Rings of Power

SECTION: Why Tolkien Never Wrote the Second Age

If you want to read the First Age, Tolkien left you stories. "The Children of Húrin" runs the length of a short novel. "Beren and Lúthien" exists in prose and in verse, and the verse version goes on for thousands of lines. Tolkien rewrote the Fall of Gondolin three different times across thirty-five years. Whatever else you want to say about that material, it's pretty close to finished writing. People with names, kingdoms with personalities, arguments happening out loud.

The Rings of Power is set in the Second Age. What do we find when we go looking for what Tolkien wrote about that?

Well, what you'll find is a list.

It's called the Tale of Years. It sits in Appendix B at the back of "The Return of the King", and it's exactly what it sounds like. A date, then a sentence. Eregion founded. Sauron forges the One Ring. Celebrimbor slain. Three thousand four hundred and forty-one years of history, logged at about the pace of a ship's manifest. That list is the only year-by-year Second Age chronology Tolkien ever produced, and he put a warning at the head of it.

"Of events in Middle-earth the records are few and brief, and their dates are often uncertain."

A lot of those dates are guesses. Approximations. The early ones especially. The most authoritative document we have for this era arrives with a note from its own author saying the numbers are soft.

There is one finished prose account, and it's a chapter. "Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age," is tucked at the back of "The Silmarillion". It covers Sauron's arrival in Eregion, the forging of the Rings, the One Ring, the drowning of Númenor, the Last Alliance and Sauron's first defeat - and it gets through all of that in roughly twenty pages. Three thousand years of history get summed up, somewhere in the middle of it, in a pretty flat sentence from Tolkien where he says, "Thus ended the Second Age."

That chapter wasn't published by Tolkien either. Christopher Tolkien assembled it after his father died, out of fragments and drafts that were never in a settled state.

We also have "Unfinished Tales", where the Second Age material sits under the heading "The History of Galadriel and Celeborn," and here Christopher Tolkien is fairly blunt about what we get. He writes that there's no part of the history of Middle-earth more full of problems than the story of Galadriel and Celeborn. He says his father's ideas about her were always in a state of flux, and he means that literally. Tolkien rewrote who Galadriel was, morally, more than once across the nineteen-fifties, sixties and seventies, and he died in 1973 without ever landing on a definitive version. So that chapter isn't a history. It's a folder of drafts that disagree with each other, printed with all the disagreements left in.

And there's another interesting piece here that I think about. In 2022, two months after the show premiered, a book called "The Fall of Númenor" came out, edited by Brian Sibley. It contains no new Tolkien. It was a curation - the Akallabêth, plus the relevant passages from "The Silmarillion", plus pieces of "Unfinished Tales", plus letters, all arranged in chronological order so a general reader could sit down and read the Second Age front to back for the first time. So that tells us something. The Tolkien Estate's own publishers went to the shelf, decided there was no single Second Age story a normal person could pick up and read, and manufactured one out of editing.

So before we grade or judge a single thing the show did, this is where we have to start. For most of what happens across those three and a half thousand years, there's nothing to check the show against - no contradiction to point at, and no confirmation either. Just a blank.

That blank is where a lot of the emotion lives.

SECTION: The Rights Wall: Why Sauron Couldn't Be Annatar

I guess to organize our thoughts, we'll need a rubric. Let's use a simple one with three settings. Straight from the text. Defensible extrapolation from something thin. Or invented outright. I struggle with most arguments about this show because people only have two settings, faithful and unfaithful. I don't think the material neatly sorts into two piles.

The three settings in our rubric do very different work. Straight from the text means you can point at a sentence and read it out. Defensible extrapolation means the text hands you a real person or a real fact, and the show builds a scene on top of it that Tolkien never wrote but doesn't rule out either. The third setting means there's nothing underneath it at all. Only that last one is a departure in any strict sense. Even then, I don't think this is automatically a fault, because you can't break a rule nobody ever wrote down.

There's another dynamic that's foundational to all of this that isn't a creative decision at all. It's a contract.

