Maleficent, Dark Lady of the Rings?
I wonder if any of the creators of Sleeping Beauty (1959) ever read The Lord of the Rings (published 1954,1955), because Malevolent, I mean Maleficent, does have a Dark Lord feeling to her, and her castle seems like a scaled down version of The Barad-dur or Isengard, and her evil hordes seem a bit Orcish.
Many species of nonhuman intelligent and often magical beings appear in various fantasy stories. They include elves and fairies, who sometimes are the same species and sometimes two different species, and sometimes only one of them exists in that fantasy world. So some readers of some fantasy stories might imagine that elves and fairies are just two different names for the same species, whether that is correct or not in those particular fantasy stories.
There is no mention of fairies in The Lord of the Rings, but there is speculation in The Hobbit that an ancestor of the Tooks might have married a fairy.
There is a scene where Frodo offers the One Ring of the Dark Lord Sauron, which tempts people with visions of giving them absolute power and slowly turns them evil, to Galadriel, the magical Lady of the Elf realm of Lothlorien, and Galadriel imagines what she could do with the power of the Ring:
“Instead of a Dark Lord, you would have a queen, not dark but beautiful and terrible as the dawn! Tempestuous as the sea, and stronger than the foundations of the earth! All shall love me and despair!”
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/796225-instead-of-a-dark-lord-you-would-have-a-queen
But Galadriel turns down the chance to become the Dark Lady.
And I can imagine a scriptwriter picturing that if Maleficent was in Galadriel's position and accepted the One Ring, she would become far more powerful than a normal fairy and start to become a new Sauron, a Dark Lady. So maybe we could picture Sleeping Beauty (1959) as happening in an alternate universe to The Lord of the Rings and imagine Maleficent as an alternate universe Galadriel who took the ring. share