A Great Wave: Amazon's LOTR Series
Here's our primer on the Second Age, a time of peace and civil war
“What I might call my Atlantis-haunting,” J.R.R. Tolkien wrote in a letter in 1964, “This legend or myth or dim memory of some ancient history has always troubled me. In sleep I had the dreadful dream of the ineluctable Wave, either coming out of the quiet sea, or coming in towering over the green inlands. It still occurs occasionally, though now exorcized by writing about it. It always ends by surrender, and I awake gasping out of deep water.”
From childhood, Tolkien had this recurring dream of a great Wave that subsumed the land. In The Lord of the Rings, he gives this dream to Faramir. It is also an echo that he articulated explicitly through the Akallabêth, the story of the rise and fall of Númenor, the island realm of a great tribe of humans descended from the half-elven hero Eärendil. Their first king is Elrond’s brother, Elros Tar-Minyatur. There are three ages covered in Tolkien’s legendarium, and the age that most people know about is the Third Age, after the Wave.
The Wave comes near the end of the Second Age, but signifies the beginning of Amazon Prime’s blockbuster foray into Middle-earth, which may cover any time span of the Second Age, if not its entirety. Ever since the billion-dollar “Lord of the Rings” series was announced — part of Jeff Bezos’ commandment to get his streaming brand its own Game of Thrones — there has been speculation about just what the series will entail, since it will not actually be about Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings proper — a Third Age concern. And so a great wave of new mythic constructs is coming that sweeps across a very different Middle-earth...
Amazon Prime first teased the thematic direction of their series two years ago in February 2019 on Twitter, with a map of Middle-earth that included Númenor far west of its shores in the great sea of Belegaer. With this, they included the chants of the Ring Poem: the three rings for elven kings, seven for the dwarf lords, nine for mortal men doomed to die, and the One Ring for the Dark Lord in the land of Mordor, where the shadows lie.
The best way for those unfamiliar with Tolkien’s Silmarillion — his Bible of sorts that covers the origins and early events of his legendarium — to understand the scope and orientation of this series, is to think of it as a prequel, but one that was indeed thought out well before Tolkien wrote his Rings masterpiece. It is a cautionary tale as well as a story of exploration, adventure and redemption.
Importantly, the Second Age begins after the Great War of the Jewels in the First Age — a time of great heroism and tumult that was defined by the Elves’ long struggle against Sauron’s master, Melkor (or Morgoth), the first Dark Lord. Rewarded by the Valar (Tolkien’s version of gods or mighty angels), the Númenóreans are blessed with longer life and greater knowledge.
Among their gifts are the Palantíri (the Seeing Stones), which the Elves of Eldamar, who live in the Undying Lands of the Valar — Aman — crafted for their Númenórean friend, Amandil. These crystal balls enable those who look into them to see across space and time. No doubt, they will play an important role in the series. The Númenóreans are also great mariners, traveling the seas and lands. Amazon Prime’s Lord of the Rings Twitter account currently has the following one-sentence profile description: “A grand journey is defined by its travelers.”
Shot in New Zealand, like Peter Jackson’s LOTR films, we should be ready to see different and distant parts of Middle-earth by land and sea. Intriguingly, the creative team behind the series, led by relative unknowns, former Bad Robot writers J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay, has placed Númenor further south in Middle-earth’s map, due west of the lands below Harad.
[*Spoiler Alert*: from here, we start to reveal more key details about the Second Age.]
Looking at the map, that jut of land resembles the northwest bend of Africa. Tolkien’s Gondor was modeled loosely on the more Mediterranean reaches of Europe, its Minas Tirith and Ithilien drawing some inspirations from Rome and Italy. Tolkien had fun with these allusions, threading a fine line that was just on the edge of direct. For example, Númenor’s name in Quenya is Atalantë, which he intended to be an etymological source for “Atlantis.” He has a few other winks in his Wave myth that help orient us in the ancient world of the Greeks, Romans and Egyptians. Take “Tar-Minyatur,” which subtly calls to mind “Minotaur,” the half bull-man monster who haunts the Labyrinth on the island Crete. Even “Elros” has an ancient Greek feel. The Númenórean city of Rómenna contains “Rome” in its linguistic form. And then there is Ar-Pharazôn, the Númenórean king who leads Númenor to its destruction. It is reminiscent of “Pharaoh,” and indeed Tolkien’s Atlantean myth clearly derives some of its mythological DNA from Exodus, with the Faithful escaping to Middle-earth.
The Second Age also begins with a long peace. Eventually though, after the defeat of Melkor, his pupil Sauron starts to cause trouble in the lands. The Númenóreans are valiant, and help the High Elves and the Grey Elves of Middle-earth fight against the rising shadow of Sauron. In a key war, they help defeat Sauron and capture him, bringing him back to Númenor. This however is a fatal mistake, as Sauron takes advantage of their discontent and desire for immortality. Soon, human sacrifices become part of Númenor’s religious rites, along with debauchery. Here is a good Reddit thread on this darker tone.
Only the Faithful, led by Elendil and his sons Isildur and Anárion, see through Sauron’s treachery. From there, the plot blooms into an even fuller exploration of faith and temptation. I do not want to give away too much more at this time, except to say that civil wars break out due to Sauron’s lies, and that at one point, he appears as Annatar, Lord of Gifts, deceiving his way into men’s hearts, and corrupting the great works of the Elves — especially the Rings of Power.
There are two critical insights into human nature and history that Tolkien made with these stories, that if done right, will make this series incredibly relevant to our own times. One is deception. Lies and distortions of the heart are key to the events of the Second Age, pushing governments and alliances into dire situations. Two is complacency. That is, much is taken for granted, and a just and powerful empire is laid low by its own hubris, and inability to see a darker wave coming, consumed by fears of death, lust for life, and the warping of Sauron.
Not to put too fine a point on this, but the theme of deception — central to Tolkien’s works — speaks to our falls into disinformation and division. And the theme of gradual surrender to evil speaks to how democracies around the world are buckling to techno-social pressures from without, but also from within.
To get more caught up on what is in store for this new chapter in Middle-earth mythologizing (set to premiere in 2022), TheOneRing.net got the exclusive on Amazon Studios’ official synopsis for the series, released seven weeks ago:
Amazon Studios’ forthcoming series 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.
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.
TheOneRing’s contributor Demosthenes also did a neat breakdown of the potential time frame and plot of the series. Finally, some of the casting for the series has also been announced, with several actors coming from diverse national and ethnic backgrounds. This will be a Middle-earth that reflects a wider world of cultures and peoples.
In terms of those roles, many of them will be brand new to the Tolkien universe, since Amazon Studios was able to get the creative license to add new characters and storylines to Middle-earth, as long as they do not subtract or change any existing aspects from Tolkien’s original works.
Next time we will dive deeper into who the existing characters from the Second Age are, and how we think their stories may play out in a TV dramatization. While the Amazon Prime series will clearly fulfill the Game of Thrones bill, it will be in the characters that we find light and redemption.