Okay, friends, we’ve got one more episode of Rings of Power on board now, and goodness there’s a lot going on. As always, I’m saving anything high-spoiler for the comments, but I’ll make a few general observations here about what I’m noticing.
One thing I think the show has done well since early in the first season is finding ways to thematically sync up different storylines – they can’t really run all 5-6 groups in a single episode, and having a logic for which ones do show up, beyond chronology, is great. For me this was an episode about trust – what it’s like when trust is broken, and when trust is (at least partially) restored. Who we choose to trust, and why. The perils of not trusting enough, and of trusting too much. I think there’s a lot that’s resonant there with the larger legendarium: the very first conversation in Tolkien’s published legendary material, after all, is Bilbo Baggins in front of Bag End, having a wary conversation with a wandering stranger who may or may not be trustworthy. Trust plays a huge role in so many encounters in the LOTR narrative: the hobbits at the Prancing Pony with Strider; Frodo standing at the Mirror with Galadriel; Denethor’s bitter and brittle mistrust of Gandalf; all the ways in which Frodo and Sam each felt trust or caution regarding Smeagol/Gollum. So having most of our main characters dealing with these issues made a lot of sense to me, and I’m curious to see where some of the strands picked up this episode will lead us.
The geography of the show is expanding, too, and that’s always a joy – the production values are high, and the chance to see more of Middle-Earth through someone’s creative vision is fun. I’d say that the choices the show makes to depict a lot of settings in REALLY low light are….well, I understand them artistically/aesthetically, but they do tend to obscure the distinctive features of these landscapes, and sometimes even the action within the landscape itself. I’d love to see them do more to make better-lit scenes feel eerie or unsettling, rather than rely so heavily on deep shadows to build tension, but I can’t deny that light and shadow are hugely important motifs in the legendarium and it’s no surprise that the series makes use of them liberally. Anyway, when the settings are more visible on screen, I got a lot of fun out of them – and one location in particular (a bridge) had me poring over maps of Eriador trying to work out exactly where it was, which is of course the kind of fun I like to have with Tolkien. I feel like the series has gotten enough of a hold on my imagination that I’m settling in with it, and I don’t feel quite as much of the tension of the highwire act that I felt in season one, when I was worrying so much about how fans might react. At this point, you like it or you don’t, and I sure like it, and I’m glad so many of you agree.
For a series that does so much to pay homage to the Peter Jackson movies, it was interesting this time around to see so many choices that, to me, felt like correctives to Jackson – attempts to pick up ideas and settings that Jackson underexplored (or didn’t explore at all). I am not, to be honest, always certain that it’s working as well as I’d want it to – more in the comments, of course – but I love their ambition in saying to themselves that they don’t always have to be the kid sibling, imitating the LOTR trilogy in particular as a way of proving how good they are. If you’re not someone who knows LOTR through anything but the Jackson movies, I’m sure you’ll still enjoy an episode like this, but if you’re a book reader also, I feel really confident there’ll be fun for you in getting to see some adaptations of material we hadn’t yet seen on screen. And in some cases I do think what they’re reaching for is working.
My last thoughts before diving into the comments are just to say this – if you’re not reading my spoilery comments that’s fine, but know that this time around, I’m diving pretty deep into some of Tolkien’s lore. And I bring that up here just because, what I’m seeing on screen contains SUCH deep cuts. These show runners are dropping elements into the series at this point that are so obscure, I strongly suspect 95% or more of fans won’t really notice they’re using Tolkien’s material at all. One of them honestly is a cut from something by Tolkien even I haven’t read – to me, this is a sign that even the moments that feel a little playful or loose with the canon right now must surely be setting up for very thoughtful adaptation of the canon down the road. Nobody knows this much about Tolkien and the legendarium, and knows how to deploy it in a screenplay, without also caring really deeply about the legendarium. I will continue to have my differences with the show creators, I’m sure, but the kind of differences you have with an interlocutor you respect enough to argue with, you know?
