Where Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is concerned, we’ve had little to go on—for years—but that hasn’t stopped anyone from speculating. Who is this show about? Will there be hobbits, even though there weren’t really hobbits in the Second Age, when the story is set? Will they drag Sauron into it even though he’s been lying low?
A big piece in Vanity Fair today offers, well, some answers (and fodder for a thousand more speculations, too). One thing is for sure: Now we know who some of those hands belong to.
The nifty elven armor belongs to Galadriel, who is in this era a warrior, “as angry and brash as she is clever” according to Vanity Fair. She has a plotline with a human, Halbrand (Charlie Vickers), who is one of the characters created for the show; he has a past he’s trying to escape from.
The series, as the name suggests, centers around the forging of the rings. “It’s the story of the creation of all those powers, where they came from, and what they did to each of those races,” said co-showrunner Patrick McKay, who explained the central question behind the series: “Can we come up with the novel Tolkien never wrote and do it as the mega-event series that could only happen now?”
Other new characters include Arondir, a silvan elf played by Ismael Cruz Córdova (he wears the striking tree-face armor), and the dwarf Princess Disa (Sophia Nomvete). Arondir has a forbidden human lover, Bronwyn (Nazanin Boniadi), who lives in the Southlands and is described as a single mother and healer.
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In a bold move, #TheRingsOfPower condenses Tolkien’s Middle-earth timeline and adds entirely new characters. Sophia Nomvete’s dwarven princess, Disa, and Ismael Cruz Córdova’s Silvan elf, Arondir, broaden the notion of who lives in Middle-earth.
: https://t.co/Tabxf9CzoL pic.twitter.com/s2MXkGpQXm
— VANITY FAIR (@VanityFair) February 10, 2022
I don’t know what to tell you about Elrond; I can’t stop thinking how he borrowed his hairstyle from Steve Harrington in the first season of Stranger Things. But here he’s “a canny young elven architect and politician” in the city of Lindon.
As some have guessed, the show has not hobbits but harfoots, who are ancestors to hobbits as we know them. “Two lovable, curious harfoots, played by Megan Richards and Markella Kavenagh, encounter a mysterious lost man whose origin promises to be one of the show’s most enticing enigmas,” Vanity Fair says. Sir Lenny Henry plays a harfoot elder.
One of the most familiar names other than Galadriel or Elrond is Isildur (Maxim Baldry), who at this point is a sailor, not a warrior; it’s years until he cuts the One Ring from Sauron’s hand. The elven smith Celebrimbor (Charles Edwards) has an important part to play. And we’ll also meet Prince Durin IV (Owain Arthur) and see Khazad-dûm at its height.
And there’s one big thing the showrunners need viewers to know. Vanity Fair says, “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.”
If that’s the biggest deviation, it’s one that makes sense, narratively speaking; thousands of years is a too-massive canvas for a show that may only have a few seasons to tell its story.
The first trailer for The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is set to debut during the Super Bowl this Sunday, February 13th.
This is looking more and more like compromised, corporate mess every day. :-(
Dis was actually the name of the mother of Fili and Kili. Dwarf women didn’t get into the histories, according to Tolkien, because they seldom went abroad and when they did they made themselves look and sound exactly like the men. For protection perhaps? Dwarf women were scarce. But they were very self directed being as interested in craft as men and free to concentrate on their work rather than marry. Dwarf men may have been slightly henpecked. If so they didn’t mind.
Am I the only one thinking that maybe making the childlike forest people brown isn’t the best look?
P.S. the new character’s names are pretty awful. Arondir??
Very excited for this. All the photos look amazing! Love the fact that there are POC dwarves and elves (Disa should for real have a beard, though :).
I am glad that they are saying up front that they are compressing the Second Age timeline, even though I really wanted them to stay true to it, because it gives me time to get over that and just enjoy the show. Like you say, a story spanning millenia probably wasn’t practical.
Looks nice to me.
The Lord of the Rings trilogy movies actually do condense quite a bit of the timeline as well, so I’m more or less okay with this, I think. And given that Tolkien himself never really settled on what was canon for a lot of these things (even in his notes) AND leaves a ton of gaps, I think I’m just mentally more prepared to accept a little more playing in the sandbox.
The concept of dwarf women is kind of neat even though I know it already is a bit of a departure (as they are supposed to be more reclusive and look enough like dwarvish men that outsiders can’t distinguish them).
@3: I recall that Tolkien canonically had a dwarven character called Groin.
