"The Rings of Power" Vanity Fair article

[Huinesoron]

So what is the scope of this series? Weirdly, Vanity Fair repeat a claim that I think can't possibly be true:

[In 2017, the Tolkien Estate] were selling the rights to the Appendices that outlined what the author had referred to as the Second Age of Middle-earth, along with any references to that time period in The Lord of the Rings itself.

Ummm... I think we can probably admit that they're also drawing on UT and the Silm, don't you?

Whatever the source material, this series is going to have a broad scope. They have 22 "stars"; even allowing for many of them to appear in pairs, that's a lot of storylines to play with. (It's also a weird number, because there are 23 character posters; is one of them a duplicate character? Did they really like a minor character's design?) The list of locations spans most of Middle-earth: Numenor, Lindon, presumably Eregion, Khazad-dum, and various undefined places that are probably further east.

And then there's the plot. I've already noted that they're condensing everything down to one mortal lifetime. That... yeah, that sounds bad, but what does it actually mean?

- Celebrimbor lives at the same time as Isildur. It's wrong, but I don't think it impacts either of their stories. Numenor was happy to go about its business basically ignoring Lindon; I doubt they'll care that Eregion is suddenly there too.

- Sauron isn't on the world stage until after Numenor is already overshadowed, OR the shadow grows over Numenor very rapidly. The former would be absolutely fine - the whole point of the Numenor tale is that the darkening has nothing to do with the Dark Lord (at least until they bring him there). The latter would be very annoying - it smacks of the darkening of Mirkwood in The Hobbit movies, which happened so suddenly that a hedgehog got injured by it.

- Galadriel's quest against "the last remnants" of the evil armies looks quite daft, OR the Second Age is only a century or two long. Again, the latter would be really irritating, but the former might work quite well. If Galadriel's activities as described in the article aren't against the participants in a war that just finished, but consist of her scouring the countryside for Orcs and going on about shadows three thousand years after the War of Wrath... then I can understand a little better why nobody listened to her.

- And... that's... it? The various stories of the Second Age (forging of the Rings, Numenorean settlements in Middle-earth, Akallabeth) don't actually interact with each other much, so I don't think things will break too much by running them all concurrently. Though it does annoy me, not gonna lie.

So... in that context, what are they doing with the plot? They say that it's all about building up to the forging and gifting of the Rings, with the goal being to establish who the various cultures who received them actually were. So I imagine we'll see a lot of disparate plotlines at first, in different corners of Middle-earth, all of them eventually converging on Celebrimbor's forge.

And yes, that means some of the mortal characters will almost certainly become Nazgul. Halbrand and Bronwyn are the two mortals named in the article (and Isildur, but please, no); I bet at least one of them gets a Ring.*

(*"But the Nazgul are all male!" Yes, and Galadriel is an elven-king under the sky.)

And then there's the weirdly disconnected bits of plot. There's a photo of two nomad hunters wearing giant antlers on their back in a landscape filmed a lot cooler than the other images. There's talk of two Harfoots finding a mysterious stranger "whose origin promises to be one of the show’s most enticing enigmas". How does this fit into the larger plot? Presumably it will, but it's hard to guess how.

Actually, the Harfoots ("HarFEET!") sound like fun; they're described as "play[ing] out a kind of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead story in the margins of the bigger quests". So they're there, but have no actual plot relevance - they're just witnessing larger events and not really knowing what's going on.

And just for fun, the pull-quote that's going to have us all pulling our hair out:

The driving question behind the production, he adds, was this: “Can we come up with the novel Tolkien never wrote and do it as the mega-event series that could only happen now?”

No. No you can't. Nobody can write a Tolkien novel except Tolkien, and he's busy being dead.

hS