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Yes, this is yet another article where I’m not talking directly about wargames, but I am talking about Middle Earth, and this website deals a lot with Middle Earth. I sincerely hope, at some point, to see Rings of Power represented on the tabletop in the Middle Earth Strategy Battle Game.

But I wanted to address some of the criticism that I’ve seen coming at Rings of Power. I realize that the show is only two days away and we’ll soon get a better idea of whether or not the show is good. But some of the things I’ve been reading and watching on YouTube have been saying that it doesn’t even matter whether or not Rings of Power is good. Their argument is that it is simply not Tolkien, so it might be a decent fantasy show, but it’s not a good adaptation of the source material.

One video made a big contention about the fact that Rings of Power is not even an “adaptation” but it is instead “inspired by” Tolkien’s worlds. That’s something that I want to come back to.

Now I will be the first to admit that I am not a Tolkien scholar. I am not well-versed in all of the letters and ephemera that exists out there that people draw upon for their opinions of what Tolkien wanted.

What I am, however, is a New York Times Bestselling author of fifteen novels who knows a little bit about what it means to have works “adapted,” “inspired by,” and “based upon” a book. I know a lot about what canon entails, and what it means to an author.

I’m not going to refute every point that I’ve read hating on Rings of Power. I don’t want to get into an argument with anyone. But what I do want to do is make a few points about bringing books to the screen.

1. Books Are Apples. Movies Are Apple Pie.

This concept was described to me at a writers conference by someone who had their work adapted to the screen. Books are apples, and movies are apple pie. A book, by its definition, cannot be a movie. The author–even authors like Tolkien who described everything in exquisite detail–cannot describe EVERYTHING in detail. No movie will be exactly like the book because the book takes place in the head of the reader.

Apples are ingredients. Apple pies are collections of ingredients, worked and refined. The Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings films had a beautiful score by Howard Shore that nearly everyone describes as perfect and iconic, but that score did not come from the books. Sure, a few lyrics from Tolkien’s poems made their way into Shore’s songs music, but the melodies, the themes, the triumphant swelling of the orchestra: that’s just an ingredient. Say, it’s the sugar that is added to the apple pie. We have Tolkien’s stories–the apples–and we have Shore’s music–the sugar. What else is there? The flour? The butter? The cinnamon? Could these be the cast, the costumes, the sets? The locations? The pacing? The cinematography? All of those are ingredients that were not in Tolkien’s books. Sure, they worked to make those things as close to Tolkien’s books, but they added their own elements.

No movie or TV show is going to be the same as a book, and that’s okay. If you want the book, the whole book, and nothing but the book: then read the book. If you want to see it on screen, you’re going to get a mishmash of a lot of ingredients that hopefully come together to make a good apple pie.

2. Canon Is Important, Except When It Isn’t

I’m at the ripe age of 44, making me in my young twenties when the Lord of the Rings movies came out, and I remember VERY CLEARLY how people were very very upset when they heard that Arwen was going to be replacing Glorfindl. I remember them being very upset when there was no scouring of the shire. When Faramir tried to take the hobbits to Denethor. When the Dead of Dunharrow were at the Battle of the Pellinor Fields. I remember all of that, because people on the internet (it never changes) were very vocal.

But, when the movies came out and everyone saw that the movies were, you know, good, people began to change their tune. Sure, there were the purists who never got over those things, but NOBODY CARES ABOUT THOSE PEOPLE ANYMORE. Get over it. The movies were good. Almost universally beloved.

I’m not saying that Rings of Power is going to be universally beloved, because I haven’t seen it. But
I am saying that changes to canon are not deal breakers.

3. “Inspired By” Isn’t Necessarily Worse Than “Adapted From”

Have you ever tried to read the book “The Bourne Identity”? It is… not great. At least, it is not as good as the movies. And did you ever notice that the second movie in the series was better than the first?

