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This week on TORn Tuesday Justin and Cliff spoke with writer Joanna Robinson (@JoWroteThis) who had the opportunity to view the first three episodes of Amazon Prime’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. She then authored two articles for Vanity Fair with revelations about the show – ‘Amazon’s Lord of the Rings Series Rises’ (co-authored with Anthony Breznican), and ‘10 Burning Questions About Amazon’s The Rings of Power.’

Joanna Robinson with Justin Sewell and Clifford Broadway of TORN Tuesday

Below are some highlights from last night’s conversation. Watch the entire interview on TORn Tuesday’s YouTube channel.

[Note: The conversation has been edited down from the original due to space.]

Justin: Are the articles speculation on your part, or are you hinting at stuff you’ve actually seen?
Joanna: In the cover story … and the article that I put up, the “questions answered” one … hardly any is speculation, um, if I’m saying something I’m saying something … when I put down here’s what I asked … then I printed word-for-word the answer I got.

Justin: Was there any discussion with the showrunners of, you know, a certain level of faithfulness?
Joanna: … they’re not deviating from that core lore …

Justin: Is the sword that we see Narsil?
Joanna: I’m gonna go and be safe and say pretty sure.

Justin: Can you provide any reaction to Lenny Henry as a Harfoot?
Joanna: That is something that I would love to see.

Justin: Was the first teaser photo from last summer of the two trees in Tirion, was that intentional misdirection?
Joanna: No

Justin: There’s so much comment about hair … let me start with Galadriel’s hair …
Joanna: … fandoms are not a monolith, and what one person wants in the fandom is not what another person wants with the fandom … I tend to be very CG resistant in general … when we got to the Harfoots in the episodes I saw … that felt so Willow to me, and that is the highest compliment I can give anything … Do people really want a glow filter on Galadriel all the time? … The hair that you see in the photos and footage that you’ve seen is accurate to what I’ve seen … [but] I have not seen all the finished digital effects …

Joanna: I think the casting of Morfydd Clark is incredible because she’s not super well-known, though if you haven’t seen Saint Maude I really recommend you go see it because she is astonishing in that, and if you want to like get a preview of how, uh, you know a Galadriel that might go toe-to-toe with Cate Blanchett going like photo negative in The Fellowship of the Ring, like, that’s the performance that she gives in that film … she’s such a perfect casting for this because people … aren’t coming in with preconceived notions of her … so she can just become Galadriel.

Justin: What are those people with the antlers?
Joanna: Here is what I can say about that, don’t worry too much about it.
Justin: Are they an integral part of the story?
Joanna: Don’t worry too much about it. They’re a very cool visual. It’s a very cool, practical effect visual.

Joanna: Does hair play an important part in the narrative?
Joanna: Like Elf hair? As far as I know, no … I didn’t ask this question specifically … but as far as the story that I’ve seen so far, it does not seem to be related to the plot … I’m guessing … it’s an aesthetic decision.

Cliff: [There’s] all this Galadriel focus … but where’s Celeborn?
Joanna: I haven’t seen him.
Cliff: They’re saving him for a later season perhaps?
Joanna: That would be my guess.

Justin: Is there a vibe of a CW show?
Joanna: No. No. No. … that’s the concern that surprised me the most … attached to Bronwyn and Arondir, that people were like, oh, are they giving a CW … this idea of sort of star-crossed lovers is a recurring theme in Tolkien’s work … the rarity of those pairings … is what makes them so special … I can understand why, you know, a slightly forbidden romance would be part of it because that’s a theme that Tolkien was interested in. But it doesn’t smack of CW to me at all.

TORN: Is it possible this only gets one season?
Joanna: Zero percent … they payed so much money for this, are you kidding me?

Joanna: There was the Covid, and the question was did they reconfigure the whole show when they shot the back end of the first season, what did they do during that Covid time? … did their understanding of what they want to do with the show fundamentally change? I can only give you the answer that JD and Patrick gave me … They said nothing fundamentally changed, in they plotted out their first season, and nothing … changed in the Covid pause … They took time during the Covid pause to map out Season Two … there wasn’t any massive structural changes. The other misapprehension that I’ve seen floating around is this idea that the first two episodes are sort of one thing, and then the rest of the season is something else. That’s not the case at all. It’s one flowing story.
TORN: It’s not a two hour prologue?
Joanna: It’s not …
Cliff: Even in the new article it says there aren’t many time jumps aside from the first two episodes.
Joanna: Am I saying there is no, uh, First Age stuff in this at all? No, Amazon has already told you that there is. But it’s not a massive prologue. No.

