Prime Video's The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power takes place thousands of years before the Lord of the Rings movies and story, as well as The Hobbit. Amazon first announced plans to develop a Lord of the Rings TV show almost five years ago, but finding the right story to tell from J.R.R. Tolkien's works as well as guiding the series through prep and production on season 1 — not to mention making sure the show can depict Middle-earth as perfectly as Peter Jackson's films did — has been long and arduous. The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power release date is set for 09/02/22, and Amazon has released several trailers, so where does Amazon's Lord of the Rings show sit in the LOTR timeline?
IAmazon has thrown over a billion dollars at the project (not an exaggeration, the first season alone cost $462 million to produce) and has guaranteed multiple seasons and spinoffs from it. Work on season 2 is already underway in the United Kingdom, and it wouldn't be far-fetched to think that season 3 could be put into production by 2023/2024. However, while The Rings of Power is expected to be a global phenomenon, thanks in large part to the franchise's branding, there's the question of how the story ties to the Lord of the Rings movies. The Rings of Power isn't officially connected to the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings movies. They're both based on Tolkien's work, though, and The Rings of Power has taken a clear spiritual and aesthetic influence from Jackson's input. It's set in a very different time of Middle-Earth's history though, one shown in flashback sequences during The Fellowship of the Ring – namely the alliance of Men and Elves in the first great battle against Sauron. The Rings of Power is set in the Second Age and will more than likely follow the creation of the titular Rings of Power, including the One Ring. Comparatively, the Lord of the Rings story and trilogy takes place at the end of the Third Age and tells the War of the Ring's tale. While specific years for the TV show haven't been revealed yet, LotR's Rings of Power were created between 1500-1600 S.A. (the entirety of the Second Age lasted for 3,441 years).
The events of Lord of the Rings begin in 3018 T.A. (Third Age), which means The Rings of Power TV show is set a minimum of 4,959 years before Lord of the Rings. Even knowing this and its inspiration from The Silmarillion and other collected appendices, the date doesn't actually reveal much about the timeframe. The cast list offers surprisingly few clues too. The casting of Charles Edwards as Celebrimbor hints it could take place before the titular rings are forged. That still leaves a lot of scope, though, since the Rings of Power were created over a thousand years before Isildur finally cut the One Ring from Sauron's finger and ended the Second Age. Isildur has also been cast (Maxim Baldry), and, unlike Elves, humans aren't capable of living for thousands of years. The trailers hint at several possible time periods for Amazon's LotR show, so here's everything known so far about when in the incredibly vast Lord of the Rings timeline The Rings of Power will be set.
Rings Of Power Will Take Place Millennia Before LOTR
There's one solid piece of info about The Rings of Power that isn't debated - it will take place thousands of years before both The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. The prequel is set so far before Jackson's trilogies that even long-lived characters like Gandalf won't be making an appearance. Only borderline-immortal elves like Elrond and Galadriel are present, but even then are much younger and different than their Third Age counterparts. The prologue sequence in The Fellowship of the Ring, in which Isildur defeats Sauron and takes the One Ring, happens at the end of the Second Age. It's this period The Rings of Power will purportedly cover, meaning it will be set a minimum of 3,000 years before the main events of the Lord of the Rings movies.
How many millennia before, however, isn't known. Some speculate that it could take place thousands of years before Isildur vanquished Sauron. The Rings had already existed for millennia prior to the Last Alliance of Men and Elves at the end of the Second Age (something lost in translation in the Fellowship prologue, which makes it seem as if Sauron's rise was relatively quick). The Rings of Power were forged in the year 1500 of the Second Age. Isildur was born in the year 3209 S.A, some 1700 years later. The trailers seem to depict events detailing the rise of Sauron, and a Middle-Earth wherein the common folk only know of his coming due to hushed whispers and dark hearsay. The canonically doesn't fit with the time Isildur lived in, by which point the name Sauron was known and Mordor an ever-present threat.
Prime Video is keeping The Rings of Power's story beats close to the vest, only now starting to reveal bits and pieces about the characters and story. It's likely that The Rings of Power's full timeline won't be clear until the show airs. The only guarantee is that no Lord of the Rings characters save for Elrond and Galadriel will be present (although they've both been tipped as central to The Rings of Power's plot). The source material Amazon is partially adapting for The Rings of Power, The Silmarillion, spans thousands of years, but it ends long before the events of The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings take place. Whenever The Rings of Power is set, it will be millennia before the birth of Frodo, Bilbo, or even Legolas (he wouldn't be born until almost a century into the Third Age, in 87 T.A.).
The Rings of Power Timeline: How Many Years Will The Show Cover?
The Rings of Power is adapting several books by J.R.R. Tolkien but mainly will draw from The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales, as well as various appendices and letters written by Tolkien that weren't intended for publication. Unlike Peter Jackson's movies, which retell the events of the War of the Ring in chronological order as they occur, The Rings of Power doesn't have a cohesive traditional narrative to adapt. As mentioned, the Second Age spans thousands of years (3,441 years to be exact). The Silmarillion isn't a novel so much as a history textbook for Tolkien scholars. This left Amazon with two choices: condense the events of the Second Age into a shorter time span, or create a show that covers thousands of years of history.
Both are plausible. If The Rings of Powers covers thousands of years, it would be an unorthodox direction for a TV show to take. However, most settings don't have immortal characters like Tolkien's elves. A series covering the entire Second Age could easily use Galadriel, Elrond, or even Sauron as thread characters to underpin and tie together the various snapshots of Middle-Earth at different points in history. If The Rings of Power does show both the forging of the titular rings and Isildur in any capacity, it will have to take steps like these. Sauron forging the rings and Isildur destroying him have almost as much time between them as Isildur losing the ring and Smeagol/Gollum finding it millennia later. A show that starts with Sauron forging the rings and ends just before Isildur takes the throne of Gondor could work, but only because of characters like Galadriel and Elrond being present throughout.
The second and equally likely option is that Amazon will condense the events of the Second Age into a much shorter but more narratively cohesive timeline – one that's palatable to modern audiences with preconceptions about story structure. Tolkien never intended books like The Silmarillion to be adapted into digestible narratives. It's not an overstatement to say the books could be considered non-fiction about a fictional world rather than a narrative work like The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit. The closer to The Rings of Power's September 2022 release date audiences get, the more likely this option seems.
It might even use flashbacks from Elrond or Galadriel to portray earlier events in the Second Age, tying them into the "present" of The Rings of Power. The drowning of the Middle-Earth Kingdom Numenor in 3319 S.A. is confirmed to be a major plot point in Amazon's LotR show, as is Celebrimbor forging the Rings and the early life of Isildur. Some trailer shots also hint at the presence of Sauron during his stint as the High Priest of Melkor in 3299, over a thousand years after the first war between Mordor and the Elves but still half a century prior to his defeat at the end of the Second Age. For The Rings of Power to cover everything that the cast list, trailers, and source material hint, it's a guarantee that Amazon's Lord of the Rings show will have an incredibly unique approach to timeline and scale.
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power premieres on Prime Video on September 2, 2022.