Rings of Power and the shaped imagination

A couple of weeks before the premiere of Amazon Prime’s The Rings of Power¹, I was in a bookstore contemplating buying one or two volumes of The History of Middle-Earth. I wanted to prepare myself for what I was about to see: to have the backmatter in my head to compare what I’d read with what I’d be watching.

But then I decided, no. I’ll go in blind. I’ll let whatever story J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay want to tell stand on its own (as much as possible) in my head. I’d gotten good at ignoring all the chatter over the casting of black and brown actors, female dwarves being in the story, and everyone knowing Harfoots are an excuse for the showrunners to get hobbits in there somehow. (To be honest, I’ve been good at that for a while: most of that chatter is annoying and petty, and people should stop.)

Now, with seven episodes under the belt—I haven’t watched the finale yet—I’m glad I didn’t go rooting around in the appendices. I’m glad I gave Rings of Power a chance. Overall, our latest adventure in Middle-Earth is a thing to celebrate! Although I would have watched the whole thing even if reviews were awful and the premiere episodes were trash.

I am always interested in how today’s storytellers tell the stories of the past. What are they bringing out that we may have missed before? How do our 21st-century eyes allow us to see the story in a new light? What is The Rings of Power saying to audiences today in the same manner that Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies spoke to audiences in the very early aughts²? And, most importantly, what does the way we tell stories and re-interpret old tales say about us as creators and participators?

While science writer Philip Ball refuses to coronate The Lord of the Rings as one of the great modern myths, I would argue that Tolkien’s work definitely meets the criteria of a story that has escaped its origins and demands to be retold and told in various ways. Here’s what Ball writes in The Modern Myths: Adventures in the Machinery of the Popular Imagination:

Myths have no authors, although they must have an origin. They escape those origins (and their originators) not simply because they are constantly retold with an accumulation of mutations, appendages, and misconceptions. Rather, their creators have given body to stories for which retellings are deemed necessary.

While The Lord of the Rings hasn’t reached the critical mass of retellings and mutations that, say, Dracula or Frankenstein has, I do think (artist-loyalist that I am) the story Tolkien crafted is riper for retelling, misconception, and mutation than most.

And that brings me to the core of this little ditty: the idea of adaptation is a misnomer. When we speak of a written-to-visual adaptation, what we really want is a translation. But that’s not what we get. What we get is an adaptation in the true sense of the word.

Adaptation, from the Latin adaptō, which means to fit, to modify, or to adjust to something else.

The use of the word in biology clarifies the meaning even more. Adaptation is:

the process of change by which an organism or species becomes better suited to its environment

That’s what is happening when people set out to adapt a work from one form to another. They are attempting to suit it to a new environment. Yes, in the case of Lord of the Rings, one media environment (ink on paper) to another (moving dots of color on a screen). But, more importantly, they are suiting the story to a 21st-century milieu. They are taking a story first delivered in one environment and adjusting it so it resounds with people living in a different environment.

(This does not mean adapters can salt-shake their way through a work of art. I mean, they can. But that’s how you get bad adaptations. I’m looking at you, 2021 Mulan movie.)

Stories do not arise out of vacuums. As austere and pristine as some myths might appear, they cannot be divorced from the culture, language, and anthropological period in which they arose. Ball writes:

As classical myths did for the cultures that conceived them, modern myths help us to frame and come to terms with the conditions of our existence.

Ball later quotes the 20th-century German theologian Rudolf Bultmann:

Myth should be interpreted not cosmologically, but anthropologically, or better still, existentially.

This is how The Lord of the Rings has been interpreted for decades. It speaks to specific people in a specific time and a specific place addressing their specific crises of existence. Hippies weren’t annihilating the story with their anti-war slogans “Frodo lives!” and “Gandalf for president!” They were further embodying Tolkien’s tales within their own lived experience.³

Partly because of them, the trilogy became an official bestseller in the ‘60s, and a 1977 New York Times report (when The Silmarillion was about to be released), described the participants in Tolkien’s story as a “cult,” a financially viable one.

The Middle‐earth cult has bought millions of copies of Tolkien’s books in the last decade. The end is not in sight. By publication day Houghton Mifflin had received orders for more than 750,000 copies of “The Silmarillion,” and two printers are now turning out literally tens of thousands of books a day.

Fast-forward to the late aughts. I often think about an anonymous report sent to TIME during the 2009 election protests in Iran. The regime, in an effort to keep protesters at home, started streaming Hollywood movies on television channels. One channel ran a Lord of the Rings movie marathon.

Gandalf the Grey returns to the Fellowship as Gandalf the White. He casts a blinding white light, his face hidden behind a halo. Someone blurts out, “Imam zaman e?!” [Is it the Imam, the Mahdi predicted to arrive in messianic fashion?]

