Oh, What a Serkis

 If there has always been a photograph of the King on the wall of a particular school, then only a very strong republican would want us to take it down. If there has never been a photograph of the King on the wall of a particular school, then only a very strong monarchist would suggest putting one up. It’s not about the picture. 

When I came to Bristol I didn’t know who Edward Colston was. When I found out, I was quite neutral towards his statue: “That’s quite interesting” I said “That someone who would definitely be regarded as a monster in one era was regarded as a hero in another one. We might as well leave it where it is.” However, as time went by, it turned out that not everyone did think that Colston was a monster. Some of them paraded about town carrying giant golliwogs, some of them wrote to the papers saying slavery wasn’t so bad and that most of the slaves had a cushy time, and some said that Bristol was a white town and we should celebrate our white history. So of course the statue had to go. When it was still there, I am sure that there were sensible moderate leftists and sensible moderate conservatives who would have been okay with it staying on display, maybe with an explanatory plaque,  but now it’s gone, only full on nutters would remotely think of putting it back.

Things that Tolkien “would have” objected to in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings:

—the change to Frodo’s age

—the juvenile characterisation of Merry and Pippin

—the comedification of Gimli

—dwarf-tossing

—Elf skateboarding

—the removal of Theoden and replacing of him with an entirely different character

—the removal of Faramir and replacing of him with an entirely different character

—the visualisation of the Balrog….

What Tolkien “would have” said about Rings of Power: 

“It has nothing to do with the history of Middle-earth, so why are you even asking me about it?”

What Tolkien “would have” said about the War of the Rohirrim: 

“Well, it’s not my middle-earth, but I respect the fact that “other hands” have taken my footnotes and appendices seriously enough to imagine them for themselves.”

Things that Tolkien probably wouldn't have cared about one way or the other.

Dark skinned Hobbits.

Yes, as a matter of fact, I can imagine a production of Romeo and Juliet in which the main characters are not played by Italians and a production of Hamlet in which the main character is not portrayed by a Dane. In fact the first time I ever saw Romeo and Juliet on the stage, at the Young Vic in the 80s, the Montagues were all played by black actors and Capulets were all played by white actors. Not what you would call subtle, but it made it terribly easy to keep track of who was on which side.

In the excellent National Theatre play about Nye Bevan, Winston Churchill was portrayed by a non-white member of the ensemble. They had the voice and the mannerisms and everyone understood what was going on. Most opera singers capable of singing the role of Cio-Cio-San don’t have the figure to pass for “fifteen exactly” but the audience uses their imaginations. 

There are, in fact, several famous non-white historical figures other than Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King. I agree that you probably wouldn’t use “colour blind casting” in a story which is about racial difference. Unless you did: I could imagine it being a really interesting avant garde experiment. On the stage, anything goes. But you certainly wouldn’t do it in something like The Crown where part of the fun is that the actors look enough like the historical characters that we can pretend we are watching candid historical footage. Beatles fans have already decided that the projected tetralogy is or ought to be a deep-fake reconstruction of real events and that since Barry Keoghan probably wouldn’t pass for Starkey in a looky-likey contest, the film will be a travesty. 

If you think that the whiteness of every white character in the Marvel texts and the Shakespeare extended universe is as important as the blackness of a black civil rights leader in a film about a black civil rights leader, then I think you need to take a long, hard look at yourself. Have I explained why the truly authentic way of adapting Spider-Man would be to make Peter Parker a Muslim)? [1]

There will always be someone who sees a person of colour playing Hamlet and says “I don’t understand — I just don’t see how a Danish prince could have African heritage.” That same same person will often see the same actor playing Othello and say  “I suppose nowadays only actual wizards can play Prospero and only actual sea-monsters can play Caliban.”

As a matter of fact, I think that it is quite clear that Tolkien intended the Shire to be a slightly idealised and slightly comedic version of a small English town. I think that he is well aware that if you think about it too much, that it stops making sense. Hobbits are a brilliant dramatic device: by accidentally placing them in his Silmarillion universe, he created a viewpoint position and a way of making the mythological epic accessible to people who find mythological epics a bit heavy going, but at the expense of sacrificing the strict “realism” of his work. 

There are hand waves about the freedom of the translator to use anachronisms. TH White talked about Arthurian knights sending their sons to Eton, and provided a footnote that Eton did not in fact exist at the time, but that if he had mentioned the actual school, no-one would have heard of it. So Hobbits get to have umbrellas, and post offices, and matches, and book-collections, and clocks, and pocket handkerchiefs, and generally act as if they are from the end of the eighteenth century even though the the Riders of Rohan are clearly living in the tenth. 

I have no particular problem with saying that these almost cartoonishly more-English-than-the-English stereotypes all have white skin. It’s not an issue. Forty-eight hours ago I would not have given the matter the slightest thought.

However, it turns out that there are significant numbers of American Tolkien fans who see The Lord of the Rings as an irreducibly ethno-nationalist text. Tolkien, it seems, was creating a mythology for England, and “England” is synonymous with white people. Any colour-blind casting, let alone any suggestion that there actually were dark-skinned Hobbits, goes against the Professor's intentions, and is therefore to be perceived as a personal insult, resulting in the posthumous necromantic gyrations that dead authors always seem to suffer from. 

Canonical questions about ethnicity in Middle-earth can be left for another day. Tolkien, we know, was engaged in re-writing his mythos from the ground up when he died, because he wanted to make it more consistent with plausible scientific reality. The Third Age ended about 4000 BC, so either he imagined that human ethnic and racial difference arose in the last six thousand years, or else he imagined that there were racial distinctions in the original creation. It is an open question as to whether he himself believed in Darwinism, and how he reconciled that with either his catholicism or his Middle-earth mythology.

