As many Lord of the Rings nerds already know, Season 2 of The Rings of Power has recently concluded. With its over 1-billion-dollar price tag – and the inclusion of Tom Bombadil, even! – one would expect a lot of hubbub. And there is! It spans everything from intense annoyance to absolute adoration.
We wanted the opinion of a Tolkien scholar and nerd, which we are delighted to share. In this interview with Laura, you’ll hear a mix of opinions about:
- How the show accurately represented Tolkien and his worldview – or didn’t
- Which of Tolkien’s themes were blatantly omitted (nerds, gasp!)
- Whether it held true to the storyline of The Silmarillion and where it deviated
- How the nature of good and evil – and heroism – were portrayed
- The role of art (both aesthetics and how being an art creator – or as Tolkien would have specified, a sub-creator – was important to him)
Among other things.
Our reviewer’s bio:
Laura Van Dyke, Ph.D., teaches in the Department of English and Creative Writing and in the Foundations program at Trinity Western University in Langley, B.C. Her doctoral work focused on twentieth-century and contemporary British literature, with a focus on what alchemical metaphysics has to offer literary representations of materiality. She is a co-editor of The Inklings and Culture (2020), the first essay collection to treat all seven Inklings-related authors, and is an executive advisor of the Inklings Institute of Canada, housed at Trinity Western University, which hosts regular evening lectures and discussions about the life and writings of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, Owen Barfield, George MacDonald, G.K. Chesterton and Dorothy L. Sayers.
Names mentioned in this conversation:
J.R.R. Tolkien, George Orwell, Christopher Tolkien, René Girard, Wendell Berry, Aristotle.
Books:
1984 (George Orwell)
Animal Farm (Geroge Orwell)
Poetics (Aristotle)
Works of Tolkien’s:
The Lord of the Rings (LOTR)
The Hobbit
The Silmarillion
Akallabêth (a section of The Silmarillion)
Collected Letters. Edited by Humphrey Carpenter
“On Fairy-stories” (essay)
“Smith of Wootton Major” (short story)
Movies & Televsion:
The Lord of the Rings trilogy (directed by Peter Jackson)
The Hobbit trilogy (directed by Peter Jackson)
The Rings of Power (Amazon series)
The Witcher (Netflix series)
The Wheel of Time (Amazon series)
House of the Dragon (HBO series)
Transcript
Radix: Do you think that the spirit of Tolkien comes through in The Rings of Power?
Laura Van Dyke: Good question. Yes, I think we can assume it does! There’s a lot to like about this adaptation of Tolkien’s Second Age. As has been well-publicized by now, Amazon has the rights to the Appendices that follow The Return of the King, and when the showrunners J. D. Payne and Patrick McKay want to use a character or a place name or something from the broader legendarium, they can ask and receive permission from the Tolkien Estate, which they’ve clearly done a few times at least.
Canadian artist John Howe did a lot of concept work for The Rings of Power (together with Alan Lee, he had done the same for the Jackson trilogy) so there’s a continuity here with the Jackson films. Set designs and costuming, for instance, will feel similar for audiences. Some of the set designs, like for Númenor, Khazad-dûm, Lindon, and Eregion, were really beautiful, and we hadn’t seen those on screen before. Much of the music was composed by Bear McCreary, and it’s excellent.
Where it was weak was in the writing, which is often generic and flat, unfortunately. While I watched the two seasons with interest, and then re-watched them both again, I can’t recall ever feeling strong emotions: I never got pulled in enough to really care about any of these characters. I think it’s a problem thematically (or maybe ethically?) that the two characters who I cared most about, in the sense I was intrigued the most by and enjoyed watching, were villains—Sauron and Adar.
The dialogue is often overly expository, and characters are very serious as they ponderously speechify (often with music crescendoing in the background). Tolkien’s stories are serious too, but drenched in pathos and rich feeling: they’re anchored in old lore, in songs and poems sung around fires under the stars, and there’s a deep pleasure in the music of language—he created this whole world because of his love for the languages he housed in it. Missing in the show is the pleasure and enjoyment of being in a rich world like this: where is the fun? The characters move from crisis to crisis, and there’s so little laughter or joy. So even though I’m happy to have more high fantasy on screen, there are similar problems with the screenwriting for this show, as with recent high-profile fantasy adaptations, and that’s been borne out by the reactions of the various fandoms to these adaptations (including The Witcher, The Wheel of Time, and House of the Dragon most recently).
