The Rings of Power, Nostalgia, and the Wraithing of Popular Culture
Being the Second Part of a Review of 'The Rings of Power' Season 1
INTRODUCTION: A Kind of Embalming
The Second Age is a transitional period in the life of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth. The Elder Days are over; the Dark Lord Morgoth has been dethroned; but the cost is great. The continent of Beleriand is broken and drowned in the cataclysmic War of Wrath. The holy Silmarils are lost to the bowels of the Earth, the depths of the Sea, or the heights of Heaven. The great heroes of the First Age are mostly dead or promoted to stardom (in the astrological sense), leaving their children and grandchildren to pick up the pieces. Most of the Elvish exiles who returned to Middle-earth have accepted the pardon of the Valar and sailed West to Elvenhome, leaving behind those who love Middle-earth too much to bid it farewell. The High Elves who remain are themselves in-between, caught between their yearning for the undying beauty of Valinor and their deep affection for the transient beauty of mortal lands. Nor are they quite willing to forsake the power they wield as Middle-earth’s eldest and mightiest inhabitants. As Tolkien writes in a 1951 letter to publisher Milton Waldman: the Noldorin exiles
wanted the peace and bliss and perfect memory of ‘The West’, and yet to remain on the ordinary earth where their prestige as the highest people, above wild Elves, dwarves, and Men, was greater than at the bottom of the hierarchy of Valinor. (Letters #131)
The Elven response to their in-between state—encouraged by a certain metallurgist calling himself Annatar—is the Rings of Power. From the same letter to Waldman:
The chief power (of all the rings alike) was the preservation or slowing of decay (i.e. ‘change’ viewed as a regrettable thing), the preservation of what is desired or loved, or its semblance. (Letters #131)
In another letter, Tolkien says of the Three Elven-Rings that they “were precisely endowed with the power of preservation, not of birth.” (Letters #144) That’s an interesting turn of phrase. It’s made more interesting still by its proximity to a comment on the nature of Orcs, who
are nowhere clearly stated to be of any particular origin. But since they are servants of the Dark Power, and later of Sauron, neither of whom could, or would, produce living things, they must be ‘corruptions’. (Letters #144)
The Rings and the Orcs seem to have something in common. The comparison grows clearer when we consider the Three Rings for Elves alongside the Nine Rings for Men. All the Rings are dedicated to preservation, but whereas the Three preserve the aesthetic and artistic beauty of an immortal race, the Nine artificially extend the lives of mortals. The result is one of Tolkien’s most striking and characteristic visions of evil: the Ringwraiths, mortal men whose lives have been stretched to breaking-point until they become blasphemous specters of malice, more absence than presence.
This isn’t to say that Galadriel’s use of Nenya the Ring of Adament to preserve Lothlorien as an “island in time” is anything on the same order of evil as Sauron’s use of the Nine Rings to grant the Ringwraiths a spectral serial longevity. One seeks to preserve beauty, the other to wipe it out. These things are not morally equivalent – but neither are they as diametrically opposed as they might seem. A word that Tolkien returns to repeatedly in his Letters to describe the Elvish yearning to halt decay is embalming. It appears in his famous letter to Waldman, and also in this 1954 letter to Naomi Mitchison:
[T]he Elves are not wholly good or in the right. Not so much because they had flirted with Sauron; as because with or without his assistance they were ‘embalmers’. They wanted to have their cake and eat it: to live in the mortal historical Middle-earth because they had become fond of it (and perhaps because they had there the advantages of a superior caste), and so tried to stop its change and history, stop its growth, keep it as a pleasaunce, even largely a desert, where they could be ‘artists’ – and they were overburdened with sadness and nostalgic regret. (Letters #154)
In their attempt (ultimately doomed) to arrest the inexorable forward motion of Time, the Rings of Power are technologies of nostalgia.
And so, by the same token, is The Rings of Power.
