Misconceptions about "The Rings of Power" (and why you should ignore them and watch the show anyway)

Let me begin by saying this article isn’t meant as a criticism against people who don’t like The Rings of Power. People are allowed to like or dislike whatever they want (especially if they try watching it before they state their opinion). However, for some reason, there are certain factions out there that enjoy spreading erroneous rumors about the show – rumors that might make those who have not watched it yet hesitant to engage with it.

Galadriel

If I had a penny for every time someone complained that The Rings of Power has ruined Galadriel’s character, treating her with disrespect and turning her into something she is not, I would probably have enough to secure some rights to adapt Tolkien myself and even hire a half-decent production team. For some reason, this is the criticism that persists even in what you would expect to be elevated circles, people who engage not only with the movie adaptations and who are by no means shallow readers when it comes to Tolkien; people who could recite to you lore facts from the most obscure corners of Tolkien’s works, who can quote fragments of The Silmarillion with their eyes closed, or tell you the identity of some character who appeared only once in an unpublished draft. Good for them. Well, even they sometimes miss the point where Galadriel is concerned.

If you listen enough to the negative discourse surrounding The Rings of Power – and especially its first season – you can’t have missed some of the loudest criticism on Galadriel. She is brash, critics claim. She is too self-focused. Too proud. Too impulsive. Too unlike the wise figure that we see in the Third Age.

And from there, it gets worse. Why is she a warrior? Why is she so skilled at fighting and so eager to do it? Isn’t it unbecoming of a noble Elvish Lady to know how to fight and be so skilled at fighting?

This last bit is the hardest to understand, because not only are Galadriel’s fighting skills acknowledged by Tolkien himself time and time again in his writings (Unfinished Tales, Letters…), but I have to wonder if those critics have not been reading an entirely different author, since their experience of Tolkien seems to be vastly different from mine. Tolkien’s female characters are far from meek swooning damsels. Or have we forgotten Lúthien, who not only defied her father’s will, but also faced both Sauron and Morgoth? Have we forgotten Elwing, who preferred to cast herself into the sea than allow the sons of Feänor to get their hands on the silmaril? What about Morwen, and Húrin’s assessment that despite all the losses and horrors she was forced to endure, “She was not conquered”? Tolkien’s female characters have always been fierce. Galadriel’s fierceness does not go against Tolkien’s lore. It embraces it to the fullest.

Apart from this, one should realize that Galadriel of The Rings of Power was never meant to be the Galadriel of the Third Age. Thousands and thousands of years pass between the Second Age events and the War of the Ring. Even to an Elf that would mean a while. The Galadriel that Frodo meets has been “fighting the long defeat” for an immeasurable number of years. She has seen once-secure realms fall. She has lost friends. She has been sundered from her daughter and knows she will lose her granddaughter for ever.

 Galadriel’s Third-Age wisdom is a hard-won gift. It is not something that she was born with and it is definitely not something that comes to her overnight. And this makes her real and – dare I say it? – human. Wisdom, serenity, acceptance, they do not come to one without years of trials and learning and pain. What we see in The Ring of Power is the making of Galadriel. Her soul-journey, if we could call it that. Personally, I think we should enjoy it and applaud it. We are watching the Lady of Light being created in front of our very eyes.

 Galadriel is a character who is constantly evolving. Given that the show has her as one of the central characters, this is a good thing. A story with a static protagonist is not a good story at all.

One of Galadriel's strongest traits is that she is not a static character - she changes and evolves, exhibiting the characteristics of many of Tolkien's heroic figures. Image credit: Amazon Prime/ The Rings of Power

The Orcs

When episode 3 of the second season of The Rings of Power dropped, the internet suddenly erupted in a rage after witnessing one scene that apparently left a lot of folks scandalized. During Adar’s preparations to go to war against Sauron, Glug, his right-hand orc, asks whether it wouldn’t be wiser to just stay where they are and go on with their lives and consider Sauron dead. After Adar hints that going to war is the right thing to be done, Glug retreats to his hut…where a female orc – presumably Glug’s wife – waits for him holding a baby. The shot of the three of them is probably three-four seconds long. The arguments and outrage it unleashed lasted for weeks (Elrond’s little diversion kiss in episode 7 did its work in real life as well, as it distracted potential complainers from the hate directed towards poor Mrs. Glug and her progeny, dethroning the snippet of Uruk domestic bliss which had so far held the title of “most scandalous ROP scene EVER!”).

The arguments against that very short scene were many: it showed that orcs had “a good side”. It was trying to make viewers sympathetic towards the orcs. It tried to justify the orcs’ actions. It “humanized” them. And on and on, all basically saying that we had this race that was supposed to be 100% evil, and the show was forcing us to like them and take their side.

The thing is – the only thing that scene is supposed to show is that Glug has a family. Tolkien says that orcs reproduce “in the manner of the Children of Iluvatar”, meaning they reproduce just like us, and while I admit the mental image is not something you’d like to pop up in your head, them having children isn’t far-fetched and showing their children doesn’t mean the show is carrying out an agenda. While Tolkien proposed two origin stories for orcs – one in which they are corrupted and twisted Elves, the other in which they are automatons – the show has chosen the former interpretation and tackled it with all the implications that it came with. Orcs can have children, and Glug has a family, and Glug’s family naturally plays a part in his motivations and his ultimate decisions. So far, I see nothing scandalous about this.

As for the scene trying to make the orcs less evil – how would it be doing this, exactly? If not being evil was a prerequisite to having children, there wouldn’t be billions of us roaming the earth today. In fact, being a loving parent isn’t a prerequisite to having children, unfortunately, so that scene does not even prove that Glug loves the Mrs. and his baby, not in the way we would perceive love, at least.

