the audience, through their own robot-colored (or ghost-colored) glasses. R2-D2 (at least in the original trilogy) serves as a useful mechanic who does some minor things to help the protagonists out of sticky situations, but particularly C-3PO's role is to simply be a translator. He sits off as an observer and translates information to the audience ("Well, Master Ani has been under a lot of stress lately" or tells us the odds of surviving an asteroid field). As the article mentions, hobbits are noted for being able to avoid the eyes of "big folk" blundering through. So if their roles in the series are indeed to be something like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, or R2-D2 and C-3P0 than that could be rather fitting to use hobbits to fill that role. Think of just how much interest gets sparked by wanting to know what happened to the random fox passing by sleeping hobbits in the Shire. :D

[mhagain]

So it seems I might be wrong about this! A seemingly independent confirmation (https://mobile.twitter.com/TolkienGuide/status/1491893226420142089) that the rights Amazon have are just... LotR+Hobbit. Which means the big deal that we were all convinced was over Christopher's objections was simply the same properties which were already out there. Amazon has nothing that Peter Jackson didn't also have.

If this is true (I'm still not entirely convinced), it's going to punch gaping holes through the plot.


I'm not convinced at all.

Amazon did a deal with the Estate, but the Estate don't control the rights to the Hobbit nor to LotR. They're with whatever Saul Zaentz's company is called this week. Plus that map of Numenor is straight out of Unfinished Tales; it doesn't appear anywhere else, so Amazon must have at least that much of UT, and that's indisputable.

No, more likely to be the opposite: Amazon don't have the Hobbit or LotR, but they do have other material, the full extent of which is currently unknown.

[Thinlómien]

Upon reading all your comments and reflecting on previous fandom experiences, I really think we should take the article - and all other written sources about the show at this point - with a pinch of salt. After all, they are the writers' interpretation, and the writers might not be particularly observant, or good writers, or Tolkien-savvy. Much of the stuff that sounds ridiculous might make more sense when you see the actual show - and vice versa...

Okay, but if they do this for Galadriel they have to do it for every single Ring. Each one gets an element - the elves get classical elements, the dwarves get metals, and the men get... I dunno, noble gases or something.I know you wrote this tongue-in-cheek, but I'm thinking they might really do it for the Elven Rings at least. I mean they all have an element assigned to them, and from the point of view making flashy cinema, it would really be a wasted opportunity not to use that. Sadly I predict it will be quite tacky.

Purely as a series with a plot that one would want to enjoy watching: I wonder how well they can manage this task. It feels like a logical idea in terms of what they intend to portray, but is it too much? Can they? Will it end up being too disjointed? Every episode, one scene with Disa asking Durin about weather, one scene with Galadriel doing the same with Hallsbaldwagon, then wait until next episode to see what they replied?
So is this what they did with Game of Thrones? I never watched it, but I thought it was. My guess is that the characters go about in twos or threes (so maybe 10 plot threads), with each episode focussing on 3 or so plotlines. That'd be 15-20 minutes per plot, which is enough to get some stuff done.Game of Thrones and other ensemble shows I've seen seem to fluctuate somewhere between these two options, sometimes depending on the episode. It's not an easy thing to juggle. Looking forward to seeing how it works here...

Eitherhow, I don't think it's "diversity for diversity's sake" - I would say it's more "diversity because it gives you more options". It lets you tell different stories, with different resonances with the modern world - and it also lets you hire different actors! If all lead characters had to be white, male, and American, we really would have Benderbatch Cumbleface playing everyone again. (And in a show like this, hordes of white men with brown hair would make it impossible for me to know who anyone was; I'm rubbish at faces.)Agreed. I actually hope they would make different peoples from different parts of Middle-Earth each have cast of a certain ethnicity (with some exceptions of course because people have always been moving). It would make everything feel more real and localised and grounded. Imagine for example all Northmen are white people of Northern European descent, Númenóreans are Caucasian folks from the Mediterranean region, Silvan Elves are say East Africans, the dwarves Southern Asians... But I don't think that would fly, Amazon would be crucifed for racial stereotyping in 0.5 seconds. While I agree that type of casting would open up a myriad problematic cans of worms, it would avoid the "every place looks like contemporary US with ethnic diversity but 90% of the important roles somehow being held by white people" syndrome which pretty much every American tv show and movie these days seems to have.

I don't know where I'm going with this rant but maybe partly: I'm European and I'm tired of seeing just racial diversity, I want to see cultural diversity too. Okay that's a whole different issue, but let's unpack that one. I would love to see all the different cultures of Middle-Earth have not only different architecture and costumes, but different customs and beliefs, ways of greeting each other, different values and arts, different foods... From the looks of the pictures we've seen, though, it all looks like one generic fantasyland ie probably one big US in Middle-Earth. (Yes, I know there is cultural diversity within the US as well, but does that ever get represented on mainstream media either? Nope.)

[Boromir88]

Upon reading all your comments and reflecting on previous fandom experiences, I really think we should take the article - and all other written sources about the show at this point - with a pinch of salt. After all, they are the writers' interpretation, and the writers might not be particularly observant, or good writers, or Tolkien-savvy. Much of the stuff that sounds ridiculous might make more sense when you see the actual show - and vice versa...


Indeed and for the most part, those involved in the series are saying the right things (https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/amazons-lord-of-the-rings-tv-diversity-1235090283/), but is impossible to know until seeing the end product.

The main cringe in the Vanity Fair article was Elrond being described as a "wily-politician." But as you say here perhaps it's best to take what is written about the show with a pinch of salt. One thing I can't ever imagine Elrond being described as is a "wily-politician." Unless if if somehow since he was one of the masterminds behind the "Fool's hope," that his character in the show is savvy and skilled in organizing the resistance against Sauron? And since his involvement in forming the Fellowship was more behind the scenes, we actually see Elrond working "behind the scenes" to organize the resistance against Sauron.

I'm not too worried about the picture with the caption of "Elrond and Galadriel's reunion." I think perhaps we all just have The Hobbit movies Galadriel and Gandalf as the first things that come into our heads. I admit those scenes are really clumsy in The Hobbit, but I hardly think kisses on the forehead or "If you need my help, I will come" are overloaded with sexual tension between them.

Which incidentally looks like this. Which makes me wonder about the protrayal of their relationship. I always imagined it as cordial but distant in a dignified manner. Which is what one might expect between a guy and his mother-in-law who is a legendary queen thousands of years his senior. (Not to downplay Elrond's achievements, but seriously...) Also wondering if Celeborn and Celebrían will make an apperance, and how old is the latter one going to be.~Lommy


I've had a much different take on their relationship. Elrond is her son-in-law, and I've always thought the 3 Elven Ring-bearers had a close and strong bond. After the Ring is destroyed on their way back, Elrond, Gandalf and Galadriel sit in the woods, not saying anything but it's implied they're speaking telepathically, or communicating in a way where they all completely understand what's being said. I don't know nearly enough about what Tolkien wrote about Osanwe, but if the Elven rings were now powerless, it would appear they figured out how to exchange thoughts without the power of their rings. This is all pure speculation on my part, so take it with a pinch of salt, but it would make sense there was a strong bond between the 3 of them.

What gets me is the criticisms from so-called "fans," (not on this forum) but honestly they're online Ted Sandymans, (http://forum.barrowdowns.com/showpost.php?p=705192&postcount=87) who then use Peter Jackson as some sort of paragon of faithfulness to Tolkien. I've disagreed with Morth,Kuru, Inzil and countless others here over the years about Jackson's films. Say what you want about their criticisms and pessimism about the Amazon series, but they are just as sharp and on-point to criticize Jackson if he did something similar.

[Galadriel55]

I don't know where I'm going with this rant but maybe partly: I'm European and I'm tired of seeing just racial diversity, I want to see cultural diversity too. Okay that's a whole different issue, but let's unpack that one. I would love to see all the different cultures of Middle-Earth have not only different architecture and costumes, but different customs and beliefs, ways of greeting each other, different values and arts, different foods... From the looks of the pictures we've seen, though, it all looks like one generic fantasyland ie probably one big US in Middle-Earth. (Yes, I know there is cultural diversity within the US as well, but does that ever get represented on mainstream media either? Nope.)

Yes!!!

And this is what GOT did do well - it picked up on GRRM's worldbuilding and kept the details. Not just the racial descriptions and costumes, but the religions and customs and accents and legends and histories and sayings and mannerisms. If shows could emulate more of that, instead of sex and swords, they would be better for it. Sex and swords might be GOT's staple, but they weren't what made it a good show. So I could not agree more with you here. Please, show us different cultures!

[Morthoron]

A return of Princess Xenarwen, with Galadriel wearing armor. Hobbits where none should be. Politically correct racial casting (Dark Elves, LOL!). Beardless dwarf-women.

The only thing that is true with all this nonsense is “Can we come up with the novel Tolkien never wrote?" The answer, of course, is yes, you certainly can come up with a novel that Tolkien never wrote. You can take the worst aspects of Peter Jackson's superfluous and extraneous inanity and make an even worse story that Tolkien wouldn't consider to having anything vaguely to do with his creation.

I'm through with this debacle before it even airs.

[William Cloud Hicklin]

The only remaining question is whether this is better compared with the Ciurea train wreck of 1917 (600-1000 dead) or the Bihar train wreck of 1981 (200+ confirmed dead, several hundred more presumed killed). The first was a collision, the second went off a cliff.

[mhagain]

The "Hobbits where none should be" thing needs to be addressed.

There is absolutely nothing in Tolkien stating there were no Hobbits in the Second Age.

Quite the opposite, the Of Dwarves and Men essay even explicitly references primitive Hobbit tribes in "unrecorded ages".

I'd expected better from posters on this forum. Sigh.

[Morthoron]

The "Hobbits where none should be" thing needs to be addressed.

There is absolutely nothing in Tolkien stating there were no Hobbits in the Second Age.

Quite the opposite, the Of Dwarves and Men essay even explicitly references primitive Hobbit tribes in "unrecorded ages".

I'd expected better from posters on this forum. Sigh.

There were no Hobbit ancestors on the west side of the Misty Mountains during the 2nd Age. Did they exist? Certainly. But far east of anything that occurs in the Second Age in The Silmarillion.

According to the Tale of Years:

TA 1050: The Periannath are first mentioned in records with the coming of the Harfoots to Eriador.

1050 of the Third Age. That's almost 3300 years after Sauron seduces the Elves into making the Rings. There's a reason that Tolkien in his letters states anyone looking for Hobbits in the material that makes up The Silmarillion would be disappointed. The Hobbits weren't even mentioned until they entered Eriador over three millenia after the ancient era when the story takes place.

They didn't even reach Bree until TA 1300. The second entry in the Tale of Years:

The Periannath migrate westward; many settle at Bree.

I would suggest you read the books before making statements about canon. It might help you in discussions here.

[mhagain]

There were no Hobbit ancestors on the west side of the Misty Mountains during the 2nd Age. Did they exist? Certainly. But far east of anything that occurs in the Second Age in The Silmarillion.

... And the reason why you think the Hobbits depicted in this show will be west of the Misty Mountains is?

Go on, I'm waiting.

I would suggest you read the books before making statements about canon. It might help you in discussions here.

Given that I cited Of Dwarves and Men I might have thought that you'd engage reasonably here, but I guess that was expecting too much.

[Huinesoron]

A return of Princess Xenarwen, with Galadriel wearing armor.

Even after the merciless assault upon the Teleri and the rape of their ships, though she fought fiercely against Feanor in defence of her mother's kin, she did not turn back.

~

Hobbits where none should be.

Already cited by mhagain, but:

... when they are first encountered in the histories [Hobbits] already showed divergences in colouring, stature, and build. [...] In their unrecorded past they must have been a primitive, indeed 'savage' people...

The vague tradition preserved by the Hobbits of the Shire was that they had dwelt once in lands by a Great River, but long ago had left them, and found their way through or round high mountains, when they no longer felt at ease in their homes because of the multiplications of the Big Folk... This evidently reflects the troubles of Gondor in the earlier part of the Third Age.

~

Politically correct racial casting (Dark Elves, LOL!).

That's utterly beneath you, but:


(Quote not found)

~

Beardless dwarf-women.

This is the only one you're on anything like solid ground for, citing HoME:

For the Naugrim have beards from the beginning of their lives, male and female alike; nor can their womenkind be discerned by those of other race, be it in feature or in gait or in voice...

And also:

[Dwarf women] seldom walk abroad except at great need. They are in voice and appearance, and in garb if they must go on a journey, so like to the dwarf-men that the eyes and ears of other peoples cannot tell them apart. This has given rise to the foolish opinion among Men that there are no dwarf-women, and that the Dwarves 'grow out of stone'.

But the HoME source (aside from being an unused draft to which Amazon don't have the rights) is sourced explicitly to Pengolod, an elf; and LotR Appendix F specifically calls the dwarves "secretive" (it uses "secret" five times in three paragraphs!), and contrasts this with the Elves. It's really trivial to suggest that maybe, like the "foolish opinion among Men" that dwarves have no women, is just an Elvish myth; and that when Gimli gave the text in Appendix A*, he was preserving the secrecy that surrounds dwarven women while being 100% accurate: when they go on a journey, they dress and act like dwarf men, to keep their presence a secret.

(*The first paragraph in Appendix A cites this to him, and implies he told it to Merry and Pippin; the term is "derived", so it doesn't even seem to be a direct quote.)

There are certainly things that could be a "debacle". But a fact which is explicitly stated to be the subject of rumours and misconceptions, and which is always sourced to specific people (rather than being in Tolkien's authorial/authoritative voice) turning out to be... a rumour or misconception, isn't one of them.

(It would be very pleasing to see Disa having to travel, and dressing herself up as a male dwarf to do it, to reach the precise meaning of the Appendix A claim.)

hS

[Snowdog]

I’m honestly surprised at this thread. I would have expected people to be far more hostile and negative than they are. I have to say I’m disappointed. This show will be an absolute garbage fire(and honestly I’d probably rather watch a garbage fire) and you are acting as though it deserves any consideration at all?

Having done time on the IMDB page on fecebook battling racist trolls, it's actually a breath of fresh air to come here and have a discussion thread of The Rings of Power not full of hateful diatribe of the usual ilk.

