Prime Video’s new streaming series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power isn’t your dad’s LOTR.Amazon Prime
The name’s right there in the title, but unless you’re Christopher Tolkien, Prime Video’s new streaming series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power isn’t your dad’s LOTR. Not only is there no Frodo or Gollum, there aren’t even – at least as the series begins – any rings to technically be lord of.
That’s because The Rings of Power is based not directly on the genre-defining stories by J.R.R. Tolkien, but on Tolkien’s genre-defining tendency to build out more background than any reasonable person could possibly want to know. (Famously reasonable, Lord of the Rings fans are.) Taken from a brief history of Middle Earth detailed primarily at the end of The Return of the King, The Rings of Power tells the stories of Middle Earth’s Second Age, when the men were men (though they lived three times as long) and hobbits were called harfoots. (Elves were still basically just elves – they’re immortal, after all.)
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The first thing to get out of the way here is probably the “when” of it all. According to the lore, Middle Earth has four ages: The actual Lord of the Rings story – the one where nine brave warriors from across Middle Earth seek to destroy the One Ring at Mount Doom, in case you have not consumed an ounce of pop culture in the past 25 years – takes place at the end of the Third Age. Astute readers will then have figured out the Second Age must be before that – thousands of years before it, to be precise – and that there must be some sort of First Age, which we don’t yet have a show or movie about.
For the purposes of the LOTR newbie tuning into The Rings of Power, the main thing we know about the First Age is that, much like ages two and three, it ends in a cataclysmic battle with a dark lord (Morgoth, not really that important), which leaves the forces of good (men and elves and sometimes dwarves and hobbitses) trying to pick up the pieces.
Because elves can only die of physical injury or a broken heart, two of the Second Age’s piece-picker-uppers will be recognizable from OG LOTR. You may remember Elrond as the elf-guy who sent the Fellowship off to destroy the One Ring, and Galadriel as a semi-mythical figure who both tests and rewards the Fellowship when they stop by her kingdom of Lothlorien. (Or you might remember them as Hugo “Agent Smith” Weaving and Cate Blanchett, respectively, depending on how exactly you remember movie characters.)
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power tells the stories of Middle Earth’s Second Age.
In The Rings of Power, their much younger selves (played by Robert Aramayo and Morfydd Clark) are still leaders in the elf world, albeit with a few thousand years’ less sway: Elrond is a budding politician eager to live up to his birthright, while Galadriel is a fearsome warrior who smells an emerging threat.
It is not revealing anything that the first five minutes of Peter Jackson’s trilogy itself doesn’t give away to say that the threat is Sauron, who is working his way up to full Dark Lord status (he’s not officially named in the cast credits, but I bet you’ll figure out who he is pretty quickly). His plan is to forge some “rings” of power, give them to powerful rulers around Middle Earth, then “lord” over them by secretly forging a ring that lets the wearers be controlled.
Besides to elves, Sauron also spreads some rings to the dwarves, led by Durin (Peter Mullan), who are basically the same gruff subterranean rapscallions they have been in other adaptations, and the humans, led by King Isildur (Maxim Baldry), who are also pretty much the same, except that they are currently living on an enchanted island that does not appear on any maps in the original Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Beyond that, the basic shape of The Rings of Power should be the classic Tolkien good versus evil tale, albeit with fewer hobbits/harfoots, who take a back seat to the elves and humans this go-round.
Whether it is a wise move to stake the future of a streaming service, as Amazon has reportedly done here, on a US$1-billion-plus form of fan fiction featuring absolutely none of the characters that the non-hardcore audience has come to know and love, well – ask Gandalf, I guess. (Gandalf does not live in Middle Earth during the Second Age. Canonically, at least.)
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power streams on Prime Video starting Sept. 1.
Special to The Globe and Mail
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