The massive timeline Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power will cover makes fantasy shows like Game of Thrones look positively tiny in scale. Amazon spent 2017 on a quest to find their very own Game of Thrones – a big-budget fantasy event series to get the world talking. Wisely, Jeff Bezos ended up splashing his cash on the fantasy epic to rule them all, purchasing TV rights to J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Scheduled to land on Prime Video in September 2022, Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power features a sprawling cast, has filmed across multiple countries, and reportedly packs a hefty per-episode budget that leaves swords-and-sorcery rivals like HBO’s Game of Thrones in the dust.
Middle-earth is outstripping Westeros in the timeline stakes also. The span between Game of Thrones season 1 and season 8 lasts a relatively short period. Between King Baratheon’s arrival at Winterfell and Bran Stark’s coronation, approximately 7 years pass. Upcoming spinoff prequel House of the Dragon focuses on the Targaryens’ reign and sits roughly 200 years prior to Game of Thrones. Flashbacks dig deeper into the past – the time of the First Men – but the core Game of Thrones narrative represents but a blip in Westeros’ history, even if you include House of the Dragon.
That’s certainly not the case for Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. Judging by its title, one can assume forging the 20 Rings of Power will play a vital role in Amazon’s upcoming series – an event that takes place around year 1500 of Middle-earth’s Second Age, when Sauron deceives the Elves into crafting his dark circular design. Bringing the Rings of Power into creation triggers a long-running war between Mordor and the races of Middle-earth, culminating in the Last Alliance of Elves and Men, during which Isildur lops the One Ring off Sauron’s meddlesome finger. By long-running, we’re talking a period of nigh-on 2000 years between the Rings’ creation and Sauron’s downfall.
Chronicling the tale behind Tolkien’s Rings of Power in full would require Amazon’s Lord of the Rings TV show to straddle that period onscreen. Such ambition might be unfeasible for other fantasy shows, but The Rings of Power has the added benefit of a largely immortal ensemble. Sauron and the Elves glide effortlessly across the millennia, while any Númeanoreans among the cast will have a longer lifespan than your average man. Hardly anyone in Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is aging normally, which means covering 2000 years across the show’s lifetime isn’t just a possibility – it’s a likelihood. This is proven by The Rings of Power‘s trailer, which incorporates First Age footage. Since Isildur is confirmed to appear too, however, that’s a period of around 3000 years in season 1 alone.
That extraordinarily long timeline will afford Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power a sense of epic scale that other fantasy TV shows – Game of Thrones, The Witcher, Blue’s Clues, etc – simply don’t replicate. Amazon’s Middle-earth yarn can feel like a properly weighty mythical tome, spanning generations of time and countless winters, swapping the mortal-centric fantasy tales audiences have become accustomed to for something truly timeless and historical in nature. Of course, clashing swords across many centuries also amplifies the gravity of Sauron as a villainous threat, compared to the War of the Five Kings, which lasted but a blink of Tolkien time.
Game of Thrones viewers might point out that season 6’s White Walker origin flashback actually happens around 10,000 years prior to the main narrative, demonstrating even greater scale than Tolkien’s Second Age. But Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power‘s first official image teased flashbacks of its own, dating back to Valinor’s Years of the Trees – a time before the First Age that lasted nearly 15,000 of our years. From these scenes all the way through to Aragorn’s coronation in Peter Jackson’s movie trilogy, the entire live-action Lord of the Rings canon could easily eclipse Game of Thrones once again, flashbacks be damned.