I myself have always had mixed thoughts on this project. the recent reveals have moved me from the 'somewhat pessimistic' zone to the 'cautiously optimistic' zone on my tilt-o-meter. Is there things I find annoying? yes. but since Peter Jackson set the standard of wholesale changes to a complete story, I'm willing to give the producers of this project a wide berth in their use of artistic license.

[Morthoron]

... And the reason why you think the Hobbits depicted in this show will be west of the Misty Mountains is?

Go on, I'm waiting.

Given that I cited Of Dwarves and Men I might have thought that you'd engage reasonably here, but I guess that was expecting too much.

When you "Sigh" as if I didn't have a valid point or I'm clueless, courtesy goes out the window. The point of throwing in Hobbits where they don't belong is another bit of fan-fiction nonsense being foisted on this project. Saying "Hobbits existed" during the 2nd Age, does not in any way validate their appearance where they don't belong.

When I said there were no Hobbits west of the Misty Mountains (you know, where almost the entirety of the action in the early Second Age occurs), perhaps I should be more specific. 3300 years before the Hobbits are recorded actually entering Eriador, they had not even gotten to the Vales of Anduin. They are most likely east even of Greenwood the Great. Nowhere in the theater of action, no real reason for them to be appearing.

The Dunedain don't note their appearance for 3300 years, the Elves are unaware of their existence 3300 years before they entered Eriador, and Treebeard doesn't even include them in his list of creatures -- even though he and the Ents searched for years for the Entwives east of the Misty Mountains.

Tolkien mentions the Hobbits as follows:

In the middle of this Age [3rd Age] the Hobbits appear. Their origin is unknown (even to themselves) for they escaped the notice of the great, or the civilised peoples with records, and kept none themselves, save vague oral traditions, until they had migrated from the borders of Mirkwood, fleeing from the Shadow, and wandered westward, coming into contact with the last remnants of the Kingdom of Arnor.

Letter No. 131, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien

So plopping Hobbits whole and hardy and jolly and plump into a war of Elves, Numenoreans and Sauron is daft.

[Huinesoron]

3300 years before the Hobbits are recorded actually entering Eriador, they had not even gotten to the Vales of Anduin. They are most likely east even of Greenwood the Great. Nowhere in the theater of action, no real reason for them to be appearing.

I don’t know how clear it was in the article, but I believe the Silvan elf and the Mortal healer are both in the vaguely-defined "Southland" (maybe future Gondor/Rohan?). So there are at least two stars east of the Misty Mountains; the action isn't all Eriador.

I'm guessing the antler-carrying nomads are meant to be fairly eastward too - that would tie in with the Hobbit movies giving Thranduil a moose for no apparent reason - and the trailer seems to imply the Harfeet are in their general area.

(Plus, of course, individual Hobbits could go where their culture didn't - and not enter the records, because they're very good at going unseen...)

hS

[Legate of Amon Lanc]

I'm guessing the antler-carrying nomads are meant to be fairly eastward too - that would tie in with the Hobbit movies giving Thranduil a moose for no apparent reason - and the trailer seems to imply the Harfeet are in their general area.
Incidentally, any idea what are they? (I assume that's the question the creators want the audience to wonder about. If they were random Lossadan - as was my first thought - who are going to host Gil-Galad for one evening because he happens to be passing through their territory, they wouldn't deserve such spotlight.)

I wondered whether they are supposed to be just some generic "Northmen", as in, denizens of (some part of) Middle-Earth as opposed to the Númenoreans. It also pretty much makes sense that they would be some sort of around-the-Wilderland-area-type-inhabitants who could also get a Nazgul or two recruited from among themselves (or are they Men of the White Mountains? FUTURE GREEN ARMY OF FLUBBER? Incidentally I had completely forgotten that this plot exists and if the series is not going to address it I am going to eat my hat!).

Speaking of the trailer: I was surprised how close the aesthetics (or at least those we have seen) are to the PJ take on it. What looks like Lindon (?) is effectively copypaste of the last scene of LotR with more architecture (which would make sense). That peculiar elf in golden armour who looks like Jamie Lannister fighting Orcs (flashback of Galadriel's brother??? Hope not) looks horribly Haldirish.

The selection of scenes for the trailer is obviously to evoke the familiar movie LotR feel in the target audience, but it is closer than I thought. Which, everything else about the series aside, is kind of a pity because I had hoped that this might bring some slightly fresher, new aesthetic (but then again not the D&D aesthetic that it seemed to me on first sight, so this is marginally better than that. Same old, but better than the D&D handbook style).

So plopping Hobbits whole and hardy and jolly and plump into a war of Elves, Numenoreans and Sauron is daft.
(Plus, of course, individual Hobbits could go where their culture didn't - and not enter the records, because they're very good at going unseen...)
Seconding what Hui said here. One Hobbit does not a record in the books of the Wise make. If the Harfoots in question are going to be just the "Rosenkrantz&Guildenstern" and sort of observers from afar, or at most the third messengers to the second lieutenant of Mr. Hallstadstborn's fifth cavalry, then nobody is really going to be interested in recording them, are they? That's hardly "plopping Hobbits whole and hardy and jolly and plump into a war", so far from what we know it's plopping Harfoots (and possibly, like, two of them) sideways somewhere to the edge of some conflict they totally don't get. And the creators pretty much stated that the Harfoot characters are not going to play a major role in the big things (that would, indeed, be a no-no!).

But imagine if Frodo and co. had not had the Ring but just went to Minas Tirith for a road trip. Would people have noticed their presence? About as much as a travelling circus.

So I am not really very worried about the Hobbits (or Harfoot, as it were) appearing. (Yet.) Look, it could have been much worse. Compare to any LotR video game where Hobbits run amok slaughtering the Witch-King of Angmar and the other nazgul by dozens (intentional use of words).

I am doubtful about the series as much as the next guy but I'm also trying to be objective and sober in my judgment of it.

[Morthoron]

So I am not really very worried about the Hobbits (or Harfoot, as it were) appearing. (Yet.) Look, it could have been much worse. Compare to any LotR video game where Hobbits run amok slaughtering the Witch-King of Angmar and the other nazgul by dozens (intentional use of words).

I am doubtful about the series as much as the next guy but I'm also trying to be objective and sober in my judgment of it.

I believe the Second Age Hobbit Episode will be called:

"Stretching the Bounds of Credulity -- Or, How the Half-assed Halfling Hath Happened Here"

[William Cloud Hicklin]

I have now read TheOneRing.net's news story/press release on the Vanity Fair article on the Amazon Lord of the Game Of Ring Thrones, and have to conclude cynically that TORN has become nothing but a paid shill. (Which I suspected during the PJ movie days).

[William Cloud Hicklin]

... And the reason why you think the Hobbits depicted in this show will be west of the Misty Mountains is?

Go on, I'm waiting.



Given that I cited Of Dwarves and Men I might have thought that you'd engage reasonably here, but I guess that was expecting too much.

Actually, there is no record of Halflings anywhere until they appear in the eaves of Greenwood several centuries into the 3rd Age. There is no evidence for them in the 2nd whatsoever

[Boromir88]

I have now read TheOneRing.net's news story/press release on the Vanity Fair article on the Amazon Lord of the Game Of Ring Thrones, and have to conclude cynically that TORN has become nothing but a paid shill. (Which I suspected during the PJ movie days).

I'm not sure if they're paid for their PJ fanaticism (which actually makes it worse, imo, I mean you would have to pay me to go to their level of gushing I saw when the movies were out). I was surprised they weren't quite as zealous about The Hobbit movies, at least once they were released. But wow during the LOTR movies, it was scary how much they worshiped him.

[Galadriel55]

Personally, of all the new characters and concepts and plot (presumably - because again, this is speculation) introduced by the show, I find the hobbits / Harfeet least disturbing. Why? Because I see a way for them to remain a sort of small side reference without turning the whole thing into Morthoron's worst nightmare. ;) :p I can totally see them being side characters, whose main goal in the story is to stay out of sight - which they would end up doing with success but not without struggle. I don't insist on precisely sticking to the letter of the law, and I allow fanfiction to indulge its fancy, so long as the foundation of the world is not overturned by it. Treat it as headcanon.

I have much less faith in equally wholesome headcanon for the named canonical characters. Galadriel in particular. I think that if anything will disrupt the tranquility of my anticipation of the show, it will be her storyline. (I mean, it's a zen born largely of indifference, but now they're pushing things into it that I do care about, so it makes sense).

[Galadriel55]

Also, the trailer is out (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7v1hIkYH24).

I watched it, but I don't think I can digest it fully, because I just spent the last few hours creating Spock Isildur Terminator for the Books forum and now it's quite late and I don't have sufficient brainpower left for analysis.



A quick summary of scenes:

1. White City
Likely Numenor. Architecture vaguely resembling visuals of minas Tirith from the movies. Lone mountain in the background. Some giant statue, not unlike the Argonath. A harbour. I think that's sufficient hints. Romenna perhaps?

2. Meeple (and thus they shall remain until proven otherwise)
Mountainous landscape, Scottish highlands type. No idea. Pretty.
Two Meeple. (What's the singular of "meeple"? "Moople"?)

3. Faun-girl
Dunno, she just has this look like she's either a faun or a fairy or some Midsummer Night's Dream character.
Perhaps she is a hobbit ancestor?

4. Waterfall
On background of icy mountains, and ?river below.
Are these meant to be Misty Mountains? White Mountains?

5. The Wall
...And the wildlings scaling it. No, this is not GOT, this is only... GOT with different names?
On second viewing, this actually appears to be the same place as #4, with the waterfall just to the right of the screen.
And the dagger is the Two Trees one, which makes the climber... Galadriel? And is that a variation of the Star of Feanor on her shoulders? I have so many conflicting feelings about this. It is going to be ridiculously action-video-game-like, but the little references in the aesthetic choices are tickling my nerdiness. But they would need to explain why Galadriel is wearing Feanor's insignia.

6. Life of Pi
That raft with a lone figure on it... at least I didn't see a second person there in that flash.

7. Slo-mo Silvan
Dude. Skateboard Legolas has got nothing on this.

8. The Comet
Fallen star? Meteor? Earendil's engines went down? Rogue dragon?
Followed rapidly by a man looking up, which makes it look like the continuation of the same scene.
The man on a stone platform near water. It's carved with leaves around the edge, and there are yellow petals (or gold flakes?) on the ground. The man is wearing gold cloth stuff over armour, looks formal.
Dunno. Lorien with its golden leaves? Legitimately no idea.
Oooh, but Huey, you have an element to work into your Ring theory! Clearly this is either a meteor from which they will get the iron for a ring, or a ring was made under the sign of this comet and the celestial body somehow symbolizes air (or fire for the burning?).

9. Cavalry Charge
Looks like it's Galadriel leading it. Are they sure that the character is named Galadriel, and not Eowyn? Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference these days.
Some tall mountains in the distance but green plains under the horses' feet, which doesn't shake the image of Eowyn stealing Eomer's eored to play soldier.

10. Torchbearer and Goblin
Torchbearer has a quiver of arrows. Goblin looks like an ankylosaurus. Sorry, that's all I got.

11. Golden Wood
White bark, golden leaves - now this is probably Lorien.
Small river running through and dropping down a cliffside as a waterfall towards a larger river or lake. Perhaps the eastern border, where it comes close to Anduin.

12. Dwarf.
That's it. We've already seen the picture.

13. Excalibur!
No, it's - Elrond? possibly? - kneeling with a sword that's just propped up against a stone in a certain manner.
This is indoors - a cave? People around him in the background. Sort of reminds me of Henneth Annun in the books ( I actually don't remember what the Faramir scenes were in the movie and I have a feeling I am the better off for it).
The Elf of the Cave in a cave is not such a novel concept. I could even propose that this might be the early days of the outpost of Rivendell. Or perhaps he is visiting Moria.

14. Dwarven Princess
What was her name? Disa?
She appears to be praying, or doing some sort of ritual.
Her hands are still gold-stained. Conspiracy theorists, make your bets on the explanation behind that!

15. Life of Pi Part 2
Okay, now there are two people on the boat.

16. Fire
No idea, too fast. People escaping some explosion?

17. Dwarves
The Fathers of the Dwarves do what Gimli could not, and smash a stone with an axe in one strike.

18. Slo-mo Silvan Part 2
Dude. Legolas got nothing on this guy.
Can't glean much from background either.

19. Helm's Deep!
Well, some fight in the rain at night.
Lots of people in golden helmets and golden armour - or is that just the lighting? Guy in the front, who is yelling, has the helmet off. I still can't recognize him.
Looks like they are a defensive island being pressed from 3 (or more) sides by the dark-armoured army.

20. Hands
A large hand, dirt-stained, offered to and accepted by a small dirt-stained child's hand. Very abstract.


The voiceover / text:
[Female voice:]
Haven't you ever wondered what else is out there?
There's wonders in this world beyond our wandering.
I can feel it.

[Text:]
Before the King
Before the Fellowship
Before the Ring
A new Legend begins this Fall

(could this be a Harfoot preparing to wander off into the big scary world?

...and it's coming Sept 2, and disappointingly not Sept 22.





...I happened to scroll to the comments. The first few pages are a single quote - largely in Russian (anything to do with my cookies and browsing history, maybe? Or perhaps timezones - it's less linguistically unanimous lower down), there's one that looked Polish, one that looked Spanish (don't kill me if I'm wrong on these). Finally there's an English version: "Evil is not able to create anything new, it can only distort and destroy what has been invented or made by the forces of good". What other languages can I spot? ...Portugese, perhaps? German? Another Slavic language, perhaps Czech? And yet another one, which I cannot place more specifically than "Other Western Slavic". And another Romance quote - not sure if a variation on the Spanish or I'm actually missing a whole other language there. On the whole, a bunch of Russian quotes and a fair number of Polish (I think) quotes, though both have slight variations in wording; A good number of English; a sprinkling of others - I'm sure that if I kept scrolling I would see more languages. Ah, just as I was leaving the page, a variation! "The Shadow that bred them can only mock, it cannot make: not real things of its own".

