As an admirer of JRR Tolkien’s writing ever since a far sighted English teacher in the first year of secondary school decided to abandon the curriculum for a few weeks and give us a reading of The Hobbit, I’ve been a fan of Tolkien’s legendarium. I progressed from the Hobbit to Lord of the Rings and then onto the Silmarillion and I’ve dipped my toes into the Unfinished Tales, although not as much as I should have done. I am without a doubt a Tolkien fan. I thought that the Peter Jackson movies did a reasonable job of bringing Professor Tolkien’s tremendous work to the screen although he and his writing team did take a fair few liberties with the story, but not so much as to make me hate the movies.

When I heard that Amazon Prime were going to make a prequel to the events that occurred in the Third Age of Middle Earth, the period in which both the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings are set, I was both intrigued and excited. Whilst the Second Age of Middle Earth has been covered as writings in some of the Unfinished Tales and in the Downfall of Numenor I looked forward to seeing how this time period and Middle Earth culture would be visualised and portrayed. This period, the Second Age, which started after the War of Wrath at the close of the First Age and included both the creation and rise of Numenor and the rebuilding by the Elves of their communities in lands further East than the now drowned lands of Beleriand, offers a wealth of possibilities for writers of a series based in this time.

The Second Age and indeed the period of the Third Age that encompasses the creation of the Rings of Power provides ample opportunities for the writers to produce a proper good versus evil story and by doing so stay true to Professor Tolkien’s magnificent vision of Arda or the Earth. There’s all sorts of stuff there from the rise and later moral corruption of Numenor, the journeys of Galadriel and Celeborn and the creation and defence of Imladris. With the first Dark Lord Morgoth gone the period after the First Age has its own embodiment of evil in the form of Sauron so there is plenty of opportunity for the writers to be inspired by and to use to create dialogue and situations for the various characters to be in.

Unfortunately this is not what we may be getting or that’s what it seems if this video by Nerdotic (see below) is to be believed. After watching Nerdotic’s video I’m becoming more and more afraid at what Amazon will serve up and whether they will ruin Professor Tolkien’s wonderful creation. According to Nerdotic, what Amazon wants is a clone of Game of Thrones and it’s likely to contain much stuff that Professor Tolkien, as a practising Roman Catholic, would not have approved of such as bedroom scenes and nudity. It’s also likely to contain an awful lot of SJW dross as I doubt very much that the sort of writers that Amazon is likely to hire will be in sympathy with Professor Tolkien’s mindset and may well try to paint genuinely evil characters as having some sort of sympathy. For me it doesn’t look good that the connection between the writers and production team and Tolkien scholars is not as strong as it should be. This tells me that what Amazon will do is produce an abomination of a story heavily laden with SJW themes with the characters behaving in a manner that would not be consistent with how they would behave in the canon stories.

I hope that Nerdotic was wrong but the big entertainment companies have a bad habit of taking good and well loved stories and either injecting leftist politics into them or completely deracinating them in order to avoid giving offence to anyone. It may well be the case that instead of the interesting and sometimes flawed characters and those who suffer from the manipulation of Sauron that are to be found in Tolkien’s works we will instead end up with social justice Elves, gay Orcs and tranny Nazgul called Nancy. If you thought that the woke entertainment establishment could not sink lower than the way it ruined Dr Who, then think again, because the wokeists may be coming for Tolkien.