In 2017 Amazon bought television rights to Tolkien for a reported two hundred and fifty million dollars. That number got repeated everywhere. The terms got a lot less attention. The deal covers "The Lord of the Rings", "The Hobbit", and the appendices at the back of "The Lord of the Rings". That's the whole shelf. It doesn't include "The Silmarillion". It doesn't include "Unfinished Tales". It doesn't include the twelve volumes of "The History of Middle-earth", which is the collected drafts and abandoned versions Christopher Tolkien published across the eighties and nineties.

Worth noting here that I don't have any special knowledge of arrangements Amazon may have with the Tolkien Estate, so I'm just going off of research I can find online.

In practice that means something that's a bit tough to deal with. If something happens only in "The Silmarillion", and Appendix B doesn't separately mention it, the show legally can't put it on screen. Whether anybody in the writers' room wanted to is beside the point.

The name Annatar is the cleanest example. In Tolkien, Sauron comes to Eregion around the year twelve hundred of the Second Age wearing a fair form and calling himself Annatar, which is Quenya for Lord of Gifts - anna, gift, plus tar, lord. He claims to be an emissary sent to help the Elves who'd stayed behind in Middle-earth. Basically an angel of the Powers, offering consultancy. Gil-galad and Elrond take one look at him and refuse him entry to Lindon. Celebrimbor's smiths in Eregion let him in.

That's a great scene. It's also, for the purposes of a television contract, radioactive. The name Annatar appears in "The Silmarillion". It does not appear in Appendix B.

Which is probably why the show gave us Halbrand. A man washed up on a raft in the Sundering Seas, claiming a throne in the Southlands, traveling with Galadriel for most of a season before the reveal. There is no Halbrand in Tolkien, and he isn't a misreading of one either - he's a legal bridge, an original identity built to carry Sauron's deception through a season and a half until the show could earn its way to a name it wasn't allowed to start with. By Season 2 he's in the golden Elf-form, introducing himself as Annatar, and the show has effectively walked around the wall.

The same pressure explains the Southlands. Sauron fortifying Mordor is completely canonical - Barad-dûr begun around the year one thousand of the Second Age, finished in sixteen hundred, the same year as the One Ring. But "the Southlands" isn't a named kingdom of Men with its own politics and its own claimant king. Tolkien never used that name for that region. The show needed a place, the available maps and names were thin or off-limits, and it built one.

And we'll see what happens when we reach the biggest event of the Age.

Possible spoiler alert here.

Will the show be able to dramatize the Downfall of Númenor the way Tolkien wrote it? That account is the Akallabêth, and the Akallabêth is in "The Silmarillion". As far as we know, all the show gets is the compressed outline in Appendix B, and maybe some privileges granted by the Tolkien Estate.

Anyway, a real slice of what people call the show's made-up material is substitution rather than invention - stand-ins for things Tolkien did write and this production simply isn't holding the paper for. Which doesn't make the stand-ins good, but it does make them a different category, and worth separating out before we go any further.

SECTION: Appendix B's 1,600 Missing Years

Alright - now for the departure the show doesn't deny making.

I think it's going to be helpful to lay the real chronology out first.

Eregion is founded around the year 750 of the Second Age. Sauron shows up as Annatar around twelve hundred. The smiths of Eregion forge the Rings of Power between fifteen hundred and fifteen ninety. The Three Elven Rings - Narya, Nenya and Vilya - are finished in fifteen ninety by Celebrimbor's people working alone. Sauron forges the One Ring in the fires of Orodruin in sixteen hundred, and the instant he puts it on, every Elf wearing one of the others feels him in their head and takes theirs off. War breaks out in sixteen ninety-three. Eregion is sacked in sixteen ninety-seven, and Celebrimbor is tortured for the location of the Three Rings and killed. Elrond retreats and founds Rivendell that same year.

Then the list keeps going for another seventeen hundred years. The Nazgûl appear in twenty-two fifty-one. Sauron surrenders himself to Ar-Pharazôn in thirty-two sixty-two and gets shipped to Númenor as a prisoner, which works out extremely well for him. Númenor drowns in thirty-three nineteen. The Last Alliance forms in thirty-four thirty, wins at Dagorlad in thirty-four thirty-four, and finally breaks Sauron in thirty-four forty-one.

