The Decline and Fall of J.R.R. Tolkien: From “The Lord of the Rings” to “The Rings of Power”

More than fifty years ago, back in the summer of 1973, when more normal children were playing sports and learning hobbies, I spent virtually every free minute obsessively reading J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy. I must have read it through, cover to cover, at least five or six times. I read my favorite passages so often that I effectively memorized them. The next year, I instantly bonded with another boy my age, now a famous geneticist, when we found we could both recite long stretches of poetry from the book by heart, including in Tolkien’s invented languages.

So it’s no surprise that I looked eagerly forward to Peter Jackson’s film adaptations early in this century, and also to the new Amazon streaming series The Rings of Power, which serves as a sort of prequel to The Lord of the Rings, based on the fanciful appendices Tolkien included in his final volume. But I found both disappointing—the second much more than the first—and the reasons may say something about popular culture today.

Much of the power—as well as the considerable humor—of Tolkien’s masterwork comes from the deft way he juxtaposes two very different sorts of characters and stories. On the one hand, there is a world of heroes and magic and wonder, of grandeur and beauty but also of terrible evil, drawn from a profound knowledge of northern European mythology. This is the world of elves, of the great kingdoms of Gondor and Rohan, but also of the terrifying dark realm of Mordor. And on the other hand, there is the small-scale world of the “small folk” Tolkien called hobbits, drawn above all from his sense of the English rural character (they live in a country called, simply, the Shire). The hobbits are often foolish, greedy, quarrelsome and short-sighted, but also have the virtues of common sense, pluck, good humor, and basic decency. The great conceit of the books is that the small folk succeed where the grand ones would have failed, in meeting the supreme challenge of the time and defeating the Dark Lord Sauron.

Tolkien’s other fictional works never quite lived up to The Lord of the Rings, because they lacked this balance and contrast. The Hobbit is a marvelously amusing children’s book, but it operates almost entirely on the hobbit level—its non-hobbit characters (dwarves, elves, men, a dragon) are mostly as silly and small-scale as the hobbits themselves. The posthumous Silmarillion, meanwhile, takes place entirely in the grand realms of myth and heroes, without the hobbits to keep everything in perspective.

Particularly important for sustaining the interplay between the small and the grand was Tolkien’s language. Shakespeare mostly has his great nobles and kings speak in poetry, while the “rude mechanicals” use prose. Similarly, Tolkien’s kings and heroes speak in archaic, sonorous cadences that sometimes verge perilously on pastiche:

“Begone, foul dwimmerlaik, lord of carrion! Leave the dead in peace!"

A cold voice answered: “Come not between the Nazgûl and his prey! Or he will not slay thee in thy turn. He will bear thee away to the houses of lamentation, beyond all darkness, where thy flesh shall be devoured, and thy shrivelled mind be left naked to the Lidless Eye."

The hobbits, meanwhile, speak in plain, vernacular English.

To my mind, no adaptation of Tolkien can really succeed without maintaining this tension between the grand and the plain. Neither Jackson’s films nor the new Rings of Power really manage to do so.

Jackson comes much closer. His films have an amazing visual power, with outdoors scenes featuring stunning New Zealand landscapes, and city sets inspired by pre-Raphaelite painting. The battle scenes are thrilling, if admittedly error-filled in purely military terms (medieval cavalry would have crashed into each other if they tried to charge downhill at full gallop with the riders almost touching each other, and their horses would never have let them charge at full speed onto rows of raised spears). Jackson is also a master of suspense who captures something of the novels’ intense drama.

But Jackson also came to the project from a background in horror films, and too often turned The Lord of the Rings into one. He portrays the evil creatures called Orcs not just as ugly, but as grotesquely deformed, covered with cysts and boils and pus. The hobbit-like villain called Gollum is physically repulsive in a way that goes beyond far Tolkien’s descriptions. Worst of all, far too often Jackson ends up portraying his principal hobbit hero Frodo as a horror film victim, his face frozen into a rictus of terror, unable to move, far less defend himself, mostly lacking the pluck and determination Tolkien wrote into the character (although his brave sidekick Sam partly makes up for this).

And it is not only in the horror movie excesses that Jackson undercuts the way Tolkien presented his characters. Tolkien cast his hobbit protagonists not just as individual heroes, but very much as products of their rural society (or sometimes, less pleasantly, of the hobbit race). They had all the virtues of the rural England he admired, but as a devout Catholic he also emphasized that they were no more free from temptation to evil than the great and powerful. He deliberately does not conclude the trilogy with the defeat of Sauron. Instead, he follows the hobbits home to the Shire, where they find that an ally of Sauron has corrupted part of the community and begun a hobbit-scale reign of terror. The heroes need to lead a rebellion to restore order. Peter Jackson often stated that he hated this ending, and could not understand why Tolkien included it, indicating his own fairly serious misunderstanding of his subject matter. His own shortened ending eliminates the entire plot line and has the heroes simply returning home to a Shire of oblivious hicks who have no clue about the world-shaking events that have just taken place.

