Last week, Amazon started
quietly teasing just where its massive
Lord of the Rings TV show would take place in the Middle-earth timeline. Now, the speculation has been confirmed: We’re heading back into the Age of Númenor.
The launch of Amazon’s social channels for the
upcoming series last month gave us a map—because all good Middle-earth stories start
with a nice map, honestly. It was pretty undetailed, but that didn’t stop it from giving us some vague hints of speculation as to just when the show could be set.
But today, the company launched
a new version of the interactive map that added a pretty significant landmass, before indeed confirming what many
LotR fans had theorized: The show will be set in the Second Age, and the isle of Númenor will play an important role.
For those fans unfamiliar with the vast complexities of Middle-earth history, there are basically four main “Ages” in the timeline:
The Lord of the Rings and
The Hobbit are set in the Third Age (with the former heralding the Fourth Age with the defeat of Sauron), for example, after the battle of the Last Alliance in Mordor and Sauron’s momentary defeat marked the conclusion of the Second Age. So we’re essentially seeing a build-up to that process from the
Lord of the Rings movie saga’s opening—which gave us the Last Alliance’s climactic assault and the death of Elendil, the King of Gondor, with the One Ring passing to his son, Isildur—in this new show.
Or at least, we
might. The Second Age lasted a
very long time (nearly 3,500 years), so while the formation of the Last Alliance of Elves and Men and Sauron’s rise occurs at the tail end of the Age, the addition of Númenor to Amazon’s map at least suggests the show could potentially not follow that—which would’ve been a way to
tie the series more directly into the lineage and iconography of the Peter Jackson saga—but instead chronicle the downfall of the fabled civilization of Man that
Aragorn’s bloodline was descended from.
The map of Middle-earth revealed by Amazon so far. Plenty of space to fill out!
Image: Amazon