So, the arithmetic. From the sack of Eregion to the drowning of Númenor is one thousand six hundred and twenty-two years. From Annatar walking through Eregion's gate to Celebrimbor's death is four hundred and ninety-seven years. The forging of the Rings alone takes ninety years - longer than most human lifetimes, treated in the text as one continuous piece of work.

And the show puts Eregion, the Rings, the fall of Eregion and Númenor's corruption inside one continuous story, with the same faces in it from beginning to end. Elendil is alive and worrying about Númenor while Celebrimbor is still at the forge. In Appendix B those two men are separated by more than one thousand five-hundred years.

J.D. Payne, one of the two showrunners, has been completely upfront about why. Do it by the letter and you're recasting or killing your human characters every hundred to two hundred years, every time the story jumps. Isildur isn't born until the back half of a multi-season show. Númenor's political collapse and the ring-forging can never be in the same room. So they are collapsing it. They took the landmarks of the Second Age - Annatar, the Rings, the fall of Eregion, the corruption of Númenor - and treated them as things that happen inside one generation's lifetime instead of across three millennia.

And the Tolkien Estate reportedly signed off on exactly that, on the reasoning that what mattered was the flow of the story and the order of events, not the dates.

There's another piece of the compression the showrunners' argument doesn't cover, because it isn't about squeezing years inside the Second Age. It's about reaching past the end of it. The show's Stranger falls out of the sky in episode one, and season two confirms him as Gandalf, or "Grand Elf". But Appendix B puts the wizards' arrival in the Third Age, maybe a thousand years in, sent because Sauron has already lost the Ring and his body and his shadow is only beginning to grow back. That's a mission that only makes sense once the Second Age is over. There is an asterisk, though. In a note written late in his life, Tolkien toyed with two of the five wizards, the Blue ones, arriving in the Second Age around sixteen hundred to work against Sauron in the East. So a wizard in the Second Age has a thin, late source. Gandalf is the one that note leaves out. Moving a human lifetime around inside an Age is considered time compression. But moving Gandalf across the line between two Ages is quite a stretch. It is placing a dated event from Tolkien's own appendix on the wrong side of a war the show hasn't even gotten to yet.

There's another complication here, though.

All the dates are Tolkien's own estimates. That's what the warning at the head of the chronology is for, and it covers the early ones hardest. So, "the show got the math wrong", is a weaker charge than it sounds, because the math was never hard in the first place. But the complication only reaches the numbers. The shape of the Age is a different matter. Whatever the exact years, Tolkien built the Second Age as an era where Elves outlast dynasties, where a single project takes ninety years, where the whole tragic point is that Men die and Elves keep going and the gap between them widens until it breaks something. Compress it into one lifetime and you don't really get the dates wrong. You get the feeling of the Age wrong - the sense of how much time is going by, which might be the only thing that makes the Second Age worth telling at all.

So here we hit a layered verdict. An acknowledged departure, argued for in public, approved by the Estate, and still a real loss. All of those are true at the same time.

SECTION: Did Galadriel Ever Command an Army?

Now let's discuss Galadriel.

The show opens on Galadriel leading soldiers across the ice at the top of the world, hunting Sauron, driven by her brother Finrod's death. I've rewatched the first episode a few times and it's a striking image. Let's take the two halves of it separately.

The ferocity is real. In Unfinished Tales Tolkien writes that Galadriel "grew to be tall beyond the measure even of the women of the Noldor; she was strong of body, mind, and will, a match for both the loremasters and the athletes of the Eldar in the days of their youth." That's a woman who could out-argue the scholars and out-run the athletes in the same afternoon. In a late note, written in the last year of his life, Tolkien goes further and calls her "of Amazon disposition," and describes her binding up her hair like a crown when she took part in athletic feats.

But where and when does that Galadriel live? Valinor, in her youth, before the Exile, before the Noldor ever crossed to Middle-earth. Tolkien is describing a young woman among her own people, at games, in the Blessed Realm, and he's describing her that way in a passage about her childhood. It's a long way from there to an army commander in the field two ages later.

