☕️ + Rhun in TROP if you watched it because I think you’ll have a interesting take on it
send me ☕️+a topic for my take on it!
Hahaha I have indeed watched it and I’ve actually talked about the Gaudrim from TRoP here before, and yes I do indeed have a Take. Just a general note for the reader, please don’t take this as some sort of anti-show vendetta or wank or whatever, it really isn’t and I don’t even wank about adaptations on here, this is just my thoughts on this specific aspect, I have tagged the appropriate critical tags, and you can absolutely scroll if you’re not keen on reading it.
Anyway, the minute these riders came on screen, literally every single bit of pomp about the show’s progressive casting and representation flew right out of the window for me and turned it into unashamed diversity theatre. It was truly the moment that made me sit back and go “ah, this is an American production funded by the Amazon corporation”. Took me right out of the setting and plunged me into post 9/11 USA. Because I’m sorry just look at these fuckers. Forget Lawrence of Arabia, these are straight up elf-jihadis under the spell of Istari bin Laden… 😭
And one of the most interesting things I learned about these guys — the actors playing were actually a relatively diverse cast and clearly individualised… yet for some reason these anonymising masks were added in post-production.
What really got my goat about all this is the fact that it is SUCH a DEEPLY unnecessary portrayal, so clearly reactionary War on Terror propaganda, that the only way I can read it is as a deliberate decision, without even a shred of allowance for ignorance, because once again, the advertising for the show literally uses its own progressivism as a hook. Because there was literally no need to do this shit. Like you have to go out of your way to do something like this. Tolkien is notoriously not-good with race, and the Easterlings were the perfect example of that. The Jackson films aren’t great with race, and the Easterlings were the perfect example of that. TROP is self-admittedly aware that neither Tolkien nor the films are good with race and that the Easterlings are the perfect examples of that, decided to shoehorn them into the narrative as the ‘Gaudrim’ and… somehow made them worse.
I chat at length under the cut re: US exceptionalism, protestant ethnics, war on terror logic, desert-spaces, and why exactly this plotline was so galling to the point I had to rewatch those scenes like “???” and how it frankly just put a bad taste in my mouth for reasons way beyond Tolkien adaptations or lore… sorry this turned into an essay haha but it’s so you don’t think it’s just me blindly criticising something because I don’t enjoy it or interpret it differently.
So firstly imo what’s crucial here is understanding that the desert riders don't simply represent post-9/11 anxieties… their inclusion in that form outright reproduces the securitisation logic of the War on Terror. And this isn’t me forcing a progressive read of an adaptation that never claimed to be righting racial wrongs, because the entire Adar plotline with the orcs (as much as I am a bit iffy about certain aspects there) was proof that the writers are perfectly aware of how fantasy can think about populations constituted as "life to be protected" versus "life disposable to violence."
The first problem for me here is how the show constructs the riders as a collective rather than as individuals. Again, a clearly deliberate choice in a piece of media where half the characters are straight up OCs, many of them well fleshed out and elaborated upon. You have an entire plotline about Harfoots and Stoors with a full new cast of characters, and yet you never even see the riders’ faces, never hear their individual stories, never witness any internal differentiation or dissent within their ranks, only an instance of collective disagreement with their leader. Sure you can say ‘this might come later’ but looking at the narrative trajectory, I simply do not think so and even so, literally every other in-group has been depicted at length already.
And this depiction of racialised populations as a collectively violent mass, this coding through ‘swarm’ and ‘horde’ aesthetics has a very trackable genealogy in colonial discourse about non-Western peoples lacking individuation. Anonymised people of the global south, etc. The riders answer only to Blue bin Laden, are not positioned as a nation-state enemy to be negotiated with or defeated militarily in conventional terms… Gandalf doesn’t treat with them, he treats with the wizard. The riders are simply a band of terroristic agents in an area very clearly representing ‘the Orient’, who are willing to kill children over a payment dispute with their boss, a kind of illegible viral threat that requires ‘divine’ counterinsurgency in the form of Bombadil and Gandalf. The lack of faces under headscarves worn in a style blatantly similar to representations of Arabs + them literally wearing fucking skull masks (edited on them in post!!!) isn't just dehumanisation fyi… it's the visual articulation of an enemy that cannot be comprehended as human through the liberal USamerican 21st century frameworks of personhood the show deals in. Just look at the very name they’re given! Gaudrim, ostensibly from the Sindarin gaud (machinery, contrivance, according to TG)!!!
Anyway this is where Lawrence of Arabia / Gandalf of Rhûn comes in, the savior figure and an example of a particular technology of power at work… elven and Maiar magic is benevolent even when violent, operates in service of life (healing, protection, nurture). Meanwhile, the desert riders' power (through their connection to the dark Istar) is necropolitical from the jump, oriented towards pure destruction.