Tolkien’s writing often emphasizes good food and drink and good pipeweed and friendship, but we don’t get a lot of that coming through here. Characters rarely seem to take a breather; things happen at a frantic pace, unless we’re watching a Harfoot and then we don’t seem to see them doing anything at all. But the books are characterized in the minds of many readers as a slow journey: lots and lots of passages describing the landscape, or unique features of flora and fauna as characters experience Middle-earth. The show presents a fairly homogeneous landscape (though to be fair Rhûn was neat), and there’s little interaction with the setting. Place is never established as very important, and the distances between locations are laughably erased in the show, leading to internet memes of characters seemingly teleporting around Middle-earth, which also makes the world feel very small.
I think the weakest sections, in terms of JRRT’s spirit coming through, though, were the Númenór scenes. Tolkien tells the story of the downfall of Númenór in the Akallabêth (a fairly short section of The Silmarillion), which is such a fascinating and heart-wrenching tale. In the source material this is narrated by Elendil, who the show of course makes a major character, and while the script he had to work with was thin, the casting here was very good, and Elendil was portrayed with a lot of gravitas (Elendil is Tolkien’s “Noachian” figure, as he calls him). In the books, we hear about how at the end of the First Age, a small percentage of men called the Edain were loyal to the Elves and joined their fight against Morgoth, the original Big Bad (Sauron’s master). To reward them for their loyalty, they were gifted a new land, their own island kingdom in the middle of the sea, between Middle-earth and the land of Aman, where the Valar lived.
This is Tolkien’s Atlantis myth, which was very personal for him, and very central to the legendarium. When Númenór sinks, this is how the earth goes from flat to round, for instance. The remnant who escape include Elendil and his sons, Isildur and Anárion, who become the first kings of Gondor—Aragorn is their descendant.
The Valar set one prohibition on the Númenóreans: they were forbidden to sail West to Valinor, which was called the Ban. Over time, as the Second Age continued (the Age that the show is set in), some of the Númenóreans began to speak out against the Ban; they envied the Elves’ immortality, mostly. This is a huge part of Tolkien’s mythos that the show doesn’t seem like they’re going to engage with (or at least they haven’t so far—I remain hopeful!)
In Tolkien’s legendarium, mortality is a gift: it’s the Gift of Ilúvatar, or God, to men. It means that unlike the Elves, who are tied forever to the world, human beings get to leave the circles of the world when they die and experience an afterlife. Númenóreans get to die of free will, by choosing to leave Arda, when they feel it is time to do so—this is part of the Gift, to lay down their life when they choose, and depart Middle-earth.
Tolkien’s letters make clear that this was among the central themes he was trying to explore in his fiction (i.e. Letters 189). It’s a theme, though, that’s so alien to modern sensibilities: perhaps the show writers didn’t feel that their audience would be able to understand why defying the Ban was a sin. Perhaps they sensed that a show about revolting against a divine order would be unlikely to land with today’s audiences; I wonder if anyone involved in the show, from writers to producers to even the audience, thinks that pushing against divinely ordained limits is bad. More likely they’d think it’s heroic.
Tolkien is so alike someone like Wendell Berry here. He too believes in creaturely limits that we transgress to our peril. In The Silmarillion we read that Sauron’s “lust and pride increased, until he knew no bounds” (346); the word choice of “bounds” is very significant to Tolkien and recurs throughout his writing. What are the bounds, or boundaries, or limits for a creature? We hear an echo of this in The Fellowship of the Ring when we learn that the dwarves “delved too deep”…
Radix: Do you think that the watchers of our time are able to get what Tolkien was originally getting at? … Another question: what was Tolkien getting at?
