"The Rings of Power" Enters the Storm
With its first season, the Tolkien adaptation reflects a fractured world
“I am afraid it is only too likely: what you say about the critics and the public. I am dreading the publication, for it will be impossible not to mind what is said. I have exposed my heart to be shot at.”
— J.R.R. Tolkien, 1953
In more ways than one, Amazon Prime’s ambitious adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Second Age of Middle-earth mirrors our own contentious times. The reflections may even be infinite, and painful. Having waited to watch all eight episodes of the first season, which premiered on September 1st, I have reserved my judgement while observing the great tempest it has stirred online among critics, fans and newcomers alike. A success in some lights and a failure to others, it seems The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is a kind of Rorschach test for all.
One reason is because the TV series relies heavily on mysteries, choosing to immerse the viewer in the eyes and minds of the characters within its fantastical drama. The all-knowing voice of the narrator — whether in Tolkien’s texts or in people’s heads who have read his works or seen Peter Jackson’s blockbuster films — is mostly absent in this imagining of a period pregnant with the empty space and countless unknowns the great author barely explored. Without the rights to The Silmarillion, the posthumous book that mostly illuminates the preceding histories before and during the Second Age, Amazon navigated bravely and perhaps a tad foolishly into this undertaking. Some have said too greedily.
Yes, they had a blueprint — “constellations” as the showrunners Patrick McKay and J.D. Payne have said in interviews — and an inspired pitch, that charted the major events Tolkien had laid out in backstories inside The Lord of the Rings and its Appendices. However, they had little of real substance to work with — virtually no character dialogue from the source texts that Tolkien left behind. No rich detailed chapters or place descriptions, save for a few things here and there. No embedding of themes within those descriptions or events that one could call a true narrative.
“Tired archetypes” is what Time Magazine has called the results, pointing out the show’s heavy reliance on imagery and motifs that have been raided over and over since Tolkien’s original works were first published, cribbed by other authors and creators from George R.R. Martin to George Lucas: A Stranger, but a wizard; a Harfoot heroine, but a Hobbit; an Elf amazon, but a princess. Some critics, fans and scholars rejected the proposition at the outset, belying their own prejudices. For the impatient, it was a kind of poison: banal, boring, pointless. Still others proclaimed at its conclusion that it was a “stinker” (a la Gollum?), a mess, arrogant, not even a story. One critic, abandoning decorum, melted down: unleashing a “Fuck this” while saying on Twitter it was a crushing disappointment. So we have: Shrugs. Dismissals. Tantrums.
Forbes in a terribly ironic article — I will explain later — posited that the culture wars surrounding The Rings of Power was actually more interesting than the series itself. More serious minded journalists and analysts tried to parse the varying data signals and social media metrics to decide whether the series was a hit or failure. Nielsen and other ratings firms gave a mostly positive picture. Amazon itself put on a brave face, releasing internal numbers that indicated the show delivered. Still, fatefully, HBO’s House of the Dragon, the prequel to Game of Thrones, recaptured as much or more adoring attention.
I’m a little less interested in telling you everything I think about the series. I am not a fan of reviews, and I do not think what works for me will work for others necessarily. If this series and its mixed reception has told me anything, it has reminded me just how subjective art is, and in this case, I think this is more accurate than usual. For one, despite what anyone may think of the series, textually speaking, it is rich. It is very layered. But, it is also often opaque. Similarly, The Lord of the Rings itself, has always been controversial. Some millennial audiences forget that Jackson’s films changed that perception. Critically, The Rings of Power’s riven reception today illustrates the social algorithms that rend us into binaries and the critics that savor them.
To me, this is inevitable. From the very moment I read about this series four years ago, I believed The Rings of Power may have to repeat the complex almost tortured reception The Lord of the Rings books received when they were initially published from 1954 to 1955. Why? My answer is simple: Tolkien. His genius defies simple reincarnation. His fantasy imitators are legion. It took R.R. Martin decades to reinvent Tolkien’s template with his darker, grittier take. Michael Moorcock bitterly revolted. Terry Pratchett took the path of comedy. Ursula K. Le Guin pursued the road of erudite science fiction. So not surprisingly, the Rings showrunners and their writers are now accused of making “fan fiction.”
