CONT Then there’s the aspect of the show that churned up a lot of internet controversy around the time of its premiere — the use of multiracial casting to diversify Tolkien’s very Eurocentric source material. “House of the Dragon” attracted some of the same controversy, but it became a bigger deal with “The Rings of Power,” a culture-war signifier, with the casting condemned as an example of Hollywood wokeness betraying authorial intent and celebrated as a blow against the reactionary tendencies of the fantasy genre.

In theory, I’m on the side of the diversifiers. It’s true that Tolkien’s legendarium is a self-conscious attempt to invent a mythology for his beloved England, such that stripping away too much Northern European atmosphere is the equivalent of making a “Black Panther” adaptation set in South Korea or Scandinavia. But it’s also absurd to imagine that a narrative so vast and complex, spanning thousands of only partially mapped-out years, is somehow sullied if every adaptation doesn’t recapitulate the final battles in “The Lord of the Rings,” with its proto-European heroes pitted against darker-skinned Easterlings and Southrons.

Especially when you consider that several thousand years pass between the events of the famous trilogy and the antecedents depicted in “The Rings of Power,” it seems easy enough to imagine diversifications that don’t betray anything essential to Tolkien’s world. If the Hobbits of the Shire are supposed to look like plump Englishmen, for instance, that doesn’t mean that their distant Harfoot cousin-ancestors can’t appear to look more African or Asian. If the people of Gondor seem Greco-Roman, that doesn’t mean their distant Numenorean forebears, based on the myths of Atlantis, shouldn’t be presented as looking more Egyptian or Phoenician. If the core property of elves is their unsurpassed beauty, then why not make the Vanyar look Germanic, but the Noldor and Nandor look South Asian or Ethiopian? And then it’s easy enough to imagine Nordic- or Celtic-looking bad guys, the progenitors of the Hill-men who serve Sauron and his Ringwraiths in the backstory behind “The Lord of the Rings.”

But notice what I’ve done in these extremely nerdy speculations: I’ve evoked a racial reimagining of Tolkien’s peoples (human and nonhuman) that still treats them as peoples, with shared histories and phenotypical traits passed down somewhat similarly to the way that they are in our world, whose distant-past Middle-earth is supposed to embody.

This isn’t what “The Rings of Power” ended up doing. Instead, on the Amazon show each tribe and kingdom is internally multiracial, resembling an elite college campus engineered for maximal diversity. The Numenoreans, who hail from a deliberately set-apart island kingdom, look Asian and African and European. Ditto the Harfoots, all in a tiny population of wanderers who presumably mostly marry one another. With the dwarves and elves, the pattern seems basically the same. On the show, every kingdom and clan, however insular, whether human and nonhuman, boasts the diversity of a United Colors of Benetton advertisement.

Now, one could certainly invent a fantasy world where, for some reason, magical or otherwise, skin color and other physical characteristics are assigned randomly at birth and every family, to say nothing of every domain or principality, is home to a perfect cross-section of the human race. But that kind of invention would need to be part of the world-building, part of the fantasy, and “The Rings of Power” isn’t doing that. It’s just asking us to accept its Benetton-world without any attempt at explanation. And since we can guess that the actual explanation is just that this was the simplest way to do diverse casting, requiring zero world-building effort and minimal risk, it’s a constant reminder that a story set in vanished Numenor or mythical Eregion actually belongs emphatically to America in 2022.