Justin: Jeff Bezos said early on ‘bring me the next Game of Thrones‘, and then they got Bryan Cogman the lore expert on Game of Thrones …
Joanna: Bryan also happens to be a really good friend of mine … I’m a huge fan of his … I can see his fingerprints on it [The Rings of Power], but he was very clear he was only there in a consulting position right at the beginning.
Cliff: … it led to worry … about the probability of nudity or sexualized elements to the story…
Joanna: I don’t think Cogman or anyone in that writers’ room, and there’s so many smart, talented writers in that writers’ room, I don’t think any of them wanted to do like orgies in Middle-earth, ever, or anything like that.

Justin: A lot of people say it doesn’t look like there was a plan…did you get a sense that there is a five season plan?
Joanna: I can’t say that for certain, but when they offered up their roadmap … 4-5 big stories they’re interested in telling, involving like Númenor and Sauron and the forging of the rings, and … I think the end after that, right, the Last Alliance of Elves and Men. I think they have the major beats of the whole story laid out.

Cliff: The novelty [of seeing the seven clans of dwarves and their lords] is the most powerful draw for me personally.
Joanna: They [the showrunners] are interested in showing us a wide array of cultures of Middle-earth in a wide array of locations … I gasped when I saw Khazad-Dûm, like when I saw the first shot … sort of descending into Khazad-Dûm … I was dazzled by it, and they built that, I know they built that, […] they told me they did.

Joanna: I found a question I feel really comfortable answering … did I have a favorite performance so far? I think Markella Kavenagh who plays Nori Brandyfoot the Harfoot, she’s my standout by far. I just loved everything that she did … and I think stories about Elves and Men and Dwarves are … fun and interesting, but for me, it doesn’t really feel like it’s Tolkien without a Hobbit or Harfoot there, and I feel like once she showed up I was like I’m locked in, I get it.
Cliff: But we have to acknowledge it is a bit of a lore squeeze.
Joanna: Yup
Justin: That’s the fear that a lot of fans have, that there’s so much good stuff in the Second Age, they don’t want this show to be told from the Harfoots’ perspective.
Joanna: I don’t think its accurate to say it’s told from the Harfoots’ perspective – the Harfoots that we see are nomadic, and they have a rule they don’t engage with the bigger folk … You’re not going to see a Harfoot forging the rings or fighting a Balrog or anything like that as far as I know … they are not bending the text that far.
Justin: Is the show being told from a certain perspective?
Joanna: Amazon is very careful over and over again to call this an ensemble cast, and I don’t think it’s inaccurate … Amazon wants everyone to be in on the show, they want the deep dive lore loving […] people excited, and there’s so many little details in there that I think are gonna make people who are engaging on that level excited, but they want those people [fans of the Jackson films] excited, too … I wouldn’t say this is Galadriel’s show, or this is the Harfoots’ show, or Elrond’s show, or this is the Númenor show.

Markella Kavenagh who plays Elanor ‘Nori’ Brandyfoot

Justin: Can you help fans reconcile the idea that they’re creating new characters?
Joanna: If you were just reading the Appendices of what happened in the the LotR trilogy … a character like Rosie Cotton … a character like that is not a big part of the history that you boiled down for the Appendices … but if you’re putting together the whole world, um, you want your Rosie Cotton since she’s important to matters … The Nazgûl, the nine kings, we know so little about them, right? So doesn’t the Amazon show have a really rich opportunity to introduce us to all of those men, and so that when they fall, it is a tragic story? … so when we lose them we will feel the loss of them. That’s pure speculation, but that’s I think a justifiable reason to add nine characters we may or may not have names for … The way they want to present Isildur … let’s spend time with Isildur … so that when it all shakes out the way it does, we really feel that. I find that kind of story-telling really interesting.

Justin: I hear the loin cloth we see on meteor man was a CG.
Joanna: Honestly classic … If you’ve got a young actress and an adult man … [the intimacy coordinator might have been for Nori so she would feel comfortable.]

Joanna: Is your question, do I know who Sauron is after three episodes?
Justin: Yeah, let’s go there.
[Joanna pulls a red card that indicates she can’t answer in front of her face.]
Justin: Well there you go.

Justin: Any hints that WETA workshop is involved?
[Joanna pulls the red card in front of her face.]

Joanna: I’ll be really curious to see if we’ll be able to tell a demonstrable difference between the seasons shot in England and those shot in New Zealand … JD and Patrick said ‘Our characters are on the move, so you’ll understand it will make sense that maybe we won’t have access to the same vistas’ – I’m paraphrasing.

