By In some distant, happy future, a day will come when the character I select to give my entire heart to will make it to the end of their series. Maybe he or she will fall in love, maybe find some peace, and perhaps, I shall dare to dream, they’ll get to sail off into the sunset with one very crucial thing… THEIR LIVES. But, alas, that day is not today. And so, it is with a heavy heart that I bid farewell to the greatest character The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power offered to the world and the long-standing object of my affections, an Uruk, an elf, a father of many, the magnificent Adar. Alas, as I knew would happen but could never fully prepare for, in the final episode of The Rings of Power season two, Adar met his death.
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In truth, I had been mentally penning a eulogy for Adar for weeks now. Not because I knew for sure that he would die in The Rings of Power season two’s finale, but because the writing was on the wall. From the clinical perspective of the narrative outline, I can see where the story has left him behind. But there is a reason why we watch fully formed stories and not narrative outlines. And that’s because they bring to us wonderful characters that live and breathe before our eyes, that evolve as they exist on the page or screen.
Specific narrative purpose perhaps had abandoned the good Lord Father, but narrative… Adar still has plenty of that. There is so much story left inside of him, past, present, and future. And that narrative has now slipped away with Adar’s death. It is a sad loss, which I add to the pile of the many stories whose abrupt endings I mourn.
As I said in a different piece about Adar, in the end, Adar’s story is a noble one, steeped in darkness. In The Rings of Power, Adar existed as an endless series of gorgeous contradictions. Victim and Aggressor. Father and Warrior. Fragile and Enduring. Uruk and Elf. A character that is as beautiful, complex, and tragic as Adar is not easily forged in any story, let alone in one where he must stand up against some of the most recognizable characters in fiction. But, as is always the case with Adar, against all odds, he persevered.
Jump to: The Complicated (and Uncomplicated) Heroism of Adar // The Narrative Potential Adar Still Holds // An Outpouring of Adar Love
The Complicated (and Uncomplicated) Heroism of Adar in The Rings of Power
Unexpectedly, given everything we know about The Lord of the Rings, the father of the Uruk had a heart. He planted seeds in the ground to pray that gods who had long abandoned him keep the orcs, or Uruk, safe. Adar shed tears for them when they were felled. He loved his children, as he called them. Adar, it turned out, for all that darkness had touched him, for his gauntlet, and his seeming ruthlessness, was soft. Adar was damaged. He was tired. He was beyond in the throes of PTSD. Mostly, he just wanted a home, a safe place for himself and his family to finally find peace, as the rest of the world tried to stamp them out of existence and punish them for the mere crime of breathing.
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It is said that every good villain is the hero of their own story. But in the end, The Rings of Power‘s Adar was so wonderful because he was not just a hero of his own story, but a hero, point blank, albeit a complicated one that presented in a way that challenged viewers to push beyond their typical definitions of the word. He was also a hero who committed great wrongs. But if we strip away what we know of The Lord of the Rings and our preconceived understandings of who an orc must be and then close our eyes to the physical mottle of “ugly” evil that touches Adar’s being and that of his children’s, beneath all these misdirecting layers, here is what we see…
An innocent being is captured by malice and tortured for many ages. At some point, his deep wish for children, for love, is granted cruelly, but he loves that family nonetheless. He cannot stand to watch them be tormented, so he frees them from their captors, only to be hunted by every other group in the world in which he lives, only to know there is no safe haven for them to exist. Desperate for their peace, he fights the armies that pursue him to create the single place where his children can live without fear. When evil again rises to threaten them, he rushes to try to stamp it out once more despite his own great personal pain.
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Is that not a heroic tale without a caveat, without the prefix “anti-” or, worse, the word “villain” involved? The Rings of Power certainly seemed to invite us to think so, as it introduced to us the notions that Uruk have hearts and names. That they wish to protect one another and their own children from harm. That they deserve the breath of life and a home. Yes, this heroism presents as “Other” and not as simply as the shining armor of the elves and their gleaming swords. But it is easy to be a hero under the latter circumstances and much more complicated to persist in nobility, in any goodness of heart, through darkness.
