(no subject)
I'm curious... has anyone been following news of Amazon's "Rings of Power" series? Vanity Fair has an article out about it with enough spoilers to give any hard-core Tolkien fan a bad case of the heebie-jeebies, I think, but also a frisson of excitement that this could be very cool. Or at least very big.
https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2022/02/amazon-the-rings-of-power-series-first-look
First and foremost: I'm beyond excited they're setting a major show in the Second Age. I never thought I'd see that happen.
I also really sympathize with trying to come up with an epic story in that period. Since the news broke of the Amazon show, I've been trying to think how I'd structure it. The actual fall of Eregion story is the best bet, I think: the politics between Galadriel welcoming first Celebrimbor and eventually Sauron and Celeborn's unease with it, the crafting of the Rings and eventually Sauron's destruction has an interesting narrative arc to it; but it's a first-class downer. Akallabeth, same benefits and same ultimate problem, only a lot of the named characters for the show just don't enter into it. The War of the Last Alliance ends on a victorious note (kind of), but on its own it's really kind of a long action-driven drudge with little space for drama or romance.
Of course they could go more episodic, I guess. This is a TV show rather than a movie; but still, there's probably some overriding story arc, isn't there? Otherwise it would just seem weird and probably a bit anticlimactic for Tolkien fans, who are used to those grand struggles and resolutions. I'm honestly not sure how I'd struggle this kind of story in this age with the canon we have, and I don't envy the writers' task. So I'm trying to be sympathetic.
What really worries me is the show is truly warping canon. I don't mean adaptations can't make changes, even big ones; I survived the genre shifting of The Hobbit book to the film trilogy and still loved quite a lot of it. But the VF article says they're basically compressing thousands of years in history into a single moment in time. There are even hobbits (harfoots, actually), and with a sword-pommel design that's eerily reminiscent of the horse-head of the Rohirric flag and another OC with a name ending in -wyn, I'd be very surprised if there weren't some kind of proto-Rohirrim involved. At what point with so much change do you lose your footing in what made the Second Age the Second Age, and just end up with a kind of generic fantasy? I'm not coming at this from a canon-purist standpoint, but the source does have its themes, and this all seems like it couldn't help being way too generic sword-and-sorcery style fantasy.
I keep coming back to this quote from the showrunners in the VF article: "One of the very specific things the texts say is that hobbits never did anything historic or noteworthy before the Third Age. But really, does it feel like Middle-earth if you don’t have hobbits or something like hobbits in it?" And I'd answer, emphatically, yes. Maybe not Tolkien or Lord of the Rings, but the Silm is different and the stories in the netherworld of the Second Age are different again. It's not that I don't love hobbits, I do, but there's a smallness about them, a personalization I guess, that does strike me as very much at odds with the kind of stories I think Tolkien was trying to tell with the Second Age.
I'm also weirding out quite a bit because there's absolutely no reference to Celeborn in all this. How the heck do you tell the story of Eregion without his counterbalance to Celebrimbor's and even Galadriel's welcoming of Sauron? Also a more hot-headed and less wise Celeborn would have been so cool.
Anywho. Limited information, I am trying to be hopeful and wait and see, and I'm also not blind to how difficult this task was going to be. Some of the photos and tidbits I've seen seem quite fun, even if they don't always seem very Tolkienish. I'm sure I'll like and enjoy what comes out. But it's seeming less and less like it will have much of a connection to the themes that made me love the Second Age. Which is fine, I guess, but it does feel a bit like a bait and switch to connect this to those old stories and try to usurp the Tolkien fanbase for something that seems like it's going to be very different.
Anyone else have any thoughts about all this? I find I'm eager to talk about it, but I don't really know where to begin.
https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2022/02/amazon-the-rings-of-power-series-first-look
First and foremost: I'm beyond excited they're setting a major show in the Second Age. I never thought I'd see that happen.
I also really sympathize with trying to come up with an epic story in that period. Since the news broke of the Amazon show, I've been trying to think how I'd structure it. The actual fall of Eregion story is the best bet, I think: the politics between Galadriel welcoming first Celebrimbor and eventually Sauron and Celeborn's unease with it, the crafting of the Rings and eventually Sauron's destruction has an interesting narrative arc to it; but it's a first-class downer. Akallabeth, same benefits and same ultimate problem, only a lot of the named characters for the show just don't enter into it. The War of the Last Alliance ends on a victorious note (kind of), but on its own it's really kind of a long action-driven drudge with little space for drama or romance.
Of course they could go more episodic, I guess. This is a TV show rather than a movie; but still, there's probably some overriding story arc, isn't there? Otherwise it would just seem weird and probably a bit anticlimactic for Tolkien fans, who are used to those grand struggles and resolutions. I'm honestly not sure how I'd struggle this kind of story in this age with the canon we have, and I don't envy the writers' task. So I'm trying to be sympathetic.
What really worries me is the show is truly warping canon. I don't mean adaptations can't make changes, even big ones; I survived the genre shifting of The Hobbit book to the film trilogy and still loved quite a lot of it. But the VF article says they're basically compressing thousands of years in history into a single moment in time. There are even hobbits (harfoots, actually), and with a sword-pommel design that's eerily reminiscent of the horse-head of the Rohirric flag and another OC with a name ending in -wyn, I'd be very surprised if there weren't some kind of proto-Rohirrim involved. At what point with so much change do you lose your footing in what made the Second Age the Second Age, and just end up with a kind of generic fantasy? I'm not coming at this from a canon-purist standpoint, but the source does have its themes, and this all seems like it couldn't help being way too generic sword-and-sorcery style fantasy.
I keep coming back to this quote from the showrunners in the VF article: "One of the very specific things the texts say is that hobbits never did anything historic or noteworthy before the Third Age. But really, does it feel like Middle-earth if you don’t have hobbits or something like hobbits in it?" And I'd answer, emphatically, yes. Maybe not Tolkien or Lord of the Rings, but the Silm is different and the stories in the netherworld of the Second Age are different again. It's not that I don't love hobbits, I do, but there's a smallness about them, a personalization I guess, that does strike me as very much at odds with the kind of stories I think Tolkien was trying to tell with the Second Age.
I'm also weirding out quite a bit because there's absolutely no reference to Celeborn in all this. How the heck do you tell the story of Eregion without his counterbalance to Celebrimbor's and even Galadriel's welcoming of Sauron? Also a more hot-headed and less wise Celeborn would have been so cool.
Anywho. Limited information, I am trying to be hopeful and wait and see, and I'm also not blind to how difficult this task was going to be. Some of the photos and tidbits I've seen seem quite fun, even if they don't always seem very Tolkienish. I'm sure I'll like and enjoy what comes out. But it's seeming less and less like it will have much of a connection to the themes that made me love the Second Age. Which is fine, I guess, but it does feel a bit like a bait and switch to connect this to those old stories and try to usurp the Tolkien fanbase for something that seems like it's going to be very different.
Anyone else have any thoughts about all this? I find I'm eager to talk about it, but I don't really know where to begin.