This isn't a morally neutral "corruption" narrative or a general black-and-white fantasy portrayal of good and evil… this takes the Oriental horde tendencies of the Easterlings from the source text and gives it a contemporary, worse, face. In a show where everyone from a random orc extra to literal Sauron is presented as redeemable or at least not ontologically ‘bad’, the elf jihadis are given no such humanity. Even their doubts are to do with honour and payment. And the thing is, for a production claiming a racial progressivism that sets it apart from its predecessors… this not a unique portrayal! This is the logic of War on Terror American exceptionalism!
As in, our violence is regrettable but necessary, protective, ultimately life-giving; their violence is pathological and must be eliminated. The show literally cannot imagine the Gaudrim as having legitimate grievances or complex motivations, their only disagreement with their leader being a basic argument over compensation and the loss of ‘honour’ for these former kings. They follow the dark wizard because *checks notes* they're just like that 🤪🤪🤪
Vulnerable to extremism and prone to fanaticism. Like, you know…
Ok moving in to spacial politics, because the desert is doing some heavy lifting lmao… and this isn’t much of a difference from book canon, in which there’s a general lack of information about the Easterlings at large, their general coding and desert setting being enough to fill in the blanks in a, well, Lawrence of Arabia sense. The adaptation takes this and dials it up to 2000, with perfect awareness of how exactly a desert setting functions in post 9/11 visual cultures, ie as an “everywhere war” space (Derek Gregory term iirc), where it’s simultaneously nowhere (outside civilisation, beyond the polis) and everywhere (the frontier or boundary requiring vigilance and intervention).
Contrast this with how Lindon, Númenor, Eregion and Khazad-dûm are shown in the adaptation: spaces of architecture, culture, history, law, hallmarks of sovereignty and civilisation… there was even that bit at the end of the second season where Elrond cries out about the burning of Celebrimbor’s books and centuries of research. Not so with the Gaudrim. These guys emerge from this vacantly violent desert space, existing in a state of exception from the other groups… the only culture and lifestyle seen in the desert belonging to the Stoors, who ostensibly leave the desert at the end. There's no room for understanding Gaudrim culture as legitimate or any proof of their position in a meaning-making system. Meanwhile, the elves' devotion to the Valar, the dwarves' relationship to Aulë, even the Harfoots' folk traditions, are all treated as enriching cultural practices.
And Gandalf’s journey was made fun of by critics as faux Lawrence of Arabia for a reason! Because it is! It’s a narrative of penetration into an ungovernable space, Bombadil’s oasis (don’t get me started oh my fucking god) and Gandalf’s presence the only instances of order/knowledge/‘proper’ magic as opposed to chaotic dark arts. This is textbook civilising mission stuff filtered through counterinsurgency logic!!!
Again, this isn’t Tolkien’s Orientalism reproduced uncritically, this is a deployment of those tropes in a specifically USAmerican sense. I think it was Rey Chow who coined the phrase “the protestant ethnic”, but it basically describes how liberal multiculturalism insists on cultural and ethnic differences being performed in legible, consumable ways. And so it is here! The "good" diversity in the show (Black elves, dwarves of colour etc) operates within palatable Anglo frameworks: they all wear clothes recognisable as ‘typical Western fantasy’ costumes with a Byzantine/Southern European influence, they speak RP English, all except the proto-Hobbits have Sindarin as a common tongue, they all participate in courtly politics (dwarves) or engage in traditional militaristic pursuits (Adar), value individual achievement but act in the interests of a legible cause. And the cause might be ‘evil’, eg with Sauron, but it’s comprehensible: they all are depicted as people who think of themselves as righteous. Their racial difference is epidermal, their cultural logic is functionally Western.
The riders, by contrast, are illegibly Other: their dress, their language, their social organisation all mark them as outside modernity. There’s no ‘fantasy robing’ here, they’re what ChatGPT would spit out if you asked it to make you a fantasy jihadi, and their motivations are ‘compensation’ and ‘put under a curse of the flesh’. And crucially, the show never does the work of making them legible as it does for its other populations, makes no effort to translate their difference into something even approaching complex subjectivity.
