“The Rings of Power”: Not Woke, Just Disordered
by Chris Bullivant
February 2023
There has been much coverage of the Amazon TV show The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, little of the reception positive. If the comments on Amazon Prime’s own promotional tweets are anything to go by, the six episode show that cost an estimated $1 billion to air disappoints because it is boring, watches like a soap opera, and, to many, feels “woke”. Probably the most damning and recurring feedback: that it is fan fiction.
However, the series is visually stunning, and rescuing it only requires three fixes.
NOT WOKE - A MYTHOLOGY
First, we should remember that the world J. R. R. Tolkien created in Middle Earth is a made-up one: it is fictional. Tolkien wanted to create a mythology for England, a country that didn’t have one. Instead, England had a vague past whose loose set of fairy tales didn’t, Tolkien felt, stand up to the towering strength of his beloved Norse mythology, which had been relied upon to inspire the Old English poem Beowulf.
To this end, America too lacks a deep, ancestral, commonly shared mythology that binds a collective consciousness into an ancient, primordial past.
The span of years in Tolkien’s world—and its lore, races, city states, established civilizations, and ruins—are appealing to a country that still, despite its age, feels so young. A country, found not on ancient narrative, but rather on legal principles neatly hand-written on parchment, finds itself wanting a deeper, more inclusive story.
So Rings of Power may truly be in the spirit of Tolkien: creating a mythology that aims to fill an ancestral void, providing an anchoring, a mooring for the collective imagination of a country that doesn’t have one.
Because if England—a land with Kings and Queens, Roundtable and Arthurian legend, Robin Hoods and Vikings, Roman villas and Celts, Warrior Poets painting their faces blue, pubs and Inklings—needs a mythology, how much more does a land without any of that need one? In which case, why not create a fantasy epic that is as multicultural, multi-faith, and expansive as the races and characters found in present-day America?
DISORDERED AND MUNDANE
Yet, in this, we bump into the main “fix” required to set Rings of Power back on its feet.
Tolkien’s world is informed by a rather Catholic concept of Order: a divinely orchestrated set of creatures set about a hierarchy of abilities and cultures, nested within different frames of lifespan and memory.
Tolkien created a caste system of beings who range in their mortality and skills. The various races co-exist as distinct entities: Elves, Man, Dwarves, Hobbits. They each have rich monocultures—language, dress, industries, skills, customs and habits—and live side by side, with varying shades of hostility, indifference, and cooperation, but at all times as distinct entities. Layered around these are the more celestially ordered beings such as the Maiar (Gandalf and the Balrog), and whatever else.
It is this peculiar nature of Order that gives that endless preoccupation in the Jackson films with Proper Nouns. That annoying habit where every name, monument, sword, scabbard, palantir, mountain, corridor, relic, or star beings with a “The” pronounced by characters with an impossible sense of importance: The Flame of the West, The Ringbearer, The Light of Eärendil, the Dimholt Road. Places and borders (“We have just entered the Realm of Gondor!”) are integral to this sense of Order.
Even abstract nouns take on the role of a character within the created Order: Shadow, Peril, Menace. These are distinct entities within an Order.
And perhaps above them all Fate: the idea of divinely ordered time and task—not as fatalism, but as meted out opportunity: for Frodo, for example, to bear the ring, with the choice to do it well or not.
Most evident, of course, is even the apparent self-perception of the Third Age and it coming to an end. So crisp are the definitions and borders of Order, that the participants know what Act of the play they are in.
This is all immensely satisfying to the American consumer of popular fiction, a transcendent security often missing, or perhaps hidden, behind a veneer of strip malls homogenous for a thousand leagues in any direction.
Yet Order is almost entirely absent from the Rings of Power, and it is likely this absence of order that is most triggering to viewers who think it is “woke.”
ARCHETYPES
“The domestic scenes between Princess Disa and Prince Durin feel more like a multi-racial couple acting out a commercial for antacids.”
But this lack of Order, isn’t just a failure to abide by a Catholic-informed worldview. Rings is also missing any of Joseph Campbell’s “archetypes”—that dozen or so features of a story argued to be embedded in the collective consciousness of all humanity regardless of culture or location in history. These archetypes are plentiful in the Lord of the Rings: Gandalf, Elrond, Galadriel act as the mysterious guides; Frodo is the orphan with a special call, aided by a Weapon; Samwise, Meriadoc, and Peregrin are the Faithful Companions; Shelob is the Creature of Nightmare; Gollum is the shape shifter, etc. This absence of archetypes in Rings of Power bleeds from the series being unclear about its genre, or story arc. The Hobbit is a Tale, and the Lord of the Rings is a Voyage and Return Quest. Rings of Power is what, exactly? The genre is unclear.
And it’s for this reason that the domestic scenes between Princess Disa and Prince Durin, amongst others, collapse into something that feels more like a multi-racial couple acting out a commercial for antacids. Despite flawless casting and costume, the rivalries between King and son, separate from a sense of Order or genre, feel soapy—and end up having a banal, Real House Wives of Khazad-dûm quality. Here, the pluralizing of skin tones has become the main event, underscored by a lack of purpose and banality. Which is a shame. A multicultural mythology for America should really speak to and enliven that most epic of quests, that noblest endeavour to which we can aspire and know: living together harmoniously to form a more perfect union. In Tolkien terms, racial reconciliation as a restoration of Order.
NOT WOKE
In fact, Rings of Power is really not radical or woke at all. There are no trans-species relationships. Black Queens, for all they may topple the patriarchy, are biologically female and heterosexual, or celibate. And there is a distinct lack of equity on account of the presence of so much monarchy, aristocracy, nobility, who exist side by side with paupers and village folk.