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PART I: The Nostalgia Industry
I’m going to interrogate the meaning—and potentialities—of the word nostalgia later in this essay, so it’s useful at this point to offer the standard, Merriam-Webster dictionary definition: “a wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for return to or of some past period or irrecoverable condition.” Flag three words there: excessively, yearning, irrecoverable. I’ll return to those presently. For the moment, if you’ll indulge me in a statement of the obvious: popular culture in 2022 is caught firmly caught in the vise-grip of a nostalgia boom. The attempt to evoke, for profit, the comfort of childhood, or of adolescence, or of any past time in which things seemed safer and less complicated than the present, is ubiquitous.
There can be no greater perpetrator—and, thus, beneficiary—of the nostalgia boom than the Walt Disney Corporation. Disney-owned Marvel Studios churns out superhero blockbuster after superhero blockbuster, tugging on the nostalgic heartstrings of not just those who grew up with Marvel Comics, but also those who grew up with the earliest installments in the MCU – Iron Man came out in 2008, nearly a decade-and-a-half ago. (In the interest of both transparency as well as heading off accusations of cultural elitism: I cried at the climax of Avengers: Endgame too.) Star Wars was one of the defining stories of my childhood, but overexposure has deadened it for me as an adult; I’d be content if no new media from that galaxy far, far away were released in my lifetime. Perhaps nothing better emblematizes the Mouse’s corporate weaponization of nostalgia than the endless stream of Disney Live-Action Remakes. No legacy film, no matter how iconic, seems able to escape the treatment: Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, Pinocchio, Dumbo, Aladdin, The Little Mermaid, Hercules. All bloated, joyless shadows of once-beloved films whose principle purpose seems to be pressing the little button in the viewer’s brain that says, “Hey, I recognize that!” As if the cynical evocation of a cultural signifier were sufficient to rekindle the warm emotions these films once engendered.
Sufficient or not, the point is moot: the gambit continues to bring in hundreds of millions of dollars for the company. The yearning for a return to a prelapsarian past is powerful enough to put butts in seats, even if the commodity on offer proves incapable, perhaps by design, of satisfying that yearning. It’s a kind of aesthetic gentrification in which originality (often springing from marginalized communities and creators) is priced out of the neighborhood to make way for retreads of existing, already-profitable IP (intellectual property, a telling turn of phrase).
For philosopher and cultural critic Mark Fisher, this kind of regressive nostalgia is produced by the very system which then exploits it for profit: neoliberal capitalism. As many of the civil and economic rights that were won during the middle half of the twentieth century have eroded since the Reagan/Thatcher Revolution of the 1980s; as wealth gaps widen and the economic precarity of working people increases, especially women, queer folks, and workers of color; as the omnipresent threat of climate catastrophe promises only to deepen as the twenty-first century lengthens – in the midst of all this, Fisher contends, we are increasingly exhausted, with decreasing amounts of leisure time, our very attention colonized by tech companies and social media. (Jenny Odell’s 2019 book How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy is an excellent guide to this subject.) We are “simultaneously exhausted and overstimulated,” Fisher says, and neoliberalism offers the consumption of the familiar as a panacea to both problems – problems produced by the same system that purports to address them. Nostalgia consumption is positioned as an answer to the destruction of solidarity and belonging. This, Fisher argues, is largely to blame for the nostalgia boom that has only deepened in the decade since he published his essay “The Slow Cancellation of the Future” in 2014.
One of the things I appreciate about Fisher’s analysis is that it destigmatizes nostalgia. Too often critiques of nostalgia are framed in terms of self-involved consumers who wish to escape from reality into the safety of childhood. The pervasiveness of nostalgic media becomes eminently explicable in light of the erosion of communities and institutions that once safeguarded economic survival, social belonging, and—critically—a sense of a livable future. A retreat from the present appears, if not rational, at least comprehensible when the present is this shitty, and all the trend-lines lead from bad to worse. The future has been canceled, resulting in what Fisher elsewhere calls capitalist realism, the inability to imagine a future beyond neoliberal capitalism and its structuring ideologies.
