The first season of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power recently concluded with an explosive finish to the season that has fans excitedly looking forward to the second season. While the second season has recently started filming and is likely to be released sometime in 2024, season one may officially be shelved alongside the various other adaptations of JRR Tolkien’s legendarium. The rings of power was one of the most anticipated series of recent years as fans eager to return to the world of Middle-Earth. The final exploration of Tolkien’s worlds took place in the early 2010s with Peter Jackson’s trilogy of films based on the hobbit. While those movies were much more of a mixed bag than Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, they still served as an exciting venture in Tolkien’s works.
There are some pretty significant differences between the new Prime Video series and the various Middle-Earth movies that have come before it. These distinguishing factors stem both from the details of the material being modified and from the general approach to modifying it. While some fans have had complaints about The rings of power‘s approach to Tolkien’s storytelling, others have hailed the series as a worthy addition to the long-established franchise. Now that the first season has ended, it can be looked back on as a whole story in itself. Here’s how the first season of The rings of power adapts Tolkien’s work differently than Jackson’s Lord of the Rings and hobbit movies.
An Unexplored Age of Middle-earth
The idea that The rings of power exists in another age is twofold. First, and most obvious is the fact that the story is set in the Second Age of Middle-Earth, as opposed to the Third Age in which the stories of the hobbit and Under the spell of the Ring have been told. Prior to the events of The rings of power, the Second Age is a time of relative peace. The peoples of Middle Earth and Arda have been settled in their lives long after the War of Wrath at the end of the First Age, in which the first Dark Lord, Morgoth, was finally defeated. The Second Age is a time of prosperity for the Men, Elves, Dwarves, and Harfoots of the world, and the first season of The rings of power shows the upheaval of that peace with the return and rise of Sauron, Morgoth’s chief lieutenant.
The Second Age was previously only seen briefly in Tolkien on-screen adaptations. Jackson’s opening prologue The Fellowship of the Ring shows the climactic events at the end of the age. The final alliance of elves and humans marches into Sauron’s realm of Mordor, before finally casting down the second Dark Lord of Middle-Earth as Isildur cuts the One Ring from his hand. The rings of power takes a closer look at this period. There are many core characters in the series. Some characters, such as Isildur, his father Elendil, Galadriel and Elrond, may be familiar to fans of the Lord of the Rings movies, while others such as Durin IV, Arondir, and Halbrand are either expanded characters from the source texts or entirely new additions to the lore.
By setting The rings of power in the Second Age, the creative team behind the series gets a lot more breathing room than they would otherwise have had in a Third Age story. While the Third Age is best known to the general public and fans of Tolkien, a new story within that time would only invite further comparisons to Jackson’s Lord of the Rings and hobbit movies. While a prequel series about Aragorn or Gimli should have led directly to Under the spell of the Ring, The rings of power is much freer to tell his own story. At the end of the day, the series will likely lay some of the foundations for the Third Age and the stories that take place in it, but it won’t appear directly in the movies. In that sense, placing the new Middle-Earth series in the Second Age is both creatively beneficial and much easier to avoid the legal complications that would come with directly teasing Jackson’s events. Under the spell of the Ring.
A new era of entertainment
The second way The rings of power exists in a different era from the previous one Lord of the Rings-related movies is in a real-world sense. The entertainment industry today is in a very different state from when the hobbit movies were released. This is all the more true for the early 2000s, when Under the spell of the Ring first hit theaters. Hollywood is increasingly dominated by streaming services and big budget blockbusters. Superhero movies didn’t catch on until the early 2000s with people like X-Men and Spider Manand even in the early 2010s when the hobbit was released, the Marvel Cinematic Universe was just beginning to take its place in Hollywood.
Now Marvel movies and other similar blockbusters dominate the multiplex, leaving little room for anything else to really come in and make a splash. More in-depth and rich stories, such as Under the spell of the Ring, are becoming rare as studios are stricter about the kind of movies they produce. Even Frodo Baggins himself, Elijah Wood, recently stated that: he didn’t believe that Under the spell of the Ring can be made the same way that it was in the present environment. Of course there are exceptions to this idea, one of the biggest is that of Denis Villenueve Dune. However, the question was whether Dune would even get a sequel in the first place.
Great stories like Under the spell of the Ring are now often told exclusively via streaming and television series. Game of Thrones is largely due to that, because that series proved that these kinds of epic stories could not only work in a serial medium, but that there was an audience for it in that form. It is probably because of this change that The rings of power was developed as a series to start with, rather than as a new trilogy of films like Under the spell of the Ring and the hobbit. Telling a story through a serial format is a very different challenge than telling on film, which is one of the main reasons that The rings of power feels so different. Since the first season (out of a planned five) had eight hours to tell its story, there was a lot more time to spend developing characters and environments. Whether you believe the show has put its eight hours to good use or not is up to you, but the fact remains that the show is much slower than the movies as it has the time available to showcase many of the conversations and moments that probably being left on the cutting room floor of a film.
Less detailed source material
One of the biggest distinguishing factors The rings of power from ‘s movies Under the spell of the Ring and the hobbit is the amount of source material available to extract from. Under the spell of the Ring and the hobbit were the only complete Middle-Earth novels Tolkien wrote and published while he was alive. A vast majority of additional material, such as: The Silmarillion, The children of Húrin and The Fall of Gondolin, was edited by his son Christopher Tolkien and published posthumously. While part of the Second Age story in the appendices to Under the spell of the Ring while Tolkien was alive, much of the material also comes from The Silmarillion and the History of Middle Earth collection. A complete collection of the stories of the Second Age will be published in November in a new book, edited by Brian Sibley, called The Fall of Númenor.
While the general narrative of the Second Age certainly provides the necessary outline of events to tell a complete story, it is in the finer details that the greatest differences between The rings of power and Under the spell of the Ring begin to appear. One of the main complaints about season 1 of The rings of power has been that much of the dialogue doesn’t carry the same heavy weight as in the movies. The reasoning for this is clear, as much of the dialogue in Jackson’s films is taken directly from the original novels. A vast majority of the most memorable and effective rules from the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy are the ones originally written by Tolkien in the books. While Jackson and his co-writers certainly added a lot of new dialogue to the story, they always had the written work they could rely on.
With the Second Age and The rings of power, there is a very small amount of written dialogue and specific smaller interactions that can be pulled for the show. Much of what Tolkien wrote about the Second Age is told more as a historical text and story than by following specific characters through a story to see all the specific interactions and conversations they have. As such, many of the dialogues and details of The rings of power had to be completely invented for the show. While this can be an advantage, as it gives the creative team a lot more leeway to tell the story the way they want, it can also be a disadvantage and contribute to the show not feeling quite like the movies.