Is ‘The Rings of Power’ a faithful Tolkien adaptation? That might be the wrong question

It might go without saying that the showrunners of the biggest “Lord of the Rings” project ever, “The Rings of Power,” should be deeply familiar with J.R.R. Tolkien’s work.
The Amazon Prime series explores the otherwise unadapted Second Age of Middle-earth, which has lots of plot holes to fill. That gives J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay the power to fill in the gaps — and an opening to take liberties with Tolkien’s mythology.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, die-hard Tolkien fans have questioned Payne and McKay’s devotion to Tolkien. The pair made controversial changes to Tolkien’s legendarium in the first season, and were accused by fans of mistreating the original mythology.
But in an interview with the Deseret News in June, both McKay and Payne spoke reverently and knowledgeably about Tolkien’s work, describing their efforts to handle it with care.
When asked what “The Rings of Power” added to Tolkien’s vision of good versus evil, McKay immediately clarified that they weren’t trying to add anything to what Tolkien has already written.
“We never approach making this show as trying to add to Tolkien’s vision,” McKay said. “I think we approach it as wanting to unearth his vision and, hopefully, unearth aspects of his vision in his world that hadn’t been brought to the screen before.”
The two showrunners were given a behemoth task: craft a linear, entertaining plot from the sparse appendices. In order to do so, sacrifices had to be made.
So maybe the question isn’t “Is ‘The Rings of Power’ a faithful adaptation?” Maybe it’s “Did McKay and Payne act in good faith?”
“The idea of faithfulness and fidelity is a really complex concept,” Michael Brisbois, Tolkien scholar and professor at MacEwan University in Canada, told the Deseret News.
“We have to ask, ‘What are we trying to be faithful to?’” he said. “Because on a certain level, any adaptation cannot remain faithful to the original source.”
That is especially true for the source material that “The Rings of Power” is working with.
The Second Age covers over 3,000 years of Middle-earth’s history. While material on the era provides context for the events of “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings,” it mostly focuses on key events of Middle-earth’s history, like the rise and fall of Númenor and the forging of the Rings of Power.
According to Grace Moone — a member of the Mythopoeic Society and co-host of the Tolkien podcast, “Queer Lodgings” — Tolkien meticulously planned “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings.” But the Second Age? Not so much.
“There are so many contradictions (in Tolkien’s legendarium),” Moone told the Deseret News. There are multiple versions of Galadriel’s backstory, for example.
“(The Second Age is) broad strokes,” Moone said. “So you always have to negotiate what version of a Tolkien work you’re putting on screen. And you’re bringing your own lens to that, and then you’re negotiating with the text.”
As Moone pointed out, creating a technically faithful adaptation of the Second Age might not be possible — and might not make for good TV. The Second Age spans thousands of years — some characters would be born and die within a single episode.
“You can’t create a compelling story that way,” Moone said.
So, in order to make a watchable — and hopefully entertaining — series, Payne and McKay had to make some sacrifices.
Both Moone and Brisbois spoke to why different Tolkien readers can have very different reactions to what they see on screen in a project like “The Rings of Power.”
People read something and, even if it’s quite detailed like “The Lord of the Rings” or “The Hobbit,” envision characters, events and places differently. When one reader’s interpretation makes it into an adaptation of the source material, other readers might feel like the adaptation is an injustice against the original work.
Moone mentioned a few different adaptation interpretations. For example, a Magic the Gathering card — a fantasy trading card game — called “Aragorn and Arwen, Wed” portrayed Aragorn as Black. Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy portrayed Legolas as blonde, but Tolkien described Legolas as: “his head was dark.” Faramir and Aragorn are both noticeably different in the films than they are in the books.
With Tolkien long gone, some might look to the Tolkien estate for authority. But it “has its gripes with Jackson’s adaptations,” according to The Hollywood Reporter, and was offered a “creative seat at the table so it could protect Tolkien’s legacy” as part of its deal with Amazon.
So the interpretation of Tolkien’s work is still subjective — for fans, artists and even the stakeholders of Tolkien’s legacy.
“It’s not a univocal text,” Moone said.
Jackson’s “Lord of The Rings” trilogy seems to be the aesthetic standard for Tolkien adaptations, so much so that “The Rings of Power” follows suit.
The link between the two projects can be comforting. Brisbois said that he appreciated how the show harkened back to a familiar Middle-earth for viewers.
But Moone wondered if showrunners boxed themselves in by taking that approach. Brisbois wondered if a “100% copy-paste” adaptation is “an effective work of art.”