It is perhaps easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism, to paraphrase Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek. Easier, certainly, to turn away from the future toward present-tense consumption and the doomed quest to reinvoke the magic of lost childhood.
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PART II: Of Rings and Wraithing
This is the corporate media ecosystem from which Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power emerges. The show exists at all because, in the middle of a boom in nostalgic media, Jeff Bezos put up hundreds millions of dollars, quite explicitly, to manufacture the next Game of Thrones. Nostalgia properties can count on a built-in audience – and when you’re talking about one of the world’s best-loved fantasy series, right on time for the retro wheel to turn around to the twenty-year anniversary of Peter Jackson’s blockbuster film adaptations, the economic logic is eminently legible.
Many of the show’s more frustrating (to me) creative decisions likewise become legible in the light of that logic. Though ROP does work to distinguish itself aesthetically from Peter Jackson’s LOTR, the impact of the films is felt constantly. The battle for the Southlands which forms the core of Season 1’s best episode, “Udûn,” makes constant visual callbacks to the Battle of Helm’s Deep in Jackson’s Two Towers. Snatches of prose borrowed directly from Tolkien stick out like proverbial sore thumbs amidst the show’s wooden dialogue-writing, nowhere more prominently than in the same episode when the human healer Bronwyn echoes my favorite passage in all 1,100 pages of The Lord of the Rings:
There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach. (LOTR VI.2)
In the context of the novel, this is a stunning moment of grace breaking into the very midst of hell as Sam and Frodo inch their way toward Mount Doom. In the context of The Rings of Power, it feels unearned, meant to press the “Hey, I recognize that!” button. (For may viewers, the place they recognize it from wouldn’t even be the book, but rather Jackson’s reworking of the passage for Sam’s inspirational speech at the climax of his Two Towers.) Bear McCreary’s serviceable but generic score is another case-in-point. Twenty years after Howard Shore set the sonic template of Middle-earth for a generation of readers and viewers, McCreary relies heavily on the tropes Shore established: Celtic folk for Hobbits, rhythmic chanting for Dwarves, ethereal soprano for Elves, more rhythmic chanting (in the Black Speech this time) for Sauron and the servants of evil. Even the Ring-Verse, sung by Fiona Apple over the ending credits to the Season 1 finale, feels like a calculated, inferior fusion of “Gollum’s Song” (Emilíana Torrini) from The Two Towers and “Into the West” (Annie Lennox) from The Return of the King.
Perhaps the worst offenders, however, are the Harfoots. These proto-Hobbits serve two major functions in The Rings of Power. In the first place, they give the Stranger a narrative space in which to serve as a red herring in the audience’s quest to figure out where Sauron is hiding this season – this despite the fact that both the Stranger’s identity (Gandalf) as well as Sauron’s (Halbrand) are relentlessly, unsubtly telegraphed from the moment they respectively appear onscreen. In the second place, the Harfoots are here because, to quote showrunners Patrick McKay and J.D. Payne, “does it feel like Middle-earth if you don’t have hobbits or something like hobbits in it?”
If you’re Tolkien, the answer is: of course it feels like Middle-earth without Hobbits in it! That’s the entire First and Second Ages, not to mention most of the Third. As eminent Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey points out in his book J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (2000), Hobbits are deliberate, brilliant anachronisms who function to link the Secondary World of the Legendarium to the Primary World of modern readers. They act as reader stand-ins, mediating Middle-earth’s strangeness and wonder to us even as they embody a certain continuity between ancient and modern; they demonstrate that there is a place for the quiet heroism of the everyday person even in the epic sagas of an enchanted past. Hobbits are a huge part of the appeal of LOTR, as Tolkien himself recognized: in multiple letters he assured fans that he was working on getting the legends of the First and Second Ages into publishable shape, yet warned them that there were no Hobbits in it. The relative popularity of The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion proves the point: humble heroes like Frodo and Sam provide many readers a point-of-entry to Tolkien’s world that epic heroes like Fëanor and Túrin Turambar do not.
