So this week the first screenshots of the Lord of the Rings adaptation Rings of Power have been released. Up to now we had only had teasers and little hints, but not really much to give an insight into the world that Amazon are creating. Now at this stage, there’s not a lot to go on, and I’m not going to go into a great deal of detail about them as a result. It’s fair to say though, that the reception has been mixed. For most people the design of the world look promising and you can see clear similarities to Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings and Hobbit trilogies. There has however been concern expressed about the plot line seemingly focusing around Galadriel. Now I’ll be honest the route they seem to be following does strike me as slightly odd; as the teaser information suggests that she’s been cast as some sort of callow elvish youth. Without wanting to go too deep into Lord of the Rings lore, a very dangerous area to go into unless you’re a Tolkien scholar, it seems odd that Galadriel is being portrayed this way. After all, this is a sister of Feanor, who lived through the entirety of the War of the Jewels and has seen the light of the valar. In the literary world, she is far older than Elrond and said to be far more powerful. So portraying her this way seems a little odd. There are narrative ways to get around it after all Tolkien makes no mention of her in the Silmarillion after her first appearance, so there could be an argument to say that she never directly fought in the War, and the reference to her having much to learn could in fact relate to her fighting in the first war of the rank.
I will say however that in my view it’s sensible to make Galadriel one of the key characters here as this series is set during the War of the Ring, and Galadriel would probably have played a part in that given where Lorien is positioned in relation to both Eregion on and Khazad Dum. We’ll see what comes with the series, but I’ll be honest, I’m not holding out a great deal of hope. Not because it’s a Lord of the Rings adaptation, but because it’s a book adaptation. There have been a number of popular IP adapted for television series recently including some of my most favourite series, and not one of them has hit the mark. Indeed, the only book adaptation I would say that has achieved great success in recent years has been Game of Thrones but Game of Thrones wasn’t a finished work (Indeed it still isn’t a finished novel series). This gave the writers more creative scope though many fans argue that they failed to nail the end. Others though have either failed or just been massive disappointments. The ones that stand out for me would be Dark Tower, Wheel of Time and The Shannara series.
Now adapting a novel is difficult. There’s no two ways about it but it’s also a tempting thing to do. A popular novel series has a ready made fan base. If you can tap into that it makes it an awful lot easier to gain traction and support for the film or series. But the other side of that is that fans of the novel series tend to be very knowledgeable about it. They don’t just read the book once and never read it again. They read it many many times over, and they often know it inside out. This causes problems when a series needs to be produced because any large novel series cannot be directly adapted to screen. It’s simply not possible. You would end up with something bloated and horrendous. Even Lord of the Rings underwent massive changes when Peter Jackson cut it down for his original three films. The Council of Elrond for example, is an awful scene to try and adapt for screen. It’s effectively a very badly chaired committee meeting with lots of people talking over each other vast amounts of exposition and argument. In TV terms it’s as boring as hell. What Jackson did was cut it down to the key points and keep the scene in but keep it as short as he could get away with.
So this highlights one of the big problems with adaptations. You cannot adapt literally. You cannot take page one of the book run it through page 300 and do each screen as it is just not going to work. You’d end up with something absolutely massive and it would have absolutely no flow and pace at all. So I do have a lot of sympathy for Amazon here. Adapting Tolkien’s work is difficult, especially when the First War of the Ring hasn’t ever been fully fleshed out in novel form. There are essays and bits here and there in various different books and appendices, but there’s no full material to work with. That means they can use creative licence. The problem with creative licence is that it’s very, very personal.
That doesn’t mean that a film adaptation or TV adaptation of a popular novel franchise cannot be done. but there are several things that I think anybody looking to do this would need to consider.
The first and most important is to decide what it is that you’re trying to achieve. Are you trying to do an adaptation of the book as closely as possible? Are you trying to make an entertainment series based on the book? Or are you just trying to make something set in the world or kind of inspired by series? And these are all very different things.
The First Lord of the Rings was pretty much as direct an adaptation of the books as you could get away with. Yes, there were events cut out; there had to be you just couldn’t get everything in. And some of those exclusions were unfortunate, but they weren’t necessary for the story. It is also worth remembering they’re not expressly excluded. They’re just not referred to. So for example, Tom Bombadil doesn’t appear in the films but there’s nothing to say that that event didn’t happen.
