People are mad about The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. People get mad often. Some people want the female dwarfs to have beards, some people want nothing new added to the canon, despite Tolkien literally writing that he wanted to “leave scope for other minds and hands.” Some people are mad about people of colour being in the series, to which I say: fuck off you racist. Some people are mad about the time compression, to which I say: yeah that could be a potential problem, but wait until you’ve seen the show before going in too hard. But, to be short, people are mad.
I’m not one to complain too hard about something I haven’t seen yet, but some complaints seem legitimate. Others are presumptuous, misogynistic, racist, or all of the above. However, if you’ve watched the new Super Bowl trailer on a platform like YouTube (how else would you watch it?), you’ve probably seen the same quote doing the rounds.
“Evil cannot create anything new, they can only corrupt and ruin what good forces have invented or made.” The quote is attributed to JRR Tolkien. You may have also seen this written in Russian. Many, many times.
However, this quote isn’t from the Professor at all. Dr. Sara Brown, faculty chair of the Language & Literature M.A. program at Signum University, discovered that the origin in fact seems to be from the website TVTropes. It does not appear in any of Tolkien’s works. I mean, come on. If you’ve read even a single sentence of Tolkien you’d know that that sounds nothing like him. Even The Hobbit, a book for actual children, has more complicated sentences than that. Tolkien was a professor of linguistics - think about this for more than one second.
That’s not to say the professor would disagree - Tolkien does write characters who echo this poorly-worded sentiment. Frodo says something along the same lines to Sam in Return of the King: “The Shadow that bred them can only mock, it cannot make: not real new things of its own. I don't think it gave life to the orcs, it only ruined and twisted them, and if they are to live at all, they have to live like other living creatures.”
Treebeard, too, believes that evil cannot create, and can only corrupt. In The Two Towers, he asks, “Maybe you have heard of Trolls? They are mighty strong. But Trolls are only counterfeits, made by the Enemy in the Great Darkness, in mockery of Ents, as Orcs were of Elves. We are stronger than Trolls.”
There are mentions along these lines in The Silmarillion, too. Tolkien really wanted it to be known that evil cannot create. And while I agree that Amazon is an evil company that treats its workers incredibly poorly, those aren’t the reasons people are misquoting Tolkien and calling The Rings of Power evil. Even if those were the reasons, spamming comments on a YouTube video won’t fix the problems of capitalism that Jeff Bezos creates and perpetuates.
Ultimately, I don’t care why you already hate The Rings of Power, six months before the first episode has even aired. But if you’re participating in pasting this misattributed copypasta, you’re a hypocrite. You think showrunners Patrick McKay and J.D. Payne don’t care about Tolkien’s text because of an armoured Galadriel and an elf of colour? You’re not even checking that your quotes are something that Tolkien ever said. Do you see the hypocrisy now?
Use that Frodo quote above, or the Treebeard one. I’ve given you plenty of ammunition. But better still, read the books that you claim to be protecting, take in Tolkien’s ideas of unity and cooperation, and have a fucking good time while doing so. Then go to The Silmarillion, or the Histories, read Tolkien’s letters; so much has been published posthumously. These are some of the best books ever written, and you’re bastardising them more than The Rings of Power - or any TV series for that matter - ever will.