{"id":1637360,"date":"2022-09-09T07:18:49","date_gmt":"2022-09-09T11:18:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1637360"},"modified":"2022-09-09T07:19:42","modified_gmt":"2022-09-09T11:19:42","slug":"three-big-ways-amazons-rings-of-power-butchers-tolkiens-lore","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/three-big-ways-amazons-rings-of-power-butchers-tolkiens-lore\/","title":{"rendered":"Three Big Ways Amazon\u2019s \u2018Rings of Power\u2019 Butchers Tolkien\u2019s Lore"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">20<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fthree-big-ways-amazons-rings-of-power-butchers-tolkiens-lore%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1637360&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><p>There\u2019s a lot to dislike in Amazon\u2019s billion-dollar adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien\u2019s work, primarily the utter abandonment of Tolkien\u2019s moral and religious imagination, as Nathanael Blake\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/2022\/09\/06\/amazons-rings-of-power-fails-because-it-abandons-tolkiens-moral-imagination\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">noted in his excellent analysis<\/a>\u00a0in these pages earlier this week.<\/p>\n<p>But \u201cLord of the Rings: Rings of Power\u201d doesn\u2019t just make a mockery of the deeper meaning behind Tolkien\u2019s legendarium, it also butchers the lore itself, unapologetically and needlessly deviating from its source material in ways that render the epic events of Middle Earth\u2019s Second Age by turns incomprehensible and ridiculous.<\/p>\n<p>With that in mind, here are the three most egregious instances where Amazon\u2019s showrunners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay decided to ignore, truncate, or completely change important elements of one of the greatest works of literature in the English language \u2014 either because they failed to understand the lore to begin with, or because they hate Tolkien\u2019s deeply Roman Catholic mythology so much they deliberately tried to destroy it.<\/p>\n<h2>Gil-galad Had No Power to \u2018Send\u2019 Galadriel (or Anyone Else) to Valinor<\/h2>\n<p>After Galadriel returns from what appears to be an unsuccessful, centuries-long mission to hunt down Sauron (a mission that implausibly ends in mutiny), the high-king of the elves, Gil-galad, proclaims the war against Morgoth\u2019s forces to be over. He then grants Galadriel and her company the honor of returning to Valinor, the realm of the Valar in Aman across the Sundering Seas. Galadriel clearly doesn\u2019t want to go and at the last moment jumps ship and swims back toward Middle Earth. Eventually, she\u2019s rescued by a group of shipwrecked human survivors on a raft, which is where we leave her at the end of episode two.<\/p>\n<p>There are a lot of problems here, but let\u2019s start with the idea that Gil-galad, as high-king of the Noldor, would have had any authority to \u201csend\u201d Galadriel or anyone else back to Valinor, much less punish Galadriel for not following his orders.<\/p>\n<p>The showrunners might think they can get away with such a silly plot device because they basically ignore the existence of the Valar, which are the spirits of Arda (the world) born from the thought of Il\u00favatar (God) that reside in the undying lands of Valinor. But anyone who has read the source material from Tolkien would know that Gil-galad could no more grant passage to Valinor than he could travel there himself at will.<\/p>\n<p>Why? Because Galadriel and the Noldor were exiled from Valinor during the First Age when they rebelled against the Valar and left for Middle Earth in pursuit of Morgoth. At the end of the First Age, after Morgoth is defeated, the Valar pardon the Noldor and invite them to return to Aman. But some, including Galadriel and Celebrimbor, remained in Middle Earth. In one version of Tolkien\u2019s lore, Galadriel is excluded from the pardon of the Valar and banned from Valinor. In another version, she rejects the pardon and chooses to remain in Middle Earth with Celeborn, whom she has long since married.<\/p>\n<p>The point is, Gil-galad doesn\u2019t decide who goes to Valinor and who doesn\u2019t, the Valar do. And he certainly wouldn\u2019t offer passage to Valinor as a reward for military service, any more than elves would have\u00a0<em>applauded at the announcement<\/em>, as they absurdly do in the first episode of \u201cRings of Power.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>(Another point about Galadriel: She wasn\u2019t some mid-level military officer Gil-galad could order around or punish, much less the leader of some rag-tag elven scouting party, or even \u201ccommander of the northern armies\u201d as the show portrays her. She was an elven queen, born in Valinor, who ruled vast kingdoms in Middle Earth. As high-king of the Noldor, Gil-galad might have technically outranked her, but she was considerably older than he was, and by birth would have been something like his great-aunt.)