Is Amazon’s Lord of the Rings Based on The Silmarillion?

12 comments

1. ” According to an interview Tom Shippey gave before he left the production, the showrunners are only allowed to use Tolkien’s Second Age material. So that would, theoretically, include anything from The Silmarillion that covers the Second Age, like portions of “Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age” and all of “Akallabêth”.”

   It sounds like Amazon’s rights are even more narrow than that. According to showrunner JD Payne, the only material they can really mine for adapytation is in the appendices at the back of Return of the King:

   “So what did Amazon buy? “We have the rights solely to The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, The Return of the King, the appendices, and The Hobbit,” Payne says. “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 lore off the table and has left Tolkien fans wondering how this duo plans to tell a Second Age story without access to those materials. “There’s a version of everything we need for the Second Age in the books we have the rights to,” McKay says. “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.”” (Interview with Vanity Fair, Feb. 14, 2022)

   The deal was negotiated directly with the Tolkien Estate, which has (so far) consistently followed the lead of Tolkien himself, who first sold adaptation rights to THE HOBBIT and LORD OF THE RINGS to Saul Zaentz in 1969, but refused to do so for the SILMARILLION or other writings on Middle Earth.

   That gives Amazon *something* to work with, but it does mean that the richest Second Age material, like the Akallabêth, The Rings of Power and the Third Age, all the material in UNFINISHED TALES, and the manuscript material in THE HISTORY OF MIDDLE EARTH are all off limits to the series. Which to be sure simplifies Payne’s job, since he no longer has to try to resolve the various inconsistencies in all that material; but it does, as Vanity Fair notes, take quite a lot of Second Age lore off the table.

   1. Thanks for sharing that. I wasn’t aware they hadn’t captured other books’ rights. I’ll have to make a note of this going forward.

   2. They had extensive negotiations with Christopher Tolkien before his death. From what I understand, although they only have unconditional rights to the published Appendices, they are allowed on a case by case basis to make mention of historical events in the First and Second Ages. For a lack of a better term, I would something like an in universe wikipedia of who’s who and a basic timeline. For example, I don’t believe that with only the Lord of the Rings, you could say for sure that Finrod Felagund and Galadriel were siblings, and you certainly could not say that Felagund was the first elf to meet humans and ally with them. But that will be a plot point in the Amazon show.

      This is something Jackson exclusively did not have. Anything not in the text of the Lord of the Rings was not his to use, and if he had to explain the origin or background of something that was in the Lord of the Rings, he needed to make up his own explanation. He wasn’t allowed to say anything about how the one ring was forged or how the elves were tricked, or even to use the names Annatar and Celebrimbor. I think that the whole strange thing in the Hobbit films about Aragorn’s ancestors locking the Ringwraiths underground came about because he could say that the Last Alliance happened thousands of years before, as that is in Fellowship, but could not say anything about any king of Arnor beyond Isildur or even that there were kings of Arnor beyond Isildur, and they also could not say that the Ringwraiths fought in the Last Alliance or where they were until Saruman sent word to Gandalf they’d been seen again at the beginning of Fellowship.

2. As to your conclusion… Perhaps it’s overly optimistic to predict that most viewers won’t care. That may depend upon their own history with Middle-earth. If most viewers are new to Tolkien, then this interpretation will become their touchstone and you’ll be 100% correct. However, if a majority of viewers had their passions ignited by the Tolkien père et fils, Peter Jackson & Co., the BBC radio dramatizations, or even Rankin Bass, there will be plenty of debate for years to come (eg., are they shooting in New Zealand? If not…). There’s a tendency in these things to splinter into factions rather than to find consensus.

3. I for one am looking forward to watching and drawing my own conclusions on whether or not I like it. I’ve always had a “maybe it’s an alternate reality” mindset when it comes to adaptations, so if the show is entertaining i will enjoy it even if I don’t fully agree personally with the changes made.

