With possible spoilers ahead, up to episode three.

Tolkien loved English in such a way that he infused his world with the poetry of it to evoke a magical and beautiful imagined past. If you adapt his works for film, that magic acquires a grand visual canvas, but the soul of it must still lie in the words the characters speak. This is the nature of the task.

After the first episode of The Rings of Power, I held high hopes that where Peter Jackson preferred an enthusiastic and implausible fight to a well-turned phrase, perhaps show-runners J.D. Payne & Patrick McKay might, if not elevate the latter, at least find room for both. With almost Tolkienesque declarations like Elrond’s “She has passed beyond my sight” and Thondir’s desperate “Night is closing in. How long can living flesh endure where even sunlight fears to tread?”, there seemed ample hope for a linguistically sensitive adaptation. With the elves’ trilling of Rs my enthusiasm reach a peak – this is just how Tolkien spoke the words he wrote and it brings them to life!

There is much else in the series to celebrate. I’m delighted by the magnificence of Morfydd Clark’s both gritty and elegant Galadriel. Robert Aramayo’s rendition of Elrond is not so stiff as Hugo Weaving’s and much more compelling for it. The whimsically rustic nomad proto-Hobbit Harfoots are a fine setting for plucky heroine Nori Brandyfoot (Markella Kavenagh), who delightfully upstages their unlikely leader Lenny Henry (Sadoc).

By episode three, however, whatever enthusiasm I held for the use of English in the show has diminished and is at serious risk of departing into the Far West. After the dinner table discussion when fêted Numenorian warrior Elendil inquires of his son “Looking for a promotion, cadet?” and the teenaged Isildur replies, “I was thinking I might defer”, continuing later “Is this really so tragic?”, I fear that whatever care was taken with earlier scripts has now been set aside to be replaced with a smorgasbord of Americanized anachronisms. Later his daughter Eärien interjects “Father, I made apprentice … Isildur convinced me to reapply”. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph in a taxicab! Did you send the guild your official transcript and GRE scores too?!

My hope now is that a renewed delight in the careful use of words soon settles upon the writing team and inspires them to craft some dialogue the better to evoke and delight in the Middle-Earthen setting.