“Is that what another artist should do when adapting someone else’s work, attempt to replicate them to a degree where this new artist isn’t putting their stamp on their work?” Brisbois asked.
Because of all this, Brisbois said, “I don’t know if fidelity or faithfulness is really an accurate or effective way to evaluate any adaptation.”
Overall, Moone and Brisbois have mixed feelings about “The Rings of Power,” but lean positive.
“There’s a whole bunch of different things that they were able to bring in as they filled in gaps,” Moone said. “But I think they also created some gaps, too.”
Both Moone and Brisbois enjoyed seeing the mythical characters in Middle-earth’s Second Age come to life on screen.
For example, Moone said that she enjoyed seeing a younger Galadriel in the Second Age — specifically how she was portrayed as “rash” and “impetuous.” Tolkien described her as having “incredible athletic prowess” in the First Age and, although showrunners don’t have access to those rights, Moone felt that they adequately hinted at those moments in Galadriel’s backstory.
The qualms that Brisbois had with “The Rings of Power” mostly had to do with plot, pacing and characterization, not necessarily the changes Payne and McKay made to Tolkien’s legendarium.
“I did find at times, the narrative pacing to have fallen into a standard 21st century television model,” he said, “which is that we’re going to put to put into place a number of vague, possibly compelling mysteries.”
For her part, Moone thought that the time compression in the Amazon Prime series, while necessary, “temporarily flattens the nuance” of specific themes.
“When you have events that occur over millennia happen within days and weeks, the meaning of those events gets foundationally altered,” Moone said.
Timing isn’t the only significant difference between the source material and “The Rings of Power.”
As vocal Tolkien fans have pointed out, there are also differences in aesthetics — dwarf women are portrayed without beards, Celebrimbor is significantly older than Galadriel and Elrond — and in canon. For example, many assume the mysterious, ragged, powerful wizard-like character of the Stranger is Gandalf (his identity hasn’t been revealed yet). But as Tolkien wrote it, Gandalf didn’t come to Middle-earth until the Third Age.
And there’s one major change that Moone can’t ignore — “forging the rings of power out of order.”
In Tolkien’s legendarium, Celebrimbor and Sauron, disguised as Annatar, forged the Lesser Rings together. Then Celebrimbor forged the Three Elven Rings alone.
But in “The Rings of Power,” Celebrimbor and Sauron, this time disguised as Halibrand, worked together to forge the Three Elven Rings first.
“That’s detrimental to the structure of the story itself,” Moone argued. “It’s not just fundamentally misunderstanding the themes or misconveying them, it is destructive to the actual narrative.”
When asked if she considered “The Rings of Power” to be a faithful adaptation, Moone said, “I consider it to be an adaptation done in good faith. I think the scaffolding there is too sparse for there to ever be a truly faithful adaptation.”
Brisbois echoed this sentiment. Most of Tolkien’s legendarium “wasn’t granted a definitive, canonical status by J.R.R. Tolkien during his life,” he explained. “And so it is difficult to suggest that we have something to be faithful to.”
Instead, Brisbois suggests another question: Does “The Rings of Power” honor Tolkien’s work and his legacy?
“I think that’s a more interesting question,” he said.
As Tolkien himself wrote of adaptations in a letter, “I would ask (the scriptwriters) to make an effort of imagination sufficient to understand the irritation (and on occasion the resentment) of an author, who finds, increasingly as he proceeds, his work treated as it would seem carelessly in general, in places recklessly, and with no evident signs of any appreciation of what it is all about.”
Does “The Rings of Power” appreciate what Tolkien’s work “is all about”? Both Moone and Brisbois think so.
While some fans might feel that “The Rings of Power” treats Tolkien’s work recklessly, the show — or any other adaptation for that matter — doesn’t affect the original source material.
As Moone said, “I don’t think that any particular adaptation can harm Tolkien’s work, because we always have the books, right?”
Brisbois shared the same view. “Amazon does not come to my house and make me change pages of my copy (of ‘The Lord of the Rings’).”
Besides — should a contradictory work full of gaps, like Tolkien’s Second Age, remain completely unadapted? Or was it worth a try, as Payne and McKay have done?
Some fans might say no, but Brisbois disagrees. He believes that it’s worth it for artists to adapt a story, regardless of accuracy or faithfulness. “You always run the risk that those artists will not produce a great work, a great story. That’s possible.”
He continued, “But if the choice is slavish dependence upon one object, viewing it with a fundamentalist intensity of inerrancy and inviolability, then we don’t get new art.”