So I googled it, and news articles report it as a multi-national smear campaign against the series. Make what you will of that. I am too tired to react, other than... they're not wrong, but it is worth the effort - creating this much negative attention? As opposed to pointedly ignoring it's existence? It's not like they're gonna stop it from happening... It's gonna happen, the posts aren't gonna stop it... So what's the point? Unless it's just too much frustration, and there is equally no chance maintaining the fatalistic zen, in which case I sympathize.


Dammit, this was supposed to be quick, and now it's midnight. >.<

[Michael Murry]

As King Theoden said after the first arrow flew, setting off the Battle of Helm's Deep:

"So, it begins."

Two additional takes on these "teaser" promotional visuals.

Amazon's Lord of the Rings Epic FAIL! The Vandalization of Tolkien and Fan ATTACKS have Begun
Nerdrotic (February 12, 2022)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qysw8A_ssRc

The Rings of Power: Tolkien in Name Only
Just Some Guy (February 15, 2022)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36lviVvo-jw

[Huinesoron]

As G55 says, we have the trailer now, and also two followup articles from Vanity Fair:

Teaser Trailer 1 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7v1hIkYH24) (Superbowl Trailer)
Secrets of 'The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Teaser' Trailer (https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2022/02/the-lord-of-the-rings-teaser-trailer-amazon) (Vanity Fair)
10 Burning Questions About Amazon’s 'The Rings of Power' (https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2022/02/10-burning-questions-about-amazons-the-rings-of-power) (Vanity Fair)

I'll obviously do a trailer response later, but for now I want to poke one specific point:

Names

The show's name-game is... kind of rubbish, actually. Ignoring the canon characters and places, here's what we've got so far:


Arondir - Silvan elf. Plausible Sindarin (maybe something like Arod+Nir, "Noble Tears"?), but as a Silvan elf he should be using a slightly different form. Even Legolas does this, rather than being pure Sindarin Laegolas.
Halbrand - Unspecified mortal on a raft. Tolerable Sindarin (Hal+Brand, "Tall and Towering"), which would make him... what, non-Numenorean Edain? It just feels like they've taken Brand (son of Bain son of Bard) and slapped an Edainic (specifically Haladin) prefix onto him.
Tirharad - Village in "the Southlands". Obvious Sindarin Tir+Harad, "Guard (of the) South", but I don't think Tir- would actually compound like that. Also: why does a mortal village have a Sindarin name?
Bronwyn - Mortal woman in Tirharad. But her name is Welsh. And not old-fashioned Welsh, which would be a clever way of extending the Old English/Old Norse 'translations'. It's just a modern Welsh name. (And apparently not much used in Wales, because -wyn is usually masculine.)
Carine - Isildur's sister. If written and pronounced as Carinë [Ka-REE-nay], looks like plausible Quenya (no obvious meaning, but could just be Car+inë, "Maker"). If pronounced as an English speaker would (ca-REEN), it's neither Quenya nor Adunaic, but looks more French.
Disa - dwarf princess. Okay, I know there's not a lot to work with, but this is literally the only known female dwarf name with an English feminine ending stuck on. (You couldn't find anything in the Eddas?!)
Elanor "Nori" Brandyfoot - I like her. She's adorable. I look forward to seeing her explore Middle-earth. But ye Valar that's a bad name. She's named for an Elvish flower which I don't think blooms anywhere east of Lindon at this point - certainly nowhere her family would have seen. The flower is yellow, which doesn't have anything to do with her (unlike Elanor Gardner). The name is abbreviated - fine, Hobbits do that - but to a canon (male!) dwarf name. And the surname combines her species name with a river that none of her people have ever seen. It's just... really bad.


I just... languages, and the names that come from them, were kind of Tolkien's whole deal. I would have expected them to put a lot more effort into making things fit properly.

So there we go! Finally, something I unambiguously dislike. :D

hS

[Huinesoron]

Okay, trailer review, using G55's numbering (http://forum.barrowdowns.com/showpost.php?p=734507&postcount=41), and drawing on the Vanity Fair reaction article (https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2022/02/the-lord-of-the-rings-teaser-trailer-amazon) (which seems to have extra information):


1. A lovely opening shot of what VF confirms to be Numenor. The archway has some nice patterning on it, and the ship looks like an interesting design. The tower (ooh, it's a lighthouse!) has a movie-Imladris feel to it, and presumably the Argonathalike is Elros. Almost has to be Romenna. The Meneltarma is nice and imposing, though I always pictured it taller than it is wide.

2. Flyover of the Meeple. This looks very like the famous flyover of the Fellowship all strung out in a line from the movie - it might even be the same filming location! I'm not convinced the Meeple are even characters; they may just be scenery to show that M-e is full of primitive nomads right now. (VF says they're "not particularly central to the story".) I feel like the valley behind gets more of a dramatic reveal than it really warrants; there's nothing there! Did they forget some SFX?

3. Nori! The name's still dumb, but this is Nori Brandyfoot (https://twitter.com/LOTRonPrime/status/1493253881651937283?cxt=HHwWhoCy9cyfjbkpAAAA), the Harfoot. She's almost certainly the voiceover as well. VF says the Harfeet live "within the forest and fields", so my guess is eastern Mirkwood (exactly as various people are saying upthread!). I think she's adorable.

4. Waterfall, and an ice-choked river running from it, leading into:

5. Galadriel climbing the ice-cliff beside said waterfall. VF says this "is clearly the Forodwaith", but that means they don't know. It's obviously the source of the rumours about the Helcaraxe appearing in episode 1, but yeah, we don't know. It's ice. Could be anywhere from the Grinding Ice to Mindolluin. I'm not impressed with her climbing technique; I wonder whether she's meant to have fallen from the top? Would explain why she's using her dagger to climb. There are at least three other billowing cloaks below her, suggesting a party of climbers/fallers.

Her 8-rayed star emblem makes a reappearance. It looks like it has uneven rays, which makes it not the Star of Feanor (which in any case should have 16). It could be based on the House Finarfin emblem, which has 8 'rays' and a central circle; but I think it's just a generic star for the High Elves.

6. Halbrand on his raft. The raft seems to have bits of sail, and what looks like a grille, so I think it's actually a chunk of wrecked ship. The colour scheme seems to match the Numenorean ship, so maybe he's a Numenorean mariner (and buddy of Isildur)? But then his name is in the wrong language...

7. Arondir in the woods, showing off his arrow-fu. Little bit silly, but oddly enough a quick Google confirms that catching an arrow in flight is physically possible. There's three arrows coming at him, and they look like they might be black-fletched (his are red) - Orcs?

8. The fireball. Flies over a gnarled-looking wood that I would parse as Mirkwood-y. This would make sense; see later.

8a. Gil-Galad (https://twitter.com/LOTRonPrime/status/1493253777415098372?cxt=HHwWiMCypcSZjbkpAAAA) looking up. Are those gold leaves? Have they put mellyrn in Lindon? Tolkien explicitly stated that they didn't grow there, though at least Gil-Galad was canonically gifted them (which is where Galadriel got hers). If the fireball is east of the Mountains, he might not actually be looking at it; there's no yellow glow on his face.

9. Galadriel, leading an armoured cavalry charge... well, could be anywhere from Forodwaith to Ithilien.

10. Galadriel again (I recognise her chainmail), in a cave with snow on the ground, finding a goblitroll thing; I think it's ice-encrusted. Putting this together with the waterfall and the claims about her "fool's errand" - she's hunting through the North for traces of evil, and oh look, she found some. Possibly she winds up in the Sea while trying to get home (shades of Arvedui) - ie, her 'crazy solo quest' is actually just the first couple of episodes, before she can get word back to Lindon that she was right after all.

11. Elves, forest, and a cliff over the sea. I reckon this is Lindon, and that could be Gil-Galad in the middle. It would match the image of Lindon in the Galadriel-Elrond reunion shot from the first VF article. So... yeah, either it's autumn, or TV!Gil-Galad has figured out how to grow mellyrn.

12. Prince Durin IV. The 10 Questions article (https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2022/02/10-burning-questions-about-amazons-the-rings-of-power) says he's the son of Durin III, which... I mean, it's not quite ruled out by the books and timelines, but would make the superstition that they were both reincarnations of Durin I a bit hard to cling to.

13. Elrond is not happy about that rock. He seems to be in Khazad-Dum, and I like the detail that he's got wing-patterning on his shoulders - his grandfather led the House of the Wing! I'm not sure what the rod is that he's holding - it's clearly of dwarf-make.

14. Disa, singing. The original VF article described this as a "scene-stealing" moment, and the later ones have talked about dwarves using chants to sound out the rock. I mean... sure?

15. Galadriel on Halbrand's raft. She's lost her armour, and might even be naked; she's also unbraided her hair for some reason. And onoes! She's an elf! It doesn't seem like she expects that to go down well.

16. The fireball has landed, and Nori is pulling The Stranger (https://twitter.com/LOTRonPrime/status/1493253972639076352?cxt=HHwWgMC-6fKkjbkpAAAA) out of it. Wild Mass Guessing on the internet says this could be one of the Istari, or maybe Sauron somehow. The producers are being very cagey about it, and seem to expect it to be an eagerly-discussed mystery. Not gonna lie, this looks kind of daft.

17. Prince Durin smashes a rock, while at least three older dwarves look on. VF want this to be a rock-smashing contest with Elrond. I mean... it could be the same rock? Would imply that the rod Elrond had was actually the handle of an axe. But that seems very silly.

18. Arondir attacking a ship. Could it be... a Numenorean ship? Is he fighting off Numenorean slave-takers who are attacking mortal villages? Please?

19. Gold armour, shields with trees on ("the tree of the High Elves" from the doors of Moria), and a blond elf we've not seen elsewhere looking very distressed at being attacked by Orcs. That's... it isn't... please tell me this isn't supposed to be The Death of Finrod. I don't ask for much, but please don't let that be Finrod. (The fire in the background could imply this is the same sequence as the one we first saw armoured Galadriel's photo in?)

20. Nori and the Stranger, holding hands. I guess they're going to go about together being mysterious and secretive. Even if he's not Gandalf, he's certainly implied to fill a Gandalf-like space. (Maybe he's Bom Tombadil! :D)


Overall? I don't hate it. Some of it's silly, but a trailer will always bend towards the most visually distinctive moments. I doubt Arondir spends his entire time catching arrows, and Galadriel almost certainly stands on the ground at some point. I am not sold on the fireball, but... well, so far we don't know anything about it, and I think I can allow them at least one Deus Ex Machina. We'll see where it goes.

I do really like the designs, and the varied colour palette! It might actually make it possible to tell everything apart! And the Lindon "mallorns" look a lot closer to my image of mellyrn than what Movie Lorien gave us.

Coming September 2nd, Tolkien's death-day. Umm... maybe that's a little on-the-nose.

hS

[Eomer of the Rohirrim]

My only comment on the trailer is that, visually, it looks nothing like the world of the Sil I have in my mind.

[Galadriel55]

My only comment on the trailer is that, visually, it looks nothing like the world of the Sil I have in my mind.

I like Numenor. I think that has potential. I also like some things purely visually, but they seem to be geographically misplaced or otherwise questionable, depending on their true identity.

Gold armour, shields with trees on ("the tree of the High Elves" from the doors of Moria), and a blond elf we've not seen elsewhere looking very distressed at being attacked by Orcs. That's... it isn't...*please*tell me this isn't supposed to be The Death of Finrod.


No. Noooooooooooo! Please don't!!!!!!!!!!!

So... yeah, either it's autumn, or TV!Gil-Galad has figured out how to grow*mellyrn.


Two roads diverged in two yellow woods,
And sorry I could not have it both
And be one geographic location.

So there we go! Finally, something I unambiguously dislike.*


:D

For Bronwyn - I wonder if she is somehow supposed to evoke Rohan's (Old English) -wyn endings in Eowyn, Theodwyn... But then don't pick a Welsh name to do the job.

[William Cloud Hicklin]

I'm not sure if they're paid for their PJ fanaticism (which actually makes it worse, imo, I mean you would have to pay me to go to their level of gushing I saw when the movies were out). I was surprised they weren't quite as zealous about The Hobbit movies, at least once they were released. But wow during the LOTR movies, it was scary how much they worshiped him.

Well, websites make their money from advertising, and the overwhelming bulk of the ads they carried were for WETA workshop and connected businesses, all tied to PJ or New Line. Add to that the remarkable number of "insider scoops" they published.

[Legate of Amon Lanc]

My first thoughts on the trailer were rather succint (mostly surprised by the closeness of the aesthetic to our late [figuratively] Mr. Jackson - Meeple valley a copypasted Rohan, the Rivendell-like setting with a "Council" of sorts, all Elves looking like Legolas only with short hair, male Dwarves looking JUST like PJ Dwarves, a cave-troll only being different in that it seems to have a beard or what? Which would be innovative, and nice for some Northern Troll, for warmth...), but I cannot resist to add a couple of ideas after reading these.

I completely agree on that Nori Brandyfoot must be the worst name of the year. With supposedly separating the Harfoots from the Hobbits by millennia, I was hoping for something along the lines of Déagol and Sméagol. Or even further back. Brandyfoot sounds like a proper Shire-dwelling holbytla. Shame on you, whoever came up with AND approved this name. Otherwise I'd say, as the classic would say, not great, not terrible.

Gil-Galad, to paraphrase Thorin Oakenshield, looks more like a trader than High King of Noldor. Or okay, he looks kingly all right - but he and Galadriel should have swapped places. He should be the one in the shiny silver armour ("his shining helm afar was seen"), and she should rather be the one looking like tsar's deputy.


16. The fireball has landed, and Nori is pulling The Stranger (https://twitter.com/LOTRonPrime/status/1493253972639076352?cxt=HHwWgMC-6fKkjbkpAAAA) out of it. Wild Mass Guessing on the internet says this could be one of the Istari, or maybe Sauron somehow. The producers are being very cagey about it, and seem to expect it to be an eagerly-discussed mystery. Not gonna lie, this looks kind of daft.
I absolutely did not pay attention to this when I watched it. But now your description made me somehow think about some sort of Lucifer-trope, "falling from heaven like a lightning". That could be any Maia (hopefully not Istari yet!!!), Sauron (cool by me) or another "thing of terror... flying from Thangorodrim..." *cough ifsomethinghadwings cough*


Coming September 2nd, Tolkien's death-day. Umm... maybe that's a little on-the-nose.


