The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power Actors Confirm Show Aims To Erase Tolkien’s Work For The Sake Of Modernity
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power actors completely stripped away any kind of façade that might have been built for the Prime Video series that it would be faithful to Tolkien’s literary work. Instead they made it abundantly clear that the show is dedicated to modernity in spite of Tolkien’s work and his clear criticisms of it.
Sophia Nomvete, who plays Princess Disa in the show, spoke to PA Media where she claimed she is “the face of a necessary redress of balance.”
She went on to detail, “We are redressing the balance within the film and television, television industry and of course, this franchise and I hope, lots of franchises moving forward.”
“These are the best people for the roles but what they’ve done is open up the doors for people of all backgrounds to come forward and have the opportunity to rise,” she lied.
Nomvete then made it abundantly clear this show has nothing to do with Tolkien’s work other than the name of the series and characters.
She stated, “To be part of creating accessibility for generations to come. For new generations this is their version of Tolkien, this is what my daughter will see of Tolkien’s works.”
Nomvete then made it clear The Rings of Power is actually an erasure of Tolkien’s work and the whole point of the show is to reflect the modern world rather than reflect Tolkien’s work.
She explained, “It’s their time and it’s so important and I hope many people will see this fantasy and be able to relate to it. This is a reflection of the world we live in, there are many and we are different and we will embrace and discover, and peel back, and learn, and educate, and be educated.”
“And we can only do that when we embrace and love our differences,” she added.
Nomvete then asserted, “To be the poster child and to fly the flag, being a mother, being a woman, being a person of colour, being a curvaceous woman deemed as a thing of beauty is something we don’t always see.”
“So that image of Disa… that is all of those things personified in a face, and it happens to be my face,” she said.
Ismael Cruz Córdova echoed Nomvete’s claim that the show is an erasure of Tolkien’s work saying, “The awareness of [diversity with Tolkien’s original source material] has grown… the cinematic world that Peter Jackson created has immense value but we’ve shifted lenses since then.”
He continued, “The conversation is different right now, but going back to the source material, the world is diverse, not only in race but also in thought.”
“It is a diverse mix, and now we’re just adding people from diverse backgrounds,” Córdova added.
Cynthia Addai-Robinson, who plays Miriel also stated, “This cast is truly global…everyone sort of has their frame of reference in terms of their culture, their heritage, what it means to them, their language.”
“Part of the story we’re trying to tell is you have people of different races coming together to defeat a common enemy,” she explained. “You’re trying to look at this through a modern lens and the world is global and people now expect to see this kind of world globally represented.”
“Even when I’m seeing different posters popping up. The title of the show is in how many different languages? It’s a beautiful thing,” she proclaimed.
These cast statements echo what Executive Producer of the series Lindsey Weber told Vanity Fair back in February, “It felt only natural to us that an adaptation of Tolkien’s work would reflect what the world actually looks like.”
She explained, “Tolkien is for everyone. His stories are about his fictional races doing their best work when they leave the isolation of their own cultures and come together.”
This assertion is utterly ridiculous as anyone who has read The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, or any of Tolkien’s other works about Middle-earth knows. The Orcs really did their best work under the guidance of Saruman when they decided to besiege the Hornburg at the Battle of Helm’s Deep.
Or how how about the Haradrim and the Easterlings joining with Sauron and his army of Orcs and trolls led by the Witch-king Angmar during the Battle of the Pelennor Fields? Really good work there. The claim is just utterly absurd and doesn’t hold up to simple questions.
In letter 131 to Milton Waldman, Tolkien offered a different explanation as to what he believed was necessary for myth and fairy-story writing, “Myth and fairy-story must, as all art, reflect and contain in solution elements of moral and religious truth (or error), but not explicit, not in the known form of the primary ‘real’ world. (I am speaking, of course, of our present situation, not of ancient pagan, pre-Christian days. And I will not repeat what I tried to say in my essay, which you read.)”
In letter 181 to Michael Straight, Tolkien reiterated this idea, “There is no ‘allegory’, moral, political, or contemporary in the work at all. It is a ‘fairy-story’, but one written — according to the belief I once expressed in an extended essay ‘On Fairy-stories’ that they are the proper audience — for adults.”
“Because I think that fairy story has its own mode of reflecting ‘truth’, different from allegory, or (sustained) satire, or ‘realism’, and in some ways more powerful,” he continued.
Tolkien then detailed, “But, of course, if one sets out to address ‘adults’ (mentally adult people anyway), they will not be pleased, excited, or moved unless the whole, or the incidents seem to be about something worth considering, more e.g. than mere danger and escape: there must be some relevance to the ‘human situation’ (of all periods). So something of the teller’s own reflections and ‘values’ will inevitably get worked in. This is not the same as allegory.”
He further elaborated, “We all, in groups or as individuals, exemplify general principles; but we do not represent them. The Hobbits are no more an ‘allegory’ than are (say) the pygmies of the African forest. Gollum is to me just a ‘character’ — an imagined person — who granted the situation acted so and so under opposing strains, as it appears to be probable that he would (there is always an incalculable element in any individual real or imagined: otherwise he/she would not be an individual but a ‘type’.)
One thing is clear, Prime Video and their cast for The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power do not respect J.R.R. Tolkien’s work and are fully embracing its destruction. Unfortunately, for them, Tolkien’s work still lives on no matter how much Prime Video And Amazon Studios will attempt to distort and malign it in their television series.
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