Middle-Earth, Missed Opportunities, and Multi-Million Dollar Fan Fiction

[This transcript has been edited for clarity]

Jacob:
Hey, Jeff, welcome to another episode of Human Friend Digital Podcast.

Jeff:
Hey Jacob. Today we are discussing your great knowledge of Lord of the Rings, because you’re a Lord of the Rings nerd.

Jacob:
Yes. And we were trying to think of a friend episode topic for this one. But also—we’ll get to a point, Jeff. I’m going to stick a little bit on you because you have read A Song of Ice and Fire.

Jeff:
I have. Yes.

Jacob:
So we do have two fantasy worlds between us worth of knowledge. But you actually have read Lord of the Rings, but you haven’t—

Jeff:
I’ve read Lord of the Rings two times, I think, through the three books. I’ve read Lord of the Rings but I’ve never read The Silmarillion. But I’ve read A Song of Ice and Fire six times. I mean, it’s not finished—George R. R. Martin, you need to finish it if you’re listening, please, before you die.

Jacob:
I’m sure he’ll listen to this pod.

Jeff:
Yeah, if he listens to us. But yeah, I’ve read it six times, so I’m pretty familiar with the world of A Song of Ice and Fire. And so in addition to all of the A Song of Ice and Fire books, I’ve also read the Fire and Blood book two times. Although it’s only part one, so we’ll see. He never finishes anything, I guess.

My first question for you as a Lord of the Rings resident expert is about The Rings of Power, which is an Amazon series that is said to be the most expensive series of television ever made by any company. But it is considered a failure among Lord of the Rings enthusiasts.

Jacob:
Yes. And I’m one of them.

Jeff:
Yeah, I know. And I’ve read that the larger internet community seems to think that it’s a failure. Why is that? What happened—considering they were given all of this structure, all of this world building—why is it a failure?

Jacob:
Because they spent more money on the budget than getting more money on the rights. You’ve mentioned this before when we were talking, and this is true. They made the script and a lot of the show-running stuff—the stuff to make the show happen—from the appendices because they own some of the rights to that, but they didn’t own the rights to The Silmarillion.

But essentially the whole story is taking place in the stories of The Silmarillion, so they’re taking footnotes and trying to make a show rather than taking a well-developed—

Jeff:
You’re talking about the appendices from the Lord of the Rings novels themselves?

Jacob:
Yes. But The Silmarillion is the expanded version. So this is what makes The Rings of Power bad: they’ve taken a sprinkling of The Lord of the Rings and then made a weird show underneath it. And they’ve taken all the main characters that appear in Lord of the Rings and gave them pretty miserable, mostly inaccurate backstories and character development that is not in alignment with how they end up or where they were.

And also the timelines—I knew with a TV show you’re going to have to condense timelines—but The Silmarillion is difficult and usually foreign for most people because the protagonists in most of the stories are immortal people.

Jeff:
Right. And they live for thousands of years, so you’re not gonna get combinations of them running into each other—

Jacob:
Right.

Jeff:
Or like, with the mortal characters and the immortal characters—you’re not going to get combinations of them in the same storyline because they’re not alive at the same time.

Jacob:
Yeah, they’ll die off. And there are really good stories of early men in The Silmarillion. And that’s where we get Beren and Lúthien—the little, ancient equivalent of Aragorn and Arwen that happens in Lord of the Rings. There was an ancient story that went with—

Jeff:
Right. A mortal and an elf that get married and have children, I guess.

Jacob:
Essentially, that’s the short of it.

Jeff:
And that’s why it led up to—well, Sauron’s leader—what was his name? Morgoth?

Jacob:
Melkor. His original name was Melkor, and then he became Morgoth.

Jeff:
He became evil. Because he didn’t start out evil, right?

Jacob:
No, he always started out as a bit of a contrarian. Maybe that’s the best word to say it. He is—

Jeff:
Well, that’s not evil—I’m a contrarian. So…

Jacob:
I think you could easily become Morgoth. Sorry. But that’s the reason that the story is bad—because they have all these characters and all these things that I’m talking about, but they really don’t give them enough life. And they condense all these plotlines. Like, it takes Sauron, who’s an immortal character pretending to be Annatar—

Jeff:
Right.

