The Rings of Power
“I have passed through fire and deep water, since we parted. I have forgotten much that I thought I knew, and learned again much that I had forgotten.”
Sometimes I think about the cast of The Lord of the Rings up on the stage at the 2004 Oscars, grinning from ear to ear. Return of the King had just won best picture, along with 10 other awards (the three movies together won 17). I was, shall we say, emotional. There is a conversation to be had about what kind of honor a major awards show can actually confer on a work of literature. Deserving works of art are snubbed year after year. But in 2004 I was 13 and I was in love with Lord of the Rings and seeing it recognized at the Oscars was an unalloyed pleasure. I distinctly remember how surprised I was that something I loved that much should receive love and appreciation from the Establishment too. It wasn’t that it was fantasy; Spielberg had long since found a way to engage legions of fans in that genre. It was that it was so un-cynical, so earnest, so Christian.
2004 was a weird time in America. We were still close to the events of 9/11. We were in the early days of the Iraq invasion; Bush had made his ill-judged “Mission Accomplished” speech a year earlier while boasting a 73% approval rating. We were just starting to get the kind of foul-mouthed bloody television that would culminate in HBO’s Game of Thrones in 2011 (The Sopranos premiered in 1999, for instance), but most popular TV was tame by today’s standards. In 2004, CSI and Desperate Housewives led the Nielsen ratings for scripted dramas; Lost was the only show in the top 30 that featured any kind of supernatural content at all. But the movies told a different story. Of the top five movies at the box office in 2003, three of them were fantasies and one was Finding Nemo, which features talking fish so I’d probably count it too. Return of the King was third, raking in $250 million from its December 17th launch to the end of the year. In 2004, it added another $128 million. The lifetime box office gross to date of all three movies is nearly $900 million, putting the trilogy in competition with films like The Avengers and The Dark Knight. The trilogy was, by any measure, a critical, financial, and popular triumph.
On the one hand, this shouldn’t be astonishing. The trilogy is filled with incredible actors, it’s visually stunning, and it features killer fight scenes, stirring speeches, and comedic relief. But it is also a set of three 4+ hour movies (in the extended editions, which are the only ones for true fans) about Christian ethics and men in long velvet robes that spends at least 1/3 of its run time following large groups of people traveling on foot from one place to another. The movies are slow, preachy, and incredibly earnest. It is hard to believe that the same public that so eagerly embraced Lord of the Rings would also embrace Game of Thrones eight years later. I can’t imagine two shows who share so much storytelling DNA being less alike at heart. Thrones is brutal, cynical, and mean, preferring to have characters act out their worst impulses just to shock the audience rather than make more consistent but less fiery choices. Yet Thrones has experienced critical, financial, and popular triumph as well (even if no one is defending the way it ended). It has often felt to me like the shift in big-budget fantasy from earnest to nihilist is a mirror of some greater societal shift towards cynicism.
George R.R. Martin saw Thrones as throwing a cold bucket of water in the face of fantasy. When he published his first Game of Thrones novel, in 1996, it had been over 40 years since Lord of the Rings had been published. In those 40 years, Tolkien’s legacy had dominated fantasy writing. He had simply done it better and done it bigger than anyone before or since. He invented incredibly detailed worlds, with their own multi-volume histories (the new series, The Rings of Power, is entirely plotted out from just the appendices to The Lord of the Rings). He created the grammar and vocabulary for at least 15 languages and dialects, including detailed information on how those languages had evolved over three historical periods, each totaling several thousand years. When Martin sat down to write, he knew he was trying to add to a genre that was dominated by Tolkien devotees who often expressed their admiration through extreme imitation. In an interview after his own books were published he said,
I admire Tolkien greatly. His books had enormous influence on me. And the trope that he sort of established—the idea of the Dark Lord and his Evil Minions—in the hands of lesser writers over the years and decades has not served the genre well. It has been beaten to death. The battle of good and evil is a great subject for any book and certainly for a fantasy book, but I think ultimately the battle between good and evil is weighed within the individual human heart and not necessarily between an army of people dressed in white and an army of people dressed in black. When I look at the world, I see that most real living breathing human beings are grey.