4. Unfortunately, due to the current nature of fandom, whatever the show is like there’s bound to be some level of entitled moaning. There seems to be a subset of people who react to a film/tv programme they don’t like by spewing anger online and even going after members of the creative team, rather than just not watching it again and getting on with their lives

   1. I often find that this ‘entitled moaning’ contains some interesting truths and reasonable considerations. I also oppose the modern trends of ‘forced diversity’ for the sake of it and I don’t care if someone would call me racist for that, and I would stand by this, there is always chance that there will be something good in the show but all too often criticisms turn out to be right in the end, especially in various modern adaptations that miss the essence, the worldbuilding, the lore, the established characterizations, etc. sometimes the changes serve no purpose than to just be and serve no function in the way adaptations require, change for the sake of change is just pointless. And obviously casting choices can be criticised ( I for one think that making the hot dwarves, in the hobbit films was a bit of mistake 🙂 but again I always thought that Hobbit films were leaving much to be desired).

5. I just want the show to not suck; I’ll accept that it’s not going to be a faithful account of the Second Age otherwise, and so long as it doesn’t suck I’ll be happy with it.

   Regarding what Amazon do or don’t have rights to, they did use the map of Númenor in promotional material, and that only appears in Unfinished Tales. There’s definitely something else going on, but it’s not 100% clear exactly what.

6. Regarding the Hobbit names or surnames, I think Amazon is completely lazy when it comes to this, obviously they apparently haven’t read even the appendix F on translation for there is everything one needs to know for hobbit naming conventions :), and it’s clear to me that the habit of giving family names, the surnames is much more recent that is it developed some centuries since settling of the Shire! And so obviously the Hobbits in Second Age WOULD NOT HAVE FAMILY NAMES :), hell even in Third Age there were still hobbit groups who lived in simpler more primitive way, Deagol and Smeagol were only known by their single first names, they had no family surname :). I’m sorry to say but I think I will NOT like what Amazon is doing with this tv show, in the end if may turn out to be decent on it;s own but to me it’s clear they lack quite a lot to do a proper adaptation of Tolkien material! To me it even seems like insanity to make this tv show WITHOUT access to the writings that contain the most detail about Second Age, without the rights for parts of Silm or Unfinished Tales there is no sense in making this show, they’d better do with making ‘young Aragorn adventures’ as the first rumors had it, those at least are recorded in Lotr appendices!

   1. There’s nothing about Hobbits in the Second Age anywhere, but “Hobbits would not have family names, because all the family names developed in the Shire” is not a good argument. There are many cultures in the real world which have gone back and forth on having family names. Various Jewish families have had surnames since the Second Temple, and yet most current Jewish surnames are less than 300 years old. Before that those families didn’t have any. If there was some historical drama about such and such family in the Persian empire, you could nitpick that Persian Jews didn’t have family names until 1800, but the drama would be right in giving them names, even names that sound modern. Names have been gained and lost many times.

      To say that Poppy Proudfoot is the direct ancestor of the Shire Proudfeet would indisputably be wrong. But could there have been a Hobbit named something that translates to Poppy from a clan that translates to Proudfoot in the Second Age? To my knowledge, Tolkien wrote about no Second Age hobbits at all, but if in the Third Age, Western given names become English, I don’t see why you couldn’t do the same with whatever mannish language Hobbits spoke in Second Age stories. The fact that Bucca of the Marish doesn’t seem to have a surname, and that his descendants only took on Oldbuck in the Shire does not mean that before that Hobbits didn’t have surnames. It doesn’t even necessarily imply that Bucca didn’t have a second name that he went by, which was simply not recorded. Surnames are fluid.

      1. Are you for real? I am addressing THIS fragment of the Lotr appendices:

         “In the case of persons, however, Hobbit-names in the Shire and in Bree were for those days peculiar, notably in the habit that had grown up, some centuries before this time, of having inherited names for families. Most of these surnames had obvious meanings in the current language, being derived from jesting nicknames, or from place-names, or (especially in Bree) from the names of plants and trees. Translation of these presented little difficulty; but there remained one or two older names of forgotten meaning, and these I have been content to anglicize in spelling: as Took for _Tûk_, or Boffin for _Bophîn_.

         I have treated Hobbit first-names, as far as possible, in the same way. To their maid-children Hobbits commonly gave the names of flowers or jewels. To their man-children they usually gave names that had no meaning at all in their daily language; and some of their women’s names were similar. Of this kind are Bilbo, Bungo, Polo, Lotho, Tanta, Nina, and so on. There are many inevitable but
         accidental resemblances to names that we now have or know: for instance Otho, Odo, Drogo, Dora, Cora, and the like. These names I have retained, though I have usually anglicized them by altering their endings, since in Hobbit-names a was a masculine ending, and o and e were feminine.

