The crimes of ‘The Rings of Power’ against Tolkien

Essential reading, viewing, and listening from the EI editors.

Having watched the first two series of Amazon Prime’s Rings of Power out of voyeuristic pleasure, I see no reason to stop now with the release of the third, if its record holds: yet more shambolic missteps, yet more lines of such cack-handed intensity to add to the miserable catalogue I’ve already compiled.

Booming soundtracks and vast CGI-generated panoramas cannot rescue the stale and wooden performances that wreck the major set pieces. One of the more irritating decisions made by the show’s makers is for every single character to stick to an accent defined by which of the ‘peoples’ of Middle-earth they hail from (the elves, strangulated, pompous RP; the dwarves, broad Scottish; the harfoots, a strain of hobbit, stage Irish; the orcs, Cockney; the Númenórean men, plain RP; and the men of Middle-earth, northern English). Part of the charm of the much-loved Peter Jackson trilogy was that its producers drew extensively on the illustrations produced for later editions of the books. By contrast, every detail of Rings of Power looks wrong; in series two, it struck me that various attempts had been made to ape the atmosphere of the films, an implicit admission of failure to construct something new and special in series one.

The writers are at a genuine disadvantage compared with those who worked on the film trilogy. Most of the crucial and most quotable lines in the films are taken directly from the books (‘like butter that has been scraped over too much bread’, ‘I like half of you…’, ‘Fool of a Took…’ and so on and so forth). The Rings of Power team have no such luxury. They are attempting to dramatise the events drily recounted in a long list of dates and battle names in the appendices Tolkien added to the text of The Lord of the Rings. The timeline includes the forging of the great rings of power, already covered elegantly and succinctly enough in the opening minutes of the Jackson films, with a voiceover by Galadriel, the elf queen played by Cate Blanchett. There are two more series planned.

The best Lord of the Rings

The best dramatisation of The Lord of the Rings is not the films at all, but a radio version produced by the BBC in 1981, with a stellar cast including John Le Mesurier as Bilbo, Ian Holm as Frodo, who went on to play Bilbo in the film trilogy, and Michael Hordern as Gandalf. When I return to the novels, it is their voices that seep into the dialogue. Holm’s Frodo captures the intelligence and authority of Tolkien’s Frodo, whereas Elijah Wood can only manage a winsome impression of the real thing.

The dramatisation makes exclusions (Tom Bombadil) that are not to be regretted, and very little change to the basic structure of Tolkien’s story. In the film version of The Two Towers, Aragorn is pulled over a cliff by a warg (an enormous wolf), a cinematic event I remember with a certain degree of shock; who knew, then, what other liberties Peter Jackson might take by inserting new and, to my mind, pointless episodes? The soundtrack to the radio dramatisation is by the composer Stephen Oliver: sharp, measured and modern, in a style that reminds me of late Frank Bridge. Faramir, the character to whom Tolkien most closely compared himself, is given a proper and appropriate air of nobility. In contrast to the unfortunate transatlantic twangs that pop up in the films, this production is wholly English in feel – down to the bright, ringing diction that shows the best of Tolkien’s writing. Just typing out the words to one of Bilbo’s poems, recited by Frodo, ‘The Road goes ever on and on / Down from the door where it began’, brings me vividly back to the otherworldly grace of Ian Holm’s performance.

The finer points of inter-orc relations

I am recording an episode of The EI Podcast next week with DJ Taylor, author of The King Under the Mountain: In Search of JRR Tolkien. The biographical and academic literature on Tolkien has always paled in comparison to the gleaming world that I came to know as a child. At last, we have a proper and beautifully written intellectual biography of the great man and of what Taylor calls his ‘great painting’ of a work. And at last, I’ve found an adult with whom I can debate the finer points of inter-orc relations. Tune in next week.