Refashioning the ring

When J.R.R. Tolkien sold the film rights for his epic fantasy The Lord of the Rings to United Artists in 1969, he didn’t know he had created a genre that would someday fill entire bookstore shelves. He also had no idea the deal, worth 100,000 British pounds—about $2 million today—would eventually earn over $5 billion at the box office or that the Tolkien Estate would see hardly any of it.

More than 50 years after Tolkien’s death, the holders of those lucrative media rights continue to look for ways to profit from them, with three new adaptations coming soon. The studios undoubtedly hope to help their bottom line, but some of the creators involved aim to keep Tolkien’s spirit alive.

The sale of the film and TV rights to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings sparked a legal tale as complicated as Middle-earth’s lore. United Artists sold Tolkien’s film rights to the Saul Zaentz Co., which in turn formed Tolkien Enterprises in 1977 and licensed a handful of animated films. Meanwhile, Tolkien’s son Christopher fleshed out Middle-earth on behalf of the Tolkien Estate by editing books based on his father’s notes and drafts, all of which were off limits to would-be adapters.

It became a tale of two Tolkiens—the Tolkien Estate and Tolkien Enterprises, which rebranded as Middle-earth Enterprises in 2010. Tensions flared after New Line Cinema leased the film rights for Peter Jackson’s live-action The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

In 2008, the Tolkien Estate filed (and soon settled) a lawsuit with New Line Cinema over profits owed from the films. The estate took legal action again in 2012, suing Middle-earth Enterprises for $80 million over video-game licensing. The estate claimed the licensing contract—signed decades before the invention of Pong—didn’t apply to digital media. Even more egregious to the estate, Middle-earth Enterprises had allowed the sale of Lord of the Rings casino games. The lawsuit stretched five years before they settled “amicably,” according to legal filings.

In 2017, Jeff Bezos entered the saga over the fate of the rights to Middle-earth. Amazon purchased television rights to The Lord of the Rings’ appendices from the Tolkien Estate for $1 billion, hoping to build a fantasy powerhouse to rival HBO’s Game of Thrones. Prime Video’s The Rings of Power became one of the most expensive TV shows ever made.

Despite the financial machinations of the Tolkien Estate, Middle-earth Enterprises, and various studios, it’s not about money for Rings of Power showrunners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay. The screenwriting duo dreamed of tackling Tolkien long before Amazon bought the TV rights.

McKay discovered Tolkien as a child, watching Rankin/Bass’ animated The Hobbit (1977): “By the time [Peter Jackson’s] films came out, I was the guy waiting, counting down to the day.” Payne considers himself a “more recent convert.” He first encountered Middle-earth in Jackson’s films. “Those sort of brought me to the books, after which I did the deep dive, learned some Elvish, the whole nine yards.”

Their second season of The Rings of Power arrives on Prime Video Aug. 29. The first season drew critical acclaim and some fan backlash on social media. Some viewers complained about the show’s deviation from Tolkien lore. Others felt the show painted its protagonist, the immortal Galadriel, as too much an action hero.

Season 2 explores some of the deepest questions of Tolkien’s work. Payne is excited for fans to experience one “iconic bit of legendarium” in Sauron’s seduction of Celebrimbor, the Elven metalsmith behind the eponymous rings of power. “He just twists Celebrimbor around his finger, gaslights him, sort of severs him from his relationship to, first, his support circle, his co-workers, his friends, and then ultimately, his relationship to reality,” says Payne.

Tolkien fans may also cheer the addition of Tom Bombadil, the merry woodsman famously chopped from Jackson’s films.

“Tom is challenging in that he’s sort of an anti-dramatic character,” says Payne. In bringing Bombadil to screen, he and McKay focused on the character’s wisdom. “We have a certain wizard, a certain Stranger who is on a path this season of self-discovery, trying to figure out who he is, what his purpose on Middle-earth is,” says Payne. “And we thought, what a delightful opportunity to have someone like the Stranger cross paths with someone like Tom Bombadil.”

“He’s our Yoda,” adds McKay.

