The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power Showrunners Explain What They Can And Can’t Adapt
By Jeremy Mathai/Feb. 15, 2022 2:59 pm EST
In an interview with Vanity Fair, the two spilled the details on exactly what limits they had to work around in creating this new series, set thousands of years before the events of “The Lord of the Rings.” As Payne tells it:
“We have the rights solely to ‘The Fellowship of the Ring,’ ‘The Two Towers,’ ‘The Return of the King,’ the appendices, and ‘The Hobbit.’” And that is it. We do not have the rights to ‘The Silmarillion,’ ‘Unfinished Tales,’ ‘The History of Middle-earth,’ or any of those other books."
Reading between the lines
So how to solve this little conundrum? The creators and writers of “The Rings of Power” had to get creative. McKay goes on to explain:
Luckily, Tolkien exposited some of that period of history through firsthand or secondhand accounts from other characters throughout “The Lord of the Rings.” Payne and McKay cite heavy info-dump chapters from “The Fellowship of the Ring,” like the “Concerning Hobbits” prologue or “The Council of Elrond,” both of which contain plentiful details about ancient history (to characters like Frodo, at least) going back to the events that “The Rings of Power” will deal with. As constraining as that may seem, this actually gave the writing team even more leeway to fill in the blank spaces left by Tolkien. I’m cautiously optimistic to see how it all turns out!
“There’s a version of everything we need for the Second Age in the books we have the rights to. As long as we’re painting within those lines and not egregiously contradicting something we don’t have the rights to, there’s a lot of leeway and room to dramatize and tell some of the best stories that [Tolkien] ever came up with.”
