The Rings of Power

I watched the trailer for the new Amazon "Lord of the Rings" series about a week ago, and I'm afraid I was unimpressed. Basically, it looked like Fantasy Lands of Generica yet again... it was okay, but there wasn't really anything in it that grabbed me and said "you must watch this".

I guess that's inevitable - since they're not adapting any of Tolkien's actual stories, what is essentially left is a set of names and locations of varying levels of familiarity. But Middle Earth is so foundational to the whole of fantasy that without the big stories it is, more or less, Fantasy Lands of Generica.

Oh well. I'll inevitably watch it anyway, so I guess we'll see.

There are two things I would like to mention at this point, though.

Firstly, I have absolutely no issue whatsoever with the greater representation seen in the trailer. Bluntly, I don't much care - there are many people of colour who are fantastic actors, and so giving them a chance can only be a good thing. Middle Earth was soft-of kind-of a mythic history of Britain, but it's so far removed from any sort of real history as to make it nonsensical. Plus, elves and dwarves don't actually exist, so who is to say that the theoretical dwarves of ancient Britain weren't people of colour?

Then there is the issue of the dwarven princess who, shock horror!, doesn't have a beard. Much has been made of the 'fact' that this is at odds with Tolkien's writings on the subject. Just one small problem: last year the Tolkien estate published "The Nature of Middle Earth", a collection of writings by the man himself. That work had a chapter on 'Beards' (yes, really), which specified who did and did not have them, and in which Tolkien specifies that all male dwarves have beards. He doesn't say anything about female dwarves here, but if he specifies all male dwarves rather than all dwarves that must imply that at least some female dwarves don't have beards.

So our beardless female dwarf is, actually, not at all inconsistent with what J.R.R. Tolkien states on the subject. Oops.

(And, incidentally, what are inconsistent is Viggo Mortensen's Aragorn and David Wenham's Faramir - in "The Nature of Middle Earth" Tolkien specifies that those characters don't have beards.)

All that said, there's a larger point here: if you are truly opposed to the beardless female dwarf, or the people of colour playing elves and dwarves, based on some sort of purist's appreciation of the written works, then surely you must reject any and all of the adaptations of Middle Earth completely - all the movies, the play, the musical, the video games, the TTRPGs, Leonard Nimoy's musical genius... all of it. The truth is that none of it is entirely consistent with Tolkien's writings or his vision, so how can it be accepted.

Bottom line: it's an adaptation; things are going to be changed. What matters is whether those changes are trivial or fundamental, and whether the result is good or not.

#7: "The Looking Glass War", by John Le Carré