More About Amazon's Questionable Foray Into Middle-Earth

 With the school year finally over, I am again able to turn my attention to Rings of Power and all of that nonsense. I mean, it may be good, but I'm very skeptical. 

I haven't yet had a chance to look through the latest information dump, but don't worry, I'll be glancing through that in a couple of weeks. 

But as I was thinking about this while driving, a thought suddenly occurred to me. 

Lots of people have been citing a letter that Tolkien wrote to a fan. (I honestly don't remember if the showrunners were among them, and I'm not hunting for that now.) Here's the text of the letter:

Galadriel, like all the other names of elvish persons in The Lord of the Rings, is an invention of my own. It is in Sindarin form (see Appendices E and F) and means 'Maiden crowned with gleaming hair'. It is a secondary name given to her in her youth in the far past because she had long hair which glistened like gold but was also shot with silver. She was then of Amazon disposition and bound up her hair as a crown when taking part in athletic feats. [Source - Letter 348]

I could point out that this letter still doesn't give Amazon's new nonsense much of a pass with what they've been doing for a variety of reasons, but I'm going to focus on just one. 

These are the pictures of Galadriel from Rings of Power so far:

Why does the chainmail around her face look so tattered in this one? Chainmail doesn't tatter like cloth does.

This looks so unnatural...

Notice it? Her hair. None of these pictures show her hair how "bound like a crown" like Tolkien described it for when she was "taking part in athletic feats". Maybe in that one where she has the cloth-chainmail headgear, but we can't see. So why not? That's something so easy to arrange, and it would probably earn you more respect in the eyes of the fans. It would be a point where you can say, "See, here's what Tolkien definitely said, and we definitely followed this, and you can see it clearly."

Admittedly, this is a minor point. I suppose the showrunners would say something like, "It's showing her growth from hotheaded warrior youth to wise magic user" (I still think that's wrong, but I'll argue against that some other time). In and of itself, not having the proper hair, or using it to show something interpretive, is a minor point. My issue with this show is that they seem to be relying too heavily on what they can do, rather than what they should do. "Tolkien never said Galadriel didn't fight, therefore we're definitely going to have fighting in a war be a major part of her character." That sort of thing. And there's a lot of it--far more than, "This is what Tolkien did say, so this is what we're doing." They seem to be relying too heavily on what they aren't forbidden to do, rather than on what they should do.