The problem with adapting it this way is unless you managed to nail everything (the story, the casting, the music and the design) you’re not going to be as successful. The Lord of the Rings movies were unique when in that it managed to get everything right but Over adaptations have not been anywhere near as successful. And this is evidence with the Hobbit films. There were changes made for cinema (and arguably marketing) reasons. And it just didn’t have the effect of the original films. For me the Hobbit was a valiant effort but it didn’t work.
Likewise, adapting for entertainment is a risky venture and I think this is possibly the route that Lord of the Rings Rings of Power is going down. Adapting for adventure gives you a wider audience. It taps into that Game of Thrones demographic with the sword and sorcery kind of world. Wheel of Time also tried something similar. The problem with that is you run slap bang into the fan groups who consider the source material as holy writ. I have to be honest I find considering a source novel as sacrosanct odd and its not a view I’ve particularly shared. It’s a bit strange. For me to be so passionate about defending a fictional world. So long as the key themes and there is a solid effort made then I’ll judge it as it comes.
But equally when some of the changes are made just for the sake of box ticking, demographics, or so so called correct thinking; it never really sits comfortably with me. We saw this with Wheel of Time. There were changes made to character backstories and indeed, the whole key premise of Rand for being the Dragon Reborn was pretty much dropped in at the beginning as an “Oh, well”. Changes for the sake of change or desire to just to tick boxes always seems to weaken things. This is how it felt with Wheel of Time, the reveals in the first episode robbed the series of a lot of its impact. Indeed, I didn’t follow it again after the first episode and this is my absolutely favourite novel series. I should have been lapping up but the whole story had effectively been revealed. Yes, there will be plot story and fill in But the idea of one of the three being the reborn dragon lose lost its effect when it was given away in essentially chapter one.
The final option of adapting using the book as an inspiration is fine. I think it’s what happened with the Dark Tower film. Dark Tower was not an adaptation of the book of the same name. It used some of the characters and it used the idea, but it was not a literal adaptation. But the problem was the series or rather the film in this case, wasn’t built that way. It was billed as an adaptation. So when it wasn’t fan groups kicked off and fan groups tend to be very noisy and have a lot of media clout. The end result being the film gang has negative reviews and people don’t go and see it.
So deciding from the start, what you intend to do, and more importantly being clear to the market. What you are doing is important.
Second thing that any adaptation needs to do is consider its audience.
Audience is important because it decides casting, tone, marketing, and I would arguably say duration of a series.
This was where the Shannara Chronicles fell down. Now I love the Shannara books. I have all of them. They’re fantastic stories set in a really deep and interesting world. Whilst the final book of the series was a little bit disappointing for me, I read them regularly and I really enjoy them. I’m not a gatekeeper for it by any means and I’m sure that there’s lots of nuances I’ve missed. So I was a really enthusiastic when the Shannara Chronicles was first announced and it was an enjoyable series. No two ways about it. It seemed well produced. The design was fantastic. And the music was pretty good.
The problem was, it never decided who it was going to be aimed at. Was it aiming at the teenage young adults market. Was it aimed at fans of fantasy drama series? Was it aimed at fans of the books (like me). It just seemed to be trying to do all three at once and it ended up as a complete hodgepodge. You had a frankly annoying main character, who, if I’m honest, actually reminded me of Dawson from Dawson’s Creek (for those of a certain age and remember that character) but I have no doubt he appealed to the teenage market. New character relationships were added to appeal to the MTV audience but it made it very, very hard to relate to as a older because it seemed to be pitched to young yet at the same time, it wasn’t fully in the fantasy show sphere and by removing an awful lot of the stuff that I would have expected I couldn’t relate to it as a fan of the books.
The original Lord of the Rings trilogy was aimed predominantly at fans of the book. Peter Jackson knew that fans of the book would be critiquing the work, even though in that time, there wasn’t the instant social media witch hunting available as there is now. So he kept to the design of the book. He involved a lot of the most famous artists and everything was done with the books as a touchstone. That gave it depth and at the same time because of the sheer scope of visual nature it was able to tap into the fantasy demographic. It was clear that first and foremost the audience had been set as fans of the book.
