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Few fantasy series have the critical, commercial, and cultural acclaim of The Lord of the Rings. J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth series of books isn’t just beloved; it ranks among the most influential literary works in history. Tolkien’s writing still defines fantasy to this day, with huge series like the anime Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End taking direct inspiration.
The franchise was notoriously difficult to adapt, however. While animators attempted to bring Tolkien’s vision to life, the initial attempts by directors like Ralph Bakshi and studios like Rankin/Bass only captured a bit of The Lord of the Rings’ magic.
This was what made Peter Jackson’s trilogy of films feel like such a miracle. While the cinematic trilogy did make substantial alterations to Tolkien’s original story, they carried over much of the spirit and themes that make the books come alive. The Lord of the Rings seemed like a juggernaut by the time that original film trilogy ended, but unfortunately, it couldn’t keep that momentum up forever.
The Lord of the Rings Has Been on the Decline For More Than a Decade Now
The real cracks started showing with 2012’s The Hobbit trilogy of films. Though Peter Jackson’s new trilogy of Middle-earth movies were initially met with tepid praise and moderate box office success, subsequent appraisals have not been so kind.
Despite a decent lead performance from Martin Freeman and a host of familiar faces, The Hobbit trilogy of films has gone on to be recognized as overstuffed and ultimately unnecessary.
Worse yet, The Hobbit movies tried too hard to be like The Lord of the Rings movies, despite J.R.R. Tolkien’s first book being vastly different in tone and scope than what would come next in the series chronologically.
Despite the mixed reception, however, The Lord of the Rings franchise would experiment with other media. Sometimes these forays would pan out well, such as with the incredibly innovative Middle-earth: Shadows of Mordor or the Magic: The Gathering expansion The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth.
Unfortunately, despite a few bright spots, Middle-earth is in a tough spot at the time of writing, and the proof is in the numbers.
The Lord of the Rings Is Still Stuck In a Rut
The current flagship Middle-earth title is Prime Video’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. That series is a prequel, adapting mostly appendix material from other Tolkien works about Middle-earth and its history.
Unfortunately, despite The Rings of Power’s absurd budget and initially strong viewer numbers, the first season proved wildly divisive. Part of the division is for reasons that aren’t really fair to the show. Poorly conceived complaints about diversity and an increased role for female characters only distract from the real problems hanging over the series.
While the original The Lord of the Rings films are filled with warm and human moments that make viewers care about the characters, The Rings of Powers’ human drama tends to fall flat. That, coupled with rights issues that prevent The Rings of Power from even properly naming characters like Sauron, adds up to a bit of a mess.
Though The Rings of Power season 2 currently has an 82% critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes, the series’ viewership numbers have tanked.
According to analytics company Luminate, The Rings of Power season 2’s premiere saw a sharp 60% decline in views compared to the first season’s debut.
While Amazon may have been surprised by the drop, fans of fantasy could have seen it coming a mile away based on one quote from the genre’s best writer.
The Lord of the Rings Is Now a Shadow Of Itself
25 years ago, fantasy writer Ursula K. Le Guin went back on her word. Le Guin is one of the most well-respected fantasy and science fiction writers of all time. Though her work might not be quite as influential as Tolkien’s, she is a multiple Nebula and Hugo award winner who is nothing less than a titan of speculative fiction.
One of her crowning achievements is the Earthsea Cycle of books that began with 1968’s A Wizard of Earthsea. After decades away from Earthsea, Le Guin released Tehanu in 1990 with the subtitle The Last Book of Earthsea.
In 2001, she amended that by releasing a -up short-story collection titled Tales From Earthsea. That collection opened with a foreword from Le Guin that sought to explain why she was releasing a new book in the series and what she thought of the then-current state of fantasy.
Though the foreword is filled with many gems of wisdom from the writer’s long career, one set of paragraphs in particular feels prescient.
Commodified fantasy takes no risks: it invents nothing, but imitates and trivializes. It proceeds by depriving the old stories of their intellectual and ethical complexity, turning their action to violence, their actors to dolls, and their truth-telling to sentimental platitude. Heroes brandish their swords, lasers, wands, as mechanically as combine harvesters, reaping profits. Profoundly disturbing moral choices are sanitized, made cute, made safe. The passionately conceived ideas of the great story-tellers are copied, stereotyped, reduced to toys, molded in bright-colored plastic, advertised, sold, broken, junked, replaceable, interchangeable.
What the commodifiers of fantasy count on and exploit is the insuperable imagination of the reader, child or adult, which gives even these dead things life—of a sort, for a while.
Unfortunately, 25 years later, Le Guin’s comments are more relevant than ever. The Hobbit trilogy is emblematic of the commodified fantasy Le Guin spoke about; a safe stab at recreating The Lord of the Rings that lacked the living heart that made the original work generation-defining.
Though The Rings of Power might fare slightly better, it is only by virtue of being better constructed. The bones might be more solid, the muscles more firm, but the soul is gone.
Though The Rings of Power might fare slightly better, it is only by virtue of being better constructed. The bones might be more solid, the muscles more firm, but the soul is gone.
Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea Series Shows How To Resurrect Fantasy
What makes The Lord of the Rings’ poor modern state so frustrating is that fantasy franchise resurrections have been done well before. Le Guin herself is a great example because she managed to bring Earthsea back twice, each time to magnificent effect.
When Le Guin first released The Farthest Shore in 1972, it seemed like a natural conclusion to the franchise. The climax of that book saw the series’ protagonist, Ged, lose his power as a mage, bringing a satisfying end to his character arc.
Fortunately for readers, however, that isn’t where Le Guin left the series. Instead, she returned to it with Tehanu in 1990.
Tehanu is, in many ways, the opposite of Le Guin’s previous Earthsea books. While the series’ first three novels were all young-adult tales focusing on powerful characters battling dark forces, Tehanu is an adult novel about ordinary people facing entirely human problems.
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Instead of just using Tehanu as an opportunity to revisit classic iconography and characters, Le Guin reexamines things. Why aren’t women allowed in the mage school? What happens to a wizard when they lose their power? What is the difference between a man and a dragon?
Tehanu is many things, but it is certainly not a comforting read. With the benefit of an 18 year gap between novels, Le Guin confronts her past text. The result is a deeply personal narrative that challenges readers and adds a new layer of complexity to what came before.
This gets to the heart of the problem with the modern state of The Lord of the Rings as a franchise.
While some fantasy fans might complain that projects like The Rings of Power are not lore-accurate, that’s really not the problem. The original The Lord of the Rings films contained many huge changes from Tolkien’s novels, and they’re beloved.
The real problem is that, good or bad, the newer Middle-earth projects like The Rings of Power are not challenging audiences.
Maybe someday another big The Lord of the Rings project will crack the code and produce something truly inspired. Even then, though, it will only exist to extend the franchise’s strange unlife.
As Le Guin warns, these zombie franchises can only shamble for so long before collapsing under their own weight. Perhaps the best thing that can happen to The Lord of the Rings is to let it rest so that new life may spring elsewhere.
The Lord of the Rings
The Lord of the Rings is a multimedia franchise consisting of several movies and a TV show released by Amazon titled The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. The franchise is based on J.R.R. Tolkien's book series that began in 1954 with The Fellowship of the Ring. The Lord of the Rings saw mainstream popularity with Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogies.
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