Undeniably, there is violence involved in Adar’s heroism on The Rings of Power. But Adar’s violence links with his specific aims, limited to what he must do to achieve his ends, not, as the violence against him is, aimed at the widespread destruction of his family. As Sauron tells Adar, the Uruk, and the viewers, in the first episode of season two. “You have nowhere else to turn. The Valar will never forgive you. Elves will never accept you. Men will never look upon you with anything but horror and disgust, a corrupted and ignoble race-worthy only to be hunted and slaughtered.”
If the Uruk truly do have hearts and names, souls, if they are creations of the secret fire, same as any other being, was it not the true villainy of everyone else to turn them into a race worth being only hunted and slaughtered? If so, then rooting for their survival is a worthy action. And Adar’s devotion to them is noble as well. Not just heroic from Adar’s perspective on The Rings of Power, but heroic, full stop.
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Maybe if any one of these races had extended a hand to the Uruk at any point, the violence might have lessened. Maybe, it could have ceased. It seems that if the elves or man had offered sanctuary instead of blades to Adar and the Uruk after Morgoth’s fall, the story of what comes next in Middle-earth would have gone very differently. The series also makes clear that generations of abuse created the Uruk. We see and hear about Morgoth’s abuse of Sauron, and Sauron’s abuse of Adar, and Adar’s desperation to break that cycle. And could breaking age-long cycles of abuse be anything but heroic? (Not to mention that in his efforts to break the chain, Adar stopped Sauron with only the help of a few of his children, a feat no other being in The Lord of the Rings‘ world can truly claim. In doing so, he spared the whole of Middle-earth from Sauron’s evil for a good long time. And no one has ever thanked him for that.)
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Did Adar enact some regrettable, even evil, actions over the course of his story? He did, absolutely. But in most cases, the question “what should he have done?” is a salient one. Allowed men, elves, and dwarves to kill his children without a second thought? Put sympathy for them before their nonexistent empathy for him? Given a thought to nature, when nature had in truth abandoned him? In some cases, especially in cases where an entire world—the very fabric of the universe—is against you, merely existing is brave. And creating a safe place for those you love to exist is noble. This does not excuse Adar the harm he committed to others, which was, at points, harrowing, it certainly does not make that harm good in any way. But it does not, I believe, relegate him to villainy either. In the end, Adar never sought war; he did not push to eradicate elves or men or anyone else, all of whom would have, and did, and will hunt him and the Uruk to the ends of the Middle-earth. Adar just wanted to be left alone, free with his family. He wanted to be at peace.
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These complicated thoughts are the absolute best ones that The Rings of Power brings us. These thoughts, I dare to say, are what allow the show not to just adapt Tolkien’s works but to enhance them. And it is through Adar that they came to exist. Adar’s presence challenged us and forced us to reexamine all our preconceived notions about light and dark in a way that few fictional figures do. His character helped to make the show as great as it is.
The Narrative Potential Adar Still Holds
Adar’s existence brought all this to the narrative, but what does his death bring? Only a fading away of so much potential. Perhaps Adar had come to the end of his narrative position as the opposing force to elves and man. But the complex stories that The Rings of Power has imbued in him could have continued far beyond that conception of his place.
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With Adar’s passing, for instance, Galadriel is the sole bearer of truth about the Uruk. Only she will know now that they have hearts and names and that once someone loved them very much. But will she remember that truth going forward? Will it matter to her? Will she know it as the Uruk fall back into Sauron’s manipulations and eventually succumb to the total thrall of the One Ring? Or will this part of the narrative fade away alongside the Uruk’s freedom from Sauron?
Had Adar lived, he could have borne witness to the tragedy that is watching the Uruk fall back into enslavement, torture, and pure evil. Adar could have held vigil for the Uruk we have come to know in The Rings of Power. He could have fought to reclaim them somehow, as no doubt no one will now do. And allowed them to join “some of every kind” of being, as Tolkien writes, in standing against Sauron during the Last Alliance of Elves and Men. No race deserves a chance to do that, in my opinion, more than the Uruk.