In another place, even more esoteric themes come forth…

…the unwanted quest and the risking of life in pursuit of an unanticipated destiny. Could [the opposition candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi] be Boromir, the imperfect warrior who is heroic at the end, dying to defend humanity?

And one more quote just because I like horses:

In the eye of the beholder in Tehran, the movie is transformed into an Iranian epic. When Gandalf’s white steed strides into the frame, local viewers see Rakhsh, the mythical horse of the Rostam, the great champion of the Shahnameh, the thousand-year-old national epic. “Bah, bah…Rakhsh! Rakhsham amad!” someone says in awe.

Galadriel riding in Rings of Power. The scene was kinda weird, but this shot is great!

In the Eye of the Beholder in Tehran. Strictly within this framework⁴, Peter Jackson’s work has no intrinsic value without the value brought to it by the Beholder. Because the Beholder gets nothing from the story if she comes to it with a blank slate. And it is, in fact, impossible to come to a story with a blank slate.

Not only are stories not developed in a vacuum, but we do not view or interpret stories in a vacuum either. We are constantly seeing things through screens—the screens of our lives, experiences, and beliefs. How our imagination has been shaped is absolutely critical to determining the value of the stories we participate in. And the shaped imagination of creators determines how the stories they craft come to life.

This is fundamentally what Vanessa Angélica Villarreal says in her Harper’s Bazaar piece, “Fantasy Has Always Been About Race.” It’s an uncomfortable title even for me, and not less than a little click-baity. But she’s pointing out that your run-of-the-mill fantasy story did not develop separately from the consciousness (or subconsciousness) of the writers who first put pen to paper in that genre.

…medieval fantasy is not history, but a reproduction of history and its metaphors. The West cannot tell itself about itself without the inclusion of race.

Whether we like it or not, whether we are comfortable with it or not, we are never telling just stories. We are always telling stories about ourselves. Aptly, Villarreal points out:

It’s even the first decision (race, gender, class) a player must make in creating a character for any campaign in the iconic Dungeons & Dragons role-playing games.

I’ve played D&D quite a bit and never thought about the race-determination baked into the game’s system. Our imagination is shaped by the concept of race. It’s shaped by lots of other things too. And I think, as creators, we bear a responsibility to be conscious of the ways our imagination informs the stories we tell. Because our imaginations have been shaped. By the stories we’ve read and watched and listened to. By the stories our parents told us.

Not to sound woke or anything, but we must do the work to examine the boundaries and barriers of our imaginations—especially if we are creating imaginative worlds for others to inhabit. Commentary like Villarreal’s is important because we tend to champion long-standing interpretations and adaptations of stories, forgetting that a story can say different things to different audiences. When a story is adapted for a different medium at a time removed from its original creation, it is also being adapted for an audience that has had its collective imagination shaped differently than the imagination of the creator of the work and the audience that first received the work.

As Ball says, myths “live in the warp and woof of the human world.” Our stories are entwined with ourselves and our collective experiences. And out of these experiences, stories and myths come to life. He quotes cultural critic James Twitchell:

The popular imagination is continually finishing these stories, plugging loopholes, locating gaps, reiterating important characteristics, and, most important, introducing new players…

This is why The Hobbit movies are different from Peter Jackson’s first trilogy and why Rings of Power is different from them both. And why they should be different from each other.⁵

This is why people keep remaking Batman and no one is mad that Robert Pattinson’s Emo Knight is different from Christian Bale’s Dark Knight is different from Ben Affleck’s Brute Knight. In fact, for each of these Batmen to be the same would be bad! Because they all sit in different—sometimes only slightly different—cultural spaces. They each come from the shaped imaginations of their creators and appeal to different fragments of the shaped imaginations of those who participate in the story.

Mature criticism acknowledges the point of the adaptive act: to retell the myth for a new generation, a new set of eyes and ears whose imaginations have been shaped differently from the imaginations of those who’ve come before. And creators who are aware of how their imaginations have been shaped—not just by the didactics of their art, but by the cultural, ethnic, religious, social, and economic paint splattered on the walls of their lives—are better equipped to tell stories that speak to the present-day.

1. Using Amazon Prime as a possessive of anything related to The Lord of the Rings still sounds weird.

2. Aughts, as a way to refer to the first decade of the 2000s, is a newish-to-me word that I’m trying out every now and then to see if I like it or not. Don’t hate me.

3. Even though Tolkien condemned some elements of hippie culture as “deplorable cults,” his story became interweaved in the expressions of those who participated in it. He had opened the door to a hobbit hole in the ground, and other people thought it was a nice hole too. And once you let people move into your house, it’s hard to kick them out.

4. Don’t come after me. I am not saying that stories and works of art don’t have intrinsic value at all. Strictly within the context of an imaginative marketplace, a product only has the value that the people who might buy it (or in this case, buy into it) put on it.

5. An adaptation is supposed to make a thing more like itself—it isn’t supposed to be the original. I might expand on this in a later post.