If the toxic Tolkien fans are correct, and Tolkien’s mythos is irreducibly ethno-nationalist, can we continue to read it? I have argued, frequently, that it is possible to enjoy texts with toxic ideologies and certainly texts produced by toxic individuals. Economic considerations apart, the Harry Potter series itself is not primarily about the mystical essentialism of bathroom arrangements. Wagner’s proto-nazism is arguably more central to his operas, but seventy five years of productions makes it possible to hear Alberich the dwarf obsessing about his gold without automatically thinking “and that, of course, is what Wagner thought Jewish people were really like.” 

I fully accept that if I was Jewish myself, I might not find the process of de-Nazifying Wagner very edifying: but at a purely artistic level, it is the case that once you ignore the poison, there is some non-poisonous stuff left. 

I remain convinced that Cerebus the Aardvark is one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century: but I would never express that view without also saying in large block capitals double underlined in red that it is shockingly misogynistic. 

In the case of Rowling and Wagner, we are either separating the art from the artist; or else deprioritising secondary themes in the work. “The person who wrote the book is horrible, but that doesn’t mean the book is horrible, necessarily.” “This book contains some horrible things: but it contains not-horrible things as well."

In Sim’s case, more problematically, we are privileging form over content: saying, in effect “This text says a horrible thing superlatively well”. It is certainly not the case that you have to agree with a work of fiction before you can read or enjoy it: indeed, if you can only enjoy books you wholly agree with you could probably never read any book at all. The Right very frequently say that The Left disapprove of (or, in fact, Cancel) anything which doesn’t meet their exacting standards of orthodoxy; although other aspects of The Right actively campaign for certain kinds of literature to be removed from school libraries, and indeed libraries in general. 

I think that most of us in practice apply a sliding scale: the worse the ideology, the better the book needs to be to justify us reading it. We put up with Shylock in Shakespeare because Shakespeare is Shakespeare. We wouldn’t put up with him anywhere else. I tolerate the ideology of Cerebus because I rate the work so highly. 

Some people might say that if something contains Bad Ideas, it cannot, by definition, be Good Art. And other people might say that if a work of art is Good, the ideas can’t, by definition, be bad. That’s why you get Bishops saying that Life of Brian was unfunny, fifth rate, undergraduate humour and Imams saying that the Satanic Verses is an unreadable novel. And also why some people are prepared to say that since Life of Brian is incredibly funny, it can’t possibly be offensive; and that since Satanic Verses is a work of brilliance, it can’t possibly be blasphemous. Some people even go so far as to say that those who take offence do not by definition have a sense of humour, and that the opinion of people who do not have senses of humour should be ruled out of the discussion of comedy movies.

What hardly anyone ever says is “You are a very funny man and that was a very clever joke, but it was completely wrong for you to have made a joke on that particular subject”.  

I was distressed to learn that some Doctor Who fans are still arguing: 

1: That Talons of Weng Chiang can’t be racist because it is such a good story. 

2: That it doesn’t matter if Talons of Weng Chiang is racist because it is such a good story. 

3: That it doesn’t matter if Talons of Weng Chiang is racist because racism wasn’t considered so bad in the 1970s.

4: That Talons of Weng Chiang can’t possibly be racist because some Chinese people really do work in laundries and talk like that. 

5: That no-one really believes that Talons of Weng Chiang is racist, but some people pretend that they think it is for bad motives. 

Spoiler alert: Talons of Weng Chiang is, in fact, racist. 

My position has always been that two things can be true: “This is an excellent Doctor Who story” and “This Doctor Who story is incredibly racist”.  But the existence of toxic fans who cannot see or do not care about the racism increasingly makes me inclined to revise my position. 

If the Lord of the Rings is incidentally or secondarily or accidentally ethno-nationalist, then we don’t have a problem. It was written by a rich white guy in the 1930s and contains many of the attitudes of rich white guys from the 1930s: it may never have occurred to Tolkien to do it in any other way. And he provided us, very conveniently, with a Watsonian get-out clause. We are supposed to imagine that the Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit are very free translations of ancient texts. If the 1930s translator can give Orcs cockney accents or make Hobbits talk like posh English dons and school boys [2] then we can assume that a 2025 translator would have seen things that Tolkien did not see and overlook things which Tolkien saw.

If you can accept Frodo pushing Gollum into Mount Doom, or that Pippin clumsily knocked an armoured skeleton into the well in Moria (rather than foolishly dropping a pebble into it), you ought to be able to accept that some Hobbits have darker coloured skins than other Hobbits do. If you cannot, I respectfully submit that your problem is not about textual fidelity.

If the Lord of the Rings is centrally and irreducibly an ethno-nationalist text — if by “a mythology for England” Tolkien meant “a white mythology” then we have a very big problem indeed. If an adaptation cannot introduce of colour without violating the very heart of the text then I don’t think any decent director would touch it with a bargepole. The underrated movie version of John Carter of Mars eliminated the references to slavery from the character’s background, which had no discernible effect on the story. Conversely, there have been no serious modern attempts to adapt or revive Tarzan of the Apes because the colonial and patrician ideology is too central to the story. 

The Lord of the Rings is not, in fact, an ethno-nationalist text. Tolkien didn’t strongly believe that all English people were white, though he may have tacitly assumed it.  There was, in 1999, no obligation on Peter Jackson to introduce black or asian Hobbits into the Shire, and we should not retrospectively blame him for having made the artistic decision not to do so. However, the existence of toxic fans trying to appropriate the Lord of the Rings into their vile ethno-nationalist ideology does create such an obligation. Like it or not, he will be signalling which side he is on. I can’t discern any neutral position. 

Plus: annoying these people is a good thing in itself. It is one of the few redeeming features of Rings of Power. 

[1] Although now we have had Ms Marvel  that would be redundant.

[2] There was a period of about forty years when the idea that the Hobbits who patrolled the boundaries of the Shire were called "bounders" would have been funny.  