There’s a certain canniness, then, to McKay and Payne’s inclusion of the Harfoots in ROP. Since the plot of LOTR hinges on the fact that Hobbits haven’t played a major part in world events until the end of the Third Age, however, the Harfoots’ role in the Second Age can only be limited and peripheral, at least in Season 1. The Harfoots strip Hobbits of their deliberate, highly effective anachronism—Tolkien once described the Shire as “more or less a Warwickshire village of about the period of [Queen Victoria’s] Diamond Jubilee,” i.e., 1897 (Letters #178)—leaving in its place flower-crowns and stereotypical “Oirish” accents. The effect is cutesy, indeed elfin, a word which Tolkien despised with its connotations of childish smallness and tweeness. The Harfoots wander the countryside, delivering half-baked aphorisms in lieu of proper dialogue and singing Broadway-wannabe walking-songs with lyrics like “not all who wonder or wander are lost,” clearly meant to invoke Bilbo’s Riddle of Strider:
All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost. (LOTR I.10)
Read together with Stranger-Gandalf’s advice, “When in doubt, Elanor Brandyfoot, always follow your nose,” a cringeworthily blatant reference to Gandalf’s identical words to Merry in Jackson’s The Fellowship of the Ring, you get my absolute least favorite part of the show.
I can only speak for myself, of course – if your Harfoot mileage varies, please, enjoy them to the fullest! But whenever they appeared onscreen, more J.M. Barry than J.R.R. Tolkien, I sensed not only a failure of imagination on the showrunners’ part, but a deliberate attempt at emotional manipulation for profit. I felt as if Payne and McKay were trying to recapture (in multiple senses of the word capture) my fondness for Hobbits by aping their sonic and visual signature from Peter Jackson’s films, all without importing the substance behind the style. Mark Fisher’s commentary on “retro” obsession in twenty-first century music is equally applicable here: “The ‘classic’ sound, its elements now serenely liberated from the pressures of historical becoming, can now be periodically buffed up by new technology.” Far from enchantment, the result is what essayist Luke Savage has called the “zombification of popular culture.”
Or to put it in more Tolkienian terms, the wraithing of popular culture.
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CONCLUSION: Toward a Radical Nostalgia
An important point has so far been left out of consideration: namely, that The Lord of the Rings—indeed, all of Tolkien’s writings—are themselves profoundly nostalgic. They reject industrialized modernity, longing instead for a time before the advent of what Tolkien liked to call the “infernal combustion engine” (Letters #64), a time “when there was less noise and more green.” (The Hobbit) It is precisely this nostalgic quality that has led some critics to dismiss Tolkien as hopelessly reactionary and his work as a flight from the modern world and its concerns. Umberto Eco, himself a medievalist, asserts that “frequently this wish [to return to the Middle Ages] is misunderstood and, moved by a vague impulse, we indulge in a sort of escapism a la Tolkien.” (“Dreaming of the Middle Ages”) Eco could hardly have been unaware of how The Lord of the Rings had been appropriated by Italian neo-fascists – neo-fascists whose descendants recently assumed parliamentary power in that country.