Had he lived, Adar’s very presence would have kept the truth of the Uruk’s depth and their suffering alive for the viewer and the other races of Middle-earth. As mentioned, the addition of a naunce for the Uruk, the anguishing victimhood of their lives, and the idea that they are not somehow “engineered to be only evil,” are some of the powerful concepts The Rings of Power has given us via Adar. To reduce the orcs back into swirling voids of canon fodder as the narrative moves on, to render them simply a group whose deaths we cheer without questioning the impulse… That would be a great shame.
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Adar’s character also brings into sharp relief the incredible shortcomings of the elves and their great many failings. In his interactions with them, we come to see that the elves would rather find unfeeling monsters to slay in the Uruk than hearts to save. And is that not in its way evil? Their hatred and lack of empathy for beings “less pure” than themselves indeed has long blinded them in a way that is difficult to see without Adar. Not to mention that no The Rings of Power elf on our screen has ever, at the most basic level of compassion, acknowledged that Adar and the Uruk suffered great torture at Sauron’s hands (and their own) without outright dismissing it… Let alone given any credence to the obvious truth before them that Adar was basically a prisoner of war.
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Again, only Galadriel seems to come some way in repairing her past mistakes in The Rings of Power season two. Throughout the episodes, she learns enough to say Uruk instead of orc and to acknowledge Adar has children and not slaves. But will she hold herself and others to account with it after Adar’s death? Had Adar continued to exist, his presence would have been directly confronting to the elves. It may have forced them to continue to evolve and fix some of their prejudices and near-sighted beliefs. It could have helped them become a force for good that is truly bright.
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Not to mention, in my opinion, there’s nothing more delicious than seeing characters who were once in opposition forced to exist peaceably. I, for one, would have loved to witness the exquisite tension that would have come to life as Adar wrestled with reassimilating (or not) to the realities of elven existence and the continued exploration of the complex and painful dynamics between him and his kind. Arondir and Adar, too, might have had a much truer reckoning with one another if Adar had more episodes to exist. And that feels to me like a story worth delving into.
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Beyond this, there’s also so much we still don’t know about Adar. So many fascinating questions that have gone unanswered. Why is it that Adar wanted children? Why could he not have had them without Sauron? What befell him in Sauron’s hands? In truth, what does it mean that he is the father of Orcs? What happened to the other Moriondor? When did Adar see the sage blossoms at Beleriend? At what point did he learn Galadirel’s Telerin name? And how did he know Melian? When did he study Rumil? What did he mean when he said there are so many lies in Middle-earth that need to be untangled? Does the song of Valinor still call to him in his heart? The Rings of Power teased so much depth in Adar that surely it could have continued exploring for episodes to come.
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And ultimately, there seems, to me, something so intrinsically unfair about Adar’s death. And I know that the fates of characters rarely rely on fairness. I know that. But despite this, after all that torture, after all that pain, after all that enduring, to simply end at Sauron’s feet, to die at the will of his abuser and the hands of his children, it hurts my soul. The symmetry of death might have been right for the narrative, absolutely Sauron’s idea of a payback, but for this character whose pain on pain on pain culminated only with more pain… It seems an unfitting end. I wish, if we couldn’t have had Adar’s continued life, we might have had one more shot of his body lying in the sunlight after the battle, at peace in death, if nowhere else. I wish that sage blossoms would grow alongside him.
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To conclude, The Rings of Power‘s Adar is a character like no other. Adar endured much. More than anyone in Middle-earth, perhaps. He never got to see his children at peace. He never got to hear the song of Valinor in his heart. In so many ways, Adar was a victim of terrible tragedies. He was a survivor of torment and torture. But, although pain after pain was inflicted upon Adar, goodness remained in Adar, and he was driven at the core by love. Though in his own world, Adar was alone, in ours, many came to cheer for him, think about him, and love him.
And so we say, namárië. In our hearts, Adar will always find new life, in defiance of death.
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Nermeen Nabil Khear