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Y’All Should Actually Read Barthes (Or: Why Your ‘Rings Of Power’ Critique Is Bad)

I think what really gets under my skin about the many, many lousy critiques about Rings of Power[1] on Tumblr dot Com and Reddit[2] that I see out there is that, firstly, they frequently seem to come from people who don’t seem to realize that their understanding and memories about Tolkien are shaped far, far, far more by the Peter Jackson movies (which were hardly ‘canon-compliant’) than they are by the original text. Second and more crucially, I think, is that everyone really wants to get pissed about canon that Tolkien never actually codified. Here’s what I mean: Tolkien didn’t ‘write’ the Silmarillion. He wrote a whole bunch of essays, letters, notes, scraps of ideas, poems, plot outlines, and ramblings, some of which he earmarked for a project he one day planned to compile as something called The Silmarillion. Then he made a slight error in his scheme by dropping dead. So his son Christopher Tolkien and his pal Guy Gavriel Kay stared at this enormous pile of stuff that went back decades, pulled out some of the bits they thought were most polished, did their best to link them into some kind of narrative, edited the crap out of it, added punctuation, and published a book they called The Silmarillion after JRR’s planned, but never completed idea. And was what was in The Silmarillion everything JRR planned to be in the final volume? Not necessarily. In many cases, not remotely, but Christopher Tolkien and Kay tried to take the stuff that was most polished, even if it was thirty year old material that Tolkien had changed his mind fifteen more times on, because the old stuff often had a clarity of completion that the later revisions did not. They usually took the stuff that complete sentences over the stuff with sentence fragments, even if the latter was more ‘fresh.’ Because they realized that The Silmarillion was more a simulacrum of Tolkien’s ideas than anything definitive, Christopher then put out The Unfinished Tales, which contained some more of Tolkien’s ideas: spme that had made it in other versions into The Silmarillion, some that had not. And since the very large pile of notes and scribblings and essays and letters and old recipes didn’t seem any noticeably smaller, he then spent thirteen years publishing The History of Middle Earth, comedically large tomes stuffed to the brim with Tolkien ideas, variations, variants, and late night side-table Kleenex notes. And then they kept putting out more books. And more. And then Christopher made the same silly mistake of dropping dead too! But other people put out even more books, with even more untouched material. There’s a new book coming out in November and JRR Tolkien’s been dead for fifty years! None of this was published under JRR’s aegis. And let me tell you, JRR Tolkien had a pretty weighty aegis: the man was famous for berating his publishers for edits and corrections. Part of the reason he never got around to completing a definitive Silmarillion was the fact that the man never wanted to publish something with which was not completely satisfied. Everything that has come out after his death, compiled with all the love and care in the world, is nevertheless pretty damning evidence that Tolkien was rarely satisfied. What we know about old JRR is that he changed his mind again and again, and we can’t know that on his death bed, his last thought wasn’t some brilliant revelation that finally made the One Ring work in the context of Sauron’s timeline in the Second Age. If he did, he didn’t get a chance scribble it on a napkin for his son to later try and make sense of. And so we will never really know what his true canon decision on, say, elven pregnancy was: sometimes he thought it should take about 108 years. Sometimes only 9 years. He would change his mind, or change his math, again and again.. So when you talk about the ‘canon’ of Tolkien, it’s important to remember that even if you’re just speaking about ‘definitive’ works, you’re left with those published with his approval in his lifetime. namely The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, and The Road Goes Ever On songbook with Donald Swann. Even with those four books there’s complexity: what version of The Hobbit are you talking about? The original? Or the one he rewrote after he changed his mind about the entire nature of the ring Bilbo found in a cave and decided that actually it was the most important piece of jewelry in existence. Honestly, given world enough and time Tolkien probably would have made a third edition of The Hobbit because those two ‘canonical’ books, The Hobbit and it’s ‘sequel’ Lord of the Rings, don’t even fit together very well, as poor Peter Jackson learned to his sorrow and our pain with his wretched, tonally disjunct Hobbit films. It’s funny, because everyone on here loves talking about Roland Barthes’ Death of the Author. Almost none of you have ever read it, but it sure is a thing that’s a super important, inviolable concept... until we talk about an author the internet isn’t mad at, and suddenly the author’s word is inviolable and all adaptation choices are wrong. I don’t know how to get this across any clearer: anyone who has ever dug deep into Tolkien’s lore knows that speaking of things like ‘canon,’ ‘definitive,’ ‘authoritative,’ and all similar adjectives is often a fool’s errand. Tolkien left us with a lot of ideas about the second age, but very little in the way of clarity, much less ‘this is the true thing unchanging.’ Even the ‘authoritative’ timeline of the Appendices in LOTR is stuff he was changed in the writings he did in the years after. So I am begging you. Please. Please stop giving the Akallabêth a level of authoritative definition that even its compiler admitted it did not possess. Until you can prove to me you brought the shade of JRR Tolkien back from beyond the Veil to speak True Authorial Intent,[3] I am going to treat your recourse to ‘but the canon’ with the level of exasperation it deserves. --------------------------

[1] Besides the general problem on this website that everyone’s heard of critical theory and almost nobody’s ever read any. [2] There are plenty of valid critiques to be made, especially about pacing and awkward racial optics, but it’s really not the unhinged shit I’m seeing, as usual. [3] Let’s be honest: in the fifty years since he shuffled off his mortal coil, the shade of Tolkien will unquestionably return with a ghostly second pile of essays, letters, notes, scraps of ideas, poems, plot outlines, and ramblings, and they won’t be remotely definitive either. And we’re all going to be super disgruntled when the ghost insists that the only good adaptation is his work is Khraniteli.

#rings of power #tolkien #jrr tolkien #The Hobbit #The Lord of The Rings #Akallabêth #Christopher Tolkien #the silmarillion #Guy Gavriel Kay #rop #LOTR #Khraniteli #Barthes #Peter Jackson

the definitive Gandalf ranking

(I will only be ranking movie/TV designs of Gandalf the Grey)

1. Gandalf from the 1985 teleplay The Fabulous Journey of Mr. Bilbo Baggins the Hobbit

This Gandalf has a long beard, thigh high boots, weird eyebrows, and glitter on his cheeks. What else could you need? 9.75/10 for not having a funny hat

2. Gandalf from the 1978 Bakshi film The Lord of the Rings

This Gandalf is amazing, he has a big hat, a big beard, and even bigger robes. Also his facial expressions crack me up. 9.5/10 for being mostly blue

3. Gandalf from the 1977 Rankin/Bass film The Hobbit

This Gandalf has the best eyebrows anyone will ever see, a styled beard, a nice and pointy nose, and a lovely little hood. 9.25/10 for having a cool shot of him in front of lightning

4. Gandalf from the 2001-2003 Peter Jackson film trilogy The Lord of the Rings

This Gandalf is truly Grey and has the wandering look down to a t: the belt, the bag, and most importantly the pipe in his staff. 9/10 for his short beard

5. Gandalf from the 1967 Gene Deitch film The Hobbit