The facile disgust from some is that because Amazon gave the show hundreds of millions to spend on the show, that because it was “cheaper” to them, that it is a waste, a bungle of a billion dollars. It may spell the end of Amazon Studios some whisper and rumor. And yet, that opaqueness, that unevenness, the flaws, are nothing out of the ordinary for something that is still extraordinary; it is the expensive sets, props, costumes, and visual effects that are only table stakes. Extraordinary, not in its veneer and patina, but in its vulnerability.
Messy as it may be, beating inside is a heart. That is the difference that any adventure into Middle-earth requires. Even an adventure that perhaps tries to do too much, and tries to be too many things to too many people. When you sit back and really think about it, this endeavor was beyond foolish. It was a fool’s hope, as Gandalf or Tolkien would put it. Still, it has a heart beat, however sometimes faint and at times intensely pounding. It may be riddled with too many ideas. Perhaps it suffers from a little hubris. But, it’s human. And with Season One coming to a spirited finish, even so, this is a baby, not a giant.
Which means despite its massive production and marketing budget, just like any artwork made with blood, sweat and tears, it asks us for compassion and in this case, patience. Reviewers often take glee in giving the opposite. It’s their job to guard against bloat and pretentiousness, to call out hacks, frauds and culprits: their pay is dependent on the value of telling us what is good and what is not, saving us, the consumers, time and money. But in a world of so many choices? Some would say such a calling is all the more urgent. Perhaps. But then, in a fracturing world that accelerates and amplifies differences, there is indeed something beautiful in a story that is wandering and more quiet.
What impressed me most about the show is the heart of the show. That is, undeniably, it was made with heart. The writers dived into Tolkien’s letters, his essays, his prologues and interviews. They searched the pages of The Lord of the Rings for key character moments. Crucially, “The Mirror of Galadriel,” perhaps one of the trilogy’s greatest chapters, was the inspiration for the intimate relationship between Galadriel and Sauron in The Rings of Power.
To me, the coupling of the Lady of Light with the Dark Lord in a kind of double helix of temptation and power, of vengeance and salvation, forming a new DNA for the great tales of the Second Age, but also the Third Age, was a stroke of genius. As tricky as it has proved, testing the tolerance of some fans, and confusing the instincts of newcomers and even scholars, Sauron’s clever deceptions — and its extreme danger — is core to Tolkien.
The showrunners have identified a key passage in “The Mirror of Galadriel” as the mythic code that they decided they wanted to explore and expand. “I know what it is you last saw,” Galadriel says, “for that is also in my mind … I say to you, Frodo, that even as I speak to you, I perceive the Dark Lord and know his mind, or all his mind that concerns the Elves. And he gropes ever to see me and my thought. But still the door is closed!”
And when Frodo offers her the One Ring, she says: “And now at last it comes. You will give me the Ring freely! In place of a Dark Lord you will set up a Queen. And I shall not be dark but beautiful and terrible as the morning and the Night! Fair as the Sea and the Sun and the Snow upon the Mountain! Dreadful as the Storm and the Lightning! Stronger than the foundations of the Earth. All shall love me and despair!” They went right to the heart of Tolkien’s epic, the question troubling hearts going back to the beginning of time: how to do the right thing?
As the Scottish psychiatrist and psychoanalyst W. Ronald D. Fairbairn famously wrote in 1952, “it is better to be a sinner in a world ruled by God than to live in a world ruled by the Devil.” In other words, to be an angel in a fallen or broken world, is much harder than to simply do evil when wrongdoing is what was expected of us, harsh self-judgment internalized by way of oppressive rule. Poetically, dramatically and mythologically, this is the problem and the conundrum at the heart of both Sauron and Galadriel’s characters.
The fact that some have fretted over whether this fits “canon” or not are missing the point. As an adaptation, The Rings of Power is simply asking us to imagine this question in detail and to go deep into the psychology of power, and how Tolkien’s mythological project can be shaped to speak to our own time in a way that has not yet been articulated: that the Internet, the Ring, the Machine, can distort us all.
This is reverence with a classic cleverness. In a podcast interview released right after the season finale, Payne described how this fateful moment, how the chance meeting of Galadriel and Sauron in the Sundering Seas — a meeting that one can also read as Providence, a chance for Sauron to repent perhaps, or even a chain reaction of events that is set in motion to test the good in Middle-earth, and eventually bring about the downfall of Sauron thousands of years later — crystallized in a painting by French Romantic artist, Théodore Géricault, depicting the survivors of a shipwreck adrift and starving.
