Amazon Prime’s billion-dollar production of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power has been targeted with a flood of racist and misogynist abuse online.
Amazon disabled reviews for the shows due to “review bombing” — when online users seek to overwhelm reviews based on political agendas. Online commenters have both criticized the casting of people of colour and how the story focuses on powerful women.
Literature scholar Craig Franson has been researching the culture wars and neo-fascist politics in Tolkien studies. In a podcast he hosts with historian Dani Holtz, an expert in American conservatism, they discuss how online fascists use mass media “to harness blockbuster cultural productions,” as in the far-right backlash to Amazon’s Rings of Power series.
As a literature scholar who has studied Tolkien’s fiction and scholarly writings, I encourage discussions of adaptations to gain a better understanding of how they respond to Tolkien’s works and the world we live in today.
But far-right commenters have tried to shut down any discussion of a new re-telling that is not to their liking. A better understanding of Tolkien’s works and the nature of adaptations will combat some of the online disinformation and harassment campaign.
Long before the first episode aired Sept. 1, some commenters condemned the show because they assumed it would not be “faithful” to “the lore,” meaning the texts Tolkien wrote.
There is no such thing as a “faithful” adaptation in all details. As literary scholar Linda Hutcheon has pointed out, every adaptation is a re-interpretation of source material.
Far-right commenters use “Tolkien” as an image of the world they want to have: a male-dominated, all-white society, and they attack any other interpretations. Legitimate literary discussion therefore is threatened with being overwhelmed by intimidation and disinformation.
In this way, they can influence even those fans who are new to Tolkien or ideas about adaptation. Let’s take a look at some of the most popular misconceptions circulating now.
The purpose of an adaptation may be to pay homage to the source or to critique it, but either way it will say something new as a re-telling of a story.
Producing an adaptation in a new medium such as a TV show requires a different way of telling a story compared to a print version.
For Rings of Power, much has to be invented. With the approval of the Tolkien estate, Amazon has bought the rights to tell a story of the second age of Middle-earth based on the appendices in The Lord of the Rings.
In these appendices, Tolkien only briefly outlined what happened in Middle-earth before the events chronicled in The Lord of the Rings.
