Mud, blood, orcs … and the secret history of the Rings of Power

Just over 25 miles from central London, Bray Film Studios has a rich and storied history as the setting for the mid-20th century Hammer remakes of iconic Universal horror films: The Curse of Frankenstein, Dracula and The Mummy, as well as classics like The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Gorgon.

It is unsurprising then, that we are ankle deep in muddy sludge on a bloody battlefield, surrounded by the bodies of Orcs, the broken and evil foot soldiers of Sauron, the necromancer whose ambition is to become the Dark Lord of Middle-earth, a fair land of elves, dwarves, humans and halflings.

If the colour palette of the first season of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power was the rich and verdant green of the Elven woodlands, and the shimmering gold of the Dwarven citadel of Moria, then the colour palette of the second is the brown of the battlefield, with splashes of blood.

“You never know what you’re making until you get a first cut, and then you go, ’Oh, I guess that’s what it is, how do we embrace that and do the best version of this?” co-creator Patrick McKay says. “We always knew season two was going to be darker.

“We also always knew season two was going to be dominated by Sauron,” McKay adds. “We had to be incredibly disciplined to keep Sauron in the box in season one, knowing that the minute he was out, he would become dominant.”

Co-creator J. D. Payne says those choices – everything from colour palette up – are always driven by story. “That’s where it starts and stops,” he says. “The backbone of the season is the relationship between Sauron and [ring forger] Celebrimbor. That’s the story we knew we wanted to tell from the beginning.”

The series is set in the second age of Middle-earth, thousands of years before the events of the novels (and later, film trilogies) The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. It stars Morfydd Clark as the elf warrior Galadriel, Robert Aramayo as the elven politician Elrond, Ismael Cruz Córdova as the wood elf Arondir, Daniel Weyman as “the stranger”, who may or may not be the wizard Gandalf, and Charlie Vickers as Sauron, the charming but deadly necromancer.

While purists might like to imagine that Tolkien’s world – like many fictional worlds – would make a seamless transition to the screen, in truth there are always influencing factors.

The American gothic horror soap Dark Shadows fundamentally rewrote how Dracula (and other vampire) stories are told, and in making the spy thriller Citadel, the Russo brothers talked extensively about the influence the fantasy role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons had on them as screenwriters.

Working within the framework of Tolkien’s Middle-earth, the potential influence of Dungeons & Dragons is obvious. The two frameworks share a lot of common territory. The game borrowed much from Tolkien, but in turn influences writers of fantasy film and television programs.

“I think both of us were Dungeons & Dragons-adjacent growing up,” Payne says. “We had friends who played it. We certainly were familiar with it but didn’t really get into it ourselves. I played computer RPGs [role-playing games]. Those are all part of the larger fantasy universe, but really Tolkien is the granddaddy of all of them.”

McKay recalls being into the computer game The Legend of Zelda and encountering the Magic card game “on the tail end of the beginning of that. But in terms of fantasy world and tone, we grew up with Willow, which was huge for us. Ridley Scott’s Legend, which has elves, Dark Crystal, Labyrinth, Dragonslayer and John Boorman’s Excalibur.

“There were these really cool, totemic, ’80s, early ’90s fantasy films that I think defined what fantasy was for us as kids,” McKay says.

One of the great revelations in the second season of The Rings of Power – at least for the not-so-Tolkien-literate – is that the “three rings for the Elven kinds under the sky” were not originally worn, as they are in The Lord of The Rings, by Galadrial, Elrond and Gandalf, but rather Galadrial, the elf High-King Gil-Galad and grey elf shipwright Cirdan. In that sense, the series delves into a somewhat secret history of the rings.

“We like being bold, and we’re not afraid of being bold if we feel that there is grounding in the text for those choices,” McKay says. “Galadriel is beloved as the wise Lady of the wood, but Tolkien talks about how she was prideful and covetous, and she tells Frodo how she’s drawn to the darkness and been tempted by the ring all her life.

“We were excited to run at that, and it’s the same with the bearers of the rings,” McKay adds. “If they’re not who you expect, that to us is exciting. It might take some viewers a minute to reset, but that’s all fair game.”

Payne says that despite the prominence of the rings in the title of Tolkien’s work, the rings themselves remain quite mysterious. “You see them, you know the elves got three, the dwarves got seven and the humans got nine, and the nine turned the humans into wraiths, but you don’t really know what the three did for the elves,” he says.

“When you dig into Tolkien, he says they had the power of healing, of making, and of preserving all things unstained, which is a little obscure and hard to parse, but we wanted to just tease some of that stuff out,” Payne adds. “We thought those were cool things to be able to explore and really dramatise.”

Perhaps the central mystery in the artistic journey of The Rings of Power, like all such stories that seek to pull open the genesis of great literary or cinematic works, is whether we need origin stories at all. In shining light into the cracks found in prefaces of such works, are they simply diluting the mystery and mythology that made them great works in the first place.

In the case of The Lord of the Rings, there is evidence that Tolkien himself was open to the process, writing in a letter to his editor Milton Waldman that “the cycle should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama.”

“He then undercut himself and said, absurd; he knew that it was absurd, a grandiose vision,” Payne says. “But he wanted to create something that had a gravity of its own, that would draw other artists to continue to expand it even after his work was done.”

But the larger question – that prequels and origin stories are themselves a risk by demystifying the secret sauce recipe – is not one that McKay agrees with.

“The idea that prequels are somehow verboten or bad in any genre, we don’t buy that,” he says. “There are great prequels everywhere, but they have to be a good story, and there has to be a reason to tell it other than just because it’s called The Lord of the Rings.”

McKay cites Andor, the series that precedes the Star Wars film Rogue One, and therefore the 1977 Star Wars itself, as a great example. “It’s not a prequel, it’s a story of radicalisation, of the corruption of bureaucracy and the forming of a guerrilla rebellion.

“In our eyes, it’s gripping and terrific, even if it wasn’t called Star Wars,” McKay adds. “That’s the standard we constantly try and apply to this show, which is what is a story that is hopefully undeniable and terrific on its own, even if it wasn’t The Lord of the Rings.”

Season 2 of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power screens on Amazon Prime Video from next Thursday (August 29).

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