Are you familiar with the concept of the death of the author (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_the_Author)? Perhaps unintended, but most appropriate... :eek:

[Legate of Amon Lanc]

Tirharad - Village in "the Southlands". Obvious Sindarin Tir+Harad, "Guard (of the) South", but I don't think Tir- would actually compound like that. Also: why does a mortal village have a Sindarin name?

What if it's a Númenorean-built village, a "colony outpost", i.e. guarding against those barbarians? Think Roman outposts in Britain just after their first landing or whatnot. Bronwyn or whoever "native" Middle-Earthians can be just part of the population, or - the uncivilised barbarians they were - settled it after the builders were chased out (by Sauron's cronies? Ok, I am already spinning tales here), because I mean, existing working infrastructure.

And onoes! She's an elf! It doesn't seem like she expects that to go down well.
This may be one of my least favourite things in the trailer.
1) I grudgingly allowed to half-close my eyes when PJ had the pointy-eared Elves (and Hobbits!!! :rolleyes: Incidentally, did anyone ear-inspect the Harfeet?), but using it as THE defining characteristic is just WRONG. You should be able to recognise an Elf otherwise anyway. 2) Why does it imply that being an Elf is something wrong? Because that's what it indeed looks like. This is not Sapkowski.

I like Numenor. I think that has potential. I also like some things purely visually, but they seem to be geographically misplaced or otherwise questionable, depending on their true identity.

Well I first thought it was Lindon, because it looks just like the Grey Havens in LotR, only with more statues. Well, that's a pity. I hoped for a more different design for Númenor. Something more oriental-like, more over-the-top, massive. Think anything from Kremlin through Mezoamerican pyramids to Taj Mahal. Or at least in the Pharazonian era - maybe that will change later; I'd be very happy with that kind of development.

[William Cloud Hicklin]

"Dori Harfoot" - at a time when, if halflings existed at all - was millennia before the Hobbits adopted Westron around the settling of Bree, is just a cardinal illustration of the fact that the writers and showrunners don't know and, worse, don't care about the material they are pretending to "adapt."

What this is of course really is 3rd rate schlock fantasy with a ridiculous budget, with Tolkien branding casually slapped on at random like sponsors' logos on a racing car. This is no more "Middle-earth" than Caligula was "ancient Rome" Without even any good porn sequences.

[Huinesoron]

This may be one of my least favourite things in the trailer.
1) I grudgingly allowed to half-close my eyes when PJ had the pointy-eared Elves (and Hobbits!!! :rolleyes: Incidentally, did anyone ear-inspect the Harfeet?), but using it as THE defining characteristic is just WRONG. You should be able to recognise an Elf otherwise anyway. 2) Why does it imply that being an Elf is something wrong? Because that's what it indeed looks like. This is not Sapkowski.


I don't think we can see Nori's ears, but aren't Hobbits the only ones we know had pointed ears? Tolkien Gateway says it's from Letter 27, and I think it's sometimes used to argue that elves did too (it's the "slightly pointed and 'elvish'" line).

If Halbrand is a Numenorean - which I theorise he is - then in these latter days he may never have seen an elf. We know that back in the First Age, the likes of Turin could be mistaken for elves; I don't think it's implausible that Numenoreans who lived (just about) in sight of Eressea would be of similar appearance.

As for #2: if Halbrand is Numenorean, then for a thousand years or more Numenorean society has been turning hard against the elves. I don't think Galadriel would be overly trusting of a people who are claiming most of Middle-earth as their own personal slave-taking playground, and literally had a king who called himself "Lord of the West".

(Also, she might just be offended he's playing with her hair! :D)

hS

[Kuruharan]

but since Peter Jackson set the standard of wholesale changes to a complete story, I'm willing to give the producers of this project a wide berth in their use of artistic license.

I don't agree with this philosophical perspective at all. In my view just because Jackson did an awful job does not entitle his successors to sequentially do as bad and just a little bit worse.

Speaking of the trailer: I was surprised how close the aesthetics (or at least those we have seen) are to the PJ take on it. What looks like Lindon (?) is effectively copypaste of the last scene of LotR with more architecture (which would make sense). That peculiar elf in golden armour who looks like Jamie Lannister fighting Orcs (flashback of Galadriel's brother??? Hope not) looks horribly Haldirish.

I thought it was known that they were going to use the WETA aesthetic, which in itself is not very accurate to what Tolkien wrote, particularly when it came to armor.

I cannot fathom why anybody, even out of their right mind, would don antlers in such a manner as is depicted outside of a religious ceremony. You would get blown over by every gust of wind. Perhaps that is the point and these people periodically travel by wind power..?

Also, "Galadriel dangling from cliff by knife" may become my new way of saying "Thorin dancing on Smaug's nose."

As Hui mentions, the big fireball makes me think that it is meant to be Sauron fleeing east or otherwise going somewhere.

[Boromir88]

I haven't had a chance to work my way all the way through the article, but some things that stood out to me from this interview (https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2022/02/10-burning-questions-about-amazons-the-rings-of-power) with the show-runners.

There's not an over-reliance on CGI:

Payne promises they will be using “every single trick in the book—old school, new school, everything—in a way that we are told no one has attempted.” Some of the stranger monsters may be digital confections, but when orc-like baddies attack The Rings of Power heroes, it’s guys in suits, not piles of pixels.

Ok, that's a good thing.

Confirmation on what material they had access to:

So what did Amazon buy? “We have the rights solely to The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, The Return of the King, the appendices, and The Hobbit,” Payne says. “And that is it. We do not have the rights to The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, The History of Middle-earth, or any of those other books.”

Apparently they can't contradict any known event, even from works that they don't have the rights to, but the 2nd Age material in what they do have the copyright for is very limited.

Perhaps an inkling of what the prior VF article said about Elrond being a politician. My immediate thought was no, because I have in my head Tolkien calling Denethor a politician, and Tolkien commenting that:

...and the most improper job of any man, even saints (who at any rate were at least unwilling to take it on), is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity.~Letter 52

But it appears young Elrond's storyline is going to be focused on a friendship with Durin IV, which Payne says Elrond is trying to "repair their friendship." Still not quite what I think when I hear "Elrond," but maybe not as bad as when I first heard him described as a "politician."

[mhagain]

Apologies for dragging up Hobbits again, but Tolkien did describe them as clearly having a prehistory before they became known, having already divided into the three subtypes. As for where they are located in this time period - the objections are making assumptions that stretch credibility. Why can they not be living around the Sea of Rhun, for example?

I'm not saying it's a good thing that there are Hobbits in this, and I'd personally prefer if there weren't. What I am saying is that their presence doesn't actually contradict anything written, and it shouldn't take huge feats of mental agility to see that.

On the other hand, Nori Brandyfoot is a terrible name, and really shows how little the creators understand the naming schemes Tolkien used. The correct approach would have been to pull something from an ancient language. Westron didn't exist yet (well it did, but only in the sense that Westron is Adunaic) and anyway if the Hobbits were further east they wouldn't have mixed with those Mannish cultures, but there are plenty of alternatives.

Disa is an OK name for a Dwarf woman. Dís already exists in the Appendices as the mother of Fili and Kili so Disa is OK.

Most of the other created names are of the Nori Brandyfoot type to me - something that sounds Tolkien-ish in a throwaway handwavey sort of way, but nothing he would have actually used himself.

I think I don't like the trailer, but there's really too little in it to form a fair judgement on. I'm keeping faith that the Tolkien Estate will prevent obvious stupidity like changing how Finrod dies.

I don't buy that the creators have rights to nothing aside from the Hobbit and LotR material. That map of Númenor they released is straight out of Unfinished Tales, and Unfinished Tales is the only place it exists, so there must at least be some kind of arrangement for selective use of other material.

Right now my biggest concern is around the Celebrimbor stuff, and the trailer did nothing for that. Númenor can be covered by material from the LotR appendices, G&C did a whole lot of moving around and not much else, so their story would need to be invented anyway, but the full Celebrimbor story only exists in Unfinished Tales (with a very compressed overview in the Silmarillion) and it's such an essential part of the overall story of the Rings. If the creators don't have access to this material I can't see them being able to do this story properly at all, and that's a huge concern: the series is called "Rings of Power" after all.

[Huinesoron]

Let's talk about Gil-Galad.

https://i.imgur.com/zILV8SQl.png

Despite all the devoted Tolkien fans out on the 'net who are horrified - purely on the basis of the difference from canon, and definitely nothing else that rhymes with dracism - by such things as a non-white elf and a non-white dwarf, you know what I haven't seen? Any complaints about Gil-Galad, who looks nothing like his canon self.

His sword was long, his lance was keen
His shining helm afar was seen
The countless stars of heaven's field
Were mirrored in his silver shield

Gil-Galad's colours are blue and silver; they're the colours on his emblem (https://www.symbols.com/symbol/gil-galad-heraldic-device), and descriptions like "into darkness fell his star" imply that he actually wore star-silver. It's even in his name! But the series has put him in gold.

Also, we know now the colour of his hair, and it's not black. From NoME, 2.IV (dated 1969):

As in the name 'Gil-galad' 'star of radiance' given to Finwain, last High-king of the Eldar, because of the radiance of his silver hair, armour, and shield that, it is said, could even in the moonlight be seen from many leagues afar.

So - unlike dwarf or Nandor skin colour - we have an explicit, late statement from Tolkien that aligns with his later thoughts on Gil-Galad's ancestry (as a descendent of Finarfin, he is kin to Elwe and thus has silver hair in his ancestry, same as Galadriel). And yet the showmakers choose to ignore that.

But y'know what? That's actually fine. Tolkien changed his mind about Gil-Galad's name and ancestry often enough that treating one comment on his hair as definitive is silly; and the point of putting him in gold is to a) show him to be royal, b) distinguish him easily from the other elves, and c) tie him thematically to the apparently mallorn-bearing Lindon. A visual adaptation is very different to a written story; you have to consider different things. (Most notably: written dialogue says everyone's name every couple of lines! Nobody wants TV to have to do the comic book thing, "Gil-Galad! It is I, Galadriel, returned from my meeting with Elrond here!")

Looking at both the trailer and his poster (https://twitter.com/LOTRonPrime/status/1489253089404096521), we can see that Gil-Galad is carrying that tall, 8-pointed star that also appears on Galadriel's armour. It's not the Star of Feanor, which has even arms and 8 additional rays. It could be partly based on the uneven star on Gil-Galad's emblem, but my guess is it's just a generic "Star of the High Elves".

He's also wearing a lot of rings - at least five. I'm not sure I like the look - though really, how often are we going to get a closeup of his hands? I guess it's a reference to the fact that he winds up carrying both Vilya and Narya; or perhaps it's just implying that rings are a massive Elvish vice, and that's why Celebrimbor started making them?

As for the robes: they kind of look like they were made for the poster. There's all that overlaid gold wrapping in intricately embroidered cloth; and then, when you get above the poster, it's a plain gold ?tunic / ?sheet of metal with crossed bandoliers.

And no crown. From Turgon and Finrod we know that elven kings did wear crowns, and the movies even gave Elrond a tiara - so why does the High King not get one? Maybe he just doesn't wear it except on state occasions (perhaps this shot takes place in his back garden).

I don't buy that the creators have rights to nothing aside from the Hobbit and LotR material. That map of Númenor they released is straight out of Unfinished Tales, and Unfinished Tales is the only place it exists, so there must at least be some kind of arrangement for selective use of other material.

This has been speculated. They've bought the TV rights to LotR + Hobbit, but the Estate is involved in a way they weren't for the movies. As you say, they must have granted specific permission to use the map, so they're clearly considering things on a case-by-case basis.

Personally, I hope they're being 'generous'/lenient enough to let the story run as it does in Tolkien's texts. Things like: Tar-Miriel should be forcibly married to Pharazon, and should attempt to climb Meneltarma at the last. Otherwise, you'd be doing the character a complete disservice. Some things (like how Finrod dies) can be worked around, but to do that with Miriel would mean writing her out entirely.

hS

[Legate of Amon Lanc]

I don't think we can see Nori's ears, but aren't Hobbits the only ones we know had pointed ears? Tolkien Gateway says it's from Letter 27, and I think it's sometimes used to argue that elves did too (it's the "slightly pointed and 'elvish'" line).
Fair enough. I have to say that here I am a prisoner to my own "headcanon" based on my early readings and perception of the world where, as opposed to all other mainstream fantasy, Elves did not have pointed ears; and Hobbits' description in all the commonly accessible sources absolutely does not mention any difference besides the size, curly hair and hairy feet. This is, I guess, the case of super-thorough nitpicky research on something that is not particularly clearly stated versus generic overall impression, and I, unusually, went with the latter.

In any case, my point about pointy ears being the decisive factor in recognising an Elf stands: it should not be like that. You should recognise an Elf by starlight in their eyes or whatever. But that said, granted, I understand that in the cinema, the former is the easiest way of doing it, also for the bulk audience who already are used to pointy-ears being the distinctive feature of the Elves.

(But I still think that is wrong simply because if having some clearly "nonhuman" body part was the difference between the races, then exactly the case of all Túrins etc being mistaken for Elves would be pretty different. If your world is inhabited by "normal" people and then people with an extra limb, third eye or pointy ears, you are going to focus on that characteristic and it would be the foremost in your mind at all times. Also then raises the question if it were so, why was it never described when anyone from Bilbo to Éomer first saw the Elves etc.)


As for #2: if Halbrand is Numenorean, then for a thousand years or more Numenorean society has been turning hard against the elves. I don't think Galadriel would be overly trusting of a people who are claiming most of Middle-earth as their own personal slave-taking playground, and literally had a king who called himself "Lord of the West".
But that would be the explanation for her suspicion of him, yet the trailer shot (anyway, it is just a trailer shot) is framed the way that he is the one who is surprised what sort of alien impostor (or perhaps what sort of species he thought has been extinct) this might be.