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Lord of the Rings: War of the Rohirrim

At one stage, Tolkien wanted the Lord of the Rings to run to four volumes, rather than the published three. Volume IV would have consisted of a greatly expanded version of the Tale of Years: a narrative timeline summarising the history of Middle-earth from its creation to the “present” day. Readers would have first experienced the War of the Ring from the inside, as a story, picking up tantalising hints about Numenor and Rohan and Gondor along the way, and then, once the story was over, they would see the whole history laid out before them in a linear sequence.

If he'd gone through with this plan, the core events of his imaginary history would have been fixed in print in 1955. Would that have hastened the completion of the Silmarillion, or made it even harder to achieve? Or would the Professor conceivably have decided that his Great Work was now finished and that he could move on to something else?

In the event the supplementary volume proved too ambitious, and we ended up with a rather piecemeal collection of essays at the back of Return of the King. Some people will tell you that the Appendices are disposable—pedantic world-building notes about runic alphabets and hobbit calendars that only the hard-core nerd needs to bother with. But the back matter also contains a lot of narrative. Shortened narratives—sketched out narratives—narratives in the language of saga, not in the novelistic language of Lord of the Rings. But definitely stories. And who doesn't want to hear more stories about Middle-earth?

About half way through the Two Towers, there is an enormous gigantic battle at a castle called Helm’s Deep. Tolkien tells us that it was “called after the hero of the old wars who made his refuge there”. When Theoden rides into battle, the Riders of Rohan shout “Helm has arisen and comes back to war!” In the movie, King Theoden says “the horn of Helm Hammerhand shall sound again in the deep!”: Peter Jackson even puts a statue of a big guy with a war hammer [TM] outside the castle. Appendix A fills out a little of the backstory: Helm Hammerhand was a king of Rohan about a hundred and fifty years before Theoden; he was besieged by wild men (Dunlendings) in the castle and fell heroically in the battle.

Flipping between page 528 and page 1065 doesn't make the Helm’s Deep passages any easier to understand. The main text tells us that Helm was a great hero from the olden days; and the appendix confirms that he lived in the olden days and was a great hero. But it does greatly contribute to the illusion that Tolkien was recounting history, as opposed to simply making up a story. You focus in on a bit of background colour and find that there is a solid chunk of narrative behind it. We aren’t just looking at suggestive stripes of brown and green on a painted backdrop, but an actual fully realised tree. Which of course, allows us to believe that behind the appendices are more lives and more stories which Tolkien never told. And if you have the sort of mind that is inclined to play role-playing games or invent fan fiction—and nearly everyone who likes Tolkien does have that kind of mind—then the temptation to imagine what those untold stories would have been is overwhelming.

Does filling in the gaps create a Middle-earth even more real than the one Tolkien left us? Or does imagining the details which Tolkien only hinted at rather spoil the illusion? Some of my friends at college played a long, long Middle-earth Role Playing campaign in which they were Dunlendings. For all I know it is still going on. I am not sure at the time I could have told you what a Dunlending even was. “Our MERP campaign” has not changed Tolkien’s text, or rewritten Tolkien’s appendices. But it has probably changed how those six or seven gamers read those passages.

Lord of the Rings: War of the Rohirrim hangs a two and a half hour movie on those five hundred or so words which Tolkien wrote about Helm Hammerhand. It’s an anime, or as we used to say, a cartoon, but it has Peter Jackson’s name on it in quite large letters; and borrows musical themes from Howard Shore. It begins with a hushed female voiceover, possibly Eowyn, talking about how history is remembered and forgotten. It ends with an Enya-esque dirge over the rolling credits, which feature sepia drawings of the main characters. It is, in short, trying really, really hard to be the fourth part of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Possibly Kenji Kamiyama is pretending that the Hobbit didn’t happen. I know I am.

The film sticks really quite closely to the text. Helm really does call the Dunlending lord fatty (“you have grown big since you were last here”) and he really does suggest that they step outside (“the king does not permit brawls in his house, but men are freer outside”). When the King sneaks out of the castle during the siege and starts killing individual enemy soldiers with his bare hands, I must admit I found myself thinking “oh, now you have gone too far this is completely unTolkienesque”, but this is indeed exactly what Tolkien says happened. (the king “went out by himself, clad in white, and stalk like a snow-troll into the camps of his enemies, and slay many men with his hands”). The Dunlending really do think that his wraith carried on fighting them after he died, and he really was found frozen solid but still standing.

I assume that Weta’s CGI models from Lord of the Rings still exist on someone’s pen drive; and have been reskinned for the purposes of the cartoon. Certainly Helm’s Deep and the Meduseld look exactly as they did in the Jackson trilogy. This sometimes creates the impression that painted characters are walking across photographic landscapes; and sometimes their feet appear to not be quite in contact with the ground. But everyone is proportioned like a grown up human-being and no-one’s face is caricatured, and the voices are all done by proper actors and it is mostly possible to forget you are watching animation and just treat it as a Jacksonian prequel. It’s all great fun, if people with beards, clashing shields and shouting “forth Eorlingas fear no darkness” is your idea of a good time. It’s very much a Tolkien movie for people who actually like Tolkien,

If there is going to be a Tolkien-Jackson extended cinematic universe—and I am very far from persuaded that there ought to be a Tolkien-Jackson extended cinematic universe—then clearly, somewhere along the line, someone is going to have to make stuff up which isn’t in the book. Anyone who has ever written fan fiction or run an RPG is familiar with the dilemma. Where are the narrative blank spaces? Where do the new characters or the new events fit into the established universe? Do you invent a new adventure for Sherlock Holmes which Watson somehow failed to mention? Or do you decide that the Baker Street Irregulars were off having adventures of their own, independent of the Great Detective? Or decide to make up stories about Mr Shereford Doyle who lived at 221A Baker Street and solved crimes when his famous neighbour was out of town?