LVD: In addition to his thematic concern with death/mortality, another theme the legendarium is oriented around is art—the creation or making of things, whether as a skilled craftsman or as an artist. Tolkien was preoccupied for most of his life with the status of art and the role of the artist. He gives a very well-developed articulation of his aesthetic theory in his essay “On Fairy-stories,” but it is also embedded into his fiction and referred to in many of his letters. So his stories of the Second Age, i.e. the content of The Silmarillion, primarily concern elvish making: we “make” as subcreators, Tolkien thought, not as creators. In other words, we make under, and in obedience to, a creator. When subcreators want to be the lord and god of their own private creations and push their creaturely limits, this to Tolkien is the kind of rebellion Satan did, and that both Melkor and Sauron do. Human characters do it all the time on a smaller scale in LOTR, because they so often want power over their lives: and in this, they’re susceptible to use either Magic or Machine to gain this power (both are essentially the same for Tolkien). Elves are often (though not always) examples of using art in a theologically affirmative way: their “magic” or art is directed towards subcreating the earth, vs. having power over it and putting it under their dominion. I would say the show doesn’t touch on this aspect of Elvish culture. Tolkien’s critique of the elves is that instead of continuing to subcreate, they are often tempted, as time goes on, to simply embalm. So they don’t make new art, they just indulge in the memory of past creation, like antiquarians.
Where the show is getting closer to Tolkien’s vision is in the portrayal of Sauron, at least in season two, and its emphasis on his desire to dominate. We see Sauron as a maker: when he’s at the forge, in Eregion, what we’re watching is him choosing not to be a subcreator, but to instead seek domination so that he can re-form creation on his terms. Tolkien says that this kind of evil can come from a good root—the desire to benefit the world, and help others—but the problem is that when our technologies come into play, we often want to rebel against the natural laws of the created order, which require patience and a kind of submission to organic processes, and use those technologies to circumvent the process. So Sauron initially wants to help bring order and beauty to Middle-earth, and those aren’t wrong desires, but he goes wrong when he decides to just bulldoze over other beings and coerce their wills so that he gets his way.
Tolkien’s anthropology is of course profoundly Catholic, so the human being has a dignity, or a kind of nobility, and Sauron’s evil is that he does not value human freedom. He uses his rings to control and override human freedom, to have dominion over the wills of others—and not only human but also elf, dwarf, and even orc.
Radix: As someone who knows The Silmarillion, do you think the writers are doing Tolkien a service or a disservice?
LVD: Hmm, I’m of two minds here. Tolkien worked for so long on the text that became The Silmarillion, which was still unfinished when he died, but his son Christopher finished and eventually published it. And I’m glad he did, but towards the end, Tolkien seemed to vacillate sometimes on whether he even wanted to show the world these stories: he knew that part of the attraction of LOTR was the “glimpses of a large history in the background” that we get, “like viewing far off an unvisited island, or seeing the towers of a distant city gleaming in a sunlit mist,” but that to go there is to “destroy the magic” (Letters 333).
It’s also that, he said, the stories of the Second Age are all grim and tragic: it’s a long account of the disasters that destroyed the beauty of the Ancient World. So staying true to the original text would require the Amazon series to portray the grim, tragic world of this ancient myth, but who would watch that? So they go and slip in love triangles, and peppy proto-hobbits, and little victories, and the more they try to lighten things up, the farther they go from Tolkien’s source myth.
Tolkien readers and critics often quote from this now-famous letter Tolkien wrote to Milton Waldman, a publisher at Collins, in the early 1950s—this is the letter where he says he dreamed of creating a myth for England, and while he would draw some of the great schemes in fullness, others he would just sketch; all though would be part of a unified whole, “and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama” (145). So this does sound like Tolkien kept the door open, even invited, other sub-creators to participate in the making of his myth.
Does Tolkien, or does his estate, “own” Middle-earth anymore? I know copyright laws say yes, but this is a question way bigger than just Tolkien. I’m inclined to think that once an artist puts a work out into the world, they relinquish possession of it, and we or the audience can freely play with it: we can make D&D characters, or write fan fiction, and maybe the best way to think about the Amazon series is as fan fiction. So are they doing Tolkien a disservice? I don’t know if that’s the level I’d evaluate it on. I’d rather evaluate it as art: is it good art or bad art?
