Robin Isard | Updates

The Guild of Salt: historical note.

Robin Isard — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 14:06:13 -0500

One of the assigned textbooks during my history degree was David Lowenthal’s The Past is a Foreign Country. The title references a quote:

The past is a foriegn country: they do things differently there.— The Go-Between by L. P. Hartley:

And that’s the approach I’ve taken to my historical fiction. It’s like travelling to a foreign country, which demands taking the locals seriously, whether you agree with them or not. It’s their country, after all. No one says you have to agree, but as a guest in someone else’s home, you need to at least consider the local’s point of view and show a little empathy for them. And so my characters are religious, despite the fact that I’m not at all. I’ve written them so simply out of respect for the fact the twelfth-century was a religious time.

Naturally, there are compromises. I hope my characters are believably religious, but not so much as to put off a modern reader. In the same vein, I’ve made compromises with the language and anachronisms. I’ve done my best, but I’m sure some have crept in. Isn’t the fact it’s written in modern English and not Anglo-Norman French the greatest anachronism of all? You can read a more thorough discussion of that here. This is — first and foremost — an entertainment, and I want modern readers to enjoy themselves, but at the same time, I want to respect the actual history and not promote “fake news,” which is what I interpret “fake history” to be, especially these days, where nostalgia can pass for history with terrible results.

In reference to the last point, I’ve chosen to write a story centering around completely fictional characters, in the style of the Hornblower novels or Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey / Maturin series, both massive influences. The occasional king or queen does show up, but I try not to put too many words in their mouths. This isn’t just out of respect for the history, it’s also a storytelling preference: I’ve always preferred the stories of ordinary people facing extraordinary events.

In terms of research, I’ve spent years working on it, heavily leveraging both my history degree and the fact that, as a university librarian, I have access to tens of thousands of academic journal articles. I’m working on a select bibliography which I will post shortly, via Zotero. In addition, I’ve consulted with various outdoors types and hunters (there’s no shortage of either where I live in Northern Ontario) in regards to the wilderness aspects, particularly about how to throw off a dog team. The sailing bits were inspired by my years spent sailing with my father. But again, the compromises. I hope my research isn’t too obvious, just something to colour in the background. Exposition is another constant headache for the writer of historical fiction, but again, I’ve done my best, and I hope you enjoy.

— Robin

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Shay responds. Exposition isn’t good or bad, it’s just a style.

Robin Isard — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

If you agree, stop reading and go do something else. If you don’t and want to argue about someone’s opinion on the internet (and be honest we all do) read on.

My interests lie mainly in fantasy and horror…so I’m going to use a seminal author from each genre for my examples: H. P. Lovecraft and J. R. R. Tolkien. In recent years Lovecraft has exploded from a “cult” figure to a household name. ‘Lovecraftian’ has entered the vocabulary of nearly every geek as an adjective, and any game, story, or comic book that wants to cash in on the hype need only append a few tentacles and they’re in!

What we might not think of as much with Lovecraft is his love of exposition…or at least his strong preference for it. Exposition can take the form of a protagonist or narrator speaking…and therefore can have a voice. Voice is what makes dialogue so interesting and fun to read (at least to me) and I’d argue properly voiced exposition is as pleasant and engaging to read as properly voiced dialogue.

Call of C’thulhu, for example, contains only one true line of dialogue. The rest of the story comes to us entirely through exposition. His less-known short story The Alchemist refrains from dialogue entirely…save for the final, revealing line of the story. A gimmick perhaps, but it worked. More often his tales are entirely expository. Doing so, Lovecraft honed a style of writing where exposition was not a grudging concession to efficiency. Rather, it was the story itself.

Tolkien has more dialogue than Lovecraft, but never shied from lengthy exposition. He had a knack for writing exposition that drew the reader in, and in a sober way that dialogue cannot always achieve. Consider this example from Fellowship of the Ring:

“There were rumours of strange things happening in the world outside; and as Gandalf had not at that time appeared or sent any message for several years, Frodo gathered all the news he could. Elves, who seldom walked in the Shire, could now be seen passing westward through the woods in the evening, passing and not returning; but they were leaving Middle-earth and were no longer concerned with its troubles. There were, however, dwarves on the road in unusual numbers. The ancient East-West Road ran through the Shire to its end at the Grey Havens, and dwarves had always used it on their way to their mines in the Blue Mountains. They were the hobbits’ chief source of news from distant parts - if they wanted any: as a rule dwarves said little and hobbits asked no more. But now Frodo often met strange dwarves of far countries, seeking refuge in the West. They were troubled, and some spoke in whispers of the Enemy and of the Land of Mordor.”