Phillippa Boyens spotted a gaping narrative hole in Appendix A. According to Tolkien, a local lord with Dunlending heritage turns up at Helm’s hall and asks if his son could please marry Helm’s daughter. Helm is not impressed with the suggestion. Helm and the Dunlending have a fight. Helm, being legendarily strong, kills the Dunlending, by accident, mostly. So the son of the Dunlending vows revenge, and comes back years later with an army. He usurps the throne of Rohan and drives Helm back to what would later be known as Helm’s Deep. Despite his impressive snow-troll tribute act, Helm dies in the siege; and both his sons fall in battle. But after the long winter comes to an end, his sister-son rides over the hill with the cavalry and saves the day and starts a new line of Kings.

Now, according to Tolkien, the Dunlending lord is called Freca; his son, the usurper, is called Wulf; Helm’s sons are Haleth and Hama, his sister is Hild, the nephew who saves the day is Frealas Hildeson and the daughter who Wulf wanted to marry is called…is called….

She doesn’t have a name. Or any agency. Or anything else. She doesn’t in fact have any function at all, except to not marry Wulf. So War of the Rohirrim gives her a name, Hera (which is, I think, Adunaic for “Mary-Sue”), and makes her the main protagonist of the story.

At one level, this is a very sensible thing to do. The focus on an “invisible” character enables the writers to invent new material without contradicting the source. It makes perfect sense that there were shield-maidens in Rohan before Eowyn; and that Eowyn (if the narrator is in fact she) would be interested in telling their story.

The decision to make Hera an all-purpose wonder-wench was a little, I don’t know, obvious. She rides horses wildly with her hair flowing out behind her; she outfights the boys; even giving Wulf a small scar when they were kids; she climbs up sheer mountains and talks to giant eagles and ends up (not a spoiler at all) taking an important message to a wizard whose name begins with a G.

It really is quite a lot of fun. But I kind of wonder if, as the narrator says, Hera was an important person who got left out of history, couldn’t she have been, say, a clever courtly lady working behind the scenes? Peter Jackson was understandably unhappy with an Arwen who sits at home doing embroidery throughout the adventure: but his solution, to put her on a horse and give her Golrfindel’s job, is not especially imaginative.

Tolkien fans are incredibly toxic. Well, fans are incredibly toxic. Or probably it’s just that some toxic people pretend to be Tolkien fans. Quite a lot of Tolkien fans think that the dark skinned dwarves and elves in the Rings of Power are part of a plot to abolish the white race. And quite a lot of Star Wars fans think that Rey Skywalker’s appearance in The Force Awakens was a preliminary step towards Walt Disney forcibly castrating the entire male population.

But in this case, the right wing commentariat are clearly in the right. War of the Rohirrim is absolutely a feminist appropriation of Tolkien. Re-inscribing the female perspective into a text which specifically excludes it is absolutely a political act. It’s somewhat akin to Jean Rhys retelling Jane Eyer from Bertha Rochester’s point of view. Kamiyama doesn’t just point out that Helm’s daughter doesn’t have a name: that would have been a perfectly valid feminist reading of Lord of the Rings. He goes beyond this: he creates a new story, which is extremely faithful to Tolkien—far more faithful than Jackson’s Lord of the Rings, his Hobbit, or god help us the Rings of Power—which asserts the centrality of that marginal figure. This is absolutely an act of political subversion. The act of doing it is arguably more interesting than the way it has been done; but as we have seen, there exists a category of modern art where the idea is more important than the artefact. Masculinist Star Wars fans were ludicrously absurd to feel emasculated by the Force Awakens: they are absolutely correct to feel that their male supremacy is critiqued by War of the Rohirrim.

To which I say, loudly and clearly, fuck them.

I am not sure that we need new Tolkien-esque works; but if we are obliged to have them, films like this that critique and destabilise the canon are the way to go. The existence of blokes who are bothered by this kind of thing is precisely the reason this is the kind of thing we ought to be doing, good and hard.

My reviews of Rings of Power Season II, complete without outtakes, extras and lots of digressions is now available as a smart little PDF. 

It is available free (along with lots of other exclusive content) to all subscribers to my Patreon. (Just pledge $1 each time I write an article.) www.patreon.com/rilstone

Alternative, you can buy the PDF document for $6.50/£5.00 (plus the Apple Tax, unfortunately). 

Rings of Power Season 2

 

My reviews of Rings of Power Season II, complete without outtakes, extras and lots of digressions is now available as a smart little PDF. It costs $6.50/£5.00 (plus the Apple Tax, unfortunately). 

But I would prefer it is you did NOT buy it, and instead signed up to my Patreon (pledging $1 each time I write a Thing) in which case you get it for free. 

www.patreon.com/rilstone

XI: Discourse

The Rings of Power is a talisman and a surrogate for a certain kind of toxic fan schism. I think that you think that I am a gatekeeper; you think that I think that you are a dyson airblade (*). The rest is discourse.

(*) Not a proper fan.

Rings of Power

Season 1 Reviews

Season 2 Reviews

Season 1 Reviews (Book)

Season 2 Reviews (Book) (Available Soon)

Complete Reviews Season 1 - 7 (Available Jan 2035)

(*) Not a real fan. 

X: History

The Rings of Power plays fast and loose with the imaginary history of Middle-earth. But historical TV shows and movies play fast and loose with real history all the time. People who know about these things tell me that Braveheart was a laughably inaccurate depiction of medieval Scottish history. People who care tell me that the Crown was a dubiously accurate fictionalisation of the life of Elizabeth Windsor and her family. And many cowboy yarns are set in an imaginary country only tangentially connected with America. Heck, Shakespeare's Richard III probably only has a passing connection to the dead historical guy they found under the carpark. 

So maybe the Rings of Power is not an inept dramatisation. Maybe it is a new and separate work that happens to use a pseudo-historical setting as its inspiration?

When I was Discoursing upon this subject, I said, frivolously, that someone with a knowledge and love of the history of the American West could be forgiven for objecting to Cowboy Movie in which all the characters had English accents; which placed California on the East Coast and made Abraham Lincoln the exact contemporary of Alfred the Great. My interlocutor pointed out that someone had, in fact, taken a story set in Medieval Japan and filmed it as if it happened in the Wild West; and indeed taken a story about Renaissance Verona and placed it in 1950s New York. 

