My Thoughts on Vanity Fair’s First Look at Amazon’s The Rings of Power Adaptation

On 2/10/22, Vanity Fair gave readers their first look at Amazon’s Tolkien adaptation The Rings of Power. The series will be based on material from The Lord of the Rings appendices and references to the Second Age in The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit; Amazon does not have rights to material from The Silmarillion or other works. Because this material is somewhat sparse, this does mean the show writers will be inventing some characters, plot lines, etc. to fill in the gaps.

Here are some things we learned about the new series in the article, and some of my thoughts:

Tolkien scholars are being consulted.

Fans may know that Tom Shippey was previous dismissed by the show, and many people were worried this was an ominous sign. Vanity Fair speculates this was because Shippey accidentally violated an NDA, but confirms there are still scholars working on the show; Amazon just won’t publicly name them anymore. I consider this good news for Tolkien fans hoping for accuracy and a sense that the series will be thematically true to Tolkien’s work.

Both he and the showrunners decline to say what exactly happened, but the obvious assumption was made by fans. “It seems like the NDA is basically ‘If you tell anyone, we can put you through a wood chipper,’ ” says Drout, the Tolkien professor. Amazon no longer shares the names of its scholars.

Vanity Fair

There will not be rampant sex and nudity.

After news broke that Amazon had hired an intimacy coordinator for its New Zealand set, some fans feared that the production might have lost sight of what makes Tolkien Tolkien. “My worry would be if it becomes a Game of Thrones in the Second Age,” says Dimitra Fimi, a Tolkien scholar and lecturer at the University of Glasgow. “That wouldn’t be what one would associate with Tolkien’s vision. It would also be derivative.”

Vanity Fair

I remember fans (including me!) being worried months ago about indications this adaptation might not exactly be PG-13 because sexually explicit content definitely does not fit the vibe of Tolkien’s work. I think many people breathed a huge sigh of relief after reading the part of the article where the writers directly say they intend the show to be appropriate for tweens to watch. No word on what exactly the intimacy coordinator is doing on set though.

There will be proto-Hobbits.

“One of the very specific things the texts say is that hobbits never did anything historic or noteworthy before the Third Age,” says McKay. “But really, does it feel like Middle-earth if you don’t have hobbits or something like hobbits in it?” The hobbit ancestors in this era are called harfoots.

Vanity Fair

I didn’t personally have thoughts about Hobbits in the series before now, but I can get behind the argument that surely Hobbits are around in Middle-earth in the Second Age. They can’t be big players in big events if the series is staying true to the source material, but we’ll have to see what the writers do with the characters they’re inventing there. It could be interesting. I don’t think we really need Hobbits to market the series to viewers, though. The other familiar characters like Elrond, Galadriel, etc. seem like enough of a draw to get the general public interested to me.

There will be an Elf/Human Romance

 One original story line centers on a silvan elf named Arondir, played by Ismael Cruz Córdova, who will be the first person of color to play an elf onscreen in a Tolkien project. He is involved in a forbidden relationship with Bronwyn, a human village healer played by Nazanin Boniadi, a British actor of Iranian heritage.

Vanity Fair

Can we stop this? I’m enough of a Tolkien purist to be annoyed by this. There are only three named Elf/Human unions in Tolkien; it’s clear this was rare. I guess some people could have had a romance that didn’t ultimately work out and didn’t get a mention in the records of history, but I suppose I’m still bitter about the Elf/Dwarf romance that got thrown into The Hobbit movies. I don’t know what it’s supposed to add to the series besides being dramatic because it’s forbidden, but it seems as if there would be enough excitement without it.

The adaptation will compress the timeline of the material.

In the novels, the aforementioned things take place over thousands of years, but Payne and McKay have compressed events into a single point in time. It is their biggest deviation from the text, and they know it’s a big swing. “We talked with the Tolkien estate,” says Payne. “If you are true to the exact letter of the law, you are going to be telling a story in which your human characters are dying off every season because you’re jumping 200 years in time, and then you’re not meeting really big, important canon characters until season four. Look, there might be some fans who want us to do a documentary of Middle-earth, but we’re going to tell one story that unites all these things.”

Vanity Fair

I’m fine with this. It seems like a reasonable change to make when moving from page to screen. I can see the argument it would be choppy to introduce times and characters and then immediately jump to a different time with different characters, also making it hard for viewers to connect to the plot or the material. I’ve seen fans propose alternate solutions, and maybe compressing the timeline isn’t the only way an adaptation could be done, but I don’t think it’s inherently a bad choice.

We Have Photos and First Looks!

Be sure to click through to the Vanity Fair article to see the photos. Galadriel seems to be highlighted, perhaps because people who have seen the LotR movies but not read any other Tolkien material will already know who she is.

Some aspects of the photos honestly look a bit modern to me, like Galadriel’s hair. However, I am not enough of a Tolkien expert to have an opinion on things like the symbols on costumes or in the backgrounds of photos, and I would caution others to be wary of people who do have strong opinions.

For instance, I’ve seen dozens of people on Twitter complain that the star on Galadriel’s armor is “wrong” or “inaccurate,” yet I’ve also seen about 10 different interpretations of what the star even is. Clearly, some of the people saying, “Oh, it means X and therefore it’s wrong,” are not correct that it’s even X in the first place, so take interpretations with a grain of salt.

And, no, I don’t expect the armor, dresses, etc. to look like the costumes in Peter Jackson’s movies. Besides the fact the creators can’t just copy someone else’s costume designs, there’s the small matter that this series takes place thousands of years before LotR, so fashion will be different.

What are some of your thoughts?