The time compression is one of my only remaining concerns. Yes, it helps that there’s time to just process and accept it. I guess I’m just revising my concern to: are we talking about having the whole of the Second Age take place within Isildur’s lifetime? Are there are only going to be like one or two kings of Númenor? Elros . . . then Ar-Pharazôn? That’s how this is starting to feel.
@2, where are you getting “childlike” from?
@7 Pronounced GROW-IN.
Isildur never had a sister. The Galadriel actress projects no power or strength (listen to her voiceover…ugh). Dwarven women have bears. I can’t wait to see what else they decided to “change for changes” sake.
Why the need to compress the timeline at all? We didn’t ”need” to have Isildur. We have plenty of interesting characters without mashing the timeline to drag in one Numenorean. What Elrond and Galadriel weren’t recognizable enough? It seems like they’re trying to pull in all the major hits of the Second Age into one show, when the War of the Elves and Sauron would have sufficed.
This is going to be a mess. Whether it will be enjoyable or exasperating has yet to be seen.
@@@@@ Agreed. Tar-Palantir will probably take Tar-Minastir’s role if they include him at all.
@8: I think the Second Age processes as normal up to the forging of the Rings, and then the events leading from the forging of the Rings to the Last Alliance will happen in under 200 years (the lifetime of an elf or Dunedain).
@9: I also recall that the protagonist of LotR was called “Bingo” for the first two years of the writing of LotR until Tolkien admitted that it was a dumbass name and changed it to Frodo.
@8 I think it’s probably going to be more like the second half of the second age is compressed into Isildur’s lifetime, from the crafting of the rings to the fall of Numenor to the last alliance.
The time compression is a huge mistake, IMO. They had the chance with five seasons (or more) to actually show the epic scope of time. Very hard to pull off in a movie, but each season could have dipped into an era during the Second Age, and quite a few characters would have remained constant. I bet they thought audiences would be too dumb to follow that, but that makes them dumb for thinking so little of their audience!
My hesitant excitement for this show took a decent blow today. Thanks, universe.
I keep thinking about the Payne quote from this article. This one: “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.”
I’m resigned to it, and as the day has gone by, there’s a kind of relief to at least knowing now what sort of cap Amazon has placed on this series as far as how faithful it will be to adapting Tolkien’s world. Knowing the timeline will get crunched means no longer worrying about it, at least.
“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…” Yes, exactly! Lean into that, I say, instead of dance around it. Think how the Elves feel about it, too—at least a lot of them. Unhappy is certainly how the Men feel about it. Why shouldn’t we? Look to the Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth. Read the melancholy in Finrod’s words and the bitterness in Andreth’s.
If the dramas of Arda Marred unfold at such a rapid pace such that the Elves don’t have the sorrow and the weight of memory that comes with the passing of centuries and millennia, and they don’t have to watch their mortal friends age and wither and “depart soon whither the Elves know not,” then is this really a respectable Middle-earth story? I’m not saying no, because I haven’t seen it yet. But it’s hard to let the *heart* of Tolkien go here. At least for me. Maybe Amazon can capture some of the magic and make it *feel* like Middle-earth (that’s what I want the most), and I know I will grasp for it myself, but dismissing such lore—due to, what, viewer impatience?—doesn’t give the audience much credit. I suppose with the sheer number of people they hope will be their viewership, maybe they’re right.
I for one think it would make sense—and be a very Tolkienian thing to do—for us to be introduced to new mortal characters each season, while the Elves remain unchanged. How original (and yet faithful to the source material) tha would be! For regular mortals, they’d come and go, yes. For Númenóreans, less swiftly. We can handle it. We’ve done it before. I know how TV and movie storytelling works; you need your audience to connect emotionally with certain characters. Does that mean you can’t become invested in them if they’re not around for the whole show? No, it doesn’t. See what some films do in so short a time, and how some short-lived TV shows have accomplished much in so little. (Like Firefly. Think of Wash, and how few episodes we really had with him.) With good writing and acting, you can accomplish a lot. Heck, I’ve seen standalone Doctor Who episodes (like “Blink”) that drew me in and made me care for just that one episode (since I know next to nothing about the series as a whole). It can be done. It’s wistful thinking on my part to think that Amazon could have taken this aproach effectively. But they certainly are not. They’re not shy about inventing new characters, clearly. So I’m not sure I understand the “then you’re not meeting really big, important canon characters until season four.” So let us wait until season four! Some of the characters *should* seem ageless that entire time.
