Powers and Dominions

There was a weighty inevitability about the proclamations by which, in the last days of August, the Home Box Office, and on the first day of September, Amazon Studios, issued their arrière-bans for a protractedly magnificent autumn campaign. Neither suzerain, however, could have planned for sudden competition from a third force—more ancient, less understood, under particular circumstances, and for a time more credible and compelling than either rival, because, perhaps, the distant but dignified ancestor of both. 

On September 8 Queen Elizabeth II died, and the return of the king was experienced, as never before, not just by the persistently or post-Britannic realms and territories but by the human race. The great potentates of private enterprise stood for a moment outmaneuvered and exposed by a traditional, national, and ecclesiastical institution, its apparent limits suddenly standing forth as transcendent qualities.

Where Amazon had undoubtedly contributed to the vexing history of intellectual property, paying a sum for the footnotes of The Lord of the Rings hardly imaginable for newly discovered Scriptural papyri, and where H.B.O. settled for redeeming past fiasco and brightening up dubious source material with solid, fundamentally conservative dramatic art, the British monarchy—as I shall call it for want of a more all-encompassing term—now wielded its rarest, greatest, power, to incarnate and display history in the very moment of formation. The late queen had just sealed her formidable reign with the appointment of a final prime minister of the United Kingdom. British prime ministers are supposed to be at their most potent and least loathed at the inception of their period in office, a truism the queen’s last, and her son’s first, premier lost little time in disproving. For King Charles III, on the other hand, it was a more seamless and auspicious beginning. 

Astute novelty was provided by the unprecedented broadcast of the Accession Council, with its astonishing, Anthony Powell—descended human revelations as former prime ministers bonded (Boris Johnson and Gordon Brown), or conspicuously didn’t (either of the forenamed and Sir Tony Blair). At the same time those great and mysterious sorcerers called heralds and pursuivants, and the Armed Forces, drilled with an immaculacy which their departed mistress had always elicited with effortless, if perhaps not wholly unconscious, artistry, successfully conveyed the ageless quality of the sword plighted to the Crown. Of the stitches in this meandering tapestry, many were confected at historically known dates and under specific and sometimes bathetic circumstances. That did not stop them from contributing to the whole their accrued significance. 

During the Accession Council the King’s oath to uphold the rights and freedom of the Church of Scotland, a denomination of which he is not head and which both of his Stuart namesakes and predecessors regarded with distaste and even loathing, became not a codicil of sectarian division, born of grubby negotiation towards the Act of Union, but an almost poetic assertion of Britain’s northern kingdom’s honor and identity (a legerdemain the Church of Scotland has often accomplished in its near half-millenium of existence, and which its spiritual heir the Scottish National Party replicates with stolid success). 

The relatively recent tradition known as the “Vigil of the Princes,” during which the monarch’s sons guard the royal body as it lies in state, was invented in 1936 for George V and in 2002 somewhat irregularly disinterred for his daughter-in-law, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother. In 2022 Elizabeth II’s most chivalric child, Princess Anne, patently counted as a “prince” and stood among her brothers at the vigil. Anne, created Princess Royal (as the late queen’s eldest, in fact, only, daughter), has a reputation as the hardest working of the House of Windsor. She appeared to be solicitously affectionate towards her visibly grieving brother the King during the (also newly televised) state funeral, and her worst headlines are occasional allusions to the ferocity of her dogs. 

A whisper that Anne was the unnamed target of the insinuated allegations of Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, did not thrive. Likely to be the next Captain-General of the Royal Marines, the Princess Royal is more than a match for Amazon’s equally equestrian interpretation of the (future) elven ruler Galadriel, dubbed, in a departure from the hierarchies and nomenclature of J.R.R. Tolkien (indeed, it appears to owe something to Ridley Scott’s Gladiator), “Commander of the Northern Armies.”

