The Rings of Power has the “optimism and love” of Tolkien’s work

These days, epic fantasy tends to be all doom and gloom. Look no further than Game of Thrones; perhaps the biggest example of the grimdark trend. But Amazon’s upcoming Lord of the Rings prequel series The Rings of Power is forging its own path.

When the writing team first sat down to work on the prequel series, they had one rule to rule them all: to not move away from the themes of J.R.R. Tolkien’s original writing. “[Tolkien] wrote a story about hope, and a little guy succeeding,” executive producer J.A. Bayona told SFX Magazine. “We always felt that it was rule number one that there needed to be true optimism and love, even in the darkest, scariest moments of the show.”

The Lord of the Rings definitely depicts evil, but is also full of hope and wonder. Samwise Gamgee carrying Frodo up Mount Doom is a personal tear-jerker for me. “When you read Tolkien’s books, you can tell how much he appreciates beauty, so the show is full of beauty,” Bayona said. “Tolkien is inherently optimistic, warm and emotional. This is a man who went through some of the darkest things in human history [in the First World War] and he didn’t come out of that and write a despairing, awful story.”

The Rings of Power is not “vaguely connected” to Tolkien’s work

After a reporter recently opined that The Rings of Power felt only “vaguely connected” to Tolkien’s work, co-showrunner Patrick McKay took it upon himself to respond. Naturally, he disagrees.

“We feel like deep roots of this show are in the books and in Tolkien,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “And if we didn’t feel that way, we’d all be terrified to sit up here. We feel that this story isn’t ours. It’s a story we’re stewarding that was here before us and was waiting in those books to be on Earth. We don’t feel ‘vaguely connected.’ We feel deeply, deeply connected to those folks and work every day to even be closer connected. That’s really how we think about it.”

Then there’s the supposed Game of Thrones rivalry everyone is going on about. The Rings of Power will air at the same time as HBO’s GoT prequel series House of the Dragon, and people are pitting the series against each other. But Robert Aramayo, who played Young Ned Stark in Game of Thrones and now plays Elrond in The Rings of Power, doesn’t see it. “I don’t feel rivalry .. the materials are so different,” he said. “I love fantasy. So now we obviously get to watch more fantasy, which can never be a bad thing.”

The Rings of Power premieres on September 2 on Amazon Prime. Now long now!

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h/t CBR