Rocking the Boat

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power opens with a young girl folding paper into a boat, or, in other words, adapting from the page for streaming (down the river). The paper boat is a beautiful, fragile thing, but well-made enough to not merely float down the river but to sail with swan’s wings. That is, until an unruly mob of kids pelts the thing with rocks. 

“Even you couldn’t possibly believe that old scrap could float,” one of the boys sneeringly shouts at Galadriel. And then the boy gloats after sinking the boat with a rock “I told you it wouldn’t float.”

What follows is a conversation between Galadriel and her brother Finrod, in which they discuss one of the central themes of the new show adapted from the works of JRR Tolkien, a theme that is deeply rooted in the great Subcreation of Middle Earth. 

“Do you know why a ship floats, and a stone cannot?” asks Finrod. “Because the stone sees only downward. The darkness of the water is vast, and irresistible. The ship sees the darkness as well, striving moment by moment to master her, and pull her under. But the ship has a secret. For unlike the stone, her gaze is not downward, but up, fixed upon the light that guides her, whispering of grander things than darkness ever knew.”

“But sometimes,” Galadriel objects, “the lights shine just as brightly reflected in the water as in the sky. It’s hard to say which way is up and which is down. How am I to know which lights to follow?”

We don’t get Finrod’s answer until much later in the episode: “Sometimes we cannot know, until we have touched the darkness.”

If any man touched the darkness, JRR Tolkien did. Tales of the Elder days from which this new adaptation largely draws were written as Tolkien watched his friends and schoolmates die in the trenches of World War I. The work for which he is best known, The Lord of the Rings, was written largely during the darkest days of World War II.

Tolkien’s entire legendarium is a fragile, paper boat floating over vast and irresistible darkness striving moment by moment to master and pull it under. You can’t read of the three kinslayings, of the falls of Gondolin, Nargothrond, Beleriand, Numenor, of the gut-wrenching tragedy of the children of Hurin, or the destruction of the two trees of Valinor and not just touch the darkness but get coiled up and smothered in it, deeper and darker and more terrifying than the unlight webs of Ungoliant. 

But through all of that, through Thorin succumbing to dragon’s sickness and Gandalf falling in Moria and Theoden slain at the Pelennor Fields and Frodo surrendering to the Ring at the crack of Mount Doom - yet still Tolkien finds a way to look up to the light. "There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach." (Return of the King).

The Lord of the Rings shows us all too clearly the dangers of being too much like the stone, looking downward always to the dark. Denethor, the steward of Gondor, thought that he could look downward with the stone of the Palantiri and see the light, but he could only see darkness. He did see ships, but these were ships shown to him by the Dark Lord. The tragedy is that the ships Denethor took to be the final nail in the coffin of all his hopes and dreams were actually the force that turned the tide of battle and saved the city he had fought all of his life to protect. But for Denthor, these ships, from his warped perspective, did not float on rays of hope but represented only darkness and despair to Denethor, to the point that he commanded his still-living son to be burned with him. Distracted by the reflected light in the seeing stone, Denethor was dragged down into the darkness and mastered by it. 

There is a contingent of those who claim to love Tolkien and his Legendarium, and yet, when it comes to this most recent adaptation of his work, they are like the group of elf children sneering at any who would dare to think that this newest adaptation could ever float, and then throwing rocks at it to make sure that they are right. Tolkien would be rolling in his grave, they howl, at each new perceived inconsistency or infidelity to the text. 

To see the discourse surrounding his work might cause Tolkien to weep bitterly from his grave, but he would hardly be surprised. In an abandoned sequel to The Lord of the Rings called The New Shadow, Tolkien wrote of exactly what has been happening. He called it Orcs’ work rather than Trolls’ work, but in both orcs and trolls “run the roots of Evil and the black sap is strong in them” (The Peoples of Middle Earth). 

In a discussion between Master Borlas and a young man Saelon regarding weather it is eviler to steal a fully ripe fruit versus an unripe fruit, Borlas draws the following distinction: “Surely even a boy must understand that fruit is fruit, and does not reach its full being until it is ripe; so that to misuse it unripe is to do worse than just to rop the man that has tended it: it robs the world, hinders a good thing from fulfillment. Those who do so join forces with all that is amiss, with the blights and the cankers and the ill winds. And that was the way of Orcs” (The Peoples of Middle Earth). 

Those who have cast stones at The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power before seeing a single episode are like Saelon and his friends stealing unripe fruit. They would deprive the world by attempting to hinder a good thing from fulfillment. Yes the boat will sink if you throw rocks at it, and the fruit will taste bad if you try to eat it before it is ripe. And the black ships sailing up the River Anduin will seem like certain doom before Aragorn leaps from the ship and unfurls his banner. 

As someone who has been reading the stories of Middle Earth for a quarter of a century, who watched and re-watched all of the special features of the Lord of the Rings films, who collected and painted Balrogs and Mumakils and armies of Khazad Dum dwarves for the Middle Earth Strategy Battle Game, who owns replicas of both Arwen and Aragorn’s swords, whose gamertag in Highschool was Olorin16, who used to pore through the names in the index to the Silmarillion in their teens to write Middle Earth Fanfic, who owns the boxed set of the History of Middle Earth - I am dismayed that the culture wars that have ravaged Star Wars and Marvel and Harry Potter and so many other properties have descended upon Middle Earth.

Whether one is hiding their real issues behind things like dwarven female facial hair or automatically labeling anyone who speaks out about casting choices as a racist and a bigot, people from either end of the spectrum who insist on hammering The Rings of Power show into a political framework are missing the true spirit of Tolkien.

