Amazon is making a lot of changes to Tolkien’s writing for the forthcoming Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power TV show. Many of them are less changes per se, and more filling in the gaps between Tolkien’s sparse sentences on the period. If you don’t want to see people filling in those gaps then that’s your prerogative, but I’m excited to see where showrunners Patrick McKay and J.D. Payne can take us in Middle-earth. As long as they stick to their promise of not contradicting existing stories that Tolkien wrote, I’ll be happy.
However, one key part of the recent Rings of Power media blitz has me a little worried: the time compression. The events of the Second Age take place over thousands of years, and that length of time is important, especially when talking about the fates of men, who live for a fraction of the time that elves do. The Fall of Númenor is not something that happens overnight, the hubris across generations of kings contributes to the nation’s downfall.
We already have the perfect way to blend several generations and to show time passing: the elves. Galadriel is set to be the main character of the series, and while I’m a little disappointed it won’t be entirely about her hair, her iconic monologues from the Jackson, Walsh, and Boyens trilogy could open each season of the Rings of Power and set the scene as we enter a new era.
The elves would be the one constant throughout the show, and we’d have to come to terms with the fact that the humans we grow to love would die every season - maybe even off-screen as hundreds of years pass. This would be pretty revolutionary (I’m not talking about shocking and gruesome Game of Thrones deaths, this is just men inevitably succumbing to Father Time), but could set the series apart from other fantasy shows and embrace the sheer scale of Tolkien’s ideas.
There’s one other major problem with compressing the timeline in the Rings of Power, and that’s the human/elf forbidden love story between Arondir and Bronwyn. Humans and elves falling in love is hardly new to Tolkien - the man had the names Beren and Luthien inscribed on he and his wife’s graves respectively - but they’re not common either. Tuor and Idril were another First Age relationship human/elf, and Aragorn and Arwen provide a parallel relationship in the Third Age. Mithrellas and Imrazôr are also mentioned briefly in the Unfinished Tales.
The central conflict of these relationships is that elves are immortal and humans are, well, human and thus mortal. Most elves in these relationships end up giving up their immortality for love and dying in Middle-earth. However, these stakes are lessened when the timeline is compressed. If most of the humans (presumably aside from those who die in battles) live for all five seasons of The Rings of Power - the same amount of time as the elves - then why would any elf give up their immortality?
It works in the Lord of the Rings films, however, so there is hope yet. The showrunners just need to make sure they focus enough on the characters and not implement a big battle in every episode at the expense of building proper relationships between them. It’ll be a more difficult story to tell with a condensed timeline, but it’s definitely possible to do right, provided McKay and Payne tread carefully.
There’s also an interesting dynamic with Arondir in particular, in that he’s the first male elf to pursue a relationship with a human. There’s so much to explore between him and Bronwyn - just two of the 22 main characters in the show - so I hope that they’re given the space to thrive in The Rings of Power’s compressed timeline.