And so what this kind of simplistic racialised portrayal of these anonymised people who blindly ‘serve’ every evil that comes around does is naturalise ‘intervention’ as a permanent necessity in places like Rhûn and Harad… a position that the books carry uncritically into the Fourth Age. The Easterlings aren’t a one-time-threat to be defeated, they’re a population perpetually susceptible to radicalisation. Such a region doesn’t call for militaristic defeat but for population management, not the winning of a single war but the maintenance of indefinite security operations. The Westerly men and elves cannot just fix the ‘problem’ of Harad/Rhûn and leave, their presence is permanently necessary… from the First Age to the Fourth, world without end…
Sound familiar? 🤡🇺🇸🇦🇫
And let's be clear about what gets disappeared in this framework: any possibility of understanding the riders as responding to actual material conditions or histories of domination. Even in Tolkien's texts (and this is saying something!!!), there are at least hints that the Easterlings and Haradrim have been conquered, deceived, or coerced by Sauron… that their enmity toward the West might have explanations beyond simple evil. The Rings of Power forecloses this entirely. The Gaudrim riders appear racialised and threatening from the outset, with no backstory that might complicate the good guys/bad guys binary aside from a flesh-curse inflicted by a single character… just like all the other ‘simplistic’ reasons for the Easterlings’ evil across the legendarium, it is weak on its own and clear as day when viewed as a pattern. And I’m sorry but imo this is identical to how War on Terror discourse severed terrorism from any connection to US foreign policy / economic imperialism / support for authoritarian regimes.
The terrorists hate us for our freedom, not because of anything we did to them. The Haradrim serve darkness because they're vulnerable to evil, not because they have historical grievances.
Finally, there's the question of rehabilitation and redemption: who gets offered the possibility of real internal change? Galadriel can be consumed by vengeance and find her way back. Isildur can be an arrogant dickhead and learn humility. Sauron gets a whole seduction-and-corruption arc that grants him psychological depth. Adar and orc-rights are a major plotline. But the Gaudrim are either threats to be eliminated or victims to be saved, with no middle ground where they might be political actors making strategic decisions within constrained circumstances. This is the fundamental violence of how a ‘terrorist’ is constructed in the post 9/11 imagination, ie not as a political subject with agency, but as either monster or dupe, either evil mastermind or brainwashed footsoldier. Either way, not fully human in the way that grants political legitimacy.
What all this, and the muted reaction to it aside from the people who already talk about race in Tolkien, told me was just… how deeply the biopolitics of the War on Terror have been naturalised into our reception of a story, the way tons of people who praise the show for its surface level representation and hold themselves as somehow more antiracist than the rest for such a veneration, only acknowledge the Gaudrim’s depiction as a blip in otherwise progressive narrative… at best.
And this isn’t me saying that people who don’t let this portrayal impact their entire reading of the show’s progressiveness are bad people or aren’t media literate or anything like that. It’s actually more telling of how the binaries of civilisation versus barbarism / savable versus disposable populations / benevolent intervention versus illegitimate unruly resistance have just… become the default settings for how we imagine good versus evil. IMO it isn’t that the Gaudrim are a problematic representation in a single show… it’s that they're purposely symptomatic of an entire apparatus of racialisation that reconfigured how post 2001 USAmerican cultural production imagines difference itself. And slapping some diverse casting on the package doesn't interrupt that apparatus, it just makes it an easier pill to swallow.
New/old pictures of Brânk and the Gaudrim from The Rings of Power! Apparently they added the metal masks in post-production because they were unhappy with the design, which I never knew!
Pictures found by Khalil on the Fellowship of Fans discord server (source: Untold Studios)
Current theory: Celeborn is one of/linked to the Gaudrim somehow (or: more Rings of Power horse stuff, sorry not sorry):
1. ‘Gaudrim’ is a Sindarin word (‘people of the machine’); so is ‘Caras Gaer’ where the wizard lives (‘sea-fortress I think). Somebody around here speaks Sindarin.
2. Horses have the same bits we’ve seen on elf-horses before (Galadriel’s horse in ep1 above, Gaudrim horse in ep2 below)
3. TROP Celeborn isn’t dead so he’s got to be somewhere remote and presumably trapped? amnesiac? something? ‘Kept in a prison camp by Sauron or Adar’ is an obvious one but other than Sauron clearly not being in a place to run prison camps - eating centipedes, failing to get job etc etc - being an orc prisoner for centuries would surely mess you up to the point where it would be hard to come back in as an active story participant like “well anyway, where were we?” and Rhûn is the most distant place we’ve seen so far that’s also disconnected from the main elves.
4. The Gaudrim have some ‘curse upon our flesh’ which, okay, is implied to be linked to why they wear their masks, but what if it’s more than that? what if ‘the machine’ is controlling them somehow? what if some or all of them are elves but don’t remember they are?
5. TROP Celeborn is linked to forests (they haven’t said ‘Doriath’ but it’s implied); they’re clearly doing SOMEthing with dead trees and desertified land; what better place to bring in an elf that’s into trees to the point of staying in Middle-earth for them?
6. and there’s some tree-like detail on Caras Gaer and Brank’s armour, plus a statue holding a palantír(?) outside Caras Gaer
7. it makes decent narrative sense to bring Celeborn in linked to another storyline and let him have his own direction as a character rather than parachute him in for Galadriel like “ta-da! husband’s back now” (boring) or create a whole new storyline for him (not enough space in season): therefore, Rhûn.