I cannot fathom why anybody, even out of their right mind, would don antlers in such a manner as is depicted outside of a religious ceremony. You would get blown over by every gust of wind. Perhaps that is the point and these people periodically travel by wind power..?
I am too stupefied, but well, I guess we have to wait to see more about them. We don't even know who exactly they are. Maybe they are just hunters returning from killing the Antlered-Spawn of Glaurung.

There's not an over-reliance on CGI:
Certainly a good thing; even though in this era, after two decades of amazement by the possibilities of CGI (effectively started by PJ's LotR, no less), there is nowadays a bit of a revival of "good ol' school puppets and real stuff" (cf. recent Star Wars). It does not make it necessarily "better", it simply is "the new mainstream" to have a bit of "real stuff" in your film.

But it appears young Elrond's storyline is going to be focused on a friendship with Durin IV, which Payne says Elrond is trying to "repair their friendship." Still not quite what I think when I hear "Elrond," but maybe not as bad as when I first heard him described as a "politician."
Well, let us anyway remember that these characters have certain development before them (HOPEFULLY!).

I mean, if in the first episode we are going to see Elrond being like, say, "I am illiterate and I hate books", I can already see fans screaming that this is not Elrond, but then the series is going to show how he meets Celebrían and she shows him a book and he is like "meh, no way!" and then he starts reading it and becomes enthralled, and then becomes an expert on Moon-letters, then I say, this is the proper way to do it. Same goes for being a wily politician or anything else.

Apologies for dragging up Hobbits again, but Tolkien did describe them as clearly having a prehistory before they became known, having already divided into the three subtypes. As for where they are located in this time period - the objections are making assumptions that stretch credibility. Why can they not be living around the Sea of Rhun, for example?

I'm not saying it's a good thing that there are Hobbits in this, and I'd personally prefer if there weren't. What I am saying is that their presence doesn't actually contradict anything written, and it shouldn't take huge feats of mental agility to see that.
Basically this. It may be good, may be bad, but it is within artistic license and it is a plausibility that the proto-Hobbits lived anywhere outside Eriador. Or heck, if you really really stretched it, they could even have lived somewhere in Eriador in the beginning, then sometime in the middle of the Second Age be chased away for some reason (say, Númenorean raids), live somewhere in the East for some thousand years, and then move into Anduin Valleys.

On the other hand, Nori Brandyfoot is a terrible name, and really shows how little the creators understand the naming schemes Tolkien used. The correct approach would have been to pull something from an ancient language. Westron didn't exist yet (well it did, but only in the sense that Westron is Adunaic) and anyway if the Hobbits were further east they wouldn't have mixed with those Mannish cultures, but there are plenty of alternatives.
Indeed. I don't know how it was possible, when doing Tolkien, to overlook the central subject of language, as it seems to be the case at the moment. I mean, if the Harfoots either were named something like Déagol or at least something close to the upper-half of the Hobbit family trees, it would be okay. Nori is a Dwarf.


Despite all the devoted Tolkien fans out on the 'net who are horrified - purely on the basis of the difference from canon, and definitely nothing else that rhymes with dracism - by such things as a non-white elf and a non-white dwarf, you know what I haven't seen? Any complaints about Gil-Galad, who looks nothing like his canon self.

His sword was long, his lance was keen
His shining helm afar was seen
The countless stars of heaven's field
Were mirrored in his silver shield

Gil-Galad's colours are blue and silver; they're the colours on his emblem (https://www.symbols.com/symbol/gil-galad-heraldic-device), and descriptions like "into darkness fell his star" imply that he actually wore star-silver. It's even in his name! But the series has put him in gold.
Literally what I said in my previous post. Gil-Galad should be the one in Galadriel's "Joan of Arc" armour.


Personally, I hope they're being 'generous'/lenient enough to let the story run as it does in Tolkien's texts. Things like: Tar-Miriel should be forcibly married to Pharazon, and should attempt to climb Meneltarma at the last. Otherwise, you'd be doing the character a complete disservice. Some things (like how Finrod dies) can be worked around, but to do that with Miriel would mean writing her out entirely.
Literally this. If it is true that the Estate is granting some tidbits here and there on a case-by-case basis, then this would be the good piece that should be included. Besides, for instance the Meneltarma thing is such a stunning idea for cinema that I can literally see it in my mind. Of all things, that should be put on-screen. (And you could even shamelessly make it akin to PJ's Frodo&Sam upon Mount Doom-ending, intentionally referencing it, only instead of fire having water - and that would be all perfect as far as I am concerned.)

[Huinesoron]

Besides, for instance the Meneltarma thing is such a stunning idea for cinema that I can literally see it in my mind. Of all things, that should be put on-screen. (And you could even shamelessly make it akin to PJ's Frodo&Sam upon Mount Doom-ending, intentionally referencing it, only instead of fire having water - and that would be all perfect as far as I am concerned.)

...you're a monster.

---

Tar-Miriel clings to the rock of the Meneltarma, her finery all in tatters, the crown Pharazon forced on her washed away. Below her, the towers of Armenelos are falling; as we watch, the great dome of Sauron's temple cracks and falls to the waves.

Above her, the Holy Mountain towers, wreathed in stormclouds. It is so close now, but still impossibly far. There is no way she can reach it.

Unless...

We see movement, at first seeming to be merely the stirring of the clouds: a downward ripple, as if something is falling through them. It repeats. Lightning flashes. The clouds part - and the Eagles of the Lords of the West emerge.

They are vast and terrible and beautiful - barely even birds any more, their claws clasping lightning, their wings a shadow that blots out the sun. But we can see something in their eyes - not rage or hate, but a pity so deep it becomes something else.

They swoop down from the storm, towards the waters, their eyes fixed on Miriel. She struggles upright, raising her hands in appeal; we see her lips move, forming the prayer to Eru that should have been spoken in the mountaintop hallows. We are with the Eagles now, watching her come closer, until she is covered by their beating wings...

... and they pass over, flying out of the storm, and the wild waters consume Tar-Miriel, last Queen of Numenor.

---

Because sometimes, the Eagles don't come.

And you're a monster for putting it in my head. :mad: ;)

hS

[Legate of Amon Lanc]

...you're a monster.
That is one of my best qualities. :smokin:

Because sometimes, the Eagles don't come.
Yes, I did not want to state it so bluntly, but that is exactly what I was thinking.

And you wrote it so beautifully that now I do want to see it. If any of the Amazon team is reading this, I beg you...

[mhagain]

It occurs to me that the First Age stuff is easily solved. There's enough material in the LotR Appendices to form an outline that can be usable as a prologue, and then all that needs to be done is show some non-specific scenes of Elves and Men in combat. So we could very easily be shown, say, Finrod in combat (at one of the earlier battles), together with a voiceover that just says he died but without explaining how. Fingolfin and Fingon don't actually appear in the Appendices, not even by name. Turgon does but only as a fleeting reference. Of all the First Age Elven Kings, Finrod is the one with most information about him, and we're told he was King of Nargothrond, brother of Galadriel, and gave his life to save Beren (but nothing more specific).


There's also the matter of Gildor Inglorion, with Inglorion meaning "son of Inglor", and Inglor being an earlier name for Finrod from first edition times, but that's probably best kept away from.


For the Second Age, the biggest hole is, as I've said, the story of Celebrimbor. The material in LotR is so thin as to be virtually non-existent, and even if the show can supplement it with the Silmarillion it's barely better. They absolutely need Unfinished Tales for this, particularly if they need to present it in a matter that doesn't contradict Unfinished Tales. Doing a story of Celebrimbor without UT, but also without contradicting UT, would be absurd, and the only solution would be to put the whole matter of the Rings creation and theft by Sauron behind the scenes. Which would also be absurd for a show named "Rings of Power".


On that basis I refuse to believe that the show doesn't have this material, but I guess we'll see.


Everything else seems adequately covered. Númenor, on a quick glance through LotR and comparison with Akallabeth, is very well-covered, but it would, I agree, be a shame to lose the Miriel story. Galadriel is very thinly-covered again, but there's no real detail there anyway, which would free the show up to invent things. Lindon, more or less likewise. And so with pretty much everything else.


If I were to fan-theory about the timeline compression, something that might work might be placing Sauron's capture and imprisonment in Númenor directly after the Númenoreans rout Sauron from Eriador. In other words, a merging of Tar Minastir and Ar Pharazon. There's not a huge amount of info in the Tale of Years (or any other source, barring the Númenorean king list) for the gap between the two anyway, so that should be very doable.

[William Cloud Hicklin]

Yes, one could cobble together a Second Age storyline from Appendices A and B. Especially since, as per the showrunner, the series only takes place in the last century or so of the Age: Isildur's lifetime, and the Fall of Numennor and the Last Alliance are covered laconically but decently..

But it should be kept in mind that such a storyline only could, hypothetically, be done. There was never any guarantee that it would be, because there was never any guarantee that the job would be entrusted to writers of any skill or sensitivity. And now it is apparent that they possess neither; they can no more comprehend what they have been given to work with than a tribe of cave men could comprehend a smartphone. Every single thing about the reveal reeks of cluelessness, and the replacement of Tolkien with schlock standard-issue Genre Fantasy.

Whether or not they get hair color or skin color or the basics of nomenclature right is just the surface of it, and really unimportant except as a symptom of the disease: total incapacity and incomprehension, Cardi B fans confronted by the Missa Solemnis, Orcs in Lothlorien.

Now, I don't think it's necessary that to count as a "true fan" one has to have read the Athrabeth or the Statute of Finwe and Miriel, or even the Silmarillion for that matter. But if we take The Lord of the Rings on its own terms, it is palpable on every page that they are in the same universe, that Frodo and Aragorn and all the rest live in the same reality that encompasses the high seriousness of the more recondite works.

The Athrabeth could not exist in this Amazon travesty. There is no room for a philosphical framework here, because the only framework there is is "how do we work this hackneyed plot device into the story?" The most expensive television production in history has less intellectual depth than a decent superhero flick: nothing but an assemblage of lazy cliches. The problem with General Galadriel in her silly plate armor is not wther it is "canon" or "faithful to the books," but rather, and far more egregiiously, that Warrior Wimmen are a tired old pop-culture trope by now (dear God, James Cameron made Terminator 2 and Aliens back in the eighties!), and Amazon Galadriel (ha!) is just a reflection of an impotence of creativity, an inability to conceive of a mighty woman in any terms other than the worn-out masculine framework of hitting things with sharp objects and climbing glaciers with really, really inadequate mountaineering equipment. Tolkien, a man born in Victoria's reign, could manage it, but not these contemporary Hollywood hacks.

I have to say, this has caused me to ameliorate somewhat my disdain for PJ's LR, simply by demonstrating that it could have been so, so much worse.

[Boromir88]

Not to give Lommy more cringes, but just thinking about Galadriel being a water-bender because, you know she has the "Ring of Water."

Clearly, Elrond being a politician would make sense to get Vilya, the "Ring of Air," to help with all the hot-air politicians have to spew.

I seem to vaguely recall that at some point Gil-galad had Narya, but ends up giving it to Cirdan. "The Ring of Fire" hmm..Gil-galad being engulfed in flames in his battle against Sauron, could have just been fire-bending gone wrong. Or maybe Cirdan figured out a good insurance scam when his ships catch fire - I mean he always has blaming the Noldor to fall back on.

[Morthoron]

Apologies for dragging up Hobbits again, but Tolkien did describe them as clearly having a prehistory before they became known, having already divided into the three subtypes. As for where they are located in this time period - the objections are making assumptions that stretch credibility. Why can they not be living around the Sea of Rhun, for example?

I'm not saying it's a good thing that there are Hobbits in this, and I'd personally prefer if there weren't. What I am saying is that their presence doesn't actually contradict anything written, and it shouldn't take huge feats of mental agility to see that.

My comments regarding Hobbits were only part of my disdain for the whole. Taken in total, and based on a trailer and an article, it seems every superfluously silly storyline and fan-fictional foible of Peter Jackson has been magnified by the producers here -- and we haven't even gotten to the release of the series. The hapless heaping helping of Halflings is just a symptom of a complete disregard for Tolkien's works.

Do Hobbits exist in the 2nd Age? Sure. Do they need to be in a story that literally has nothing whatsoever to do with them, and who Tolkien literally said do not appear until the middle of the 3rd Age? No, evidently they were only added as a sop for a certain demographic of LOTR film-fan who wants to see the Shire again but can't afford to fly to New Zealand.

Galadriel, for instance, is demeaned as some impetuous Elven Valkyrie in plate armor (yeah, plate armor always cracks me up in Middle-earth), seeking some vengeful vendetta against foes who no longer exist. Given Galadriel is an Elda born in Valinor, who beheld the Two Trees, intuitively saw the malingering evil in Fëanor, crossed the Helcaraxë, and had a millenia-long stay learning at the feet of Melian the Maia, I don't see her as being impetuous, or needing to don armor to be like one of the guys, for that matter. Not to mention all of her brothers died in the 1st Age, Morgoth is locked away, the balrogs are destroyed or hidden away in the bowels of the earth, and Sauron is still Annatar (isn't he?).

As William Cloud Hicklin correctly concluded, Galadriel's appearance reeks of the warrior woman trope, and detracts from the innate abilities and wisdom that made Galadriel one of the most powerful beings in Arda -- this might as well be the cartoon Heavy Metal with a Middle-earth overlay. Perhaps if they fitted Galadriel with a steel-cupped brassiere....

And stranded on a raft with a mortal? Let's ignore the idea that yachting was not one of Galadriel's pastimes, but the mortal grabs her by the hair? An Elf would not survive such effrontery on her person; therefore, I wonder if the mortal is summarily tossed from the raft, and whether his fingers were still intact.

Again, faux pas strictly from a trailer and article. That they would advertise it that way leads me to the inexorable conclusion that this will be a high-priced Elf and Sorcery boondoggle fit for a new World of Warcraft MMORPG. I will lay odds that the game(s) are already in development.

[Boromir88]

Do Hobbits exist in the 2nd Age? Sure. Do they need to be in a story that literally has nothing whatsoever to do with them, and who Tolkien literally said do not appear until the middle of the 3rd Age? No, evidently they were only added as a sop for a certain demographic of LOTR film-fan who wants to see the Shire again but can't afford to fly to New Zealand.

