"Tolkien has become a monster, devoured by his own popularity and absorbed into the absurdity of our time. The chasm between the beauty and seriousness of the work, and what it has become, has overwhelmed me. The commercialization has reduced the aesthetic and philosophical impact of the creation to nothing. There is only one solution for me: to turn my head away."

Christopher Tolkien

Excerpts from How The Rings of Power Inevitably Removes Tolkien from His Creation:

Obviously, something that popular is going to be adapted into things like film or TV. And in the case of Tolkien’s work, there’s been a long and mixed record. All of it (until now) has occurred during the life of Tolkien himself, or was overseen by his son, Christopher, whose death at 95 in 2020 heralded the true end of an era.

Christopher Tolkien isn’t around anymore to tell us what he might think of the property being adapted by Amazon. This is the same Amazon that is literally an all-seeing eye, the same Amazon that is despoiling the land at an ever-increasing rate, and directing its servants to toil away in shitty conditions and dangerous environments. How the company could miss the point of Tolkien’s works to fixate on telling another story about Sauron is anybody’s guess.

And yet the rights now rest with them (and the videogame rights apparently with some scary-sounding company that is buying up tons of stuff and which I have seriously never heard of). Rather than passing from the dying hands of Tolkien and his son to, say, the public domain, they’re being parceled out by corporations, which can live far longer than the lifetime of a man (if not an elf, yet). In film and videogame form, at least, Aragorn and Arwen and Frodo and Sam don’t get to sail off into the west to the same undying land that Hercules or Sherlock Holmes occupy. They’ve gotta make that paper for Amazon and Embracer Group.

As a result, those corporate-owned forms of the characters are, sad to say, going to be the most well-known. In time, they’re likely to eclipse the subtle, lyrical (occasionally plodding) works from which they originally were born: Like all good books, the reward for engaging fully with them is directly proportional to the effort involved.