Which is a slight non-sequitur. But I concede: if someone wanted to create a radical reimagining of Lord of the Rings set in the First World War, I'd be all on board with it. Frodo and Sam as a senior and junior officer carrying a dangerous new kind of bomb to a munitions dump behind enemy lines? A disguised Prince George pretending to be a scout named Strider? The Kaiser in his dark tower sending out nine secret service agents to assassinate them? 

Why not? Why not Tom Sawyer with the geography and social attitudes of a 1970s British sit-com? Oliver Twist in the modern American residential care system? 

This kind of thing is really done, all the time. And I am normally highly in favour of it. I liked (though I didn't fully understand) the production of Wagner's Lohengrin in which the knights were substituted for laboratory rats and the Swan was a Kubrick-esq space embryo. I thought the play about Queen Lear and her three sons illuminated Shakespeare's text in unexpected ways. It's normally the rest of the world who says "Oh, but Andrew, I don't think Richard the Third would really have been driving a tank."

I went to see the Lord of the Rings stage musical. Twice. I wish I had seen the original Canadian production that everyone says was much too long. As regular readers know, the show made many changes to the story. It describes the Rings as the source of magic in Middle-earth and insinuates that when the One is destroyed, magic in general will go away. It conflates Theoden and Denethor into a single figure called the Great King Of All the Lands of Men. It jumps from the Prancing Pony to Weathertop in single dance-routine. 

Why am I prepared to defend this kind of thing; but draw the line at being told that Isildur was a young man at the time of the forging of the Rings?

I don't have a satisfactory answer to that question.

But here is part of it.

The Jackson trilogy failed as an adaptation of Lord of the Rings but it worked, brilliantly, as an action movie. It ran rings around anything in the roughly contemporaneous Star Wars prequels, and it was also much funnier. The Guardian film critic of the day, who appeared to have no interest in fantasy and may not have read the book, said the Helms Deep sequences were as good as anything Kurasowa ever did. And in some cases (not all) it did a good job at dubbing Tolkien's epic language into the patois of the summer blockbuster: 

Book:  'But no living man am I! You look upon a woman. Eowyn I am, Eomund's daughter. You stand between me and my lord and kin. Begone, if you be not deathless! For living or dark undead, I will smite you, if you touch him"

Movie:  "I'm not a man."

One thinks of the modern Bible paraphrase which renders "Am I my brother's keeper?" as "Am I meant to be the baby-sitter?"

The stage musical works pretty well as a musical -- the songs remain forgettable, but the bollywood inspired dance routines in the revival were a lot of a fun; and it did a creditable job of turning the accomplishment of half a million words into an hourglass. The shrinking exercise had been undertaken by people very much in touch with the spirit of the books. The sudden eruption of paper flowers and rose petals at the end of the London version, and the distribution of packets of seeds to the audience at the end of the recent Watermill show don't reproduce the exact plot of the Scouring of the Shire. But they are in touch with its mythic emotions. Sam uses Galadriel's gift to heal the Shire. Jackson chopped out the healing and gift. 

The Rings of Power adapts an historical story, removes the history, and in return gives me...

Some pretty speeches and nice backdrops. Some generic fight scenes in cookie-cutter forests, Some Irish people claiming to be Hobbits. Some short, funny Scotsmen with silly beards. It is not a translation of Akallabeth into the language of a TV mini series. It's not a new story using the Fall of Numenor as a background. It really is an artistic vacuum. If it didn't have the title of my favourite book tattooed on its bottom, I wouldn't give it a second glance.  And neither would you. 

Rings of Power

Season 1 Reviews

Season 2 Reviews

Season 1 Reviews (Book)

Season 2 Reviews (Book) (Available Soon)

Complete Reviews Season 1 - 7 (Available Jan 2035)

IX: Sources

Does Tolkien contradict himself?  Very well: he contradicts himself. 

He contains multitudes. He never finalised his meta-narrative; at any rate he never brought the texts embodying that meta-narrative to a publishable state. He could see the whole history of Middle-earth in his head. Some parts he saw more clearly than others. Whenever he wrote one thing down, another thing went out of focus. Wikipedia refers to a non-scholarly source which distinguishes three distinct Middle-earths (Middles-earth?). But probably there are hundreds. We have 6,000 pages of textual variations and footnotes. We have one pretty good editorial stab at presenting those variations as a single text.

In the last years of his life, Christopher Tolkien seemed to be working towards a compromise between the Silmarillion and the History of Middle-earth: three books which presented Tolkien's writings about Turin, Gondolin, and Beren and Luthien in a non-scholarly format, accessible to the general reader, but still reflecting the unfinalised state of the manuscripts. Since his death, the estate has allowed Brian Sibley to present everything Tolkien wrote about the Second Age as a chronological narrative.  

I wonder whether, at some point in the future, some scholar might be let loose on the History of Middle Earth and be allowed to produce an alternate Silmarillion -- a beginning-to-end collage of Tolkien's Unfinalized Tales that makes different choices from the ones that Christopher made? Maybe a readers' edition of the Book of Lost Tales or a Round Earth version of the Silmarillion?

Why not? That text of Hamlet you have your shelf is one editor's set of choices about how the various Folios and Quartos ought to be treated. Even your Penguin Classic Frankenstein is a compromise between the 1818 and 1831 editions: and we now know that some of the boring bits in the first version were written by Percy rather than Mary.  

I wish that were the conversation we were having. I wish that when we watched Rings of Power, we split into the faction that thought that was a good idea to incorporate elements from the Lost Road and the faction who thought they should have stuck rigorously to the published Akallabeth. I wish we were debating which version of the courtship of Galadriel and Celeborn they should run with. I wish we were being shocked to find that they'd dumped the Silmarillion altogether and were treating the abortive re-write as canon. 