While the oath to protect the Church of Scotland is a piece of real but ossified political haggling that now lends a kind of magic by its antiquity and its national identity, the Vigil of the Princes (like the overwhelming majority of post-Saxe-Coburg British royal ritual) is an artifice, fantasy fiction, now made for television. As such, it is, like most of the ceremonial dreamed up for the monarchy according to the constitutional doctrines of the subtle semi-republican Walter Bagehot, highly convincing. Even my father, a sometime classicist, lifelong seventeenth-century reader, and innately historical thinker, was, until we checked, under the vague impression that the Vigil of the Princes dated from the Wars of the Roses. This is surely the definition of success for both the enchantments of monarchy and of fantasy—that either endows a paradoxically heightened, deepened, and in some sense far from untrue connection to essential reality.

But the more or less native dynasties of England and Scotland have had well over a thousand years to weave this glamourie. Tolkien achieved a hold arguably even more pervasive and intoxicating over a single passionate lifetime of involuntarily intense industry, combining scholarly practice, artistic obsession, and the best of amateurish joy. To peek behind the professor’s arras, as the posthumous publication of thousands of pages of his drafts and fragments allows any interested or (more usually) possessed enquirer to do, is to see a powerfully Romantic creative intelligence subjecting itself to rigorously classical standards. Tolkien, honest and humble about what he does not yet know, does not doubt that the solutions he seeks are accessible, that the quest, doubtless with divine aid and sanction, is never in vain. Some grace of understanding—as an artist and as a believer, Tolkien knows it is and is not his own—perceives an unbroken, gleaming, lucid whole, where Blue Wizards have rods, names, purposes, chronologies, where the nature of Orc souls poses no moral difficulties, where the exact number of elvenkind sleeping on the shores of Lake Cuiviénen can be given definitively. 

This confidence is overpowering and infectious to Tolkien’s admirers, who, like all consumers of great poetry, are thus taught to perceive simultaneously contradictory things—contradictory, that is, according to mere reason. For example, Tolkien is in some ways and places clear that Arda is our Earth, Eru Ilúvatar our (and specifically the Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church’s) God, Minas Tirith on the side of modern Florence, the myth of Earendil the Mariner transmitted back through the centuries into Old English understanding to create a “mythology for England,” and so on. But at the same time, quite obviously and whatever else he may say, he has created something else altogether. The categories of epic articulated by Tolkien’s close friend and mythological sparring partner, C.S. Lewis, are here extremely useful. Tolkien’s extended “Legendarium,” for all its capacious mystery, is not a patchwork, organic, evolved “primary epic,” like Homer’s, or, it might be argued, the Arthurian cycles, but a coherent creative vision, like those of Virgil, Dante, and Milton.

Does Amazon’s surprisingly Estate-sanctioned offering live up to this grandeur and harmony of conceit? Its first and perhaps greatest tragedy is that it so very clearly intended to do so. This was always going to be a fatal course. Throughout Tolkien’s work runs the moral unvaried that it is the small, the specific, the seemingly accidental, the humane and human (or hobbit) scale, the amateurish perspectives and devices that will, by the highest and most ineffable divine workings, attain immortal heroism and enact great tales. Amazon, the vastest, most ruthless company named for the hugest, if industrially assailed river, stretching out its hand to claim the whole story of Tolkien’s most untold Age, his Second, is quite obviously an act of limitless ambition, of reckless hubris, more in keeping with Tolkien’s Lucifer figure, Melkor/Morgoth, who like Amazon in the beginning only wanted to create his own (yet what could never by its nature be his own) majestic work of song. Amazon’s very name is amusingly similar to that of Tolkien’s un-model-monarch, Ar-Pharazôn, currently being done less than justice as, despite the epochal budget, a cut-price Wormtongue spiced with a few clichés of twenty-first century populism.

I suspect every fanatical reader and re-reader of Tolkien has mentally enacted some variant on Jeff Bezos’s dream. Had I possessed the criminal rashness and awe-inspiring folly to try and buy moral right to reinterpret the Appendices of The Lord of the Rings (but not, or only very patchily and obscurely, to call upon the riches of The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, etc.), I have no doubt about what story I would have chosen. Entirely enclosed in the Appendices, self-contained, requiring hardly any gloss from without, there lies mostly forgotten an example of Tolkien’s narrative pattern at its most perfect and characteristic. 