I happen to think that while identifying a real problem with Tolkien’s imitators, this is a fundamental misreading of Tolkien himself. If I were reviewing Lord of the Rings, perhaps I would be justified in spending one thousand words explaining how Tolkien is nothing but shades of grey, but given I’ve spent a thousand already without even touching on the series I’m meant to be reviewing, let me just say that it doesn’t surprise me that the creator of Game of Thrones would simplify Tolkien to an army of white hats clashing swords with an army of black hats. His misunderstanding of the importance (or simply presence) of moral precepts is part of why Game of Thrones ended as a failed story.
No reviewer can ignore the deliberate juxtaposition of The Rings of Power with House of the Dragon. The commercial success of Thrones is why both of them exist. The commercial success of Lord of the Rings is why all of them exist. It is nonetheless jarring and strange to see them compete with each other for viewers. I say compete because I cannot imagine being a viewer of both. They are so similar in concept and so different in tone that it is hard to believe someone could tune in for incestual orgies, graphic depictions of childbirth, and morally bankrupt villains so one note I feel compelled to ask Martin to take the writing advice he so generously bestowed on Tolkien, then switch over to Rings of Power for the next hour. I understand the commercial incentives for placing these shows in competition; every streaming service wants its own player in the big high fantasy game. In the years since Thrones proved it could transfix vast audiences and deliver consistent subscribers, Netflix has released The Witcher and Shadow and Bone, Starz has released Outlander, HBO has released His Dark Materials, and Amazon has released The Wheel of Time. All of these shows are meant to be long-running fantasy tentpoles that keep viewers subscribed by iterating their universes into prequels, sequels, and spin-offs. HBO has been yearning for a do-over since the end of Thrones left even the strongest fans feeling betrayed and Amazon has been developing their return to Middle Earth since they bought the rights to the aforementioned appendices in 2017 for $250 million. In the best possible scenario, there is a large crossover in audiences. Everyone gets good viewing numbers, fantasy as a genre continue to thrive, more projects are greenlit, and everyone goes home fat and happy. Yet I cannot help but feel that the juxtaposition of these two series was always going to do one or both no favors. In my worst imaginings, I saw House of the Dragon looking like the cool, grown-up version of fantasy it so desperately wants to be seen as while Rings of Power looked like the kiddie version, all sweet-cheeked halflings eating blackberries and pointy-eared elves floating around in front of a Thomas Kincaid-esque background. Instead, 15 minutes into the first episode of Rings of Power, I realized that the series was going to take me back to that feeling I had when I was 13. What a gift to be allowed back into this world.
I’ve said virtually nothing about the content of Rings of Power, making this perhaps my first-ever spoiler free review. It has felt so necessary to explain where this all comes from, but I want to spend at least a moment speaking to the series itself. It’s phenomenal. It’s visually stunning, so much so that I actually feel all $500 million was well-spent on this first season; the showrunners opted for visuals and music consistent with the original trilogy and that has been executed so well it feels like exactly the same universe. The acting is top quality. The writing is improbably good; Patrick McKay and JD Payne wrote the pilot and are credited as the showrunners despite somehow having basically no credits to their name (??). Future episodes have more established names writing and directing, but to place a billion dollar show on the shoulders of two people basically no one has ever heard of and then have that work spectacularly is some kind of miracle. There appear to be about twenty characters to follow, yet each is given time and space to develop individual characteristics, motivations, and desires. Finally, the series is as earnest and as un-cynical as the original trilogy. It is as concerned with Christian ethics and as morally complicated as it ever was. I have missed that in the era of Thrones; I can’t imagine a more necessary time for it.
Lord of the Rings was Tolkien’s response to the human evil of the two Great Wars. Game of Thrones was Martin’s response to the lack of moral complexity he saw in Lord of the Rings. But to Tolkien and his contemporaries, calling something or someone evil did not indicate a lack of moral complexity. In his preface to the second edition of Lord of the Rings he said,
One has indeed personally to come under the shadow of war to feel fully its oppression; but as the years go by it seems now often forgotten that to be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years. By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead.
In 1945, when the budding moral philosopher Phillippa Foot saw the newsreels of the concentration camps Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald, she realized she had to say something concrete about morality. Academic philosophy of the time contended that moral judgements had no objective reality to them, merely expressing the approval or disapproval of the speaker. She later said that after seeing those images she knew,
This is not just a personal decision…or an expression of disapproval. There is something objective here.
After eight seasons of a show that consistently mistook moral ambiguity for moral complexity, I think perhaps it will do us good to have literature again that can look at evil and say, there is something objective here.