— Page 52 in my copy

Here Tolkien indicates the passage of narrative time, unpacks the contemporary history of Middle Earth, and foreshadows the rest of the series. Score one for efficiency…but it does something else too. Years after reading it the phrase “strange happenings in the world outside” stuck with me. The voice, the tone, the ominous atmosphere…these are established in the way the text is ordered and presented. The details come relentlessly, in long sentences that threaten to overwhelm the reader only to stop short. All that information could have been relayed in dialogue, and perhaps successfully so, but also work effectively as exposition.

Tolkien and Lovecraft each had a strong expository voice. I discovered both of these authors as a teenager, and while their subject matters differed, both captured my imagination. Lovecraft’s exposition was a heady blend of archaism and verbosity. There is a vocabulary that comes with his stories…words like eldritch and stygian sent me scurrying to my dictionary, and I’ve not forgotten them since. Tolkien painted a vivid landscape and culture to his world; it’s still the standard for the image of a high fantasy setting in my mind, and probably always will be.

Ultimately, Tolkien and Lovecraft were authors who successfully created a sense of weight and atmosphere through exposition. That doesn’t mean exposition is the best way to do this, or the only way; however, it shows that despite what the top ten lists of YouTube tell you, it’s more about how you use it than whether you use it.

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Rethinking exposition.

Robin Isard — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Exposition. It’s a pain.

I write historical fiction and I try to weave information in via dialogue. However, sometimes passing necessary information via dialogue is either tedious or ridiculous or both. For example, two people born and raised in the 12th century wouldn't have a conversation about what a tally stick is, they'd just know. That’s like two adults in the 21st century having a discussion about what a credit card is.

“So what’s that bit of plastic?”

“Oh, this? It’s a form of money.”

“Really? I’ve grown up my whole life in Los Angeles, and I’ve never seen anything like that. We can really pay for our plane ticket to Rio with that?”

“You bet!”

“Really? How does it work?”

“Well, there’s this thing called ‘credit’….”

I’ll stop there. Not just to spare you from a silly conversation, but also a very boring one. Sure, it keeps me in the story, to a certain degree (although someone this ignorant seems strange and artificial), yet the long-drawn-out description of modern finance that’s likely to follow will make me wish I hadn’t stayed in this particular story. Nevertheless, injecting information like this is often necessary. If the drama of a 12th-century story centres around financial fraud, the reader might very well need to know how tally sticks work.

Generally, I try to pass information in the recommended manner, weaving it into the narrative without it becoming overbearing, boring or obvious. But it’s difficult. Building a historically accurate story usually means correcting preconceived notions about the Middle Ages, seeded largely by Hollywood’s “vision” of the past. As a result, I often find myself making statements like this to my alpha and beta readers:

“No, medieval buildings weren’t grey stone ruins, they were whitewashed and painted, often with colourful designs.”

“No, women generally didn’t walk around with their hair uncovered.”

The above issues are easy enough to dispense with. A conversation about what to paint on the walls of a great hall serves the first purpose, and a risque young woman telling her friends she’s going down to the market without a veil would pretty easily cover the second. Yet there are difficult moments. The tally stick is a perfect example. I could contrive a tally stick explanation by having a child ask questions of their parent who “educates” them and so the reader too. I’ve seen a lot of these explanations, and sometimes they come off. Other times, most times, they come off as exactly what they are: contrived.

On the other hand, I could just have the narrator explain it. The narrator — unshackled from the back and forth demands of dialogue or the need to sound “natural” — can in fact explain tally sticks in a few lines, a single short paragraph, and then we can get on with the story. But then I’d likely be accused of using exposition.