Jacob:
The gift-giver, the Lord of Gifts. It takes him like 500 years to make all the rings with them. He’s taking his time because he’s got time. He knows he’s immortal—

Jeff:
And yeah, he’s working also with elves who also have time. But yeah, if you looked at the show, you’d think this happened in like a year or something.

Jacob:
Yeah. Which really takes away from the character of it. And also, we don’t have a good human plot in the story. So much of the most compelling tales in The Silmarillion are when the short lifespans of a human have a really good story of interacting with the elves in the world. You get kind of sucked into it—like the Beren and Lúthien story. You get a story of Beren falling in love with Lúthien. 

But they made up like a bunch of stuff. Like, Gandalf doesn’t show up until the Third Age—a thousand years into the Third Age. And another thing that’s really important in the Second Age and the First Age is the Valar, the Ainur, the gods at play. And a lot of the shaping of the world is watching them mess up. That’s part of the tragedy—that the gods wanted to create a beautiful paradise for the elves and men on Middle-earth, the children of Ilúvatar, as they’re called. And then they fail because of Melkor. And then they fail because of Morgoth. And then they fail because of Sauron. A lot of times, they’re watching their creation get tarnished and ruined, over many, many thousands of years of trials, and they keep trying to have a lighter and lighter hand.

Gandalf and the Istari, the wizards, don’t show up until way into the Second Age, when Sauron is starting to come—

Jeff:

Third Age.

Jacob:

In the Third Age. Thank you for the correction. About a thousand years in, and they come disguised as old men and are heavily weakened. Like, they are on the same spirit level as Sauron, but they are meant to have to be fed. They have to eat. They—

Jeff:

They’re mortals, but they’re also like the—what are they called—the demigods? What are they called?

Jacob:

Yeah, the Maiar.

Jeff:

The Maiar. Yeah, they’re Maiar. But they’re mortal at the same time, which is why Gandalf can die and then be reborn—because he’s immortal.

Jacob:

He has an immortal spirit, but his body has been made mortal… and that was the gods trying to be like, “Okay, in the First Age, we played too much of a heavy hand.” And so much of a heavy hand at the end of the First Age that they changed the map, you know. They take out a whole section of it.

Jeff:

All about, like, correction. Like they’re trying to fix their mistakes over and over and over again. With each age. It’s like, “we messed up last time for these reasons, so let’s fix them. Oh, wait. Now we have more reasons to fix things, so we’ll fix them as well”.

Jacob:

Yeah. And so we’re missing this… 

Jeff:

It sounds very engineer-y.

Jacob:

Well, it is. It is. I mean, that’s the whole thing. Melkor. And that was Melkor’s vision of it. He—so in the beginning, when the gods were creating the earth with Ilúvatar, the main god, Melkor was singing in dissonance, and he was the contrarian in the group. And he is then responsible for creating ice, he’s responsible for creating fire and the volcanoes and the destructive forces. But then there’s beauty that comes from the destructive forces. Like, with ice and fire, we now can make the air and the wind move, and we get the realms of this god and this… And so it creates this backdrop. 

But you’re right—the whole Silmarillion is a long-scale dialogue with the gods figuring out how bad they are at crafting the world and then relying on the elves, really… 

Jeff:

To fix their mistakes?

Jacob:

And the elves eventually—I think the elves basically correct all of the errors of the gods by also making errors of their own. And that’s kind of—I think that was maybe the vision of the first children and the second children, which would be the elves and the men. Dwarves were created by another god. And then Ilúvatar was like, “This is cute,” and he let the dwarves—they’ll be made.

Jeff:

Oh, there’s, there’s a little—

Jacob:

Well, that’s all right. But no, really, that’s kind of how it is. Like Aulë, the smith god—kind of the equivalent of the Greek Hephaestus—he made the dwarves. And his wife, Nienna—I think that was how you say her name— She’s the one that created, that was in charge of creating the Ents and some other beautiful, magical creatures and stuff like that that they interact with on Middle-earth. But anyway, they all play in this role.

But the two ones that were envisioned by the main god, the God of Gods—Eru Ilúvatar—were the elves and the men. And it seems like, by the end of the story of the Third Age, the elves have set the world right. And when Aragorn takes over, it’s finally like… 

Jeff:

“Oh. Everything’s settled.”

Jacob:

We did it. We’ve taken away the dark power. And it’s really the world for men to create now. And there’s no undue dark influence of creation still at play.

