The Rings of Powers Season Three press release is out now. I’d like to comment on just one passage from it.
(more…)Tag: sauron
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Here’s another installment about some of the things I learned about Tolkien and The Silmarillion by writing a book about it. This one is about how the vast spans of time in The Silmarillion are easy to overlook (and lead to assumptions), and about how no group in Tolkien’s legendarium is truly homogeneous.
read about things “uncomfortable, palpitating, and even gruesome” -
This is the blog post version of the talk I gave at the New York Tolkien Conference last summer (2025). It also revisits a few of the things I said in my Mythmoot talk from a few years before. But all in all, it’s about the writing of The Silmarillion Primer, a book which I promise is about to drop soon. Since it’s a bit long, I’ve made this just part 1. This one’s about the characters in The Silmarillion.
Read the doom that is written -
In the real world, what we in the Tolkien fandom call the primary world, Orcs are not a race. They’re a mindset, an ideology, the basest outlook of humanity. Tolkien certainly thought so.
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Here is an admittedly long bullet list of some of my thoughts and opinions concerning the first episode of the Rings of Power season 2 episode 1, “Elven Kings Under the Sky.” I say “some” because I simply cannot contain them all! Spoilers, of course, abound.
An important disclaimer: I do not hate The Rings of Power. I’m still watching and I am very entertained. I do wish I was more than entertained by it, because it’s inspired by J.R.R. Tolkien. The show is still far and away the best fantasy television series around.
But here I would like to record many of my opinions. And they are only opinions.
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What did Sauron look like, really? What’s his deal? Was he ever a flaming eyeball on top of a tower? Probably not. Was he a creepy-as-hell humanoid with nine black fingers when he tortured Gollum? Yes. Was he a big guy in spiky black armor when he fought Gil-galad and Elendil on the slopes of Mt. Doom? Possibly. Was he a friendly Elvish-looking mentor when he was “cozening” the Elf-smiths of Eregion? Almost certainly.
He can, in theory, be all of the above. How about a handsome actor like Charlie Vickers? Or a, ummm, Jack Lowden? Apparently!
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Foreshadowed and Foresung 