I doubt if one in a hundred people watching Saturday evening fantasy TV in the 1980s knew about the textual history of the Robin Hood ballads.  And even fewer cared. But Richard Carpenter did; and he cleverly made the discrepancy between the earlier ballads (where Robin is a yeoman) and the later ones (where he's a nobleman) part of the story.  That kind of thing can be done if it's the kind of thing you want to do.

The Silmarillion is not sacred. 

But some people speak as if -- some people may honestly believe -- Christopher Tolkien created the Silmarillion out of the whole cloth. I hear every day apologists for the Rings of Power asserting on social media that Silmarillion is not really by Tolkien; that it is new work that Christopher made up based on his father's notes; that those of who object to the TV show's dumping of the lore are clinging to a "head-canon" that we ourselves made up. 

Now, writers' kids sometimes do invent new books; and they sometimes even put their dad's names on them.  And sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. We all know about Brian Herbert writing new Dune novels based on synopses discovered among his late father's papers, and going on to create many further volumes out of his own imagination. Many people have told me that they are not very good; but there is nothing sinful about their existing. There are twenty-five more or less official sequels to the Wizard of Oz written by persons other than Frank Baum. A licensed continuation of Tolkien by Other Hands might be very interesting. I am frankly astonished that no one has attempted, officially or unofficially, to write The New Shadow based on Tolkien's thirteen page opening chapter. 

But that is not where we in fact are. 

Where we are is that some gate-leaver-openers are using the admittedly unfinalized state of Tolkien's mythos as a nuclear option to deploy against those of us who honestly don't think the Rings of Power is very good. Tolkien didn't publish the Silmarillion so the Silmarillion is not by Tolkien so no version of Middle-earth is any better than any other so there is no lore for Rings of Power to be faithful to and everyone else should jolly well shut being so horrid about it.  And that is fannish trolling and gate-leaving of the silliest kind. 

However....

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VIII: Fantasy

Then we are decided.

Pointy eared people talking posh and furry footed people living down holes are in the cold light of day, every so slightly incredibly silly. And the idea of light skinned goodies and dark skinned baddies is a tiny little bit incredibly racist, and it doesn't become less incredibly racist because a few of the light skinned people now have dark skins.

It isn't true that all Tolkien's good characters are purely good and all his evil characters are purely evil and it never was. But it is perfectly true that Tolkien's brand of mythology turns psychology into geography; that the good side of human nature is externalised and put in a woody glade overseen by a pointy eared B.V.M and the darker side of human nature is externalised and put in an industrial hellscape populated by bestial cockneys. Even Michael Moorcock's barbs about class; about the Hobbits romanticising a fictional upper class rural England and the Orcs demonising the urban working class majority sometimes hits home.

It's more complicated than that. Lothlorien only remains Edenic because of the tainted Ring. Orcs aren't evil at source. Frodo fails and Gollum completes the quest. Gandalf as ring-bearer would have been much worse than Sauron.

But we are talking about the Lore, even the Deep Lore, and we are asking if that Lore really and truly matters? What would the text of Tolkien, separated from that lore even look like? 

I think it would look slightly reactionary, slightly racist, slightly superficial, and slightly silly. It would look, in fact, as exactly as it looks to the literati who haven't read it: a stream of mumbo-jumbo and psychedelia. 

Remember Private Eye's review of the Nature of Middle-earth? 

"Yet, amid much that is obscure and recondite, the Elvish chronicler Naffly in his Annals of the Second Age insists that he was the son of Shagpile, a fell warrior, and cunning withal, whose mighty deeds included the sack of the Llareggub Mountains, the pillaging of the Snurdlings of Westernesse and the forging of the great sword Bolok, first wielded at the Battle of the Thirteen Armies, at the sight of which the elf-princes fled in terror, with only Tarragon of the House of Herb resisting...." 

But none of this matters. Because Tolkien's fairy-tale archetypes, do, in fact, exist in a world with past, with a mythology, even a theology. C.S Lewis said that when you scratch Middle-earth, you find history underneath. Nine-tenth of the time, that history is not literary sleight of hand, but an allusion to manuscripts which actually existed and would one day be published.

Tolkien didn't create a story. He didn't create a series of stories. He didn't even create an imaginary world -- not in the way that Frank Herbert or Greg Stafford or Oliver Postgate created imaginary worlds. Tolkien's (if you insist) legendarium is best thought of as imaginary history: history-as-art.

To some extent, history is always art. "History" is the story about plucky little England standing alone against the beastly Germans; not a database of facts and figures about the years 1939-1945. When people pull statues down or demand that new ones are erected they aren't arguing about the facts of history; they are arguing about which story they prefer. That is why discovering, or drawing attention to, a new or neglected piece of information is called "erasing our history". CS Lewis made out the case that the popular scientific account of the universe (as opposed to the one which actual scientists believe in) gained traction because it hits all the expected narrative beats. Evolution is a good story and Genesis is also a good story, regardless of which one you think is literally true.

There are lots of stories about Atlantis: stories about Atlantis before it fell, stories about heroes who survived Atlantis; stories about modern archaeologists seeking for Atlantis. But only Tolkien, I think, made Atlantis an element -- a character almost -- in a narrative stream. We see the High Men migrate to Numenor; we see them living on Numenor; we witness the destruction of Numenor; we see the survivors establishing themselves in Middle-earth; and we and we stick around long enough that "Numenor" has become part of a long-ago golden age that the men of Gondor turn their heads towards before they say grace. 

The Star Wars Universe and all three Marvel Universes have histories. But we aren't invited to step back and contemplate that history as an artefact, with a shape and a structure and a narrative form. They are made up of the immediate present-tense moment: the present supervillain or the current space-ship-battle.

Writers -- or at any rate, writers' manuals -- are inclined to treat World Building as a dirty word. Build as much world as you need for your story to happen in, but anything else is displacement activity. Some fans, similarly, treat Lore as a something a little bit naughty -- the small print marginalia that other people obsess over.

