14 Jul 2022

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Diversity

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Ismael Cruz Córdova will be the first person of color to play an elf, Arondir “a silvan elf,” onscreen in a Tolkien project.

The Estate of J.R.R. Tolkien auctioned the rights to the stories originating in the Appendices to The Lord of the Rings and the winner was Jeff Bezos’s Amazon paying $250 million.

Comes the new Numenorean series that begins streaming September 2nd, long-time readers like myself, I expect, are going to feel that Christopher Tolkien did not get nearly enough, considering what Amazon and their millennial screenwriters and “showrunners” J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay will be doing to J.R.R. Tolkien mythical universe, in particular, repopulating it with characters of their own, and especially with characters whose raison d’être is not even a dramatic goal, but mere politically correct “diversity.”

Vanity Fair spilled the beans on what is coming back in February:

Amazon’s series will also broaden the notion of who shares the world of Middle-earth. One original story line centers on a silvan elf named Arondir, played by Ismael Cruz Córdova, who will be the first person of color to play an elf onscreen in a Tolkien project. He is involved in a forbidden relationship with Bronwyn, a human village healer played by Nazanin Boniadi, a British actor of Iranian heritage. Elsewhere, a Brit of Jamaican descent, Sir Lenny Henry, plays a harfoot elder, and Sophia Nomvete has a scene-stealing role as a dwarven princess named Disa—the latter being the first Black woman to play a dwarf in a Lord of the Rings movie, as well as the first female dwarf. “It felt only natural to us that an adaptation of Tolkien’s work would reflect what the world actually looks like,” says Lindsey Weber, executive producer of the series. “Tolkien is for everyone. His stories are about his fictional races doing their best work when they leave the isolation of their own cultures and come together.”

When Amazon released photos of its multicultural cast, even without character names or plot details, the studio endured a reflexive attack from trolls—the anonymous online kind. “Obviously there was going to be push and backlash,” says Tolkien scholar Mariana Rios Maldonado, who is not affiliated with The Rings of Power, “but the question is from whom? Who are these people that feel so threatened or disgusted by the idea that an elf is Black or Latino or Asian?”

Catch the final note of intimidation in the second paragraph of the Vanity Fair summary. Get in line! Dare to object to the intrusion of extraneous and inconsistent characters and complete infidelity to J.R.R. Tolkien’s imagined world and text, and YOU KNOW WHAT THAT MAKES YOU! A BIGOT! A RACIST! AN UNPERSON! THE NEXT SUBJECT OF TWO MINUTES HATE!

Well, too damn bad, Señorita Maldonado. I don’t feel “threatened,” but, yes!, I am already disgusted with the prospect of some self-important, brain-washed-at-school, 1980s-born twerps misusing their opportunity of working with the products of J.R.R. Tolkien’s imagination and brain to intrude their own completely incongruous and abrasively obnoxious political ideology.

It is perfectly obvious to every reader of the LOTR that Tolkien’s fantasies represent an alternative mythical pre-modern European world. Eskimos, Japanese, Cowboys and Indians, astronauts, sexual deviants, and the notion of Affirmative Action are all missing.

Tolkien was born in 1892. His sensibility is fundamentally Edwardian, and his viewpoint is completely Northern-European-centric, more than that: England-and-Scandinavian-centric. Persons of color are represented, as Haradrim pirates, as dark-skinned wild men, and, of course, possibly, one could argue, as Orcs. One will look in vain to find Dutchmen, Germans, Frenchmen, Italians, Spaniards, or Slavs.

There was no depiction whatsoever of female dwarves, and presumably Tolkien had his own reasons for omitting them. There can be no possible legitimate justification for Amazonian twerps putting in what a great author and creative genius left out.

Entertainment Weekly, today,

One new character is Isildur’s sister Eärien, played by Ema Horvath. Invented for the series, this bright and ambitious young woman has dreams of being an architect. Horvath describes her as being “on the cusp of womanhood,” adding that “she’s still quite insecure and naïve about the way the world works.” Tolkien wrote that Elendil had two sons: Isildur and Anárion. (At the start of Rings of Power, Anárion is off screen.) When it came to inventing new details like Eärien, McKay and Payne say they and the writers’ room approached the task almost like historians, poring over Tolkien’s work to “excavate” details and common threads they could weave into a larger narrative.