         In some old families, especially those of Fallohide origin such as the
         Tooks and the Bolgers, it was, however, the custom to give high-sounding first-names. Since most of these seem to have been drawn from legends of the past, of Men as well as of Hobbits, and many while now meaningless to Hobbits closely resembled the names of Men in the Vale of Anduin, or in Dale, or in the Mark, I have turned them into those old names, largely of Frankish and Gothic origin, that are still used by us or are met in our histories. I have thus at any rate preserved the often comic contrast between the first-names and surnames, of which the Hobbits themselves were well aware. Names of classical origin have rarely been used; for the nearest equivalents to Latin and Greek in Shire-lore were the Elvish tongues, and these the Hobbits seldom used in nomenclature. Few of them at any time knew ‘the languages of the kings’, as they called them.

         The names of the Bucklanders were different from those of the rest of the
         Shire. The folk of the Marish and their offshoot across the Brandywine were in many ways peculiar, as has been told. It was from the former language of the southern Stoors, no doubt, that they inherited many of their very odd names. These I have usually left unaltered, for if queer now, they were queer in their own day. They had a style that we should perhaps feel vaguely to be Celtic elements in England, I have sometimes imitated the latter in my translation. Thus Bree, Combe (Coomb), Archet, and Chetwood are modelled on relics of British nomenclature, chosen according to sense: bree hill, chet “wood*. But only one personal name has been altered in this way. Meriadoc was chosen to fit the fact that this character’s shortened name. Kali, meant in the Westron ‘jolly, gay’, though it was actually an abbreviation of the now unmeaning Buckland name Kalimac.

         I have not used names of Hebraic or similar origin in my transpositions.
         Nothing in Hobbit-names corresponds to this element in our names. Short names such as Sam, Tom, Tim, Mat were common as abbreviations of actual Hobbit-names, such as Tomba, Tolma, Matta, and the like. But Sam and his father Ham were really called Ban and Ran. These were shortenings of Banazîr and Ranugad_, originally nicknames, meaning ‘half-wise, simple’ and ‘stay-at-home’, but being words that had fallen out of colloquial use they remained as traditional names in certain families. I have therefore tried to preserve these features by using Samwise and Hamfast, modernizations of ancient English _samwís and hámfoest which corresponded closely in meaning.

         Having gone so far in my attempt to modernize and make familiar the
         language and names of Hobbits, I found myself involved in a further process. The Mannish languages that were related to the Westron should, it seemed to me, be turned into forms related to English. The language of Rohan I have accordingly made to resemble ancient English, since it was related both (more distantly) to the Common Speech, and (very closely) to the former tongue of the northern Hobbits, and was in comparison with the Westron archaic. In the Red Book it is noted in several places that when Hobbits heard the speech of Rohan they recognized many words and felt the language to be akin to their own, so that it seemed absurd to leave the recorded names and words of the Rohirrim in a wholly alien style.”

         Yes Tolkien did not wrote aobut Second Age Hobbits OBVIOUSLY for his artistic vision for that time did not include them simple as that! But come on THINK a little!

         As Tolkien wrote in a letter about the ‘older legends’ which includes the time of Second Age:

         “Nearly all are grim and tragic: a long account of the disasters that destroyed the beauty of the Ancient World, from the darkening of Valinor to the Downfall of Númenor and the flight of Elendil. And there are no hobbits. Nor does Gandalf appear.”

         Also enough from the prologue about the Hobbits tells us that before the great migration the Hobbits during their Wandering Days had only oral traditions, they were illiterate, have yet not even learned to write and read and again used single names, Deagol, Smeagol, Marcho and Blanco these are main examples of the Hobbit names without any surname.

         1. If your issue is that there shouldn’t be any hobbits at all, that’s a legitimate issue. But if your issue is only what they are called, that isn’t. As for the conceit of English specifically corresponding to Westron and other Mannish languages being changed into real-word languages based on their distance from Westron, obviously that cannot work for a tale in the Second Age. What I said was that if you make a similar concession for Second Age languages, then there is nothing unreasonable about having two names. There’s also nothing unreasonable about being a more settled, literate people long before the days of wandering and upheaval.

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