The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power unleashed one trailer to (arguably) rule them all on Sunday. The move finally provides proof of life for an idea that was, for several years, only a lofty serial television concept connected to a frequently cited series commitment by Amazon for $1 billion total. Yet, for fans familiar with the vast mythical backbone of J.R.R. Tolkien’s literary source material, the trailer was also a head-scratcher. Indeed, the clip brought a barrage of familiar, impactful imagery and an intent to cover a wide variety of Tolkien-inspired storylines—arguably too wide, seeing as the author originally set such benchmarks across several millennia. However, the new story approach may be taken as a necessary evil for the greater good that is cohesive storytelling.
Check out The Rings of Power teaser trailer just below!
Just last month, when the Amazon series dropped its initial teaser—laden with imagery evocative of the eponymous Rings of Power being forged—showrunners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay released a statement describing a series that “unites all the major stories of Middle-earth’s Second Age: the forging of the rings, the rise of the Dark Lord Sauron, the epic tale of Númenor, and the Last Alliance of Elves and Men.” However, with The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power trailer now in the ether, the specificity of such a statement has been, ironically, made more ambiguous. That’s because the aforementioned Rings-addled events occurred across the vast span of 2,000 years.
And no, Rings is not an anthology series of tales separated by millennia since the showrunners have made their intentions to “tell one story that unites all these things” rather clear. Consequently, anachronisms are inevitable for the series, which previews a version of the Second Age that’s apocryphal to Tolkien. Indeed, the trailer—context-deprived as it may be—focuses on the adventures of members of the hobbit-like harfoot race, and the hitherto unknown exploits of Galadriel (Morfyyd Clark) as a horseback-riding armored warrior who goes on a maritime adventure, along with stories centered on woodland elves, dwarves and teases of more of the big battles we’ve come to expect from the Rings franchise. While the presentation is a mix of original characters and loosely inspired Tolkien concepts, one of the more evident alterations is confirmed by the very presence of Isildur (Maxim Baldry) the eventual One-Ring-tainted prince-turned-king of Gondor, who, in Tolkien’s timeline, wasn’t born until about 1,700 years after the Rings of Power’s creation. Thus, making Isildur a contemporary of the creation of the Rings is a confluence of anachronistic historical figure interactions that, for our world, would make Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure look like a documentary.
Of course, not all of Tolkien’s mythology—as famously represented by the 1937 novel The Hobbit and the 1954-1955 sequel trilogy The Lord of the Rings—can be feasibly adapted onscreen with extreme verisimilitude. The array of contextual backstories and chronicles, most of which were published posthumously under the editorial purview of the author’s son, Christopher, are often purposefully detached and unpoetic, meant to stand as quasi-historical chronicles in a semi-biblical form. They were, nevertheless, crucial for the foundation of the main stories. It’s an idea that director Peter Jackson understood, leading to his adaptation of ideas from Rings’ appendices, most notably the movie-crucial angle of Aragorn and Arwen’s romance. Yet, even the novel-knowledgeable creative triumvirate of Jackson and writers Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens had to tweak Tolkien’s order of certain events to provide a sense of urgency, which is a necessary component for films to unfold.
As co-showrunner Payne explained to Vanity Fair amongst recent details divulged: “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.”
The most prominent example of this practice in the beloved films was in Fellowship of the Ring, in which Bilbo Baggins bequeaths the One Ring to his nephew Frodo Baggins before leaving the Shire to set off on another adventure. At this point, Gandalf, suspicious that the magic ring might be the Ring, instructs Frodo to keep it in a safe place and never put it on, and then embarks on a journey of his own across Middle-earth to research and investigate historical chronicles that can verify said suspicions. Of course, the movie made this sequence seem as if Gandalf simply took a day trip, from which he quickly returned to send Frodo and pal Samwise Gamgee on the first leg of what would become a life-altering journey. However, in Tolkien’s version, the time between Gandalf’s departure from the Shire and his return was about 17 years—not 17 hours, not 17 days, but 17 years! While a discriminating fan’s purist impulses would likely have seen Gandalf’s lengthy absence retained, perhaps with the film cutting to a pace-crippling “17 years later…” message, it would have mitigated the existential danger of the Ring’s presence and the upcoming task, which, at this point, is escalated by the arrival of the Nazgûl (Ringwraiths) in a woefully vulnerable Hobbiton.
Pertinently, The Rings of Power faces a similar predicament, only on an unprecedentedly epochal scale. While the medium of television brings a serial format that would allow some leeway on any prospective pacing issues attached to a purist rendition of the texts, the showrunners are nevertheless tasked with telling a single, unifying story of grandiose events. Such a task clearly requires a more compact chronology to convey the amount of urgency necessary to keep audiences of all stripes engaged. That can’t happen when even the ancestors of your central figure aren’t even gleams in anyone’s eyes at the time of the show’s inciting incident. Plus, while some might lament the tweaking of the timelines, one could also argue that the live-action mythos already abandoned any conceit of being a purist Tolkien adaptation. If the several (necessary) changes Jackson made to the Rings Trilogy were not enough evidence of this, then the egregious liberties taken with The Hobbit Trilogy should suffice on that front.
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is scheduled to premiere on Amazon Prime Video on Friday, September 2.
