Welcome to the first substantive #JamesAndTheSecondAge post, in which I recap the only canonical assertions about the Second Age (and the only stuff we’re certain Amazon has the rights to work with for their upcoming series The Rings of Power). I should acknowledge up front that the text of The Lord of the Rings novel itself does contain allusions to the Second Age, and while I won’t catch every last one I’ll deal with some of them as I go. I’m going to focus my attention, though, on the places where Tolkien tries to give us material about the Second Age in more detail, acknowledging as I do so that there’s still not a lot of detail here. And I have to apologize – this post is going to be SUPER detail heavy, since I don’t fully know what to expect from later books, but I think you and I all need to be on the same page about names of prominent people and places, and basic details of the narrative of the Second Age. So I’m going to dump info at you here, since in later posts I’d like to be able to say “ah, okay, in this version of events Tolkien does this with Lindon” without having to stop and explain what/where Lindon is. Oh, and also, this is SO LONG that I’m forced to split it into two pieces – not even you, my nerdiest friends and family, would be able to put up with it in one go.
So, working from the Appendices, the events of the First Age (which I won’t try to detail here: here’s hoping they get their own movies/series someday) had left Middle-earth in a strange position. On the one hand, evil had been defeated in resounding fashion: after millennia of struggle with the dark spirit Melkor (known to many as Morgoth), the Elves had finally prevailed over him, thanks to basically angelic intervention from the otherworldly land of Valinor, after a sailor named Earendil had managed to get there (which is, again, like figuring out how to row your way to Heaven) and appeal for help. On the other hand, there’s a lot of weird bad vibes left over in Middle-earth: the High Elves remaining here are mostly exiles or the descendants of exiles, having been kicked out of Valinor for their misdeeds, trying to figure out what to do with themselves and whether they should accept the Valar’s forgiveness and sail back West, and the humans living in Middle-earth have really been through the ringer (many of them having lived under the cruel authority of Morgoth or his crew). Now, Morgoth’s gone and won’t ever return, but there are plenty of bad dudes left around—Sauron, in particular, is the lieutenant of Morgoth who played a smaller (but pivotal) role in the evils of the First Age, and he's stepping into the role of "planetary villain". Ultimately, Tolkien constructs essentially two big narratives for the Second Age – one of them about the Elves trying to make the best they can out of life in Middle-earth (and getting tricked into nearly ensuring the doom of all peoples) and one of them about the humans trying to make the best they can out of life in Middle-earth (and basically destroying the planet). The Second Age is, then, not comedy but tragedy. But dang, it’s some good tragedy.
Let’s take on the human side of this first – Earendil and his wife Elwing, heroes of Middle-earth, are gone now (again, First Age stuff we just have to skip here), and their half-elven kids were given the option of choosing either the fate of being an Elf or the fate of being Human. One of them we’ll deal with in a bit (his name’s Elrond, you might know the guy). His brother Elros, though, chooses to be a mortal man – the Valar grant his wish, gift him with incredibly long life (he and his people are initially living literally centuries before dying), and his crew of humans (called the Edain) are also given an awesome place to live, on an island way out west of the parts of Middle-earth we know from The Lord of the Rings. That island, Elenna, is as far west as you can go without getting into the waters surrounding the Undying Lands—the idea was that those living there would get a little extra blessing, being so close to the land of angelic spirits and immortal elves that you could see its shores from the highest peak on Elenna, the Meneltarma, and even receive occasional gift-bearing visitors. So a bunch of the Edain sail west to Elenna and found a kingdom there called Numenor.