Comments:
Let’s start where obviously a lot of us LOTR folks want to start here – Tom Bombadil! We finally, after multiple screen adaptations that could have included him and chose not to, have a version of Tom to see in action. I’m of several minds here about Tom, and I’m curious how he worked for you all. There’s no question they’ve worked hard to integrate a lot of Tom’s lines from Fellowship, so that in many ways we’re getting elements of the scene we could have had in a Fellowship movie, and I appreciate that. There’s a homeliness to Tom and the things around him, goats and weeds and gentle smiles, and while he’s not singing as much as I’d like him to yet, he does sing to himself a little – all of this is great, to me. I’m struggling a little more with the depiction of Tom’s magical abilities: he comes across more like some wizard gone to seed, horsing around with little daily life cantrips like candle lighting, and less like the Master we know him to be. Tom is simultaneously less and more magical than this, I feel like – I’d like to see in him a power that is wholly unlike any other figure in Middle-earth, but of course in part that’s because my conception of Tom is that he is wholly unique. It’s possible JD and Patrick have a different vision – what does it mean to them, for instance, that he is Eldest, that he remembers the dark before the stars? Maybe subsequent episodes will at least make this characterization make more sense in their universe, even if he’s not “my Tom” – I can live with that. This last musing about Tom’s maybe unfair, but I have to say it – I know that in a series like this, you need Tom to play a role in the plot of some kind. But, like, what we love about Tom is how not-really-plot-critical he is, you know? Tom’s not the guy to look in your eyes and say “you are called to some high purpose” – he’s the guy who so thoroughly lives out his own high purpose that it restores your soul a little for the purpose you’re pursuing. Tom’s maybe the last character in Middle-earth I can see leading a training montage like Yoda or Philoctetes, but I feel like we’re basically being set up for that, and it sure makes me uneasy. To be clear, I do like the idea of Gandalf (I mean, the Stranger, but, come on now) getting to have a conversation with a wise old soul who can serve for him the way he’ll serve for Frodo at the outset of LOTR….and I get that there aren’t many plausible candidates for that work in Middle-earth. But I really struggle to see that as Tom’s calling – I would be more willing to believe it of Gwaihir the king of the Eagles, or even Fangorn/Treebeard….maybe even Cirdan, though I get that there’s no way to criss-cross Cirdan with the Stranger geographically right now. I don’t know – how are you all feeling about Tom?
Speaking of Fellowship elements being brought to life finally, I’ll jump over to Elrond and Galadriel finding themselves in Tyrn Gorthad, the Barrow-downs, facing off against some wights. It’s a little bit of a hand-wave – the evil wights who attack the hobbits in FOTR are pretty explicitly identified with spirits sent there in the Third Age – but the barrows have been there since the First Age, and if spirits could have been sent there in the Third Age, why not in the Second Age also, I guess? Again, they make good use of some wight poetry from Fellowship, and while I didn’t think the outcome made a ton of plot sense – how would Elrond know that trick with the blades and Galadriel doesn’t? And why does that work? – it’s also a perfectly good magic solution to a magic problem. The wights looked cool as hell, too, so I’ll just go for the ride in that sequence. I’m intrigued, as I mentioned above, by the broken bridge the Elves encounter that sends them south to the Barrow-downs – first of all, where is that? I think geographically the most sense would be that this is a crossing of the Brandywine, but the descriptions we get from the Third Age are not of a dizzying canyon…..and if anything, thousands of years should deepen that riverbed, not make it more shallow. Maybe they’re even further north of the Shire, though, where the Baranduin is in a canyon….if so, though, and they’re making for the forge at Ost-in-Edhil, they are WAY north of the shortest track to Eregion when they hit an out bridge. If it’s a geographic wobble, it’s a weird one from a team that’s normally a little more meticulous – they must have some idea of where they think they are, and I wish they’d tell us, even if it’s just in some behind the scenes featurette. I am frustrated by the Elrond/Galadriel dynamic in this episode just because, by now we’ve had two episodes of them at odds. They seem overdue for reconciliation to me, though, and Elrond’s profound suspicion of the Rings just feels overcooked to me when we know he will end up wearing one – why make him THIS hardened? Like, he’s rushing away at the end of the episode and his friend Galadriel is likely dying behind him against hundreds of orcs, and all he can do is continue to express his deep suspicion of her? Her handing him the Ring to escape with is proof she loves the Ring too much….so, what, her refusing to let it go wouldn’t have been? It just feels a little too on rails for Elrond, to me, and since Robert Aramayo’s an incredible performer and he’s normally made Elrond really rich and multidimensional, I just think the writing is getting in the way a little. I’ll be glad when they hit whatever twist puts him back in a mood to be conciliatory. How’s it hitting you all?
