THE RINGS OF POWER Showrunners Talk About What LORD OF THE RINGS Properties They Have the Rights to
The upcoming Amazon series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is rooted in the stories of J.R.R. Tolkien, but not all of the author’s titles have been bought by the streamer. So fans may be wondering what all the series plans to cover, and that question was answered in a recent sit down with showrunners Patrick McKay and J.D. Payne. While talking to Vanity Fair, the pair explained:
“We have the rights solely to The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, The Return of the King, the appendices, and The Hobbit. And that is it. We do not have the rights to The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, The History of Middle-earth, or any of those other books.”
That takes a huge chunk of the story off the table, and has left Tolkien fans wondering how the creators plan to tell a Second Age story without access to those materials. McKay explained:
“There’s a version of everything we need for the Second Age in the books we have the rights to. As long as we’re painting within those lines and not egregiously contradicting something we don’t have the rights to, there’s a lot of leeway and room to dramatize and tell some of the best stories that [Tolkien] ever came up with.”
Payne added:
“We took all these little clues and thought of them as stars in the sky that we then connected to write the novel that Tolkien never wrote about the Second Age.”
The report when on to say that the duo cites songs like “The Fall of Gil-galad” (you can hear actor Bill Nighy sing it here from a 1981 BBC Radio adaptation) or “The Song of Eärendil” or Fellowship chapters like “The Council of Elrond” and “The Shadow of the Past” or the “Concerning Hobbits” section of the prologue as sources for significant lore dumps. Beyond the premiere, there aren’t, however, any significant time jumps or, thus far, episode-long journeys to the past. The rights to the First Age material from The Silmarillion are still owned by the Tolkien estate.
Payne went on to say:
“We worked in conjunction with world-renowned Tolkien scholars and the Tolkien estate to make sure that the ways we connected the dots were Tolkienian and gelled with the experts’ and the estate’s understanding of the material.”
It sounds like they have a ton of resources and material to work with here, so I think they’re on the right track. When asked if this series will “feel” like The Lord of the Rings films, McKay praised the tone that Peter Jackson nailed in the films, saying:
“What I loved about those first three films in particular [was] Peter and his collaborators captured…a unique blend of tones that Tolkien [uses] in his characters and his worlds. It’s heartfelt but it’s complex and political. It’s dark and intense, but it’s also whimsical and funny and sweet. It’s very rare to find an author who, in any medium, tries to play every note on the piano. Sometimes it’s suspenseful, sometimes it’s scary, sometimes it’s esoteric and complex and wildly imaginative, but it’s all Middle-earth.”
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power are set to premiere on Amazon on September 2nd. Are you looking forward to this series?