The Rings Of Power’ New Tagline Stirs Debate

Everything about Amazon’s upcoming Lord Of The Rings show is divisive. It’s inevitable at this point. Adapting Tolkien’s writings about the Second Age into a live-action TV show is bound to be controversial among fans—especially as recent adaptations of other popular works have fallen so blisteringly short.

This includes Amazon’s adaptation of The Wheel Of Time—a bizarrely unfaithful, cheap-feeling rendition of Robert Jordan’s epic fantasy.

So it’s no wonder that this very brief teaser for The Rings Of Power should have fans in heated debate. We see very little of the Second Age in the trailer, but we get a new tagline: “Nothing is evil…in the beginning.”

Here’s the trailer:

The controversy here is the question of whether or not nothing is actually evil in the beginning, specifically in Tolkien’s fictional universe. Sauron, for instance, didn’t start off evil. He was lured to the dark side by Morgoth (aka Melkor) the first and mightiest of the Valar.

But not even Melkor started off evil. His pride and jealousy caused him to rebel against his creator, Eru Ilúvatar, the supreme deity of Arda, when his fellow Valar chose Manwë to be their lord.

So the question becomes, is there a deeper evil beyond even these deities and angels—an “original evil” of some sort that caused even Melkor to turn to the path of wickedness? Or, as the trailer suggests, is nothing evil in the beginning and only through our choices do we become evil?

It’s an interesting question and one that I’ve often thought about in the real world. You see real evil sometimes. Someone like Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer, or David and Louise Turpin—parents who raised their own children in filth and isolation, starved them and kept them chained up in their home. Or Adolf Hitler and his genocidal collaborators.

To me, these are all examples of pure evil. But at one point in time, these people were children themselves. Did they start evil? Can a baby be born evil or do they go bad over time?

It’s an interesting question whether we’re discussing Valar or the real world. What do you think? Let me know on Twitter or Facebook.