from “The Uxbridge Guide To Middle Earth”

 
Aulë. Like an owl.

Balrog. He’s having a ball. He’s a bit of a rogue.

Bree. Where the cheese comes from.

Dwarf (plural: dwarfves). In popular usage, when we say something “dwarfs” something else we mean it makes the something else seem small. This is because dwarfs are really, really big.

Ent. A tree with ears, nose and a throat.

Gil-galad. An elf born in the First Age. Known as ‘Old Gil’.

Lothlórien. This is French; it means ‘never Lothló’.

Manwë. Masculine urine.

Morgoth. Likes Sisters of Mercy to a greater degree than you.

Númenor. Or what? No really. What’s the alternative?

Saruman. The man with the Saru. If you ask me to defnine Saru, I can only tell you that it's a very difficult word, very difficult indeed. Truly, Saru seems to be the hardest word.

Silmarillion. A famous prog-rock band took their name from this. You remember: The Sils.

Tom Bombadil. Hey dol! merry dol! ring a dong ditty!
Ring a dong! hop along! flatten the city!
Tom Bomb, jolly Tom, Atom Bombadillo!

Old ’tom Bombadil over-water bringing
Enola Gay is bearing him and OMD are singing
Hey! Come merry dol! derry dol! and dream-o,
Brighter than a thousand suns above old Hiroshim-o!
Poor old mortal-man, tuck your roots away now!
Bomb's in a hurry now. Night must follow day now!

Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (2022)

 

Two episodes in, a review is surely premature. Maybe, to adapt the immortal words of Will Self, it will turn into Tolstoy at the 121 minute mark. But so far, my reaction has not been one of entirely unalloyed positivity.

Some people I know, people who themselves know and love Tolkien, and whose opinion I respect, are loving it; so perhaps my reaction is the one out of whack. But then again, a lot of people are dunking on this billion dollar—let me just say that again, this billion dollar—project. For a billion dollars you might think you could expect a lot. Is a lot what we get?

Not so far. One kind of consensus is emerging, I think, from the fan-reactions: astonishing visuals, excruciating dialogue. There's something in this, although the visuals, which are often absolutely dripping with lovingly and intricately designed Middle-Earthitude, are perhaps not as stunning as some people are saying (I'll come back to this). But certainly the dialogue is bad, on a par with the herky-derky storytelling and the ludicrous shifts and turns of the plot. 

One problem is that the elves get the lion's share of the screen-time, and they're dull, dull, they're a-elbereth-gilthoni-dull. This need not be the case: in the Silmarillion the elves are a rather more lively, dramatically-speaking, prone to the kinds of failings Tolkien considered compatible with their dignity and elevation (pride, arrogance, hauteur, impetuousness etc). But in Rings of Power there's not even that. Instead there is a lot of pompous, humourless posing about, lots of mouthing the given dialogue slowly ensuring each syllable gets its ponderous weight, lots of standing still in golden clothes with arms at their sides, looking off into the middle-distance. The exception is Morfydd Clark's Galadriel, who gets to run and fight and leap about and so on, and is provided with a clunky but vivifying piece of motivational backstory (her brother was killed by orcs). This leads to her hunting orcs up and down Middle Earth. But it seems that all the orcs are gone, and she has to content herself with battling a lumbering CGI Snow-Troll, encountered in the CGIce of the frozen northern wastes. A few video-game leaps and swordstrikes and there's no troll left. (Get it? -s no troll left! Yeah? Yeah?)

(Yeah?)

Anyway, in fact, and as ep 2 makes plain, the orcs are not gone, but have instead taken Paul Weller's advice concerning going underground. It's, we might say, surprising that nobody has noticed this subterranean ruse, especially the dwarfs who are surely experts in that whole Middle Earth basement thing. But nobody has. So we wait future episodes in which, I presume, the orcs will swarm back above ground and make things orc-ward, sorry, awkward for the regular Midland-Earthers.

All the orcs being gone, or so everyone believes, Galadriel is rewarded by the elven king with permission to return to Valinor, the undying lands. This, by the way very much isn't canon: the Silmarillion tells us a ban was placed on Galadriel returning to the undying lands by Manwë, a kind of god, on account of her joining the revolt of the Noldor in the First Age. She's just a Gal who can't say No(ldor). But the show's not interested in any of that. In TV-land access to Valinor is in the gift of the king, somehow.

So off Gal goes, an ocean voyage across a body of water that looks, on the map helpfully panned-over on screen, about as wide as the Atlantic. There are various shots of Galadriel and some other elves standing on the deck of their bijoux little sailing ship, gold clothes, arms at their sides, staring straight ahead with actorly intensity. When they get to the Undying Lands a big SF-nal portal opens up in the sky and then, at that stage and not before Galadriel has second thoughts and jumps overboard before the ship is magicked away forever. Her plan? To swim back across the Atlantic I guess, which doesn't seem to me entirely thought-through. She does a servicable front-crawl for a little while, but then luckily encounters a raft of the medusa, or equivalent.