I think that demographic is larger than you believe it to be, or I should say the demographic isn't just film-fans. It was either Milton Waldman, or one of publishers when Tolkien was trying to get the Silmarillion published that said one of the essential problems with the Silm is "it contained no hobbits." This was decades before the films were made, but I think proves a point that people wanted to read about Tolkien's hobbits long before Jackson's adaptation.

I stand by my previous comment about the 2 Harfoot characters (but because of Legate, I need to add the caveat "if only"). The show runners have said the harfoots are included to fill in a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern type role. If it's only that role, then they would have no direct involvement in resolving the plot or significant interaction with the characters in the series. They would essentially be travelers in the background, translating information to the audience, so their role would be directly passing information to the audience, and not the in-story plot or its characters. Similar to the fox passing through in the chapter Three is Company. In my opinion, that's a creative way to include characters, who are known to be able to avoid being spotted by the "big folk," and not be disrespectful to Tolkien.

Now if the Harfoots take a significant involvement in the battles, or events, interacting with characters, resolving the conflicts then that would be 2 middle-fingers to Tolkien. As well as make them liars, or seriously not understanding the roles of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in a story.

Galadriel, for instance, is demeaned as some impetuous Elven Valkyrie in plate armor (yeah, plate armor always cracks me up in Middle-earth), seeking some vengeful vendetta against foes who no longer exist. Given Galadriel is an Elda born in Valinor, who beheld the Two Trees, intuitively saw the malingering evil in Fëanor, crossed the Helcaraxë, and had a millenia-long stay learning at the feet of Melian the Maia, I don't see her as being impetuous, or needing to don armor to be like one of the guys, for that matter. Not to mention all of her brothers died in the 1st Age, Morgoth is locked away, the balrogs are destroyed or hidden away in the bowels of the earth, and Sauron is still Annatar (isn't he?)

There is more than one way to get to the same final location. Galadriel goes through a ton of growth, and is much different by the Lord of the Rings, the Galadriel that most people are going to be familiar with. A film or series doesn't have the same amount of time to expand and show growth in characters. It doesn't have the benefit of time to explain in a few sentences the passage of time and how a character changes...

'Galadriel was the greatest of the Noldor, except Fëanor maybe, though she was wiser than he, and her wisdom increased with the long years...and she grew to be tall beyond the measure even of the women of the Noldor; she was strong of body, mind, and will, a match for both the loremasters and the athletes of the Eldar in the days of their youth.' ~History of Galadriel and Celeborn

Now if one wants to show growth in a character from a movie or series, how can it be done to show that "Galadriel's widom increased with the long years?" Stories have to have their characters grow, as aggravating as it was to see a weak and uncertain Aragorn, one of your main characters has to grow throughout the story. You don't get the luxury of translating Aragorn's 80 year backstory in a few hours of screen time.

Sure I agree Galadriel in the 2nd Age is probably not the same Galadriel from her rebellion days, but showing how Galadriel does change as a character, that is she wasn't always the Galadriel from Lord of the Rings, would be an accurate portrayal of her growth. It doesn't fit the timeline, but the timeline has to be compressed, and characters in all stories have to show growth.

She fought against Feanor in the Kinslaying:

Even after the merciless assault upon the Teleri and the rape of their ships, though she fought fiercely against Feanor in defense of her mother's kin, she did not turn back. Her pride was unwilling to return, a defeated suppliant for pardon; but now she burned with desire to follow Feanor with her anger to whatever lands he might come, and to thwart him in all ways that she could.

Unless you can convince me that when Tolkien writes Galadriel "fought fiercely against Feanor", he doesn't mean she actually picked up arms "in defense of her mother's kin" then I see no problem with depicting Galadriel as being able to wield a blade, or any other type of weapon.

From her earliest years she had a marvellous gift of insight into the mind of others, but judged them with mercy and understanding, and she withheld her goodwill from none save only Feanor. In him she perceived a darkness that she hated and fear, though she did not perceive that the shadow of the same evil had fallen upon the minds of all the Noldor, and upon her own.

Yes she perceived the evil in Feanor, but also note her pride, her own anger, and the inability to perceive that some piece of Melkor's corruption had fallen "upon the minds of all the Noldor, and upon her own."

She tells Frodo when she's tested and offered the Ring:

"You begin to see with a keen eye. I do not deny that my heart has greatly desired to ask what you offer. For many long years I had pondered what I might do, should the Great Ring come into my hands, and behold! It was brought within my grasp."~The Mirror of Galadriel

This would have to be Galadriel talking about her 2nd Age self, because the One Ring wasn't made until the 2nd Age, and she admits her "heart has greatly desired" to ask for the Great Ring to come into her grasp and "many long years pondered" what she might do with it. Again, this proves a point she might not be a warrior who would fight "fiercely against Feanor," but she was still not the same Galadriel Frodo meets in Lothlorien.


It was not until two long ages more had passed, when at last all that she had desired in her youth came to her hand, the Ring of Power and the dominion of Middle-earth of which she had dreamed, that her wisdom was full grown and she rejected it, and passing the last test departed from Middle-earth for ever.~The History of Galadriel and Celeborn


I'd make a case that 2nd Age Galadriel would not have rejected the Ring of Power if it had come within her grasp then.

[Boromir88]

I'd also just like to point out the criticism of depicting a young Galadriel being an armored up fighter smells of sexism when the same criticism isn't made that depicts Elrond as a fighter.

While it's true Elrond is mentioned a few times being in a position of command, leading an army, or being second-in-command to Gil-galad's forces in the Last Alliance, there is actually no description of him fighting, as in performing the action of "fighting." Galadriel is specifically mentioned to having "fought fiercely against Feanor" in his attack on Alqualonde.

Elrond is in a position of commanding an army (but being a leader of an army in battle doesn't necessarily mean you physically fought in that battle), so I think it's a fair assumption to make that he would have fought, or at least be armored and wielding a weapon to fight if he had to. However, those are just assumptions we make, there's no actual text describing Elrond physically fought anyone in the Last Alliance and Siege of Barad-dur. He says that him and Cirdan stood with Gil-galad when Gil-galad wrestled Sauron, but that's the only action described. Actually something that's associated to Elrond more is he's mentioned as being a skilled healer, arguably the best healer, so one could easily assume he was at the battle in the capacity of being a medic/healer (and 2nd in command). That would be another assumption, but my point being there's more textual evidence to have a warrior, armored up Galadriel than there is of Elrond...yet I don't ever hear anyone griping about Elrond's armored up depiction in PJ's films.

[Galadriel55]

I'd also just like to point out the criticism of depicting a young Galadriel being an armored up fighter smells of sexism when the same criticism isn't made that depicts Elrond as a fighter.

Um, sorry, but no. What you are saying is that the reason I am a number of others have taken badly to the idea of Valkirie-Galadriel is because she is a woman, and had Elrond been in the same spot, we would not be equally as disgusted with the idea. Sorry, but I think that misses the point entirely.

The issue is not that Galadriel is a woman who is swinging a sword; the issue is that the story we can piece together is Galadriel throwing a hissy tantrum, and the sword and armour just happen to be part of the package. She is absolutely a woman who can wear armour and wield weapons - if there is a woman who can do that, it is her. She wasn't named Nerwen for nothing. But, at the same time, she wasn't named Nerwen for her physical prowess alone; the name reflects more than her tendency to masculine hobbies, but a more masculine frame of mind. Hard. Stubborn. Ambitious. Knows her mind. Has it her way. Stern. Perhaps quick to anger in her younger days. Cunning. Proud. You want to start not with the already calmed and grieved Second-Age Galadriel but the more fiery First Age Nerwen - fine, start with Nerwen. But she is not Nerwen because she can swing a sword. She is Nerwen deep inside her soul, a leader, a player of the big game, a strong-minded and strong-willed person, more full of strength than subtlety, but a strength of will as much as of body. She doesn't need a sword to be Nerwen, she just is; she would still be Nerwen if she never rode a horse or held a weapon. Does Nerwen throw a hissy-fit and go on some lonely revenge-quest against non-existent enemies? Especially a Nerwen who has lived through the Wars of Beleriand? Sorry, that's not Nerwen, that is not even Eowyn, that is... I don't know what. A glorified tomboy? But let's not condemn criticism of the butchering of her character to sexism. It's being unfair first and foremost to Galadriel herself. If anything, it's more sexist to reduce a complex female character to an empty suit of armour and claim that this somehow enhances her.

As for Elrond - have we actually seen him fighting in any of the promo materials? Yes, I expect him to be fighting at some point or other, and I expect to see him standing by Gil-Galad. I don't recall seeing any ridiculous Elrond fighting scenes as yet though, so not sure what you are expecting the audience to criticize. I am happy to criticize the ridiculous Silvan Elf stunt-fighting style - but where has Elrond appeared fighting? Or did I block out a whole scene from my memory? If you just mean that he stood wearing armour in Gil-Galad's forces in the LOTR films - I thought that was actually pretty close to how he comes across in the books, and there's no reason to assume someone would not don armour when expecting to be in the midst of a battle. I just thought it was silly that he didn't have a helmet, but I suppose you need your character to be identifiable by the audience. And he is Gil-Galad's herald, and stood beside him in the Last Alliance. It is less natural to argue against his participation than to argue for it. Had he been portrayed as a bloodthirsty butcher - that would be a different story. A reluctant but competent fighter, and a loyal and reliable lieutenant, and a level-headed leader of his men - that is not at all out of keeping with his character. I don't think we see that in the LOTR movies, but as we don't see the contrary either, so why complain there. I think that the argument you've made is pretty weak - or perhaps I have misunderstood it, and if so, my apologies.

Elrond's character is also being butchered, but in his case it's with the role of a "wily politician". I think we've complained enough about that to not have to rehash why it makes me cringe. Can we say that both characters seem to be utterly misunderstood so far - but that we are only given the very beginning of their tales, so there is still a sliver of hope that after the first couple of episodes things will get less ridiculous? And, now that you've brought up Elrond as a mirror for Galadriel (;)), I realize that it would not be half as cringeworthy to portray Galadriel as a wily politician in the Second Age and early Third Age. She is the ambitious one looking out for her interests and her kingdom's interests, who seeks independence and builds alliances, who initiates the Council of the Wise and is involved with wheels turning in the background of many of the great events of those Ages.

[mhagain]

The single strongest argument against a wise 2nd Age Galadriel is how she's handled at the end of the 1st Age. That's a story that was developed in multiple variants, but whether she rejects the pardon of the Valar, whether the Valar keep her under the Ban (and IIRC one version where she would have stayed anyway), whichever way you slice it this is still a character who has a long way to go, and would have continued to be a disruptive presence in the Blessed Realm.

[Galadriel55]

The single strongest argument against a wise 2nd Age Galadriel is how she's handled at the end of the 1st Age. That's a story that was developed in multiple variants, but whether she rejects the pardon of the Valar, whether the Valar keep her under the Ban (and IIRC one version where she would have stayed anyway), whichever way you slice it this is still a character who has a long way to go, and would have continued to be a disruptive presence in the Blessed Realm.

Aye. The Second Age Galadriel is not yet wise, or as wise as can be. She is still ambitious, and proud, and headstrong. But she is not brash. I hate that word so much. It might just barely apply to her in the beginning of the First Age, but it's a stretch to say that she was that even with her end of the First Age decisions. She might not have reached her full wisdom, but she is not some impertinent tomboy; at the very least her temper is a little softened with patience and the knowledge of loss. Her descriptions in the show keep putting me in mind of Obara Sand from GOT and various action-movie heroines and that is just not who she is. Pre-Helcaraxe Galadriel might have ridden off on a horse after an argument to chase some bad guys around and pout. End of First Age Galadriel acts on a bigger scale. This is a woman who has kingdoms on her mind. She thinks in bigger goals. Chasing some scattered enemies in a one-[obsessed]-man-mission because she has no bigger ambition (?) or nothing better to do (?) is petty and small and just not the scale to which the end-of-FA Galadriel would apply herself with such zeal. So do I conclude that the show Galadriel really has nothing more to her than action figure sword waving? I am trying very hard to give it the benefit of the doubt, but purely based on the info they have released to date, I am very not happy.

I am not sure why Galadriel irks me more than the other irksome things in the promo material. It might be that I've grown more attached to her after becoming her namesake. I suspect it is a case of the show just disregarding the essence of the world they are portraying, as William has been saying, and all the specific examples of misinterpretation are just the manifestations of the underlying problem. But some things you are more willing to forgive, whereas others just hit a little too close to what is dear and should not be touched. Maybe this is one of mine.

[Morthoron]

Now if the Harfoots take a significant involvement in the battles, or events, interacting with characters, resolving the conflicts then that would be 2 middle-fingers to Tolkien. As well as make them liars, or seriously not understanding the roles of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in a story.

I would suggest prominently displaying a Hobbit in the trailer, as well as the actress playing the Hobbit doing the voiceover for said trailer, you are going to be dismayed. An Easter egg does not present itself in such manner.


Now if one wants to show growth in a character from a movie or series, how can it be done to show that "Galadriel's wisdom increased with the long years?" Stories have to have their characters grow, as aggravating as it was to see a weak and uncertain Aragorn, one of your main characters has to grow throughout the story. You don't get the luxury of translating Aragorn's 80 year backstory in a few hours of screen time.

Sure I agree Galadriel in the 2nd Age is probably not the same Galadriel from her rebellion days, but showing how Galadriel does change as a character, that is she wasn't always the Galadriel from Lord of the Rings, would be an accurate portrayal of her growth. It doesn't fit the timeline, but the timeline has to be compressed, and characters in all stories have to show growth.

Unless you can convince me that when Tolkien writes Galadriel "fought fiercely against Feanor", he doesn't mean she actually picked up arms "in defense of her mother's kin" then I see no problem with depicting Galadriel as being able to wield a blade, or any other type of weapon.

I would direct you to a single phrase from the passage you quoted:

...she fought fiercely against Feanor in defense of her mother's kin.

Exigent circumstance against the massacre of her kinsmen is wholly different than going all Godfather on a Sicilian vendetta, slaying various and sundry alleged foes in revenge for deaths that occurred in a prior Age. And then donning armor as a commander when we know that never happened in the 2nd Age. Intellectual and spiritual growth does not equal wanton slaughter.