This is the story of the royal house of Arnor, from the tragic undoing of Isildur, through splintering and strife into three lesser kingdoms, these petty dominions’ conquest by one of Tolkien’s most visible, intriguing, and active of nemeses, the Witch King of Angmar (crucially, no fallen god or angel but once a mortal man), the Delphic, Jacobite, luckless adventures of Arvedui, last king of Arthedain and nearly king of Gondor, including his encounter with the Lossoth or Snowmen, Tolkien’s Inuit, and the early mercenary career of his eventually successful descendant, Thorongil alias Strider alias Aragorn. Elves and hobbits would feature but very much in their place compared to the greater fascination of our own humankind, with whom Tolkien’s prose is at its most beautiful and his characterisation richest (consider the glories of his Rohan, the psychology of his Boromir, and, beyond The Lord of the Rings, the superiority of the human components of Beren and Lúthien, The Children of Húrin, and Tuor’s journey to Gondolin in Unfinished Tales). 

The tone would be decadently tragic, its flashes of hope provided by courage, beauty, defiance, persistence, the whole captured with geographical and historical plausibility born of Tolkienian exactitude. But at this point it occurs to me the main danger of my scheme is that I might end up with something all too confusingly akin to H.B.O.’s House of the Dragon—rousing, regal, barbarous, but thoroughly enjoyable.

In part the strength of House of the Dragon comes from its dependence not on sublimely secondary epic material, but on an extremely varying, in places downright dubious, primary example of the genre. Fire & Blood, the book on which the new television series is (admirably loosely) based, could be justly described as the money-spinning by-blow of a writer whose powers are on the slide. George R.R. Martin, who has made no secret of his admiration for that indeed great French romancer, rogue, and historical fiction factory owner Maurice Druon, adopted similar tactics by recruiting as his assistants a pair of fantasy fact-checker super-fans. 

The concept, a limited and unreliable, if grandly expressed, in-universe historical chronicle, could have been rendered extremely enjoyably, even perhaps made a feyly intelligent point about history writing. But this is an idea that is surprisingly hard to get right. Another Frenchman, Jean d’Ormesson, in 1971 published a full-dress fictive history, The Glory of the Empire, that, unlike Druon’s collaborative romances, is far less entertaining than it sounds. Fire & Blood, vast first of a projected pair of volumes, was more d’Ormesson than Druon if judged by the usual standards of aesthetics or even readability. 

But this very presence of a fairly unconsecrated source is perhaps responsible for its televisual interpretation’s air of unstrait-jacketed comfort. At the same time House of the Dragon takes its true caliber as primary epic from elsewhere, Martin’s own underlying source, a hearty, popular understanding of twelfth century England’s mythopoeic dynastic war, “the Anarchy,” “nineteen winters when God and his angels slept.” During the tributes in the House of Lords to Queen Elizabeth II, the Nineteenth Earl of Devon, prior to his inheritance a Los Angeles lawyer, remarked that his family had always done well under Queens, owing its earldom to Matilda, Lady of the English, and the original of Martin’s Princess Rhaenyra. House of the Dragon, in other words, owes its deepest foundations to the same story that animated the global mourning for the Queen and the almost natural-seeming acclamation of Charles III. Rings of Power, by contrast, traces its lineage to a single exceptional human intellect, one which it is as a result under immense pressure to understand, or, at least, not wholly to misunderstand.

I beheld the publicity for Rings of Power with no very impartial eye. It may be that this enthusiasm, a product of Tolkien’s own, is part of the problem. We readers all see and fight for our own Tolkiens, and as a teenager I remember criticizing (while basically loving) Peter Jackson’s film trilogy for reasons that now feel more often than not comparatively trivial (I will not rescind righteous disapproval of Jackson’s needlessly fight-bloated, tone-deaf Hobbit trilogy). Nonetheless, what I saw of Rings of Power’s marketing campaign often delighted, thoroughly intrigued, and only occasionally baffled me, usually in a benign and tantalized spirit. A maneuver involving twenty stills of characters identified only by torsos and certain symbolic-seeming objects was particularly alluring. The number twenty, identical to that of the known Rings of Power, made it briefly tempting to speculate that every hinted character was in fact a ringbearer of some kind, though the charm of the scheme didn’t fit (too many apparent hobbits, not enough apparent dwarves). 