Appendix A deals with Numenor mostly by chronicling the kings and queens, and I’m going to hit the highlights here – Numenor’s arc is that initially Elros and his descendants are wise rulers. They take Elvish names and they explore basically every part of the world you can sail to (east of them – the seas west are forbidden to mortals): they’re smart and kind and happy. But increasingly there’s tension in Numenor between the Faithful, humans who are content with their grace as mortals who live long lives and then go to whatever the afterlife is, and folks cranky about Elros’s choice, thinking that immortality should have been theirs and maybe they should just sail west and take it for themselves. Those cranky folks get to be led by one of their own after Ar-Adunakhor takes the throne and rejects an Elvish name – he starts persecuting the Faithful, the Elves stop visiting Numenor for coffee and a chat, and the civilization is in this moral downward slide where they’re starting to dominate weaker human lands back in Middle-earth. The most critical moment in all this history is probably the point at which, briefly, the rulers of Numenor shift allegiances back to being Faithful. Because shortly afterwards, a Faithful woman is in line to take the throne, Tar-Miriel, but when her father dies, instead of her becoming Queen, her cousin, Ar-Pharazon the Golden, rebels, usurps the sceptre and crown, and takes over Numenor.
What does Ar-Pharazon do? I guess we have to credit him with moxie. Because he literally sails his fleet for Middle-earth where there’s this Lord Sauron guy, by this point well-known as an evil jerk: Sauron’s set up camp by this point in a little plot of land called Mordor, and he’s built himself this tower called Barad-dur near a big mountain called Orodruin. Anyway, Sauron the Great is bad news, but he’s no match for the might of Numenor – so he humbles himself (you heard me, Sauron bends the knee to the mortal king Ar-Pharazon), and is taken away a prisoner to Numenor. But it turns out Sauron’s even more bewitching a prisoner than Saruman managed to be inside Orthanc—he has the ability at this point to take on fair and pleasing forms (shapeshifting, even, possibly?) and can make himself really appealing to humans. Sauron persuades Ar-Pharazon that he can live forever if he sails west and conquers the Undying Lands. So Ar-Pharazon assembles a massive navy and heads west, and the Valar take one look and say “oh, SCREW this” and break the planet. Literally, Middle-earth had been a flat earth up until this point – which explains why you could just sail to the edge of it and into Valinor (which, again, isn’t “Heaven” exactly, but that’s a fine analogy if you aren’t familiar with Valinor) – so to stop Ar-Pharazon, the Valar break free from the planet and wrap it into a sphere. In so doing, they create a massive wave that destroys all of Numenor – the painting attached here is Ted Nasmith’s rendering of this moment, as poor Tar-Miriel, the ousted and rightful queen, is whelmed by the wave that takes the whole island.
https://tolkiengateway.net/w/images/6/60/Ted_Nasmith_-_Queen_Tar-M%C3%ADriel_and_the_Great_Wave.jpg The only survivors are Elendil and his sons, Isildur and Anarion, who manage to sail away from Numenor with a few key treasures (among them the seedling of the White Tree that grows in Minas Tirith, and those palantir seeing stones we encounter multiple times in The Lord of the Rings) and found what are effectively Numenorean kingdoms-in-permanent-exile—Arnor in the North, ruled by Elendil, and Gondor in the South, ruled by his two sons.
I said there were two tragic narratives here, and chronologically I’ve skipped ahead of the other one, so let’s backtrack. After the wreckage of a whole lot of Elven nobility in the First Age, the Elves in Middle-earth emerge in the Second under the leadership of a king named Gil-galad – the final High King of the Noldor in Middle-earth. He forms a kingdom called Lindon in the northwestern part of Eriador (the bit of Middle-earth west of the Misty Mountains), and gathers a bunch of Elves under his rule. Elrond was, at the time, a young Elf (having chosen immortality when his brother, Elros, chose humanity) and apparently lived as Gil-galad’s subject in Lindon—Tolkien’s a little fuzzy on what it means that Gil-galad is “High King” though. For instance, Galadriel and her husband Celeborn occupy some coastal lands adjacent to Lindon, according to the Appendices, but there’s not a lot of clarity about their status: if they owe allegiance to Gil-galad, that would make sense, but also they’re as old as he is, if not older, and maybe are just doing their own thing. Thranduil (familiar to us as the Elvenking in Mirkwood, from The Hobbit, or else as Legolas’s dad) sets up his kingdom at around this time, and a few hundred years into the Second Age, Celebrimbor (known to us from The Lord of the Rings as the guy who made the Three Elvish Rings) sets up as king over a group of Elvish craftsmen (craftselves?) and smiths in Eregion, the region just west of the Misty Mountains adjacent to Moria, the chief Dwarvish kingdom – Celebrimbor’s people and the Dwarves of Moria become close friends, and collaborate on a lot of work together. The implication of Appendix B’s passing references to all of this, to me, is that Gil-galad may have had some kind of authority as High King over people like Thranduil and Celebrimbor, but it’s not clear whether this is a formal liege-lord feudal arrangement or more of a moral authority.
