We are now waist-deep into 2022′s great Battle of the Fantasy Prequels. This weekend House of the Dragon streams the sixth instalment in a 10-part season, while Amazon yesterday released the fifth episode of its eight-part The Rings of Power. For the uninitiated, the uninterested or the actively phobic, the two might merely seem indistinguishable variants of the same sort of Dungeons & Dragons twaddle. For devotees of George RR Martin and JRR Tolkien, the stakes may be inexpressibly high. For most of us, a half-decent plotline and a few good battles to go with our Friday night pizza would have been sufficient.
Unfortunately, by this stage it has become clear that the showrunners and their streaming paymasters have made the same terrible mistake. In setting out to replicate successful predecessors (Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy and HBO’s eight-season Game of Thrones series), they chose the wrong damn heroes. In both cases, after surveying the expansive universes created by Martin and Tolkien, they decided to focus on the posh blonde people. With House of the Dragon, that meant the Targaryen dynasty. In The Rings of Power it was the elves. With that, their doom was sealed.
It’s not hard to see how this could have happened with The Rings of Power, the first billion-dollar production to be based on a book’s appendix (the only-for-true-nerds bits tacked on to the end of LOTR). Tolkien, an arch-conservative who was in the news again this week when putative far-right Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni was revealed as a lifelong fan, was at his worst in these portentous, cod-medieval passages. It should not be a great shock that the unreadable has turned out to be undramatisable.
House of the Dragon, meanwhile, is based on an account of the Targaryen dynasty written, according to Martin, “300 years after the fact”. It is unsurprisingly short on humour, nuance or any of the little details that can turn fantasy’s faux-historical creations into living, breathing reality. At least unlike the perennially bloodless elves (surely Tolkien’s most unsuccessful creations after Tom Bombadil), they demonstrate some appetite for sex, drugs, power and the other finer things in life.
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Unlike their predecessors, both dramas start with the posh blonde people and proceed to climb down the social ladder from there. In the case of House of the Dragon, they don’t proceed very far. The sweeping vistas of Northern Ireland, Iceland, Croatia and Spain, which brought some visual grandeur to Game of Thrones, are sorely missed in House of the Dragon. Filmed largely in an English studio, it feels cramped by comparison.
The Rings of Power is able to flex its bigger budgetary muscles with cinematic vistas that had some critics in initial ecstasy, but the problems begin as soon as the characters open their mouths.
With their cut-glass Rada accents, Elrond and his fellow elves move through this pageant of rough-hewn authenticity with all the poise and empathy of Prince William visiting a community centre in Toxteth
Irish Times readers may already have read about the stage-Irishry of the proto-hobbits. Irritating they may be, but only marginally more so than the dwarves, who appear to have dialled in their performances from an early episode of Rab C Nesbitt. Men (that’s you and me, send your misgendering complaints to the Tolkien estate) appear to have based their general visual affect and accents on the veteran Leicester hard-rock band Kasabian. Meanwhile, with their cut-glass Rada accents, Elrond and his fellow elves move through this pageant of rough-hewn authenticity with all the poise and empathy of Prince William visiting a community centre in Toxteth.
Asked about this by The Irish Times last week, showrunners JD Payne and Patrick McKay unwittingly dug themselves a newer, deeper hole by explaining that they had been inspired, “as Tolkien was, by particular regional accents around the British Isles”. They didn’t say which particular region inspired the elves, but it was clearly the Home Counties.
From Medea to Hamlet to The Crown, there is, obviously, a long tradition of compelling stories about the rich and powerful ruling classes which has set the template for most of the drama we see today. You could make a convincing case, for example, that the BBC’s I, Claudius, for all its rickety 1970s sets and plummy accents, is the touchstone for much of contemporary prestige TV, from The Sopranos to Succession.
But one of the reasons for the success of Tolkien’s and Martin’s fantasy worlds has been their willingness to present them through the eyes of the small and the weak, undercutting the genre’s tendency towards heroic grandiosity. Is it possible that, in making commendable efforts to introduce racial diversity into their casting, the creators of the two series lost sight of that? Negotiating themes such as the contested purity of bloodlines or a continent-wide race war is tricky enough without having to address the fact that your leading protagonists are a Nordic-blonde ruling caste.
