Magic is not easy to portray in fantasy television series. There are many reasons why the makers of game of Thrones seemed so intent on shying away from the most fantastical elements of that universe in its adaptation. It destroys the sense of grounded realism that newer versions of these series love so much; it introduces additional complications to the story, like potential plot holes and new rules that need to be explained; and most of all, it’s just extremely expensive – even for series with a budget as much as The Rings of Power. So it is no surprise that Prime Videos The Rings of Power seems equally unwilling to grapple with the magic that fills the pages of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings universe. But by hiding the magic of Middle Earth, the series does its own storyline – and one of the greatest worlds in fantasy literature – a disservice.
Tolkien never took much time to explain the magic of Middle-earth. He did describe the mountains and rivers, the traditions and the delicacies, but when it came to magic, he never seemed to find anything worth talking about. This was not due to any unease about the place of magic in his world, but rather a sense of deep comfort. Tolkien’s elves do not explain the many magics of Rivendell to Frodo in the same way that we do not explain the interior plumbing in detail to each of our house guests; magic is simply another fact of life in Middle-earth, too familiar to even mention most of the time, but always present throughout.
The Rings of Poweris, in contrast, afraid of the magic that lives in its world. It dishes out magic like secrets, showing it briefly but then rushing past it, as if too long an exposition of the trick could destroy an illusion. Characters often react with shock or horror to any supernatural event, even though they should be more familiar with it than even characters in the original trilogy, but to the audience, the show rarely makes it clear how we should think about magic of any kind.
Nowhere is the series’ reluctance to let magic rest unconcerned more damaging than with the Rings of Power themselves, particularly the Rings of the Dwarves. In the brief time we spent with King Durin after he received his Ring, his corruption seemed almost instantaneous. The Ring went from a helpful savior of Khazad-dûm to an object Durin the Younger recognized as pure evil in no time. There was no room for the Ring’s magic to wash over the Dwarves or King Durin, no time for the slow, seductive, unnatural power of evil to take root. Instead of the complicated morality that permeates Tolkien’s original stories, such as the destructive effect that accepting small evils can have on a civilization, or how weak rulers can be tempted by the promise of restored glory, whatever the cost, Rings of PowerThe moral of is simplified to something like watching a child touch a stove: a misguided impulse with an immediate and obvious consequence.
And the rings are not the only magical thing in Rings of Power that falls short. Almost every mystical element of the show suffers from the same problem.
Tom Bombadil seems eminently normal, and his very questionable instruction in the arts of magic by Gandalf (or “the Stranger”) is only mentioned in passing. We saw a nice display of the Easterlings’ moth magic, but never returned to it, and have no context at all to understand the person who appears out of nowhere, or the evil bearded wizard who seems to be in charge.
That’s not to say the show needs to take the time to explain each and every one of these elements to us. But when the show skirts past its mystical elements and only draws attention to them when they’re relevant to the plot, our understanding of the world shrinks. Background magic tricks or little flashes of it here and there could give audiences a glimpse into our characters’ daily lives in Middle Earth, but instead magic is kept mysterious for reasons that seem to be driven by the plot rather than the world the story actually takes place in. If we as an audience barely understand the magic in this world and rarely see it, the show doesn’t need to do the work of proving to us why things like the Rings of Power might be evil or why the people of Númenor balk at the idea of using an elven-made palantír, even when there’s no canonical reason for their confusion. It’s an easy shortcut that makes the entire world of the show so much poorer by its omission.
Magic is a fundamental part of Tolkien’s Middle Earth. It moves and shapes the major events of the series, but goes unnoticed in the everyday lives of nearly all of the story’s characters. The important thing here is that magic is there, that it has its own space to live and breathe in the lore of The Lord of the Rings, and all of this is so that we can understand what it means when Sauron uses his own corrupt and evil version. By instead reducing magic to a brief sideline to the show’s otherwise grounded drama, The Rings of Power shrinks Tolkien’s world, makes the heroes less heroic and the villains less evil, and makes the whole story a little more boring.