Claiming that Tolkien’s work or adaptations of his work can or should or must have a woke or anti-woke or [insert political or social or economic or religious] agenda is claiming that Tolkien’s works or their derivations must be allegorical in nature. Tolkien famously hated allegory in all of its manifestations and had done so since he had been old and wise enough to detect its presence.

It is possible and perhaps even likely that many of the people who worked on the Rings of Power adaptation did not share to the same degree Tolkien’s intense loathing for allegory. But we can make a choice to approach The Rings of Power with this idea of applicability, which “resides in the freedom of the reader [or viewer]” rather than allegory, which “resides in the purposed domination of the author [or producer or showrunner or actor]”. 

This contradistinction between allegory and applicability runs far deeper into the core of Tolkien’s creativity than might at first be surmised. Tolkien believed that true creativity was the purview of God alone, and that what mere mortals could do was at best sub-creation - or in other words, creations in miniature as subsets of capital C Creation. In Tolkien’s mind, this Sub-creative process was much more about discovering or revealing art, than it was about coming up with it from whole cloth, as it were. Tolkien wasn’t so much devising Middle Earth from the top-down as he was exploring it from the bottom up. 

That’s why this raging debate between what is considered canon and what isn’t is ultimately meaningless. A canon implies some kind of systematic approach, with clear-cut guidelines and blueprints and databases of information and facts. Tolkien didn’t think like that.

The Hobbit started on the back of an essay he was grading. He had no idea when he started it that it would in any way connect back up to the myths he had devised for his made up languages he had written in his teens and early twenties. And then he didn’t realize when he wrote The Hobbit that Bilbo’s ring would be of any significance, and had to go back and rewrite part of that book. But he didn’t just retcon with some arbitrary “Word of God” authorial insertion. He came up with a whole in-world explanation as to why there were two different editions of the Red Book in circulation.

You can find all sorts of versions of “canon” where dwarf women have beards, or they don’t, or there are no dwarf women. In some versions Galadriel is a lot more flawed, and in some she’s a lot more purely good. The breaking of the world and turning it from flat to round is a big part of the Akallabeth, but in later years Tolkien was considering making the world round from the beginning. 

Tolkien was not authoritarian or domineering about his work. He was building a great tree, and every time he found a new leaf he liked, he'd rush home with it and tack it up on his tree. And he never threw any of the leaves away. I mean, Tom Bombadil started out as some silly stories he told about some Dutch doll, but that went up on the tree. So did the “original”, real version of “Hey Diddle, Diddle”. 

To switch to another metaphor that Tolkien used, it all goes into the soup. Made-up languages and children’s stories and poems and Finnish myths and Christianity and fairies and philological debates and  Atlantis and time travel bets with CS Lewis. All of it goes into the soup. 

It’s all so much more than canon. That’s the great beauty of Tolkien. There is no purposed domination of the author. He doesn’t assume he knows more about Middle Earth than the next man, especially when the next man is himself from five years in the past or twenty years in the future.

Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy is far and away my favorite movie ever. There’s no contest. It’s not even close. That being said, I have some real issues both with departures from the text as well as flaws in story telling. Every single time Sam turns to Frodo and says “By rights we shouldn’t even be here Mr. Frodo” I internally scream I KNOW! Why? Why did you drag them down to Osgiliath, Movie Farmir? It robs his whole “not even if I found it on the road..” speech of any impact. BUT. As much as I would like to learn film editing just so I can cut out that whole sequence because it drives me up the wall every single time, I can’t do it. I can’t do it because even though I hate that they’re in Osgiliath, it’s from Osgiliath that Sam gives his epic monologue at the end of the Two Towers, talking about how the light shines out the clearer while cutting back and forth to Gandalf the White letting the light shine out the clearer as he and Eomer lead the Rohirrim to sweep away the Uruk-Hai. It’s my favorite moment of the whole series.

What I’m trying to say is that I have some major issues with Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy and it’s still my favorite movie ever (I know, I know, it’s three movies, but as Gimli would say, it still only counts as one). So far, from what I’ve seen of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, I’ve got some major issues both from a story point and considering departures from the text. 

But I can’t help but have a big stupid grin on my face every time I think about the fact that we’ve got an actual Lord of the Rings TV show, one that I get to tune into for the next six weeks and then again for the next five years (assuming we don’t let the trolls win). For all of the problems I have with it so far, there are some things that they are absolutely nailing.

Take the opening scene that I described above. There are layers to this scene. Galadriel’s mother is a Teleri, and they built these beautiful swan-shaped white ships, some of the most beautiful works of art in all of Arda. Feanor and his sons (some of whom have read hair just like some of the children that destroyed Galadriel’s boat) go on to destroy these beautiful ships. They may not have the full rights to the Silmarillion but they are finding ways to bring to life, even in small ways these great parts from Tolkien’s works that so few get the chance to experience.

Look, you can steal the unripe fruit and deprive the world from a good thing fulfilled. You can get sucked into the darkness of the stone like Denethor got sucked into the darkness of the Palantir. You can be so convinced that this paper boat ought to sink that you throw rocks at it. But just remember, you can try to rock the paper boat, but in the end paper beats rock, not the other way around. 

I’m going to keep looking up. I’m going to try not to get sucked in by the darkness, but float above it. I’m going to enjoy the fact that more stories from my absolute favorite imaginary world are being brought to life, perhaps not exactly as I imagined, perhaps not as Tolkien himself imagined, but brought to life nonetheless by other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama.