Latest news on Amazon's "Lord of the Rings" series
I'm sure everyone here has been following this pretty closely, but have you heard about the latest definitely almost certainly happening development? What do you think? Is it too early to start pouring the victory swarfega?
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Sounds good to me! Tolkien's whole 'and then three thousand years passed between the interesting parts' premise was always pretty dumb, so I'm glad to see they're streamlining it, as he should have done in the first place. (Of course, Isildur as 'the last king of Gondor' was already in RotK-M, so Jackson as ever was prescient on this!)
Delighted to hear PJ will be back - I hope he has some more of his amazing cameos! Ooh, idea - what if they got Andy Serkis to play Ar-Pharazon? That way, we could avoid having a physical Sauron (another of Tolkien's goofy ideas that Jackson rightly fixed), and just have him as a voice in Pharazon's head. Serkis'd be great at that. hS |
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Bah! Nolan North.
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I hear the latest date for this to air is in 2021. As the deal is production has to start within a certain timeframe else the Tolkien estate walks away with all the money.
Amazon is probably busy casting and setting up the set infrastructure and the like. |
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You'd have to prove you were reincarnated and that the past life was you and if you couldn't do that, your suit would be dismissed.
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I don't know if any of you were watching Game of Thrones, and I won't issue any spoilers, but...episode 5...wow. Ummm...that was...completely unnecessary.
And that should be a cautionary tale for this new Middle-earth monstrosity Amazon is erecting skyward like the tower of Babel. George RR Martin never finished his story, and the GoT franchise writers have seemed to throw caution to the wind and went off the deep end in a TV show that seemed to never have a deep end. The Second Age Middle-earth is sparse on detail. The amount of detail required to build a story may well lead us in a direction none of us have any inclination to follow. |
I'm not a devoted watcher of GOT, but I'm familiar enough with it to have indeed suspected that any Middle-earth based series might follow that template. No doubt it's been a resounding ratings success; why not stick with a winning formula, when they've no one with the Estate to reckon with?
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However, the GOT style would be COMPLETELY WRONG for Tolkien. |
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Bad enough that in the same video they mention a Stephen King Dark Tower series and one based on H.P. Lovecraft, both of which I enjoy in the written form, but am rather skeptical of other "visions". :rolleyes: Curiously, they also mention a Narnia series. I've never been a fan, so that one doesn't have any impact on me personally. |
The Akallabeth has quite a lot of GOT esque elements if only by implications. However GOT’s style and thematic atmosphere do not fit Tolkien even in that context.
Thing is, Amazon wants to make the next GOT and will seek to emulate whatever elements of GOT real or perceived to have made it successful. |
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Probably not. :( |
Tom Shippey on the limitations of the series.
There's a clump of interesting questions and responses at the beginning. Quote:
It's also notable that Shippey mentions the Appendices here; more on that in a minute. Quote:
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There is a video introducing some of the team behind the show; it doesn't exactly grab my attention, but someone might see something exciting. They show John Howe sketching what could be a shoreline or a rockface, and Kate Hawley (costumes) working on this: https://i.imgur.com/7g384XY.png (Heavily skewed and then repaired.) My guess is that it's probably a sketch of the interviewer. It certainly doesn't seem to hold any details. ^_^ hS |
If characters are the main avenue open for original development, I have to wonder if they're going to want to impart convictions and motivations that, while recognizable to us today, would be out of phase with Tolkien's established "worldviews" for his creations.
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Indeed, Amazon may not be able to change the timeline or add events, factions and so on, that didn't occur in the books, but through the characters, they will be able to insert modern ideas, agendas, and biases.
And when criticized, will simply say they are filling in the gaps and not contradicting existing source material. |
FWIW, New Zealand has been confirmed as the location for principal filming.
