![]() Tolkien was meticulous in his world building – to the extent the stories sometimes feel like an afterthought – and the production team have, Payne says, “worked in conjunction with world-renowned Tolkien scholars and the Tolkien estate to make sure that the ways we connected the dots were Tolkienian and gelled with the experts’ and the estate’s understanding of the material.” Luckily, the production team won’t have to make things up as they go. It seems imperative, then, that the show find a hook stronger than filling gaps in canon, and that the multiple storylines promised are more than just a very expensive lesson in Middle-earth history. The last stand of Elves and Men, the fall of the Atlantis-like city of Númenor, and even the forging of the 20 eponymous rings (nine for mortal men, seven for the dwarf lords, three for the Elves, and one for Sauron itself) are all pivotal to the history of Middle-earth, but is it essential that we see them on screen? Prequels are notoriously difficult things to pull off, however – Star Wars, Alien and JK Rowling’s Wizarding World have all floundered when diving into backstory – and the success of The Rings of Power is tied up in how much viewers want to know about what came before. The billion dollars Amazon is reportedly investing in the show feels like a lot of money to spend on what’s effectively a prequel – after all, we already know that, in a few thousand years, the Dark Lord Sauron will be vanquished, the One Ring destroyed in the fires of Mount Doom. ![]() #The lord of the rings ring saying tvThe new Lord of the Rings TV show is undeniably influenced by Peter Jackson's movies. Will bringing Harfoots (the diminutive ancestors of the Hobbits) into the mix be enough to make us nostalgic for those good old days back in the Shire with Frodo and Sam? Prequel opportunities ![]() Where Frodo, Gandalf and Gollum were famous long before Elijah Wood, Ian McKellen and Andy Serkis played them on screen, the key players in the Second Age are familiar only hardcore fans of Tolkien’s ‘expanded universe’.Īmazon is therefore gambling that enough fans of Jackson’s movies will join them on the journey – and that they’ll invest in a load of characters they don’t really know. The fact that many fans of Jackson’s movies will have never read The Silmarillion or those appendices makes The Rings of Power a very different proposition to the movies.Įven before Jackson’s films, The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers and The Return of the King were novels beloved by millions, effectively set texts for adolescence and the blueprint for epic fantasy storytelling. ![]() “As long as we’re painting within those lines and not egregiously contradicting something we don’t have the rights to, there’s a lot of leeway and room to dramatize and tell some of the best stories that ever came up with.” “There’s a version of everything we need for the Second Age in the books we have the rights to,” added co-showrunner Patrick McKay. We do not have the rights to The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, The History of Middle-earth, or any of those other books.” “We have the rights solely to The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, The Return of the King, the appendices, and The Hobbit,” showrunner JD Payne told Vanity Fair. These appendices will form the basis of the new season. In the meantime, edited highlights had found their way into the appendices of Return of the King when it was published in 1955. To paraphrase the venerable Master Yoda, a page turner it was not, and the book was only published (edited by Tolkien’s son, Christopher) after the author’s death. One thing it isn’t, however, is an adaptation of The Silmarillion, the sprawling collection of stories from the First and Second Ages of Middle-earth, that Tolkien originally intended as a follow-up to The Hobbit in the late-1930s. The Rings of Power – “ a title that we imagine could live on the spine of a book next to JRR Tolkien’s other classic s,” the showrunners claim – is not a remake, but it is based on the works of JRR Tolkien. Don't expect to see any Hobbits in The Rings of Power – they don't turn up until the Third Age of Middle-earth.
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