After two seasons I am quite tepid on Amazon’s Rings of Power. Like, the show’s fine, I guess, doing some things well, other things less so. Sometimes it gives decidedly reverent shoutouts to Tolkien’s legendarium, other times it kinda runs roughshod over it, which wouldn’t be so bad except that it strikes me as choosing to deviate from the established lore to make the story more… boring. It’s especially glaring when the changes made by the earlier The Lord of The Rings movies helped make it a better story on screen while keeping its heart intact.
But anyway, Rings of Power isn’t the only Tolkien adaptation out there right now. Heck, it’s not even the only Tolkien adaption based primarily on the appendices in the back of The Return of The King*. Enter The War of The Rohirrim. On paper, it’s a bit of a weird idea: Let’s adapt a couple pages from the appendices, and let’s adapt it as an anime. But the segment we’re adapting is the tale of Helm Hammerhand (of Helm’s Deep fame), one without Elves, Dwarves, Rings, Hobbits, Orcs, or really many of the popular markers of Tolkien’s stories. Oh, and Helm himself isn’t the main character, instead, his daughter is — a character only mentioned in passing in the already quite brief source material.
And yet, it works. Rohirrim teases out a larger plot from its limited source, spinning the character of Héra from Helm’s unnamed daughter and using her to craft a story from the sparse vignettes presented in Tolkien’s history. Vitally, not much is completely changed from the source: the major plot points of passages happen as written — and on occasion the movie’s narration quotes Tolkien’s prose verbatim. (Trust me, I’m the kind of nerd who reread the section the day I watched the movie). The result is a movie that feels true to the spirit of the source material, that keeps enough beats to have me pointing at the cinema screen like that one meme and getting really excited while making pragmatic changes to create a story that plays better as a movie than a brief summation in the back matter of a massive tome.
I will admit, I am probably the ideal audience for The War of The Rohirrim, located as I am at the nexus of Major Tolkien Nerd, Likes Anime, and Fan Of Women With Swords. But as far as adaptations go, Rohirrm is a great time, one that clearly loves Tolkien’s world while still finding space to tell new stories alongside the old. Stories like that of Helm Hammerhand’s war with the Dunlendings are brief and almost begging for expansion. It’s fan fiction on a massive scale, but it’s great to see one that looks at an unturned stone and has some fun with it.
Point is, I really liked The War of The Rohirrim, more of that, please.
*Due to some fun licensing issues, Amazon cannot use material from The Silmarillion in Rings of Power, meaning that both the Akallabêth (dealing the fall of Númenor) and Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age being off limits… despite those topics being central to the show.
Essays, Not Rants! 