Yes she perceived the evil in Feanor, but also note her pride, her own anger, and the inability to perceive that some piece of Melkor's corruption had fallen "upon the minds of all the Noldor, and upon her own."

This would have to be Galadriel talking about her 2nd Age self, because the One Ring wasn't made until the 2nd Age, and she admits her "heart has greatly desired" to ask for the Great Ring to come into her grasp and "many long years pondered" what she might do with it. Again, this proves a point she might not be a warrior who would fight "fiercely against Feanor," but she was still not the same Galadriel Frodo meets in Lothlorien.

I'd make a case that 2nd Age Galadriel would not have rejected the Ring of Power if it had come within her grasp then.

She was extremely powerful and proud, but not brash or foolish. Celebrimbor handed her a Ring of Power because insight told him she was wise and would use the Ring to preserve and not destroy. Perhaps she would have used the One Ring in the 2nd Age, had it come to her; however, when she makes her remark to Frodo ("...my heart has greatly desired to ask what you offer. For many long years I had pondered what I might do..."), that was late in the 3rd Age after Sauron's return and the slow encircling of Lothlorien with evil.

The call of the One Ring on the other Rings of Power must have been intense at that point in time, and it would have taken everything in Galadriel's power to conceal hers from Sauron. I think once one puts that remark in context, it's clearly meant in regard to the waning of the Peoples of the West (of the Elves, Dwarves and Gondor) in the 3rd Age and the waxing of Sauron's strength.

The single strongest argument against a wise 2nd Age Galadriel is how she's handled at the end of the 1st Age. That's a story that was developed in multiple variants, but whether she rejects the pardon of the Valar, whether the Valar keep her under the Ban (and IIRC one version where she would have stayed anyway), whichever way you slice it this is still a character who has a long way to go, and would have continued to be a disruptive presence in the Blessed Realm.

That she didn't want the mean restraints of being under the thumb of the Valar, forever forced to come and go by their leave, would and did rankle many of the other greater Elves as well. in this case, the strict paternal oversight of the Valar was one of the greatest of their miscalculations, and they made many tactical errors over the Ages.

Much like a parent forbidding their now mature children to go forth in the world, it is natural for a strong-willed person to rebel and strike out on their own. This is not a character flaw, it is a sign of independence and trust in one's own vision of their future. Her will was strong and her blood was still hot and her thirst for knowledge and ambition was unquenched. Again, I don't see this as a flaw that wisdom must overcome.

And in regards to wisdom, it is interesting that everyone ignores the centuries Galadriel spent with Melian the Maia, and I quote from the Later Quenta:

"Yet Galadriel his [Finrod's] sister dwelt never in Nargothrond, but remained in Doriath and received the love of Melian, and abode with her, and there learned great lore and wisdom concerning Middle-earth."

She wasn't some churlish tomgirl Valkyrie out for vengeance at the dawn of the 2nd Age -- that entire plot point is asinine. She had no part in any of the great wars of the 1st Age, like her brothers, but suddenly she gets a hankering to lead armies in anachronistic armor in the 2nd Age?

She was a builder of kingdoms and a preserver of Elvish memory in both the 2nd Age and 3rd Age -- she founded a fiefdom in Lindon with Gil-Galad as her liege, then removed for a while to Lake Evendim in northern Eriador, went on to establish Eregion, and finally Lothlorien. But even then she left that behind and spent some time in Belfalas at the place later called Dol Amroth. She was the original Middle-earth Rolling Stone before Gandalf arrived.

[William Cloud Hicklin]

Do remember also that between her ban/refusal at the start of the Second Age, and the fall-of-Numenor era the TV show is set in, Galadriel had had over three millennia to think things over.

[Huinesoron]

I don't know how much impact it's having on people's thoughts, but I've noticed a couple of us seem to be misinterpreting Galadriel's lone quest. She's not a reckless vigilante on the hunt for enemies long dead - she's right. There's literally a shot in the trailer of her finding the Morgoth--spawned enemies she's been insisting are there, while (presumably) Gil-Galad and Elrond brush the idea off. "Morgoth is banished," they say, "the Balrogs are slain, Sauron has slunk off never to be seen again - take it easy, there's no orcs or trolls anywhere this side of the Orocarni."

But there are. And as a high-ranked leader of the Noldor, Galadriel is well within her rights to ignore her possibly-nephew's complacency, take a few soldiers, put on her old armour (because going /un/armoured would be suicidal), and go get the evidence.

Which exists. Because she's right. The Enemy is still there; the War never ended. And the safety of one Artanis Nerwen isn't more important than proving the threat.

(Heck, even at the end of the Third Age she probably wore armour - I've always pictured her tearing down the walls of Dol Guldur with magic in a dress, but realistically, you wear armour so one Orc with a bow doesn't get insanely lucky.)

hS

[Morthoron]

I don't know how much impact it's having on people's thoughts, but I've noticed a couple of us seem to be misinterpreting Galadriel's lone quest. She's not a reckless vigilante on the hunt for enemies long dead - she's right. There's literally a shot in the trailer of her finding the Morgoth--spawned enemies she's been insisting are there, while (presumably) Gil-Galad and Elrond brush the idea off. "Morgoth is banished," they say, "the Balrogs are slain, Sauron has slunk off never to be seen again - take it easy, there's no orcs or trolls anywhere this side of the Orocarni."

Congratulations on your newest venture into fan-fiction -- let us know when you've posted it. Galadriel didn't don armor and go hunting or command armies in the 1st Age, and she didn't don armor and go hunting or command armies in the 3rd Age. What, she only gets the urge every other Age? It's a good thing she sailed for Valinor at the end of the 3rd, cos', boy oh boy! she was ready to kick some a** in the 4th Age!

[mhagain]

Congratulations on your newest venture into fan-fiction -- let us know when you've posted it. Galadriel didn't don armor and go hunting or command armies in the 1st Age, and she didn't don armor and go hunting or command armies in the 3rd Age. What, she only gets the urge every other Age? It's a good thing she sailed for Valinor at the end of the 3rd, cos', boy oh boy! she was ready to kick some a** in the 4th Age!

That's one way of viewing it, I suppose. Maybe an attractive way if you're predisposed to hating and negative interpretation of what's being done here.

Another way might be to view it as a "show, don't tell" rendering of Tolkien's depiction of Galadriel as one of the Elven leaders who did not think evil was gone forever, and who wasn't taken in by Annatar. A clumsy one, maybe, but we really don't have sufficient information yet to be able to fully form that judgement.

It's correct to be cautious about this for sure, but it's not correct to go from 0 to 120 on the internet hate fest at this stage.

[Morthoron]

It's correct to be cautious about this for sure, but it's not correct to go from 0 to 120 on the internet hate fest at this stage.

Unless you're a shill for a corporate mega-conglomerate, calling out nonsense is completely acceptable as far as I'm concerned. And there is a lot of nonsense in just a brief trailer.

Just a trailer! Any half intelligent producer with the slightest clue of the work they are expropriating should have at least made a trailer that wouldn't alienate readers. And from what I've read elsewhere, I am not the only one who finds these cute little fan-fic deviations to be flat-out juvenile Mary-Sue level scripting. But if that's the type of story plotting you like following, by all means dish out your dollars to Amazon.

[Huinesoron]

Congratulations on your newest venture into fan-fiction -- let us know when you've posted it. Galadriel didn't don armor and go hunting or command armies in the 1st Age, and she didn't don armor and go hunting or command armies in the 3rd Age. What, she only gets the urge every other Age? It's a good thing she sailed for Valinor at the end of the 3rd, cos', boy oh boy! she was ready to kick some a** in the 4th Age!

Thanks! The Third Age equivalent is over here (http://forum.barrowdowns.com/showthread.php?t=19267), let me know what you think!

But seriously, the articles and trailer make it clear that what I outlined is exactly what the showrunners are doing. They're not showing Galadriel on some quixotic quest - they're showing her as the only person who recognises the threat and is willing to do something about it. That's all I was pointing out.

And that concept is taken directly from Unfinished Tales:

"But eventually Galadriel... percieved that there was an evil controlling purpose abroad in the world, and that it seemed to proceed from a source further to the East, beyond Eriador and the Misty Mountains."

Tolkien specifically cites Galadriel as both becoming aware of and perceiving the rising threat of Sauron. She later "scorns" him as Annatar, but - despite (again in this account) being ruler of Eregion, doesn't throw him out. Tolkien is painting a clear picture of Galadriel as the one person who believes the Shadow is out there.

In this account, her involvement in the founding of Eregion is specifically as a ward against Sauron and to forge a a military alliance with Khazad-Dum (note that "Ost-in-Edhil" means "Fortress of the Elves". She crosses the mountains and acts against Sauron's influence in Lorinand, and later moves there to "[take] up rule, and defence against Sauron".

This is what we know Galadriel was up to, in the part of the Second Age which has been temporally compressed into season 1 of the show: she was an active, mobile, military presence who is the only person named as working to counter Sauron. Could she have done all that in a flowing white dress? Maybe, but it seems foolhardy when Elvish armour is available.

(As for the other Ages: in the First she was a student in a time of peace, and apparently left Beleriand entirely before war broke back out. In the Third, she was tied to Lorien, both as its ruler and as the bearer of Nenya.)

hS

[Galadriel55]

I don't know how much impact it's having on people's thoughts, but I've noticed a couple of us seem to be misinterpreting Galadriel's lone quest. She's not a reckless vigilante on the hunt for enemies long dead - she's right. There's literally a shot in the trailer of her finding the Morgoth--spawned enemies she's been insisting are there, while (presumably) Gil-Galad and Elrond brush the idea off. "Morgoth is banished," they say, "the Balrogs are slain, Sauron has slunk off never to be seen again - take it easy, there's no orcs or trolls anywhere this side of the Orocarni."

But there are. And as a high-ranked leader of the Noldor, Galadriel is well within her rights to ignore her possibly-nephew's complacency, take a few soldiers, put on her old armour (because going /un/armoured would be suicidal), and go get the evidence.

Which exists. Because she's right. The Enemy is still there; the War never ended. And the safety of one Artanis Nerwen isn't more important than proving the threat.

(Heck, even at the end of the Third Age she probably wore armour - I've always pictured her tearing down the walls of Dol Guldur with magic in a dress, but realistically, you wear armour so one Orc with a bow doesn't get insanely lucky.)

It's not the armour that's the problem. I don't think that part is such a stretch. It's what they do with that point, and if anything remains to the clever and ambitious and insightful Galadriel except for her armour. Am I being pessimistic? Yes. I acknowledge the possibility of being pleasantly surprised, but I won't bet on it.

As for the rest - Galadriel is influential. She is a leader. She doesn't end up in a situation where she is all alone against the world. She persuades people. If those people are not her Noldorin relatives, they are people of her following. She sends spies and scouts. She organizes patrols. She gathers intelligence in ways that are accessible only to her as Melian's student. At the very least, if she believes her presence is more necessary on a quest than at the heart of her kingdom, she still doesn't go alone. She is supposed to play the game on a bigger scale, as the leader of a kingdom, or at least a large population. A place to which she got with all her characteristics and experiences listed upstream the thread. And what really hurts me is that of all those characteristics, the only one that seems to have survived so far was her tomboyishness.

But I admire your optimism. I agree that it is not outside the realm of possibility that actually this can all make sense within a reasonable portrayal of Galadriel. I just don't have your faith that it could be such.

Why couldn't they just stick to Numenor or something and be as unreasonable as they want with some Second Age king I don't even remember? Make up a whole backstory for him and his court, it would not even severely contradict anyone's head cannon... Gil-Galad and Galadriel could make appearances - appearances, not lead roles - to tie the story to what is known in the movieverse... That would have been grand.


Congratulations on your newest venture into fan-fiction -- let us know when you've posted it. Galadriel didn't don armor and go hunting or command armies in the 1st Age, and she didn't don armor and go hunting or command armies in the 3rd Age. What, she only gets the urge every other Age? It's a good thing she sailed for Valinor at the end of the 3rd, cos', boy oh boy! she was ready to kick some a** in the 4th Age!

Galadriel didn't go hunting? That is outright not true. Command armies? When she is the head of the state, she certainly directs her armies... the strategy if not the tactics. If Denethor can be said to be a commander, so can she - and this is at the minimum, going by what is explicitly written in the text. As for wearing armour, I don't see how that would be such a stretch for her to occasionally do it. She was a tomboy after all. I don't find the bare fact as unbelievable as you.

(And if we stick to the bare text when it comes to dress, most of the people of ME would have to go around naked, lacking an explicit statement regarding wearing any sort of clothing).

Third Age Galadriel in LOTR seems so wise, and you can hardly imagine her otherwise. But in the context of The Sil, the difference in the 1st and 3rd Age Galadriel is also that by LOTR she is tired; she accepts defeat, she no longer wants to fight the windmills of time, and this repeated acceptance humbles her. The question is - will this be evident from the show's backstory? Or is it going to be "Galadriel was foolhardy and high spirited and brash, but then she grew out of it and became calm and wise"?

Just a trailer! Any half intelligent producer with the slightest clue of the work they are expropriating should have at least made a trailer that wouldn't alienate readers. And from what I've read elsewhere, I am not the only one who finds these cute little fan-fic deviations to be flat-out juvenile Mary-Sue level scripting.

I mean, to be fair, often trailers end up as the worst representation of a movie, and if you wanna convince someone not to watch a movie, show them the trailer. I don't know how this paradox happens.

But yes. Absolutely expecting juvenile level character arcs and plot development. And, I mean, in the event that some of it isn't that - I would be pleasantly surprised.

[William Cloud Hicklin]

Command armies? When she is the head of the state, she certainly directs her armies... the strategy if not the tactics.

Yes, but note Appendix B: "when the Shadow passed, Celeborn came forth and led the host of Lorien over Anduin in many boats. They took Dol Guldur, and Galadriel threw down its walls and laid bare its pits, and the forest was cleansed." Which I read as saying that the Lord of the Galadhrim was the military commander, the general and warrior, and the Lady's role was more magical and mystical. (Note also the parallel phrasing to Luthien's destruction of Sauron's tower on Tol-in-Gaurhoth long before: again, Luthien put forth her power after Huan, and Beren sort of, had already defeated Sauron and driven him off.)