Radix: What aspects of modernity—specifically of the 2000s and up—have been snuck into the show?
LVD: When the show was first announced, they made it quite clear they wanted more gender parity, and I was positive about changes in this respect because this is obviously a very male-centered story. One of the best changes the Jackson films made was to amplify the role of Arwen in the narrative, which nearly everyone now sees as a good change.
So their decision in The Rings of Power to make Galadriel the protagonist was surprising, but I was intrigued. It’s strange though: book Galadriel is over six feet tall, and super majestic and speaks with a deep voice (“deeper than women’s wont”) so it’s not that she’s not imposing, but she’s certainly not running around Middle-earth with a sword and killing nine orcs at once as she cartwheels. She’s also over 7,000 years old by the time we get to the era where the show is set, and she’s both Gil-galad’s superior and Elrond’s mother-in-law; the show, inexplicably, chose to over-emphasize her combat skills but under-emphasize her other qualities, like her wisdom and perceptiveness. I feel that a more feminist representation of Galadriel would show her as a leader, as someone who commands the respect of male elves because of who she is, not because of how efficiently she can kill.
Most noticeable though is probably the show’s total lack of interest in engaging with our human addiction to technological power, and perhaps this is the blindness of the twenty-first century. The whole Eregion plotline failed to convey Tolkien’s “warning”—what he called “an ‘allegory’ if you like of a love of machinery, and technical devices” (Letters 190): there was a particular branch of elves (the Noldor, of whom Galadriel was one) who were “always on the side of ‘science and technology’ as we should call it: they wanted to have the knowledge that Sauron genuinely had, and those of Eregion refused the warnings of Gil-galad and Elrond” (190). He compares this to those Catholics in his time who were engaged in scientific research that produced bombs, poisonous gases, and explosives: things not necessarily evil, but “pretty certain to serve evil ends.”
Do we get any sense that the show is picking up on this allegory in the Eregion plot? Nah, they don’t even try: instead, we’re distracted with “mithril” becoming a magical substance, somehow, and Celebrimbor and his Gwaith-i-Mirdain in Ost-in-Edhil are simple victims of Sauron’s deception. We don’t have the ethical weight of their complicity in his love of techne; in the source text, they are able to succumb to his temptation because they already have a predisposition towards The Machine. It’s way more complex.
And then there’s the treatment of death: this is connected to the main concern of the mythos, which is with death/mortality and how we respond to the reality of our death as human beings. Tolkien calls this the great mystery and says over and over that he returns to the question of what it means to love the world when we’re going to leave it, and whether or not death is a doom or a gift, or whether we’re wrong to desire deathlessness the way we so often do. My sense is that the Amazon series is uninterested in exploring this question that so gripped Tolkien. For the writers, death is obviously bad—the worst! So this entire level of the original text is absent.
But lacking thematic substance makes the whole series feel trite: like, what’s the point of this story? They don’t want to engage with Tolkien’s themes, so they add new themes of their own, but then they feel plugged in with very little thought. It’s a shame, because even when Tolkien’s themes sit uneasily in our culture, their distinctiveness in a context in which we’re inundated with generic fantasy that often feels like it’s recycling the same tired tropes is precisely what makes Tolkien’s stories still feel fresh and worth returning to over and over and wrestling with.
Radix: Is the nature of evil properly demonstrated, in your opinion?
LVD: The show’s greatest strength in season two was its depiction of Sauron. Charlie Vickers was excellent, and his slow and sneaky manipulation of Celebrimbor was a joy to watch. I think the show absolutely captured how good Sauron was at deception, to the point where in the books he is able to deceive even very noble and good elves.
Saruman is similar in this sense to Sauron: through both “villains,” Tolkien gets at how evil manifests sometimes as wisdom, and strength, and beauty. Evil is tricky, and not always easy to recognize and identify as evil. Both figures, for instance, manipulate through their facility with language—this wariness about the potential for both good and evil inherent in language is something Tolkien shared with George Orwell, writing during the same time.