Probably to be expected, given the PJ connection, the availability of WETA, and relatively cheap costs compared to Hollywood. I'm not however convinced how well it could pass for Numenor, though, as opposed to Eriador and Rohan/Gondor; Westernesse lay in subtropical latitudes. |
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... yeah, it was the 'Lungs' map. Let's forget that. ^_^; Is there an actual source for the tropical/subtropical location? Logically speaking, Numenor should lie such that both Umbar and Vinyalonde are sensible landing points; the Fonstad map shows it south of both, and begs the question of why they wouldn't get their wood from those handy southerly forests. hS |
Keep in mind that the bulk of the ultimate Numenorean colonies lay off-map in Harad; Umbar and Pelargir were the northernmost. As to why Aldarion originally landed in Lindon- well, besides the fact that one would want an established port for refit and resupply, not an uninhabited bay, it's also the case that the Numenoreans are stated to have been taught shipcraft and sailing "by the Eldar," which I expect means Cirdan's people rather than the occasional visitors from Eressea. So the route to Lindon was known and Aldarion may well have had Elvish navigators on his first voyage.
Why harvest timber and establish a logging port in Minhiriath? Probably because it was "uninhabited" in the usual imperialist meaning of the term (Eriador means, roughly, "empty land"); Harad was full of "civilized" peoples who likely would have objected rather violently to wholesale felling (those of Eriador did, too, but they couldn't do much about it). Moreover, Aldarion's voyages were to the northwest of Middle-earth, even if later mariners went much, much farther; and it would make sense that he was looking for a source of timber not far from his 'advance base' in Lindon without actually encroaching on Elvish lands; probably was pointed that way by Gil-Galad's folk. Equatorial latitude: the Annals of Valinor state that Tun (later Tirion) is located on the "girdle of the earth." The maps associated with the Ambarkanta (mid-late 1930s, definitely after the Numenor legend was first created) show Taniquetil and the Bay of Elvenhome marked at or near the equator. Eressea is also on or near the equator; and Numenor was just within distant sight of Eressea (from the top of the Meneltarma, so say ~100 nautical miles). One could also speculate about currents and prevailing winds; in the RW North Atlantic they run in a clockwise circle, so that ships returning to Europe from the West Indies would run up the American coast with the gulf stream and cross in northerly waters, and similarly outbound ships went southwards via the Canaries and Azores. Trying to make a beeline left you becalmed in the Sargasso Sea. HOWEVER- our ocean and atmospheric currents are products of the spinning of the spherical Earth, which wouldn't really be a thing before the Downfall. |
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hS |
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Assuming that Numenoreans have RW human vision or close to it (and they seem not to have Elvish eyes, since Aragorn is always using Legolas as his binoculars), then their angular resolution is approx one arc-minute or 1/60 of a degree. That's why you can't look up at the moon and see flags and old lunar rovers there, and why the military relies on radar to pick up approaching aircraft that the Mk 1 eyeball hasn't a chance of seeing before it's too late..
So, even if we assume absolutely clear air without haze or turbulence, the maximum distance at which an unaided human eye could pick out a tower of ~ 30m diameter would be around 100 kilometers. |
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This does mean that Eressea itself would be a major presence on the 'horizon' - it would be impossible to miss from anywhere on the slopes of Meneltarma! But I guess Numenor doesn't really have other mountains, so that's not necessarily a problem. (I am now imagining young Numenorean kids in the west climbing trees and insisting "I can totally see it! Wow, that tower's so tall!" and suchlike.) So why couldn't they see Taniquetil? Surely the tallest mountain in the world would be... kind of hard to miss? hS |
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This impression is reinforced in that the passage originated with the first draft of the Drowning of Anadune (circa 1945-6), which appears, not definitively but suggestively, to have been a Round-World text. At least there is the passage (§ 31, HME IX p. 347) "For with subtle arguments Sauron gainsaid all that the Avalai had taught. And he bade them think that the world was not a closed circle; and that there lay therein many lands yet for their winning..." Nor, in DAI, do we have the passage from the Downfall in which Eru globed the world, simply that the great chasm opened and Aman was removed from reach. |
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it's aliens. |
A new link has emerged to tie the Amazon series to Game of Thrones.