Meanwhile, Amazon not having acquired the rights to represent hobbits on screen, despite paying $250 million for said rights, the show opts instead for arche-hobbits, a kind of ur-hobbit species called Harfoots. There's some lumbering rural comedy with these scatty, unwashed little fellers, gabbling on in their stage Irish. Then there's an overlong interlude during which Elrond visits Durin IV and his wife Disa (Owain Arthur and Sophia Nomvete) in Khazâd-dûm, which gives the show the excuse to try for a little levity, and some sub I Love Lucy-style domestic-squabble-comedy, wincing and unfunny but at least a change of tone (“I Love Lúthi”). And one undeniable positive emerges from the whole sequence: Durin's enormous red beard, which is tremendous. Really, I can't state too emphatically how great his huge red beard is. It deserves a spin-off show of its own. It brought to my mind the celebrated William Khazâd Williams poem:

so much depends
upon

the red beard
dwarrow

praised for fine
metalwork

beside the white
diggings

Meanwhile Downton Abbey/The Crown stalwart Charles Edwards stretches himself by playing a posh elf. This is Celebrimbor, the smith who is going to forge the actual rings of power:  

One other important development: a gigantic fireball crashes down into Harfootland (Hartfootshire, Hertfordshire, whatever). Boom! In the midst of the crater is a young-ish beardy man (Daniel Weyman, billed in the credits only as ‘the stranger who falls from the sky in a flaming meteor’). At first he is confused and seemingly language-less, although he possesses nascent magical powers. Some friendly Harfoots, Harfeet, whatever, take pity on him. Presumably his identity will be revealed in a later episode with a plot-twisty flourish, but also (presumably) he's young Gandalf, send by the Maiar to aid Middle Earth. His kindly treatment by the Harfoots is I suppose inserted to explain why old Gandalf in Lord of the Rings has such a soft-spot for hobbits. Of course there's nothing about a flaming meteor man in the Silmarillion, and this whole sequence has a much more War of the Worlds than Tolkien vibe to it, really. Perhaps it's not Gandalf, sent by the Maiar, at all. Perhaps it's Tom Bombadil (that would be a truly catastrophic reveal, for a hundred reasons, but I wouldn't put it past the script-writers). Can it really be Gandalf, arriving à la War of the Worlds? After all, the chances of anything coming from Maiars/Is a million to one/He said.

That's enough facetiousness. What about the show's strengths? A billion dollars is a lot of money, and you can certainly see the cash splashed on screen: huge sets, elaborate costumes, casts of thousands and top-tier CGI. This has been very elaborately rendered, and will give trufans the chance to freeze-frame and pore over all the little details with squeals of delight; but as elements in a screen drama I thought the landscapes and cityscapes over-detailed, visually clogged, in some cases positively horror vacui. Over-egged, too rich.  There's a reason why the show lifts when Galadriel, having opted for her insane swim-across-the-Atlantic last-minute change of mind, ends up on the raft with those others: the screen is simplified, water, sky, a few actors and every now and again a giant CGI sea-serpent. When it pares the scene down, the show becomes considerably more interesting to watch. Maybe things will improve with later episodes.  

---

Update. I watched the whole series. Things did not improve with the later episodes.

Peter Nicholls, “Genre Fiction: The Roaring Years” (2022)

This is very good: a collection of reviews and essays by the late Peter Nicholls, of SF Encyclopedia editing fame—he edited and co-wrote the first edition of the encyclopedia with John Clute, and the later editions with Clute and David Langford, whose ‘ansible editions’ are the publisher of this collection. Nicholls was also the editor of Foundation in the 1970s, and one of the first people to establish an academic base in Britain for the study of SF, out of the North-East London Polytechnic (now the University of East London). Several of the pieces assembled here are autobiographical and Nicholls, sad to say, really doesn't have happy memories of this decade. He also, several times, expresses his low opinion of academic SF criticism as a discipline: for him, the fannish is fitter. Eventually Nicholls returned to his native Australia where, his encroaching Parkinsonianism notwithstanding, he seems to have been much happier. He died in 2018.

