The Rings of Power Episode 5 “Partings”: Stop! In the Name of the Lore!

Suppose you sat down to play a game of chess. Suddenly your opponent begins making wild, unorthodox moves: knights act like rooks, bishops like queens, pawns start capturing pieces right in front of them. You would say he is cheating, or perhaps didn’t understand the rules of the game. He might counter that he is simply being creative, and that it makes things more exciting. One thing would be certain. Though you were using the same gameboard and pieces, it certainly wouldn’t be chess.

This episode, I think, finally sets a pointing finger down on the very sore spot that has been vaguely plaguing readers of Tolkien since the very beginning. Forget black Elves and Dwarves. Forget deviations from the timeline or contradictions with known ‘lore’ or even clumsy writing and callbacks. The difference is even more fundamental than that, and it is epitomized in the story the writers have concocted for the origin of mithril.

The story that Gil-galad orders Elrond to recount has an unnamed Elf-Lord and a Balrog fighting over a tree growing high on a mountain.  Lightning strikes the tree, and the two combatants are somehow merged into a single substance that trickles down to the roots of the peak and becomes the fabulous shiny ore when it mingles with a lost Silmaril. Gil-galad states that mithril is “as pure and light as good, as strong and unyielding as evil.” And therein lies the crux, I think.

It would be very easy from a cursory reading of The Lord of the Rings to describe Middle-earth as a kind of Manichean world, with good and evil poised in a sort of yin-yang struggle for dominance. A closer reading reveals that for all its power, there is light and a high beauty that the Shadow can never touch; that Evil does not have the power of creation, it can only sully what is made. To describe strength and rigor as an essential quality that evil can impart is to deeply misunderstand the nature of Middle-earth. They are simply positive goods that can be misused. C. S. Lewis summed it up:

“The truth is that evil is not a real thing at all, like God. It is simply good spoiled. That is why I say there can be good without evil, but no evil without good. You know what the biologists mean by a parasite—an animal that lives on another animal. Evil is a parasite. It is there only because good is there for it to spoil and confuse.”

It seems that moral ambiguity is the greatest, perhaps the most irreconcilable, difference between what is Tolkien and what is The Rings of Power. Perhaps it is this that the showrunners mean most profoundly when they say it reflects “modern sensibilities”. This moral ambiguity plagues every episode. Are Gil-galad and Celebrimbor’s actions evil? Do the Orcs just want lebensraum? In Tolkien there is moral uncertainty (“I know what I must do, but I’m afraid to do it”) but no moral ambiguity. Tolkien’s moral theme is not the largely accepted Zeitgeist of our time and it would take a master-touch to dramatize it.

“Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear; nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among Men. It is a man’s part to discern them …”

It is not the ridiculous constructions of the story (“The Elves are going to fade … right now! Unless we take our mithril pills!” or some such nonsense – although I suppose the forging of the Three Rings, which do resist time and fading – and could need to be made with mithril - of which Durin seems to have enough to hand out samples - but then ring-making is not a thing yet – ah, the Lore!) that is the worm in the apple here. It is the profound philosophical disconnect. They do not play by the game rules, and if they don't, they should play another game.