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Prime Video’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power brings to screens for the very first time the heroic legends of the fabled Second Age of Middle-earth’s history. This epic drama is set thousands of years before the events of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and will take viewers back to an era in which great powers were forged, kingdoms rose to glory and fell to ruin, unlikely heroes were tested, hope hung by the finest of threads, and the greatest villain that ever flowed from Tolkien’s pen threatened to cover all the world in darkness. Beginning in a time of relative peace, the series follows an ensemble cast of characters, both familiar and new, as they confront the long-feared re-emergence of evil to Middle-earth. From the darkest depths of the Misty Mountains, to the majestic forests of the elf-capital of Lindon, to the breathtaking island kingdom of Númenor, to the furthest reaches of the map, these kingdoms and characters will carve out legacies that live on long after they are gone. (synopsis courtesy Paste Magazine)
The idea of heading back to Middle-earth is intoxicating in any form.
But the idea of going back to this strange and mystical, and yet comfortingly familiar place, is all the more exciting as The Rings of Power beckons because we are being taken to a time before The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, so much earlier in fact that it’s a whole new time, known as the Second Age we are going to see, albeit one with familiar faces, places and sensibilities (tales of the Second Age never featured in any book but rather is drawn from extensive notes penned by Tolkien that form appendices to The Lord of the Rings).
Entertainment Weekly (EW), in an exclusive look at the upcoming fantasy blockbuster of a show, explains how the show’s creators and showrunners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay, decided they didn’t simply want to do a prequel of either The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings; rather they wanted to draw on the Second Age mythology, a time EW describes as occurring “thousands of years before Bilbo or Frodo Baggins were even born, but the era includes some of Middle-earth’s most significant events, from the forging of the rings to the rise of the evil Sauron.”
“We were not interested in doing a show about the younger version of the same world you knew, where it’s a little bit of a prequel,” McKay explains. “We wanted to go way, way, way back and find a story that could exist on its own two feet. This was one that we felt hadn’t been told on the level and the scale and with the depth that we felt it deserved.”
It’s an exciting and appealing approach that has fruition in the form of the $1billion The Rings of the Power which arrives on Prime Video on 2 September.