Summer is over, so living like a hermit...I mean Hobbit is in vogue once again. I pretty much spent the whole of September waiting for the days to get a little chillier so I could reasonably excuse my ridiculous TV and Film watching habit and, of course, read perhaps a book or two.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
