The Rings of Power: (Season Two, Episodes 4 and 5) Please Just Stop It

 

Last night we again gathered to watch new episodes of Amazon’s The Rings of Power, last week’s and this week’s. While we had fun getting together to riff and groan about them, they are otherwise a boring litany of periods of frenzied over-action and callbacks (‘memberberries’) from better iterations of Middle-earth. We were yawning by the end; our only emotions that had been evoked were incredulity and outrage. On the drive home our memories of the jumbled incidents were starting to fade. Rather than tax myself with trying to straighten them out, I affix Wikipedia’s summation:

Episode 4: “Eldest”. Elrond and Galadriel set out for Eregion. They come to a bridge that has been destroyed and are forced to take a more dangerous path. The Stranger meets a mysterious man named Tom Bombadil while Nori and Poppy find a community of halflings called Stoors. They learn that the Harfoots are descended from a Stoor who left Rhûn in search of the Sûzat, a place of green hills that he dreamed could be the home of halflings. Arondir deduces that Estrid is one of the Wild Men. She earns back Isildur's trust when he and Arondir are sucked into a mud pit inhabited by a nameless creature and she helps free them. They are confronted by two Ents who captured Theo and the Wild Men in retribution for the felling of trees by Wild Men and by Adar's army. Arondir promises to protect the forest and the Ents free their prisoners; one of the Wild Men is Hagen, Estrid's betrothed. After fighting off Barrow-wights, Elrond and Galadriel find Adar's army. Galadriel gives her ring to Elrond and tells him to return to Lindon to warn Gil-galad. Galadriel stays to hold off the Orcs and is captured by Adar.

Episode 5: “Halls of Stone”. Durin III uses one of the new Rings of Power to help rebuild the Dwarves' infrastructure and bring sunlight back to Khazad-dûm. The ring also makes the king greedy, and he dismisses a warning from Disa that they could be awakening something evil that lives beneath the mines. In Eregion, Annatar insists that they start work on Rings of Power for Men but Celebrimbor refuses to be involved. When Durin IV expresses his concerns about the Dwarven rings to Celebrimbor, Annatar suggests that the negative impacts are being caused by Celebrimbor lying to Gil-galad about making more rings. Celebrimbor agrees to help make rings for Men in an attempt to redeem his work on the Dwarven rings. The new king of Númenor, Ar-Pharazôn, tasks his son Kemen with cracking down on members of the Faithful who remain loyal to Míriel. Kemen interrupts a memorial service that members of the Faithful are holding, leading to a fight with Isildur's friend Valandil that ends with Kemen killing Valandil. Isildur's father Elendil is blamed for starting a riot and arrested. Elrond arrives in Lindon and warns Gil-galad.

In such a bare outline, it might sound better than it is. Better (if still not very good), but still stupid in terms of Middle-earth lore and history.

Barrow-wights were evil spirits stirred up by the Witch-King of Angmar to inhabit the barrows of the North Kingdom of Arnor. Not only is there no Witch-King (a Nazgul) yet, there is not even a North Kingdom yet, and these barrows are way down south.

Ents were always very friendly with Elves; it seems unlikely they would try to kill an elf on sight, no matter how ‘hasty’ they may be acting. And if they are being so murderous and vengeful, why have they spared Theo and the other Wild Men with imprisonment? And this might be just a design quibble, but they look almost 40 feet tall, not 14 feet tall, and their faces a chance collection of knots and knobs. And by this time the Entwives have separated from the Ents (if not being lost yet) so why is Winterbloom (an obvious female, voiced by Olivia Williams)) accompanied by Snaggleroot (an obvious male, voiced by Jim Broadbent)?

Tom Bombadil. Why is he so far East, and why is he not a ‘merry fellow’? In the books, it is said that Tom will not go beyond his set borders (around and in the Old Forest and the Withywindle), but it is argued that his borders have been ‘shrinking’ over time. The Rings of Power seems to suggest his borders were once vast, and not just the shrinking Forest. But how does that explain the presence of Goldberry, the spirit of the Withywindle River, being with him so far east in a desert? He has a little lamb named Iarwain, which is one of his own names (‘Eldest’) Why? And he has his desert (minion? companion? antagonist?) Old Man Ironwood, to fill in for Old Man Willow. Real stretch of the imagination there, writers. Why is Tom so evasive and yet so proactive, compared to Book Tom?

Isildur, Arondir, and Estrid encounter what amounts to a ‘Watcher in the Swampwater’ on their journeys. After defeating the ‘nameless thing’, Arondir even says “There are older and fouler things than Orcs in the deep places of the earth,” echoing Gandalf’s words in LOTR. These ‘deep places’ apparently include mud puddles. It is the occasion for a rather feeble dad joke.

And one element that particularly annoys me is that the not-Hobbits refer to a prophecy of a future green land full of running water and hole houses called the Suzat. Suza is an actual non-translated Hobbitic word for ‘province, area’ which Tolkien says translates to ‘the Shire’.  Why, oh why, the extra T? Just to get their grubby mitts all over it, like a dog marking territory.

Apologists for The Rings of Power try to handwave these objections away by saying these were earlier, less-developed times, not the Middle-earth described during The Lord of the Rings. It coulda happened. There coulda been Barrows and Barrow-wights in other places. Tom Bombadil coulda been down East for a while. There coulda been a couple of wild and crazy Ents out on their own. There coulda been Wizards in Middle-earth before the Third Age and (surprise!) they coulda been trained by the neutral, careless Tom Bombadil.

All these couldas might be fine for private fan-fiction, but hardly for a billion-dollar boondoggle with pretensions to ‘tell the story Tolkien never could.’ The real problem (apart from plotlines, dialogue, and general incoherence) is that the show is running in a different moral universe than Tolkien’s, almost an amoral universe. Middle-earth does not run in that framework.

The thing that really bothers me about The Rings of Power, the thing that really scrolls my knurd, is that it may very well rise up before another little eleven-year-old kid like me as an actual barrier from finding the real Middle-earth, whether by accepting the show’s mediocrity as a fan or by judging the quality of Tolkien by this turd and refusing to give him a chance. I can only hope that they will be able to follow this dirty puddle backwards to its pure source.

 I could speak more about and against these episodes here (I hate how the rings make a twingly, 'magical' sound and how the Numenoreans have some sort of sacred, holy practices -they only had one yearly religious rite, directed to Eru himself) but I grow weary of the subject. At least I need say no more about it for two weeks yet. 

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.