<\/p>\n<h2>Sorry, but Elves Didn\u2019t Loath or Fear Human-Elf Couplings<\/h2>\n<p>In one of the several boring and tedious subplots of \u201cRings of Power,\u201d Arondir, an elven sentinel, is not-so-secretly in love with a healer woman from the southlands named Bronwyn. At one point Arondir is chastised by his companion Medhor, who says human-elf couplings have only twice \u201ceven been attempted,\u201d and \u201con each occasion ended in tragedy, ended in death!\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The two human-elf couplings he\u2019s referring to are of course Beren and L\u00fathien, and Tuor and Idril. L\u00fathien eventually chose to renounce her elven immortality to marry Beren, a mortal man. Although the loss of L\u00fathien might be considered a \u201ctragedy\u201d by some elves, the unions of Beren-L\u00fathien and Tuor-Idril led to the final defeat of Morgoth and can hardly be considered a cautionary tale or to have \u201cended in tragedy.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In the case of Tuor, a man, and Idril, an elven princess, it was their half-elven son E\u00e4rendil who sailed to Valinor in the First Age to seek the aid of the Valar against Morgoth. He was married to Elwing, daughter of Dior, the son of Beren and L\u00fathien. Their sons were Elros and Elrond.<\/p>\n<p>After E\u00e4rendil\u2019s voyage to Valinor (he was the first mortal man ever to set foot there), he fought and killed a great dragon in the battle that finally brought Morgoth down. Afterward, the Valar agreed that because E\u00e4rendil and Elwing were both descended from a union of elves and men, and because of the great and perilous journey E\u00e4rendil had undertaken for the sake of both elves and men, it would be granted to them and their sons the freedom to choose the race to which they would henceforth belong. Elros chose men, Elrond chose elves. Centuries later, Elrond\u2019s daughter Arwen would forsake her elven immortality to be with Aragorn, a descendent of Elros, thus marking the third human-elf coupling.<\/p>\n<p>As anyone acquainted with this lore knows, it was through these human-elf couplings that some of Middle Earth\u2019s greatest figures emerged and some of its greatest deeds accomplished. Only someone wholly unfamiliar with or hostile to all this would portray human-elf couplings as dangerous or somehow taboo. But that\u2019s exactly what Payne and McKay did in \u201cRings of Power.\u201d<\/p>\n<h2>Hobbits (Er,\u00a0Harfoots) Don\u2019t Appear Until Thousands of Years After the Second Age<\/h2>\n<p>Because the show\u2019s creators don\u2019t give a damn about fidelity to Tolkien\u2019s mythology, and perhaps because they thought \u201cRings of Power\u201d needed some comic relief (the cartoonish rock-breaking contest between Elrond and Durin wasn\u2019t enough, apparently), they decided to throw some hobbits \u2014 excuse me, <em>harfoots<\/em> \u2014 into the mix.<\/p>\n<p>Never mind that hobbits don\u2019t appear in Middle Earth until a thousand years into the Third Age, long after the events portrayed in \u201cRings of Power.\u201d The show tries to get around this by positing that harfoots are ancestors of hobbits, but they\u2019re not. Harfoots are one of three breeds of hobbits, along with stoors and fallowhides. Anyone who has read the prologue to \u201cThe Lord of the Rings\u201d knows this. It\u2019s not an oversight on the show\u2019s part, it\u2019s an intentional distortion of Tolkien\u2019s lore.<\/p>\n<p>Chronological problems aside, these hobbits\/harfoots feel\u2026\u00a0<em>off<\/em>. Not necessarily because so many of the actors and actresses portraying them are black or multiracial \u2014 although that also doesn\u2019t make sense, given that Tolkien was depicting a prehistoric mythology of northern Europe and Britain, which was more or less racially homogenous. It\u2019s more because they seem less like the hobbits of Tolkien\u2019s creation and more like forest-dwelling gnomes, or a primitive nomadic tribe, or <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=b2mm79vRuzA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the elves from Ridley Scott\u2019s 1985 fantasy film \u201cLegend.<\/a>\u201d Their dress and manner and village all feel totally disconnected from Middle Earth, and absolutely nothing like the pre-industrial Englishmen on which they were based.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Indeed, you get the sense that one of the reasons the showrunners wanted hobbits was so they could showcase multiracial hobbits along with multiracial elves and dwarves, perhaps because they thought it would be edgy and progressive. (Ooh, look! See how Arondir\u2019s commander is racist against men? See how the townsfolk are racist against Arondir?\u00a0<em>But are they racist against him because he\u2019s black or because he\u2019s an elf?<\/em>\u00a0So deep.)