The record does give her a Second Age, though, and it's a substantial one. She and Celeborn move east out of Lindon. A late draft - one Tolkien wrote in 1973, the last year of his life - has them helping to found Eregion itself, then leaving when they grow mistrustful of Annatar. She makes contact with the Silvan Elves in the vale of Anduin, and what comes out of that is Lothlórien, which she and Celeborn will rule for most of the next two ages. And in sixteen ninety-three, when Celebrimbor finally gets frightened enough to move the Three Rings out of Sauron's reach, it's Galadriel he hands Nenya to, and on her counsel that Vilya goes to Gil-galad and Narya goes to Círdan at the Grey Havens.

That list sounds sort of like a job description. Founding realms. Reading a stranger's character correctly when the greatest smith of the age reads him wrong. Holding one of the Three Rings and deciding where the other two go for safekeeping. That's enormous strategic judgment - and every bit of it is diplomacy and safekeeping.

Nowhere in anything Tolkien wrote does Galadriel command an army in the Second Age.

But her distrust of Sauron isn't a show addition either. That one is in the text, it's explicit, and it's one of the better-attested things about her in this period.

Then there's Finrod. In the show, it seems like Finrod dies in the Second Age. His death is the engine of Galadriel's obsession. In Tolkien, Finrod dies in the First Age, in the dungeons of Sauron's own tower on Tol-in-Gaurhoth, killed by a werewolf while defending Beren with his bare hands after his crown has already been taken from him. That death is one of the great scenes in "The Silmarillion", and it happens centuries before the Second Age starts.

So here there's a bit of a hung jury. A fierce, formidable, physically imposing Galadriel is a defensible extrapolation - Tolkien wrote that woman, just in a different century and a different world. Galadriel the field commander of Gil-galad's armies is a complete fabrication. And Finrod dying in the Second Age is something else again - an important piece of the First Age picked up and carried forward into a century it doesn't belong to.

Worth adding one thing, though, before anyone gets too confident about what Galadriel "really" is. There are at least two incompatible versions of her leaving Valinor in Tolkien's own papers. In one, she's a willing participant in the Noldor's rebellion, hungry for a realm of her own, and her long exile is real penance for real pride. In another, she's innocent - she opposed Fëanor from the start and fought against the Kinslaying at Alqualondë, defending the harbor. Christopher Tolkien says that these two versions can't be reconciled and that his father never resolved them.

The Rings of Power show picked a lane. But so does every reader who's ever had an opinion about her.

SECTION: The Orc-Father Tolkien Couldn't Write

Adar is the show's boldest original creation, and he's completely original. No counterpart, no source, no misread passage behind him. He was, "made for tv".

Adar is an Uruk who was an Elf once, captured and twisted by Morgoth in the First Age, and he leads the Orcs of the Southlands as something between a general and a parent. The Orcs call him Adar, which is simply the Elvish word for father. They gave him the title themselves.

So on the rubric he's invented outright. That's not really arguable. But the question that probably matters most is what he's built "on top of", and the answer there is a hole Tolkien dug himself and never filled in.

Where do Orcs come from? Tolkien moved between at least three answers over the course of his life. The earliest and the most dramatically useful is that Orcs were Elves once - taken by Morgoth in the dark before the Elves ever reached Valinor, and ruined over generations into something else. Later he tried Orcs as corrupted Men instead. Later still, in notes collected in Morgoth's Ring - that's volume ten of "The History of Middle-earth", Christopher Tolkien's series of his father's drafts - Tolkien floated the idea that Orcs might not have real souls at all. Beasts, or puppets, animated by Morgoth's will and empty when he's gone.

Tolkien never picked one. And what kept him circling was theology more than storytelling.

If Orcs were Elves, then Orcs have souls. If Orcs have souls, then under the Catholic framework Tolkien was writing inside, they're capable of being saved. Every Orc cut down at Helm's Deep becomes a different kind of event. The clean fights in his own books stop being clean. Tolkien saw that problem sitting under his own story and he kept backing away from it, which is why the question was still open when he died.

And every exit he tried cost him something else. Orcs as corrupted Men makes Morgoth's cruelty smaller and more ordinary. Orcs as soulless puppets turns the war into a war against machinery, which drains the blood out of it. Orcs as ruined Elves is the most terrible version and probably the most interesting one, and it's the version he couldn't live with. So he kept all three in play and published none of them.

If you're interested, we did an entire episode on the possible redemption of Orcs. Give it a listen. It was one of my favorites.