I never knew Nicholls, although I know many of the people he mentions in his various memoir-essays—Clute, Langford, and others. Still: not being part of the UK SF ‘scene’ in the 70s and 80s, I read Nicholl’s energetic accounts of the fun-times he had at various cons with a sense of melancholy, actually. People partying-hearty in the dead depths of the last century, in-jokes and namechecks and strenuous assertions of how much fun it was. Reading accounts of a party to which one was not invited, and where many of the people partying are now dead, can’t help but evoke the vibe described in Browning’s ‘A Toccata of Galuppi's’:

Did young people take their pleasure when the sea was warm in May?
Balls and masks begun at midnight, burning ever to mid-day,
When they made up fresh adventures for the morrow, do you say?

…

“As for Venice and her people, merely born to bloom and drop,
“Here on earth they bore their fruitage, mirth and folly were the crop:
“What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing had to stop?

“Dust and ashes!” So you creak it, and I want the heart to scold.
Dear dead women, with such hair, too—what's become of all the gold
Used to hang and brush their bosoms? I feel chilly and grown old.

Nicholl's con reports, and particularly his overlong and self-indulgent ‘The Great Seacon Freakout Seacon ’75, the 1975 UK Eastercon’, certainly left me feeling chilly and grown very old, and I wasn't even there. Parties can’t be memorialised in a way that captures their in-the-moment vibrancy and point, I think.

But most of the collection is not this, I'm glad to report: much more of it is reviews and essays from the 1970s through to the early 2000s, and these are very good indeed. Memorialising old books is a much more worthwhile business than memorialising old parties, and Nicholls is insightful in his judgments and often witty in his prose.

Both Tau Zero and Ringworld derive their intellectual force from grand scientific concepts, concepts of such massive scale that they both deserve their reputation as landmarks (spacemarks) in the history of hard science fiction—that surprisingly small but important branch of the genre in which the science is central and not simply decorative.

But there are two important differences. First, Tau Zero is based on a known scientific principle that has been in the public domain for 68 years, while Ringworld is based on a grandiose piece of engineering whimsy that has a vanishingly small chance of ever finding fruition in the real universe. Secondly, Tau Zero takes its initial conception and develops it with a satisfying logic; Ringworld takes its initial conception and treats it rather like the man who spends £300 on a Hi-Fi Stereo, and shows it off by playing stereophonic records of a ping-pong match.

He develops a number of interesting and resonant critical positions—‘the writers of hard sf are as a group probably more, not less, Romantic than their soft sf colleagues’ for instance—and is especially good on the crossovers between SF and theology, and the sublime. On this latter he is surely right with what he calls ‘a point that’s not often made: one thing about the sublime is that it is dehumanizing. It makes us feel small and unimportant and indeed hardly there at all. I think this feeling, of our vulnerability and littleness in the context of cosmic vastness and indifference, is one of the root feelings of space fiction, a sort of default feeling that almost all space fiction at some point approaches. When you hit science fiction’s “enter” key, that’s where the cursor goes.’ I don’t know if dehumanizing is quite le mot juste where the Sublime is concerned, but Nicholls is absolutely right about its centrality to space fiction, and actually to SF more generally, and how much of that depends upon the existential implications of scale as such.

You see Nicholls developing and improving as a critic as you read through. His earlier pieces are flatter, sometimes concerned with irrelevancies such as his personal rankings of writers (his 1973 review of The Farthest Shore includes this who-cares account of children’s literature: ‘I would put Ursula Le Guin in the first rank, along with Alan Garner, and perhaps T.H. White from an earlier generation. They are closely followed by William Mayne, Phillipa Pearce, John Gordon and J.R.R. Tolkien.’) But as he goes on, his pieces becomes sharper: more insightful and thought-provoking and also funnier. There’s a brilliant 1990 review/essay on Ian Watson, the great if now catastrophically underappreciated British writer—one day I hope to write a short monograph on Watson’s writing—and an excellent paean to Gene Wolfe (‘he is the metaphysical poet of science fiction; he has a great deal more in common with Donne or Marvell or Crashaw than he does with Heinlein. I’m being quite serious, while fully conscious of rendering myself liable to incarceration in Pseud’s Corner.’) He’s also nicely pointed about his friend and co-editor Clute:

Another celebrated critic represented [in this collection] is John Clute who, when in obscurantist mode, as he is in this analysis of the Hyperion novels of Dan Simmons, is magisterially opaque: “When history cannot be perceived with any clarity, the consequent absence of a firm past haunts as Hyde haunts Jekyll through doppelgänger erosions of public masks.” Well, yes. Or no. I think.

Clute supplies the introduction to this volume, proceeds from which will go towards maintaining the SF Encyclopedia, currently in its 4th edition. It’s a worthwhile cause and the book is very much worth its purchase price. I might add that I read the ebook version, which contains various typos and slips, presumably from where the text has been scanned to make the file (James Blish becomes ‘Jina Blish’ at one point [update: this has now been corrected]). But that’s a small nitpick. Overall this is an often brilliant and always entertaining collection.