The first movie was written to be an adaptation of the book. And it didn’t follow it entirely, but it was close. And that movie is the worst of the trilogy. (We don’t talk about the fourth and fifth movies.) What happened is that, after the C grade that The Bourne Identity got, the producers gave the writers the instruction to write a Bourne movie, about the character, but they could ignore the canon. And it was SO MUCH BETTER.

NOW. I know what you’re saying. The Bourne Identity book may have been weak, but Tolkien’s expanded universe is not weak. And I’m not going to claim that taking certain characters out of context and rewriting everything around them is going to make Rings of Power better. But I am saying that “inspired by” is not automatically worse than “adapted from”.

4. Let’s Talk About Tolkien’s Expanded Universe

There’s a problem that the writers of Rings of Power were going to face: Tolkien’s Expanded Universe takes place over many, many thousands of years. And any story that they want to tell, from the forging of the rings of power, the two trees, the Silmarils, Beren and Luthien, the fall of Numenor–any one of those stories is going to span generatiosn and millenia. And… you can’t exactly adapt that to a TV series.

As much as I love Tolkien’s expanded universe, it’s a history and a framework. It is not fully-fleshed-out stories. At most it’s a series of connected vignettes. And the writers of Rings of Power knew that they were going to have to take some liberties, especially with the timeline. Were all of the Elven characters going to be in all the seasons and all the mortals die off every few episodes or every season? That’s how they’d have to do it be true to canon. That’s hard and it’s weird.

There’s certainly an argument to be made that that WAS the right way to go, but even if they went that way they were still going to have to make up characters, give characters (both side characters and main characters) non-canonical character arcs and plot points. You simply can’t be true to writing the story of the forging of the rings of power and manage to do it exactly how the books do unless you MAKE SOME CREATIVE DECISIONS.

5. Let’s Talk About Politics

I have seen so many people arguing about politics in Rings of Power. And… it seems to boil down to “Different races are political”. No, different races are just… different races. There’s no way that I can argue this without simply saying that getting upset about a black Dwarf and a black elf is–at best–making a mountain out of a molehill. At worst, they’re just being racist.

And they’ll say “But… the canon!”

I’m not going to argue about the canon, and the fact that some hobbits (Sam) were described as having brown skin, and on and on. What I am going to say is that if the sight of different races in a movie is going to upset you so much, I have a feeling that Tolkien wouldn’t have really liked you. (He was notably anti-Nazi for their treatment of the Jews.)

Now, do I think that Tolkien was picturing black elves? I have no idea. But I DON’T CARE. I’m not even going to make the common argument that “This is fantasy and there are dragons–shouldn’t there be black people, too?” It’s a good argument, but I’m not going to make it.

My argument is that if you can’t enjoy watching something because someone in it has the wrong color of skin, then that’s on you. That’s not the fault of anyone else but you.

Critics of Rings of Power and it’s “political agenda” will point to how Tolkien would commonly say his books did not have a political agenda. These people have apparently not taking a literature class, because the truth is that there are agendas in every author’s work, whether they put them there or not.

Watch The Two Towers and tell me how everything with Saruman and Isengard and the Ents is not SCREAMING “ENVIRONMENTALISM”. And that’s not Peter Jackson’s doing. Environmentalism is flying off the pages of Tolkien’s books, everywhere you look (and his letters, and his non-Lord of the Rings writings). So you can say that Tolkien wasn’t trying to make a point about World War One (the most common thing he was accused of) and maybe he didn’t intend his books to be about World War One, but they were absolutely colored by World War One. His experiences showed him what war and death and destruction were about, and that carried into his books.

So, the experiences of the modern writers of Rings of Power are affecting their portrayal of Tolkien’s work? Sure it’s politics. Name me a book devoid of politics.

I’m reminded of Mark Twain who starts out Huckleberry Finn with the epigraph “persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted” and then proceeds to write one of the greatest abolitionist works of fiction ever put to paper.

Conclusion

I have no idea if Rings of Power will be good. I really really hope it is because I love Tolkien and I want to see a lot more of it. So far I’ve really liked the trailers. But it might not be.

But I stand behind these arguments about its critics (who also haven’t seen it yet).