\u201cI posit that if Tolkien were to write the novel of the Second Age, he would have condensed the timeline,” McKay said. <\/p>\n
McKay may be too polite to sass the show\u2019s detractors outright, but the playful frustration in his voice spoke to his many years of explaining a simple truth: there is no one \u201cfaithful\u201d adaptation of a timeline.<\/p>\n
And it is a timeline that the showrunners are adapting, for the most part. They have the rights to The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings<\/a>, and its appendices, and the only part of that which really covers the Second Age is the timeline in the appendices. But even so, the showrunners rightly state in their interview that the parts of Tolkien\u2019s legendarium that do go into more detail on the Second Age are few and far between compared to those that cover the First and Third Ages.<\/p>\n In the extended interview, Tolkien scholar Corey Olsen and the showrunners also discuss how keen Tolkien was to include more detail in his appendices, while he was forced by various external constraints to cut much of it out. <\/p>\n “We took all these little clues and thought of them as stars in the sky that we then connected to write the novel that Tolkien never wrote about the Second Age,” Payne said while speaking to Vanity Fair<\/a> in 2022. <\/p>\n Adapting challenging material<\/p>\n The show has managed to get one-off instances of rights to other parts of Tolkien\u2019s work, so rights haven\u2019t been the issue, for the most part. McKay and Payne are confronting the criticism that their show\u2019s timeline compression isn\u2019t faithful to Tolkien\u2019s Second Age by asserting the fact that they are simply adapting material without TV-level detail. Tolkien\u2019s work on the Second Age is wide-ranging, as the showrunners acknowledge, but it is big on broad strokes of narrative and not very detailed in terms of dialogue and character psychology.<\/p>\n If Tolkien had written a novel about the Second Age, he may well have condensed the timeline so as to write a gripping story that kept readers caring increasingly about one consistent set of characters. A novel is far closer to the TV format, and that would have been easier for The Rings of Power showrunners to adapt.<\/p>\n But they didn\u2019t have a novel. They had Tolkien\u2019s entirely unique and generation-spanning legendarium, composed of the archaic Silmarillion, medieval poetry, drafts, and notes. While some argue they should have adapted something more suitable, the downside of that is less Middle-earth on our screens.<\/p>\n How the show alters Tolkien\u2019s timeline<\/p>\n Rings of Power season 3, starting five years after the events of season 2, will see the rise of Sauron\u2019s dark tower, Barad-d\u00fbr. But in the books, this was built a full 200 years before Sauron reached Eregion and manipulated the Elves there into making the Rings of Power, which already happened quite decisively in season 2.<\/p>\n Sauron actually spent 300 years in Eregion before he even started forging the Rings of Power with Celebrimbor, which, perhaps wisely, the show skipped over. The Rings of Power season 2 launched straight into the creation of the rings after Sauron arrived, and ended with the sack of Eregion, which happened in the books nearly 500 years after Sauron arrived.<\/p>\n The show\u2019s N\u00famenor storyline takes place thousands of years after Sauron arrives in Eregion to make the Rings of Power, which fans pointed out in season 1. Some also pointed out that Gandalf arrived in Middle-earth in the Third Age, not the Second, as the show depicts. That is more of a timeline scramble than a compression. Although in late writings Tolkien never published in his lifetime, Tolkien toyed with having some of the Wizards arrive in the Second Age.<\/p>\n The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power season 3 premieres<\/a> on Prime Video on November 11, 2026. Stay tuned to Winter Is Coming for all the latest Middle-earth<\/a> news.<\/p>\n
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