The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power teaser reaction

It’s official the Amazon Prime prequel to The Lord of the Rings will be called The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power…

Eek, I told myself I wouldn’t get excited about the prequel tv show on Amazon. But they put out a teaser and well let’s just say I am hyped…tbh I did get kinda hyped when the first image that had the two trees of Valinor in it came out but I managed to calm myself down sufficiently.

The Name

It was obvious from day one that the name would have to include Lord of the Rings despite it taking place before the Third Age and the actual time of the Lord of the Rings, it’s Marketing 101 really. But this does tell us that maybe just maybe (I mean it has to be absolutely the case doesn’t it?) Sauron will appear in physical form and under the guise of Annatar. This is cool as I’ve been delving more and more into the lore of Middle-Earth and I will be reading The Silmarillion and the Unfinished Tales soon.

Galadriel voiceover

I must say that Cate Blanchett’s Galadriel had a much more ethereal voice and the monologue at the beginning of The Fellowship of the Ring with the music playing always gives me chills and this didn’t. However, I’m not going to dismiss this version of Galadriel just yet because it’s only a teaser.

The imagery

Another thing to perhaps further suggest the physical manifestation of Sauron and the crafting of the rings taking place in the show is that the whole teaser was the forging and crafting of the title. It would be rather crap if the rings already existed so I think the series will start when they don’t exist and then go from there to the creation of the rings, the hiding of the 3 rings by the elves then the men and dwarves being given the rest of rings that are reclaimed and how this starts to poison the mortals of Middle-Earth.

Other thoughts

This better be good. I watched the Wheel of Time show when it came out and while I kinda liked it to begin with it was actually a bit naff and I don’t know whether that’s because WoT is kinda a LOTR rip off (to begin with as I’m told) or that they just adapted it a bit cheaply…like the world just looked too artificial and very much like a show not somewhere that feels lived in and narratively it was rushed. So I have a similar worry because the 1st season of Rings of Power will also be 8 episodes but because its the most expensive show ever made maybe the sets will look real and at least to the standard of Peter Jacksons’ movies which while not being perfect adaptations they are certainly absolutely fucking close!

Let me know in the comments what you think of the teaser and whether you’re excited for the show!

Read my article on 9 locations in England that inspired Tolkien's Middle Earth

Reading The Lord of the Rings for the first time: Part 2 - The Two Towers 👁️

Just a heads up, this review is rather chaotic…

Reading The Two Towers curiously took me longer to read than The Fellowship of the Ring, not for any book-related reasons but for the fact that I hit a bit of a weird patch. You know the kind of mood where you can’t seem to focus on anything, you try and watch TV, but you're just not feeling it, you pick up a book, read a few sentences and think…meh…I can’t be bothered—that kind of mood.

And then, straight after that, the other kind of mood where you becomes slightly obsessed with something and think that maybe you’ve found your calling in life and you can’t focus on anything else until you come back to reality. But weird really, I get this sometimes, but it’s safe to say that I’m back to normal now.

Real footage below of me getting back to normal:

So what did I love…everything. Lol, at this point, I am such a Tolkien fangirl. I love his prose. The way he describes everything in such rich detail, except maybe Shelob, that description did make me gag slightly!

Tolkien’s whole love affair with nature and trees speaks to my soul, and I feel like the whole story could be read as a fable on climate change. You have champions of good, the elves, the men and the hobbits etc., who live in harmony with nature and then you have Saruman and Sauron agents of darkness whose dwellings are the foul centres of industry. It works as a thematic way to read the LOTR, much like Dune can be read as an anti-imperial / anti-colonial work.

Treebeard and his non-hastiness made me chuckle, and tbh I wrote an article for work about an ancient tree in Surrey called the Crowhurst Yew because I was in that whole vibe. Ents and trees are just awesome, and I love the quote from Legolas in the Fellowship when he says ‘I am at home among trees’ because I would have to agree with him; there’s just something magical and soothing about them.

As I’m on the subject of Legolas, I think I love book Legolas more than movie Legolas! He is funnier, slightly sillier and totally on the same wavelength as me, lol. Like when he can’t think of a logical way the hobbits could have disappeared, he makes up a weird story about them flying off, and when he finds them again, he cares not for how they came across pipeweed like Gimli but says ‘ I would sooner learn how they came by the wine’. Like Legolas is a whole mood, and I love him.

I think the Voice of Saruman was much better in the book than in the movie, and I am curious to see what he does next as Peter Jackson killed him off, yet in the book, he still lives! That’s a crazy difference that I really didn’t see coming, and I’m intrigued to see what he does next…though I don’t expect any good to come out of the actions of the evil wizard.

Another surprise is how the book was formatted. Of course, in the movies, we flick between all the characters all the time, so for the books to be just focusing on Gandalf and co for the first half and then the second half with Frodo, Sam and devious little Gollum was rather interesting. And I guess that will be very much the same for Return of the King as Frodo and Sam are pretty much almost there in terms of how it was in the movies anyway; perhaps there’s some other crazy stuff that gets in the way of them leaving the orc lair and getting to Mount Doom that Jackson didn’t include in the movies!

And what didn’t I like…that I cried when Sam tried to wake Frodo up ‘it’s your sam’ fucking chokes me up every time! And then he tries to get ready to go on without him. Man, tears they were streaming down my face, I feel like Fix You by Coldplay could be the anachronistic soundtrack moment that Peter Jackson just missed out on. Just imagine it, pure cinematic excellence…

Ok, I didn’t mean for this review to get quite so ridiculous but we’ll just roll with it. This is what happens when you blog without a plan. Lol what am I talking about this whole blog is unplanned, I just ramble about books, movies and random stuff and I really wouldn’t have it any other way. But, back to my main man Tolkien. He is brilliant, the book is brilliant. BRING ON THE RETURN OF THE KING!!!!