Amazon’s “The Rings of Power” cost billions and delivered a 100 million person audience that isn’t shabby among today’s streaming options. But the series fell painfully short of replicating the Tolkien legacy with storytelling of multi-generational appeal and deep personal meaning.
This may disappoint Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, a Tolkien fan personally involved in securing the creative rights for “The Rings of Power.” His hopes for the project are hinted at every time he recounts his son’s marching order, “Dad, don’t eff this up.”
But the script for “The Rings of Power” commits the ultimate Tolkienian taboo: talking down to its audience, most notable in how shallow and ham-handed it treats ethnic, racial and cultural representation. This disappointment is profound given that Professor Tolkien teaches the master class on the subject.
Tolkien, a native of Bloem, South Africa’s judicial capital, was the most race-conscious of the Oxford Inklings, a mid-20th-century writer’s club meeting on campus and later at a local pub. The Inklings vowed to fight the cynicism and godlessness of their counterparts at the Frankfurt School in Germany.
While the Frankfurt School spawned doctrines that would eventually become critical race theory, Tolkien and colleagues advocated racial equality as later advanced by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in his “I Have a Dream” speech. The former deconstructs the “American Dream” to ensure no oppressor class owns it. Tolkien and King both see a future where all participate in it.
Superficial Tolkien critics argue that “The Lord of the Rings” touches only lightly on race. That view proceeds from ignorance of Tolkien’s personal history, his clash with Aryan faux-supremacy and his denouncing of the politically power-hungry who foment race hatred and violence.
Tolkien readers find his world “white” only because they overlay their own prejudices on his stories, a shallowness allowed only since Tolkien doesn’t declare melanin skin content for his characters. How light or dark is a Hobbit? That is left to the reader’s imagination. Tolkien tells us the “race” of Hobbits resulted from merged ethnicities and genotypes, and that anciently their ancestors were marked by distinct differences in complexion, stature, hair and speech.
“The Lord of the Rings” is, in its essence, a study in racial conflict and comparative merit in coexistence and cooperation. “Representation” is a thing in Tolkien as each member of his Fellowship is selected to “represent their peoples.” Peter Jackson’s film adaptation makes the group look superficially homogenous. But Tolkien’s version stitches together a “Fellowship” whose families don’t intermarry, comprising races at fierce bloody war with each other for most of known history.
Few modern stories offer us the relatable drivers of race reconciliation as well as Tolkien’s “Tale of Legolas and Gimli.” Backdropped by a history of race hatred over millennia, the two characters do not immediately warm to each other. It takes time, shared challenges and eventual understanding of strikingly different cultures before the two characters make peace. Even at the end of their story arc, each clings to dramatically different values, but they accept, even celebrate, those differences.
The actress and comedienne Whoopi Goldberg stunned her audience last year by declaring that the Holocaust wasn’t about race. “It was white-on-white violence,” she later apologized for saying.
Her commentary revealed ignorance that Nazis still persecuted equally meaningless “racial” aspects, like smaller variations in skin tone, facial features and accents stereotypical of “Jews.” It is the reason many non-Jews became mis-identified casualties.
“The Rings of Power” makes Whoopi’s same mistake: suggesting melanin content is the essence of race hatred so “representing” it solves all. Tolkien fans rightfully expected a deeper dive skipping the superficiality of “skin color” and portraying actual victims of discrimination.
In that alternative script, Bezos gets his legacy as audiences today, and decades from now, cheer when a character succeeds despite irrational prejudice. That is true “representation.”
Trent Clark founded the Rocky Mountain Chapter of the Tolkien Society in the United States and guest lectures on the Inklings who advanced Christian liberalism over Marxism.
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(1) comment
I've seen the movies but I won't watch this cr-ap.
They did the same thing to Vikings Valhalla....
Vikings was one of my all time favorite series
But when they cast a historical Scandinavian
King as a black female......I'm out.
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The Idaho State Journal invites you to take part in the community conversation. But those who don't play nice may be uninvited. Don't post comments that are off topic, defamatory, libelous, obscene, racist, abusive, threatening or an invasion of privacy. We may remove any comment for any reason or no reason. We encourage you to report abuse, but the decision to delete is ours. Commenters have no expectation of privacy and may be held accountable for their comments. Comments are opinions of the author only, and do not reflect the opinions or views of Idaho State Journal.