The Federalist
The show doesn’t just abandon Tolkien’s moral imagination, it also mangles, disregards, and needlessly changes its source material.
There’s a lot to dislike in Amazon’s billion-dollar adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s work, primarily the utter abandonment of Tolkien’s moral and religious imagination, as Nathanael Blake noted in his excellent analysis in these pages earlier this week.
But “Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power” doesn’t just make a mockery of the deeper meaning behind Tolkien’s legendarium, it also butchers the lore itself, unapologetically and needlessly deviating from its source material in ways that render the epic events of Middle Earth’s Second Age by turns incomprehensible and ridiculous.
With that in mind, here are the three most egregious instances where Amazon’s showrunners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay decided to ignore, truncate, or completely change important elements of one of the greatest works of literature in the English language — either because they failed to understand the lore to begin with, or because they hate Tolkien’s deeply Roman Catholic mythology so much they deliberately tried to destroy it.