I don’t know if Amazon have decided on an audience but a given some of the casting and story choices. It seems that they’re taking the option of entertainment for the fantasy demographic and that’s absolutely fine by me, no problem with that. But if it’s not clear, and they’re trying to bridge both sides, fans of the book and just general fantasy fans, I can see them running into issues
The third thing I think any adaptation needs to consider is how they handle changes. Changes are inevitable in any book adaptation. Any writer or fan of a novel series who believes otherwise is misguided. You cannot adapt page for page it won’t work. Now some books are written in a very visual style; its something I am familiar with as that tends to be my writing style. I would say this is Lord of the Rings. Things are described in great depth and detail and the prose itself gives you everything that you need
Wheel of Time was similar in describing things in immense details. To film this though things would need to change. You’d need to cut things out, move things around, change some characters around and that is fine, I have no problem with a line that was attributed to character X in the book being given to character y in the series. If it makes the series make more sense then no complaints from me. The problem comes when changes are made for the sake of changes.
And I’m not talking about casting actors or actresses of certain ethnicity for roles. No. Unless a character is expressly described as a certain race or gender, then I have no problem with them being changed. So in the Dark Tower the casting of Idris Elba didn’t really bother me as to the best of my knowledge it had never been confirmed, only hinted. that the gunslinger was white. ‘ll stand corrected on that though, because I’ll be honest, I’ve not read the whole series as often as I’ve read other IPs.
Likewise, with the Rings of Power, there was the initial outcry over the casting of black actors for the dwarves. This thing nuts to me because again, to the best of my knowledge, there has never been anything in any of Professor Tolkien’s work to say that dwarfs were not black.
So for me, those kinds of changes, even if done as a box ticking exercise to appeal to the marketing and PR types don’t cause me a great deal of problems. I know it it does for certain people. But their opinions motivated for different reasons anyway.
What I do have the issue is when changes are made, for the sake of changes, or to push a philosophy of the part of the show’s runners. This happened a lot for me in Wheel of Time. I got the sense in wheel of time that there was a very much ardent feminist ideology going on. Now the books are set in a female dominated world, but they’re set in a female dominated world for a reason. Yet the series basically from the beginning made changes to several key lines to basically say it’s allman’s fault and all men are evil. Whereas the Wheel of Time books do not say that. They say a group of men were evil and the problems of the world are a group of men’s fault. Group not all. And indeed later in the books they actually explore it in much more detail and give a more balanced and nuanced view.
But the change in the series felt very much like a change for the sake of pushing your philosophy. And I’m never comfortable with that. If you’re adapting an author’s work, particularly on a popular IP you should be focused on adopting the work not pushing your own agenda. If you want to push your own agenda, do your own work.
Wheel made other changes, it changed significant parts of Matt and Perrin’s backstories for example. Now those backstories didn’t need changing. They were quite powerful stories. And indeed it sets up narrative depth that will force those characters to take different paths to the books. There was no need for those changes. Those characters were popular in their own right and their stories were well fleshed out in the books. It just felt again like a bit of a flex from the show runners. Look at us, we’ve changed this popular piece and guess what, you’re going to live with it.
The problem is fans don’t live with it and they protest and there was a lot of protesting about a lot of the changes in Wheel of Time. I stress again that I have no problem with changes being necessary for a story but it seems that too many producers now are looking to alter old works for the sake of it; and failing to recognise and many of these works are indeed old. Written in a different era with a different worldview.
Now it remains to be seen what changes lord of the rings, rings of power makes to the bits of lore and published works related to this era. I’ll certainly be watching the first episode just to get a flavour but I do still have my reservations.
I’d also be interested in hearing what my readers think of film adaptations and TV adaptations of popular books. Do you think it’s something that should be attempted more often? Do you think the idea been done to death? Maybe you think that there’s been so many failed are weak adaptations that it’s time for a bit of a breather and people to focus on new and original IPs.
This is something that I’m really keen to discuss with people. It anybody does have strong views on the above, or indeed strong views on Rings of Power from what they’ve seen so far, to drop a comment below. And as always, if they’re polite and well reasoned, I’ll respond.
So we’ll see what comes in September, but in the meantime, I hope everybody is safe and well and I look forward to catching up with you soon.
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