The Rings of Power teaser looks expensive

boing
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Tolkien only died in 1973. Most of the work that would be more appropriately adapted here was published posthumously with Christopher as the editor/copyright holder. He died 2 years ago.

Even with a shorter copyright term most of this would still be under copyright.

I’m not sure Amazon having a tougher time on a cash grab is a great argument for shorter copyright terms. The Tolkien Estate has been generally a good example of how to manage a copyright in this system. They haven’t shat all over to make a lot of money. Christopher legitimately did serious, academic work from his father’s papers. They haven’t been overly litigious. And when they have stirred legal shit it’s been against major companies. Not fans, parodies or small operations. The fact that D&D exists as it does today is evidence of that. The only conflict there was early use of “Hobbit”, they still roll with the also Tolkien derived “halfling” and got away with cribbing his entire conception of Dwarves.

ETA: The most prominent dispute was with WB/New Line. In part over their assumption that they were clear to make whatever videogames they liked, despite not having rights for that. Because they claimed video games were just merchandize for the films, which they did have rights for.

The estate wasn’t even pissed about the various games. It was the slot machines that had them mad.

From a February Vanity Fair piece.

So what did Amazon buy? “We have the rights solely to The Fellowship of the Ring , The Two Towers , The Return of the King , the appendices, and The Hobbit ,” Payne says. “And that is it. We do not have the rights to The Silmarillion , Unfinished Tales , The History of Middle-earth , or any of those other books.”

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Innit. It’s obscene that a bunch of people who had nothing to do with the creation of the Lord of the Rings (most of whom were not even born when it was written) continue to benefit from JRRT’s work.

Inherited wealth is a blight on civil society; inherited intellectual property doubly so.

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“Mischief” is when a couple of aimless halflings set off a firework by accident. Whoever vandalized that Wikipedia page is just a racist misogynist edgelord.

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I’m English. Litotes is our official national writing style.

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GoT was a success (at least until it jumped the zombie dragon in the final season) because it featured relatable people in peril.

Where’s the peril for Second Age Elves? They literally cannot die.

I loved the Jackson LoTR films and was a huge LoTR fan when I was younger, but nothing in these trailers makes me want to watch this show. It seems to have contracted the same disease as a lot of recent SF movies, the belief that being plodding, overwrought and portentous is the same as being entertaining.

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Has no one tried to take a swing at Fred Saberhagen’s Books of Swords series yet?

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Wasn’t that very immortality imperiled by the Downfall of Númenor? Or at least change the rules so reincarnated elves couldn’t ever return to Middle-Earth?

To make an analogy with another sci-fi/fantasy series, the elves of the Second Age would be something like the Cylons of the Battlestar Galactica reboot facing the prospect of losing resurrection technology.

And of course we don’t even know if the TV adaptation is going to depict elves as “unkillable” or merely extremely long-lived.

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Bummer, when I saw the two trees of Valinor, and what looks like Galadriel crossing the Helcaraxe ice sheets into exile, it got me pumped for a show based on the fall of Numenor with throwbacks to the first age stories from the Silmarillion.

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Well that appears to be what the show is about.

The problem is they only have rights to the summaries and references to that from LOTR and it’s Appendices. They have to create the rest of the story as original material, but their agreements with the estate apparently mean they can’t contradict any of the published material while doing so.

It really sounds like the show is being written by a team of lawyers and continuity people. It’s not very encouraging.

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It worked for me, but I knew about the Trees

Obviously there is no way to have a functioning ecosystem with the only source of light and heat right on the ground like that—this is the difference between hard s.f. and fantasy, where the job is to put the poetry on the screen somehow

I was expecting a kind of hyper-Nordic world of endless Arctic twilight where the “sun” is always just below the horizon for everybody with no line-of-sight to the Trees, and it looks like they … sort of do that, some of the time, maybe

but not always or in any consistent way :confused:

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And even expertly written source material can be messed if not well handled. As demonstrated by the aforementioned Wheel of Time. Which while being an okay enough adaptation has encountered a fair bit of criticism for the less well considered changes it makes to the material.

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Yes, that’s officially part of Tolkien’s creation story/cosmogony. The Sun and Moon were the fourth way the gods lit he world. First was starlight, just enough to see by. Second were two lamps in the far North and South. Melkor, Sauron’s boss, knocked them over. Third was the two trees of Valinor, which lit only where the gods themselves lived with some of the elves. Melkor and Ungoliant killed the trees. The last two fruits (or maybe flowers? I don’t remember) became the sun and moon, and the remainder of the light was captured in the Silmarils.

(This means canonically, the first sunrise was in the West.) (Also at this point the world was still flat.) (Also also, Ungoliant was the ancestor of Shelob the spider that Frodo and Sam had to deal with using the bottled light they got from Galadriel, which was actually the light of a star which itself was actually one of the Silmarils, and so the light was derived from the Trees. Plus Galadriel is the only elf left in Middle Earth who was old enough to have ever seen the Trees. Tolkien was very thorough in his worldbuilding.) (Also also also, this is why that white tree in Gondor was so important, it was a distant descendant of the Tree that the moon came from, and a symbol of how Gondor’s authority derives from the elves and the gods and why it blooming meant Aragorn is the rightful king).

