Every few months I check on the progress of The Lord of the Rings Amazon series which is still scheduled to arrive sometime in 2021 and a cast has been created for the show filled to the brim with actors and actresses I have never seen before. However, there was one actor that stood out, that being Morfydd Clark.
The series will transpire during the Second Age of Middle-Earth, meaning we may get a firsthand account of how Sauron created the One Ring and the incredible battle that transpired thereafter involving elves and men against Sauron’s mighty army. While the cast hired for the show is mostly for roles unheard of in The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit trilogies there was one familiar name among the bunch.
It appears that this actress, Morfydd Clark, will be portraying a young Galadriel in the series, which could be really exciting. Of course, we’ve supposedly seen a younger Galadriel in the opening narration of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring but that doesn’t matter because we saw Ian Holm as a young Bilbo in that film as well but, unsurprisingly, Peter Jackson recast the character with Martin Freeman bringing young Bilbo Baggins to life in The Hobbit Trilogy.
Honestly, this is exciting news and I truly hope this The Lord of the Rings series becomes the next Game of Thrones/The Mandalorian craze that’ll have fans clamoring for more.
How do you feel about the casting decision for a young Galadriel? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below.
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I like the idea of it, although frankly I want to see a series based on the Silmarillion and the First Age. They can even continue it into the Second Age if they want, but I want to see the era where Morgoth lurked in the halls of Thangorodrim, the nature of his relationship with Sauron and how the latter came to be as evil as he was, and things like the theft of the Silmarils, the tale of Beren and Luthien, the duel between Fingolfin and Morgoth, the oath of Feanor and the cost the elves paid for its greed, the fall of Gondolin, and of course the fall of Morgoth himself.
That was a very dark, very brutal era in Tolkien’s Legendarium, and even Tolkien himself never truly finished writing about it, but it’s at least as fully complete as the Second Age and would be more than merely a further prequel to the movies themselves — it’s an entirely different story with different directions for the power of love, the price of greed and lust for power, and the ways in which evil destroys the evildoer almost as much as the victim, especially in the ways Morgoth became less than his strength of old by squandering his power on violence and tyranny. There’s a whole lot of stuff there that could be explored, and I wish someone would cover that part more than just filling in more stuff that’s directly related to Sauron.
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Whoa! That sounds like some really cool prequel material to cover. Wow.
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There’s a lot there, although the main knock on it is that a fair amount of it could be considered disjointed. Tolkien originally wrote it as a collection of stories that took place across the entire First Age, and then it was collected and published by his son after his death. A couple of other books based on it have since been published, and frankly the fact that they’re not terribly finished shows a lot. I tried reading “Beren and Luthien” a year or so back and frankly couldn’t get very far into it. “The Silmarillion” itself touches on the same story in shorter form, along with a lot of the other stuff I’m describing here, and while it was better than the longer form one IMO, a neutral reader could be forgiven for deciding that it wasn’t really that firmly finished.
However, it’s not like similar couldn’t be said for the Second Age. The Silmarillion itself is probably the most coherent source for that period, too. The fall of Numenor is probably the most compelling story aside from the actual forging of the Rings and the siege of Barad-Dur that leads to Isildur’s failure to destroy the One.
I don’t know. The Second Age is closer to the movies in its characterization — Elrond and Galadriel are in there, as is Sauron. On the other hand, Gandalf isn’t (the Wizards didn’t come until after Sauron lost the Ring in the original material), and there’s basically no mention at all of Hobbits or anything in there. And, in fairness, the First Age is kinda depressing until it ends. Morgoth gradually breaks everyone who faces him until the Valar finally answer a prayer for relief from his tyranny, and then they come over the ocean from the West and tear his entire empire to shreds in deus ex machina form. Maybe people just figure the power level is too “out there” to really be compelling.
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I actually tried to read Beren and Lúthien as well and it was just too much. The lore of his world is so deep and complex that I found myself bored to tears trying to understand it all.
We’ll see what they can do.
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Yeah. That was kind of my take as well. I get the sense that this, like a bunch of the “Lost Tales” stuff, was started by Tolkien in his own head and never really revised to a point where it could stand on his own, and that when his son took over his manuscripts he didn’t feel confident in those revisions to be able to do that after his death. Some of the added material in the Hobbit movies was based on this, and more than a little bit, Jackson just added out of whole cloth on his own. Any part of this — First Age or Second — would take a great deal of refinement on the TV series’ part to get there. Since they’re doing the Second… well, ok. Maybe they’ll eventually get to the First.
That said, I will admit to some concern. Tolkien’s greatest weakness as an author is that he was rather poor at self-editing, IMO. I frankly find it to be some of Jackson’s greatest accomplishments that he managed to make this all coherent and watchable. The second book frankly always came off to me as a horrible tangent — the character development of a Gollum is worthwhile but a bit weird in the second book, and the battles with Saruman aren’t very well done at all in the books. They took some liberties with Helm’s Deep which were generally fine, although the fact that an army of elves shows up was a bit random given that they didn’t continue to help at Minas Tirith — in the books the elves pretty much are checked out of the whole thing on the ground. Christopher Lee and Andy Serkis’ acting pretty much saves the second movie in general. Jackson also wisely chose to leave Tom Bombadil out — this was a bit of a “darling” character on Tolkien’s part that doesn’t really add anything to the story at all.
And the third book is split up into two sections that tell the same chronology from two perspectives — one in Gondor with the defense of Minas Tirith, and then the second in Mordor with the Hobbits and the Ring. Jackson threads this back together.
That said, I think his efforts on the Hobbit movie were overwrought and stretched. The Hobbit just isn’t enough material for three movies. The Battle of Five Armies takes up like a couple pages in the book, and he made up a third movie out of very, very thin air for that. I could see maybe stretching it to two movies (at two hours instead of three each) if they wanted to fold in the Dol Guldur stuff and the rediscovery of Sauron (which was left in the background in the book), but three three-hour movies was waaaay too much.
Hopefully this comes off more like the first movies and not the second ones.
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I didn’t have a problem with Jackson splitting The Hobbit movies into three films because it felt appropriate how he broke up the stories. I mainly didn’t like how he added the romance element the wrong way and how he handled the final battle.
The idea of an elf being with a dwarf seems wrong in theory and it turned out to be just as wack as expected. Peter should’ve focused on what he had; a forbidden romance between Legolas and Tauriel, have Tauriel die during the battle (yeah, she’ll be Fridged) and that’ll lead him to go lead a life on his own out there in Middle-Earth.
Last time I checked, The Battle of Five Armies consisted of Dwarves, Men, Elves, Orcs, and Wargs. Where did the warts go? I was really looking forward to that.
And why didn’t he highlight Beorn and Radagast more? That would’ve been awesome.
He tried to recreate the magic of The Lord of the Rings but the CGI alone brought down the quality of all three films.
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