Things might have gone well for all these folks, had Sauron not shown up – according to the Appendices, one key detail about Sauron in the Second Age (distinctive from his presence in The Lord of the Rings) is that his form was “not yet evil to behold” and that therefore the Elves of Eregion trusted this Lord Sauron dude from the land of Mordor, which maybe back then just sounded like a nice place to go antiquing. Not everybody trusted this handsome, smooth-talking tall drink of water, though – back in Lindon, High King Gil-galad and his trusted advisor Elrond both reckon this “Lord Sauron the Great” is not to be trusted, and they refuse to meet with him. Sauron and the Elvish smiths of Eregion get along like peanut butter and chocolate, though, teaching each other some cool new magic approaches to making awesome jewelry together like it’s craft day at summer camp, and the net outcome here is that Sauron makes some magic rings as gifts for prominent Dwarves and Men, and then secretly pours all his best skill (and more than a little of his soul, apparently) into One Ring that will rule…well, you know the rhyme. Celebrimbor figures all this out a little late, and when Sauron puts on the One Ring and goes through what I can only assume was some kind of Sailor Moon-esque villain transformation sequence, Celebrimbor freaks out and hides the Three Elvish Rings for fear that Sauron will be able to corrupt them with his new powers.
Everything falls apart really quickly at this point—Sauron’s armies march out of Mordor to seize power in Eregion, while Gil-galad sends Elrond (presumably leading some kind of Elvish force but the Tale of Years isn’t specific) out of Lindon as a countermeasure. Celebrimbor dies (fighting Sauron? We don’t know), the Dwarves freak out and close all Moria’s doors to hide from the conflict (explaining probably some portion of the bad feelings between Elves and Dwarves in the Third Age), and Elrond leads Elvish survivors out of Eregion and constructs a defensive refuge nearby in Imladris (better known to us as Rivendell) where he hunkers down. Sauron’s armies run rampant all over Eriador and might well have even conquered Lindon eventually had not a Numenorean king (Tar-Minastir—one of the good ones) sent a massive expeditionary force across the ocean like FDR in ‘43-’44, boosting up Lindon’s armies at the right time and kicking the crap out of Sauron. Lord Sauron runs back to Mordor and holes up there, extending his power east and south away from the Elves and biding his time….but then Ar-Pharazon shows up and Sauron’s so taken off guard that he has to surrender and be led away in chains. He gets his revenge, though, as noted above, and Numenor is destroyed: Elendil and his sons assume at the time that Sauron died in the Great Wave, but Appendix A lets us know that his body perished but his soul fled back to Mordor and found a new form. He’d never be a shapeshifting beauty again. And when Sauron finds out his old enemy Elendil somehow survived the Wave also, he sparks up Mount Doom like a Zippo lighter, equips a new army, and runs right at Gondor. Elendil and his sons frantically call for the only aid left (now that Numenor’s gone)—Gil-galad the High King—thus forming the Last Alliance of Elves and Men, as it’s called in the text. So the armies of Lindon march out, led by Gil-galad with Elrond by his side, and they have that battle we all know from the beginning of the Fellowship movie. Gil-galad and Elendil both die facing Sauron, but Isildur kills him (or so he thinks) and cuts the One Ring from his hand. End of the Second Age.
And I have got so much more to say that we’ll let that be the break point: the other half of this post is written, I promise, and you’ll get it tomorrow. In it, I reflect on themes and characters in the stuff I’ve narrated here, I muse about what I would do with all of this in a television series if Amazon had let me plan one, and I reflect on what’s NOT really here at all but kind of ought to be? Let your own thoughts run on those subjects (saying anything you like in response) and meet me in the next post!