But as others have noted, that’s all in the Silmarillion, so they’re not allowed to explain/use that info in the show.

@smulder Is it a problem, though? The Trees didn’t light the whole world, which is why the elves that didn’t go to Valinor were called Dark elves. Tolkien never says how big the Trees were, but one fruit became the sun, so there’s that. The lamps before them were also really big, tall enough that there was no true night anywhere but not necessarily lighting everything uniformly, and in any case the world was flat then so 1) the horizon is more an asymptotic limit than a thing that occurs at a specific distance, and 2) any questions of nonmagical physics and climate and how plants work are kinda out of scope, at least until the fall of Numenor and the bending of the world.

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Just for the record, one of each. As the trees died, one gave a single golden fruit and the other a single silver flower.

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Thanks. I haven’t read LOTR so a lot of this stuff, while nice as verse, is a bit of Jethro Tull album to me.

Not to be antagonistic, but is it commonly accepted that Tolkien is perfunctorily swiping the bible? It’s a clear rewrite of the first page of Genesis: Bible, King James Version

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Makes sense, I grew up hearing a lot of Jethro Tull, too, and I can see the similarity.

Also yes, lots of biblical influence. It’s not a coincidence that Tolkien was friends with CS Lewis. And the Silmarillion is a creation myth, for an audience that was already familiar with the Bible. There’s no effort to hide it. Melkor is a Satanic enemy figure, the gods/Valar are basically archangels of Eru Iluvatar. But its in a world based on a combination of older pagan mythoi plus his own spin. And it was also an excuse for him to write a story to use his constructed languages.

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What I remember from the Silmarillion and the various other finished and half finished works taking place there. The trees were indeed smack dab in the middle Valinor, slightly to the left of the 7 Elven convenience store.

Later a giant spider eats them!

This was all created as mythic literature. It’s never really stated that the trees light the entire world, and I think that the idea is that what rest of the world there was. Was in perpetual twilight.

Though it is specified that they don’t glow all the time. Kinda fade in, fade out in turns. The sun and moon get made from them as part of their destruction and they primarily exist as a creation myth for the sun and the moon.

Thing is they should be gone by the time of the events of the series. That all goes down relatively early in the First Age . The creation of the rings is like early mid Second Age. LOTR and it’s immediate backstory run the spread of the Third Age. There’s thousands of years between them trees being alive and the events the show supposedly covers.

We may be getting a flash back of some sort. It’s been a bit but there are references to the trees and the spider eatin’, Melkor and what have in LOTR an the Appendices. But they’re mostly thin references about where Sauron came from in explaining what the shit the rings are and how they work. So I dunno what they can be doing there that their license covers.

And if memory serves they cross the sky in a sweet boat.

No. Cause he didn’t. He was pretty Catholic so that was in there. But he was mixing a bunch of stuff. Old Anglo Saxon literature, Finish and Norse mythology and epic poems. A smattering a celtic shit and Germanic shit. Lots of fairy tales and bible stories.

This particular bit isn’t overly close cause it involves something like Genesis, then something like 3 or 4 other creation myths in sequence with major events between. The whole stars, lamps (like actual really big lamps), trees, then the sun and the moon moving across the sky in no shit actual boats bit. Is spread out around millennia with other things going on. It’d be a bit like Biblical God not really getting that “Let there be light” bit hammered out till sometime around Moses.

The bit like Genesis is actually fairly interesting. The Music of the Ainur. It sees the gods (more or less) under the direction of the Creator, making the world by playing music.

With our bad guy (Melkor/Morgoth) deciding he doesn’t like harmony and rhythm and junk. So he just makes noise it mess it all up. Which breaks shit! So he gets banished!

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More particularly, as the greatest of the Ainur, he decides he wants to create his own themes rather than follow the creator’s, even though that causes discord all around him. And a number of the others decide to follow him, Sauron and the balrogs included. Then afterward the creation of the music is brought into reality where the themes will be recapitulated, and some of the Ainur go in to guide it, Melkor and his followers included.

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And then Vin Diesel got the tattoo.

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Ah - Cheers! - appreciate you welcoming the Tull joke. :laughing: Indeed, I have heard CS Lewis and him were drinking buddies! I welcome the blend of myths and belief that Tolkien seems to take a play at with his writing. Yeah I see the God(s) mashup in there.

I’m secular, but I’ve been around friends who are athiest to the point of being aggressive about it. It’s funny how many of them are hyper serious about Tolkien. All myth is real if it’s the one that works for someone, I suppose.

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Ha. All respect, but how is this not a direct swipe of the FIRST PAGE of the Bible?

Top line: Bible
Bottom line: Tolkien

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
In seven hours the glory of each tree waxed to full and waned again to naught

And the earth was without form, and void;
and each awoke once more to life an hour before the other ceased to shine.

and darkness was upon the face of the deep.
And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

It goes on. It’s fine to suggest it was an homage, but it’s also completely reasonable to call it a direct swipe of Creation story for Creation story, too. Matching prepositional phrases, matching comparatives. Even has a matching FACE OF THE in the third line.

No hate on Tolkien. So he swiped the bible? Ha, it’s a little tacky to take from page one, but that’s humorously bold, too. He clearly was in it to win it.