Anyways, but like the Rings of Power show—to get back to the main point—really fails to capture that essence of the Second Age being outplayed. And it fails to capture, like you said, like we were talking about a lot, how slow everything was. This was not—this was like a simmer. The Second Age was a simmer, not a boil. The Lord of the Rings, that book—that’s coming to a boil.

Jeff:
Right. It’s at the end of the whole arc.

Jacob:
Yeah, of a whole 10,000, 11,000 year arc being played out. So, I mean, there are some parts of the Second Age that are very dramatic, but they, again, are like little vignettes separated by hundreds, if not thousands, of years.

Jeff:
Sure. Okay.

So, what about the Hobbit movies? Because I know you like the book, but the movie was expanded and split into three parts, which I personally think is excessive.

Jacob:
It was. I think 50 percent of those movies, combined, was great.

Jeff: 

Okay, so out of three movies, one and a half movies was good. So that’s maybe three hours worth of quality content.

Jacob: 

Maybe they could have made—turned it into two movies. It’s still fun. It’s still a fun movie to watch.

Jeff: 

Yeah, to put it—it’s still kosher, right? It’s still valid to the universe, right? As opposed to The Rings of Power, which, like, goes way off course.

Jacob: 

No, I feel like The Rings of Power is high on its own supply, and The Hobbit was—I think Peter Jackson just took a lot of liberties with crafting a new narrative. It’s more straight and narrow than The Rings of Power. I would say The Lord of the Rings is an extremely well-done faithful adaptation of the books, where—

Jeff: 

I agree 100%.

Jacob: 

Really, they did take liberties with certain scenes, but there were nothing that took away from the books—only just made it more—

Jeff: 

It was one of the best adaptations of any book I’ve ever seen in my whole life.

Jacob: 

He did a really good job. I think with The Hobbit, he wanted another trilogy, but he didn’t have a trilogy’s worth of content.

Jeff: 

Alright. Let’s move on a little bit. I want to ask you two fun questions real quick. So if you were to go on a quest, like Frodo, which member of the Fellowship would you want to go with? Like, Sam went with Frodo. Who would you go with?

Jacob: 

Oh, out of anyone in the Fellowship?

Jeff: 

Yeah, out of the Fellowship. No, just the Fellowship.

Jacob: 

So, okay, out of the Fellowship, I do think it is really hard to not take Gandalf.

Jeff: 

Okay, sure.

Jacob: 

He is extremely useful.

Jeff: 

Yeah, Gandalf’s amazing.

Jacob: 

So, that would be the other one. And then I would probably do—I would probably do Strider, Aragorn. Pre-book three. I feel like when he’s becoming the king it’s not what’s fun anymore, he’s got a duty to uphold—

Jeff: 

Right, he’s not there to help you. He’s there to help Gondor.

Jacob: 

Yeah, he’s there to save the world. But I mean, I think when you meet him in the Prancing Pony, he’s such a great character. I mean, I always envisioned him as a kid—or not really as a young kid—but after I started—I think I read it in high school, and I immediately was thinking, I would love it if it was Clint Eastwood—a Clint Eastwood kind of character, you know, in my mind, playing that. Just like, yeah, let’s get on the horse and ride.

Jeff: 

Let’s go, cowboy!

Jacob: 

That’s John Wayne.

Jeff: 

Oh. Well, you know—

Jacob: 

Clint Eastwood’s a little more subtle and a little more—

Jeff: 

They’re the same thing.

Jacob: 

No.

Jeff: 

They are to me.

Jacob: 

You’re gonna mess up—you’re gonna piss off our Western fans.

Jeff: 

As if we had any. Okay. And then I have one more fun question for you. Most underrated character?

Jacob:

 Of the whole books?

Jeff: 

Of the whole books, of the whole series.

Jacob: 

It’s hard for me to pick an underrated character. I would say in the cinema versions of the movies, I would say the dwarves. Dwarves, in general, are turned into more of a comic relief. Gimli being that—I think he gets a little bit just turned into a huffin’ puffin’ prop. He is a little bit like that in the book, but not so much. He’s a little bit more of an equal keel to Legolas, with mastery of his axe and mastery of his knowledge. And he has these great scenes where he goes back into the glittering caves of Helm’s Deep, and he goes back after the whole thing’s over, and he reworks those caves for the people of Rohan.