Géricault’s “The Raft of Medusa” was based on a real event in 1816 when the French frigate, the Méduse, ran aground on a sand bank far off the coast of Africa, today’s Mauritania, with the subsequent shipwreck spurring a hastily constructed raft with 147 people aboard, only 15 surviving. It was a controversial event at the time and Géricault’s painting was in turn controversial, for it showed death and despair in graphic and lurid detail, yet shot through with sickly shadows and a luminous Romantic light. The adrift mortals resorted to cannibalism to survive while most drowned. For critic Jonathan Miles, the Méduse’s raft carried the survivors “to the frontiers of human experience.”
First exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1819, over two hundred years ago, the image of despair caused a sensation and was equally praised and condemned. Invoking such artistic fire, The Rings of Power has invited much the same. People love it or hate it. And lest we forget, until Peter Jackson’s award-winning adaptations, as Tolkien feared, The Lord of the Rings was no different. Art provokes at its best — Géricault’s “The Raft of Medusa” inspired Auguste Rodin’s great sculpture The Gates of Hell, and at the other end of the spectrum, Eugène Delacroix’s masterpiece, Liberty Leading the People.
In 1953, Tolkien wrote a letter to his close friend, Father Robert Murray, a Catholic priest and grandson of Sir James Murray, the founder of the Oxford English Dictionary, who had read excerpts of The Lord of the Rings before it was published at Tolkien’s behest. Murray assuaged his anxious friend, telling him that his masterwork was compatible with the Gospel and the “order of Grace.” But he also cautioned that he doubted many critics would be able to make sense of his book, writing, “they will not have a pigeon-hole neatly labelled for it.” Also, importantly, he saw in the image of Galadriel that of the Virgin Mary.
Which leaves me to wonder, as surely the showrunners have, what would happen if the Virgin Mary met Satan on a raft and at the Gates of Hell? The gutsiness of The Rings of Power is that it endeavors to answer such a question at a time when the world seems to be flying apart, pushed on by algorithms that tempt out the darkness in all of us, our vanity, our pain, our rage. Such biblical and fantastical hypotheticals are at the heart of this strange series: the Two Trees of Valinor, apple trees and red apples for the Harfoots and the Stranger, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and Galadriel’s twin baptisms.
But you don’t have to be Christian to receive such wonders. You just have to be somewhat literate, patient and open-minded. Whether one receives it in the spirit of Western art, or as a global spiritual tradition, West or East, clearly Tolkien’s message of enlightenment and compassion still speaks to many in the masses. Whether it does so through action-packed entertainment, or expert or earnest television, or whether shadows creep darker in its schisms and chasms, the promise of Middle-earth is still alive in The Rings of Power.
I see it in the many stories of orphans, widowers and widows, from Elrond to Elendil to Bronwyn. I hear it in Poppy’s “Wandering Day” song. I sense it in Sadoc Burrows’ journey to the sunrise, as surely Tolkien as a baby adventured home from a kraal in the countryside of South Africa. I perceive it in Adar’s dark mission to restore dignity for his orc children. I anticipate it in Gil-Galad’s hard wisdom, as surely he will take it to Mordor in the Last Alliance of Elves and Men. I was blown away by it when Mount Doom erupted in a rush of water and magma. I relished it in the “mind palace” inside Galadriel’s head, as we stared with her into the sea and the abyss. Yet all of these things are easy to let into our hearts.
For what I also enjoy, even admire about The Rings of Power, is it is almost reckless in what it asks of its audience. Like Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings — not Jackson’s — it asks a lot of us. It asks us to juggle five, sometimes six, or seven storylines, in our heads, and this often strains and exposes some questionable choices in pacing and editing, two aspects of filmmaking and television few ever notice. I’m not interested in regurgitating plot points here. One, if you’ve watched it, you can make up your own mind and probably already have. Two, if you have not, just watch it. Three, if you’ve seen some of it, I recommend you keep at it. Most importantly, however, rewatch it. Sit with it. Absorb it. Turn it.
Especially now. Watching it in more of a “binge” mode seems clearly the best way to experience it, and is likely how the series was originally meant to be digested. It is immersive with an average episode length of 70 minutes, which is in many ways too short to gain the slow-build momentum of a 120 minute film, and too short to be enjoyed more quickly after a busy day or when tired. To this, it is unconcerned with the dramatic blow after blow verve or viciousness of most television these days. Watched with this more expansive, world-building metabolism in mind, Rings of Power is not unlike Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring, which famously takes ten chapters before it truly picks up. And even so, Rivendell slows the momentum down again with two more long chapters of expositions and deliberations in “Many Meetings” and “The Council of Elrond.”
