There and Back Again: A Rings of Power Postmortem
Season One of The Rings of Power has ended, and none too soon. It is a mess that bears only a passing resemblance to Tolkien’s world of engaging characters, strong moral code, and story realism.
Rings of Power: Jeff Bezos’s Billion Dollar Anti-Tolkien Fan Fiction
Whatever else Rings of Power may be, it is not Tolkien; nor is it—as the opening credits claim—based on The Lord of the Rings and its appendices in any meaningful way.
Amazon’s Tolkien
It seems likely that Amazon Studios’ Rings of Power series will soon surpass Peter Jackson’s Battle of the Five Armies as the worst vandalism of Tolkien ever committed to film.
Númenor and the Decline of America
Dystopian fiction can offer a curious consolation in dark times. There is comfort of a sort in the knowledge that our current troubles were foreseen by others: this shows, if nothing else, the evils of our age are not as chaotic as they sometimes seem. On the contrary, they conform to a pattern that can … Read more
America in the Eighth Circle
The American media lies, and lies damnably. This statement will come as no revelation to regular readers of Crisis magazine. We all remember the more glaring falsehoods peddled in the past few years, e.g., that Nicholas Sandmann and his classmates bullied and harassed a Native American tribal elder, that President Trump praised neo-Nazis as “very … Read more
Piety in the Time of Coronavirus
The nation has been treated to an uncanny spectacle over the past few weeks. Schools and businesses closed in the face of the Wuhan flu, and public health officials urged all Americans to stay home and practice “social distancing” to slow the spread of the disease. But as anxious families braved supermarket lines to stock … Read more