Prime Video released a ton of information about their upcoming television series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power in a new piece published by Vanity Fair.
In the puff piece for the show, Vanity Fair reveals all the shows’ plot lines will revolve around the forging of the rings.
One of the series’ showrunner Patrick McKay explained, “Rings for the elves, rings for dwarves, rings for men, and then the one ring Sauron used to deceive them all. It’s the story of the creation of all those powers, where they came from, and what they did to each of those races.”
One of the main stories will follow Galadriel, who will warn those around her that the evil of the First Age, presumably Morgoth, was not fully defeated.
Those warnings will apparently lead her to be cast adrift on a raft in the Sundering Seas with a man named Halbrand, an original character for the show.
An image in the article also describes Galadriel as “commander of the Northern Armies.”
Another thread the show will follow will be about a group of Hobbits called Harfoots. In the prologue to The Fellowship of the Ring, Tolkien described the Harfoots stating, “Before the crossing of the mountains the Hobbits had already become divided into three somewhat different breeds: Harfoots, Stoors, and Fallohides.”
“The Harfoots were browner of skin, smaller, and shorter, and they were beardless and bootless; their hands and feet were neat and nimble; and they preferred highlands and hillsides,” he added.
Later in the prologue, Tolkien wrote, “The Harfoots had much to do with Dwarves in ancient times, and long lived in the foothills of the mountains. They moved westward early, and roamed over Eriador as far as Weathertop while the others were still in Wilderland. They were the most normal and representative variety of Hobbit, and far the most numerous. They were the most inclined to settle in one place, and longest preserved their ancestral habit of living in tunnels and holes”
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This group of Harfoots in The Rings of Power, which includes two women played by Megan Richards and Markella Kavenagh will “encounter a mysterious lost man.”
Vanity Fair also detailed the Harfoots thrive “on secrecy and evading detection” and will “play out a kind of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead story in the margins of the bigger quests.”
A third storyline will follow a silvan elf named Arondir and his forbidden romance with a human villager named Bronwyn.
The show also plans to show Celebrimbor crafting the various rings the show revolves around.
It will also see Elrond, described as a “canny young elven architect and politician,” come “to prominence in the mystical capital of Lindon.”
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Prime Video also revealed that the series will also feature “a sailor named Isildur.” Isildur is the man who used the shards of Narsil to cut the One Ring from Sauron’s hand.
Finally, they detailed that Sauron’s presence will loom over the show and will culminate “in his resurrection as a tyrant.”
Unlike Tolkien’s The Silmarillion and the appendices of The Lord of the Rings, the series will not take place over thousands of years during the Second Age. Instead it will be compressed to a single point in time.
Showrunner JD Payne explained the decision behind this, “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,” he added.
The Lord of the Rings; The Rings of Power’s official synopsis states, “Prime Video’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power brings to screens for the very first time the heroic legends of the fabled Second Age of Middle-earth’s history.”
“This epic drama is set thousands of years before the events of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and will take viewers back to an era in which great powers were forged, kingdoms rose to glory and fell to ruin, unlikely heroes were tested, hope hung by the finest of threads, and the greatest villain that ever flowed from Tolkien’s pen threatened to cover all the world in darkness,” it continues.
“Beginning in a time of relative peace, the series follows an ensemble cast of characters, both familiar and new, as they confront the long-feared re-emergence of evil to Middle-earth. From the darkest depths of the Misty Mountains, to the majestic forests of the elf-capital of Lindon, to the breathtaking island kingdom of Númenor, to the furthest reaches of the map, these kingdoms and characters will carve out legacies that live on long after they are gone,” the synopsis concludes.
The series arrives on Prime Video on September 2, 2022.
What do you make of these new plot details for The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power?