While TV is a different medium than books — it usually serves shorter attention spans (25 minutes to 50 minutes) — as the director of the first two episodes, J.A. Bayona, has stated in multiple interviews that he and the creative team see The Rings of Power as embodying and inhabiting a new kind of visual narrative form, something that is neither TV nor film, pushing on the boundaries of television and on previous conceptions of how storytelling should work on screen.
Perhaps avant-garde is what this series is then, in a way. It’s impressionistic, dreamy, emotional, languid, bizarre, and highly poetic. The Tolkien Professor, Corey Olsen, on his episode-by-episode analysis, the excellent Rings and Realms, joined by Maggie Parke, demonstrates how deeply literate and intricate the series is thematically, and in terms of film techniques. I have learned a lot from their videos, which on average run two hours or more — subtlety upon subtlety.
This goes right to the opening scene of The Rings of Power. One could so easily miss it. For those who have read The Silmarillion, we know just how important Finrod Felagund is to Tolkien’s legendarium. He is beloved. And we also know Galadriel loses two other brothers in the First Age, as well as her uncle and many cousins, much less other friends and companions. But the key part is given to us by the show when Finrod tries to teach Galadriel to sharpen her moral compass.
“Do you know why a ship floats and a stone cannot?” he asks Galadriel after pulling her away from enraged violence when another Elf child sinks her paper boat. “Because the stone sees only downward. The darkness of the water is vast and irresistible. The ship feels 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.”
Here he is foreshadowing the tale at the heart of Tolkien’s whole myth cycle, the impossible mission of Eärendil the Mariner, who takes one of the Silmarils — a gem, a “rock” — and carries it on high hope to the gods, who lift him and his ship Vingilot up into the sky where he becomes the Morning Star that will inspire the free peoples of Middle-earth against Sauron and evil in the many ages to come. This passage was criticized as “pretentious” by TheOneRing.net’s Ostadan in a learned analysis of Tolkien’s use of language compared to the show’s more contemporary word choices at times. But I respectfully disagree.
In fact, this passage, while a bit too poetic for its own good at first, is just that: poetry. And while that may be asking a lot of most viewers, it is not impossible to understand or grasp, that we live in stormy times, that all people do. Cherish the times we don’t. But when the storm comes, remember we have a choice to do the right thing, even when others are not looking. I will quote the rest of the passage because I think it is that important. We see the power of its theme repeated throughout the first season, including with the meteor falling at the end of episode one through to Sauron’s illusions in the finale.
“But sometimes the lights shine just as brightly reflected in the water as they do in the sky. How am I to know which lights to follow?” Galadriel asks her brother. Finrod answers simply, “Sometimes we cannot know until we have touched the darkness.” To which she says, “But that seems so simple.” Yes, it is. “The most important truths often are,” he says. And so is The Rings of Power in its way.
But entertainment requires more than poetics. Without rousing action. Without blood and guts and sex, Rings of Power can often feel like a spa or diet. Its gotchas and misdirects and mystery boxes are all the more annoying for many, having caused what one might term various waves of online riots. The resistance of course started first with backlashes against diverse “woke” casting. It then devolved into lore zealotry (no matter that the Tolkien estate approved the storylines, characters and scripts). The phantom scent of politics and the perceived blasphemous transgressions against Tolkien’s original texts? Distractions all, from receiving the show on its own terms.
Despite flaws, real or perceived, I found I was able to enjoy its flashes of inspiration. It’s funny how much those flashes lie in the eyes of the beholders. Even a Forbes critic — Erik “Wokebeard” Kain — admitted to me that he liked Poppy’s song and the Harfoots, despite trolling the show week after week, almost day after day, on Twitter, on his blog, and on podcasts and YouTube videos. How strange and strained: A mockery. A mess. Arrogant. Insufferable. All of those are the hyperbolic volleys he has thrown at the series.
And yet it is that last one, “insufferable” that I think brings us back to earth. I set out this consideration of The Rings of Power with an inner sense that this show is a reflection of our times, one that fans and non-fans can stare deep into, and where we can see our own shadows, as well as our angels. The beginning of this series begins in Valinor with Galadriel saying nothing starts off as evil. But Galadriel’s character has sparked many evils on and off screen. She is hated by some on the Internet — this bolder, surer, strong-willed warrior. “Insufferable.”
