Dreaming of Middle Earth

A Tale of Two Adaptations

Anyone old enough to remember the 90’s will know what I mean when I say we live in an era of good television. In the dark ages before The Sopranos and The Wire, dramas worth watching were few and far between: much as I’m a sucker for Patrick Stewart in Star Trek: The Next Generation—comfort food for nerds of a certain vintage—it’s hard to think of many shows from the last decade of the millennium that will stand the test of time.

Since its rebirth in the early 00’s, good TV has ballooned to juggernaut proportions. To satisfy its monstrous appetite for raw narrative, there’s nothing quite so handy as pre-packaged stories, otherwise known as books—you know, those unwieldy, papery things your parents kept around.

Maybe there’s a German word for the nervous mixture of longing and trepidation that arises when your favorite books are being adapted for the screen. Could the show runners possibly do the originals justice? It’s almost impossible to believe, and yet, if they did…! Suffice to say, for those of us whose tastes run to the imaginative, it’s been a season of heady anticipation.

If, like me, you’re as likely to be found in the fantasy/sci-fi aisle as the literature section (notwithstanding the righteous indignation of Ursula K Le Guin—surely due to be sainted one of these days— who fumed at the critical powers-that-be for consigning fantasy to the genre ghetto in the first place), then chances are Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman and the works of J.R.R. Tolkien are toward the top of your personal Greatest of All Time list.

So, yeah. Expectations.

I’ll take them in order of release date, starting with the Gaiman adaptation.

The Sandman, Gaiman’s groundbreaking graphic novel (otherwise known as a comic book), first appeared in 1988 from Vertigo, DC Comics dark, mature alter-ego. Over nine years and 75 issues, it took readers on a wildly original ride that was—by turns or all at once—funny, epic, gothic, bizarre, raunchy, tragic, and deeply moving. The series’ main characters are the god-like Endless siblings—Dream, Death, Destiny, Despair, Desire and another couple of D’s you can try and guess—but it was always, at heart, extremely human.

It’s hard to explain the magic of the The Sandman, the way Gaiman dug deep and struck inspiration over and over again. It gushed forth in a hundred different ways, an ever-shifting display of gratuitous virtuosity: now wise, now wistful; now trippy, now terrifying.

Gaiman’s done some other excellent work in comics, and written some very respectable fiction-fiction, but for me and plenty of other fans, nothing he’s done surpasses The Sandman. The stunning success of the graphic novel is thanks in part to how well it exploits the visual medium: with different artists brought in over the course of the series, Dream’s appearance (for instance) is ever-shifting, yet the character’s distinctive white-on-black dialogue bubbles always serve to identify him. Meanwhile his kingdom, the Dreaming, is free to morph and shift from panel to panel. Much as words are handy things, it’s largely in pictures that we dream, after all.

Given the visually-intensive nature of the novel, you might think it would be a natural fit for the screen. And you wouldn’t be wrong, as the series (with minor exceptions) thankfully proves. Yes, it works, praise be. They actually did it. In style, with bells on.

Sure, there are minor flaws, and let’s get those out of the way first. For one, the phantasmagoric, ever-shifting quality of the comic art doesn’t readily translate to the screen. (They’d need a slew of actors just to play Dream, which would only be confusing without the comics character’s distinctive dialogue bubble style to cue the reader.) Another visual effects issue: Merv Pumpkinhead looks painfully CGI. It’s almost enough to make one wonder why they didn’t go with a hand-drawn aesthetic and animated the whole series, which could make things that much closer to the original—but then, let’s not overlook the considerable accomplishments of the live action cast.

Overall, the series nails it, over and over. It nails it so much that the main weakness of the first season exactly mirrors the weakness of the first volume of the graphic novel (collected as Preludes & Nocturnes): neither print and nor screen version fully finds its feet until the episode entitled “The Sound of Her Wings”—more on which in a moment.

