They've got the vibe right, which is all that matters to me. Feels like middle earth.

I'm a casual in the lore, I have the silmarillion but i use it to just look up shit in the movies while theyre namedropping stuff i dont know the context of. So I can't really vouch for how well they've kept everything intact, but it seems solid from my light knowledge.

But, yeah, it's got the vibe and if you like the way middle earth feels then I recommend the show.

Was not expecting to like it, but here we are

  • PROMIS_ring [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    It is kind of nice having a middle earth product that doesn't revolve around a Baggins

    Question for the lore heads: if Valinor is so tight, why dont all the elves ditch middle earth and go there all at once?

    • Commander_Data [she/her]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Whatever the elf version of white guilt is, mixed with paternalism and chauvinism.

    • Comrade_Bones [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      I'm pretty sure they're not allowed to mention this, because it happens in the parts of the Tolkien lore that they didn't pay $500 million for, but Galadriel's people were actually banished from Valinor for committing elven genocide (making it really weird that the king thought he had the right to send them back for their glorious deeds in tracking down Morgoth)

        • GenderIsOpSec [she/her]
          ·
          2 years ago

          Amazon doesn’t actually have the rights to The Silmarillion. This means the series will be based on The Appendices at the end of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. Which, admittedly, does overlap in stories between the two books, but if it is mentioned in The Silmarillion and not in the Appendices, it is off-limits. And this has to do with the rights from the Tolkien Estate and from J.R.R. Tolkien himself.

          Tolkien had never wanted to sell the rights to his books to the movie companies, but he was forced to eventually for the money in the 1970s to Saul Zaentz, and the animated Rankin and Bass productions of The Hobbit and Ralph Bakshi’s The Lord of the Rings (among a few other small budget films) were made. But those were the only rights that were sold. Even for Peter Jackson, he only had the rights to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. So, for example, when Radagast the Brown was introduced in Jackson’s Hobbit movies, he had to be very careful with not saying that Tolkien had mentioned there were other wizards in Middle Earth (there are, in fact, a few more mentioned in other works) because he didn’t have the rights to it.

          McKay and Payne might have a little more leeway due to the Tolkien Estate being involved in the project, but we can probably expect not to see significant life events in Middle Earth-like the Fall of Gondolin, as described in depth in The Silmarillion or anything else from Tolkien’s Unfinished Tales.

          From here

          • TheLepidopterists [he/him]
            ·
            2 years ago

            Lol, I can't believe they decided to make a show out of the appendices, assumed it was the silmarillion.

            • Dingdangdog [he/him,comrade/them]
              ·
              2 years ago

              I read elsewhere that it's on a case-by-case basis, i.e they're allowed to use certain things with permission from the estate, but they don't have free reign on it. Which is basically what that article says. They're working with the estate to get certain things even without full rights basically

    • Mardoniush [she/her]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Almost all of them that went there in the first place already have.

      Elves are split into three types (and many subtypes). Light elves heard the call of the Valar in the dawn age and went to Valinor, Grey Elves heard it but stopped along the way (these are most of the elves you will see in the TV series). Dark Elves never listened and stayed vibing along what would become the Sea of Rhun (and in Tolkien's mythology, reside in our world to this day, faded but still able to give rise to stories of the Fair Folk.)

      There's like 5% of the Noldor (the ones who came back from Valinor cause they were malding) left and of their leaders who went on the exile and haven't returned it's pretty much just Galadriel, Gil-Galad the High King (who arguably has a weaker claim than Galadriel), and Celebrimbor. Galadriel is able to return at any point, as she went over the northern ice and didn't take part in the Kinslaying.

      Celeborn, Galadriel's husband (they've been married thousands of years at this point) is a Dark Elf I think. Cirdan the Shipwright is a Grey Elf of Teleri stock (though he is so old he predates the sundering of the elves and the original call to Valinor, making him at least 7500 years old by the time of lotr).

      Elrond was born in Middle Earth, though he's Half-Noldor and Half-Human (of (at some remove) Beren and Luthien, the second of the famous Elf-Human tragic romances and directly of Earendil and Elwing the third tragic romance. This is why he doesn't want Arwen to marry Aragorn). His (long dead) brother choose humanity over Elfdom and founded Numenor.

      So, The remaining Noldor are pretty much all absolute monarchs or otherwise near demi-gods and are Having a Good Time. Their subjects kind of want to go but are really happy to just stay awhile. And the Dark Elves won't want to go unless they sight the sea.

      The Creation of the Rings, the Corruption and Fall of Numenor, and the Last Alliance are about to sour them on Middle Earth.