For fans worried about conflicting canon, McKay and Payne point to one of Tolkien’s published letters, where he wrote about wanting “other minds and hands” to create art in his legendarium. “We feel like we’re taking up the gauntlet that he himself put down,” Payne adds. “He gave us what we like to say are the stars in the sky that we have to connect and draw the constellation in.”

The diversity of the cast has also been scrutinized. For the first time, Middle-earth will be populated by multiple actors of color, including those playing dwarves, elves, and more. It’s a decision that’s been key to the show’s DNA from the start, and [Cynthia] Addai-Robinson [who plays Tar-Miriel, the last legitimate ruler of Numenor] says to complain about that diversity would be to go against the very spirit of the source material. “[Tolkien] explores many themes, but one of them is the idea of people of different ethnicities, backgrounds, and walks of life all coming together for a common cause,” she says. “For me personally, as a viewer, I would have the expectation that [the show] would reflect the real world, as well as the world as I aspire it to be.”

So much for Legitimacy! If we’re unbound by any obligations of fidelity to the author’s vision and we’re going to go right ahead and “reflect the real world” and have a go at making “the world as [we] aspire it to be,” well, we certainly don’t want to grow old and die. We clearly need to climb aboard the ship with Ar-Pharazon the Golden, break the Ban of the Valor, invade the Undying Lands, and go for Equity and Diversity of Immortality!

Tolkien might have liked the idea of other people writing fan fiction spin-offs set in Middle Earth, but he certainly would have expected his epigones to respect the Middle Earth he created as he defined it, and to confine their creative innovations to new storylines and personages consistent with the world as he invented it. He would have been absolutely infuriated by the intrusion of sanctimonious left-wing egalitarian ideology and identity group politics.

It’s clear that the new Amazon series will be certainly as bad as Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, which at least was watchable and had some good things in it. But it looks perfectly possible that it’s going to be every bit as bad as Jackson’s The Hobbit movies (which were terrible), or worse.

Amazon may butcher Tolkien’s Numenor as completely as they made a hash of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time.


Sophia Nomvete plays dwarven princess named Disa and will be the first Black woman to play a dwarf in a Lord of the Rings movie, as well as the first female dwarf. And she’s missing her beard!

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8 Feedbacks on "The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Diversity"

HairlessJoe

No Tolkien fan here, but my guess it’s going to be a stinker and bomb in the theaters.



Boligat

So far I have not succumbed to LOTR. Not the books, not the films. Don’t plan on it either.



OneGuy

There is real hate and real bigotry, most of it from the left. But what I think most people fail to grasp is that when you put something out there:

OK let’s use an example, suppose I decide to have a play based on The Lion King but all the actors are Lilly white. And I do nothing more than show pictures of the actors. Seems harmless, right? BUT I guarantee you that you would get a million replies demanding that the actors must be people of color and more specifically of African descent.

OK! I get that. It makes sense even in today’s topsy turvy world. BUT the very same people who would say “how dare you cast a white actor to play in The lion King” would conversely say “what’s the problem casting a black actor in a movie that was traditionally white?

So there is a clear double standard and it is an intentional double standard and it is intended, hoped for, that it will cause exactly the reaction that they got. They want to be in your face and dare you to object,

So, when the “trolls” on the internet object, because they aren’t stupid and they know the whole purpose of this is to troll them, then the “in your face” crowd goes “OMG what a bunch of racists!!

And that is how the game is played.



bobby b

I’ll agree with your ideas about how these new people are subverting Tolkien for their own ideological purposes. But . . .

LOTR/H fanboi here. Probably read the four books ten times by eighth grade, many more times after.

Peter Jackson’s movies – which were constrained as all movies are in the face of a saga – were wonderful.



Fusil Darne

You guys have your panties in a bunch over a piece of fiction, a piece of fiction not nearly as good as the real life fiction we have been forced to live in since January of 2020.
Find a shop manual for an old car. Use it to perform a rebuild on that model cars carburetor, brake system, or suspension. Find glory and accomplishment in a constructive use of a book.
Burn your fiction when it gets cold next January, and you are eating the bugs you stored.



bobby b

Fusil, it’s bread AND circuses. Both are important to a healthy life.



Fusil Darne

Hunger, changes everything.



bobby b

I know. No one ever dies of a lack of circuses.

But they want to.



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