When I’m confronted with issues like this, my instinct isn’t to look at advice lists. Things with titles like: “Twelve things a writer must do, and twelve they should never do,” etc. I’ve found most of them to be vague and often contradictory, instead, I turn to authors I admire with a track record of success, and in this case, the question of exposition got me thinking about the big names in fantasy and sci-fi. After all, if exposition is difficult in historical fiction, in science fiction or fantasy, it has to be a nightmare. Whole worlds need inventing. Without the context of the world, it’s impossible for the reader to know what the stakes are.

“Captain, the enemy ship is armed with phigureite weaponry.”

So is the enemy ship dangerous or pathetic?

Seeking a bit of wisdom, I looked at Tolkien, Robert Jordon and Frank Herbert. I noticed instantly that all three used a huge amount of exposition, but they handled it by putting the lion's share of their world-building outside the narrative.

LOTR starts with a long prologue that explains Hobbits. It's literally called "Concerning Hobbits, and other matters". It's not written like a regular prologue, instead, it's like a travel essay. Here Tolkien explains what hobbit holes look like, what their clothes are like etc. Things that are done in the movie with a camera by just panning over Bilbo's house, Tolkien did in an expository essay at the beginning of his book. Once he does that, he doesn't have to worry about it in the narrative. And it's not short. In the edition I have, it's 16 pages long. Could you imagine if he tried to “slip” that much description into his narrative? A narrative many people feel is already description heavy? He also ends LOTR with seven appendices where he explains the origins of the dwarves, the history of various kingly lines etc. The appendices are over 100 pages long. Frank Herbert did the same thing. Dune ends with nearly 70 pages (in the copy I have) of expository essays in the form of appendices. Jordan did similar with a detailed 17-page glossary.

But I can already hear the dissatisfaction. I imagine a conversation between an author and a reader about exposition to go something like this:

R: “I need to know how magic works in your world, otherwise, these first chapters don’t make sense.”

A: “Ok, I’ll add a conversation where one character explains to another. Maybe in a classroom environment, that seems natural!”

R: “Ugh. A classroom. I get bored enough hearing teachers drone on in real life. You need to keep the action going.”

A: “Ok, I’ll just describe it in the action, in a fight maybe. It’ll be an action scene and, I’ll just slip some explanation in here and there.”

R: “I hate long descriptive passages. And besides, is slowing the action down to explain things even realistic? Would people in a magic fight even be thinking about the origin of the other guy’s school of magic, or would they just be fighting for their lives?

A: “Fine. I’ll just drop it into a short prologue or maybe an appendix, just a page or so. Just get it out of the way.”

R: “Read an appendix? I don’t even read prologues. If it’s part of the story, it should just be in the story.”

A: Slumps in chair.

So what are you going to do? Ask a group of writers or readers in any forum, and you’ll get all kinds of opinions. I sometimes believe that the push to keep it all in the story is a result of visual media. People are used to visual explanations. It’s easy to show what a hobbit looks like in a movie, but in a book, descriptions and explanations need to be written; they’ve got to be squashed in there somehow.

On the other hand, a lot of movies start with a prologue. Even the Star Wars movies start with a short expository essay (the scroll at the beginning) explaining important bits of context for the opening of the story. In A New Hope we learn in the prologue that a civil war is being waged between the Galactic Empire and a band of rebels; the Rebels have won their first victory and in the process managed to steal the plans to the Empire’s trump card: the Death Star, and Princess Leia has them. How would this have sounded if C3PO and R2-D2 had to explain it in their opening scene? The first spoken line of the movie is from 3PO (R2-D2’s bleeps and bloops not included here):

“Did you hear that? They shutdown the main reactor! We’ll be destroyed for sure! This is madness!”

How do you segue from that to a conversation about current politics, especially politics both 3PO and R2 are already very aware of? And how do you do it without sounding lame and contrived?

Anyway, I guess my point is that I think exposition is sometimes necessary, but it can be handled in different ways.

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Anachronisms and trying to sound old timey.

Robin Isard — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A friend’s comment on an early draft of Guild of Salt read:

“I think ‘picnic’ is an anachronism. They didn’t use that word in the 12th century, I’m pretty sure.”

My response:

“Well, if I was trying to be that accurate with my language, shouldn’t I have written the whole book in 12th century Anglo-Norman French?”

