Lots of Interesting New Details Shared for Amazon's THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE RINGS OF POWER

Thanks to Vanity Fair, we have some new information to share with you regarding the highly anticipated fantasy epic The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. We already shared some new photos with you, but these new details give us more insight on the story that the series will tell and the characters who fill it.

Galadriel is played by Morfydd Clark in the series, and this version of the character is thousands of years younger than the version in The Lord of the Rings. She is described as “as angry and brash as she is clever.” It’s explained that a “certain that evil is looming closer than anyone realizes,” and by episode two, ”her warnings set her adrift, literally and figuratively, until she’s struggling for survival on a raft in the storm-swept Sundering Seas alongside a mortal castaway named Halbrand (Charlie Vickers), who is a new character introduced in the show. Galadriel is fighting for the future; Halbrand is running from the past.”

As you are aware, this series is set in the Second Age. The story picks up with the wicked god Morgoth having been defeated, and his apprentice, Sauron, has vanished. “As the series begins, Galadriel is hunting down the last remnants of their collaborators, who claimed the life of her brother.”

The show will juggle 22 characters and multiple storylines. Those stories come from “deep within the dwarf mines of the Misty Mountains to the high politics of the elven kingdom of Lindon and the humans’ powerful, Atlantis-like island, Númenor.” The show is described as “a lavish, compelling mix of palace intrigue, magic, warfare, and mythology—and there are enough mysteries to power a thousand podcasts.”

Everything will center on the forging of the Rings of Power. Showrunner Patrick McKay said, “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 other stories centers on a silvan elf named Arondir, played by Ismael Cruz Córdova. “He is involved in a forbidden relationship with Bronwyn, a human village healer played by Nazanin Boniadi, a British actor of Iranian heritage. Elsewhere, a Brit of Jamaican descent, Sir Lenny Henry, plays a harfoot elder, and Sophia Nomvete has a scene-stealing role as a dwarven princess named Disa—the latter being the first Black woman to play a dwarf in a Lord of the Rings movie, as well as the first female dwarf.” Lindsey Weber, executive producer of the series said, “It felt only natural to us that an adaptation of Tolkien’s work would reflect what the world actually looks like. Tolkien is for everyone. His stories are about his fictional races doing their best work when they leave the isolation of their own cultures and come together.”

The series is also going to explore the Misty Mountains at a time when the kingdom was still “full of light, food, and music.” It’s also going to introduce the elven smith Celebrimbor (Charles Edwards), “as his skill with metals and magic lead to the forging of the rings.” Another story will follow “a canny young elven architect and politician named Elrond (Robert Aramayo) will rise to prominence in the mystical capital of Lindon.” Then there’s a story that will center on “a sailor named Isildur (Maxim Baldry) years before he becomes a warrior and cuts the soul-corrupting ring off Sauron’s hand, then falls victim to its powers himself.”

It’s also said that Sauron’s presence is a major factor throughout the story and Second Age, “culminating in his resurrection as a tyrant.” It’s explained that story begins, “there are only hints of the danger to come. Some see them clearly; others don’t necessarily want to.”

Bayona goes on to revelaed that the first episode is titled “Shadow of the Past” and he he says, “I think this is all about the repercussions of war. There is an idea that feels very faithful to Tolkien, which is intuition. Galadriel has an intuition that things are not fixed, and there is still something lurking.”

The driving question behind the development of this series was, “Can we come up with the novel Tolkien never wrote and do it as the mega-event series that could only happen now?” JD Payne added, “Can you imagine going back to such a beloved world and facing the high bar of the Peter Jackson movies? We were, all the time, very aware of the massive expectations.”

There are a few other questions answered in this report. With the show being set in the Second Age, fans have been wondering if there will be Hobbits in the series. The answer to that is yes and no. McKay explains, “One of the very specific things the texts say is that hobbits never did anything historic or noteworthy before the Third Age. But really, does it feel like Middle-earth if you don’t have hobbits or something like hobbits in it?”

So, the ancestors of the hobbits in this series are called “Harfoots.” They also don’t live in The Shire, “but they are satisfyingly hobbit-adjacent.” There’s a “pastoral harfoot society that thrives on secrecy and evading detection so that they can play out a kind of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead story in the margins of the bigger quests. Two lovable, curious harfoots, played by Megan Richards and Markella Kavenagh, encounter a mysterious lost man whose origin promises to be one of the show’s most enticing enigmas.”

There have also been concerns about nudity and sex in the show, but that’s something that you don’t need to worry about. McKay shared that the goal was “to make a show for everyone, for kids who are 11, 12, and 13, even though sometimes they might have to pull the blanket up over their eyes if it’s a little too scary. We talked about the tone in Tolkien’s books. This is material that is sometimes scary—and sometimes very intense, sometimes quite political, sometimes quite sophisticated—but it’s also heartwarming and life-affirming and optimistic. It’s about friendship and it’s about brotherhood and underdogs overcoming great darkness.”

What do you think about all the new details have been shared for The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power? Are you excited for what is coming?

The Lord of the Rings “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.”

The series is set to premiere on September 2, 2022.