Radix: And with good?
LVD: I’m going to say no, the show found it easier to portray evil than it did good. But this is not surprising; goodness is way more difficult to capture, in any medium. The showrunners clearly wanted the Harfoots to represent the kind of rustic simple goodness that the Hobbit characters embodied so well in the Peter Jackson films. The Harfoot storyline, though, was among the weakest—there is very little that is compelling in watching them. (I should say, though, that they’re better at dwarves than Jackson was! The Khazad-dûm scenes really brought dwarven culture to life, and gave it more weight and dignity than The Hobbit films did, certainly).
LOTR is what Tolkien called “hobbit-centric, that is, primarily a study of the ennoblement (or sanctification) of the humble” (Letters 237, #181), so Bilbo and then Frodo are the primary P.O.V. characters there. But The Silmarillion is elf-centric: it’s meant to be myth, and we as the readers are meant to feel a distance from the characters. It’s the Second Age, vs. the Third Age—the Age that transitions Middle-earth into the age of men.
So the show tries to write a story of the Second Age, but the values here are different, and we’re seeing it from a different perspective, and that doesn’t translate well cinematically. When TV wants to show a good character now, or get audiences to like a character, they make them an underdog: so characters like Isildur are cast as having what René Girard called “victim power” so that the audience aligns with them. But that to me is different than being “good.”
Radix: Does the show do a good job in demonstrating what heroism looks like? Or the opposite?
LVD: Again, if we take Galadriel as the protagonist or hero of this story, it’s a problem for me in terms of her characterization because I can’t help but ask, what does she do when she’s not doing the plot? What does she like to eat, what makes her and Elrond friends, what is her personality? Within five minutes of screen time the Peter Jackson films managed to make us understand exactly who Pippin is and why he was such a fool of a Took. But after two seasons of The Rings of Power I still don’t know who show Galadriel is. She is so one-dimensional: warrior/commander is her whole identity.
In this show, Galadriel is given the same name as the Galadriel of the books, but they turned one of the most powerful and dignified elves in Middle-earth into an angsty, vengeful warrior elf who submits to being talked down to by men; such a shame, because here she could have been a female lead in what’s often a male-driven story, like we were saying. In the book’s lore, she is thousands of years older than Gil-galad, and would not have been subordinate to him. She’s also married to Celeborn by the events of the show and has a daughter named Celebrían (who marries Elrond, so she’s his mother-in-law).
I think it’s fair to expect the other “hero” to be Gandalf, who is called in the second book of The Silmarillion, the Valequenta, the wisest of all the Maiar. But in the show, he has a concussion and doesn’t even know who he is? And he can’t control his “magic”? In terms of the timeline in Tolkien’s books, Gandalf isn’t even in Middle-earth during the Second Age. He arrives in the Third Age, and Círdan immediately recognizes his purpose and gives him the ring of fire, Narya. There’s no indication he is a concussed, mute former meteor.
To go back to the Harfoots, we do get some moments of very Tolkien-esque heroism where Nori and Poppy prioritize loyalty and friendship. Tolkien often wrote that heroism is meaningless if, in the background, we don’t have simple ordinary life at stake. But in the show, we haven’t seen anyone’s ordinary life apart from the Harfoots who are, it must be said, very dull; I suppose we see Theo’s ordinary life with Bronwyn briefly in season one, but he’s the worst though, so the stakes feel so low.
Tolkien once described “ordinary life” as “breathing, eating, working, begetting” and this is what he thought needed to be present in a good story in order for the stakes to feel meaningful. (The breathing makes me laugh. Yes, we see characters breathing! I suppose he meant just being). Like in the film version of The Fellowship of the Ring, the first establishing shot of Frodo has him sitting in the woods, reading. He’s surrounded by green and peace, and it’s a great way to introduce him to audiences because in just a few seconds we learn so much about who he is and what he values.
