Amazon’s Lord of the Rings show parts ways with its Tolkien scholar

For a show that was announced quite a while back, we know surprisingly little about Amazon’s Lord of the Rings series. We know it’s costing around $500 million to make the first two seasons alone; we know it’s set during the Second Age of Middle-earth, thousands of years before J.R.R. Tolkien’s legendary novel trilogy begins; and we even know who’s in the cast.

Amazon also hired Tom Shippey, a former professor of Old English at Oxford and one of the world’s foremost experts on Tolkien’s works — he also consulted on the Peter Jackson movies — as a “Tolkien consultant.” But do we know exactly what story he’s consulting on? No. Do we know who these cast members are playing? No. And if Amazon has done much shooting, they’ve done a great job of keeping it under wraps.

That said, there have been rumors that the show hasn’t been running 100% smoothly, even without the added stress of coronavirus-induced set shutdowns. The latest comes from Corey Olsen, aka the Tolkien Professor. Olsen runs Signum University, which travels the world with Tolkien-focused scholarly events. He also does a weekly Tolkien live-stream on Twitch, where he let slip an interesting factoid.

A viewer asks Olsen about Shippey’s place on the show. Olsen, who’s careful not to say too much (“I know that would not want me to reveal most of the things he told me”), broke some unfortunate news. “I have spoken to Shippey… is he still involved? I don’t believe so…I do not believe he is involved as of right now.”

"I will say, it’s not that simple [as Amazon fired Tom Shippey]. I don’t think that’s exactly what happened. Like they just up and fired Tom Shippey."

Now, there’s lots of reasons Shippey may not be involved with the show anymore. As Olsen points out, the whole thing is shut down at the moment due to the coronavirus, which is true of pretty much every production everywhere. Maybe Shippey is just taking a break on account of that?

Although the way Olsen talks, it sounds like the break goes deeper. Naturally, this has some fans worried that the show won’t be as faithful to Tolkien’s Legendarium as it could have been with Shippey on board, but the way he talked before, it sounded like the Tolkien estate had Amazon on a pretty tight leash regarding what it can do with the story. We’ll have to wait and see.

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h/t TheOneRing.net, Gamespot