The soundtrack for Amazon’s Lord of the Rings prequel has afforded composer Bear McCreary a canvas as vast as Middle-earth to play with: Howard Shore-ish riffs, unique orchestral pieces, and increasingly in season two, lots of song work. We already know the lumbering hill-troll Damrod is getting his own heavy metal infused piece this season, and this week, McCreary weaved one of Tolkien’s own poems into a beautiful song to welcome Tom Bombadil to the show. But the composer has a much more obscure, and much more intriguing ditty from the franchise’s adaptive past he wants to make a nod to.
That song? “Where There’s a Whip, There’s a Way” from the Rankin Bass adaptation of Return of the King. “I’m looking. I’m looking for the moment,” McCreary said in a recent Instagram live chat of his desire to bring the song to Rings of Power (via /Film). “It hasn’t happened yet but I would love to make that happen.”
In the 1980 follow-up to the studio’s adaptation of The Hobbit, “Where There’s a Whip, There’s a Way” plays when Sam and Frodo sneak their way into Mordor in disguise, running into Sauron’s armies as they march towards the Black Gate to confront Aragorn’s marshaled forces from Gondor and Rohan. As they encounter the orcs, they sing a song lamenting their own plight: that they’re forced to fight whether they want to or not by their whipmaster and Sauron. Sam and Frodo, mistaken for deserters, get whipped up into the march too, forcing them to find a way to sneak off and continue on to Mount Doom.
It’s a peculiar song and it would be a very interesting one for McCreary to try and incorporate into Rings of Power, but considering the man just gave a giant troll an orchestral metal anthem, it’s not really out of his wheelhouse to attempt to do so. But what is interesting is that, even in this brief song from a nearly 50-year-old adaptation, it touches on something Rings of Power is also playing with in fits and starts: treating the Orcs not as a mindless mass of beasts unyielding in their service to evil, but an actual people with their own sense of agency—one that is being denied by Sauron’s villainy.
Through the frame of Adar in Rings of Power—one of the first corrupted by Morgoth into the Orcish race, and now the leader of what he sees as his “children,” seeking their own land—we’ve already begun to see glimpses of the show humanizing the Orcs as society, even while still treating them as the primary threat right now besides Sauron’s machinations with Celebrimbor. Much controversy has been made of the depiction of seeing an Orc couple with a child in the second season’s three-part premiere, even if that kind of depiction aligns with Tolkein’s own writing about Orc society, and his eventual reflection later in life to treat them as a species with nuance and depth beyond being purely, inherently evil. Given that Adar’s plight is as much about liberating the Orcs from Sauron’s dominion as much as it is going to war with the other mortal races of Middle-earth, a song like “Where There’s a Whip, There’s a Way” could easily fit into McCreary’s soundtrack plans going forward—and offer another intriguing tie to Lord of the Rings‘ adaptive history along the way.
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