So the show reached into the one place Tolkien refused to stand, picked the most troubling of his three answers, and gave it a face and a voice and a grievance. Adar is what that answer looks like if you have to sit across a table from it.

And there's a footnote to all of this that I like a lot. All of that Orc-origin material lives in "Morgoth's Ring", which is "The History of Middle-earth", which is exactly the shelf Amazon's deal doesn't cover. So the show can build a character standing on that idea. It can't quote the notes that produced it.

Halbrand belongs in the same bucket for a different reason. The shipwreck, the raft, the claimed Southlands throne, the blacksmith work in Númenor - none of that exists anywhere in the books. Tolkien gives you exactly one move for this stretch of Sauron's career. He came in fair form, he called himself the Lord of Gifts, and the smiths believed him. That's the whole disguise. Everything else on screen is scaffolding built to make that one line dramatic across eight hours of television.

And that leaves us with two inventions that behave very differently. Adar fills a question Tolkien left open. Halbrand glosses over an answer Tolkien gave us, because the show wasn't allowed to say it out loud yet.

SECTION: Mithril and the Silmaril That Wasn't There

An episode in Season 1 gives us the Song of the Roots of Hithaeglir. An Elf warrior and a Balrog fight over a tree high in the Misty Mountains, lightning strikes, and the light of a lost Silmaril runs down through the roots of the mountain into the ore below. That's where mithril comes from, and that's why it can save the Elves.

We can start with the part the show is entitled to do. Tolkien never explained where mithril came from.

Tolkien tells us plenty of other things about it. That it can be beaten like copper and polished like glass, that it never tarnishes, that it's lighter than steel and far harder. That Thorin gave Bilbo a shirt of mithril mail in "The Hobbit", and that Gandalf reckons that one shirt is worth more than the entire Shire and everything in it. That Khazad-dûm was the only place in Middle-earth it was ever found, that the Dwarves dug for it greedily and went deeper than they should have, and that the Balrog they woke down there ended their kingdom.

So we get the value, the properties, the location, and the price. We get nothing at all about the origin. There's a blank in the record, so you could say that filling it is fair game.

What the show decided to fill that with is a bit problematic, though.

There are three Silmarils, and at the end of "The Silmarillion" all three are accounted for. Maedhros takes one into a chasm of fire in the earth. Maglor throws one into the sea. The third is bound on Eärendil's brow and sails the sky as the morning and evening star, which is the one detail from the First Age that ordinary people in "The Lord of the Rings" still know about. Sea, fire, sky. All three Silmarils are spoken for.

None of the Silmarils is in the Misty Mountains. None of them is anywhere near Khazad-dûm. The fates of the three jewels are pretty explicitly laid out by Tolkien. The show's mithril story would almost need a fourth Silmaril or it would need one of the three to have gone somewhere Tolkien says it didn't.

The tougher problem, though, is that Tolkien already answered the question the song is asking, and the jewel is the smaller half of it.

The song is trying to establish what carries the purest, least-corrupted elven light in the Second Age. I think Tolkien answered that. It was the Three Rings. Across those ninety years at the forge, the smiths of Eregion make the lesser rings and then the Seven and the Nine, with Sauron's guidance all over them. Then Celebrimbor makes Narya, Nenya and Vilya alone, finishing them in fifteen ninety. Sauron never touches those three. He never watches them being made, and he doesn't know they exist until it's far too late to do anything about it.

And that's the reason the Three stay clean. What kept them pure was who stayed out of the room while they were being made.

It's a very Tolkien idea. Purity in his world is the absence of a corrupting will, and you can't mine that. You can't dig it out of a mountain, and you can't inherit it from a rock, however holy the rock is. It comes from someone making a decision about who they let near their work.

And there's an irony sitting in the middle of this. Celebrimbor is Fëanor's grandson. What drives him at that forge, in the text, is the wish to make something that can stand beside his grandfather's Silmarils. So the Second Age already has a Silmaril problem built into it, and it isn't a jewel buried under a mountain range - it's a man trying to outdo one, and letting the wrong adviser through the door to help him do it. The show went looking for the light of a Silmaril in the roots of Hithaeglir when the Silmarils' real influence on this era was sitting right there in the smith's own family, doing all the damage already.

