• Rings of Power: true to Tolkien’s vision or ‘woke’ distortion?

    Tolkien was an enormous part of my world when I grew up. I was and am a Tolkien nerd. But in those years, his works lived a sub-culture and very few knew about the Lord of the Rings and fewer still bothered to read the books. That was, of course, before Jackson’s movies made the Lord of the Rings a global phenomenon. My version of Tolkien is the book version, which as is well-known, Tolkien fans regard as the ‘gold-standard’ for any portrayal in film. Jackson’s films were a breakthrough in presenting Tolkien’s world – but the gratuitous action and violence added to the scripts represents crass commercialisation – for…