Jeff: 

I have no memory of that.

Jacob: 

It’s all in the last couple chapters of the book, where he brings dwarves down from Erebor—because he’s from the Lonely Mountain. So he’s from the Lonely Mountain, and then they come down, and they, like—you remember that big thing that busts through the door at Gondor? The big wolf? The battering ram in the third movie? Gimli comes down at the end of that with the dwarves of Erebor and makes a mithril gate for Gondor. Like, he’s got a whole level of craft and knowledge, and they’re going through the Mines of Moria and he’s like—he’s working with Gandalf through much of the Mines of Moria, trying to guide them through that and understand the way of the dwarves and how this is all going to structure. Like, he’s not just a prop so much.

Jeff: 

Right.

Jacob: 

So I would say—

Jeff: 

You think that in the movie, he’s just there as a prop, but in the books, he’s actually more substantive.

Jacob: 

Yes. I would say that in the books, he is just as pivotal and has as much depth as maybe Legolas. So maybe not a huge crazy character with lots of things, but he really has an even place in the group. Like, Legolas might have his magical little farsighted abilities and he can shoot ringwraiths in the dark flying overhead. I think Gimli has a lot of those moments too. So I would say that.

And then I think most people made the most fun of was Sam: “boil them, mash them, stick them in a stew.” And in the book, it’s like this too—Sam is underrated a little bit amongst the Fellowship, and even to himself. But in The Two Towers and in The Return of the King, when they’re up there in Cirith Ungol, and they’re getting killed by Shelob—

Jeff: 

Could you describe what Cirith Ungol is?

Jacob: 

So there’s two towers along the path to go through the middle gate—or I would say the middle pass—where Shelob’s lair is.

Jeff: 

The side door.

Jacob: 

But that whole chapter there goes from Sam being—and even in the scenes with Faramir—there’s a massive transformation of him as a character where, without Sam, everyone would have died. He literally goes from being an underrated character—he’s even saying, “I don’t know why I came on this journey, Mr. Frodo should probably leave me behind,” at some points in this thing—to becoming a complete hero in his own right. He fights off Shelob with the Phial of Galadriel and Sting. He then sneaks his way into Cirith Ungol under these magical things, fights off some orcs—most of the orcs have killed each other at that point—but then gets Frodo out of there. They get disguised in orc clothing. They do all of this stuff with Cirith Ungol and Shelob and all this stuff, and then make their way through all this horrible land of Mordor to get all the way up there. 

He really is the leader at that point, from pretty much Shelob’s lair to Mount Doom, it’s Sam’s show and he comes through. So I would say that—he does get made fun of the most. He’s a big pudgy man.

Jeff: 

I don’t know. I think Pippin gets made fun of the most, but—

Jacob: 

Yeah, Pippin has some good stories too. But that’s kind of the thing with the Hobbits that I think are such a good—why The Lord of the Rings is really the best story of Middle-earth is because the main characters are the weakest characters of the land. I think that’s the point of the whole book—that it’s about friendship, companionship, and doing the right thing is more important than having the best swords, the most power, all this stuff. I think that’s what makes the books work.

And this is another thing that I feel like The Rings of Power doesn’t do a good enough job with. Like, they have the Harfoots, but if they were going to stick true to Tolkien, the elves, the men—these are the powerful people of the world—should be the backdrop. Not the main characters. The weakest characters should be the main characters.

Jeff: 

In order to keep true with what you think the themes of The Lord of the Rings actually are.

Jacob: 

Yes. And some of the best stories in The Silmarillion, like Beren and Lúthien—Beren is a man who is on a group of—he’s got kind of like—there’s like some tribal groups of men that are trying to fight with Morgoth and the elves at this point, but his whole family gets killed. And they’re like outlaws, essentially,.and they’re like outlaws essentially in the—

Jeff: 

Sort of like underdog story.

Jacob: 

Absolute underdog. And this guy goes against Sauron. This guy goes against Morgoth. This guy goes against this giant demon dog and gets his hand bitten off. This guy has a terrible time—just very Greek tragic-like, over and over again. And he’s honestly the weakest character. But it’s his character, it’s his—the quality of his love, the quality of his perseverance that overcomes every chapter of the story with the love of Lúthien. I can’t say—she saves his ass quite a lot in the story.

