The most expensive series in history went live these days on Amazon. Its name is “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power”, and it is based on Tolkien’s works.
The imaginary history created by Tolkien won not only the race for the series with the most expensive production. Tolkien’s work is a huge literary triumph. “The Lord of the Rings” and “The Hobbit” are in the first places in all lists of the ten best-selling books.
We would not have heard anything about Tolkien, who was a lecturer in ancient English languages at Oxford, if he had not written that extraordinary work, “The Hobbit”. The book which laid the foundations for the three volumes of “The Lord of the Rings”, and hundreds of stories and unfinished manuscripts. As a writer he created an entire imaginary world including its geography, history, peoples, races and languages. Now also in a series on Amazon based on the same unfinished manuscripts.
At the time I knew a bunch of people, younger than me, who mastered everything related to Tolkien. There is also a younger generation of Tolkien lovers in Israel, and from their reactions it doesn’t seem like they are crazy about the new series.
I watched her. There are beautiful sentences. Here is one of them: “Evil does not sleep, it waits, and in a moment of weakness it blinds us.” A fine Tolkien phrase. Not “attacks us” but “blinds us”.
It is easy to recognize the struggle of the Hobbits and the Western nations in the evil kingdom of Mordor as a parable for the war against Nazism or Communism or the Muslim threat mainly in its Iranian form, although Tolkien himself resisted defining his work as a kind of parable. Nevertheless, I like to read such a sentence in a book more than to hear it from an actor who says it with the emotion he thinks he deserves to say it, and maybe I, when reading, would say it differently to myself.
The series for me is, therefore, a photo album. A spectacular photo album, admittedly, and yet, when it’s written, it’s even more beautiful.
In the series, the educational trend, the politically correct one, immediately stands out, this is the Segi Noor version. Orandir the soldier is black. He is a black elf. I need to punctuate the word Elef, otherwise it is read Elef, therefore, in the past, Elfim was translated as Bnei Lilith. I liked Benny Lilit more.
Among Tolkien enthusiasts in Israel, I found that many felt uncomfortable with this PC casting, this castration. Well, at least all the landscapes are very northern, the landscape is not politically correct at all, everything is green. It’s understandable, because all of Tolkien’s work is in a Nordic world, but okay, let’s move on.
What is not politically correct is that the bad guys are ugly. All evil orcs have rotten teeth, and are not only ugly, but also growl stupidly and are dirty. What is? Who is ugly is bad? Where did you get the other?
The chapters are long. 1 hour old. In the end the result is more of an adventure than a poem, which is a shame, because the poem and the sublime are the beauty of Tolkien’s books. It’s not Tolkien, but if Tolkien contributed, even indirectly, to this beauty, to the spectacular architecture of the cities in the series, it shows the power of Tolkien’s imagination.
I have already said before that the revolution that Tolkien brought about in modern literature is enormous. Without Tolkien, this is literature that relies on the “anti-hero”, on their defeat, and glorifies the cowardly man, who resists commitment, is unable to go to war for moral values, and runs away from any situation that requires a fight.
Tolkien’s heroes are creatures who, when duty is imposed on them, do not retreat, do not fold, do not whine and do not invent selfish theories. They set out to fulfill the mission. Even against all odds. Even in the face of much greater forces than them, and in the presence of an atmosphere of surrender.
He wrote all this when, as an Oxford man, he knows very well the accepted literature of our time. The Loser literature, the literature describing the small family, “shit and shit plots”, as a literature student once defined it to me with self-irony.
One more thing needs to be said about Tolkien’s wonder:
If you assume that writers break through when they’re only young, here’s a fact to think about: Tolkien finished writing The Lord of the Rings when he was close to his 60th birthday.
Another two years passed before the publisher published it, because the book seemed unworthy of publication. Who would read such a book? Tolkien also did not encourage the publisher when he wrote to her at the end of the work on “The Lord of the Rings”: “The work is out of my control. I have created a monster. A complicated, scary, bitter and above all terrifyingly long novel.” He stated that he would not be surprised if the publisher rejects the deal “which certainly has no chance of bearing any profits”.
This was the beginning of negotiations in which another publisher was also involved, which finally gave up in a letter: “Unfortunately, we are afraid of the great length of the book. The expense involved in publishing it is large considering the current price of the paper.”
No one expected the book to ever include anything. The book was published in August 1954 about 68 years ago.
Just before the outbreak of the corona virus, I was in Oxford, where, as we know, Tolkien lived and wrote. Inside the university buildings, in the library, there was an exhibition dedicated to Tolkien’s manuscripts, I also saw his paintings there. He painted the scenery of “The Hobbit”, and his ability in drawing would have easily landed him a job as the director of the art department of the new series at Amazon.
There I also saw his desk, his pen and his pipe. You don’t need more than that to create a world and to conquer the world.
The corner of the puddle
Instead of the corner of the puddle I will repeat the love story of Ronald Reuel Tolkien.
At the age of 16, Tolkien met Edith, 19. When their love was discovered, his adoptive father intervened and forbade him to see Edith or write to her for three years, until he reached the age of 21. Tolkien obeyed. They both promised each other to wait.
When he turned 21, just as the clock struck midnight, he sat down and wrote a letter to Idit. She wrote him back that she was engaged. “I began to doubt you, Ronald,” Idit wrote, “and to think that you don’t care about me anymore.”
He got up and went to her immediately, to convince her to give up her fiancé and marry him.
When Tolkien came to her by train, she waited for him at the station, and after a long conversation with him sent the ring back to her fiancé with a farewell letter.
They married and lived together all their lives in happiness (and at a very late age also in wealth, which did not change anything for them).