Details of the cast, as they emerged, seemed thoughtfully left-of-field. A talented, non-A-list young Galadriel seemed in demeanor and intonation to be gesturing to Cate Blanchett, the best thing in Jackson as in most of her films, while following her own independent approach. The rival Westeros team provided a couple of promising alumni, the universally loved, fascinatingly lean-featured Benjen Stark and the young Ned Stark, who’d made a decent show of his flashbacks amid an otherwise deteriorating saga. Even The Crown—which recent events have plunged for now into a strange, distant, muted Lethe—provided one of its experienced royal private secretaries. This was not the disastrous cinematic casting-by-numbers of Brad Pitt’s Troy, or Daniel Craig and Nicole Kidman in their mercifully forgotten Golden Compass, but something that seemed considered, delicately judged, perhaps to an almost elven degree. Everything looked, as was to be expected, visually gorgeous (at this stage not enough was revealed to expose many lapses into kitsch). Then trailers with a little dialogue crept out of the woodland realms, and I began to worry. 

That I was worrying was, in itself, not propitious. So many, so desperately, whatever their views on Amazon and its little-loved but ineluctable role in their lives, wanted the Rings of Power not just to succeed, but to be good. By contrast, House of the Dragon merely needed to be less bad than a poor book and the most disastrously received conclusion to a television saga on record to be hailed with justice as a triumph. It emerged onto the race course first and was from its restrained beginning more than good enough—not too much messing about with computerized dragons, well-chosen expenditure, not unlike Ridley Scott’s Last Duel (unfairly ignored), on the magnificence of late medieval aristocratic life, a script serviceable at its worst, and actors, both old troupers such as Rhys Ifans and relative newcomers, very difficult to match at their best. The concentration of the new saga vis-à-vis its predecessor, genealogically, geographically, narratively, on the movements and relationships of a single royal house, immediately repaid attention. Meanwhile, Rings of Power seemed to have indulged opposite instincts.

To my relief, as I watched it just as the nervous father I am observes my child entering a party likely to exhaust and irritate him, it made an endearing start. A Yeatsian fairy-child (actually, I discover, the daughter of the Earl of Jersey, and even more surprisingly an actual resident of that beautiful and storied island) had been found to play Galadriel the Even Younger running about in the Blessed Realm of Valinor. I was unannoyed by her over-portentous exchange with her elder brother. Her fully grown avatar, Morfydd Clark, the nearest thing the whole drama as yet possesses to a protagonist, intoned a fine, school-of-Blanchett voice-over accompanying glimpses and maps that struck me as a fair summary of a Silmarillion one did not actually own. The first map before action proper read Forodwaith, i.e., the Very Far North, which cheered me up immensely. Were we about to meet Arvedui’s Lossoth/Snowmen friends?

Alas, we were instead introduced at this point to the version of Galadriel written and directed for the Rings of Power. I cannot as yet tell if Clark, a fittingly Welsh-speaking, preternaturally Elven-looking, interesting, talented actress with strong and readable positive views on Tolkien, is powerless to mitigate the poverty of her role or has accepted its premise, but I would bet on the second, a more reliable method of fulfilling her task while, somehow, preserving her respect for it.

Amazon’s writers have, in effect, explained that their Galadriel portrays the single-minded youth of Blanchett’s mature, complex character, working back from the point when the elf of the films, in accordance with the text of The Lord of the Rings, wavers, apparently about to fall to evil by accepting the One Ring from the enthralled hobbit Frodo:

In place of a Dark Lord, you would have a queen! Not dark, but beautiful and terrible as the dawn! Treacherous as the sea! Stronger than the foundations of the earth! All shall love me, and despair!

This is certainly a gripping scene, a deliberately irresistible what-might-have-been, in both the book and the film, even if the heavy-handedness of Cate Blanchett’s photo-negative transformation is far more Jacksonian than Tolkienian. But this White Witch note, if written to predominate, both makes little sense and misses the point of Galadriel as Tolkien wrote, and compulsively rewrote, her. It seems unlikely that so consistently impetuous and combative a figure would have endured the Second Age to become one of the wisest leaders of the Third. And Galadriel, possibly Tolkien’s most beloved creation and one who came especially in late, slightly sucrose revisions to possess Marian attributes, was more consistently notable and unforgettable for her sustained ambiguity. 