Jeff: 

Yeah, well that’s like Gandalf or like the elves with the hobbits—would never have survived if they didn’t have all the other guys there to help them out.

Jacob: 

Absolutely. And that’s like the biggest theme. So when you watch—not to pick on The Rings of Power again—but that’s like an obvious thread. If you’re going to try to rewrite this story, Galadriel should not be a main character. Elrond should not be a—

Jeff: 

Okay, so, okay—so I haven’t read The Silmarillion. I do think Galadriel should be a main character, but I think that the end of the first season should have led her to be consumed by Sauron. Then the second season would be like her finding her way back to the good side. Like, that would be good storytelling.

Jacob: 

That would be good storytelling, but it would be—

Jeff: 

Not accurate to The Lord of the Rings, but that would be good storytelling.

Jacob: 

You should just write a different story at that point.

Jeff: 

I’ll do some fan fiction.

Jacob: 

You know what I mean? Like that’s just not—

Jeff: 

Yeah.

Jacob: 

Not real in The Lord of the Rings. It’s just not her character.

Jeff: 

And then, just finally—A Song of Ice and Fire vs Lord of the Rings—which do you think is better fantasy?

Jacob: 

Well, as a The Lord of the Rings person, it depends on what you’re going for in fantasy. If you want—and I think this was the intention of Tolkien too—if you want a saga that feels like Norse, Greek, Western mythology… If you want a fantasy world where you feel like you could set up a business in your mind and you can figure out the politics, the finances, the tax system, the interplay between continents, the wars, everything like that—if you want a really like, “I can actually live here” fantasy book—

Jeff: 

Sociopolitical, geopolitical.

Jacob: 

A Song of Ice and Fire, hands down.

Jeff: 

Yeah, it’s my favorite for those reasons.

Jacob: 

Yeah, and that’s like if you want that level of nerdiness. And this is—I think this is a famous quote of J. R. R. Martin—

Jeff: 

George R. R. Martin

.

Jacob: 

George R. R. Martin. Sorry. J. R. R. Tolkien. George R. R.—two R’s. About—he’s making a critique of Lord of the Rings. He’s like, “But what is the tax system of Gondor?” And like, it’s true. I mean, if you look—

Jeff: 

How does it support its kingdom?

Jacob: 

Yeah. Like, yeah, it’s very vague on all these details because it’s not the important part of the story—

Jeff: 

Yes. It’s myth. So yeah, exactly. I think Lord of the Rings is more mythological—A Song of Ice and Fire is more—

Jacob: 

Real world-building.

Jeff:

Yeah, it’s realistic but fantasy, you know what I mean?

Jacob: 

Yeah. And I think that’s one of the big differences between the two. So I think they can each stand on their own. But I feel like Lord of the Rings—

Jeff: 

I love them both, but—

Jacob: 

Lord of the Rings is a better cinematic universe, in my opinion. But I—

Jeff:

Did you watch Game of Thrones?

Jacob:

I’ve watched all of Game of Thrones and I thought it was great. But I feel like I like the mythology world. I think it’s more fun. I don’t really care about the tax system. I don’t care about— I don’t care about how the Bank of—

Jeff: 

Iron Bank.

Jacob: 

—the Iron Bank funds the wars and all that stuff. I don’t care. I don’t care how Gondor finances its army, you know, but—

Jeff: 

If they have an Iron Bank of Númenor or whatever.

Jacob: 

Like, where do they—you know, and Númenor—how does their trade system work? Where do they get their money?

Jeff: 

As someone who is a Song of Ice and Fire nerd, and why I hated—oh my god—basically Season 4, 5—I liked 6—and then hated 7 and 8. Like, I get it—

Jacob: 

Yeah, once you get pretty into it, you’re like, you’re missing the thread.

Jeff: 

The first few seasons of Game of Thrones were really good. Like, they were—well, the first season, I swear to God, is word for word the same thing as the book. And then second and third season are close enough. Like, I get the deviations. I’ll forgive them. But then once—past Season 4—it’s like, where are you even going? And then once it goes beyond the books—because they’ve only written five books, or he has only written five books—it’s just like, I know that George R. R. Martin told the showrunners the principal plot points, but it’s like, how they connected them, it’s just like, what are you—what—you guys aren’t good storytellers. You’re bad at your job. As soon as you ran out of source material, this show sucked.