Are the signs indeed pointing toward a new GoT with a Tolkien flavor? |
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-They're very clearly not Adunaic names. Those come in forms like Îbal and Zamîn; having three without accents on would be implausible, given how accented Adunaic is in general. -Beldor looks like Sindarin, but I think it might be... bad Sindarin? 'Bel' could be Beleg (strong), and 'dor' is, well, Dor (land), but a) Strong Land is a stupid name for a person, and b) I'm pretty sure you'd wind up with something like Belegdhor, or even Belendor, not 'Beldor'. -Tyra is clearly not Sindarin, with that ending - the only instance of 'yra' in the entire Sindarin corpus is in the collective plural yrath of the suggested Sindarin form yr of Noldorin ior. I don't think it can be Sindarin, either - 'ty' seems to be a consonant cluster, so can't be followed by another consonant. What it is is an Old Norse name, derived from Tyr (the god), which means it could be standing in for Northern Mannish. --Which takes us back to Beldor, which is very close to Baldr, the son of Odin. So we have two possible Northern Mannish names - but would they really set a Second Age series up in Lake Town? (Or maybe they're dwarves? That would be hilarious, actually.) -Oren... well, in our world it's a Hebrew name, so if you accept the reductive 'dwarves are Tolkien's Jews' stance, you've got a good case for Khazad-Dum: The Series (not gonna lie, I'd love that). It could be Quenya, using órë, 'heart' - in fact if you put the accent back on, it's valid Quenya for 'my heart'. There's nothing to stop it being Sindarin, but it feels a bit too Quenya-y for that to me. So. We have three characters who cannot all be Elves, and cannot all be Numenoreans. They could all be dwarves (maybe), or Men of Middle-earth - but those really aren't the sort of stories you'd expect to see in such a series. Taking a quick look at the actors, I can see Elf or Numenorean in the two heroes, but not Dwarf. 'Oren's' actor could pull off a Dwarf, but I'm not sure he could play an Elf or Annatar. Best guess? Fake names, because they're actually playing canon characters. Given the number of pouting faces both of the 'goodies' pull in their Google photos, I'm guessing Aldarion and Erendis. hS |
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https://tvline.com/2019/10/21/lord-o...-villain-oren/ To be philologically unaware of Tolkien's languages is bad enough, but to be completely incognizant of cultural touchstones is laughable in the extreme. I wonder if Beldar will meet up with his Numenorean buds and say, "Come, let us consume mass quantities!" http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-li...conehead-74136 |
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Well, as of yesterday we have 15 cast members, which includes several we already knew.
It has, embarassingly, only just occurred to me that if you're bad at reading the appendices, the name 'Sauron' could be pronounced 'Sore-on'. Which is very very close to the 'lead villain' name of Oren. Given that the series is still called 'The Lord of the Rings', of which as we know There Is Only One, I think Joseph Mawle is probably playing Sauron. Given the... inventiveness of that code-name, is it possible that the others are just as bad? 'Tyra' could be a contraction of 'Tar-Telperien', who was queen at the time the Rings were forged. (And I'm not just suggesting this because I want a Witch-Queen of Numenor arc! ;)) As for Beldar... yeah, I've still got nothing there. From the pictures in the article, I think Morfydd Clark might be playing an elf - perhaps even Galadriel? She and Elrond are just about the only characters people who only know the films might recognize in this time-frame... hS |
I'm basically expecting this to be every bit as bad as the Hobbit movies, crossed with The Last Jedi and Ishtar.
That leaves room to be pleasantly surprised. |
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It really depends on the estate and how much they are willing to veto. They might only Veto large scale contradictions or thematic or plot notions. They might have a relatively free hand and be reluctant to use the veto lest they anger Amazon.
My worst case prediction is that Amazon gets around the veto by basically making up glorified fanfiction. Basically Shadows of Mordor(and that actually contradicts the lore). They can always claim they are filling in the gaps, or they aren’t violating the agreement not to contradict things. This could mean the show is basically Shadows of Mordor but without even the pretense of being an “adaptation” except in the loosest sense. But rather original fiction set within Tolkien’s world. Which at its best would probably be uncreative and mediocre. At worst it would be torture. But with Christopher gone-my main concern is that if the show does well. The younger Tolkien family members might sell out as it were. Letting Amazon and other corporations poach and ravage the rest of Tolkien’s corpus. |
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