I don’t like anachronisms any more than the next guy: they throw you out of the story, turning the author’s world-building to ash, yet, to make the story readable to contemporary audiences, compromises are necessary. Very little historical fiction would be readable if it were written without a lot of anachronisms. Tudor-set stories should sound like Shakespeare, shouldn’t they? But how many of the book-reading public would actually buy them? I like Shakespeare, but I don’t think I’d like to “relax” by working through the five hundred-odd pages of “Wolf Hall” in sonnet format. So how do we thread the needle of contemporary prose and old-fashioned atmosphere?

When I started writing Guild of Salt, I realized I’d have to reckon with this. My first book — Trials Elsewhere — was a contemporary memoir, which I wrote in my natural “voice” as they say in the publishing world. But I knew instantly that my “voice” wouldn’t cut it for a medieval story, so I had to figure out a strategy to make it readable but — hopefully — old-timey enough sounding that it would still provide that sense of escapism people like me read historical fiction for in the first place.

My first step was to just come to terms with the fact I couldn’t please everyone. There’s always going to be someone who finds fault with your style or word choice, and the fact that words change meaning an awful lot doesn’t help.

I think it’s the sound of the words and diction that people react to. If it sounds modern or specifically like modern slang, people turn their noses up. The irony here is that it’s often better to use anachronism because language more accurate to the time can in fact sound pretty modern. Consider a potential line from a hypothetical story set in the late medieval or early modern period. A farmer looks at some wheat being threshed:

“This corn has a lot of crap in it.”

Most people would look at that and cry “anachronism!” almost instantly, or argue that the editing is bad because corn isn’t wheat. But, I’d argue the sentence is a lot more of the time than many I see in historical fictions. A quick check of the OED tells us that corn is:

“collective singular. The seed of the cereal or farinaceous plants as a produce of agriculture; grain.As a general term the word includes all the cereals, wheat, rye, barley, oats, maize, rice, etc., and, with qualification (as black corn, pulse corn), is extended to leguminous plants, as pease, beans, etc., cultivated for food. Locally, the word, when not otherwise qualified, is often understood to denote that kind of cereal which is the leading crop of the district; hence in the greater part of England ‘corn’ is = wheat n., in North Britain and Ireland = oats; in the U.S. the word, as short for Indian corn n., is restricted to maize (see 5).

And looking up “crap” we get:

Usually in plural. Husks of grain; chaff.1649 C. Hoole Easie Entrance Lat. Tongue 171/1 Corn craps, Excreménta, órum.

So, the hypothetical sentence translates into modern English as: “This wheat has a lot of chaff in it.” I’d bet a modern reader would actually prefer this version to the first, if only because the word “crap” tends to put people off almost instantly due to its modern use as a bit of low-brow slang.

I guess it’s all about how things sound. It needs to sound right, more than actually be right. I guess it’s kind of like how in old World War II movies, high ranking German officers are usually played by English actors. The accent adds a bit of foreignness that “feels” right, but is actually completely wrong. The Germans ought to speak with German accents; really, they should just speak German with subtitles. There are exceptions (Tom Cruise in, Valkyrie James Coburn in Cross of Iron) yet American actors usually play the lower ranks. Hollywood just can’t seem to believe in German staff officers who don’t have a posh English accent. Would you buy into George Clooney playing General Keitel?

So the question became: if it’s all about the sound, how do I make my voice sound less modern? This wasn’t that hard. I just read a lot of books I felt had the right tone. This consisted mainly of re-reading the Patrick O'Brian Aubrey and Maturin series and C. S. Forester’s Hornblower books as well as a bunch of Jane Austen. In the same way a child picks up their parent’s verbal cues, I hoped I’d pick up some of their vocabulary and diction through osmosis. Those books aren’t medieval stories, but they all aim for a Regency sounding style (in the case of Austin, of course, it’s not contrived), and I felt Regency language was old-fashioned enough to sound the part, but is still modern enough to be readable.

I did make a series of compromises, however. I decided before writing that flow mattered more than exact wording, and so I use contractions wherever they smooth out the prose. I don’t feel too bad about it; it’s about how it sounds, after all, and people blend words together when they think and speak. I also went out of my way to avoid modern clichés because nothing sounds worse — to my ear — than hearing a 12th-century knight cry out: “Let’s kick some ass!” As I wrote, I’d usually put down the cliché as a placeholder, then go back and try to unpack or re-write it into something less modern. In this example, I might change the line to: “let’s see them off with a kick to the arse!” or something like that. Not great, but you get the idea.