But we are not here talking about detachable easter eggs distinct from the work of art. We are talking about the entirety of Tolkien's artistic project. We are talking about the one thing that makes Tolkien enjoyable, or even bearable. Tolkien's elves and hobbits and dwarves are embodied in Tolkien's meta-narrative. They can't exist any where else. 

Even if they still have pointy ears and beards and furry feet. 

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VII: World Building

The Rings of Power abandons Tolkien's internal chronology.  The opening credits claims that the series is "adapted from the Lord of the Rings and Appendices", but it appears entirely uninterested in Tolkien's tally of years.

But does this matter? Does this really, really matter?

The simple answer is that if Rings of Power were giving me something else, anything else, to enjoy it probably wouldn't.  As long as I Dreamed a Dream is a good song it hardly matters if Schonberg and Boubil take liberties with Victor Hugo's enormously long novel.

But the Rings of Power proves, experimentally and empirically, that orcs and dark lords and hobbits, in an of themselves, detached from the lore and the mythos and the world building that Tolkien spent sixty years tinkering with, are not remotely interesting. There are dwarfy caves and there are hobbity burrows, and the caves and the burrows look quite pretty, but if I wanted to look at whimsical interiors I am not at all sure that I don't prefer the Clangers.

I'm fairly serious. Oliver Postgate's world building, although it consists entirely of surfaces, is second to none; and the CGI extension of his work, overseen by his son, develops it very imaginatively. It would be silly to talk about Clanger Lore or Clanger Mythos or Clanger Canon. It's a puppet show. But the experience of watching those puppets is a little like staring into a very intricate aquarium. 

Some people have said the same thing about Fraggle Rock.

There are worlds which seem real because they feel real.  And there are worlds which seem real because there is solid world building behind them. Stars Wars and the Clangers in the first category: the Lord of the Rings and Thomas the Tank Engine are in the second.

And there are worlds which do have solid world building behind then but which don't feel in the least bit real, like your first Dungeons & Dragons campaign and the Harry Potter books. But perhaps that means that the world building isn't that solid after all. 

Someone very wise once said that the reality was made up of facts, as opposed to things. Perhaps fantasy worlds are made up of feelings, not facts. Perhaps a good fantasy world is composed of what the young people call vibes. Sometimes you need a card index system or a transformational grammar to evoke the correct vibes. Sometimes a vague gesture in the direction of the Clone Wars will do the trick.

But can't a card index system and a book of grammar be works of art in their own right? 

Don't some of us enjoy reading world books for RPGs we will never play in? 

Would it be completely mad to be fascinated by the timetables and route-plans of Sodar without having the slightest inclination to ever read any of Rev Awdrey's actual stories?

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VI: Adaptation

People who had read Lord of the Rings -- and even people who had read it twice -- were mostly okay with what Peter Jackson did to Fellowship of the Ring. They thought he had done a literate job of translating Tolkien's long, difficult book into the language of the Hollywood summer blockbuster, even if some of them thought that turning that kind of book into that kind of film was a pretty weird thing to do in the first place.

But some of the people who had read Lord of the Rings three times were rather discombobulated by what Peter Jackson did with the Two Towers. They felt that he had pretty much abandoned Tolkien's storyline. And they thought that what he had replaced it with was, on the whole, a bit too silly: CGI hyenas, elvish cavalry, skateboarding elves and dwarf-tossing.

Some people didn't think this mattered and enjoyed the film on its own terms. But when some of the people in the first group expressed their disappointment that Jackson's Theoden had only a passing connection with Tolkien's Theoden and that Jackson's Helm's Deep had no connection at all with Tolkien's Helm's Deep, some of the people in second group embarked on a campaign of gate-leaver-openingism. 

"Well, naturally" they cried "If Peter Jackson gets one letter of an elvish inscription wrong, you are going to tell the rest of us that we aren't allowed to enjoy the movie."

Actually, Peter Jackson pretty consistently got his elvish inscriptions right: it was the broader stylistic decisions -- the Moria theme park ride, the fist fight in Theoden's hall, the Indiana Jones cliffhanger on Mount Doom -- that some of us had issues with.

With big, complicated, important books like the Lord of the Rings and the Bible, there is always going to be a certain amount of friction between people who are too pedantic and people who are not nearly pedantic enough. 

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V: Gatekeeping

There is nothing wrong with loving Dogtanian and the Three Muskhounds and having not the slightest intention of ever reading Dumas. 

You really don't have to wait seven years for your ticket to Bayreuth before you are allowed to think that Ride of the Valkyrie is a good tune. 

You're not a bad person because you like your steak overcooked.

Actually, food is interesting edge case. It is very likely that a steak chef, or a coffee barrista, or a sommelier really, really, likes steak, coffee and wine and really, really wants you to like it as well. So he may be tempted to say "I think you will like that coffee better without sugar" or "That cut of steak really needs to be enjoyed pinkly." And I think some of them might out-and-out refuse to chill your red wine or serve your white wine at room temperature. "If you want latte, sir, I am using this coffee: I am not prepared to put milk into these unusual and expensive single estate beans." 

But many others would probably allow you to ruin the food you have payed for.

Gate-keeping is very annoying. But the contrary, which I might as well call "gate-leaving-open" is very nearly as bad. If I happen to mention that I am a big fan of Victor Hugo's original novel, the gate-leaver-open is apt to think that I have somehow spoiled his enjoyment of I Dreamed a Dream. If I remark that Bob Dylan's later work repays close listening, the gate-leaver-open may think I have prohibited from liking Blowing in the Wind.  To the gate-leaver-open, any criticism is an attack and any negative opinion a prohibition. 

If I say that 1970s Doctor Who was the best Doctor Who (which it obviously was) it does not follow that I am declaring the ninth, tenth, eleventh, twelfth, thirteen and fourteenth Doctor's non-canonical.  And even if I am, that does not mean that I am declaring that the tapes should be expunged.  And even if I am, no-one is likely to pay any attention to me.  Your enjoyment of Jodie Whitaker is not impacted by my enjoyment of Tom Baker, any more than my enjoyment of Tom Baker is impacted by your enjoyment of Jodie Whitaker. 

