Why Amazon Doesn't Have The Rights To J.R.R. Tolkien's 'The Silmarillion'
When Amazon first announced that they were going to be doing a series from Tolkien’s Middle Earth/Lord of the Rings universe, the fanbase exploded with questions about what it might focus on, who it might be about, and when in the timeline, that Tolkien mapped out, it would take place.
Some people stated that the show would focus on Aragorn’s life. There is already a fan-made film that came out after Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings film that focused on Aragorn’s story, but many fans would love more. Some people thought that the series would focus on early timeline moments from early on in Tolkien’s The Silmarillion, focusing on Morgoth as the big bad instead of Sauron. Morgoth was the precursor to Sauron and was worse in terms of villain status.
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In addition, rumors flew that it would focus on the stories of the Silmarils and Beren and Lúthien, which made some fans upset since that is such a beloved story, and they didn’t want it “ruined.” Even until the teaser/title release trailer was released in January 2022, the main idea was that the Amazon series would be focused on the events in The Silmarillion. However, after the title was announced, the focus was shifted from the First Age to the Second Age of Middle Earth, and the theories started to waver as more information was released to fans.
The title of the series is The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. And clearly, the series is going to focus on…the rings of power. “Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky, Seven for the Dwarf-lords in halls of stone, Nine for Mortal Men, doomed to die, One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne.” The series will occur in the Second Age of Middle Earth, after Morgoth’s demise, and as Sauron rises to power (the first time).
However, this still left questions for the fans about what exactly it might focus on. In mid-February of 2022, the showrunners Patrick McKay and J.D. Payne finally announced in a Vanity Fair exclusive what Amazon has the rights to and what they were hoping to accomplish with those rights. And the answer surprised many fans who thought the show would be focused on the events in The Silmarillion.
Amazon doesn’t actually have the rights to The Silmarillion. This means the series will be based on The Appendices at the end of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. Which, admittedly, does overlap in stories between the two books, but if it is mentioned in The Silmarillion and not in the Appendices, it is off-limits. And this has to do with the rights from the Tolkien Estate and from J.R.R. Tolkien himself.
Tolkien had never wanted to sell the rights to his books to the movie companies, but he was forced to eventually for the money in the 1970s to Saul Zaentz, and the animated Rankin and Bass productions of The Hobbit and Ralph Bakshi’s The Lord of the Rings (among a few other small budget films) were made. But those were the only rights that were sold. Even for Peter Jackson, he only had the rights to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. So, for example, when Radagast the Brown was introduced in Jackson’s Hobbit movies, he had to be very careful with not saying that Tolkien had mentioned there were other wizards in Middle Earth (there are, in fact, a few more mentioned in other works) because he didn’t have the rights to it.
McKay and Payne might have a little more leeway due to the Tolkien Estate being involved in the project, but we can probably expect not to see significant life events in Middle Earth-like the Fall of Gondolin, as described in depth in The Silmarillion or anything else from Tolkien’s Unfinished Tales.
Payne said in the Vanity Fair article:
“We have the rights solely to The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, The Return of the King, the appendices, and The Hobbit. And that is it. We do not have the rights to The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, The History of Middle-Earth, or any of those other books…We worked in conjunction with world-renowned Tolkien scholars and the Tolkien estate to make sure that the ways we connected the dots were Tolkien-ian and gelled with the experts’ and the estate’s understanding of the material.”
McKay added:
“There’s a version of everything we need for the Second Age in the books we have the rights to. As long as we’re painting within those lines and not egregiously contradicting something we don’t have the rights to, there’s a lot of leeway and room to dramatize and tell some of the best stories that [Tolkien] ever came up with.”
And that’s just it. Tolkien has created such an expansive world, complete with complete languages, extensive history, multiple characters, and plots and stories. He has created lore that, to date, no one else has been able to accomplish. But with that, he also has quite a few unfinished stories; even The Silmarillion is not finished per se. There’s where Payne and McKay are taking The Appendices and stories of the past within The Lord of the Rings and are adding their own flare, characters, and stories within Tolkien’s world. While at the same time, not taking away from the essence of the world of Tolkien’s creation, just adding to it, and bringing in, hopefully, fantastic stories that will stand the test of time.
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Source(s): lrmonline, empireonline, vanityfair