Elves live as long as Arda does. Dwarves and Númenóreans live a really long time. Regular Men and hobbits do not. Shouldn’t we see how they don’t all advance through time the same? Isn’t that part of a fantasy world? Especially this one?
Sorry, just thinking out loud. I’m trying to work through and managing my expectations. I’m not tanking them.
I’m thinking I owe Christopher Tolkien an apology for ragging on him for sitting on the rights of the rest of the Legendarium for so long and blocking something like this.
i can see your point, and obviously if this show were being made for Tolkien die-hards like us, thats the way it should go, but it’s not. It’s a billion dollar (!) investment, so they’re trying to rope in the broadest audience, which includes all the people who will be too impatient to sit through that.
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@17 JLaSala
“…Look, there might be some fans who want us to do a documentary of Middle-earth…”
Hand Raised
@16 – that would be so Tolkienian – watching the evanescence of Men flicker in and out. I would go for it, haha.
I think it’s safe to say for the TV show at least though they probably are just interested in getting to all the cool set pieces and not really that melancholic feeling that can pervade some of Tolkien’s work, just slightly laced with hope ;)
That said, maybe I’m just more blase about this because Wheel of Time already tanked my expectations to the ground.
I’m even more skeptical about this than about WoT. For WoT I was warily excited, for this I’m just wary. Doing the Second Age just doesn’t make sense to me, aside from LotR and The Hobbit, the most detailed stuff come from the First Age, the “Great Tales”, the Second Age is just broad stroke sketches, I guess it allows the show’s creators more room to invent but I’m not sure if that’s a good thing, I don’t know if I trust them to be able to fill in the gaps satisfactorily.
Also, should that be “derivation” or “deviation” in the second to last paragraph?
As a stone fan of Tolkien’s legendarium for most of my life, I’m now about as happy with the prospect of this as I was with Jackson’s Hobbit films.
Whish is not to say I won’t watch them, although the point about Christopher Tolkien sitting on the rights for years is well taken.
Compacting about 18 centuries into just a few years sounds like a really bad idea, assuming we’re talking about the span of years from the forging of the Rings/War Between the Elves and Sauron and the corruption and fall of Numenor/flight of the Faithful/Last Alliance. If it’s planned for 5 seasons, each season could have been a snapshot of a crucial time during those centuries.
Of course, then, the only continuing characters would have been the Elves and Sauron, but others above have made a good case for why that wouldn’t be bad.
Galadriel as a young, brash badass? Um, no. She’s already a few thousand years old at the beginning of this. Badass, yes. Brash, hardly.
I’m curious as to whether they’ll do a flashback to the very beginning of the Second Age, where we’d get to see the actor playing Elrond play both Elrond and Elros at their final parting, when the latter is leaving for Numenor to become the first king.
Who says Isildur never had a sister? Perhaps like the sons of Elrond, she was so overshadowed by siblings that no one remembered her…
They seem to have set things up that they’ll be binging on all the available source material at once. Very slash-and-burn.
Dr. Thanatos, that’s a great point. But it also means, like Elrond’s boys or the hobbits, that Isildur’s sister surely can’t play a historically memorable role unless none survive to tell of it.
Re-posting this comment in the appropriate topic!
Oh wow. That is big news indeed. I will also adjust my expectations accordingly and go into this pretty much seeing it as…fan fiction set in Middle Earth. It looks like they are trying as hard as they can to match the feel and tone of the Second Age and it does appear they’re treating the material respectfully, so I do have hopes! Just not going to expect particular plot points or characters now. As long as they don’t make big character changes, I think I’ll be happy.
The pictures look gorgeous and this does look promising, even if it won’t be telling the tales we all know and love. Very much a compression of the Second Age, as they themselves have admitted. Isildur is in this!? Very much surprised by that. But at the end of the day, if they tell a good story, with living, breathing, believable characters and beautiful dialogue, and give us a quality production of a Might-Have-Been in the Tolkien mythos…I will be happy.
Is that too much to ask? =)
I’m a little dissapointed they’ve fallen back on the Elf-Man romance. The problem is that this has happened twice before in the Legendarium at this point, and when it happens again 3000 years later it’s such a big deal because it’s only happened twice before. If they really want an inter-speicies romance, why not a Man and a Dwarf? That could become (part) of the origin of the hobbits.
I am by no means an expert in Tokien Linguistics, but doesn’t the name component “ar” mean “lord” or “king”? As in Aragorn and Argonath and Aratar? I’ll be interested in how (or if) this applies to Arondir
Even in the Silmarillion, Galadriel never struck me as a “warrior”. As strong and willing to fight as any of the Noldor, sure, but she would never make a carieer out of fighting. Her tutalage under Melian means she can afford not to fight.
