The TV series "Rings of Power" has caused anger already in advance, in part because some of the actors are non-white. But Tolkien's work is about crossing borders, about a world in change, about escape, estrangement and overcoming enmity, writes Nathan Hamelberg.
I was eight years old the first time I was introduced to Tolkien's fairy tales. My mother read "The Hobbit" to me as a bedtime story. Already after a few evenings of reading, I started flipping through the book myself and quickly became hooked on the maps, they spurred further imagination about the world described in the text. A few years later, the same thing happened when I devoured "The Lord of the Rings", I threw myself over the maps and they set off fantasies about forests, kingdoms, mountains and foreign lands.
The maps of Middle-earth I studied with wide eyes were drastically different from the maps in the school book atlas we had in geography: there were no boundaries drawn. It was the same with the maps in "Silmarillion", "Tales from Midgård" and "Ringens värld" which I eagerly devoured a few more years later.
Some maps depicted places that had completely disappeared from the world when the events of "The Lord of the Rings" took place: the huge continent of Beleriand that grew out of Middle-earth that sank into the sea two ages ago, the island of Númenor that was created as a gift to the human tribes that came to the aid of the elves in the war against the evil prince Morgoth, but an age later sank to the bottom of the sea. Tolkien's fictional world becomes so much more real when it too contains places that no longer exist:
"But it's not your county. Others lived here before there were hobbits, and others will live here when the hobbits no longer exist. The wide world is all around you: you can shut yourself in, but you can't shut out the world," says the elf Gildor to Frodo early in "The Fellowship of the Ring" (p. 114).
The borders between the kingdoms that remain in Middle-earth are maintained through natural formations, through violence and through sorcery. The Realm was remembered through song and poem – the Middle-earth that exists at the time of the War of the Rings remembers fragments of what existed before the Ring was forged, just as ideas about ancient Greece in the Middle Ages lived on through the Iliad and the Odyssey. It's these layers of history that give the fictional world credibility, but it's also how we understand that the hobbits who set off on their adventures are completely ignorant of the wider world because their songs are about harvest, apples, ale and feasting rather than about a mythical bygone past.
Tolkien invites the reader to co-create with his texts. The layers of history, and how we as different readers come into contact with them in different ways – arriving at legends within legends on various paths and chance encounters, reading side stories about kingdoms or ancient songs – make Tolkien reading either imaginative or not at all. Whoever does not fill in the gaps themselves will put the books down.
That is precisely why I tremble and agonize before the series "Rings of Power"; will it invite me to co-create? On the one hand, it will direct attention to the enormous treasure that predates "The Lord of the Rings," the tales that are only hinted at in almost caterpillar passing in Jackson's films. On the other hand, I'm afraid that the characterization of those stories will be incredibly clumsy.
The series has already aroused anger in advance, for two reasons that are closely intertwined. Anger at portrayals that are clearly at odds with how things are presented in Tolkien's stories - such as the elven queen Galadriel being portrayed as a young warrior rather than a multi-thousand-year-old wise woman with magical skills. And anger that, completely in line with today's constant hurricane-like background noise of culture wars, is directed at the fact that some actors are black, or just non-white.
Tolkien's idea of creating a coherent saga myth because Britain lacked a counterpart to the Greek, Old Norse or German or for that matter Egyptian or Indian mythology has been capitalized on because his sagas and all their protagonists are white and other characters are some kind of abomination.
In Peter Jackson's acclaimed film adaptation of the books, the fifty-year-old hobbit Frodo was played by an 18-year-old Elijah Wood. In practice: the almost patrician middle-aged gentleman with his own servant was portrayed as an innocent youth. It did not cause a fraction of the outcry that black actors in the TV series caused. One can make lists of casts and characters that are incredibly far more significant in the Tolkien film adaptations than whether any actor is non-white, yet some make whiteness central to their reading of the tales.
For me, the fairy tales are about something completely different. "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings", like "The Silmarillion" for the most part, deal with people (and dwarves and elves) in exile. About estrangement and past enmity. About escape, about returning to countries that no longer exist, about giving up life in a part of the world because it has become impossible, about letting go of history in order to survive. About people who lost their homes. About introducing yourself as a friend in the language that has almost stopped being spoken to enter an abandoned kingdom.
The stories are about boundaries that are crossedThe conservative label has been liberally applied to Tolkien ever since his stories were published, but in the books, you see time and time again how those who are set to guard borders break the law and welcome strangers. As leader of the Fellowship of the Ring, Aragorn negotiates so that the dwarf Gimli is allowed to move freely in the elven kingdom of Lothlorien, contrary to their thousand-year ban on dwarves staying in the land. The outlaw Éomer not only gives said Aragorn and Gimli and their friend the elf Legolas free rein in the realm of Rohan but also gives them the horses of their fallen comrades to enable them to succeed in their hunt. Faramir, son of the prince and lord of Gondor, releases the ring with Frodo, Sam and Gollum after capturing them, against the law of the realm. ersatz for Britons and Englishmen – get rid of their ancient prejudices against the Wozs.
