Rings of Power is wasting Middle-earth's magic

Magic isn’t an easy thing to depict in fantasy television shows. There are plenty of reasons why the creators of Game of Thrones seemed so eager to shy away from that universe’s most fantastical elements in their adaptation. It breaks the sense of grounded realism that recent versions of these shows are so overly fond of; it introduces extra complications to the story, like potential plot holes and new rules to explain; and most importantly, it’s just extremely expensive — even for shows with budgets as big as The Rings of Power. So it’s no surprise that Prime Video’s The Rings of Power seems equally reluctant to engage with the magic that fills the pages of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings universe. But by hiding Middle-earth’s magic, the show is doing a disservice to its own plot — and to one of fantasy fiction’s greatest worlds.

Tolkien never made much time for explaining the magic of Middle-earth. He would describe its mountains and rivers, its traditions, and its delicacies, but when it came to magic he just never seemed to find anything worth going on about. That didn’t come from an uneasiness about the place of magic in his world, but rather a sense of such profound comfort. Tolkien’s elves don’t explain the many magics of Rivendell to Frodo the same way we don’t detail indoor plumbing to our every house guest; magic is just another fact of life in Middle-earth, too familiar to even remark on most of the time, but always thoroughly present.

The Rings of Power, by contrast, feels terrified of the magic that inhabits its world. It doles magic out like secrets, showing it briefly but then rushing past, as if showing the trick for too long might ruin an illusion. Characters often react in shock or horror to any supernatural event, despite the fact that they should be more familiar with it than even characters in the original trilogy, but for the audience the show rarely makes it clear how we should feel about magic of any kind.

In no place is the show’s reluctance to let magic rest comfortably more detrimental than in the Rings of Power themselves, particularly the rings of the dwarves. In the little time we’ve spent with King Durin after he received his ring, its corruption of him seemed almost instant. The ring went from a helpful savior of Khazad-dûm to an object that Durin the younger recognized as pure evil in no time at all. There was no space for the magic of the ring to wash over the dwarves or King Durin, no time for the slow, seductive, unnatural power of evil to take root. Rather than the complicated morality that Tolkien’s original stories are imbued with, like the corrosion that accepting small evils can have on a civilization, or how weak rulers can be tempted by the promise of restored glory no matter the costs, Rings of Power’s morality is simplified into something like watching a child touch a stove: a misguided impulse with an immediate and obvious consequence.

And the rings aren’t the only magical thing in Rings of Power that’s getting short changed. Just about every mystical element of the show suffers from the same problem.

Tom Bombadil feels decidedly regular, and his very questionable tutoring of Gandalf (or “the Stranger”) in the ways of magic is relegated to an offhand mention. We saw a neat display of moth magic from the Easterlings, but we’ve never gone back there and don’t have much context at all for what to make of the person appearing out of thin air, or the evil bearded wizard who seemed in charge.

None of this is to say that the show needs to take time to explain every single one of these elements to us. But when the show breezes past its mystical elements, only calling attention to them when they’re relevant to the plot, it shrinks our understanding of the world. Background acts of magic, or little flashes of it here and there, could give the audience insight into how our characters live day to day in Middle-earth, but instead magic is kept mysterious for reasons that feel more dictated by the plot than by the world the story is actually set in. If we the audience barely understand magic in this world, and only rarely see it, then the show doesn’t have to do the legwork of proving to us why things like the Rings of Power could be evil, or why the people of Númenor recoil at the idea of using an elven-made palantír, even if there’s no canonical reason for their confusion. It’s a simple shortcut that leaves the entire world of the show so much poorer for its omission.

Magic is elemental to Tolkien’s Middle-earth. It moves and shapes the most important events in the series, but it also passes unnoticed in the everyday lives of almost all the characters in the story. What’s most important in all of this is that magic is present, it has its own space to live and breathe in the lore of The Lord of the Rings, all in service of us understanding what it means when Sauron uses his own corrupt and evil version. Instead, by relegating magic to a brief aside for the otherwise grounded drama of the show, The Rings of Power shrinks Tolkien’s world, making its heroes less heroic and its villains less evil, and making the whole story a little more dull.