Although my expectations have been significantly lowered, I’m still cautiously optomistic. Long-shot theory: the “man with mysterious past” the harfoot encounters will end up going by the name… Annatar.
@7, admittedly Tolkien had some bad names too.
@8, Two lovable, curious harfoots, sounds childlike to me. Possibly I am unfair.
As I recall Glads was married to Celeborn by the time she settled in Eregiion if they want an elven Warrior Princess why not Celebrian of whom we know little or nothing? And they could cover her romance with Elrond.
@29, the name Arondir doesn’t fit Tolkien’s linguistics very well. Arandir could mean ‘Royal Man’ but Arondir combines the Sinfarin ‘Ar’ element with the Quenya word Ond, meaning stone, and Dir, a masculine ending.
@29 Agreed re falling back on Elf-Man romance, as that is supposed to be incredibly rare. Although the local traditions regarding the origins of the Princes of Dol Amroth also has them descended from a Man-Elf pairing (Imrazor, a Numenorean colonist with possibly a Silvan Elf).
Man+Dwarf for Hobbits? Doesn’t really work for me. The character of Dwarves is way too clearly defined. I always had the impression that Hobbits were strictly descended from the race of Men, perhaps from an originally isolated group where a diminutive population bred true (phyletic or insular dwarfism), to the point where when they came back into contact with other Men neither group recognized the other as kin.
(Well, maybe if they were a survival of Petty-Dwarves. But again, that seems a stretch, especially as the Petty-Dwarves’ character seems to be a distillation of everything that’s bad about Dwarves in general.)
I agree with you totally about Galadriel. She’s already a few thousand years old at this point, and no brash hothead. They totally missed an opportunity by not assigning this to Celebrian, about whom we know nothing other than she marries Elrond, gives birth to Elladan, Elrohir, and Arwen, and departs Middle Earth after her ordeal at the hands of Orcs.
@33, making Celebrian a brash action girl would be totally defensible and quite interesting especially if it put her in conflict with her future hubby Elrond.
What’s with the modern haircuts on the Elves?
@33, I also think Celebrian makes more sense than Galadriel as the protagonist. Galadriel should be a contemporary of Gil-galad and Celebrimbor (I believe she’s actually supposed to older than both of them) rather than Elrond. I foresee them going the unfortunate route of a Galadriel-Elrond-Halbrand love triangle in the series.
So here are my thoughts on the teaser: https://tinyurl.com/bdh9wstx
markvolund, right. It’s the Melian element of Galadriel’s history that makes her seem inappropriately brash and fiery in the Second Age. I think it’s clear they’re leaving Melian out of the equation entirely to justify the version of Galadriel they’re running with. We just have to accept that.
Celebrían might have been a better fit, but I think it’s obvious that Amazon never considered her, since Galadriel is about name-recognition and moviegoers have no idea who Celebrían is. Which doesn’t mean they won’t introduce her through the Elrond story. I mean, I hope they do. They have to set up Galadriel as his mother-in-law somehow.
Now to be totally fair Tolkien does describe Galadriel as fighting to defend her mother’s people at Aqualonde and she is fired up at the idea of ruling a realm of her own. But Helcaraxe knocked the brashness out of her and her studies with melisn tempered her desire to rule. It was still there, for the Ring to tempt, but it no longer dominated. Galadriel defended her realms as melisn did, with her powers of magic. She never led troops. That was Celeborn’s role. And where is Celeborn? The husband she has dwelt with for long ages and beside whom she has fought the long defeat?
If they’re fine with introducing totally new character’s with no name recognition why not Celebrian? A woman with no story and so open for invention.
@38, 39
Yeah, Melian would not come into the story at all now (although her contribution to Galadriel’s growth and character damn well should have). With Thingol gone to the Halls of Mandos and Doriath under the waves, any reason for her to remain embodied as a quasi-Elf in Middle Earth is gone. Melian the Maia is back in Valinor.
They’re inventing new characters, so worrying about name recognition? Also, there’s still a place for Galadriel in the story in a major role. Just not as a warrior.
This is not Tolkien’s legendarium. This is very l o o s e l y based on Tolkien’s legendarium.
@33
Man-Dwarf? Maybe if the Petty Dwarves are involved; almost certainly if the Pretty Dwarves showed up.
Elf-Dwarf? If we learned anything from the Hobbit adaptation it’s that this is an abomination in the sight of Eru…