The problem with this knee-jerk and borderline or over the line misogynistic reaction, is that it ignores eons of male heroes who behave no different. If we go back to Achilles in Homer’s Iliad, presented in many ways as a tragedy (as the first season of The Rings of Power often reads), here is a male hero who pouts, cries and refuses to help his fellow Greek soldiers as they die by the hundreds, all over the “spoils” of war — the captured women that King Agamemnon took instead for himself. Galadriel is nowhere near this kind of selfishness.
Or take the impetuousness of any number of male heroes who are captured and brought before judgement. We have Luke Skywalker who talks back to Han Solo and the Emperor in the Star Wars saga, both times when he is clearly lower in the power structure. We have James Bond, who refuses to bow down to any villains, without fail quipping and playing with fire, all the while seducing this innocent and this fling and that damsel. And yet, when we get a heroine, a testy female character whose passions often get the better of her? Sighs. Curses. Anger.
But that is not what I am seeing from most female reviewers. In fact, there is something very odd happening here. The main character Galadriel solicits shrugs, dismissals and tantrums from some corners, almost all male. Female reviewers like the show more, without a doubt: the Ringer’s Ringer-Verse podcast is in love with Galadriel and The Rings of Power — Joanna Robinson and Mallory Rubin; Slate Magazine’s Leah Marilla Thomas; IGN’s even-keeled Samantha Nelson; IGN’s tough Helen O’Hara; Looper’s Kim Bell and Rachel Redfern; SlashFilm’s Hoai Tran-Bui; Vulture’s Roxana Hadidi; Variety’s Caroline Framke; The New York Times’ Jennifer Vineyard; The New Yorker’s Jo Livingstone; Esquire’s nerdy Adrienne Westenfeld; Salon’s Alison Stine; AV Club’s Cindy White.
That is not to say that plenty of male journalists did not also enjoy or love the series: Variety’s Michael Nordine; The New York Times’ Noel Murray; Collider’s Andrew Anderson, Kevin Tash, and Steve Weintraub; The Spectator’s Grayson Quay; AV Club’s Matt Schimkowitz; The Ringer’s Miles Surrey; IndieWire’s Steve Greene; Far Out’s Arun Starkey; even a measured college paper reviewer, Samuel Garcia Piccione, at The Stylus. To be fair, I am not saying the show is stellar in all regards, or that it surpasses relative assessments. As Ben Travers of IndieWire demonstrates, one can have a measured and balanced reaction.
Is it the year’s best TV or the decade’s, the century’s? It’s clearly not, though it is remarkable nonetheless. It feels jumbled in some places. Is it the kinks and jitters of a first season? Or was it the pandemic? The miscalculations of Amazon Studios’ leadership? The inexperience of McKay and Payne? Either way, I find the social-media normed howls from the harshest critics excessive: again, there is Sean T. Collins of Decider’s “Fuck this”; Kain’s barrage of self-immolating diatribes at Forbes; 19FortyFive’s Robert Farley drawing military strategy comparisons; Entertainment Weekly’s derisive Darren Franich; and The Guardian’s Stuart Heritage, who worships Jackson and cannot pass up slinging coarse and superfluous demerits.
There’s lots to say about the latter set, who are invariably gaga over Jackson’s popular adaptations and were perhaps teenagers when those films came out. They’re also apparently steeped in Tolkien. They are true fans they want us to know in some capacity or another. They have credentials. But in some ways that’s exactly the problem because it is not really the logic of their arguments that taints their flippant retorts, but the injured tone and in fact the hasty journalism — case in point: Heritage guffaws at the Stranger’s “I’m good!” declaration in the season finale. But this is specifically what Nori tells the Stranger emphatically in the opening of the fifth episode. That is, Heritage’s take feels careless and lazy.
The world is breaking in great part due to the loss of decorum, accelerated and amplified by algorithms. Social media platforms connect us to each other across the globe, but the click economics of journalism combined with the rewarding of outrage in political and social discourse, has also corrupted the discourse around The Rings of Power. It has entered the storm. And like Tolkien before them, McKay and Payne are now getting their hearts shot at. That’s showbiz, in a way. It has always been a bloodsport in some fashion. But it’s also sad, because this is Tolkien. That is, would he approve of such vitriol expressed in his name?