Jacob: 

Yeah. I feel like they were—it felt like one of those things that—it was like, well, this is the last season. We’re going to get it all in.

Jeff: 

Yeah, exactly. No—

Jacob:

It felt like I was going through it—I was watching a checklist version of a TV show.

Jeff: 

Well, okay, so let’s make sure we do this, this, this, this, this, and we don’t care whether or not it makes sense to the audience.

Jacob: 

We’re just going to get it all done.

Jeff: 

We’re going to get it all done.

Jacob: 

And then here we go. And we’re done. And that’s a wrap. And that’s how it felt like at the end of that show. It was really fun. I mean, this is why I think I would like The Rings of Power if I didn’t read the books, because I think objectively it’s probably a fun show.

Jeff: 

Like The Silmarillion.

Jacob: 

Yeah, if I didn’t read The Silmarillion, or I didn’t even read The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit or any of it—if I just took them on face value, maybe this is the thing I would end with. I could see objectively, on face value, that they’re fun. You know, maybe they’re not going to win Academy Awards outside of—

Jeff: 

First of all, shows don’t win Academy Awards, they win Emmys

.

Jacob: 

Sorry, outside—sorry—outside of their set and production and CGI. I think they can win Emmys for all of those things. But the actual cast and the acting and all that stuff is just—

Jeff: 

Yeah, it is kind of like—it’s middling, and it’s like, you spent a billion dollars making the show—

Jacob: 

Visually, I can see where some of that money went, but I wish they spent about another million dollars on source material. Maybe a couple. Maybe—

Jeff:

Spend a billion dollars to get the rights to The Silmarillion.

Jacob: 

Yeah.

Jeff: 

Then spend another billion dollars on your show and I might like it.

Jacob: 

Okay, you don’t have to put this in, but can I give you my show pitch that I wish Amazon would do? I wish they would—

Jeff: 

Oh, the first season—hold on—first season was 750 million dollars. Including 250 to acquire the rights, and then 465 for production.

Jacob: 

I wish they spent more on the rights and did more. God—I look like—well here’s the thing, if I was Amazon—if they had a true fan do it—these should be called… I would have loved it if Amazon did Tales of Middle-earth. You could probably come up with a better—

Jeff: 

Or—

Jacob: 

Like, really tight-in, zoomed-in, great vignettes.

Jeff: 

Little—yes, yes, yes, yes.

Jacob: 

What’s that show about the detectives that changes the cast every season on HBO? True Detective? Have you seen that?

Jeff: 

Oh yeah, True Detective.

Jacob: 

I love how True Detective doesn’t have the same cast, doesn’t have a recurring plot, but has a great theme.

Jeff: 

It’s sort of like—and also like American Horror Story.

Jacob: 

Yes. That is what The Silmarillion—if you’re going to take that—

Jeff: 

Could have been.

Jacob: 

—what it should have been. It should have been tight, great stories, vignettes into unique stories and people. And then there could have been a specific Galadriel arc. What would have been really fun if you did a Galadriel tale would have been—you can have her birth in Valinor, you can have the fall of Fëanor and her going over with Fëanor and those elves to try to take over Middle-earth from Morgoth and get the same world you could have had. And she’s—one thing that’s great about her character is that she is in the room for really pivotal moments and stories over and over again.

Jeff: 

So then you could tell—

Jacob:

 —she’s not the main protagonist in any of them, but you could use her as an entryway into the world because she’s in Valinor. She’s with Doriath, and she comes up with Lúthien and Beren, who I mentioned before, and many other characters. And she marries Celeborn, she’s in the places with Gil-galad, she’s with Celebrimbor, she gets a ring of power, she makes Lothlórien, she fights off Dol Guldur and Sauron’s forces in the Lord of the Rings battles—even though Gondor’s fighting in that big Battle of Pelennor Fields. Shortly after that, she’s waging her own war and clearing out Dol Guldur. And she’s going up there and clearing out Mirkwood with—

Jeff: 

Yeah. Which Mirkwood used to be called?

Jacob: 

Greenwood.

Jeff: 

Greenwood.

Jacob: 

Greenwood the Great. Anyways, but like—there we go. That would have been one—

Jeff: 

That would have been great. It could have been like six episodes per season, right? And then each one is just a tight story. You know what? I just have to say—I love short-form TV.

