I remember when a friend of mine sent me a text with the words, “there’s a Lord of the Rings show being made.” A flurry of emotions overcame me. Growing up, Tolkien’s legendarium was a huge part of my life, especially after relocating to the United States in 2001. It gave me a place to escape being bullied in school, it helped me learn English, and it helped my own creativity flow as I wrote a short story that, to this day, I’m still perfecting.
Long story short, I am a big fan of Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien and of his Middle-earth.
All that said, I didn’t read (or rather, listen to) Tolkien’s The Silmarillion — the book where he dives into everything happened before The Lord of the Rings — until after I’d watched The Rings of Power, Amazon’s new prequel show set during the Second Age of Middle-earth. However, back in 2004 I had read the appendices to The Lord of the Rings trilogy, which is where The Rings of Power takes a lot of its cues from.
The Amazon show makes some obvious and major deviations from the lore, and some fans haven’t forgiven it for that. Some claim The Rings of Power is a complete disaster and disrespectful to Tolkien’s work. That said, it should be noted that Amazon does not have the rights to the entirety of the source material, so making an exact adaptation is out of the question. The Rings of Power showrunner J.D. Payne clarified that in an interview with Vanity Fair: “We have the rights solely to The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, The Return of the King, the appendices, and The Hobbit. And that is it,” he said. “We do not have the rights to The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, The History of Middle-Earth, or any of those other books.”
Yes, I also scratched my head at that. How do you make a truthful adaptation of Tolkien’s work when you can’t access his lore and stories? It’s a fair question to ask, and fair for fans to be frustrated about it.
I won’t lie: I had some gripes watching the first three episodes, many involving how Galadriel was written. I stopped watching, but I had friends telling me to give it a second chance. After the finale aired, I decided I was going to sit my butt down on the couch for about eight hours and just watch it in one go.
I am so glad I did that. Let me tell you why. Here are the top three things I enjoyed about Rings of Power, in no particular order. Warning: there could be SPOILERS below!
Elrond
Elrond is probably my favorite character from the show thus far. Robert Aramayo portrays a younger version of the elf, who was played by Hugo Weaving in Peter Jackson’s movies, extremely well. We get to see the diplomatic and resourceful sides of Elrond. His interactions with the dwarves Durin and Disa are not just entertaining, but are crucial to the story this show has made up.
The Orcs
There was something about the orcs from Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies that left you feeling slightly unsettled. But the orcs his Hobbit trilogy weren’t quite as threatening, so I admit I was a little nervous about how they’d look in the show. Luckily, even though Jackson had nothing to do with The Rings of Power, the series was able to recapture the menace of these creatures. With much less CGI and more makeup and prosthetics, these Orcs are beautiful, realistic and terrifying.
The Harfoots and The Stranger
Yes, yes, I can hear you from here. “They’re hobbit ripoffs!” Actually, they’re not. Tolkien wrote about three different types of hobbits: the Harfoots, the Stoors, and the Fallohides. They’re kind of the predecessors to hobbits as we know them.
The harfoots bring a little bit of silliness to the series; it’s easy to imagine these people turning into the hobbits from The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Elanor, our main point of contact for the Harfoots, is sweet and brave in the style of Frodo and Samwise. The Harfoots give the hobbits a kind of origin story, or at least that’s what Amazon seems to be gearing up for.
As for the Stranger, I fell in love with him as soon as he was onscreen. His body language, expressions, looks…they all remind me of a very dear Tolkien character: Gandalf. Yes, I know he’s arriving too early to be him. But don’t lie to yourself that the moment The Stranger said: “When in doubt, Elanor Brandyfoot, always follow your nose,” you immediately didn’t point at your screen and say, “GANDALF!”
With the Stranger traveling with the Harfoots and finally leaving on an adventure with Elanor, I bet this is going to lead to the founding of the Shire. None of this seems consistent with the lore, which usually has Gandalf arriving in Middle-earth much later. But would it bother me? A bit. But after that last line, if he’s not Gandalf, I will be a little angry.
I liked other things about the show, mainly the locations and the overall excellent cast, but the three above really stood out for me. Is the show perfect? No. Is it a disaster? Absolutely not. There’s massive room for improvement. Galadriel in particular is a sticking point for me, but I feel like Amazon did a good job with the limited amount of lore they could use. My hope is that they’ll take the feedback from fans, both negative and positive, and tweak things for season 2.
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