From Book Riot:
Lord of the Rings fans rejoice: in their new adaptation, Amazon is going far back. This is no re-adaptation. No, it’s going bigger—as many suspected and hoped, it’s going epic, and it’s going prequel.
The official Twitter account for the new adaptation has finally started tweeting. They first teased us a month ago with the exciting quote from J.R.R. Tolkien himself: “I wisely started with a map.”
. . . .
Earlier today we got the map itself, gorgeous, full, and bigger than the one we would see from the Lord of the Rings films; more ancient, too. Númenor, the land of Men, is visible: this is notable because it was destroyed thousands of years before our main trilogy begins, and because Aragorn is descended from that land. Harad and Khand are visible as well—the people of those lands fought for Sauron, but we don’t know much about them—and the space around the kingdoms we know is very empty, perhaps implying that we will get to fill it in with more detail with this series.
The tweet alludes to the rings, naturally; but most notably, the tweet that follows the map reads, “Welcome to the Second Age.”
Link to the rest at Book Riot
I am cautiously hopeful. There’s a fair amount of storyline, a fair amount of opportunity for stuff that will appeal to Hollywood, and a lot of CGI stuff. Plus Sauron will be in his handsome period.
It still cracks me up that Peter Jackson is a true blue WWI geek, such that his house is full of uniforms and artillery. I wish he’d been that geeky about Tolkien, but it does warm my cold little heart.
Hmm. I was wondering what I’d spend my gift card on. I think I’ll give the Silmarillion a go …
And I’m glad that Amazon has Tolkien’s guardrails to go by for this series. I wouldn’t trust modern writers in general to make up a story out of whole cloth: Peter Jackson clearly did not “get” Faramir.
I have a litmus test for Chinese restaurants: what is the sweet and sour chicken? Is it magenta goop over breaded chicken? Pass. Is it pineapples and vegetables and stir fried chicken (it can be crispy)? Okay, I’ll stay. For the writers of this series, I’d like to know if they can pass the Faramir test, or are they giving us magenta goop?
Do you like audiobooks at all? If so, I highly recommend the audio version of the Silmarillion read by Martin Shaw, especially if you can pair it with a copy of the genealogy appendices to keep the names straight. Tolkien wrote much of the Silmarillion in the style of oral history and lyric epics, so it really shines when hearing it. The Ainulindale (the first chapter) reads like a song in prose, the cadence of the words are like music.
It’s a very different beast than the Lord of the Rings, more of a collection of connected tales, but well worth the experience. There will be so many things you come across that become “Aha!” moments to things in the Lord of the Rings that add so much depth to that story as well.
So much of his writing reads like lyrics. I love the alliteration in the Rohan chapters, especially as they ride to battle. But I think I may look for that audiobook. My county library system has a vast store of items.
I haven’t given audiobooks a try yet, but you’re tempting me. The Silmarillion sounds like a perfect test case for that format.
The Forging of the Rings?
Hail, yeah!
Thank goodness. There was no way they were going to do Lotr better than Jackson did it. The second age? Sign me up!
Whoa! The Second Age! Now that catches my interest. If the show were just going to do retreads of LotR, or if it were going to push ahead and speculate on the Fourth Age…that wouldn’t interest me.
But telling the tales from Silmarillion—that could be very cool!
I recently reread it and was thinking that it was simply made for an Amazon series. It’s epic, the stories are high tragedy but also there’s the giant battle in the end… Hoo-boy, I’m going to need a lot of tissues if they do The Children of Hurin.
That would be if they did the First Age.
The Second Age is the tale of the rise and fall of Numenor, the forging of the Rings of Power, and the War of the Last Alliance.
Which still has the potential to be awesome, if they don’t GoT it up.
Dang it. I’d rather have the First Age, but yeah, the Second has plenty to tell.
Akallabêth (Part IV of The Silmarillion) tells of events in the Second Age.
I have lost some Tolkien geek cred today. 🙂
LOL! I had to double check that my memory was not playing me false. (Terrible memory, but in this case it was correct.) 😀
Forget Middle-Earth. I can’t wait for their upcoming Wheel of Time series. Move over, Game of Thrones. Rand al’Thor would wipe the floor with Dany.
Daenerys Targaryen is it. All hail the Mother of Dragons.
Dan
SIGH. If y’all are going to argue religion, please take it outside. 😉
Usul commands it!