LOOK WHO'S TOLKIEN NOW

WITH THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE RINGS OF POWER, AMAZON IS TAKING US BACK TO MIDDLE-EARTH. WE GET THE LOWDOWN ON THE BIGGEST TV SHOW IN HISTORY

- RICHARD EDWARDS

CHANCES ARE YOU’VE got a version of this story on your bookshelf, though you may not have read it. When The Return Of The King, the final instalment of JRR Tolkien’s now legendary The Lord Of The Rings trilogy, was published in 1955, it came with extensive appendices. These colossal footnotes provided a crash course in Middle-earth history to complement the story, and now they provide the inspiration for Amazon’s mega-budget fantasy TV series The Rings Of Power.

“The appendix that comes after The Lord Of The Rings is basically like a historical chronicle,” producer Belén Atienza tells SFX. “It’s like reading a history book where a king here did this, or this is where the battle of that happened. We weren’t really worried about people knowing the broad strokes of the story, because everyone knew the broad strokes of The Lord Of the Rings movies – and in this case people know even less!”

If you’ve struggled your way through The Silmarillion, you can now breathe a sigh of relief. While certain pivotal events in the appendices appeared in that distinctly non-page-turny history of early Middle-earth, The Rings Of Power isn’t quite so hung up on Silmarils and creation myths.

Instead, the new show zeroes in on the Second Age of Middle-earth, millennia after Morgoth (Tolkien’s answer to Satan) was banished to the Void, but around 3,000 years before Frodo Baggins left the Shire on a quest to dispose of some troublesome jewellery, and bring the Third Age to a close. Remember when Galadriel explained that “History became legend. Legend became myth,” in the introduction to The Fellowship Of The Ring? We’re about to see those legends and myths.