The opening story arc finds our guy, Dream of the Endless, being held captive in an English manor for decades by one Roderick Burgess, a kind of second-rate Aleister Crowley (much that is made about the 20th century, it is implied, is due to this unnatural binding of Dream). Upon the Sandman’s eventual escape, he goes to recover his tools (his helm, a pouch of dream-sand, a ruby). Again, the original material was still finding its feet here, finding its voice. Much heavier on gothic horror than what was to come, the opening is not nearly as human, or as humorous.

That changed in the sixth issue of the comic, and the sixth TV episode, “The Sound of her Wings.” This pivotal story stages an encounter between Dream and his warm, likable elder sister, Death. While Death goes about her business, helping car crash victims or the newly-drowned adjust to their post-mortem circumstances, a brooding Dream follows her. Along the way, they talk. Mostly, she talks, scolding her little brother for being self-absorbed, for forgetting that he exists to serve humanity and not the other way around. I missed it in the original comic, but watching the show it landed: we are witnessing the author coming to his senses through his avatar, Dream, remembering his commitments as a storyteller, vowing to dig deeper in his sacred role. It’s a beautiful moment of self-awareness, like a dreamer becoming aware he’s dreaming. It’s as if, in this one moment, all the latent potential of the book (and show) becomes activated. The story—on the page and, so far, on screen—never looks back.

Much of the dialogue is verbatim from the comic, as are the scene settings; individual shots often parallel their comic equivalents to a T. All of which speaks to Gaiman’s close involvement, and the respect the show’s team has for the source material. Comics are a visual medium, after all, so there’s a sense in which the show simply needed not to mess with a good thing.

The show occasionally even improves on the original: there’s an added plot line involving a demon who wants to evolve past being a nightmare, and a Dream who grows enough to grant her her wish. Throughout, too, there is more racial diversity, which is especially welcome in a story with such universal scope.

Along with “Wings,” a high point of this first season comes at the end, in the bonus 11th episode. Moving beyond the series’ second big narrative arc, which concludes with Episode 10, the eleventh episode offers a pair of self-contained stories originally told in the graphic novel’s third volume, Dream Country. The larger of these vignettes, “Calliope,” tells the story of a struggling author whose fortunes change when he’s offered the chance to hold captive the eponymous literary muse and extract, in a decidedly non-consensual manner, her gifts. Though what unfolds is in part a cautionary tale, and it would be foolish to impugn Gaiman’s honor, one can’t help but wonder where the author of all this magic sources his own inspiration. In dreams, perhaps.

~ ~ ~

Part of the reason The Sandman works so well as a show is that the team behind it wisely decided to stick closely to the source material. Not only that, the show also felicitously had direct access to the original author, no longer green himself [after the mixed result that was the American Gods series] when it comes to adaptations.

Unfortunately the new Tolkien-inspired series, Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, shares neither of these advantages. Even with access to the pipe-smoking, tweed-jacketed author himself, it’s hard to imagine what a living Tolkien would have the show-runners do with his sprawling epic, posthumously published as The Silmarillion, which often resembles a history more than it does a novel.

Whereas the action of The Lord of the Rings trilogy covers a span of a few decades, and is largely centered on the events of one momentous year, The Silmarillion outlines the creation of a world and its development through two Ages, each lasting millennia. Perhaps mercifully, Amazon’s show only licensed Tolkien’s Second Age for the series, which at least reduces the potential overwhelm by half, but even so, we’re talking thousands of years’ worth of material.

Obviously the sheer scope of the work is a challenge for adaptation. So is Tolkien’s narrative style. By necessity, The Silmarillion unfolds largely in exposition, in a lofty and archaic style:

“It is said by the Eldar that in water there lives yet the echo of the Music of the Ainur more than in any substance that is in this Earth; and many of the Children of Ilúvatar hearken still unsated to the voices of the Sea, and yet know not for what they listen.”