8. I have had to deal with so much fandom warfare about this guy, really I’m owed a decent storyline for him starting now.
Brânk: Strange wizard! [threateningly] The time for your penance has come.
Nori, unconcerned: [to Gandalf] You know this guy?
Gandalf: [shrugs in indifference]
Collecting up my lost-Sindar-in-Rhûn speculation posts on where Rings of Power's Celeborn is, because there's a few now and we have maybe another 18 months to go at best before getting any answers on it.
My posts about this:
Written during s2 speculating he was one of the Gaudrim: one, two
Rhûn's desertified land and dead trees as deliberately paralleling Anfauglith as the opposite of Doriath
And a post on TROP's 'Rhûnic', possibly the language of a 'lost tribe' of elves
And Gandalf's mysterious past.
Fics I've written with this premise:
Lands far away (2000 words, G) - catching up with Gandalf many years later in Third Age Lothlórien
Five places Celeborn hasn't spent the past eight hundred years (7k words, T) - as the title says, five different alternative stories of which chapter 4 is the Gaudrim-in-Rhûn one
The names of our wounds (ongoing WIP, M, Galadriel/Sauron/Celeborn)
The thinking:
Celeborn has got to be somewhere at this point: the overall outline of this show has already been planned out with said plan okayed by the Tolkien estate who had a "no killing off any characters who don't canonically die yet" clause, and the show is slavishly determined to line up with the Peter Jackson films as a prequel. (This also probably means we'll get boring-coloured hair for him, alas.)
By TV convention, missing-presumed-dead spouses and loved ones who are mentioned in a tragic way in season 1 have a 65-80% chance of turning up alive, well and working for the bad guys by season 3. Say what you will about McPayne's former boss JJ Abrams but he had one of the best takes on this with Alias.
The show has too many plotlines as it is and has little space for a whole new 'Galadriel Looks For Her Missing Husband' one, plus taking Galadriel out of the War of the Elves and Sauron while that's actually happening would make no sense for her character & role. It makes more sense to introduce Celeborn as part of an existing plot, and Rhûn is the one that's most geographically and narratively separated from all the others.
Rhûn is currently the only place with a powerful magical villain who could potentially be keeping prisoners and certainly seems to be keeping some people under some sort of magical control - Brank, the Gaudrim character who got most of the lines, talked about the "curse upon our flesh".
Putting a prince of a forest kingdom (Amazon confirmed they're using the Doriath version of Celeborn) in a land of dead trees and giving him a storyline connected to whatever's happening there works a lot better for establishing a character than just "hey look Galadriel's missing husband who you don't know is back now!"
The show is doing a lot of things that if you want to see it that way already feel like they're setting up an elves-in-Rhûn story, including eg Sindarin names turning up for 'Caras Gaer' and 'Gaudrim'
I'm less confident on him being one of the Gaudrim we've met specifically than on him being in Rhûn generally, but if he is, he's 'Kilta' - the one who killed the snake that was about to strike Poppy and Nori, looked straight at their hiding place, and told the others to mount up and search elsewhere. (With thanks to @oroniel for noticing that 'kil' in Primitive Elvish had a meaning of 'silver glint', and 'ta' also could be 'high, lofty' - one of the translations JRRT gave for 'Celeborn' is 'Silver-tall')
And thanks to Peter Jackson's films the one thing the general audience know about Galadriel's husband is that he's the guy who very much wanted to speak with Gandalf (it's not his line in the book!), and this is the kind of show that will therefore want to give him a whole Surfing Dracula backstory on why he wanted to speak with Gandalf.
All of which, if this is true, suggests that this is the kind of show that a) can't resist doing some kind of melodrama shocking "It's... you?" reveal, again; b) will include some ridiculous geeky detail of Elvish language development that only five people on the internet will appreciate anyway; c) wants to do more! with trees and forests and Tolkien's interest in industrialisation and trees in general; and d) will do some awkward comedy fan-service to a line in a Peter Jackson film which isn't even his line in the book, all at the same time. And I think we all know it's exactly that kind of show.
So Gandalf (who also was good friends with Glorfindel from Valinor in this version apparently, who knew) “had already visited Middle-earth” and got to know “the Sindarin Elves and others deeper in Middle-earth”, you say?
and I can think of one Sindarin elf who in Rings of Power continuity might currently be hanging around ‘deeper in Middle-earth’ in a plotline that will overlap with Gandalf’s…
(had to add that, sorry! I'd probably have dropped this by now, but people got deeply weird about Celeborn theorising to the point of muttering about "motives" and saying "people need to STOP posting Celeborn 'theories'!", so now I am afraid I must do it solidly for the next 43 years. There are not many fandom hills worth dying on but "you do not get to order other people around on how to have fun with made-up elves" is very much one of mine!)
(The book is HoME 12, The Peoples of Middle-earth)