Tolkien’s Galadriel is first symbolized by the double-sided silver and gold thread of her hair, which draws the unwelcome attention of her half-uncle, the disturbed genius Fëanor (so far, one might add, so House of the Dragon). Her mother named her Nerwen, Man-maiden, for her tall, athletic stature. Galadriel first participated in the revolt against the archangelic Valar, then defended the seafaring elves of the Teleri against her own close kin when the elves devolved into internecine fighting. She refused to accept divine forgiveness for her rebellion after the disastrous First Age, and remained a proud ruler in Middle-Earth. Her character was most profoundly affected by her love for and marriage to the Telerin elven prince Celeborn—the very name Galadriel is Celeborn’s pet-name, in his form of Elvish, Sindarin, not his wife’s Quenya—but the Amazon script, preferring Galadriel as a single, heartbroken warrior, declares Celeborn presumed dead after ignoring his existence altogether for six episodes.

Amazon has taken some hints from the Galadriel of Tolkien’s various writings—warlike physicality, defiance—but has left out everything else: a heart in conflict, a doubting conscience, a capacity rare in fiction for steady marital affection, the exalted dignity not of a high-ranking military officer but of a great feudal tenant-in-chief or sovereign. It may be doubted whether the writers of Rings of Power understand many of these omitted aspects, all highly Tolkienian but not at all pertaining to the twenty-first century. So instead we meet a charmless martinet bullying a weary platoon (the “Northern Armies,” it would seem) and fileting a justifiably grumpy snow troll.

Where House of the Dragon keeps its canny eye on the prize, the city, the family, the throne, Rings of Power aims simultaneously to acquaint us with about six rather slowly interlocking tribes, arranged for the most part neatly by “race,” in the stereotypical, now gradually contentious fantastical sense of that unfortunate word, elves, dwarves, proto-hobbits called Harfoots (not Harfeet), humans, and (increasingly) orcs (with a twisted dark elf and a mysterious extraterrestrial being thrown in). This is all very much as a casual acquaintance with Tolkien, or with Dungeons & Dragons, would dictate, but actually for the most part lacks Tolkien’s fathomless intricacy. Only the humans possess sophisticated political or truly racial differentiation, being divided into the downtrodden, vaguely Pythonian “Southlanders” and the seafaring, self-regarding, mercantile Numenoreans. 

Of all these plots, the Southlands one, whose generic name conceals a narrative purpose, is the limberest. Unhampered by Tolkienian expectations, this strand can explore controversies Tolkien left unresolved or inconclusive. What was the attitude of ordinary men to colonial rule, whether by Dark Lords or paternalistic elves? What happens when a male elf loves a mortal woman? What is the theological status of Orcs? This explorative background brings out some real acting, especially from Ismael Cruz Córdova as the elven squaddie Arondir, who innately exudes the archetypal, not unsubtle sense of melancholy which Orlando Bloom never mastered while playing a similar elven archer. My major complaint here is the presence of an adequately acted human adolescent named, with crushing bathos, Theo. Even if this turns out to be short for Theoden it is scarcely acceptable.

Both the Harfoots and the dwarves are all but unwatchably hackneyed, rarely escaping their blanket, respective, Erse and Scotch cod-accents. Once again names are a problem—the main Harfoot girl is called Elanor, after an elven flower Hobbits only encountered after the events of The Lord of the Rings; a welcome female dwarf is criminally feminized to Disa rather than the one known genuinely Tolkienian dwarf princess name, Dís. 

The elves are for the most part a travesty. Their High King, Gil-galad, in books and film a heart-stirring cameo of legendary, fallen romance, a sort of elven Arthur, here wears an imitation Cesarean laurel in gold worthy of Asterix, recites bromide-ridden, bad-faith orations composed by long-suffering speechwriters, and so cannot be trusted when he reels off some common-or-garden ominous fantasy codswallop that turns out somehow to be accurate. The elven kingdom, Lindon, to which Tolkien only takes us in the enigmatic, semi-funereal, utterly sui generis port of Mithlond, or the Grey Havens, is just an elven kingdom anywhere—trees, robes, very bad post-pre-Raphaelite statuary. Here, where a Celtic lilt or two would not go amiss, everyone sounds like an understudy for Fortinbras. There is no access to otherness, to faerie, only to the familiarly trite. Young Elrond Half-Elven, well played by Robert Aramayo, seems to draw strength once he escapes this cloying atmosphere into the company of another decent elf, Charles Edwards from The Crown, and then his dwarf friend, who is “funny” in the Peter Jackson tradition.

