When the teaser for The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, a new Amazon Prime series, was released on YouTube in February, an interested party heading to the comment section would have come up against a wall of repeated text. Over and over, in English, Polish, and Russian, thousands of comments read: “Evil cannot create anything new, it can only spoil and destroy what good forces have invented and created.” Each of these thousands of comments attributed this awkwardly phrased statement to J. R. R. Tolkien. Spoiler alert: it’s widely believed to be a misquote.
It’s not without irony that a group of self-anointed Tolkien purists crusading for textual accuracy have played fast and loose with facts. Their imagined antagonists, be they the showrunners or casting agents, are purportedly spoiling and destroying something good, the commenters felt. How? Apparently by casting people of colour.