Meanwhile, Jackson undercuts the other side of the story by removing most of the archaic language Tolkien gave to his grander characters. Perhaps he felt that teenage moviegoers would not understand it. Perhaps he thought the grand visuals would compensate (and, to a certain extent, they do). But to anyone who knows the novels well, the loss is starkly noticeable. In the passage I quoted above, from one of the books’ climactic battles, the leader of the Nazgûl, servant of Sauron, stands gloating over the body of the King of Rohan, whom he has just killed. He is confronted by the king’s niece Éowyn, who has disguised herself as a man named Dernhelm to join the fight, accompanied by one of the hobbits, Merry. After the villain’s dire threat to her, the passage continues:

A sword rang as it was drawn. "Do what you will; but I will hinder it, if I may."

"Hinder me? Thou fool. No living man may hinder me!"

Then Merry heard of all sounds in that hour the strangest. It seemed that Dernhelm laughed, and the clear voice was like the ring of steel. "But no living man am I! You look upon a woman.”

A duel follows, in which Éowyn kills the Nazgûl and avenges her uncle.

In Jackson’s film, the scene has a visual splendor, but the language is almost entirely truncated and simplified. Éowyn screams “I will kill you if you touch him.” The Nazgûl replies: “Do not come between the Nazgûl and his prey” (the archaic “come not” eliminated). The two fight, the Nazgûl knocks Éowyn down, and gloatingly raises his arms as if soliciting applause from a group of bro buddies “No man can kill me,” he boasts. “Die now.” Éowyn is saved when Merry stabs the Nazgûl in the leg from behind, giving her a chance to recover. She pulls off her helmet, reveals a mane of flowing blond hair, shouts “I am no man,” and stabs the villain in the face with her sword. That’s the extent of the dialogue.

Despite these issues, the films are highly entertaining, and made enormous amounts of money, ensuring that more screen adaptations would follow. Jackson himself turned The Hobbit into a bloated misfire of a trilogy of its own, about which the less said the better. And now Amazon is broadcasting the second season of its prequel series The Rings of Power, which embroiders upon a thin plotline Tolkien sketched out in the appendices to The Lord of the Rings. Set several thousand years before the novels, although including some of the same (immortal) characters, it centers on Sauron’s first rise to power, his forging of a series of magic rings to exert power over the races of “Middle Earth,” and his corruption of the king of the powerful, Atlantis-like island kingdom of Númenor, whom he urges to invade the “undying lands” of the god-like Valar across the western ocean (in response—spoiler alert—the Valar sink all of Númenor beneath the waves).

The Rings of Power may well end up as the most expensive television series ever filmed, with a total budget of over a billion dollars. As in Jackson’s films, the money has been well spent when it comes to the sets, costumes, and gorgeous natural backdrops. But the scriptwriters are no Tolkiens. They lack his imagination, the immense mythological knowledge that he drew upon, and his skill with words. They do have a sense of how to construct a coherent story, and to keep the action moving. The result is mostly watchable. But it is also woefully flat, with very little dramatic tension or suspense, and too many characters and plotlines to permit proper development of any of them, even with multiple episodes per season.

Above all, the balance and contrast between scales that made The Lord of the Rings into a masterpiece are almost entirely lacking in the new series. It has hobbit-like creatures (supposedly ancestors of the hobbits in The Lord of the Rings), but they have so far had little interaction with the elves and humans who occupy the principal roles. Once or twice per episode, the writers have dared introduce an archaic note into the language, but mostly the characters speak like twenty-first century Americans, with vaguely English accents (although the dwarves sound unconvincingly Scottish, and the proto-hobbits weirdly Irish). The characters also mostly have drearily predictable motivations. The elf queen Galadriel, whom Tolkien portrayed as a figure of literally inhuman nobility and beauty, is here reduced to a frustrated and angry woman warrior who chafes at slights from her male colleagues and wants nothing more than to avenge herself on Sauron for killing her brother. The male elves often come off as self-satisfied prigs. The elf whom Sauron tricks into helping him forge the rings shrugs off warnings with the words: “this is my moment.” It is simply not convincing, and there have been news reports that viewership has plummeted in season two. Will Amazon cut its losses before the fall of Númenor and Sauron’s first defeat? It’s all too possible.

But, then, it is hard to imagine how a film true to Tolkien’s intent could be produced today. His language, and the mythologies he drew on, are simply too unfamiliar to generations of non-readers raised on superhero movies and TikTok videos. Meanwhile, the idea of innately noble and evil races rubs very hard—with good reason—against contemporary sensibilities. Not surprisingly, The Rings of Power has made some efforts towards “humanizing” the Orcs, giving them their own origin story and motivations. But since the entire narrative structure Tolkien invented casts them as irredeemably evil, the result is mostly just incoherence and confusion. I’ll continue to watch the series for as long as it continues, but mostly out of loyalty to my eleven-year-old self. And I’m not particularly looking forward to it.