It is equally true that some people will read any positive criticism, or any push back against negative criticism, as gate-leaver-openerism. 

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IV: Fantasy

Some time ago I confessed that I didn't particularly like comic books. What I like is superheroes. I grok that Heartstopper is marvellous, but I don't generally read YA romantic fiction when it's written in words, so I am not likely to read it when it happens to be told in words and pictures. However marvellously.

Here is a much worse confession.

I don't particularly like fantasy.

Please read the next paragraph before throwing your computer out of the window.

Tolkien created a new thing. We can see him creating it, right there on the page, as part of a dialogue with his friends in the pub: the fantasy novel. There had been fantasy stories before, obviously. And there had been novels about wizards and magic, not all of them necessarily for children. And there had been modern prose romances -- that line that goes from William Morris to ER Eddison via Lord Dunsany and James Branch Cabell. But a long prose work about dragons and goblins, told in the narrative voice of a naturalistic novel was something new and strange. As if Enid Blyton had developed Toytown in the style and on the scale of Middlemarch and turned Big Ears into a tragic hero.

Which might, as I always say at this point, have been awesome.

Tolkien didn't have a novelistic model in mind when he began creating his, if you insist, legendarium. Or he wouldn't have written "know then aforetimes that in the days of Inwe" on the one hand or "this for their hearts uplifting did Halog sing them as the frowning fortress clasped then and nethermost night in its net caught them" on the other.

I don't think the pictures we see in our head when we read Lord of the Rings are necessarily the pictures that Tolkien wanted us to see. The Pauline Baynes map illustrations he partially endorsed; and that Jimmy Cauty poster that everyone had on their wall in the 1970s are a long way from Peter Jackson and even further from World of Warcraft. Tolkien never quite told us what a balrog looked like. He didn't describe orcs, but I think he probably imagined them as rough, grotesque, humans; not piggy faced Games Workshop miniatures or dark skinned CGI ogrons. Lord of the Rings begat Dungeons & Dragons and Dungeons & Dragons begat Games Workshop and Games Workshop begat genre fantasy and genre fantasy begat Peter Jackson and Peter Jackson begat the Rings of Power and there is now a Consensus Fantasy Universe which these kinds of stories happen in.

I spent a lot of time playing Dungeons & Derivatives and feel quite at home in Consensus Fantasy Land. But if all you see in Lord of the Rings are ugly orcs and beautiful elves and funny dwarves and talking trees and grey wizards and dark lords on dark thrones in lands where there are very probably some shadows, you are only seeing about 12% of what Tolkien actually does.

I once said that I liked Dickens, apart from the Dickensian parts. I am quite tempted to add that I like Tolkien apart from the Tolkienesque bits: at any rate, the Tolkienesque bits are not the bits I like the most. It's the operatic dialogue and the mock epic scenes which I return to over and over again. This will I take as a weregild of my father. Through the fate of Arda is bound up in it, you will think me generous. Master of doom by doom mastered. Nevertheless they will still have need of wood.

And the little character moments too. Sam sulking because the farmer gave Frodo a slap when he was little. Pippin wanting to quit smoking because he misses Theoden. The rabbit stew. Silly songs in the bath-tub. There are no Games Workshop box sets recreating those scenes.

So am I, after all, a gate keeper? Am I saying that if you go to Tolkien to get your fix of orcs and wizards but have not the slightest interest in variant reading of the Lay of Lethien then you are a Dyson Airblade? [*]

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III: Canon

It is often said that Tolkien never finished the Silmarillion. It would perhaps be truer to say that Tolkien finished the Silmarillion several times; leaving a paper trail of mutually contradictory versions in his wake. Christopher Tolkien had to select material: the published Silmarillion can't, by definition, represent Tolkien's final intentions. Christopher didn't automatically regard the last thing his father wrote as authoritative: he went for the versions that were most polished, most finished, most consistent with the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings, or simply "best". And we know that not every word in the Silmarillion is exactly what Tolkien wrote: Christopher made amendments and added bridging passages to create a sense completion and consistency. That's what editors do. At some point between 1980 and 1983 Christopher decided that this had been a mistake and embarked on a thirteen year project to produce a scholarly edition of the exact words his father wrote, false starts and contradictions and crossings out and all.

We could, if we wanted to, say that the only canonical Middle-earth texts were the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings ("including appendices"): since these were the only works that Tolkien approved for publication during his lifetime. We could add -- I think most people implicitly do -- the Silmarillion and the Unfinished Tales, because they contain writings that Christopher Tolkien felt to be broadly consistent with what was already published. You can read the Silmarillion, the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings, in that order, with the Unfinished Tales as a kind of appendix, and feel that you have read a complete history of an imaginary world in various styles and from various points of view.

It would seem odd to say "the island of Tol Eressea is canonically England" (because that was Tolkien's idea in the very early Lost Tales manuscripts), or "Numenor canonically became the continent of America" (because Tolkien explored that idea in a very late "round earth" revision). But it would be equally odd to say that the story of Sam's daughter Eleanor becoming Arwen's hand-maiden was "apocryphal" or "part of my headcanon" because it occurs in an epilogue which Tolkien was persuaded (fairly reluctantly) to take out of Lord of the Rings. And I assume that no-one in their right mind would say that the magnificent ending of Beren and Luthien ("The quest is fulfilled; even now a Silmaril is in my hand!") was "only fan fiction" because it was one of the manuscripts that was published posthumously.

So perhaps, if we are talking about Tolkien, "the canon" had better refer to "what Tolkien actually wrote" (as opposed to what was invented by David Day, Iron Crown Enterprises, Peter Jackson or Amazon TV.) 

But "canon" can too easily become a weapon to be wielded in fan disputes. It is not enough to like Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit. Unless and until you jump over twelve heavily footnoted hurdles, you are a Dyson Airblade. (*).

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