How well I succeeded with this, only the reader can say, and I suppose a lot of people will say I fell short, nevertheless, that was my process.

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Why historical fiction?

Robin Isard — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Recently, I was asked why I thought history was vital to my story. An interesting question, so I thought I might write a line or two about it. I don't know if history is *vital* to any story, but I do believe it's vital that people engage with history. I imagine the intent behind the question was to get at why I would risk putting modern readers off by placing my story in the past. After all, who cares about the past? Why would a modern reader give a fig about the twelfth century when there are so many current cultural issues being interrogated now?

I guess I see the question as a false distinction. If history were a factory, its product, its output would be culture. “Current” issues are the offspring of historical issues; there isn’t a modern talking point that doesn’t have a precursor from the past. Sure, it’s a lot more obvious when one side of a debate is actively taking a “traditional” stance, but calls for equality for women for example, harken back to ideas of equality that go back to Ancient Greek philosophy. Maybe the Greeks didn’t have women in mind, but the concept of equality they developed was added to the historical fabric and its thread has run into the more recent past where it’s been taken up by people the Greek philosophers might not have intended. And that’s fine. No one owns a cultural concept. Ideas are in the public domain.

I’m not a determinist; I don’t believe that we’re puppets of history without free will. But I think most things that seem “new” are just remixes of other and older concepts. I just think that there are so many ideas out there being remixed and refactored that “new” things are created, sort of like intellectual gene splicing. Even technology shares a lot of DNA with the past: what’s a cell phone for? To communicate. To send messages. Smartphones mean we communicate differently than the Greeks did — who preferred to sit around a table with wine in a symposium — but the necessity of staying close to the people we want to hasn’t changed at all.

So where does all this leave an historical novelist? My writing is aimed at presenting history in an entertaining way but also in an accurate way to help people engage with the past.

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Review: The Rings of Power

Robin Isard — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

TL,DR: I didn’t like the show for what I would call storytelling or narrative issues. If you’re looking for some racist screed about the colour of the actors, you’re not going to find it here, best move on.

Spoilers Follow

I thought I had novels figured out when I was young. Stolid tombs assigned by my teachers sketching stories of people wrestling with some societal ill. A theme or moral was the heart, and the characters — meant to be someone easy to relate to — grappled with it. Catcher in the Rye is a perfect example. Novels made you think because, apparently, young people didn’t think about their lives unless the issues were packaged as a “relatable story.” It was all rather dull.

I was twelve when a friend introduced me to Lord of the Rings. It changed everything. After being immersed in this incredible world filled with its own languages and mythology, I’d never look at a novel the same way. I know a lot of “lit people” don’t see the point of the fantasy genre — and I’m not here to defend it — but for me, LOTR taught me what a book could be. It opened my world and created an interest in books that would never go away. A novel could centre around the struggles of some navel-gazing twit named Holden, or it could be a universe. After LOTR, I’d never take fiction for granted again.

I enjoyed the Peter Jackson movies, despite their occasional departures from the books, and I waited for Rings of Power with a “brace for the worst, hope for the best,” attitude. You have to believe me when I say I really tried to like this show. LOTR was my Harry Potter. I wanted to see more of it on screen. But alas, as I watched the first few episodes of RoP, I couldn’t escape the conclusion that it’s simply not a very good show. It’s not epically bad; it’s worse: it’s boring. Here’s where I think the major problems lay.

A world-building paradox.

So how did Tolkein do it? How did he go about building that world that was so big and immersive? The stories are famous for their wide, sweeping and magical world, but you’d never guess it by looking at Tolkein’s storytelling techniques. Despite couching his world in mythology and thousands of years of history, the two primary vehicles for bringing that world across (LOTR and The Hobbit) are very short, focused narratives with just a few point-of-view characters. The storyline of LOTR is relatively short: from leaving the Shire to destroying the ring is a six-month journey for Sam and Frodo. Only four months if you subtract the two they spend in Rivendell. In The Hobbit, Bilbo’s roundtrip journey is thirteen months. In both, the essential plot is very simple: destroy the ring, defeat the dragon. In both, the point-of-view characters are fairly restrained. In LOTR, things generally stay with the hobbits, and in The Hobbit, the focus is almost continuously on Bilbo, although there are exceptions in both works. Sure, other books outline the world (The Silmarillion etc.), but most people haven’t read those.

