The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, episode 1: ""A Shadow of the Past" (Amazon Studios, HarperCollins Publishers, New Line Cinema, Tolkien Enterprises,Warner. Bros. Television, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at about 9:40 p.m. my husband Charles suggested we watch the first episode of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power on Amazon Prime (which we had to watch on the computer because our 10-year-old TV isn’;t current enough to receive Amazon Prime). It’s actually set several millennia before The Lord of the Rings, and is based less on anything J. R. R. Tolkien actually wrote for publication and more on the so-called “appendices” he wrote to The Lord of the Rings to help him keep track of his elaborately constructed backstory. Some of these notes were later turned into a more or less publishable novel, The Silmarillion, edited after Tokien’s death by his son Chrisopher, which Charles said he tried to read and found impenetrable. (That was my feeling about The Lord of the Rings, too, and I loved the comment of a critic for the BBC Music Magazine who asked how, in a world in which Wagner’s Ring exists, anyone could take Tolkien’s seriously.) So my hope that Charles could serve as my “Tolkien whisperer” the way he had when we watched the Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit movies were pretty quickly dashed. What emerged with any clarity from this first episode, “A Shadow of the Past,” is that the central character is a young woman warrior elf named Galadriel (Amelie Child Villiers as a child, Mortydd Clark as an adult) who’s grown up with her brother in the aftermath of a great war which rendered the land they grew up in uninhabitable. Elf-king Elrond (Robert Aramayo) insists that the danger is over and the dreaded enemy leader is dead, but Galadriel is convinced that his evil minions, the Orcs (ya remember the Orcs? The ones who in The Lord of the Rings reminded me of John Ford’s Indians, charging straight ahead without any sort of cover and thereby neutralizing their numerical advantage?), have regrouped and are now being led by the Evil One’s son, Sauron.

Of course Galadriel leads a small band of elves into the frozen North, where she’s convinced Sauron and the Orcs are using as a base of operations in an attempt to once again conquer elfdom. Like a lot of other fantasy writers, Tolkien was fond of making up gibberish names for all the races and places in his stories, and for a non-cognoscentus like me it’s very difficult to keep track of who’s who, what side they’re on and where they’re located, but one thing I got was taht there is a race of huimans to the south to which Galadriel appeals for help. The humans have names like Largo and Nora Brandyfoot (Dylan Smith and Markella Kavanagh), Poppy Proudfellow (Megan Richards) and Sadoc Burrows (Lenny Harry, later Sir Lenny Harry), indicating the sort of whimsical names Tolkien would later apply to the Hobbits once he got around to creating them. Galadriel is warned that there have been only two previous attempts at an elf-human alliance, and both of them ended badly.One unexpected but (at least to me) pleasant aspect of the show is the cross-racial casting; Black peole appear in the dramatis personae wihtout any attempt to explain how they got there. Apparently this caused a lot of online controversy from people in the Tolkenverse who had obviously assumed that all the characters in The Lord of the Rings and its prequelae were white, just as I remember wh en Kevin Reynolds and Kevin Costner released their film Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves there were nasty objections to the appearance of a Black male as one of Robin Hood’s Merry Men. (In that film he was explained as being a Moor who had somehow wandered up from Spain through France and crossed the English Channel.)

As far as I’m concerned, if you’re making a fantasy you can make the people in it look any way you like. I remember h earring about the controversy when The Lord of the Rings:The Rings of Power premiered and thinking that we should have got over this nonsense 60 years ago when African-Aerican soprano Leontyne Price played a teenage Japanese girl in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly (and sang her gorgeously). Aside from that, my main interest in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power: “A Shadow of the Past” is how much the elves who want to disband tieir army because they think the war is over sounded like the British appeasers of the time Tolkien started writing the books, and Elf King Elrond in particular songs a lot like Neville Chamberlain. I know that when Tolkien was interviewed about The Lord of the Rings years later he always said he’d intended the books just as a fantasy epic and he was not writing deliberate allegories to the historical events of his time. But I don’t buy it: I don’t see how Tolkien could have written a saga about a small nation being threatened with annihilation by an enemy led by a genocidal egomaniac and and not have been affected by the real-life struggle his small nation was waging for its very survival against an enemy led by a genocidal egomaniac. Whether Tolkien was consciously writing a real-life allegory to the history of his time is unknowable (he said he wasn’t, and there’s no reason not to believe him), but at least unconsciously I suspect the allegory is still there.