Like many people who started writing after COVID, my experience in reading ill-prepared me for publication. What I mean is that when I read for pleasure in the past, I read a lot of books that are, as you say, old. Well, old in that they weren’t written this Millenium. Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, A Confederacy of Dunces, old-school Stephen King, and above all, J.R.R. Tolkien. I grew up reading the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings, though I didn’t get to the Silmarillion until I was a young adult. Some books are meant to be read over a lifetime.

I bring this up because I am currently watching the Rings of Power. It’s been subject to all kinds of complaints. Some of these center around the race of the actors, which I find less racist and more pedantic. No, there probably weren’t black people in prehistoric Europe. Shakespeare had no black actors to play Othello. He just told the crowd that Othello was a moor and expected them to use their imaginations. I wonder if some of those people did stomp out in protest, and no doubt their descendants are the people now bitching and moaning about black elves.

A better point being made is that the Rings of Power isn’t true to Tolkien because it gets the events of Tolkien’s world out of order. The show takes the timeline of Tolkien’s world and condenses it. Galadriel was a warrior…in the First Age. The Ring was forged in the first half of the second age. Numenor fell in the second half of the second age. Gandalf and the Balrog both appear, despite the fact that in Tolkien’s time line, neither show up until the Third Age.

However, it is unlikely that Tolkien’s work would ever be translated to the screen as he intended. That’s because his type of writing doesn’t map onto our modern idea of good storytelling. It includes unnecessary characters like Glorfindel and Tom Bombadil, employs an omniscient viewpoint, and involves long bits of exposition. Tolkien cared very little about the golden rule of modern writing “show, don’t tell” as he spent hundreds of pages telling us about the history of Middle Earth in the back of the Return of the King.

However, I wonder if this means that Tolkien was a bad writer (unlikely) or if our ideas of what constitutes good writing are deficient (more likely). In any event, it is unlikely we will ever see Tolkien’s vision on screen. And I think maybe he would prefer it that way. Tolkien was pretty reticent to allow his movies to be adapted. Something will inevitably get lost in translation.