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Illustration focused on the One Ring to rule them all from the Lord of the Rings, with scenes from the Battle of Dagorlad and elements from the map of Middle-earth in the background Source images: New Line Cinema | Illustration: James Bareham/Polygon

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The key to Amazon’s new Middle-earth series is Aragorn

How one character can connect thousands of years of stories

It’s a well-known fact that Peter Jackson’s critically acclaimed Lord of the Rings trilogy left some of the stories from the books out. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; after all, the trilogy is held in the highest esteem by thousands of Tolkien fans — myself included. However, with Amazon’s Lord of the Rings series slowly beginning to emerge from the horizon, perhaps it’s high time we look into these wonderful, seldom-told tales of rangers and ringwraiths.

Tolkien’s legendarium is split into three Ages. The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit are both set toward the end of the Third Age, so there’s a lot that happens before the likes of Frodo and Aragorn are even born. In the time before the War of the Ring, great nations were swallowed whole by the sea, Elven kings reigned supreme over the lands, and Sauron forged the Rings of Power, setting the scene for a conflict that would last for thousands of years. To put it simply, there are a plethora of stories that take place long before The Lord of the Rings, all of which directly inform the events of the trilogy with which we are so intimately familiar.

One such story begins at the end of the First Age, thousands of years before the War of the Ring. In this tale, an elf called Glorfindel is killed by a balrog. However, he is deemed so pure and noble that Manwe, King of the Valar — the Valar being the divine spirits who govern over Arda, or the world itself — resurrect him in the year 1600 of the Second Age. After this, Glorfindel becomes an emissary for the Valar in Middle-earth. Almost 5,000 years later, he helps to escort Frodo’s company to Rivendell.

In the film, this task was assigned to Arwen, who puts Frodo on the back of her horse and hightails it to Rivendell. In the books, Frodo goes there alone, delirious after having been stabbed by a Morgul Blade at Weathertop, but still sufficiently conscious to make it. In fact, he actually travels there on a horse given to him by Glorfindel. It’s not that important that Arwen absorbed this role in the movie, as it doesn’t make a huge difference to the plot. However, it is important to at least recognize the book’s version, because this sets up something that is essential for us to understand the Amazon Prime series: connectivity.

Glorfindel’s involvement in The Fellowship of the Ring is indicative of a wider trend in Tolkien’s writing. There are hundreds of characters who were important before the trilogy, thousands of tales referenced by no more than a single line. Most of these stories are told in The Silmarillion, a book that Amazon didn’t manage to procure the rights to — much to the disappointment of fans all over the world. However, if we turn to the back of our trilogy copies, much of this information is also contained in the Appendices for The Lord of The Rings, which lets Prime explore these stories anyway.

When The Lord of the Rings on Prime account began to tweet pictures of maps coupled with captions derived from the infamous “One Ring to rule them all” inscription on the One Ring, it seemed highly likely that the series would be grounded in the Third Age. In fact, reputable Tolkien site TheOneRing.net stated that the series would center on a young Aragorn, which would place the timeline less than 100 years before the Fellowship of the Ring.

However, recent developments in the maps ditched the landmarks that pointed to a Third Age setting, in favor of the southwesterly island of Númenor — the sinking of which is one of the most important historical events of the entire Second Age. (If that’s not enough proof of a Second Age setting, you can read this tweet by the series’ official account, which literally says, “Welcome to the Second Age!”)

This is why it’s important to look at characters like Glorfindel for insight into what stories the series will tell. Glorfindel is an arbitrary example of a whole host of characters that appear briefly in the main trilogy but have massive parts to play in the extended lore. Elrond’s sons, Elladan and Elrohir, also appear in the books, as does the elf Gildor, who utters the famous phrase “don’t you lose him, Samwise Gamgee!” which is spoken by Gandalf in the films. All of these characters were around long before the War of the Ring, and their existence is the connective tissue that serves as the bridge between Frodo’s journey and all of the stories that came prior to it.

Realistically, the Ring-Verse captions attached to the maps imply that the series will at least in part bear reference to the creation of the Rings of Power, which, if you’ve played Shadow of Mordor or read The Silmarillion yourself, you’ll know were crafted by the elven smith Celebrimbor. As well as forging the One Ring for Sauron, Celebrimbor smithed three rings in secret for the elves, one of which went to Galadriel, while the other two went to the Elven King, Gil-galad.

While Galadriel evidently has a ring in The Lord of the Rings, few casual fans know anything about the legendary Gil-galad. He fought alongside Elrond, Elendil, and Isildur at the Last Alliance of Elves and Men — the battle that saw Isildur cut Sauron’s finger off, separating him from the One Ring, and marked the end of the Second Age. In a Second Age setting, characters like Gil-galad would come front and center, as they are the heroes of their own seldom-told stories.

