JRR Tolkien Came to Write the Stories of 'The Rings of Power' | Hacker News Reader

JRR Tolkien Came to Write the Stories of 'The Rings of Power'

smithsonianmag.com

10 pointsgmays16 comments

That looks like a deliberate use of "The Rings of Power" in the title, when as far as I know Tolkien never wrote anything with that title. The article doesn't point exactly which parts are "The Rings of Power" that Tolkien wrote, yet a big part of it is about the Amazon show (of that exact title), and comparing the inspiration of the book to the inspiration of the show. So, my only conclusion is that this is deliberate misdirection to make it sound like Tolkien actually wrote the Amazon show in some way.

I think the opposite is true. It really seems like the show runners and writers at Amazon really, really dislike Tolkien. They don't like him, or his stories, so they decided to change it substantially, and anyone who is familiar with the stories (as many are, since the whole point of buying the IP is that there is an existing fanbase) can immediately feel on the first episode.

They're going to have to do a lot of coping and begging. Why is anyone surprised that if you serve steaks at a vegetarian restaurant the customers will be unhappy? Either adapt Tolkien faithfully or create your own IP.

>They don't like him, or his stories, so they decided to change it substantially

Nah. They just didn't had the rights to anything that hasn't already been adapted. So they took parts from here and there and made up their own. It is "inspired by Tolkien stories" but not "based on a Tolkien story".

They did have a license to LotR, and cite the Appendices of LotR as what it's adapted from in the show credits. It radically departs from these to the point where there's really nothing in common other than a few character names and the idea that some people made some Rings.

Tolkien did not write that much on the Second Age - of course most of the story would have to be made up! Even including all Tolkien writings, the Appendices of LotR still constitute probably the biggest source on the SA. I don't expect anyone thought they could do otherwise. But rather than filling out the outlines of a story, the writers chunked it in the trash and made their own thing with the same label. (And frankly, the writing is not very good, particularly for a billion-dollar show. It's watchable, but nobody is ever going to mistake it for a tour-de-force masterpiece. The writing is the quality you'd expect from a low-budget scifi channel show.)

I don't see anything necessarily wrong with that[1], but I am puzzled why people seem determined to defend it as "they did everything they could." They definitely did not, they made a creative decision. Probably the best thing to do for someone who likes Tolkien is to regard this as someone filming their AU fanfic and to come into it with zero expectations.

[1] The thing that is wrong with it is that Tolkien would have hated it, as he would have the movies. I do find this very depressing. But I don't think a series that Tolkien would have liked could have been made in 21st century America, so I didn't come in expecting that.

So this is just a PR piece to help save the Amazon disaster?

I think it is.

The full title is "How J.R.R. Tolkien Came to Write the Stories of ‘The Rings of Power’".

I think HN removes "How" at the beginning, I recall seeing something similar before. Can't for the life of me figure out why.

Despite what a few naysayers have stated in the comments, the Rings of Power show does NOT diverge from Tolkien’s work. Forums have been flooded with trolls who have no knowledge of Tolkiens work outside of Jackson’s film trilogy.

For a detailed breakdown of each episode, check out the Rings & Realms shows on YT: https://m.youtube.com/c/RingsandRealms/featured

I’m not going to watch a series of YouTube videos, but I strongly dislike the films and have read everything Tolkien that’s been published, repeatedly, from Letters to HoME to the Nature of Middle Earth. This is flatly untrue. The show compresses thousands of years of events into a few months at most and reorders them to boot, changes fundamental facts about the world (the absurd idea behind mithril, Elves being forced to leave by some corruption in the Second Age, for example), and places characters in places they never were and doing things they never did or that didn’t even make sense - Gil-Galad having the authority to order someone to sail west is absurd. And no, as I mentioned above, this wasn’t because of licensing, the facts published in the Appendices they did have licensed that were radically changed.

More importantly than narrative details, it’s even further from the spirit of Tolkien than the films.

I can’t understand why people make this claim. It’s just bizarre. Of course there are people with the same names and some of them get together and make some Rings (though it was partly different people, and others in different guises, and the Three came after many other Rings, and they did it for different reasons), but this doesn’t make it a faithful adaption by any means. They made a creative decision to wildly diverge from the story, but people seem more interested in denying that than talking about how good the new story is on its own merits. It has about as much to do with Tolkien as the I, Robot film did Asimov.

Why I heard about this after the movie is announced? How legitimate is that mass of papers?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com