The Harfoots…..so, I am glad we’re getting Stoors. I am a little bummed that we’ve basically inverted the Harfoots and Stoors from the Fellowship Prologue, though – Harfoots are the hole-diggers, not Stoors. I have to believe it’s just because they needed wandering hobbits to meet the Stranger….and they knew that the audience would be confused by them being “Stoors” but would hear “Harfoots” and get the Harfoot/Hobbit association more easily. Which….okay, who cares, it’s fun to see hobbits discover the idea of living in holes. :-) I am a little irritated by the obvious Nobody/Poppy romantic tension we’re going to enforce here, mostly because I was very much enjoying the possibilities for queer romance between Nori/Poppy (or at least us being given room to let them be head canon) – like, I get that Tolkien is more often about depicting close same-sex friendships, and that’s awesome of course, but if you’re going to make the right wing fanboys angry with an inclusive cast already, I’d really love to lean all the way in and say explicitly that, sure, there’s more than cishet folk in Middle-earth. And my hat is off to the show runners for deciding to give us actual Westron in show – so, for folks who do not read the language appendices obsessively, Westron is the actual language spoken by most characters in Middle-earth in the Lord of the Rings. Anytime you read English language dialogue in the book, the characters are actually speaking Westron; like, love it or hate it, even the character’s names are mostly not the ones you know. Samwise Gamgee is an “Anglicization” of that hobbit’s REAL name, Banazir Galbasi – Frodo Baggins is Maura Labingi. Tolkien just “translates” (since his conceit is that he found these old texts somehow and is publishing them for us) from Westron so we can read them. Anyway, a super nerd would tell you Westron is a lingua franca that only emerges in the Third Age and shouldn’t exist in the Second Age at all, but let’s handwave that also, this is too fun. Now, what am I talking about with Westron in the show? When “the goon” (I have no idea how her title is spelled) of the Stoors talks with Nori about the Rorymass Burrows who set out to find some fabled land of happiness for the halflings, she calls it “the Suzat”. Which is SO close to good Westron – “Suzat” is translated by Tolkien as “The Shire”. So, technically she says “The The Shire”. Let’s ignore, too, that if she says “The Suzat” she must be speaking some language other than Westron for every word in the sentence but Suzat, and we don’t know what that language is. Some concessions have to be made to an English speaking audience, haha. Anyway, it was a lovely Easter egg for Tolkien language nerds, and it makes me wonder if we’ll get any more Westron in the show (Tolkien never really laid out that language, and all we have of it are a handful of example words he shared here and there). Other than language fun, though, I feel a little stuck in the Harfoot narrative right now – what are we doing? Some hobbit battle against the mask guys? Or will Nori and Poppy somehow take over this little settlement and lead them west? I can’t really tell what the function of this is now that the Stranger’s been “delivered” to where he’s going.
The Pelargir stuff is a little weary for me at this point – somehow losing Bronwyn took the wind out of Arondir’s sails so much that I feel like he’s destined to die gloriously and soon. Theo….well, there’s not much to say other than that he’s clearly doomed also, as one of the few human characters we actually know in a show that’s about to need nine Nazgul and a King who will betray Isildur and wind up leading a ghost army in the Third Age. I would have said he was Nazgul bound in season one, but he’s built up enough of a connection to Isildur now that I feel like the betrayal of the King of the Dead is the most logical arc. I do appreciate the back and forth between Isildur and Estrid but I’m not sure what they’re really doing with it – Estrid’s not high profile enough to get a Ring of Power, and the show doesn’t have a ton of room for love triangle stuff now that she has her betrothed back. I guess it could be fuel for a sort of Dark Isildur arc, but we need him to be heroic long before we need him to make a huge fatal error….anyone have any sense of where it’s going? I like all these actors and the scenes are working well for me….I just can’t tell why it’s getting screen time other than that we know Isildur will be important. And the Ents….well, we finally got an Entwife, and it would be churlish not to be happy about that! I feel like the showrunners are also trying to correct from Jackson’s far too “we do nothing at all no matter what” depiction of the uselessness of Ent bureaucracy in The Two Towers….but I worry that it goes a bit far in making these Ents so rage-fueled and, well, hasty, that they don’t feel very Entish to me? I would have liked it better if, after her rage cooled, the two Ents had a somewhat more measured, thoughtful conversation with each other about how to deal with an unfamiliar scenario. I did like Arondir making that connection with them, of course, and I feel sure we will see those Ents again. I’m glad, since I think that one tense encounter is just not the best setting in which to get a really Entish depiction of Ents….any thoughts?