For as Sean “Fuck this” Collins declared in Decider, by his rights, The Rings of Power has almost zero value. In his disingenuous accounting, the series added nothing of value to the appreciation of Tolkien. This is impossible. Alternately, Kain, after saying on Twitter that fans on Reddit who liked The Rings of Power were “stupid” and called a fan who challenged his tirades a “dumbass,” also told me that “there is nothing here” in regards to the adaptation while writing elsewhere that he actually liked aspects of the show, such as Adar and the opening two episodes. So how can there be “nothing” when he says there is something?
Similarly, on Twitter, Collins more transparently talked about how he was personally gutted by the show’s direction, revealing his inability to separate his emotions from his judgements. “Obviously I've watched a lot of shows that were a lot worse, but I don't think I've ever felt so let down by something I wanted and expected to love,” he posted. Continuing his shred: “I'm sure McKay and Payne are nice guys, and I don't think they deliberately set out to Ruin The Books, and I'm not going to write a tumblr essay about how they, personally, assaulted Galadriel.” Is that sarcasm or honesty? Perhaps it’s meant as both.
Out of respect, I do want to give all of these writers the benefit of the doubt, however. Collins is a talented writer. He once wrote one of the better reviews of Underworld’s Barbara, Barbara, We Face A Shining Future for Pitchfork. Kain is an industrious chronicler of video games and obviously cares about his craft and the art of storytelling in various mediums. And I can appreciate that reviewers like Stewart are frank and unsparing. Brutal is their brand. Still, while Amazon is a mega corporation with a maximal bent (something Stewart invokes in his take-down of Rings of Power), I still adhere to the Jonathan Gold or A.O. Scott tenor. Masters of criticism, they elevated more than destroyed. With humanity, they celebrated the humanities always with a touch of humility and compassion. Objectivity was therefore preserved even when they effused or revulsed.
But even more than this — as the shadow lies inside us all — is the lie that the show has no story. That is the accusation. Because it wanders and spans. Because it stumbles. Because it violates some fans’ orthodoxies in terms of lore. Because it takes chances and holds many secrets. Polygon’s Joshua Rivera raises this specter: that at the end of the day, it was more a map than a story. But I don’t see it just as one thing. The creator does not owe the audience a conventional story. When art works, the audience does not know what it wants or what to expect. And while I caution against the tone and the outrage of some of these critics, I also would grant that by leaving so much in the dark, one can indeed “lose the room.”
And yet, while at times wayward and off, it does have a story. That story is pretty wild in fact. It’s the story of what Tolkien called the Machine. How it deceives us and divides us. How it corrupts even the best among us — the “ends always justify the means.” Even Elon Musk took the bait like a moth to the flame. By giving us a story about Sauron’s evil and its consequences, The Rings of Power indeed tests us. How? By showing Galadriel fail that test and then struggle again to pass it.
We see this in the story’s other main thread with the Stranger and Nori. This was the moment when it started to play a deeper melody for me. I never expected that much from it. That it could “match” Tolkien was always a long shot. And yet, as I thought about all of its orphans and hurting families, it emerged brighter. The Brandyfoots and Poppy are struggling to keep on trail, to not fall behind …
We’ve just seen that even the Harfoots can be harsh in the storm to survive, outcasting Nori’s family. The Stranger — homeless, battered and speechless — awakens and begins to push. There he is, standing behind the cart, with its wheels that will one day become doors to hobbit holes in the Shire, speaking.
“Friend,” he says. Speak friend and enter.* Amid all the bitterness and recriminations, it doesn’t get any simpler or better than that. A light burned brighter inside me as I made new connections to Tolkien’s original vision. Even despite a dazed first season. We must remember. Friend.
*For anyone who missed the last reference, “Speak friend, and enter” are the instructions to opening the Doors of Durin, at the West-gate of Moria, which Gandalf and Frodo together decipher in The Fellowship of the Ring.
And no, I am not convinced yet that The Stranger is Gandalf. He could still very easily be a Blue Wizard or someone else altogether. We’ll have to find out in Season Two, likely two years from now.
Everyone needs to read/listen to this. Captured to perfection my thoughts and feelings regarding the phenomenon of the Rings of Power itself. Looking forward to the other parts of this series, and the subsequent thoughts that will eventually arise once the new seasons are out down the line.