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.