In his book Defending Middle-earth: Tolkien, Myth and Modernity (2004), Tolkien scholar Patrick Curry takes a different approach to Tolkien’s nostalgia. He argues, and I agree with him, that as the twentieth and now twenty-first century have drawn on, the project of industrialized modernity—on both the left (state communism) and right (capitalist imperialism)—has proven itself a demon of Sauron-like proportions, torturing the Earth and ruthlessly exploiting its inhabitants in the name of profit and power. The yearning in which Tolkien’s work is grounded is, first and foremost, for an enchanted world, where the Earth and its inhabitants have sacred value in and of themselves, not as instruments to be used (and abused) in the pursuit of domination. As Goldberry puts it when Frodo asks whether the Old Forest “belongs” to Tom Bombadil:
That would indeed be a burden… The trees and the grasses and all things growing or living in the land belong each to themselves. (LOTR I.7)
Far from being an escapist flight into unreality, Middle-earth is a cogent and powerful critique of what Max Weber called modernity’s disenchantment of the world: transforming the Earth and its inhabitants (especially the non-human ones) from subjects to be encountered into objects to be manipulated. Curry contends—and again, I agree with him—that by reaching back into humanity’s collective memory of a world of living wonder, Tolkien re-enchants modernity through the power of fantasy. This is Tolkien’s radical nostalgia,
a liberating perception that things might have been different, and therefore could be different now. It suggests that just as there was life before modernity, so there can be after it. In short, Tolkien’s books are certainly nostalgic, but it is an emotionally empowering nostalgia, not a crippling one. (Curry, Defending Middle-earth)
After all, quite apart from the common, dictionary definition I quoted earlier, the original meaning of the word nostalgia is “homesickness.” The world for which LOTR longs is one in which humans are once more at home, the way Hobbits are at home in the Shire, or the Elves are at home in Lothlórien: at one with the Earth, not its master.
This is how the modernity-disillusioned Tolkien can credibly claim that “I am not a reformer nor an ‘embalmer’!” (Letters #154) This is not to deny that Tolkien can be, and has been, appropriated for reactionary causes; it does not deny the possibility that readers might use his work for regressive-nostalgic purposes. However, Tolkien’s enchanted vision poses a compelling challenge to the totalizing logic of industrialized modernity, embodied today by the neoliberal capitalist order that profits from the nostalgia industry. The Lord of the Rings posits a world in which change is sad, indeed, but also ineluctable; it is radical in the original Latin sense of rooted, holding out the hope (not guarantee) that things can change for the better. This is, to quote Tolkien scholar Verlyn Flieger, “a story about the ability to let go.” (A Question of Time, 1997) The alternative is wraithing, as the past vanishes into irrelevance, the future is forever canceled, and the present “becomes an intolerable torment” (Letters #131).
It remains to be seen whether The Rings of Power will embrace the subversive power of Tolkien’s vision, or whether it, like so much nostalgic media, will end up all thin and stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.
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WORKS CITED
Breznican, Anthony & Robinson, Joanna. “Amazon’s Lord of the Rings Series Rises: Inside The Rings of Power.” Vanity Fair, February 10, 2022: https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2022/02/amazon-the-rings-of-power-series-first-look/.
Curry, Patrick. Defending Middle Earth: Tolkien: Myth and Modernity. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004.
Fisher, Mark. “The Slow Cancellation of the Future.” In Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology, and Lost Futures, 13-35. Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2014.
Eco, Umberto. “Dreaming of the Middle Ages.” In Faith in Fakes, translated by William Weaver, 61-72. London: Secker & Warburg, 1985.
Flieger, Verlyn. A Question of Time: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Road to Faërie. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1997.
Odell, Jenny. How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. New York: Melville House, 2019.
Power, Ed. “Rings of Power: The New Hobbits Are Filthy, Hungry Simpletons with Stage-Irish Accents. That’s $1bn Well Spent.” The Irish Times, August 31, 2022: https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/tv-radio/2022/08/31/rings-of-power-the-new-hobbits-are-filthy-hungry-simpletons-with-stage-irish-accents-thats-1bn-well-spent/.
Savage, Luke. “Entertainment Monopolies Are Zombifying Mass Culture.” Jacobin, December 21, 2021: https://jacobin.com/2021/12/disney-mass-culture-commodification-tv-movie-franchises/.
Shippey, Tom. J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000.
Tolkien, J.R.R. The Hobbit. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
Tolkien, J.R.R. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. Edited by Humphrey Carpenter & Christopher Tolkien. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981.
Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1994.