Glug's pivotal role in "The Rings of Power" wouldn't be so striking if we did not know about his family. Image credit: Amazon Prime/ The Rings of Power

As for taking the side of the orcs – the show doesn’t hesitate to show just how cruel, just how devious, just how treacherous orcs can be. The brief snippet with Glug’s family doesn’t stop us from cheering when Elrond throws one of the orcs with a trebuchet after he witnessed the same orc kill his horse and laugh. The brief snippet of Glug’s family doesn’t stop us from seeing the orcs as cruel when they burn the scrolls of Eregion.

Does the scene offer us the possibility that orcs might be redeemed or, at least, redeemable? Well, maybe. But Tolkien does so himself in The Two Towers. During the conversation between Shagrat and Gorbag, we get the impression that the orcs do not always want to fight, that they are pushed by fear of Sauron and the knowledge that they have no choice – the Free People of Middle-earth would never accept them, not after all the atrocities they have committed.

The debate about the possible redemption of the orcs has been carried out in Tolkien circles since before the arrival of the Peter Jackson movies. The conclusions are manifold, and there are no straightforward answers. The show plays with this moral dilemma, even dangling the possibility of Uruk redemption through Glug’s family and the deal Adar is ready to strike with Galadriel – “No more flames, and no more darkness”, he says, and for a moment we, the viewers, can really believe it. However, this illusion is quickly yanked away from us with Adar’ brutal murder, having none other than Glug as the main instigator. No, we are not supposed to sympathize with the orcs or take their sides. But we can acknowledge the tragedy of their existence and we can ruminate a little on what could have been.

The Harfoots

In my essay “The curious case of the Harfoots in the Second Age”, I have already addressed one of the Harfoot controversies – they have a purpose in the story and aren’t just there for the sake of “fan service” alone. Now, I will address the second complaint about the Harfoots. Many viewers seemed to have formed an erroneous impression of them. They see the Harfoots as cruel, callous, too different from the Hobbits they know – in fact, the term “murder-hobbits” has been bandied about, and whoever came up with it probably believes themselves terribly clever.

Where did this come from, may we ask? Well, it all goes back to the third episode of season 1, during the ceremony of “those left behind”. There, Sadoc Burrows recites a list of Harfoots who have died over the years and the manner of their death. Every name is accompanied with the mantra “We wait for you”, and the ceremony is a moving evocation of those lost – or, at least, it is if you pay attention and not jump to the conclusion that the expression “left behind” means that the Harfoots literally left their peers to die and moved on without trying to interfere.

If you pay attention to how some of those Harfoots died, you realize that there was nothing that their people could have done for them. One of those named “ate the sunshine-yellow berries”. So, presumably, she ate something poisonous and was unable to be saved, certainly not with whatever rudimentary healing skills the Harfoots would have possessed.

Poppy’s family was killed in a landslide, so not something that the other Harfoots could have stopped or avoided. But Poppy is alive, even though she presumably was in the same place as the rest of her family. If this is true, then the Harfoots did indeed attempt a rescue, even if Poppy was the only survivor. Poppy still being in the Harfoot caravan shows that she was taken care of even after the death of her family – indeed, she is very much like a third daughter to the Brandyfoots – showing that, far from being callous and uncaring, the Harfoots build strong community ties and help those in need.

Nori and Poppy offering us a lesson in friendship and loyalty. Far from being callous or uncaring, Harfoots stay true to each other. Image credit: Amazon Prime/ The Rings of Power

After Nori is discovered helping an outsider, the Stranger, Malva Meadowgrass insists that the Brandyfoots should be thrown out of their caravan – a sentence which had very high chances of leading to death. The extreme measure was used by some viewers to cement the idea of the Harfoots being “psychopathic” “murder hobbits”.

Two things should be taken into account in this context, though. One is that every society is going to have a system of punishments, should one member commit a crime, especially if that crime potentially endangers the other members of the society. The Harfoots do not throw out members on a whim. But they do punish trespasses, and their way of punishment, we could argue, is certainly not worse than the death penalty, which is used even today in what might construe as civilized societies. In fact, it might be even kinder – because the exiled Harfoots might have some chances of survival, albeit admittedly small.

But there is a second issue when it comes to Nori’s punishment – Sadoc refuses to enforce it fully. He makes as many concessions for Nori as he can, in light of her transgression. If the Harfoots were as inflexible, as cold and as bloodthirsty as certain misguided viewers see them, then there would have been no concessions whatsoever.

I also need to mention one last thing about the “murder-hobbits” claim. Hobbits aren’t all perfect. Some of them are rotten apples. Yes, we have Frodo and Sam and Bilbo. But we also have Ted Sandyman, who mocks Sam’s love of Elves and laughs at his distress when the Party Tree is cut down. There is Lotho Sakville-Baggins who establishes what could only be referred as a totalitarian regine in the Shire, with the help of Sharkey and Grima . And, if we are talking about proto-hobbits, there is also Sméagol who murdered his best friend to get the One Ring – and, while the Ring played a part in Sméagol’s actions, Smeagol is not entirely blameless. The Harfoots being a complex group doesn’t go against Tolkien’s portrayal of the Hobbits. On the contrary, it fits right in.

I could go on. In fact, I will probably be doing more of these myth-busting articles. As I have said time and time again, ROP deserves to be seen as the complex story it is. The showrunners do not have an easy task, adapting years and years of events, sticking to Tolkien’s themes and tackling the philosophical aspects of the Legendarium. Perhaps they do falter from time to time – although not in any way that is worth mentioning. Still, the truth remains that The Rings of Power is made with love and respect for the original materials, and some of the subject it tackles are just as thought-provoking as the books themselves.