Justin: There’s a fear that if they share crews because they’re in the UK, it will look like other shows.
Joanna: They are building a home studio in the UK … it will make production easier … In terms of will this show look like the Witcher or Wheel of Time … These are portraits [the posters and photos in Vanity Fair], they’re not the moving images that you’re going to see … When I saw the Wheel of Time screeners that we got which were finished … I spent a long time thinking about why that film, that show, didn’t look as good as I thought it should … there was something slightly off, I thought … it looked ‘costume-e-y’ … I did not feel that way watching [Amazon’s] The Lord of the Rings footage.

Justin: Are there any photos that almost made the cut?
Joanna: There were many, many, many, many, many … conversations about … which photos were going to be in this piece and which weren’t … we had a beautiful portrait of Benjamin Walker as Gil-galad … I love all the photos … I would have put like all the photos we got [in the article] … I want to give you every single name of every single actor playing every single character … Amazon is like, hey, it’s February, we want to keep doling these cookies out … and let other outlets have some fun in sharing.

Justin: Cliff, what is your one ask? What do you wish you would have seen?
Cliff: I want to see Celebrimbor with a hammer and tongs working over some molten ring-making chaos. I want to see the Elven smiths behind him watching, learning while he’s doing this ring-craft, and then, into the frame, reaches one long, slender hand with the golden robe and guiding Celebrimbor’s hand to a different position with the tongs … I want to see Annatar teaching Celebrimbor this most specific thing.

Justin: Can you give us one no context spoiler?
Joanna: Oh that’s really fun! Hmmm … I’m sorry; if I come up with something, I’ll tweet it to you…

Cliff: We’re on the threshold … I’m going to quote Dune … “A beginning is a very delicate time…”

Check out the full interview on TORn’s YouTube channel.

Thanks to Varking, head of the Rings of Power sub-reddit, for notes on the interview.

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As we all know, Prime Video’s teaser trailer for The Rings of Power was released on Sunday 13 February, and aired during the Super Bowl. With 257 million views in the first day, the teaser trailer has broken Super Bowl records (as reported by SyFy Wire). TORn’s own Official Trailer Watch Party, in partnership with Prime Video, and with a host of guests, had peak concurrent viewers over 65k. Whether you’re thrilled with the teaser, or skeptical about what’s coming in September, there’s no doubt that fans are interested.

We asked fans to share their reactions with us as they watched the trailer for the first time, tweeting to #LOTRFans. Prime Video have cut together some of these reactions, which you can watch below. And now we wait; what will be revealed next…?

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Writer Joanna Robinson sure has been busy. Over on The Ringer (not actually a Tolkien site, believe it or not), she writes cogently on the commonalities and differences between the “Harfoots” we’ll see in Amazon’s The Rings of Power series, and the Hobbits we know rather better from The Lords of the Rings and The Hobbit.

She muses on how hobbits function as a crucial mediating influence into Tolkien’s milieu — and how that probably serves double for wider audiences outside core Tolkien fandom, a wider audience whose emotional attachment is mostly via Peter Jackson’s films.

And she explores the applicability of Hobbits to the WWI and WWII experiences of J.R.R. and Christopher Tolkien, and of the British folk in general.

Hobbits can be seen as the proxies for Tolkien’s children, but as with all things with the author, there’s also something much darker at play here. Tolkien abhorred any attempts to turn his Middle Earth books into simple allegories for the two world wars he lived and wrote through. Still it’s very hard not to see his hobbits as the “everyman” analogues for the pastoral Brits who were drawn into the horrors of the First World War and then the even greater terrors of WWII, as Tolkien and his sons were, respectively. In that way, Bilbo of The Hobbit—who is press-ganged into leaving his cozy hobbit hole by a wizard and a pack of dwarves—reminds us of the young J.R.R. Tolkien, who was so reluctant to go off to war at the tender age of 22 he used an academic deferral to delay enlisting.
In a 1941 letter to his son Michael, Tolkien recalled: “In those days chaps joined up, or were scorned publicly. It was a nasty cleft to be in for a young man with too much imagination and little physical courage.” A few years later Tolkien did, reluctantly, go to war. He wrote: “Junior officers were being killed off, a dozen a minute. Parting from my wife then … it was like a death.”

It’s a thought-provoking read. Go check it out.

Read a Field Guide to The Rings of Power Pt 1: Concerning Hobbits

DON’T FORGET! Joanna Robinson will be joining TORn Tuesday tomorrow from 5pm PT, 8pm ET to discuss her Rings of Power experience with Staffers Quickbeam and Justin. Join us then, and be sure to bring your own burning questions!