Okay, this is my last comment and good lord this is nerdy. To be totally clear, this was so nerdy even I didn’t really understand it at first, but some of the Elvish linguists I follow online (your boy James lives an exciting life, doesn’t he?) pointed me to it, and it’s FASCINATING. Here’s where I started – the last shot of the episode is Adar looking down at Galadriel and greeting her in Elvish. To be clear, this isn’t just Elvish, since Elves generally speak Sindarin to each other…Adar is greeting her in High-Elven, in Quenya, the language I studied just enough in college to write a linguistics paper, so I recognized the words right away. That’s weird enough coming from an Orc (“....Uruk,” Adar would whisper). But I did notice at the time that the actor had weirdly mispronounced one word – the verb “to shine” in Quenya is sila, pronounced “SEE-la”, but Adar says “THEE-la”. It’s subtle, but I thought it was odd they hadn’t caught it. Well….here’s the thing. There’s a fragment by Tolkien I’ve never read that was republished for linguists after his death about the Shibboleth of Feanor. Quenya was the language of High Elves in Valinor, the distant, immortal realm in the West. In the version of Quenya originally spoken by the Noldor (the branch of Elves we mostly know – Gil-galad and Galadriel and Elrond are all Noldor, for instance) said the letter s as a “th” sound. But after the King of the Noldor, Finwe, remarried when his first wife died, his new wife was Vanyar, and Vanyar Quenya says “s” instead of “th” – I promise, all this will make sense and matter in just a second, folks. So, everyone started ditching the “th” sound for the “s” in imitation of their new queen. Everyone that is except Feanor, the surviving son of Finwe’s first wife – because his dead mother was Miriel Serinde, and changing the “th” sound meant changing how his mother’s name sounded. So he was furious with the language change and refused to let his people switch over – gradually the “th” sound left Quenya, but only as Feanor and his sons gradually died off. By this point at the end of the Second Age, I think even Celebrimbor, Feanor’s grandson, probably had ditch the “th” sound.
So, think about what this means. Adar, the Uruk, is addressing her in the language of Valinor – a language he cannot have learned anywhere other than in Valinor itself, or from the Noldor who came here to Middle-earth. And he’s addressing her in a dialect of Quenya that is so ancient, Galadriel may not have heard it in centuries, even millennia. What does this mean? Is Adar somehow a Feanorian, one of the descendants of that house, kin to Celebrimbor? Or did he in some ancient context learn Quenya from a captured son of Feanor – and if so, is he intentionally signaling something to Galadriel by continuing to use that pronunciation? And sure, this may just been the best-hidden of Easter eggs, something that would elude all but 1% of their audience, a nod about how languages evolve, but I don’t know. I think maybe who we think Adar is and what motivates him is in fact more complicated than at least I have been thinking. To be clear, I don’t think he can be one of Feanor’s sons – their fates are accounted for, and anyway Galadriel would recognize them, unless he’s been so warped by evil that somehow she didn’t pick up on it when she had him in custody in the Southlands. In any case, even if we never learn anything more about where he came from or who he was, just that moment is to me such an eerie one now – Adar’s careful pronunciation of what is, at this point in Middle-earth, a holy language used by the Elves only ceremonially, in a way that signals his connection to the distant past, to the greatest of the Noldor whose wrath led to their greatest evils, and to the pain of an Elf who felt isolated and ignored and painfully passed over. It would echo in Galadriel’s ears like almost nothing else could. So the online Tolkien nerds who want to crap on the show for “desecrating the lore” or whatever garbage they say, well, I just wish they could recognize that the people making this show are so carefully attentive to every scrap the Professor wrote, they slipped a carefully chosen mispronunciation of a Quenya word into Adar’s mouth to taunt Galadriel. What an incredible creative undertaking. :-) Anybody have any thoughts on what the Shibboleth will mean (or if it will mean anything?)?