One franchise to rule them all: New Lord of the Rings spin-off The Rings of Power introduces a new generation to Tolkien

When Morfydd Clark auditioned for the role of elf queen Galadriel in Amazon Prime’s new Lord of the Rings spin-off, The Rings of Power, she had little expectation of getting the job. Four years later, with the first two episodes of the $1 billion fantasy series having debuted on the streaming service, the Welsh actress is still catching her breath. It is, she reports, quite a journey from her background in British independent cinema to one of the biggest franchises in popular culture.

“When you’re auditioning for these things, you don’t actually think you’re going to get them,” she says. “And when you get offered them, you don’t believe you’re going to end up filming them. It’s very surreal. I still can’t quite believe it. It does at times feel daunting.”

The attention Rings of Power has generated is testament to the enduring popularity of JRR Tolkien. Lord of the Rings, his tale of brave hobbits, dark lords and grumpy wizards, is the best-selling English language book of the 20th century. The 2001-2003 Peter Jackson movies are widely considered the greatest blockbusters of their era. And the books helped create the genre of heroic fantasy, although purists argue it is inaccurate to describe Tolkien as the father of fantasy.

There is an Irish component to the story too. Rings of Power leans into negative caricatures by giving the show’s version of the hobbits atrocious Irish accents. But Tolkien’s writings are nonetheless indebted to Celtic lore and landscape – even if the prejudices of the author himself were perhaps typical of the Edwardian era in which he grew up.

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Tolkien was an external English examiner at University College Galway, as NUI Galway was then called, for 10 years starting in 1949. The Lord of the Rings was first published in 1954. On his journeys to the west of Ireland, he spent time in the Burren, Co Clare.

The forbidding landscape is believed to have partly inspired Mordor, the craggy kingdom ruled by the Dark Lord Sauron in the Lord of the Rings.

The late Tolkien scholar Dr Liam Campbell from Derry wrote in 2014: “Ireland and, in particular, the Burren, it seems, may have played a key role in Tolkien’s conceptual design for masterworks such as The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion.”

Tolkien’s debt to Ireland is believed to go much further than the gnarled vistas of northwest Clare, however. Scholars have pointed to similarities between the Celtic saga The Book of Invasions and Tolkien’s great elven history, The Silmarillion, in which a race of elves, the Ñoldor, leave their mystical homeland of Valinor and travel to Middle Earth.

Middle Earth’s elves are also arguably influenced by the Irish Tuath Dé Danann. In The Silmarillion and Lord of the Rings, elves are noble, mystical creatures who cannot die of natural causes but may perish in battle.

Publicly, however, Tolkien always distanced himself from Irish myth, insisting his influences were primarily Norse and Finnish – a language with which he was fascinated. He lamented the Irish language as possessing a “fundamental unreason”. And he reacted strongly in a 1937 letter to his publisher, who had passed on a comment of a reader hired by the publishing house describing The Silmarillion as bedevilled with “eye-splitting Celtic names”.

While saying the reader’s comment “affords me delight”, he retorted: “I am sorry the names split his eyes – personally I believe… they are good, and a large part of the effect.”

“Needless to say they are not Celtic! Neither are the tales. I do know Celtic things (many in their original languages Irish and Welsh), and feel for them a certain distaste: largely for their fundamental unreason. They have bright colour, but are like a broken stained-glass window reassembled without design.”

Tolkien’s wizard, Gandalf, was inspired by Merlin from the Welsh King Arthur myth cycle.

Tolkien did not singlehandedly create epic fantasy. There was already a long tradition of fantasy writers – including the Co Meath Anglo-Irish writer Lord Dunsany. In the United States, swords and sorcery authors such as Robert E Howard (creator of Conan the Barbarian) likewise predated Lord of the Rings. They would, in turn, become the dominant influence on role-playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons – which, for their part, have influenced modern fantasy as much as Tolkien.

Nonetheless, Lord of the Rings is the one franchise to rule them all. This is why the cast of the new series felt such a weight of responsibility when taking on the parts.

“I don’t know why you would play Elrond and not explore the incredible source material, everything that surrounds him. It is fascinating,” says Robert Aramayo, who portrays the powerful elf king in Rings of Power. “People who are fascinated about the decisions he made in the Third Age [when Lord of the Rings takes place]. Why did he do this and not that? There are all clues, I think [in the Rings of Power].”

The series will also introduce a new generation to Tolkien, believes Sophia Nomvete, who portrays dwarf princess Disa – a creation of the show – and who came to the material fresh.

“I didn’t grow up with the books at all,” she says. “I grew up touching on the films in my late teens back in uni. My relationship with the books and with the world is very, very new. I’m a new fan. And so it feels like it’s all unwrapping while I’m playing the role.”

The Rings of Power is an epic, thrilling watch – though viewers here will have to make peace with the new “Irish” hobbits. And, while Tolkien may not have liked it, even here there is a Celtic influence. For her portrayal of Galadriel, Clark drew on her Welsh upbringing, in particular her fluency in the Welsh language.

“I speak Welsh. And for some reason, in Welsh, my voice is slightly different. There are certain words in Welsh that don’t exist in English. Even though she [Galadriel] is completely fluent [in human languages], there would be another way she would express it should she be doing it in Elvish. I guess I wanted to find the richness that I feel when I speak Welsh.”

Episodes one and two of The Rings Of Power are on Amazon Prime now. New episodes debut every Friday.