Name: Why TV Is Wrong For Tolkien
Uploaded: 2026-01-13T17:37:39.000Z
Duration: 8 min 28 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

There are plenty of criticisms that you can level at the Rings of Power, Amazon's TV series set in the second age of Tolkien's Middle Earth.

Sentences with advanced comparative

I don't dislike the show as much as some people, but

Adverbs of degree

the first season didn't really work for me.

That's, of course, partly down to the show's creators, but

I also have a lot of sympathy for them because I think they're faced with what might be an impossible task.

See, I'm skeptical that the Lord of the Rings or any other story from Tolkien's mythology can really work as a TV series.

TV as a form just doesn't play to the strengths of Tolkien's vision.

To understand why I think this, we have to look closer at what makes Tolkien's story special and also what stories TV is best at telling.

The Lord of the Rings trilogy consists of epic high fantasy novels.

All four of these words have important meanings.

Fantasy is the genre indicating a story with with supernatural elements.

Epic and high are subgenres without exact definitions.

But generally, high fantasy means a story told in an alternate or secondary world, as opposed to fantastical elements in our own world.

And epic, in this case, means a story that has the highest possible stakes, the fate of the world or the universe.

But I actually want to focus on this novel.

It's by far the most popular form of literature.

it's also a genre itself, with conventions that separated it from earlier genres of literature like medieval romance and the epic.

What set the novel apart when it emerged in the 1700s was its focus on ordinary people, as opposed to knights or noble heroes, and

their engagement with contemporary culture.

Plots became less important than characters.

And the stories, rather than take their structures from traditional genres, were structured by the choices these characters made, by the consequences of those choices, and

eventually by their inner lives, their psychological conflicts with themselves.

Now, as you move backward in time, characters become grander and more archetypal, embodiments of particular virtues, vices and codes of honor.

They're more defined by their roles in the narrative structure, which is rigid and conventional.

Not to be confused with the word epic in epic fantasy, I'm talking about epics like Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil's Aeneid, Beowulf, or the Indian Mahabharata.

According to genre theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, the epic is Set in a distant mythical past, it reflects the collective memory and values of a society.

It's centered around the heroic deeds of larger than life figures.

And it takes place at the founding of a culture or at a peak time.

Most importantly, epics have a sense of completeness to them.

What happens in an epic was always going to happen.

The character are bound by fate or destiny.

It is as closed as a circle, Bakhtin says.

Inside it, everything is finished, already over.

These are all qualities that describe the Lord of the Rings.

The story is set in an alternate world, but

Tolkien also imagined it as a mythical past for England.

It reflects shared values of fellowship, friendship, courage, and hope in the face of overwhelming dark forces.

It features the heroic deeds of larger than life figures like Aragorn and Gandalf.

And it takes place at a peak time of Middle Earth, the end of the Third Age during the War of the Ring.

Now, of course, the Lord of the Rings is novelistic too, most apparently in Tolkien's choice to foreground the hobbits, characters who are literally not larger than life, but

whose choices have a huge impact on their world.

What makes Tolkien truly special was his ability to incorporate the qualities of epic and myth into a modern novel and to let the reader feel again the power of long dormant genres.

See, in a world as complex and rapidly changing and scientific as ours, we're not really able to write new epics and myths because, well, we can't believe in them.

We need our characters to be as complex as we are.

Their wills need to be free, not bound by destiny.

And yet we still yearn deeply for the completeness, the unity, the closed circle of epic storytelling.

In fact, the more complex our world becomes, the stronger we feel that longing.

The catch is that ages that are characterized by high rates of change are eager for new myths, but

also ill adapted to giving themselves what they desire, as Hans Blumenberg said.

But in his fictional secondary World, Tolkien found a loophole, a way for readers to satisfy their burning desire for the epic and the mythic without betraying their knowledge of how the world really works.

For me, that's the value and the beauty of Tolkien's vision and what any adaptation should seek to capture.

Twenty years ago, I believed Peter Jackson did, and

that's due to his artistry and the artistry of everyone who worked on that trilogy.

But it's also because movies are able to convey this epic quality.

Even when they're trilogies, their endings have a finality to them.

Tv, on the other hand, is much more open ended.

There are endings, of course, endings of episodes, of seasons, even of series.

But TV shows, especially those that run multiple seasons, are fundamentally oriented toward the next thing, not the last thing.

This is what makes television the ideal medium for novelistic storytelling, where characters are the most important thing.

Complex, flawed characters whose choices and their consequences are what structure the story.

I mean, all the best TV series, especially TV dramas, are intense character studies.

This is why Game of Thrones is the ideal fantasy series for tv.

It's a story in which destiny plays a role, but

a complicated one, often being misinterpreted and subverted by the messy choices of messy characters who ultimately decide their own fate.

TV is just not suited to capturing the epic in Tolkien's world.

But to remove it is to remove an essential piece.

Now, watching the Rings of Power, you can see the creators trying to balance epic narrative with psychologically complex characters.

But when they lean into the epic, it stops being good tv, it falls flat.

And when they lean toward the psychodrama, it stops feeling like Tolkien.

And their job is extra, extra hard because they're dealing with the second age, which is less novelistic than the Lord of the Rings, even less epic in Tolkien.

These are myths where characters are even grander and more archetypal, their stories more conventional.

Trying to dive into the psychology of Galadriel and Sauron for multiple seasons is a losing game.

Now, I'm not rooting against the Rings of Power.

Maybe they'll find a way to square the circle in season two.

Or maybe, just maybe, popular IP doesn't have to be adapted and forced into every shape under the sun.

This episode was brought to you by Squarespace, the all in one website platform for entrepreneurs to stand out and succeed online.

Whether you're just starting out or managing a growing brand, Squarespace makes it easy to create a beautiful website.

And now you can make a completely personalized website with their new guided design system, Squarespace Blueprint.

Choose from professionally curated layout and styling options to build a unique online presence from the ground up, optimized for every device and with optimized SEO tools so you show up more often to more people.

You can upload video content, you can even sell access to your video library all from within Squarespace.

Basically, a Squarespace site is going to make whatever you're sharing or selling, look professional, and

that's going to help you get the word out.

Head over to squarespace.com for a free trial, and

when you're ready to Launch, go to squarespace.com nerdwriter for 10% off your first purchase.