When dramatic scenes do arrive, they are as often as not sketched rather than rendered in detail—else the author’s legendary masses of notes would have filled several more Oxford houses. Meanwhile Tolkien’s characters, with names like Celebrimbor and Old Testament-esque lineages, tend to be larger-than-life figures burdened with terrible oaths who labor towards dreadful dooms long foretold. As for dialogue, it occurs throughout the book in an impossibly noble and lofty register (“And thou, Melkor, shalt see that no theme may be played that hath not its uttermost source in me, nor can any alter the music in my despite.”)

For readers who persevere and penetrate The Silmarillion’s craggy exterior, the work yields rich rewards. Chief among them, along with the consistently beautiful language, is an all-but-unparalleled depth. Though “world building” has by now become a commonplace, Tolkien’s creation is perhaps the most complete imaginative world we have, fleshed out not just with maps and multiple fully-wrought languages, but with an exhaustive (and occasionally exhausting) history and cosmology of its own. Every narrative event happens against this three-dimensional backdrop, echoing back and forth through time, and together with Tolkien’s beautiful diction and feel for the fateful and the tragic, this temporal resonance makes his epic, arguably, more epic than any other epic, ever. He’s created nothing less than a universe in the writings that became The Silmarillion. Who can blame him if it’s only occasionally that he grounds that universe in relatable characters and the specifics of their doings, as he does much more consistently in The Lord of the Rings.

Such, then, was the challenge facing the creators of the Rings of Power series: to adapt Tolkien’s massive, much-larger-than-human-scale history in a way that preserves its majestic grandeur and solemn beauty, while also making it relatable and human and, well, watchable. It was a tall order, akin to building a bridge connecting heaven and earth.

I won’t go into the minutiae of how exactly the show has approached its source material. Broadly, it employs a mixture of elision, omission, compression and a surprising (and often questionable) degree of whole-cloth invention: not just new characters and new storylines for familiar ones, but entire cultures and classes of beings (such as the hobbit-prefiguring Harfoots, who don’t come into The Silmarillion at all). For all these reasons it is a far less faithful adaptation than either The Sandman or, to take a closer-in-kind example, The Lord of the Rings films. To be fair, though, a faithful adaptation would have watched something like a Ken Burns documentary: not exactly chart-topping potential there. The question is, does this adaptation stay true to the spirit of the original?

Alas, this is where the series falls flat. For all the hype and budget, Amazon’s release lands, along with shows like Shadow and Bone and The Wheel of Time, as just another big-budget fantasy spectacle. The magic? Lost in adaptation. The pomp, the bad guys, the elf lofrds with unwieldly names are here. What’s missing: the indefinable something—some elusive scent of wisdom, grandeur, beauty—that makes us care.

The comparison with The Wheel of Time, also based on a series of novels (by Robert Jordan), is a good litmus test: judging by the screen adaptations alone, you’d never guess that one show is based on a magisterial and wildly original (if idiosyncratic) literary work, the other on a heavily derivative one (the reading of Jordan’s dozen-plus volumes was described by a friend as “fantasy penance”). The Rings of Power flattens the character out of Tolkien’s vision and puts it on a level with every other piece of made-for-consumption fantasy: more starry-eyed than a Game of Thrones, perhaps, but lacking the wisdom and (it’s impossible to avoid repeating this word) majesty of Tolkien’s writing.

The Rings of Power’s most emblematic failing, in my opinion, is its failure to use of any of Tolkien’s language. High and aloof the master’s diction might seem in today’s media world, but language is at the heart of Tolkien’s creation. Discarding it, the essence is lost, no matter how beautiful the jewels or how pointy the ears.

Who knows, Amazon’s watered-down moneymaker may yet improve beyond fair-to-middling over its projected five season run. But it’s probably too late to hope it will do any sort of justice to its source material, and just as well that the TV release comes a good 18 months after J.R.R. Tolkien’s son and hard-working literary executor, Christopher Tolkien, is safely underground (the compiler and editor of The Silmarillion passed in January 2020).

As for me, the most this dusty book-lover hopes is that the show will send a few curious folks back to the source, to Tolkien’s strange and singular history of a most richly imagined world. There the real magic awaits.