So the show found a gap and filled it with a story that quietly reverses Tolkien's own logic. It traded an argument about consent and corruption for an argument about a magic ingredient. Yeah, there was a hole in what Tolkien wrote so it is fair game to fill it. But in this case, what got written collides with something Tolkien already nailed down.

SECTION: The Harfoots Were Supposed to Stay Home

Now onto another curiosity, but this one I don't hear a lot of discussion about.

The show's Harfoots are nomads. They live in wagons, they move with the seasons, they have a ritual for saying goodbye to the ones who can't keep up, and they have no fixed home anywhere. It's some of the most distinctive world-building in the series. But when it came to the Harfoots, Tolkien wrote the exact opposite.

In the Prologue to "The Lord of the Rings" - which is inside Amazon's rights - Tolkien lists the three breeds of hobbit. Harfoots, Stoors, Fallohides. He describes the Harfoots as browner of skin, smaller and shorter, beardless and bootless. He also gives them the single trait that is distinctive from the other two breeds. Of the three, he writes, the Harfoots "were the most inclined to settle in one place, and longest preserved their ancestral habit of living in tunnels and holes."

For some reason, the show made them the wandering ones.

I guess this is probably more interesting than it is wrong. The show has the taxonomy right. Harfoot, Stoor, Fallohide, three breeds, correct names, all lifted cleanly from that same Prologue passage. Somebody read it. Somebody read it carefully enough to get that part right, and then inverted a piece of it on purpose.

This felt a little weird to me.

The timeline compression is the biggest complaint I hear in the fandom, and the dates it violates are dates Tolkien himself marked as guesses. Warrior Galadriel is the second loudest, and the text that supposedly forbids it doesn't forbid anything - it's silent on her Second Age military career, and it does describe her as a woman who could match the athletes of the Eldar. Adar evokes emotion because he's made up, and he's made up out of a question Tolkien asked three different ways and never answered. Halbrand gets called a betrayal of Annatar, but at the time Annatar was a name I don't think the show could legally say. Gandalf's Second Age arrival draws real fire too, against a real Appendix B date - though Tolkien's late note on the Blue Wizards gives even that fight a footnote.

And then there are the Harfoots. I don't hear many complaints about this one. Ironically, of the issues we've discussed, it's the only change on the list where Tolkien never wrote a word that reopens the question - no late note, no change of mind, nothing. The sentence it contradicts still sits inside "The Lord of the Rings" itself, in plain English, where any reader can check it in an afternoon.

I guess that's the pattern. In the Second Age, the size of the objection runs almost exactly opposite to the strength of the evidence behind it. A lot of the loud fights are fights about silence - about what an adaptation is allowed to do with a blank page. And in some places, like the Harfoots, people don't care to argue.

There's a Tolkien scholar named Corey Olsen that made a broader version of this case, arguing that the legendarium never had one fixed set of facts to violate, given how much Tolkien revised. Other writers have pushed back hard, and their objection is a good one too. Saying that "There's no canon", can become cover for changes that contradict the clearest and most stable parts of the text, which is a different act from filling a gap. Both of those things are true, and the Harfoots are the proof that you need both halves of the argument.

The model for all of this, honestly, is Christopher Tolkien. Given Galadriel's two irreconcilable histories, he didn't pick. Given Celeborn's shifting lineage, he didn't pick either. And when he had three different theories of where Orcs come from, he laid all three out and let them sit there contradicting each other. He treated, "my father never settled this", as a finding, not an embarrassment.

I think we can do the same for a lot of this. For most of "The Rings of Power", the accurate verdict isn't faithful or unfaithful. It's that the text doesn't say - and then a separate question about whether what got put in the gap is any good, which is a question about drama and not about scholarship.

Season 3 arrives on November 11th, 2026, in three drops through the 25th. It reportedly opens five years after the fall of Eregion, with Barad-dûr finished. Which means the show is walking straight into the densest stretch of Appendix B there is - the war, the Nine Rings, the Nazgûl, Pharazôn's rise. Some of that Tolkien dated and described. Some of it he left as one line in a list. Knowing which is which before the argument starts makes all of it a great deal more interesting.