It is now confirmed that the Lord of the Rings TV series will take place during Middle Earth’s Second Age – that’s thousands of years before Bilbo Baggins, Golem or Aragorn ever existed! Moreover, the end of said age was a full millennium before the Wizards (Gandalf, Saruman, et al.) even arrived in Middle Earth, which makes the series a prequel in an epochal sense.

Indeed, the latest version of Amazon's series-era map not only confirms the show’s time period, stating, “Welcome to the Second Age,” but bears another bountiful clue: the five-pointed-star-shaped southwest island kingdom of Númenor.

Given Amazon’s tweeted teases, which recalls tropes connected to the Ring of Power, one might further deduce that the Lord of the Rings series will specifically chronicle those events. Pertinently, the sporadically posted lines recall the story of how Sauron deceived the kingdoms of Elves, Men and Dwarves with rings of power that he secretly controlled with the One Ring; a story famously told in The Fellowship of the Ring film prologue by Cate Blanchett's Galadriel.

We could also take this to mean that the Lord of the Rings TV show might showcase the formation of Gondor and the era in which Sauron’s insidious plot first came to a head; events that were briefly chronicled in Tolkien's posthumously-published quasi-Biblical Middle Earth chronicle, The Silmarillion, specifically in the section titled "Akallabêth."

An ancient kingdom of Men with long lifespans, Númenor flourished throughout much of the Second Age until the initial incursions of Sauron, which eventually led to the kingdom’s legendary fall and Elendil’s arrival on the mainland, where he eventually founded the kingdom of Gondor.



The name on that map was “Calenardhon,” which was the ancient original name of the pastoral plains of the region that we know as the kingdom of Rohan (founded in 2510 in the Third Age), which we saw on magnificent display in the Rings Trilogy’s 2002 middle act, The Two Towers. Additionally, the familiar sight to Rohan’s south, the great kingdom of Gondor, was nowhere to be seen on the map. This was a crucial clue, since Gondor (along with Northern Kingdom Arnor,) was founded by King Elendil and his sons during the Second Age of Middle Earth in 3320, setting up a climactic confrontation in 3441 between "The Last Alliance of Elves and Men" against Sauron and his evil army from Mordor – again, as depicted in the Fellowship prologue.

Consequently, with the Lord of the Rings series now confirmed to take place in the Second Age, speculation can begin on how it might fill in the gaps of the first war over the One Ring, potentially showcasing movie prologue characters like King Elendil, his son and eventual One Ring-owner, Isildur, as well as the powerful high-born Elven king, Gil-galad. Moreover, it appears that we might finally get to see Sauron himself as an actual character, rather than a giant irritated flaming eye!

Denofgeek