The Rings Of Power: 8 essential locations you should know before you watch
The A.V. Club takes a detailed look at the most important realms and lands in the new version of Middle-earth
TV Features The Lord of the Rings
Photo: Courtesy of Prime Video
This week, The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power will finally take us back to the Second Age, the era before The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and bring with it a new live-action version of the Middle-earth landscape. Though we’re talking about the same continent and many of the same creatures, the Middle-earth of the series is, politically and sometimes even geographically, very different from the one fans know from Peter Jackson’s films. So, before you dig into the two-part series premiere, we’ve put together a handy guide to some of the most important locations in Middle-earth (and beyond) during the Second Age, because there’s nothing worse than confusing your Eregions and your Rhovanions.
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Literally the first image released for the show was of Valinor – albeit, Valinor in the First Age. That shot of the Two Trees, and the city of Tirion in front of them. It has also been shown in more than one trailer.
Yeah, it’s a part of the prologue sequence.
Can’t really expect bezos’s shills to actually know what they’re talking about
Read the first 2 slides and had to stop so many things wrong……..
I know the timeline of this show is the Second Age, but wasn’t there some side-story in the appendices about the last remnants of Arnor being wiped out in the Northern Wastes? I remember something about snow, ice and wolves.
That was the war against the evil kingdom of Angmar, ruled by the Nazgul Witch King. It’s about 1300 years after this show, but I don’t know how much that matters since they pretty much bunched up the whole second half of the Second Age together.
ARNOR’S LAST REMNANT FELL IN THE THIRD AGE, ~TA1974, SO IT IS VERY UNLIKELY THAT STORY WOULD BE TOLD IN THIS SHOW.
Places I’d like to see:CuivienenGondolinDoriathThe Gates of NightAngbandDor-LominCabed-en-ArasAnyway, there’s some really beautiful official art of these places on the Tolkien wiki and such.
That’s all First Age stuff, I think. The only way they appear in this would be flashbacks.
A map would be helpful, which is why they are typically included in the books. Does anyone know a good map for this era?
https://www.theonering.net/torwp/2019/03/07/105938-amazon-primes-new-map-welcomes-us-to-the-second-age/
try this…
The physical geography shouldn’t be different from the maps in the Lord of the Rings, it’s just a matter of pointing out where they are on the map. Exceptions, of course, for Valinor and Numenor.
I don’t know why I thought this wouldn’t be a slide show.
The lifespan of Númenóreans has nothing to do with “half-elven blood”. Long life is a part of their gift from Valar for their help in defeating Morgoth.
1. There are only a few known half-elves even though all Númenóreans were gifted with long life.2. Being half-elf doesn’t give people hybrid abilities – it gives them the choice to be counted either among elves (eternal life in the Undying Lands) or among humans (mortality = Gift of Men). Half-elves who choose to be counted among humans have their lifespan determined by their human parent, not their elf parent. So Elros (and his descendants like Aragorn) lived longer because they had Númenórean blood, not because they had elven blood.