The Rings Of Power Sound Team Layered This Deleted Elvish Incantation Into The Series [Exclusive]
"The Lord of the Rings" and the Beatles are now sorta-kinda connected through Peter Jackson's filmography and the docuseries "Get Back," but don't be alarmed if you're watching Prime Video's "The Rings of Power" and hear what sounds like Satanic backmasking, subliminally inception-ing you with hidden song messages (à la the infamous "Turn me on, dead man" from "The White Album"). That's not Satanic backmasking, silly! It's just a magical mystery incantation of the Elvish variety, layered into the sound design. Supervising sound editor Damian Del Borrello and his team came up with this motif after he sought the aid of a dialect coach for "The Rings of Power."
/Film's Jack Giroux recently spoke with Del Borrello as part of an exclusive interview digging into the behind-the-scenes secrets of the series. After meeting with the dialect coach, Del Borrello said he came away with "a fantastic phrase, which was an incantation mastered by The Stranger [Daniel Weyman] in a scene that actually didn't make the cut." Said phrase then became "a layer within all of the magic elements" in "The Rings of Power." Del Borello elaborated:
"So you hear sort of whispers and that's, I guess, conceptually, that's our version of the Ring. You know, like in the original films when they put the Ring on and they go into the unseen world and they hear the voice of Sauron talking through the Ring. So, the big question in our show was, 'What does that sound like without the ring?' Because that's the connection between the Ring and Sauron, but this all happens way before the Ring's even created."
'What is the sound of Ilúvatar's thoughts?'
The history of Middle-earth is dense, and all the foreign-sounding fantasy names it employs can be a little confusing at times, but if you ever needed to consult a wiki while watching "The Rings of Power," you weren't alone. Del Borrello, for one, said he "read into the depths" of tolkiengateway.net. "I had that tab open on my computer for two and a half years," he said, "and I was always mining that for a bit more information about what we were saying." The lore reinforced "the idea that all magic comes from Ilúvatar, the creator in Middle-earth and in the universe of Tolkien." It sprang from Ilúvatar's thoughts, and the whisper element in the sound design originated from there. Del Borrello added:
"The natural extension of that would be, 'What is the sound of Ilúvatar's thoughts?' It's the magical mystical whispers. And so we worked closely with the dialect coach to pick that right phrase to use and then extend out how we used it and the different ways we recorded it and processed it. There are layers of it and it changes and develops depending on what's happening with the magic, and whether it's mysterious or whether it's dangerous. So that was a fun way that we used that language."
Though the incantation came from a deleted scene, Del Borrello revealed that the phrase used was a hard-to pronounce Elvish version of, "I called to you to work through me, to hear my needs and guide my hands." "I read into it a little bit as it was The Stranger drawing on the power of Ilúvatar to perform some magic," he said.
"The Rings of Power" season 1 is now streaming on Prime Video.