The first season of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power just recently wrapped up with an explosive conclusion to the season that has fans excitedly looking forward to the second season. While the second season started shooting recently and will likely release sometime in 2024, season one can officially be filed away alongside the various other adaptations of J.R.R. Tolkien’s legendarium. The Rings of Power was one of the most anticipated series of the last few years, as fans were eager to return to the world of Middle-Earth. The last exploration into the worlds of Tolkien came at the beginning of the 2010s with Peter Jackson’s trilogy of films based on The Hobbit. While those films were much more of a mixed bag than Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, they still served as an exciting venture into Tolkien’s works.
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There are some pretty significant differences between the new Prime Video series and the various Middle-Earth films that have come before it. These differentiating factors come both from the detail of the material being adapted and the overall approach to adapting it. While some fans have had complaints about The Rings of Power’s approach to the stories of Tolkien, others have praised the series as a worthy addition to the long-rooted franchise. Now that the first season has wrapped up, it can be looked back on as a whole story in and of itself. Here’s how the first season of The Rings of Power adapts the work of Tolkien differently than Jackson’s Lord of the Rings and Hobbit films.
An Unexplored Age of Middle-Earth
The idea that The Rings of Power exists in a different age is two-fold. Firstly, and most plainly is the fact that the story is set in the Second Age of Middle-Earth, as opposed to the Third Age in which the stories of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are told. Prior to the events of The Rings of Power, the Second Age is a time of relative peace. The peoples of Middle Earth and Arda have long settled into their life following the War of Wrath at the end of the First Age, in which the first Dark Lord, Morgoth, was finally defeated. The Second Age is a time of prosperity for the Men, Elves, Dwarves, and Harfoots of the world, and the first season of The Rings of Power showcases the upheaval of that peace through the return and rise of Sauron, Morgoth’s chief lieutenant.
The Second Age has only been seen briefly in Tolkien adaptations on-screen previously. The opening prologue of Jackson’s The Fellowship of the Ring depicts the climactic events at the end of the age. The Last Alliance of Elves and Men march upon Sauron’s realm of Mordor, before eventually the second Dark Lord of Middle-Earth is cast down as Isildur cuts the One Ring from his hand. The Rings of Power explores this time period in much more depth. There are many core characters to the series. Some characters, such as Isildur, his father Elendil, Galadriel, and Elrond, may be familiar to fans of the Lord of the Rings films, while others such as Durin IV, Arondir, and Halbrand are either expanded characters from the source texts or entirely new additions to the lore.
By setting The Rings of Power in the Second Age, the creative team behind the series is given much more room to breathe than they otherwise would’ve had in a Third Age story. Even though the Third Age is the most familiar to general audiences and fans of Tolkien, setting a new story within that time would only invite even more comparisons to Jackson’s Lord of the Rings and Hobbit films. While a prequel series about Aragorn or Gimli would’ve had to lead directly into The Lord of the Rings, The Rings of Power is much freer to tell its own story. At the end of the day, the series will likely lay some of the groundwork for the Third Age and the stories that take place within it, but it’s not going to run directly into the films. In that sense, setting the new Middle-Earth series in the Second Age is both creatively beneficial and makes it much easier to avoid the legal complications that would come with directly teasing the events of Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings.
A New Age of Entertainment
The second manner in which The Rings of Power exists in a different age than the previous Lord of the Rings-related films is in a real-world sense. The entertainment industry today is in a much different state than it was when the Hobbit films were released. This is even more true of the early 2000s, when The Lord of the Rings first hit theaters. Hollywood has become increasingly dominated by streaming services and major big-budget blockbusters. Superhero films were only starting to catch on in the early 2000s with the likes of X-Men and Spider-Man, and even in the early 2010s when The Hobbit was released, the Marvel Cinematic Universe was just beginning to really establish its place in Hollywood.
Now, Marvel movies and other similarly styled blockbusters are dominating the multiplex, leaving little room for anything else to really come in and make a splash. More in-depth and rich stories, like The Lord of the Rings, are becoming rare as studios are more stringent about the kinds of films they are producing. Even Frodo Baggins himself, Elijah Wood, recently stated that he didn’t believe that The Lord of the Rings could be made the same way that it was in today’s environment. Of course, there are exceptions to this notion, one of the biggest being Denis Villenueve’s Dune. However, it was questionable if Dune would even get a sequel in the first place.
Grand stories like The Lord of the Rings are now often told exclusively through streaming and television series. Game of Thrones is largely to thank for this, as that series proved that these kinds of epic tales could not only work in a series medium, but that there was an audience for them in that form. It’s likely because of this change that The Rings of Power was developed as a series to begin with, rather than as another trilogy of films like The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. Telling a story through a series format is a completely different challenge from telling one on film, which is one of the key reasons that The Rings of Power feels so different. Since the first season (of a planned five) had eight hours to tell its story, there was a lot more time to be spent developing characters and environments. Whether you believe the show utilized its eight hours well or not is up to you, but the fact remains that the show moves at a much slower pace than the films because it has the available time to show many of the conversations and moments that would likely be left on the cutting room floor of a film.
Less Detailed Source Material
One of the biggest factors that differentiates The Rings of Power from the films of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit is the amount of source material that is available to be pulled from. The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit were the only complete novels set in Middle-Earth that Tolkien wrote and were published while he was alive. A vast majority of the additional material, such as The Silmarillion, The Children of Húrin and The Fall of Gondolin, has been edited by his son Christopher Tolkien and published posthumously. While some of the story of the Second Age was published in the Appendices to The Lord of the Rings while Tolkien was alive, much of the material also comes from The Silmarillion and the History of Middle-Earth collection. A complete collection of the tales of the Second Age is set to be published in November in a new book, edited by Brian Sibley, called The Fall of Númenor.
While the overall story of the Second Age certainly provides the necessary outline of events to tell a complete story, it is within the finer details that the biggest differences between The Rings of Power and The Lord of the Rings begin to appear. One of the chief complaints about the first season of The Rings of Power has been that much of the dialogue does not carry the same lofty weight as it does in the films. The reasoning for that is plain to see, as much of the dialogue in Jackson’s films was lifted directly from the original novels. A vast majority of the most memorable and effective lines from the Lord of the Rings film trilogy are ones that were originally written by Tolkien in the books. While Jackson and his co-writers certainly added a lot of new dialogue to the story, they always had the written work that they could rely on.
With the Second Age and The Rings of Power, there is a very small amount of written dialogue and specific smaller interactions that can be pulled from for the show. Much of what Tolkien wrote of the Second Age is relayed more as a historical text and recounting, rather than by following specific characters through a narrative to see all the specific interactions and conversations they have. As such, much of the dialogue and details of The Rings of Power have had to be entirely invented for the show. While this can be a benefit, as it gives the creative team much more wiggle room to tell the story how they want to, it also can be a disadvantage and a contributor to the show not feeling quite like the films.