Nevertheless, Middle Earth feels like a real place. It seems expansive. When I asked friends what they thought about RoP, a constant refrain was, “it seems small.” I think this is because most of the “action” occurs in a few sound stages, and the characters simply “teleport” around to locations. They jump from Lindon to Eregion in a scene cut. The story is built around characters chatting in various rooms. The shots of wide-open vistas and mountains that anchored the Jackson movies are practically non-existent. There’s little movement. Occasionally, RoP gives the audience a flyover of the Middle Earth map to situate the proceedings, but is that really sufficient? Sure, it tells us where we are, but it doesn’t really show us where we are. A map gives you the place, but not the sense of the place. Tolkien built a huge epic world, filled with mountains, swamps and rivers in his relatively small, tight narrative by simply having the characters walk around in it.

No enchantment.

Outside of giving a sense of place, Tolkien uses the passage of his characters as a way to establish a sense of enchantment. Middle Earth isn’t just a place; it’s a magical place. Yet very few explicit examples of magic use are exhibited. No one shoots fireballs or lightning bolts from their fingers. Rather, magic just seems to saturate the world. For me, it’s not what Tolkien did here so much as what he didn’t do. Tolkien didn’t spend much time explaining how things worked. I can still remember the outrage when the Star Wars prequels explained the force with “midiclorians.” People everywhere — not just fans — just sighed and said, “why, George?” In a few lines of dialogue, The Force went from spiritual phenomenon to high school biology experiment. I know there are branches of fantasy that put a premium on explaining things like magic systems and insist every creature has a backstory, but Tolkien’s world is not one of them. The words “mystical” and “mystery” are closely related. When you explain something, you kill the mystery. The enchantment dissipates. It turns into technology. In RoP they pan over some interesting architecture, but they don’t foreground the feeling of wonder the characters in LOTRs feel when they pass by The Argonath, for example. I feel if RoP has a similar scene, one of the characters would have to explain the whole origin of the statues, who they’re meant to be, why they’re there etc. Just sitting with the characters and taking in the grandeur of the moment just wouldn’t be enough.

In fact, one of my biggest concerns when the series was announced was that they’d try to give the rings some kind of detailed origin story. My worst fears were realized. Sure the rings have a story in Tolkien’s work, but in RoP they get so detailed about the creation of the three elven rings that they’re practically just a technology. They do the same with the ludicrous origin story of mithril.

The characters aren’t handled well.

By removing any meaningful interaction with the world as a whole, RoP turns into a completely different story than the works it’s based on. More importantly, with the world out of play, the storytelling is going to fall hard on the characters.

A great show can be based on simple chit-chat, but to do that, you need some pretty compelling characters. In both LOTR and The Hobbit, Tolkein uses the quest story trope to build his characters and story tension. All that walking around isn’t just showing off the terrain; it also builds the stakes. As I said above, the plot of LOTR is simple: drop a ring off a cliff. But the difficulties of the journey centre the story. As Bilbo and Sam trudge over hard ground and through rough weather, surmounting the dangers of the road, they weaken. Every step becomes a personal challenge as they tire, run out of food and wonder if they can make the next ridgeline before their luck and willpower run out. The famous military philosopher Karl von Clausewitz wrote a whole chapter in his On War, just describing that kind of struggle:

"Everything is very simple in war, but the simplest thing is difficult. These difficulties accumulate and produce a friction, which no man can imagine exactly who has not seen war…. take the weather. Here, the fog prevents the enemy from being discovered in time, a battery from firing at the right moment, a report from reaching the general; there, the rain prevents a battalion from arriving, another from reaching in right time, because, instead of three, it had to march perhaps eight hours; the cavalry from charging effectively because it is stuck fast in heavy ground... Just as a man in water is unable to perform with ease and regularity the most natural and simplest movement, that of walking, so in war, with ordinary powers, one cannot keep even the line of mediocrity."
— On War, Book 1, Chapter 7, Friction in War

Like Clausewitz, Tolkien was an experienced soldier and knew the essence of any quest was that the world — life— sets itself against you. The simplest of things — just going from A to B — which we take for granted in our cosy, well-engineered lives, becomes a significant test of willpower when you’re outside the familiar. And willpower and a commitment to doing what’s right are the core of Frodo’s journey.

