How Does Rings of Power Tie Into the LOTR Timeline?

Amazon’s hotly anticipated “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” shall be a brand-new exploration of the world of Middle-earth. J.R.R. Tolkien’s writings discover hundreds of years of this fictional world’s historical past, giving the artistic workforce an enormous quantity of materials to select from. So how precisely will the new collection match into the Lord of the Rings timeline? It’s a prequel — by a pair of millennia, no much less.

When Does “The Rings of Power” Take Place?

In March 2019, Amazon revealed that “The Rings of Power” can be set in the Second Age of Middle-earth through a pair of tweets that depicted a Second Age-era map and a easy “Welcome to the Second Age.” Tolkien aficionados will acknowledge this setting as an period hundreds of years earlier than the occasions of the authentic Lord of the Rings trilogy throughout a time of nice turmoil in Middle-earth.

Since it is set so lengthy earlier than the trilogy, you will not be seeing many of the acquainted characters you already know and love. No Frodo, no Samwise, no Aragorn, no Éowyn, and so forth. That doesn’t suggest it is going to be fully bereft of acquainted names and faces, although! One of the main characters in the series shall be Galadriel, the royal elf seen as an ethereal and historical being in the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy. Here, she’s hundreds of years youthful and attempting to boost the alarm about impending risks that nobody else appears to see. Elrond, one other main elf character in the authentic trilogy, additionally performs a serious function in the new collection.

The most important half of this period is the act that defines the later adventures of Middle-earth: the forging of the Rings of Power.

“Rings for the elves, rings for dwarves, rings for males, after which the one ring Sauron used to deceive all of them. It’s the story of the creation of all these powers, the place they got here from, and what they did to every of these races,” showrunner Patrick McKay informed Vanity Fair in February. The present additionally plans to cowl different “historical” occasions in Middle-earth, together with the rise of the evil Sauron and the fall of the island kingdom of Númenor.

Is “The Rings of Power” Based on a Book?

The reply to the query of whether or not “The Rings of Power” is predicated on a e book is a bit more difficult. Technically, sure, “The Rings of Power” is based on material that Tolkien wrote — however not in standalone novels. Instead, most of the materials is pulled from the prolonged and dense appendices at the finish of his Lord of the Rings novels. These appendices include detailed “histories” of the Second Age, and people shall be the inspiration for the Amazon collection.

What’s much less clear is how components from different Tolkien texts shall be included and the way a lot of the present shall be invented from scratch. Tolkien did write “historic” prequels, together with “The Silmarillion” and “Unfinished Tales,” which span a number of hundreds of years of Middle-earth historical past. Some components already confirmed to be half of the present, corresponding to the historical past of Númenor, are described in these books, not simply in the appendices of the Lord of the Rings. The showrunners have additionally confirmed that the present’s timeline will compress the occasions of the Second Age as laid out by Tolkein, becoming all of it into about the size of one human lifetime.

“The Rings of Power”‘s first two episodes premiere Thursday evening, Sept. 1. New episodes are launched Fridays.