Los Angeles, Feb 20 (FN Agency) Executive producers for the upcoming Amazon show ‘Lord Of The Rings: Rings of Power’, Patrick McKay and J.D Payne, have revealed that Amazon only has the rights to ‘The Fellowship of the Ring’, ‘The Two Towers’, ‘The Return of the King’, the appendices, and ‘The Hobbit’. In a talk with Vanity Fair, they have revealed that Amazon does not have the rights to ‘The Silmarillion’ and ‘Unfinished Tales’, which delineates various past events of Middle Earth, starting from its very creation to various wars and other such happenings leading up to the events of ‘Lord Of The Rings’. “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,” McKay said.
Then the question arises as to why someone who does not have the rights for the ‘Unfinished Tales’ and the ‘Silmarillion’, try to create a live-action adaptation of ‘Lord Of The Rings Second Age of Middle Earth’ when they don’t have the rights to the key materials that document that period. McKay said “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,” he added. Despite the show not arriving on Prime Video until September, the show’s first trailer and the initial images first published by Vanity Fair have shown that they have already greatly contradicted the books and taken several liberties with material Amazon does not have rights to. An example would be the portrayal of Galadriel as a commander of the Northern Armies which were in fact led by the 31st king of Gondor, King Ondoher, which is greatly detailed in the ‘Unfinished Tales’.
Galadriel, also known as the Lady of Lorien, while an important figure given her power and position as one of the three ring bearers, was never a battlefield commander. Apart from that the show has created several characters who do not exist in either the Silmarillion or mentioned in the appendices of ‘Lord Of The Rings’. Galadriel was portrayed by Cate Blanchette in Peter Jackson’s LOTR and Hobbit trilogy and Morfydd Clark will play a younger version of the same character in ‘Rings of Power’. The producers have justified this however, by claiming, “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.” This statement however is marked by great contradictions in their actions, as Amazon has proceeded to fire renowned Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey from working as an advisor to the series. ‘Lord Of The Rings: Rings of Power’ is an Amazon series set around the Second Age of Middle Earth and will portray various events from that time such as the rise of the second Dark Lord Sauron, the formation of the Last Alliance which defeated Sauron’s forces, and most importantly the formation of the rings of power as given by the title of the show, all of which lead to the events of ‘Lord Of The Rings’. The show will premier of September 2.