When we’re introduced to Galadriel in The Rings of Power, we find out that she’s motivated by getting revenge on Sauron for her brother’s death. The show changed this from the books too: in the books, her character arc is about overcoming her ambition for power. The show swapped this for her “sin” being her desire for vengeance (fun fact: they also changed Finrod’s death: in the books, he is imprisoned by Sauron in his tower Tol-in-Gaurhoth and dies a hero’s death, sacrificing himself to save Beren by jumping in front of the werewolf that’s about to kill Beren and killing it with his teeth and hands. Yes, werewolf. Yes, teeth and hands. Imagine leaving this out!!). Elves are immortal, so after Finrod dies and goes to the Hall of Mandos, he is re-embodied and keeps living in Valinor with his family there. So if Galadriel really missed him, she could just go back to Valinor instead of… jumping off the ship.
If we’re talking, though, about what heroism is for Tolkien it’s worth thinking about why he called Sam the “chief hero” of LOTR. This gives us a good clue—Sam’s heroism comes from his love and devotion to Frodo, to whom he’s unfailingly loyal. Heroism comes from virtues manifesting in the lives and choices characters make: so Tolkien is pro mercy/pity and anti vengeance; pro humility and anti pride; pro courage and anti cowardice; pro loyalty to lord, kin and friend, and anti the kind of dishonor that allows characters to break oaths.
Radix: Sometimes ugliness can be a very useful tool. Is ugliness used effectively in this show?
LVD: Interesting question. This makes me think of Adar and his disfigured face, which we see restored in one particularly powerful moment at the end of season two, just before he dies. Adar was a really well-done character: actually, he was so intriguing to watch that I wished the show had invented more new characters like him, instead of shoehorning characters like Gandalf and Galadriel into the series. It seemed clear that with the characters the writers wrote just for the show, like Adar, they were way more free to be genuinely creative.
Radix: The kings don’t end up looking especially good as things progress in the series. I wonder if the writers are knowingly—or unknowingly?—trying to make anything authoritative or aristocratic look less attractive?
LVD: Do you mean Gil-galad, Durin the older, and Ar-Pharazôn? If so, yes, I agree that the kings of elves, dwarves, and men range from ineffective to weak and corrupt, and this likely reflects contemporary sentiments about monarchy (and maybe about men in authority, in particular—Miriel is portrayed as a noble monarch). In the first episode of season one, we hear Elrond being called a “politician” and we learn that he writes Gil-galad’s speeches: Gil-galad looks like a puppet king, and a bit like a fool as he recites the words Elrond wrote for him. (Gil-galad, the great high king of all the elves!)
The writers took many of the most impressive and noble figures in Tolkien’s legendarium and downgraded them to ineffective, slightly foolish politicians and bureaucrats. Ar-Pharazôn in the legendarium is a great ruler: his fall is so tragic because he really was a king of such high stature. Even Elendil is re-envisioned as a random naval captain Queen Miriel hasn’t even heard of when she meets him in season one. Isildur seems doomed to ineptitude at everything he touches, including choosing who to fall in love with because we get another odd romantic pairing here.
In the first episode of season one, there’s a strange moment where Elrond is barred from a meeting because he’s told he’s “not an elf-lord,” so we see him looking sad and dejected over being left out. But Elrond’s ancestry means that he is one of the most renowned of all elves; his dad Eärendil is a literal star in the sky, and his great-grandparents are Beren and Lúthien. Basically, ain’t no one not inviting Elrond to any elf party.
Most painful though of these many demotions is the treatment of Gandalf, the wisest of all Maiar, now reduced to a concussed buffoon. It’s so hard to watch him stumble around Rhûn looking for his magic staff.
Why did the writers want to do this to every character? Do they not believe audiences want to watch stories that feature admirable characters?
In my field, Literary Studies, our founding text is Aristotle’s Poetics, which is a short but super profound analysis of what makes a narrative a narrative. He has this pithy statement that when we’re telling a story, because art is always an imitation of the only reality we know (a mimesis), we have a choice of really just three options: “we must represent men either as better than in real life, or as worse, or as they are.”
If we portray characters “as they are,” that’s realistic fiction: like much of what we see today on TV. People like this nowadays, which you can see when you read reviews from sites like Goodreads where the most withering critique people seem to feel they can level against a text is that the character, wait for it, is “not relatable.” Aristotle would have been very confused by this, but I guess that’s what he gets for being dead.