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I’ve read a lot of responses to, and hot takes on, The Rings of Power in the last 24 hours (you can check some of them out here if you’ve missed our roundup). But, without a doubt, this is the most insightful and useful one so far.

In it, Vanity Fair writer Joanna Robinson puts 10 key questions about Amazon’s Rings of Power production to showrunners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay, and adds her own lore-based thoughts on their answers.

It’s just a terrific read, chock-full of amazing details.

An excerpt:

In studying the language from the first three episodes Amazon let Vanity Fair screen, we found a mix of cleverly repurposed lines of Tolkien’s dialogue as well as a few snatches of Biblical text. “Both Patrick and I have religious backgrounds,” Payne says. “I spent a lot of time just reading those sacred texts. I was an English major at Yale and loved Shakespeare at the time and still go back and reread the various plays. I’ve also spent a lot of time studying Hebrew poetry and parallelism and inverted parallelism and chiasmus and all these cool rhetorical strategies that poets and prophets from thousands of years ago would use to communicate sacred material. And Tolkien, sometimes, will play in that kind of a sandbox.”
McKay explains that they tailored the dialogue to fit each kind of character. The harfoots speak with an Irish lilt whereas the elves speak in elevated British phrases. “We even came up with hero meters for each different race in Tolkien,” Payne says. “Some of them will speak in iambs. Some of them will speak in dactyls. Some of them will speak in trochees.” That in-depth approach might please Professor Tolkien, whose specialty was philology, a.k.a. the history of language.

One of the best revelations is clear, direct confirmation on the rights situation simply because it immediately clears away so much fan debate:

So what did Amazon buy? “We have the rights solely to The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, The Return of the King, the appendices, and The Hobbit,” Payne says. “And that is it. We do not have the rights to The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, The History of Middle-earth, or any of those other books.”

So if you’ve been wondering (as I have), everything in the trees image must be explained by LOTR and The Hobbit alone. And if you can’t find it in those books, don’t expect to see it in The Rings of Power.

Read Vanity Fair’s “10 Burning Questions”.

BOOTNOTE: Writer Joanna Robinson will be joining TORn Tuesday tomorrow from 5pm PT, 8pm ET to discuss her Rings of Power experience with Staffers Quickbeam and Justin. Join us then, and be sure to bring your own burning questions!

Galadriel, commander of the Northern Armies. Matt Grace/Amazon Studios.

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Following on from last night’s teaser trailer, Prime video have now revealed names and actors behind three more of those character posters.

This is High King Gil-galad, played by Benjamin Walker. In the teaser trailer, we see him standing on a stone platform – presumably in Lindon – golden leaves around his feet, staring up into the sky – presumably watching the meteor we saw soaring overhead.

It was clear this would be one of our Harfoots – but we didn’t know which one. She is Elanor ‘Nori’ Brandyfoot, played by Markella Kavenagh – who seems to be the narrator of the teaser trailer. Is there some significance to her dwarven style nickname? And a thought about that last name: etymology of ‘Brandywine’ can be from dutch ‘brandwijn’ or icelandic ‘brennevin’ – ‘burn (or distil) wine’; OR it can come from welsh name Branwen, ‘raven fair’. So here it could mean ‘raven foot’ (dark hairs on toes, presumably); or possibly ‘burn foot’ – perhaps foreshadowing the fiery pit she appears to walk into in the teaser trailer…?

Prime video are not giving us much to go on with this one – they call him The Stranger, played by Daniel Weyman. Is this the man we saw in the pit of fire, with one of the Harfoots reaching out to him? It is certainly his hand we see, holding a Harfoot hand, at the end of the trailer. Who is he? Annatar? One of the Istari? Some entirely new character…?

We hope you enjoyed our Official Trailer Watch Party last night – staff and guests went over five hours, poring over every detail of the trailer, wondering what it all might mean, and sharing our hopes and fears. We’ll bring you any more news as soon as we have it!

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While TORn staff and guests have been busily analysing the new Rings of Power teaser trailer on Youtube, the first print roundups have emerged online.

Vanity Fair

First, Vanity Fair has a great dissection that leverages their insider knowledge to provide some keen — and provocative insights on the contents.

An excerpt:

The opening shot shows a ship passing through an ornate gateway into a bustling port city. It’s a thriving metropolis, the westernmost civilization of mortals in the Sundering Seas, situated on the star-shaped island of Númenor.

TORn Tuesday talks to Vanity Fair first look writer Joanna Robinson

Category: The Rings of Power