In the opening episodes of the second season of Amazon’s lavishly-budgeted Tolkien prequel The Rings of Power, Galadriel and Elrond debate using the three magic elven rings. Can the rings be used for good, or are they too dangerous to use, since they were created under the suggestion of villain Sauron?
I couldn’t help but see an echo of the question that I’ve been wrestling with in relation to The Rings of Power, having watched the first six episodes of series two. This is a show created to sate the desire of the great empire of Amazon for a franchise success, for its own Game of Thrones or Harry Potter in terms of cultural and above all financial impact. It might seem from the beginning a cynical exercise, the zombification of Tolkien’s literary legacy into a vehicle for ‘brand extension’ and corporate exploitation of ‘intellectual property’.
And yet Amazon, whether by design or by ‘luck’ (as we call it here in Middle-earth) seem to have assembled a writing team surprisingly well-versed in Tolkien and the appendices to The Lord of the Rings on which this prequel series is based. The quality of the writing in season one inevitably fell far short of the literary vision of a linguist and mythologist steeped both in the myths of medieval Europe and in a deeply Christian worldview. But its failures were mainly functional, issues of effective storytelling craft, rather than more fundamental misunderstandings of Tolkien’s writings as it could so easily have been.
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