I suppose it's worth mentioning that Elrond (who clearly was a general, at least during the First War of the Rings) was present at the battle of Dagorlad and the siege of Barad-dur with Gil-galad, as was Thranduil's father Oropher, but Galadriel makes no mention of having been there herself.

[Morthoron]

Galadriel didn't go hunting? That is outright not true. Command armies? When she is the head of the state, she certainly directs her armies...

See WCH's most recent post.

When I referred to hunting, I was referring to balrogs and orcs (not a traditional bow hunt for four-hooved mammals). When I referred to commanding armies, I was not referring to a sovereign sending generals into battle, but rather that Galadriel was not a field general with sword in hand like Henry V exhorting his troops, "Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more; Or close the wall up with our English dead!"

[Boromir88]

Um, sorry, but no. What you are saying is that the reason I am a number of others have taken badly to the idea of Valkirie-Galadriel is because she is a woman, and had Elrond been in the same spot, we would not be equally as disgusted with the idea. Sorry, but I think that misses the point entirely.

I should have been more clear that my 2nd post comparing Elrond and Galadriel was not directed towards anyone or anything that's been said on this thread, or on the 'Downs. I did something that I never do and went to read youtube comments. Perhaps Galadriel in the show throws a hissy fit (I'm not sure I've seen enough to confirm she does)...but if you want to talk about tantrums? Wow, you don't have to look far to find people losing their minds about Cate Blanchett not being Galadriel, and because of "wokeness" they won't get to see Cate Blanchett in an elegant white gown. Or "Tolkien would be rolling in his grave if he knew Galadriel had a sword." My apologies as well for not being clear there's so much misogyny and sexism in the "fandom" at the moment. This place is a breath of fresh air, even though I still disagree and am glad they're going to show a different Galadriel.

Now if they make her into a Tauriel "This is MY fight" Mary Sue character, then sure the criticisms are going to be more valid. At the moment, they fall flat, when you consider people don't raise the same gripes about depicting Elrond as a fighter.

(Yes I'm doubling down)

In The Hobbit films, Elrond is off hunting orc parties on his borders and then he's armored in Dol Guldur to rescue Gandalf. The latter scene, makes reasonable sense. However, there is whole LOTR and Hobbit movie lore about Arwen's sword named "Hadhafang." It was Elrond's sword, and how great Elrond was wielding "Hadhafang." All made up by Jackson and the team. I don't know about the Amazon series, but the movies are clearly depicting Elrond as a fighter.

And my point here is there is more evidence that would suggest Galadriel is more capable, and has more of a disposition towards fighting (both physically and a greater will) than Elrond. Elrond is most commonly associated with healing, in fact being a great healer.

As I said, Elrond being someone who has commanded armies, and was at the Last Alliance it is a fair assumption to make that he would have actually fought in the battle. But Elrond, unlike Galadriel, is never directly given the action of "fighting" against anyone, or "killing" anyone. It's a reasonable assumption, but that would still be an assumption. Given that he was most known for being a great healer, I think it would be an equally fair assumption that he was at the battle to be serve in the capacity of an advisor (Gil-galad's 2nd in command) and healer. My point is though, we all make an assumption that Elrond would have fought in battles, because he's lead armies a few times. Then we would have to make that same assumption about Galadriel, because she it is directly quoted that she "fought against Feanor" in his attack on Alqualonde.

If you want to consider when Tolkien got philosophical in "Laws and Customs Among the Eldar," then there would even be evidence to suggest Elrond would not want to fight, and would not want to kill anyone, even in battle. Because there Tolkien remarks that a person's healing powers would diminish with the more people they killed. Granted it's not unlike Tolkien to contradict himself when he was writing more philosophically, but to have a problem with Galadriel being depicted as a warrior, and not have it about Elrond, is not a fair criticism. I shouldn't have gone to the extreme of saying it smells of sexism (not with what's been posted on this site) but hop onto youtube and see the hissy fits people who have no idea what they're talking about. I wonder if those trolls ever read Tolkien, because they make the Amazon show runners look like Tolkien scholars.

[Snowdog]

Much of the 'analysis' I've seen online comes in with a 'hateful' bias from the start. I found that This Analysis by Cory Olsen (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5etaXw2MgQ) was pretty objective and fairly balanced, and does a good job of pointing out what Tolkien actually wrote vs what has grown to be pop-culture in the wake of the Peter Jackson fan fics (bearded women dwarves as an example).


Sadly, it appears that many people already have written off this new Rings of Power series. I see the haters are really out in force with these latest poster and trailer reveals. One thing I noted in the various places the posters and first look articles were posted on fecebook (IMDB has some of the most horrid comments) reddit, and on some forums is a lot of the ones who hate this so bad think PJ did an awesome job presenting Lord of the Rings. They didn’t mind the many wholesale changes made to that complete book story, saying ‘it needed to be done to appeal to the masses’. I find that segment humorous.

Anyway, the main reasons for the hatred of The Rings of Power appears to be a mix of these:

A. I hate it because it is being made by Amazon.
B. Bezos made mention of Game of Thrones when he bought the rights, so it is going to be Game of Thrones.
C. It’s revisionist ‘woke’ BS (because it isn’t an all-white cast)
D. They are making stuff up that isn’t in the source material (original characters and storylines, tweaking canon characters, and such).
E. They didn’t use the same actors that PJ did, so it’s crap.
F. It doesn’t matter if the Tolkien Estate is actively involved. They only care about money, not Tolkien’s legacy after Christopher died, so it will be crap.

That is just to name a few I’ve come across. Any more reasons given?

[Galadriel55]

While there are extremes of both opinions, and while this site is perhaps more anti-Amazon inclined, is it even possible anymore to present moderate opinions on the matter without being accused of being an extremist one way or the other? Can we all take a step back and calm down a little? It's a show. We will dislike things (for myself, Galadriel's portrayal is an example), we might like some things (for myself - the random references to Two Trees and such scattered in bits of costume), we might have no firm opinion either way on some things (for myself - Gil-Galad: not how I imagined him but not ghastly off either). Can we express opinions on these things anymore without forgetting that disagreeing with the showrunners doesn't make you a die-hard hater, and liking or defending the show's decisions doesn't make you a die-hard fanatic? It's a show. We can debate and discuss it and chew it over peacefully to the extent that it gives us pleasure to do so. And when it comes out, we will watch it (or not) to the extent it gives us pleasure, and the moment it starts giving more grief than pleasure we turn off the screen. It should be this simple, but it just somehow got very complicated. I feel like this thread has been escalating ever more, though there have been multiple attempts to pacify things. Please let's not forget that in the end, all this matters very little? With the debate getting ever more heated and emotionally involved, and the posts coming in so frequently, I am beginning to feel a bit like Hui and getting the itch to ++vote. :p

[William Cloud Hicklin]

... a lot of the ones who hate this so bad think PJ did an awesome job presenting Lord of the Rings. They didn’t mind the many wholesale changes made to that complete book story, saying ‘it needed to be done to appeal to the masses’.


Well, I'm at least spared an accusation of inconsistency, since I hate the Jackson movies!

[Huinesoron]

While there are extremes of both opinions, and while this site is perhaps more anti-Amazon inclined, is it even possible anymore to present moderate opinions on the matter without being accused of being an extremist one way or the other? Can we all take a step back and calm down a little? It's a show. We will dislike things (for myself, Galadriel's portrayal is an example), we might like some things (for myself - the random references to Two Trees and such scattered in bits of costume), we might have no firm opinion either way on some things (for myself - Gil-Galad: not how I imagined him but not ghastly off either). Can we express opinions on these things anymore without forgetting that disagreeing with the showrunners doesn't make you a die-hard hater, and liking or defending the show's decisions doesn't make you a die-hard fanatic? It's a show. We can debate and discuss it and chew it over peacefully to the extent that it gives us pleasure to do so. And when it comes out, we will watch it (or not) to the extent it gives us pleasure, and the moment it starts giving more grief than pleasure we turn off the screen. It should be this simple, but it just somehow got very complicated. I feel like this thread has been escalating ever more, though there have been multiple attempts to pacify things. Please let's not forget that in the end, all this matters very little? With the debate getting ever more heated and emotionally involved, and the posts coming in so frequently, I am beginning to feel a bit like Hui and getting the itch to ++vote. :p

^All of this, basically. Just because the world at large wants every idle thought to be a rock-solid opinion and every opinion to align with the most extreme position on a subject, doesn't mean we have to join in. :)

What really winds me up (elsewhere!) is people insisting their read of the text is not just the best, but the only possible interpretation. I've had an amusing conversation on Twitter where I said that Beleg's whetting spell (http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Beleg%27s_whetting_spell) opens the possibility of a lightning-vs-fire-sword duel in Middle-earth (see Celeg Aithorn (https://huinesoron.neocities.org/Netilardo/Theory19.htm), and have Eonwe fight a Balrog), and someone has been insisting that those lines not probably are, but must! be metaphorical. There is no possibility that they could be literal, because... Sting was once described as a blue flame, apparently.

Also, if the Valar had a world-breaking lightning sword, why didn't they send Gandalf back with it?!?! After all, he could already destroy armies single-handedly, so he should have it!! (On being queried on this point, they asserted that because Gandalf the Grey could equal a Balrog, of course Gandalf the White could destroy armies. Thaaat's when I stepped away.)

And the odd thing is, holding and expressing a nuanced opinion - like "this thing is possible, though not really certain" - seems to wind that kind of person up just as much as their unsupported certainty does me! They really, really wanted me to be saying that the whetting spell was definitively literal. It was funny. ^_^

Anyway, in the spirit of finding weird hills to die on, I think we can all agree that if anyone in Numenor has any carpet other than this one (https://www.tolkienguide.com/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=4099), it will be proof that they are in the direct pay of Morgoth and intend to steal, spit on, and burn all our Tolkien books. :D

hS

[Morthoron]

... a lot of the ones who hate this so bad think PJ did an awesome job presenting Lord of the Rings. They didn’t mind the many wholesale changes made to that complete book story, saying ‘it needed to be done to appeal to the masses’.

Well, I'm at least spared an accusation of inconsistency, since I hate the Jackson movies!

I am reminded of a quote by the composer Rossini regarding Richard Wagner, which for me would also be apt for Peter Jackson. To paraphrase:

"He has lovely moments but awful quarters of an hour."

[William Cloud Hicklin]

BTW, Corey Olsen is dead wrong; Tolkien absolutely, positively did write that Dwarf-women were bearded. War of the Jewels, p. 205.

"For the Naugrim have beards from the beginning of their days, male and female alike; nor indeed can their womankind be discerned by those of other race, be it in feature or in gait or in voice, nor in any wise save this: that they go not to war, and seldom save at direst need issue from their deep bowers and halls."

Note that means that Dwarf kids have beards too!

[Formendacil]

BTW, Corey Olsen is dead wrong; Tolkien absolutely, positively did write that Dwarf-women were bearded. War of the Jewels, p. 205.

...

Note that means that Dwarf kids have beards too!

By the same token (or should I say, "by the same Tolkien?"), he absolutely, positively... left the door open. Nature of Middle-earth, p.187:

When I come to think of it, in my own imagination, beards were not found among Hobbits (as stated in the text); nor among the Eldar (not stated). All male Dwarves had them. The wizards had them, though Radagast (not stated) had only short, curling, light brown hair on his chin. Men normally had them when full-grown, hence Eomer, Theoden and all others named. But not Denethor, Boromir, Faramir, Aragorn, Isildur, or other Númenórean chieftains.

The emphasis, if we trust Hostetter, on male Dwarves is there in Tolkien's text (and I think this forum can generally be trusted to trust the editors!).

Does Tolkien specifying that male Dwarves are bearded equal a syllogism that excludes female Dwarves from being bearded? Absolutely not, but it would be very odd, in a footnote where Tolkien goes out of his way to tell us the bearded status of nearly every male character of importance, that he would tell us that male dwarves are bearded and not simply say "all Dwarves are bearded" unless he meant by implication that NOT all female Dwarves are bearded.

Of course, if you think Tolkien was a pure, logic-driven machine, then the two statements are easily reconcilable: all Dwarves have beards, all male Dwarves are a subset of all Dwarves, therefore, all male Dwarves have beards.

(I don't mean "you" to be William Cloud Hicklin here specifically, though I suppose I am arguing against your post, so much as a rhetorical "you.")

I think it should be clear to anyone who's read the HoME that Tolkien tended to forget ideas he'd jotted down before, and also that he was quite willing to revise previous ideas--his main constraint was that he considered things that had appeared in print to be "canon" (see: the Problem of Ros), except that even here he was totally willing to revise what was in print (see: the 2nd Edition)!

All of which is to say... any adaptation of Tolkien is going to involve judgement calls simply to fill in the gaps, but there's the FURTHER--and even more fraught--judgement calls where Tolkien said more than one thing!

(As an aside on Dwarven female beardedness, I think the pro-beardians have the better textual authority: besides WCH's quite definitive quote above, there's the published text of Appendix A, which has usually been interpreted this way, which is two texts against NoME's one. And, to cast a little extra aspersion toward Amazon, I doubt they could have read NoME early enough in their creative process to have considered it.

As an aside to my aside: I wish we WERE seeing bearded dwarf-women, if only because the Aganzir-sect of this forum have inclined me to expect them and because I think it would be an interestingly canonical subversion of expected appearances. Amazon hieing away from this is actually a case counter to the dominant story of Amazon being "oh so woke"--at least if I can make the assumption that "bearded Dwarf women" would likely have been seized on, had they gone that way, as somehow transgressive and thus woke.)

Ultimately, I expect the series to fail to live up to Tolkien because that has been my unshakeable instinct as the ultimate fate of all adaptations since I first saw the animated Rankin-Bass Hobbit in about 1999. No adaptation has yet proven me wrong, but that doesn't mean there haven't been good things in the adapations--gold amidst the dross. And just because I don't expect to much enjoy it myself doesn't mean that others have to share my exact level of apathy or the reasons for it.