03:45 lifecell AZ | The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power review — it’s so reverent This Amazon Prime Video series has the vibe of executives carrying an expensive vase across a slippery floor Hugo Rifkind Wednesday August 31 2022, 3.00pm BST, The Times Kk ka Look, these are the rules. When elves are on screen, wafting ethereally about, you have soaring, beautiful voices or perhaps strings. When it’s hobbits gambolling through their settlements — sorry! I meant harfoots! Not hobbits! Don’t sue me, Tolkien lawyers! — then it’s a tin whistle, or maybe a fiddle. When it’s dwarves, hefting axes inside a hollowed-out mountain, you get lusty Wagnerian singing, ideally in German. Which is odd because these dwarves are Scottish. A word about stereotypes. Let’s get it out of the way. When Amazon’s lavish, unspeakably expen) Tard af tha Dinnowurace annaunan din IN10 4DERM cer way. When Amazon’s lavish, unspeakably expensive Lord of the Rings was announced in 2018, a much-discussed — but, crucially, fake — industry headline went viral. It read: “Amazon Studios confirms that their Middle-earth will include elves of color”. Fake or not, though, it turned out to be true. For now we indeed do have elves of colour, foremost in the form of Ismael Cruz Cordova, who plays a hero soldier elf called Arondir. All other mystical races are likewise multiracial, which is why, in a sentence that surprises me even as I write it, this fantasy opus also features Lenny Henry playing an ancient proto-hobbit called Sadoc Burrows.DERM cer eB Are SSS ae | Morfydd Clark as Galadriel and Robert Aramayo as Elrond in The Rings of Power AMAZON If this enrages you, get a better hobby. Yet, while racial stereotypes are clearly now beyond the pale, it does seem peculiar that national ones are still just fine. So the dwarves all sound Scottish, and the hobbits/harfoots sound Irish. The elves sound incredibly, preposterously English, like Lord Haw-Haw or Jacob Rees-Mogg. I’m not sure how the orcs are going to sound because I’ve seen only one so far and he was too busy trying to kill people and having his head chopped off to “) anything. Neatness suggests that they will be We A HomeDERM cer kill people and having his head chopped off to say anything. Neatness suggests that they will be Welsh orcs, but I’m betting on French. Imagine. = West side glory: it’s time to discover the coastline that really is a Turkish delight At a reported cost of nearly half a billion dollars a season, Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (on Prime Video) may be the most expensive television yet made. It looks it too. You will be wondering, I suppose, how it relates to the Peter Jackson film trilogy, and the honest answer is that it doesn’t really. "3 Lord:of the Rings: The Rings of Power = Offici " ~ do eek | .* ~ é .03:47 lifecell uw Lord:of the Rings: The Rings of Power = Qffici < L ff . , , ~ Lae 1c © CT a Rather than following the relatively well-known stories about the gang heading to Mordor (“We'll never make it,” the Flight of the Conchords sang in their brilliant LOTR parody song Frodo. “Oh. We made it”), this series takes as its source material the mildly interminable appendices to the third book, which is not really a story at all, but more of a pretend history of what had happened a few thousand years earlier. Helpfully, elves are immortal, barring disaster, so there is some scope for familiar characters. What with said appendices being heavy on chronology but low on detail, though, this show is dominate) characters made up afresh. fi Home03:47 lifecell AZ | but low on detail, though, this show is dominated by characters made up afresh. e 10 things to know about The Rings of Power So we have Morfydd Clark playing Galadriel (Cate Blanchett in the films) on a quest for revenge against Morgoth for being mean to elves (I paraphrase), but we also have elves we’ve never heard of before, such as the aforementioned Arondir. He has spent decades stationed, in the manner of a Roman soldier, next to some sort of human settlement where he has fallen in love with Bronwyn (Nazanin Boniadi), the village healer. Being a human, she is probably a few hundred years younger than him. It’s a bit Leonardo DiCaprio. With all this intermingling of humans and elves, it can be quite hard to tell who is what, and you do spend quite a lot of time peering intently for ears. Hats and headbands are a nightmare. Home03:47 lifecell SA 2 Lenny Henry as Sadoc Burrows ALAMY Meanwhile, Nori (Markella Kavenagh) is a harfoot, which is almost a hobbit, but not quite (please don’t make me explain this), and she’s just found a pet giant who has for some reason just landed ona meteor. Also, there are dwarves, such as King Durin III (Peter Mullan, obviously) from whom other elves want something. Can’t remember what, but it seems important. One problem with all this is that, after two hour-long episodes (the first two will be released on Friday, then they are rolled out each week), we’re still very much waiting for the plot to click into groow) Probably orcs are about to attack. Thev usually do. A HomeDERE Mer very much waiting for the plot to click into groove. Probably orcs are about to attack. They usually do. Another, though, is how very ... safe it all feels. Despite the inventiveness that the creators have had to deploy to populate Tolkien’s world with fresh, non-canonical characters (and actually quite convincingly, if that’s not a mad thing to say about dwarves and elves), the whole thing has the vibe of terrified executives carrying an exceedingly expensive vase across a slippery floor. e Why The Rings of Power is an expensive gamble e Inside the book that inspired the series It’s just so damn reverent. Not just the elves, because they can’t help it, but everything. Nobody is sexy. When it isn’t awing you with celestial lights and a thousand people singing “ahhhh”, the threat of twee hangs extremely heavy. No humour is risked except for the unthreatening and frankly excruciating pseudo-humour of dwarves being peeved. Unfair as it may be, it’s impossible not to contrast all this with the loose, swashbuckling campery of House of the Dragon, or Game of Thrones, which spawngle) it. Both are. of course. almost as derived from A HomeeR] a I of the Dragon, or Game of Thrones, which spawned it. Both are, of course, almost as derived from Tolkien as this is, but they just manage to be so much less Enya about it. Perhaps two episodes aren’t enough to judge, and we are indeed gearing up for the greatest and most gripping fantasy TV series yet made. But I’m certainly not there yet. And between us, the books drag on a bit too. The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power launches with two episodes on Amazon Prime Video on September 2 Related articles STREAMING Amazon's new Lord of the Rings drama is an expensive gamble In the winter of 1951 JRR Tolkien wrote a letter to a prospective publisher in which he characterised the so-called Second... August 21 2022, 12.0lam BST Josh Glancy TELEVISION The Rings of Power: where Tolkien's story comes from The six appendices a famously reserved Oxford University philologist added to the trilogy he had finished in 1955 have led to... 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