New story details for The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power confirm the series will follow the creation of the Rings of Power, bringing many fan-favorite J.R.R. Tolkien characters to live-action for the first time. The new details come from Vanity Fair, which dives deep into the series plot while also revealing The Rings of Power‘s first images.
According to Vanity Fair, the series takes place after the evil god Morgoth has been defeated in a war that almost decimated the entire land. Morgoth’s general and apprentice, Sauron, also vanished after the conflict. Set thousands of years before Frodo and Sam’s journey to destroy the One Ring, the series will start as the elf leader Galadriel hunts down the remaining Morgoth’s minion who still hide in the shadows.
Since The Rings of Power takes place in the past, we’ll be able to see some familiar locations with new eyes. For example, the dwarven kingdom Khazad-dûm will be shown in all its glory long before it becomes the mass grave we see in Peter Jackson’s The Fellowship of the Ring. The Rings of Power will also adapt the story of a sailor named Isildur (Maxim Baldry), who would cut Sauron’s finger during Middle-Earth’s last stand against the agent of darkness. The series will also explore the life of Celebrimbor (Charles Edwards), the elven smith who forges the Rings of Power. Elrond (Robert Aramayo) is also part of the narrative, long before becoming the Lord of Rivendell.
Although The Rings of Power brings many fan-favorite characters to life, the series will also have significant deviations from Tolkien’s original work. While all the events featured in the series take place over thousands of years in the original novels, showrunners Patrick McKay and JD Payne decided to compress it all into a single point in time. As Payne explains it:
“We talked with the Tolkien estate. If you are true to the exact letter of the law, you are going to be telling a story in which your human characters are dying off every season because you’re jumping 200 years in time, and then you’re not meeting really big, important canon characters until season four. Look, there might be some fans who want us to do a documentary of Middle-earth, but we’re going to tell one story that unites all these things.”
Director J.A. Bayona also commented on the series tone, underlining how he used his personal experience to deal with the lingering presence of Sauron, who comes back as a tyrant to torment Middle-Earth. Bayona grew up in Spain, which took decades to recover from a brutal dictatorship that ruled the country for 40 years. As Bayona puts it:
“We had a dictatorship for 40 years, so you notice the repercussions of war and the shadow of the past. I think this is all about the repercussions of war. There is an idea that feels very faithful to Tolkien, which is intuition. Galadriel has an intuition that things are not fixed, and there is still something lurking.”
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power will premiere Friday, September 2 on Prime Video, with new episodes dropping weekly each Friday.
via Collider