Jacob: 

Me too. Miniseries.

Jeff: 

Six to eight episodes. That’s it. And then that’s the whole story. I don’t want multi-seasons.

Jacob: 

Yeah, I agree with you. And there’s enough material in The Silmarillion to do that perfectly, but not enough to—

Jeff: 

Like five times.

Jacob: 

Yeah, I mean, you could have done one with Galadriel, you could do one about Beren and Lúthien, you could do one about The Children of Húrin, which is a very—I mean, if you wanted a dark, sad tale to watch—

Jeff: 

Jacob, are we in the wrong industry?

Jacob: 

That’s just super tragedy. Maybe we—

Jeff: 

Should we be showrunners?

Jacob: 

We should be showrunners. But I mean, all of that stuff is there too. Like, there are little books that were written by Christopher Tolkien collecting—

Jeff: 

Mm-hmm.

Jacob: 

—J.R.R. Tolkien’s works and creating these little vignettes like The Fall of Gondolin. It’s all there. The fact that they decided to try to do it all at once—

Jeff: 

And based off of the appendices—the appendices!

Jacob: 

It’s just like, oh my God. You have all this money, you have all this—

Jeff: 

Why would you spend all that money on appendices? That’s the worst thing you could have done. That’s the worst source material you could have had. And then you’re assuming that your writers are going to fill the gaps. Absolutely not, because they’re not good.

Jacob: 

Well, yeah. That also—you’re trying to work in someone else’s playground and write a whole story. You’re right. They wrote a fan fiction. A multimillion dollar fan fiction.

Jeff: 

That’s exactly what they did.

Jacob: 

That’s—

Jeff: 

Exactly what they did.

Jacob: 

And it’s just—

Jeff: 

I’ll do it too, and get multi-millions of dollars.

Jacob: 

I know, but it’s like, that’s not—I think—I do have one theory, and maybe we should look this up after, but The Silmarillion was published posthumously after J.R.R. Tolkien’s death. And many of the vignettes that we talked about—The Fall of Gondolin, Beren and Lúthien, The Book of Lost Tales—they were all edited and written partially by Christopher Tolkien. And that might be where a lot of the copyright issues are coming from. Because Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings would have been Tolkien’s and would have been older, under a different publisher.

Jeff: 

I don’t know that that’s true because they would have had the same estate, right?

Jacob: 

You’re probably right. I’m not very good with copyright and estate laws.

Jeff: 

Yeah, that’s because you’re dumb.

Jacob: 

Maybe that’s—that’s just my guess. That Christopher Tolkien definitely has more rights and control over The Silmarillion than—

Jeff: 

Yeah, I think he has absolute control over the whole estate. Hold on, I’m looking him up right now. Blah blah blah. Tolkien family, Tolkien Trust company, whose director is Christopher Tolkien until 2017, when his wife Baillie Tolkien and J.R.R. Tolkien’s grandson Michael George Tolkien—he’s the director. The executors of the estate were Christopher Tolkien died January 16, 2020, who was the sole literary executor. And Kathleen Blackburn, of Maier and Blackburn, who has been the estate’s solicitor. So. They own—they own it all. And so they were only willing to sell, I guess— We’ll sell you the appendices for 250 million dollars. And they got a good deal for that.

Jacob: 

They did. Wow. What a complicated world we live in.

Jeff: 

Ugh.

Jacob:

Well, Jeff—Okay, so Jeff, thank you for letting me deep dive with you about Lord of the Rings today.

Jeff: 

Hey, I’m happy to hear it. You know way more than me, and I love Lord of the Rings, so it’s a fun time.

Jacob: 

It was—it was really fun, and I hope to do it again sometime soon, in about another year. Because I bet anyone who’s made it this far should be bored to tears.

Jeff: 

Uh, so we should do one—you should watch Season 2 of The Rings of Power, and then we should just do a review of every—

Jacob: 

I’m gonna hate-watch it.

Jeff: 

—Rings of Power. Yeah, we could do like a live tweet—only like a live podcast version of it.

Jacob: 

I don’t want to torture myself. I’ll think about it.

Jeff: 

All right. All right. Well, thank you guys for listening. We’ll see you in two weeks.

Jacob: 

Bye.

Jeff: 

Adios.

Jacob: 

Okay.