All of this information is included in the aforementioned Appendices. Appendix B in particular tells the story known as “The Tale of Years,” which outlines all of the major events of the Second Age, including the destruction of Numenor. The thing is, this fact alone lends credence to both the rumors of a young Aragorn protagonist and a Second Age setting.

As dedicated Tolkien site TheOneRing.net wrote on Twitter, “Starting with a young Aragorn narrative allows connections to his Numenorean bloodline (and to the founding of Gondor).” If the series does place emphasis on the sinking of Númenor and the defeat of Sauron at the Last Alliance of Elves and Men, it would make sense to use Aragorn as a way of linking the Second Age to the parts of Tolkien’s legendarium that have already been showcased on the silver screen.

While Aragorn may be too young to be directly included in anything from the Second Age or the majority of the Third Age, his lineage runs deep and the stories it holds are worth telling. He was raised in Rivendell — which is where he met Arwen — but he grew up under a plethora of false aliases, lest he be taken in the night by Sauron’s assailants. Aragorn never even knew his real name until he was 20, at which point Elrond told “Estel” that he was the son of Arathorn II, and rightful heir to the throne of Gondor.

The Gondorian bloodline is rooted in Númenor, with Elendil — father of Isildur — having been born there before founding Gondor with Isildur and his other son, Anarion, near the end of the Second Age. Before Númenor sank, Sauron (in disguise) took up residence there with Ar-Pharaz?n, the last ever King of Númenor. As the Numenoreans became increasingly xenophobic, no longer seeking to help the people of Middle-earth and instead deciding to oppress them and adhere to the tenets of the cult of Melkor, a schism between those who followed Sauron and those who went on to found Gondor formed.

Lord Elendil remained faithful to the Valar and Eru Ilúvatar, the creator of Arda. Those who supported Sauron and the cult of Melkor went followed the Dark Lord from Númenor, eventually becoming the Corsairs of Umbar. The Corsairs became pirates, remaining loyal to the evil that should have been expunged when Númenor sank, and waged war on Gondor throughout the Third Age from the South, while Sauron’s servant, the Witch-king of Angmar, sought to usurp the throne from the North.

A gnarled white tree is the centerpiece of the courtyard outside the palace of the king in the Gondorian city of Minas Tirith.
The White Tree of Gondor, grown old and withered during the rule of the Stewards, as depicted in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Legendary Pictures

In fact, Gondor’s emblem, the White Tree, grew from a seed born from the White Tree of Númenor. The sinking of Númenor occurred after Sauron grew too proud, seeking to invade the Undying Lands of Aman, where the Valar resided — it’s not a perfect analogy, but you can think of Aman like the elven afterlife. The Valar called for Ilúvatar, the creator of the universe, to intervene, at which point the supreme deity separated Aman from the rest of Middle-earth, and bent its flat plane into a sphere. The straight road to Aman was destroyed, as was Númenor itself.

With all of this in mind, Aragorn is the centrifugal character around which the entire crux of the Lord of the Rings is built. It is his lineage that connects those who opposed Sauron at Númenor to those who took up arms against him at the Last Alliance of Elves and Men, and again to those who did so during War of the Ring. A young Aragorn could be used as a point of reference around which the series could be made anthological, which is the only suitable explanation, if maps of both Second Age and Third Age settings have been posted online. The only way for all of this to be true is to have Aragorn discover his true lineage, and to show the history of that lineage onscreen throughout the process of that discovery.

Boromir (played by Sean Bean) discovers a painted mural of Isildur, fallen but defiantly raising his broken sword to keep the Dark Lord at bay.
A mural depicting the moment Aragorn’s ancestor Isildur cut the ring from Sauron’s hand, as seen in Rivendell in Lord of the Rings movies.
Legendary Pictures

If you want to know about a huge part of Aragorn’s own personal story arc, you can check out the fan film centered on The Hunt for Gollum. This is a story told in the Appendices of The Lord of the Rings in which Gandalf sends Aragorn, then a Dunedain ranger, to find the creature Gollum before Sauron gets to him first. The fan film is fantastic and will definitely sate your appetite for Lord of the Rings while you’re waiting for Prime’s series to come out.

Until then, just know this: There are stories held in Tolkien’s legendarium that you might not be familiar with just yet, but if you dig a little deeper into the Appendices of your dusty old copy of the trilogy, you’ll find fabulous tales of monsters and men — and elves, dwarves, hobbits, and a whole range of other beings in all shapes and sizes. These are the stories that we’ll be told once Amazon’s series launches. Whether they be tales from the Second Age or the Third Age, they’ll feature some familiar faces — and some unfamiliar ones — all of whom had their own part to play in the events that led up to the trilogy we’ve all grown to know and love.

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