Warning: This article contains spoilers
For Irish viewers, the conversation around Amazon’s $1 billion Lord of the Rings prequel, The Rings of Power, has been dominated by the bizarre decision to give the hobbit-like Harfoots ersatz Irish accents while portraying them as primitives who have just climbed out of a bog. As the linguist and writer Conrad Brusnstrom put it: “There’s an accent that is identified globally as ‘Irish’ that somehow still means ‘primitive’.”
That debate seems set to rage on across the internet. So let us set the horrible Harfoots to one side and focus on other aspects of the series as it now reaches its finale on Amazon Prime Video and zooms in on the question of “Where’s Sauron?”
Where’s Sauron? is The Rings of Power’s version of Where’s Wally? JRR Tolkien may not have appreciated his life’s work being distilled into a game of TV Cluedo
This is The Rings of Power’s version of Where’s Wally? Apparently, the embodiment of evil in Middle-earth has gone underground and taken on a new guise. The fun with The Rings of Power has allegedly been in working out which of the cast is Ole Big Eye.
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That tutting from on high is possibly JRR Tolkien, who may not have appreciated his life’s work being distilled into a game of TV Cluedo. Nor does The Rings of Power really even pull off the shock reveal. Because, as everyone had already worked out, the big bad is brooding bro Halbrand (Charlie Vickers). The real surprise would have been the show unveiling someone else as ruler of Mordor (which we saw created earlier in the series).
So Halbrand is Sauron, though he comes across not as irreducibly evil so much as merely a bit distant and romantically contorted. Why are his feelings in a heap? Because he has been rejected by Galadriel (Morfydd Clark), whom he is keen to seduce and make his queen. And there we have it: Sauron is not the successor to Morgoth and the font of all that is dire in Middle-earth. He’s the original incel, lashing out when his dream girlfriend rejects him.
The tragedy of The Rings of Power is not that Amazon wants to tell new stories in this old land but that it has gone about it ham-fistedly
As a Tolkien fan, my nerd antenna went haywire when The Rings of Power debuted. The pilot — Harfoots aside — conveyed a great deal of the mystery and the beautiful menace of Middle-earth. Of the two types of Tolkien fans — those who revere his writing as sacred text and those who regard The Lord of the Rings as nothing more or less than a great fantasy novel — I was in the second category, and the idea of using Middle-earth as a sandbox felt thrilling.
It wouldn’t have been the first time someone had got stuck into the lore. Since the Peter Jackson movie the best takes on Middle-earth have been the Shadow of Mordor video games and the One Ring tabletop game. So it isn’t as if Middle-earth should be held up as a holy place where nobody other than Tolkien gets to tell stories. It’s fine to bring a new perspective to this land of ennui-stricken elves and drums in the deep. (His estate agrees, which is why it licensed Middle-earth in the first place.)
The tragedy of The Rings of Power, then, is not that Amazon wants to tell new stories in this old land. It is that it has gone about it ham-fistedly. In particular, attempts at suspense have fallen flat. In the finale, the reveal that the Stranger (Daniel Weyman) is Gandalf lands with a thud. And, as pointed out, it was plain to everyone that Halbrand was Sauron all along. So much for Game of Thrones-level shocks.
The pacing is off too. Galadriel and Halbrand’s adventures on the island kingdom of Númenor dragged on and on. And then, in this simultaneously dreary and rushed finale, Halbrand somehow convinces Elrond (Robert Aramayo) and the other elves to forge rings of power — and Galadriel goes along with it, despite having rumbled her admirer’s secret identity. What a muddle Amazon has made of Middle-earth.