Númenor is clearly where the money both has and has not been expended. The place is breathtaking, in the manner of a computer game too advanced to have impinged on my youth, and the writing at times too bad even to be amusing. The scriptwriters strain wearily after the Tolkienesque, then collapse into the contemporary direct. For a while the children of Elendil appear to discuss U.C.A.S. forms. There is another way, exhibited by Tolkien himself, usefully discussed by Ursula Le Guin, and exemplified in her way by another departed soul with a part to play in the history of British monarchy, Hilary Mantel; the lucidly timeless style, which need not always be without humor but should maintain a certain elevation of timbre.

Thus the players and the scene; we must proceed to the incident. If I did not know better, I would assume from the Rings of Power that the writers had not read the material their paymasters so dearly purchased, and were proceeding solely on the hints revealed in Peter Jackson’s films—i.e., there was a Dark Lord, and he made some crafty rings a while back. Not that, as yet, the eponymous rings are in sight or prospect. But wherever Tolkien left an evocative, worthwhile guide, it seems to be cast aside. In Tolkien, Galadriel has refused her summons to the Blessed Realm out of pride and desire to rule her own realm. In Rings of Power she accepts it then tries to swim back at the last minute on her solo vengeance mission. In Tolkien, the Queen of Númenor is pure-hearted but subject to oppression by a wicked and arrogant husband. Her televisual equivalent seems to be a semi-constitutional monarch with a radically isolationist, protectionist prime minister. In Tolkien, Sauron makes his reappearance as a fair and angelic being, thus alienating his own Orcs (according to very recently published and fascinating marginalia), but fooling most of the rulers he intends to enthrall. The television wants at all costs to keep its audience guessing, with the result that its audience has very likely figured out that Sauron is disguised as a handsome, roguish human wanderer who has definite chemistry with Galadriel.

If the rings are wholly absent, perhaps it is power, especially in the form of kingship, that feels in the Rings of Power so entirely miscarried. Disgruntled with elven occupation, a human youth in the Southlands early on threatens his village’s elf guardians with the return of his “true king.” This was a decent instant of tension—was the rebellious human referring to a lost prince of his own race or to some half-remembered Dark Lord? But in general, it does not make sense that there are still subjects and kings at all in a universe whose thought processes are so patently capitalist, contemporary, and democratic, and where kingship does not convince as a sacral or romantic ideal. Dwarven allies are recruited as a “work force.” Elves are resented by isolationist Númenoreans because of their potential as “workers who do not tire.” It is perhaps unsurprising that the drama comes a little to life with the Orcs, in twenty-first century terms a hard-working cohort with a virtuously identitarian cause. By contrast, when the Southlanders very suddenly cry “All hail” to a king whose name they have not yet appeared to hear, the effect falls a trifle flat.

The first Marquess of Halifax, that brilliant and cynical minister of King Charles III’s slippery second namesake, disapproved of monarchy on rational grounds but thought it necessary to satisfy the appetite for pomp of the people (Halifax also deprecated hereditary titles, while accepting everything he was offered). If monarchy is a fantasy that makes the life and history of a nation and a people more real to itself, then House of the Dragon feeds well upon that fantasy, at a particularly splendid, amoral, unforgiving juncture. Rings of Power does not deliver either any intensification of reality or painted cloth of reverie. It is a gallimaufry of absurdity, flashily bought technology, and incomprehension. Its several gifted and I hope excellently remunerated actors have my sympathy. “Do not spend your pity on me,” Miriel, Queen-Regent of Númenor, declares, “keep it for our enemies!” I do not know whether to reserve mine for Tolkien’s wrathful shade, for those it will persecute, or for my so very predictably disappointed self.