In RoP, there really isn’t any kind of stakes. Everyone has a problem to solve, but none of those problems is really very interesting. Galadreil’s plot line is the worst of the bunch. She’s out for revenge, and that’s super interesting because we’ve never heard of that plotline before. Not that a good revenge story can’t be fun, but a revenge arc has its own story beats and tropes that need to be hit in order to resonate with the audience. At the very least, there needs to be a set-up to get the audience involved. A perfect example is the first John Wick movie. The bad guys kill Wick’s cute, defenceless, innocent puppy. As a viewer, you hate those guys. You’re completely involved. You’re riding shotgun with Wick all the way to the end. RoP doesn’t set anything up. Galadriel is out to avenge her brother, who we barely see (he’s literally a rando, on screen for about two minutes in the entire season). As a viewer, I just don’t care.

Trying too hard to be relatable.

What makes the treatment of Galadriel and the other powerful characters, like Elrond, even worse, however, are the efforts to make them relatable. I’d argue that “characters” like them aren’t really characters at all. Their level of power and mythical role makes them more like parts of the world, in my opinion. In the books, they’re essentially fantastical creatures who swan in from stage left, do something astonishing, and then swan out stage right. The POV in the books is anchored on the hobbits because they’re meant to be the relatable ones. They’re literally small folk surrounded by immortals and heroes. By the time of RoP, Galadriel is approximately 8000 years old (it’s hard to tell due to the compression of the timeline in the show and the fact that she was born in Valinor and one Valien year is equal to about ten solar years) and is one of the most powerful sorceresses in Middle Earth. How do you make an 8000-year-old eleven sorceress relatable? You don’t. People go on about how millennials and baby boomers can’t get their heads around each other, an approximate 30-year age difference. Eight thousand? RoP handles this by just changing the nature of the characters, essentially mutating them into generic thirty-somethings. As with the world, there’s no enchantment in the way they’re portrayed, either. The Jackson movies went to great lengths to portray Galadriel’s otherworldliness, but RoP doesn’t even try. I agree; watching all that surreal etherealness every week would likely wear thin, but all the more reason to focus the story around a non-canon, non-mythical character. Relatable characters aren’t automatically interesting. I can’t relate to Walter White, Tony Soprano or Carrie Mathison, but they’re all very interesting characters, and I love to watch them in action; wondering what they’re going to do next keeps me engaged.

And all the rest.

There are other problems with this show: because it’s a prequel, we know the fates of Galadriel, Sauron and Elrond, making it very difficult to build tension around them. For example, in one episode, Galadriel is floating in the ocean with a giant sea creature, but since we know she’ll be around in the Third Age to talk to Frodo et al., we know she’s going to escape. The same thing can be said about the whole “Elves need Mithril to survive” storyline. Clearly, it all works out because the elves are still around in the third age. I know you could say the same about the characters in LOTR, particularly if you’ve read the books, but that’s where the quest trope comes in. In LOTR, It’s about the journey, not the final result.

Another major problem is that RoP has several other plots: Dwarven and Elven diplomacy, a mysterious starman, and orcs attacking stuff, but none of them really connect. They’re all separate threads unto themselves. All are potentially interesting but forced to share screen time, they’re hopelessly chopped up. None of them gets enough time to really breathe. I’m sure in about season three or so, they’ll all come together, but honestly, so what? I’m not even going to make it to season two.

Conclusion.

At the end of the day, I think the RoP production is desperately short on writing skills. After nearly thirty years of essentially making adaptations, Holywood seems to have a dearth of storytelling talent. It’s hard to think of a show or movie made in the last decades that wasn’t an adaptation of a book, comic book or a reboot of some older IP. I’ve some friends deep into Game of Thrones who’ve said the quality of the later seasons went downhill fast: right when the showrunners ran out of book to adapt and were left to their own devices. I think — fundamentally — RoP has the same problem. Amazon only bought the appendices. Without a story to hang the show off of, they found themselves adrift at sea.

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