Amazon dosen't have the rights to the Silmarillion. Tolkien himself sold the rights to the Hobbit and LOTR to what is now MGM in like 1970, and every adaptation since has been based on those rights. The Tolkien Estate has been very firm that they will never sell the rights to the Silmarillion.
What Amazon bought was the TV rights to LOTR from MGM. However as part of that sale they couldn't just redo the stuff covered in the LOTR and Hobbit films. So they are basically cornered into trying to film Appendix A of Return of the King, and since there isn't much detail there, the show is just going to be bad fanfic.
They sold the rights to MGM because at the time there was no American copyright holder and people were making bank off of illegal paperback productions of LOTR and the Hobbit in the US. Tolkien’s anted to solidify what was official.
The Tolkien Estate has been very firm that they will never sell the rights to the Silmarillion.
For now
Ya, Christopher Tolkien was the one who was absolutely against selling and he just died. His wife is still a director and some Tolkien fail-grandchildren. They will probably hold out until his wife dies and sell the Silmarillion for like a billion dollars.
However as part of that sale they couldn’t just redo the stuff covered in the LOTR and Hobbit films.
Wait, what?
Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey, who is supervising the show’s development, told German fansite Deutsche Tolkien that the estate has refused to allow the series to be set during any period other than the Second Age of Middle-earth. This means Amazon’s adaptation will not cross over at all with events from the Third Age, which were dramatised in Peter Jackson’s Oscar-winning trilogy in which the hobbit Frodo Baggins journeys to destroy the One Ring.
Shippey said that Amazon “has a relatively free hand” to add details since Tolkien did not flesh out every detail of the Second Age in his appendices or Unfinished Tales, a collection of stories published posthumously in 1980. But Shippey called it “a bit of a minefield – you have to tread very carefully”, saying that “the Tolkien estate will insist that the main shape of the Second Age is not altered. Sauron invades Eriador, is forced back by a Númenórean expedition, is returns to Númenor. There he corrupts the Númenóreans and seduces them to break the ban of the Valar. All this, the course of history, must remain the same.
“But you can add new characters and ask a lot of questions, like: What has Sauron done in the meantime? Where was he after Morgoth was defeated? Theoretically, Amazon can answer these questions by inventing the answers, since Tolkien did not describe it. But it must not contradict anything which Tolkien did say. That’s what Amazon has to watch out for. It must be canonical, it is impossible to change the boundaries which Tolkien has created. It is necessary to remain ‘Tolkienian’.”
There is this bit in the end though:
Contacted by the Guardian, the Tolkien estate declined to confirm or deny Shippey’s claim.
So they pretty much have to contradict The Silmarillion. Awesome, this is totally not gonna fucking suck and be incredibly frustrating to hear people be even more wrong about the 2nd age than Jackson leads people to be about LOTR
This new show is about the Second Age of Middle Earth, including the forging of the Rings of Power, the war between Sauron and the Elves of Eregion, Sauron establishing himself in Mordor, the history of Numenor (maybe???) and the War of the Last Alliance which is the opening of the Fellowship film. This is only stuff that appears in the Appendices to the LOTR books.
I believe there is some kind of agreement that the Amazon can't just do a TV remake of Jackson's LOTR or Hobbit trilogy (which would be way better than this show). So they have to do this, which is going to be 95% made up bullshit becuase the Second Age is covered in like 10 pages in Appendix A.
They've said it's gonna be accessible to kids, they may want to cover their eyes for some scary stuff but they aren't going dark and gritty. That whole vibe would be really weird for Tolkien, so thank god they at least knee to not go game of thrones on it
Hard to say at this point what they own. The map of Numenor that's shown briefly in the trailer has location names that are only in Unfinished Tales and the promo image has the two trees of Valinor which I'm pretty certain wasn't in the appendix. If they do t have the rights then they're violating them
I think they can show Numenor, Valinor and the Two Trees becuase they are mentioned in LOTR but can't do any of the actual stories in the Silmerillion. Like they might even have some scenes on Numenor but it all has to be original story and they definitely can't show the downfall. Also one of the showrunners specifically mentions the Song of Earendil from Fellowship, so they might even be able to kind of show that but only what the song depicts and not the fully story. It's always been kind of awkward how the rights for Tolkiens work is split in two even though they are all part of the same universe.
I'm praying no one ever gets to film the Silmarillion until after the revolution when it can be done properly.
Also I just watched the trailer, I've been avoiding this thing like the plauge, and it looks like absolute CGI garbage. Numenor especially looks like something a ten year old thought up.
If they do t have the rights to the material they're covering then why bother?
Bezos is a huge LOTR nerd and paid an exorbitant amount for this vanity project, I think it's was like $250 million basically just to have the LOTR name on this show. Plus given how popularthe movies were, they probably think they can make bank off of that.
Since they are boxed in by the rights issues, they are just making shit up. Like 'young' Galadriel is going to be a plucky heroine leading a rag-tag army, even though she has been alive for 15,000 years and witnessed the whole history of Belariand. And Elrond is going to be like a naive kid who becomes jaded, who again is actually a thousand years old and knew the last Sons of Feanor.
They have hinted multiple times that they were going to make the Silmarillion TV show over the last few years. I'm pretty sure they have been badgering the Tolkien Estate to sell ever since Christopher resigned from the board, but ultimately didn't get the rights and now have to make a multi-season show based on 10 pages in the Appendix.
Jesus, just let me do it. The way to make the Silmarillion as a show is to have it be a visual aspect to an audiobook. Have the actors play it all out silently and have a guy with a really awesome voice read the book.
Also just to add, Galadriel was pretty fucking old even before Beleriand was a place with a name.
If he was a huge LOTR nerd he would make Tolkieny estate an offer they can't refuse, he has the money
He never 'wrote' the Silmarillion, he wrote bits and pieces of into unfished stuff that his son compiled and edited into as best a narrative as possible and that's the Silmarillion. He did in a sense start some writings that over many decades later would become the writings of the Silmarillion but to say he wrote the book in the trenches is super misleading
Yes, this. But language is nothing without culture. And to make up languages you need to make up cultures. 50 years later, and you have a cultural classic that people love, and people actually speak his languages. I wonder which has more speakers, Sindarin or Klingon?
Probably Sindarin. Klingon is intentionally linguistically really hard like, no matter what your culture is. There's a big feature with the linguist they hired for star trek 3 on the special features and he tries to use all of the least common word orders, grammar and all that in human language. Sindarin is easier to figure out words that don't already exist as well, it's not made intentionally hard for humans to get naturally. I guess Finnish people have a pretty easy time with Sindarin cause there are a lot of similarities.
He kinda gave up on the mythology for England idea pretty early on as well.