But it is in the accents that Rings is probably the laziest when it comes to failing to tackle its unconscious bias. If Divine Order is still expressed in Rings, it is as with all films or television series, through the expression of English as communicated through an accent. The tropes are tried and tested, and familiar to all.
The Elves, being at the height of the caste system, speak with an upper-class British accent: Lord Elrond straight from Oxford and set to become the next decade’s Prime Minister.
The Dwarves are hardened Glaswegians, a departure from the usual Welsh depiction, so that the Elrond-Durin partnership draws on ideas about Scottish oppression by the upper class Englishman.
Galadriel slightly departs from this, but probably because Morfydd Clark masks her Welsh accent to lean perhaps on something more Scandinavian perhaps to evoke Norse mythology or in auditioning for the next season of Vikings.
As we descend the caste system, the protoplasmic pre-Hobbits speak as Irish travellers, sweet, well-meaning, but a thin civilization based on scavenging and migration.
Meanwhile, at the bottom of the food-chain, as ever, the Orcs use a cockney, East End London accent to denote their savagery and lack of credentials.
Here we cannot see Rings deconstructing anything, nor tackling the prejudices of its audience: rather it perpetuates them. I have long thought it about time orcs asked for “maggotty bread” in a posh Lady Crawley Downton Abbey accent, while Gandalf says “a wizard arrives precisely when he means to,” speaking like Adele. That would be small progress.
“It is in the accents that Rings is probably the laziest when it comes to failing to tackle its unconscious bias.”
One observes that there is no substantial Asian, Native Indian, Pacific Islander, North African, nor Hispanic culture represented in this new Middle Earth, even with an impressive screen presence from Ismael Cruz Córdova and airtime for a number of Polynesian actors. There are no Mexican accents at court in Eregion, the artwork and architecture remains distinctly European, so that all that has occurred is the co-opting of different races or species into an idea that it is still fundamentally white and European.
If Jeff Bezos had truly wanted to challenge Eurocentric imperialism in streaming network services, if this were truly woke, he would have directed that $1 billion be spent on drawing out a mythology inspired by African legend written by truly pan-African resident writers, for example.
FANTASY OR SCIENCE FACTION?
So the big fixes are to restore Order, use archetypes, and be clear on genre. That done, the writers need to accept that in the Science versus Faith discourse that has trundled through many a century, Tolkien appears to express a suspicion of science in the Lord of the Rings.
Engineering was, after all, in the world of Saruman and Sauron alone. Men, Dwarves, and Hobbits live in a pre-industrial Iron Age of horse, cart, stone, aqueducts, steel swords, and herbs for medicine. Elves, immortal, possessing of powers more spiritual than natural. It’s Saruman who cuts down trees, enters an early-industrial revolution, who builds “dark satanic mills” at Isengard, uses gunpowder, and genetically engineers the Uruk-hai.
Rather, Rings of Power departs Tolkien’s world of a Created Order further with a greater emphasis on science over faith. And here, the series moves the dial from the fantasy genre to science fiction.
The opening credits, and the use of a magnetic response to particles, suggest less a mysterious magic used in the creation of the rings, so much as basic chemistry. This is elaborated upon when Sauron gives Celebrimbor the metallurgy scientific breakthrough required to create the rings that “in the darkness bind them”.
The introduction of what turns out to be (spoiler alert) Gandalf is jarring too. “Baby Gandalf” is shot naked across the stars as a falling meteorite in a scene that places Middle Earth in a larger cosmos, and not a “flat earth” map.
Galadriel, rather than using water as a mystic crystal ball as she does with Frodo to view “what has still to come to pass”, instead asks for water in a scene that is more laboratory experiment in the form of a DNA test to assess whether a fragment of ash is in fact a spec of dark fragment. This is a far cry from the spiritual power Galadriel holds in the Third Age, where Elven speech can transform situations, heal the heart, fill it with dread, speak telepathically to each and all, or appear as a prophetic visitation in the darkest of places.
One anticipates in the next season an explanation that the Light of Eärendil acts as a holographic transportation device, rather than being some form of Marian visitation from celestial realms as an expression of Order that assists Samwise when all else feels lost.
To that end, Rings has made the rather draining mistake of emptying the mystic quality of this world in much the same way Qui-Gon Jinn does when chatting about how one’s midichlorian count explains susceptibility to the Force. Ring’s show runners should get over any discomfort with the idea of a mysterious or other-worldly power, and rather accept that religious transcendence is some of the appeal of this otherwise deeply natural world if they are to write successful fan fiction.
EVIL AS BINARY
Further, a Tolkien understanding of evil is of a “turning from God”: evil isn’t made, its just what happens when you turn something good into something lesser. Shadow cannot exist without light, even if light can exist without shadow.
A climax exchange between Adar and Galadriel, an unconvincing interrogation, is controversial because Galadriel is genocidal in her intent to wipe out the Orcs. By contrast, Adar presents a good case for orcs’ right to exist and promote a view of the Good Life. And a Balrog’s malice creates mithril. This is a more dualist approach to good and evil, as equal partners. Here the writers have stepped too far from the gentle theological frame that underpins the original works by Tolkien.
A billion dollars is a lot of money. A worth greater than the value of the Shire, perhaps. But in all Rings of Power didn’t mithrill at all. Slow, laborious, ill-paced, with sudden rushes to plot conclusions–six episodes without a sense of divine created Order to bind them.
Season 2 needs to decide whether it actually wants to be “woke”, as its detractors decry. In this case, go hard on inventing an entirely new multicultural mythology, and breach the narrative from the confines of a north European culture, demolish a Catholic sense of created Order that transcends science, and demote Good to the equal of evil.
Alternatively, if you wish to satisfy fans and respect the footnotes so dearly paid for, pick a story arc (quest, tale, rags to riches), define your archetypes, and restore a sense of transcendent Order.
That’d be precious.