<\/p>\n<p>And maybe that would be fine \u2014 a bit of artistic license in a sprawling fantasy series \u2014 if showrunners Payne and McKay hadn\u2019t also mangled, changed, or ignored so much else about the lore they were supposedly adapting. In the context of all that, however, their nonsensical decision to make Middle Earth look even more multiracial than modern Britain comes off as self-conscious virtue-signaling that distracts from the story and adds nothing of substance.<\/p>\n<h2>Amazon Has Quashed All Future Film Adaptations of Tolkien<\/h2>\n<p>The items above aren\u2019t all that\u2019s wrong with the lore in \u201cRings of Power.\u201d There\u2019s the bizarre suggestion that elves didn\u2019t have a word for \u201cdeath\u201d in Galadriel\u2019s youth. (Elves are immortal but they can die from injury or extreme privation, and they can even give up their spirit, as F\u00ebanor\u2019s mother did, and they certainly saw animals die in the First Age.) There\u2019s the weird Sauron symbol that crops up in strange places, the absurd depiction of Elrond as a simpering speechwriter for Gil-galad, somehow not invited to the \u201ccouncil\u201d that only \u201celven lords\u201d are allowed to attend, which is just flat wrong \u2014  he\u2019s the son of E\u00e4rendil, he\u2019s an elven lord! And let\u2019s not even speculate about the strange comet-man who, if he turns out to be the first Istari (or wizard) would also be thousands of years too early, since the wizards didn\u2019t come to Middle Earth until the Third Age.<\/p>\n<p>But the worst part about \u201cRings of Power\u201d isn\u2019t that it has already failed miserably on its own terms (as of this writing, the show has a dismal 39 percent audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes). It was obvious enough it would fail when\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=v7v1hIkYH24\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the first teaser trailer came out<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>The worst part is that no one will ever attempt another large-scale adaptation of Tolkien after Amazon has spent its billion and had its say. We could have had a show that\u2019s actually about the compelling characters and gripping tales of the Second Age as Tolkien created them. We could have had a standalone miniseries about the rise and fall of Eregion, or the saga of Tar-Aldarion, the great N\u00famen\u00f3rean king and mariner who sailed to Middle Earth and established contact with Gil-galad and the elves at Lindon. There were so many possibilities, but none of them will ever be made now. Payne and McKay and the geniuses at Amazon didn\u2019t just ruin one show, they killed all future big-budget adaptations of Tolkien.<\/p>\n<p>Maybe that\u2019s for the best. Maybe we\u2019re no longer the kind of people or society that can faithfully adapt Tolkien because, having lost our own moral imagination and sacramental understanding of creation, we can no longer comprehend the meaning of Middle Earth. If that\u2019s the case, it would be best to leave Tolkien\u2019s lore on the page where it began, protected from meddling and butchering by those who despise the man and his epic work, and would unmake it if they could.\u00a0<\/p>\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator\" \/>\n<p>\n  John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.<\/p>\n<div class=\"article-comments mt-30 mt-sm-60\">\n<div class=\"article-comments-container d-flex flex-column align-items-center py-30\">\n    <img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"110\" height=\"106\" src=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/12\/fdrlst-mark.svg\" class=\"img-fluid mb-20\" alt=\"The Federalist logo eagle mark\" \/>    <\/p>\n<p>Unlock commenting by joining the Federalist Community.<\/p>\n<p>    <a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/plans\/pricing\/\" class=\"btn btn-on-white\">Subscribe<\/a>  <\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There\u2019s a lot to dislike in Amazon\u2019s billion-dollar adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien\u2019s work, primarily the utter abandonment of Tolkien\u2019s moral and religious imagination, as Nathanael Blake\u00a0noted in his excellent analysis\u00a0in<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":518,"featured_media":2315279,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1637360","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1637360","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/518"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1637360"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1637360\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2315279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1637360"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1637360"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1637360"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}