Dan McLaughlin has written a careful, reasoned explanation, rooted in lore and fact and not in rash judgments or unmet expectations, of the ways in which the depiction of Galadriel in Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power does not line up with what J. R. R. Tolkien told us about her character. Indeed, despite what Dan accurately describes as my “cautious optimism” about the show, I noted in my initial review that “the character of Galadriel herself is changed considerably.” His assessment is difficult to challenge on factual grounds.
I would thus only submit a few partial defenses based on artistic license, which Dan accepts as a justification for change “so long as additions do not detract or subtract from what [Tolkien] has already created.” (Emphasis in original.) As I wrote in my review, the metric by which to measure the show’s treatment of Galadriel is “whether what becomes of her character so radically betrays her nature as to render her unrecognizable.” Dan is right that some of the ways she has been changed significantly alter her place in the story and her relationship to other characters, though I think much of that is an unavoidable byproduct of the way the show has decided to tell the story (time compression, choices of focus, rights access, etc.) Dan focuses on the absence of her husband Celeborn (and their family), and on the rejiggering of her apparent place in elven hierarchy that sees her essentially subordinate where she should be dominant, or at least more important. He is right to do so. But I think, from a storytelling perspective, that there is a case for showing Galadriel work her way toward these things over the course of a series, rather than have them from the get-go, even if it is not strictly speaking lore-accurate. If The Rings of Power is to show us a different time, it would be less interesting to depict the Galadriel we already know than it would be to show how she became that person (er, elf). That she does not have some of the attributes she should does not mean we won’t see her get them as the show progresses. The choice to make this progression visible to the audience may induce distortions of lore, but for the sake of allowing us to see them happen in real-time rather than merely to learn about them secondhand or in flashback.
There is a similar defense to make of Galadriel’s warrior status in Rings of Power, to which Dan does not object. I think it is quite possible, perhaps even likely, that the course of the Rings of Power over the tragedy of the Second Age will show why the fierce fighter we have thus far seen ultimately concludes that contesting evil through strength in arms is not the right path for her to take. Perhaps the triumph of that evil, or the setbacks endured by the good, will have even in some way been caused by her efforts in this area. A series that depicts such a journey for its main character would be thematically rich, and deeply consonant with the spirit of Tolkien, even if it plays fast and loose with some of Tolkien’s canon.
These judgments may ultimately prove mistaken. My cautious optimism about the show thus far amounts largely to a willingness to see what it does over time. Thus, I am, at this point, mostly laying down markers for future reference, against which to measure the show’s success or failure.