Some fans may feel wary of the on-screen violence. Even the beloved Jackson trilogy sported its share of hacking and slashing. But the carnage in Rings of Power, though infrequent, hits with a brutality reminiscent of Game of Thrones.

But Season 2 of Rings of Power isn’t the only upcoming adaptation trying to fill the gaps in Tolkien’s novels. New Line Cinema’s The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, an anime film set 183 years before Tolkien’s trilogy, arrives in theaters Dec. 13. Western viewers might recognize director Kenji Kamiyama’s work from Star Wars: Visions on Disney+, for which he wrote and directed “The Ninth Jedi.” Tolkien lovers have no reason to doubt Kamiyama’s storytelling ability, but they might wonder how this Japanese form will mesh with the European mythos of Middle-earth.

A new live-action film is also in development. The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum is scheduled for 2026 and set to be directed by Smeagol himself, Andy Serkis. Peter Jackson, now producing, has vowed to stay directly involved.

When tackling Tolkien, even the best-intentioned adaptations can flop. Jackson himself fell from fans’ good graces with his coolly received Hobbit trilogy, which also attempted to fill in some gaps—stretching a short children’s novel into nine hours across three films. Last year, The Lord of the Rings: Gollum ranked as Metacritic’s worst-­reviewed video game of 2023.

It’s hard to imagine the famously particular Tolkien stomaching even well-received adaptations of his work. In his published letters, he eviscerated one writer’s attempt at a Lord of the Rings screenplay, labeling an entire section “totally unacceptable to me, as a whole and in detail.” He also bemoaned the ­“sillification” of BBC Radio’s dramatized Hobbit. What are fans to make of these attempts to embellish Tolkien’s story?

“Capturing the length, breadth, depth, and height, not to mention the historical tone, is a major challenge,” says Michael Ward, co-author of Popcorn With the Pope: A Guide to the Vatican Film List.

Ward, a literary scholar and theologian, writes extensively on the Inklings—C.S. Lewis, Tolkien, and their circle. He notes the themes a true Tolkien adaptation should display: “Moral seriousness, humility, humor, hope amid realism, respect for tradition, love of the natural world—especially trees—love for language, and a willingness to find significance in all things … a relaxed recognition that the world, properly understood, is a kind of sacrament, flawed and fallen, yes, but retaining its essential value and meaningfulness, and basically intelligible to a person of good faith.”

On the other hand: “If audiences find characters who are depicted positively yet who also bend or break the moral law or who are individualists intent on self-­realization, that’s a pretty sure sign that it’s not true to Tolkien,” he says.

Faith poses another challenge. Tolkien avoided religious allegory, but his devout Catholic worldview shines through the text. “As creators and adapters, we want to be true to all of that,” says McKay. “Faith is an important theme in the Second Age, and fear of death and the devil’s bargains that our villains make and the destruction that is wrought because of that are all informed clearly by his own beliefs and his own faith.”

“We’re constantly reading Tolkien,” says Payne. “But then when it’s us and the keyboard, and it’s late at night, and it’s our turn to do the thing, it’s going to come out through us and our own unique set of makeups and beliefs and experiences.”

Payne, who is Mormon, says faith affects the way he thinks about his craft during those late-night writing sessions.

“I spent a lot of time in the Old Testament and the New Testament, and in the language of Scripture, and reading Hebrew poetry and parsing how a spiritual experience is conveyed through just black-and-white letters and words on a page,” says Payne. “That way of thinking about language as a vessel for a spiritual experience impacts the way that I think about writing in general.”

He draws an analogy from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, where Sean Connery’s character prays, “May he who illuminated this manuscript illuminate me.”

“I will pray regularly and say a prayer kind of like that,” says Payne. “And say that I believe there was a source that inspired Tolkien in what he did, and seek that myself, and everyone we work with can be inspired by the same force, the same spirit, that inspired Tolkien.”

Would Catholic Tolkien have recognized that same spirit in these modern adaptations? It’s doubtful. Ultimately, the fans who preserve Tolkien’s spirit through a love of his work will need to decide if these new tales carry his.

—Jonathan Boes is the multimedia editor of God’s WORLD News and a graduate of the World Journalism Institute