If we portray a character “as worse” than us, we’re usually in the genres of comedy and satire/irony; so sitcoms today, for instance, or basically anytime a late-night comedian talks. These are perennially popular stories, because we love to look down on people and laugh at them. It’s like a social glue: it really bonds us together and cements our values.
The third category though, when we represent characters as better than in real life, we’re talking about what were long considered the “higher” stories: tragedy, myth, epic, romance. Tolkien wrote in this genre. He called LOTR a fairy story, or a heroic romance, and The Silmarillion is made up of legends he collected together that resemble the mythic tales he so loved. So his stories are full of great and noble characters who have great falls: and the drama is increased when someone like Denethor falls, or Ar-Pharazôn, because the tragedy is the greater.
The show is not striking me as being in this category of storytelling: characters are starting off right from the beginning as being much more in the realm of realism, even the elves. So tonally, this is striking many enthusiasts of Tolkien as unsettling. Tolkien intentionally structured things so that the legends he tells start very mythic and then become more and more “story,” as they meet our own history and merge with it. Towards the end of his life, Tolkien truly did merge his legendarium with our own world, even to the point of writing that after Christ we entered the seventh age; he has a prophecy in-world where Eru Ilúvatar, the one God, is said to one day become a man and enter into Middle-earth. When this happens, the mythic past—the time of the elves—will truly be over, and it will be the time of man.
Radix: Considering our culture’s tendency to individualism, do you think that this show reflected Tolkien’s ideas on the importance of community? Or the opposite?
LVD: I think the show tried very hard to portray what they intended to be genuine friendships. And to their credit, I did believe that Elrond and Durin were real friends; I also believed Gandalf and Nori developed a bond, and I think Adar loved his orc children. (I did not believe Galadriel and Elrond had a deep and enduring bond, or that Arondir and Bronwen had an epic love story, but ah well).
Tolkien’s work makes clear he was very invested in the importance of community. I think this was personal to him: he was an orphan by the time he was twelve years old and was then raised in a very unconventional family setting. Today the concepts of “found family,” “chosen family,” and “Friendsgiving” are becoming common phrases, but we also live in a time that still privileges heteronormative life scripts. And it’s in this context that it’s so interesting to me that LOTR is the story of two bachelors who relate to each other as uncle-nephew (they are actually second cousins); Bilbo and Frodo are both unmarried, childfree, and live together in relational and domestic intimacy.
In Rohan, Théoden is uncle to Éomer and Éowyn, who he raises as his own children; with Éowyn especially, Tolkien writes touching scenes that show the depth of their bond. Epic literature is so often concerned with fathers and sons, but Tolkien tends to adapt this to the relationship between uncles and nephews (also in the delightful Smith of Wootton Major, it’s an uncle and nephew, and in The Hobbit, Fíli and Kíli are Thorin’s nephews, not his sons).
Really, we read very little in Middle-earth about domestic family life as post-war Western cultures might envision it. Does Gimli ever think about his mother (and does she have a beard)? Does Legolas ever think about his sister? Sam has five siblings (and later 13 children!) but Tolkien never seems very interested in writing about them or his family life, even though Sam’s daughter Elanor is quite important to the story since she’s the recipient of the Red Book (begun by Bilbo, and containing the stories of The Hobbit and what Frodo and Sam wrote down that became The Lord of the Rings).
But he is interested, consistently, in friendship, and in fellowship. This is true in his fiction and in his personal life; I get the sense that often today Tolkien is seen as a curmudgeonly introvert who holed up every day with his pen and his paper and his maps, but my sense of his everyday life from his own writing is that he was super busy outside his home, often with social things. He was a consistent participant in committees and clubs and reading groups, some of which he was the spear-header for. Community, especially intellectual and spiritual community, was very important in his own life. We see this so powerfully in LOTR, that the “good” side values friendship and loyalty and cheer, and works as a team, and the “bad” side works as individuals, beneath various forms of tyranny that prevent true fellowship from forming.