Game of Thrones is the champion of messy family trees and romances, but Rings of Power is officially joining in on the game. While both George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series and Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings inspired massively successful fantasy franchises that demonstrate many of the same tropes, the general outlook on these stories is very different. Tolkien is the grandfather of high fantasy who pioneered fictional world-building on a massive scale. Martin carried on his predecessor’s work, but the flavor of his fantasy story is far more mature.
Part of what made Game of Thrones such a hit on HBO when it first premiered in 2011 was the way it unabashedly approached sex and violence. This wasn’t Tolkien’s style, by any means, but Martin certainly wrote a lot of raunch and incest into his story, allowing HBO to turn up the volume. Family trees tend to loop and twist in the most baffling ways, and it’s not uncommon for Game of Thrones or House of the Dragon characters to be related to one another in various ways—someone’s spouse can easily be their sibling, uncle, cousin, or combination of the three (and beyond).
Things appear far more vanilla in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, and screen adaptations have kept that general tone going. However, this isn’t to say that the meticulously constructed family trees within Tolkien’s legendarium don’t contain some overlapping branches. Things certainly get messy, and while it’s nowhere near as unsettling as Game of Thrones, Prime Video’s Rings of Power has made a couple of changes to ramp up the inner-family drama.
Immortality Makes Lord Of The Rings’ Family Trees Even More Complicated
In Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, relationship complications typically involved differences between the two characters’ races. Elf women and human men were the go-to here, the most significant matching in the central story being Arwen and Aragorn. Sure, it’s tricky because one person is destined to die while the other will have to live on without them. However, this is really the least of it. Immortality adds a strange dynamic to romance across the board, and that’s true for even Aragorn and Arwen.
Outside the typical fantasy discomfort of a thousand-year-old being falling in love with a mortal human, immortality in Lord of the Rings adds some complications to family trees. It’s not mentioned in Peter Jackson’s film trilogy, but Aragorn and Arwen are cousins. The mortal King of Gondor is the direct descendant of Arwen’s uncle, Elros, the twin brother of Elrond. It’s not all that important, other than that Aragorn and Arwen’s connection to their common grandparents, Eärendil and Elwing, is why one lives longer than typical Men while the other can choose mortality if she wants.
As a reward for their great risk and sacrifice in bringing a Silmaril to the Valar, Eärendil, Elwing, and their descendants were given the choice to become mortal. Elrond decided to remain an immortal Elf, while his twin brother, Elros, became a mortal man and the first ruler of Númenor.
Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings simplified Aragorn and Arwen’s story, likely to avoid the complex exposition regarding their ancestors and to steer away from the fact that these two are related. Cousin marriages were typical in the real-world Middle Ages as well, but it’s far trickier to define the parameters of strangeness when one lover was born thousands of years before the other.
Rings of Power season 3 will officially put actor Robert Aramayo, who plays Elrond, in the additional role of Elros during flashback sequences. It will have to be crystal clear that Elendil and Isildur are descendants of Elros, which means it will have to be crystal clear that Elrond and Aragorn are, therefore, related. Still, that’s only the beginning of the Game of Thrones-like weirdness.
The Rings Of Power Has Made Several Tolkien Romances Even Weirder
It’s always been a bit uncomfortable to consider how immortal beings meet and fall in love, and to define the line where it is no longer appropriate for a 3,000-year-old being to marry a 1,000-year-old being. The idea of an ancient elf knowing their lover as a child and marrying them once they “grow up” is on the ickier side of things we try to ignore. Rings of Power has made that impossible, unfortunately, and it looks like it will only get worse heading into season 3.
In canon, Elrond marries Galadriel’s daughter, Celebrian. He is several hundred years older than her, at least, but he met her for the first time when she was an adult visiting Rivendell. That’s all well and good, but Rings of Power has made the whole thing far more complicated in several ways. First, Elrond and Galadriel, though not explicitly romantic, share some intimate moments in Rings of Power season 2. They end up in a sort of love triangle that (as if it couldn’t get any weirder) also involves Sauron.
Celebrian has been MIA in Rings of Power, but season 3 is about to introduce Galadriel’s husband, Celeborn, adding another element to that bizarre love triangle from season 2. This will mean that either Celebrian is already alive somewhere and will turn up for Elrond to fall in love with (has he really not met her if he and Galadriel are so close?), or the Galadriels will give birth to their daughter in the near future. That would be even weirder considering Elrond is a whole ancient adult who was kissing his future mother-in-law.
Rings Of Power Is At A Disadvantage Compared To Game Of Thrones
With Elros and Celeborn being introduced in Rings of Power season 3, it will be impossible for the Prime Video TV show to avoid talking about the elephant in the room. The fact that this adaptation seems to have purposely made the dynamics even weirder than they needed to be suggests there is some conscious effort here to make Rings of Power feel a bit more Game of Thrones-like. If the taboo worked well for the HBO fantasy show, perhaps Prime thinks the same will happen for its Lord of the Rings adaptation.
Of course, Rings of Power‘s strange love-triangle-with-uncomfortable-age-differences changes have already been unpopular, and Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings doesn’t have the same sort of reputation as Game of Thrones. These stories aren’t meant to have the same sort of unsettling appeal. Therefore, while Rings of Power may fully embrace the canon complications of its Elven family tree, it’s unlikely to play off as well as what we saw in Game of Thrones. Prime Video is working to play the same game as HBO, but it might not be the right angle to take.