The stories are about boundaries that are crossed. Perhaps the best example - from a Swedish horizon not as clear as from that of British class society - is how the upper-class hobbit Frodo goes from addressing his servant and gardener Sam Gamgi based on a working relationship to a love relationship, possibly platonic. Or not platonic - the parts in the books that are more than others characterized by physical intimacy are when Sam and Frodo share kisses, caresses or hugs.
It's another story of transgression hidden in plain sight in Tolkien's sagas. They all deserve re-reading to ponder: What boundaries are opened in and by Tolkien's world? Perhaps more than is ever done in a contemporary series adaptation loosely based on his books.
Read more:
Magnus Västerbro: This is how Tolkien created his distant and enchanting Midgard
Charlotte Brändström: "'The Rings of Power' is the most secret project I've ever worked on"
Judith Kiros: "I regularly wore a cloak and studied High Elvish"
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Unlike some of us, how fortunate to have cut one's teeth on Tolkien - perhaps, the way that history and even the Bible should be taught - a history that awakens the faculty known as imagination, before plunging into British History beginning in 1066 with William the Conqueror and zapping through the long bloody adventures studded with dates of famous battles, civil wars, tower of London, decapitations, from the Wars of the Roses to The British Empire Under Queen Victoria, fondly remembered by some of Sierra Leone’s Creole old timers, as “Mammy Queen”
In whatever society, and that includes the Islamic, the role of mothers and grandmothers cannot be underestimated
As President Buhari jokes, his beloved Aisha belongs to the kitchen - and the other room, and as Don Harrow says, when it comes to the patriarchy, Sweden is not as reprehensible as some other unmentionable places such as Ancient Israel where daughters were sacrificed to Moloch - although, fast forward, there are some exceptional women mentioned in the Jewish Bible of such a stature that even Salman Rushdie would never dream of tampering with any of them, not even Rahab, in any kind of seditious verses of his own lurid imagination
I was not searching for Mount Doom. Far from Mordor, between July 1982 and July 1983, I was mostly in Nigeria on this circuit searching for the Holy Grail, the gravy train: Ahoada, Omoku, Port Harcourt, Umuahia, Owerri. Port Harcourt, Bonny, Port Harcourt, London, Stockholm, London, Port Harcourt, Aba, Port Harcourt, Buguma, Bakana, where I found myself on that election Day, 6th August 1983 and witnessed first-hand “NPN Magic” on the island of Bakana where Levy Braide was the resident NPN Minister of Agriculture.
New Year’s Eve, 1983, NPN Magic
“Ran out of luck
Seems like lightning struck”
Just like what happened to poor Willy, HERE
Nice essay. So where was the Oga on top when Oga Madam was reading Hobbit to the 8 year old Prince?Biko
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kenneth harrow
professor emeritus
dept of english
michigan state university
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JRR Tolkien's tales of Middle-earth and the Lord of the Rings have captivated generations of readers, and still do. Now the TV series "The Lord of the Rings. The Rings of Power" premiere on the streaming service Amazon Prime. In Studio DN, journalist, poet and researcher Judith Kiros and writer Nathan Hamelberg reason about what it is that affects us with them. Are there similarities we see with our own contemporaries, or the possibility of an escape from reality?
Listen here:
What was it about Tolkien that captured you?
- I was probably around eleven and hung out a lot in the library, because of my rich social life, and found "The Hobbit". I read it and became completely obsessed. I have found a diary entry from that day, where I have drawn the various dwarves. After that I continued. I thought there was such incredible depth to that world, and like many rather nerdy 11-year-olds, I was interested in mythology and fairy tales. But this was also much more: deeper, richer and more well-developed than the rather short stories you find in storybooks, says Judith Kiros to Studio DN.
- It was similar for me: When you opened a page with Tolkien, there were literally thousands more. That developed over almost fifteen years, to find and discover that there were fairy tales in the fairy tales, and those fairy tales made the fairy tale you read yourself become much more real, says Nathan Hamelberg.
What should you know about the new series "The Rings of Power", which takes place before the big story?
- Those who made the "Rings of Power" only had permission to use something from a sketch, which can be found at the back of the "Rings" appendix. They have decided to depict something called "the second age". It takes place before the "Lord of the Rings" films, which begin right with "the third age". But they have very little to go on, and that's why many fans - including myself - are freaking out. We know approximately what will happen, but the series creators do not have access to a great deal of what they want to portray. So what will we get? From what we've seen, what we're getting is Sauron - who in "the first age" was the lieutenant of the Dark Lord, but is now coming into his own and his form, and is beginning to infiltrate the humans, the elves, and influence them to create these rings. And that will lead to all sorts of chaos. Another thing that is important to know is that "the second age" goes on for a long time, and many people wonder how to compress it into five seasons. How will it go?, says Judith Kiros.
In the section also about how Tolkien's fairy tale world can be used as an interpretation model for our own contemporaries (including the giant company Amazon) - and about what the author himself (perhaps) had to say about the film adaptations of his works.
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