By Jennifer Asencio
| Published 17 seconds ago

As more material based in the world in which The Lord of the Rings takes place gets made, more entertainment pundits and fans are referring to Middle-earth and everything in it as a “franchise.” This is a travesty of entertainment that was even decried by Christopher Tolkien, son of the story’s creator, JRR. Middle-earth has been the inspiration for almost all modern fantasy, most notably the tabletop role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons, but calling The Lord of the Rings and its associated worldbuilding a franchise is a cynical attempt to pardon weak and uncreative attempts to add to it by modern filmmakers.

Tolkien’s son famously did not enjoy the original Peter Jackson trilogy’s telling of the quest to destroy the One Ring. In a 2012 interview with the French newspaper Le Monde, Christopher decried the films for a variety of reasons, including the commercialization of The Lord of the Rings for pop culture, which he felt betrayed the essence of his father’s work. “The chasm between the beauty and seriousness of the work, and what it has become, have overwhelmed me.”

How The Hobbit Stretched Tolkien

The younger Tolkien said this just in time for the release of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, the first of the Lord of the Rings films to contain source material Tolkien didn’t write. Young Tolkien’s statements were about the original trilogy, which he felt overshadowed the books and thus subsumed them as the authoritative version of the story, but The Hobbit trilogy only made that worse. It expanded a single book into three movies that were as long as their predecessors, each covering one book apiece.

To stretch the single book The Hobbit into a trilogy, writers like Phillipa Boyens added plots that JRR Tolkien never intended. This included the infamous love triangle between Legolas, Kili, and Tauriel, the latter played by Evangeline Lilly, who only joined the cast on the condition she would not be inserted into a gratuitous love triangle. That she finished filming the trilogy despite this blatant betrayal is either a remarkable sign of Lilly’s patience or of the power of her movie contract.

Rings Of Power Took A Bad Idea And Ran With It

Rings of Power took the technique of adding extraneous and original characters and subplots into the established lore and ran with it faster than Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli ran to Rohan. The most blatant of these new additions is the constant attempts to give Galadriel a love interest despite lore linking her to Celeborn in a marriage lasting thousands of years and no established history of her being with anyone else. They even matched her in the second season of the show with a character who turned out to be Sauron.

Many of the new characters are also gratuitous, including an Orc protagonist, despite canon that is clear that Orcs are corrupted former elves (this is an oversimplified explanation about which Tolkien wrote entire books). Races that don’t have the variety of humans are given that variety anyway, especially if the character it is given to is in a position to lead or be a hero. These characters wouldn’t be an issue except that they were not the world Tolkien wrote; they are imposed upon Tolkien’s world by the lack of respect for his source material.

Tolkien Under Fire From Activists

Tolkien’s source material has been attacked by commentators before, including the 50^th anniversary edition of the game Dungeons & Dragons. In that book, the publishers at Wizards of the Coast denounced the creators of the game for misogyny, racism, and themes of colonialism and slavery.

Lord of the Rings had so much inspiration on Dungeons & Dragons that the game had to replace hobbits with Halflings to avoid a lawsuit for copyright infringement (and even then, the names of the different Halfling races are very similar to those of The Shire). This close adherence by D&D to Tolkien’s vision opened the author and his works to the same accusations, especially since the minions of Sauron include men who seem to be based on North African and Indian soldiers.

The Importance Of Skin Color In Middle-earth

These accusations are therefore “answered” by subverting all the racial elements of the show, both those that are real-world and those that are fantasy. Protagonist Orcs are not something Tolkien would have designed, especially in a prequel to the main series that takes place so long before it, when Orcs were new.

All Elves were fair, because those who were “dark” never saw the Light of the Two Trees of Valinor; this is in Tolkien’s Middle-earth history, The Silmarillion. With the wide variety of human skin tone variants present among Men, Dwarves, and Harfoots (the predecessors to hobbits), inserting real-world identity politics on the Orcs and Elves is more of a rebellion against Tolkien and his perceived transgressions than it is “inclusive.”

Upcoming Middle-earth Transgressions

Two new Lord of the Rings projects are expected in the next year or two: The Hunt for Gollum and Shadows of the Past. The Hunt for Gollum is about the period between The Hobbit and The Fellowship of the Ring, as Aragorn tracks the doomed hobbit-creature in the search for the One Ring before anyone knows Bilbo has it. The problem with this script, directed by original Gollum actor Andy Serkis, is that Philippa Boyens and her co-writers are essentially making it up. This particular period in Middle-earth’s history isn’t detailed in any of the books; it’s only alluded to through secondhand information from Gandalf when he visits The Shire for the One Ring.

Shadows of the Past, written by Boyens, Stephen Colbert, and his son, Peter McKee, at least relies on source material to tell its story. There were a few chapters of The Fellowship of the Ring that were left out of the movie, particularly the adventures in the Barrow Downs and the party’s encounter with Bugs Bunny cartoon Tom Bombadil. However, unable to resist adding yet more of their own garnishes to Tolkien’s work, the trio have reportedly framed this story around Sam’s daughter, well after the trilogy takes place, who will be solving a mystery from the past.

How Calling Lord Of The Rings A Franchise Allows Hollywood To Ruin It

Calling Lord of the Rings a franchise is the backhanded technique that these writers think allows them to alter and add to Tolkien’s work. If a collection of stories is a franchise, it gives other creators permission to have their say about it, especially in film.

Most people haven’t read much more than The Hobbit or the trilogy, if they even got through all of that. The Silmarillion is a famously tough read, and Tolkien’s many other histories of his fantasy world are more like notes than prose. So most people wouldn’t recognize that these works have been altered, since, as Christopher observed, most people take the films as the definitive canon. In this way, The Lord of the Rings has been appropriated from its creator.

The fact is, until Peter Jackson got hold of it, The Lord of the Rings was the sole work of Tolkien. To write it, he leaned on his research of Icelandic sagas and Anglo-Saxon poetry, like Beowulf and Arthurian legend.

Tolkien wrote his novels and his histories of Middle-earth in the style of these sagas, complete with their triumphs, tragedies, wars, and romances. Tolkien modernized the concept of the saga, but he did so without turning the storytelling style into a franchise by creating his own original work.

Hollywood Is Rationalizing Theft

Those insisting that Lord of the Rings is a franchise are thus rationalizing the theft of Tolkien’s world from its author. The worst part is that this theft isn’t because of anything the author did wrong except not be a writer in the 2020s.

The changes that Boyens and her compatriots have made to the series are all there to apply presentism to the saga by adapting the content to their own tastes rather than presenting Tolkien’s work as it stands. There are too many themes of the series they deem “offensive” for them to present the source material accurately, so what we have gotten since the original, Oscar-winning trilogy are several Tolkien fanfictions with Mary Sue self-insertions.

Controlling Lord Of The Rings Corrupts Everyone Who Uses It

Control of the Lord of the Rings saga is just like the One Ring, and as happens to everyone who touches the One Ring (except maybe Sam Gamgee), it has corrupted those in power with their own egos. They think they can do better than Tolkien, but they can’t, so they pardon this with the cynical label of “franchise.”

The slop eaters let them get away with it because slop eaters will eat anything the producers tell them to, even when it attacks and subverts a thoroughly established canon. It’s up to the rest of us to remind Hollywood that Middle-earth is not a franchise, lest it continue to grow into the commercial nightmare JRR’s son feared.