Whew! So, in that first #JamesAndTheSecondAge post, yesterday, I ran through the major players and events of the Second Age canonically—and the fun of the month of reading ahead of me is to see what added layers I can unearth, what rabbit holes he went down and then rejected, what recombinations of things Tolkien makes that intrigue me. But first, now that all those pieces are in place, let’s talk a little about what I see in “the canonical Second Age”---what can be done with this material, how I might do it, and some things that haven’t yet been mentioned but really ought to be. First, let’s talk theme.
The Second Age, for Tolkien, is about the repeated failure to actually deal with evil. Good folks consistently have opportunities to decisively resolve the problem of Sauron, but instead they don’t—they suspect him but don’t stand in his way (Gil-galad and Celebrimbor when he approaches them initially), they close their doors and try to separate themselves from his evil deeds (Dwarves), they defeat him but don’t actually break his center of power (Tar-Minastir and Gil-galad in that first war), and of course, famously and finally, when they can destroy the last scrap of his cruel spirit by tossing the Ring into Mount Doom, they choose to keep it instead (Isildur) with dreadful consequences. The events of the Second Age created the problems of the Third Age—after all, by then there’s no Numenor left to beg for help, and what’s left of Lindon is mostly a one-way ferry terminal to the Undying Lands (since, once Gil-galad bit the dust, plenty of Elves decided this Middle-earth situation was a losing proposition). The Dwarves of Moria dwindled in isolation (and greed, delving too deep and waking a Balrog) until they ceased to exist, and the men of Arnor and Gondor turned themselves, respectively, into a ghost town kingdom of barrows and ruins, and a battered shell of its former self ruled by a haunted steward named Denethor who seems to have learned none of the lessons that the tragic history of Numenor should have taught him. Just compare the Second Age (in which Numenor alone can overrun Mordor with one big naval assault) to the Third Age (in which a Council in Rivendell can combine the might of nearly every human, elvish, and dwarvish power, and the result is a crew that can MAYBE delay Sauron’s inevitable triumph long enough to get a spy into enemy territory to melt the One Ring, which is the only chance they have to defeat him).
There’s also clearly some narratives about good rulers and bad ones—Tar-Miriel was poised to be a good ruler of Numenor when usurped by the bad Ar-Pharazon. Gil-galad was cautious about this Lord Sauron fellow, and wisely so, while Celebrimbor was reckless (or too trusting? Is it the same thing, to Tolkien?) to the demise of himself and his whole kingdom. What I think is striking here is that Tolkien doesn’t make every bad ruler weak or ineffective—to the contrary, Celebrimbor’s smiths create tremendous works (including the Three Elven Rings we know will be wielded for millennia by Galadriel, Elrond, and eventually Gandalf) and Ar-Pharazon is so powerful that he had it within his grasp to annihilate Sauron. What characterizes good from bad really comes down to wisdom and restraint—whether it’s the Faithful Numenorean kings abiding by the expectations given by the Valar or the leaders of Lindon recognizing that there was something just a little too convenient about the generosity and beauty of this visiting Lord Sauron. (“On your CV here under References it just says ‘Balrog.’ Is that a Mister Balrog, or…?”)
What would I do to turn all this into a television series? Well, first of all, I’d have to do what Amazon has announced that they secured permission to do—move away from the timeline in the Appendices, since all the events I’m narrating to you here take place over more than three thousand years, and you just couldn’t make a meaningful series out of “well, this happened, in 275 years the next thing will happen”. Tolkien purists out there are going to lose their minds over this stuff, and I get it, but there’s no alternative here – either you make a Second Age series about just a single one of these events (and have to invent 99% of the content, which surely wouldn’t appease the purists) or else you break the timeline in order to group them together. Folks who can’t enjoy the series shouldn’t pretend that they do, of course, but also nobody’s making them watch it, right?
Anyway, I think clearly the three big events of the Second Age are Sauron deceiving everybody and getting the One Ring made, Ar-Pharazon seizing power and conquering Sauron but being deceived by him (to the ruin of Numenor), and then the war between the survivors of that wreckage—Elendil and his Elvish allies against Sauron and Mordor’s legions. Left to my own devices, I’d probably structure it with Tolkien’s rough chronological order, so that Sauron’s ring making climaxes at the end of season 1 (with the resulting war and the isolation of the Dwarves in season 2), followed by the Pharazon/Sauron/destruction of Numenor arc in 3, maybe 3 & 4, and closing up with the Last Alliance stuff in season 5, maybe 6. I’d presumably sequence all this out so that it occurs over, at most, a few decades, rather than three thousand years, acknowledging that Tolkien just wanted time to move a lot more slowly for his own reasons (and hey, I’m not burning the books here, I’m just making a different kind of art out of them). The Appendices haven’t given me a ton to work with—I’ll need to invent a bunch of characters and even relationships (since, for instance, we have zero information about how Elendil felt about Gil-galad, for instance, or whether Tar-Miriel was naive or suspicious of her cousin Ar-Pharazon, etc.).
And I have a big problem, in that the two coolest Lord of the Rings characters available to me in this era, Elrond and Galadriel, are a supporting player and a totally sidelined one, honestly, in this narrative. So I’d need to really work on how to get them involved, Galadriel especially, since I know the fans of LOTR are going to want to see them a ton, and I sure want to see them also. Not sure how to do that, other than (maybe obviously) move up Elrond’s deployment to Eregion so he gets there early, maybe warns Celebrimbor about Sauron, maybe meets up with some Dwarves (whether happily or unhappily), scouts out Rivendell. Galadriel…well, since in this present scenario I don’t have any other lore to draw from, I mostly have to work backwards from her comments in the Lorien chapters and design a character who, for instance, needs the test that she passes when Frodo offers her the Ring. I guess I’d need a more impetuous, more arrogant Galadriel, someone who genuinely does think herself ready to rule, maybe a bit of a competitor with Gil-galad at least in council conversations? This is all brainstorming, though – there’s lots of places to go with her (and again, once I have the material from other books beyond The Lord of the Rings, there’s a LOT more depth in her character for me to work with, but the canonical stuff is limited).
The other big gap here is that LOTR fans are going to be curious about a bunch of things that the Lord of the Rings simply doesn’t describe at all. Let’s start with the most obvious question: what are hobbits up to in the Second Age? The hobbits who wrote the Red Book of Westmarch (and therefore, our only sources of information for The Lord of the Rings) don’t know that about themselves—we only know that hobbits as a race took possession of the Shire in the year 1600 of the Third Age, and that the time prior to that was only a matter of “ancient legend” referred to as “the Wandering Days” (according to the Prologue to Fellowship). Their earliest legends suggest an era in which they lived in that region east of the Misty Mountains but west of “Greenwood the Great” (which becomes Mirkwood) along the banks of the Anduin—the hobbits in their Prologue claim not to know precisely when their progenitors crossed the mountains, or what could have persuaded them to make such a perilous journey (considering only the looming end of the world persuaded the four bravest hobbits in the Shire to cross the mountains the other direction, centuries later). The scribes who recorded the information presented in Appendix B (presumably Elves, or else maybe Arnorian scribes whose work was preserved somehow) indicate that the Harfoots are the first of the three hobbit groups to cross into Eriador, in about 1150 of the Third Age.
First of all, we have to treat this as VERY speculative—nobody but a hobbit would be able to distinguish between Harfoots, Stoors, and Fallohides, let alone care to do so, and we know from the Prologue that hobbits themselves have no such detailed records. Furthermore, hobbits are famously good at remaining unobserved, either due to natural stealth or simply to being overlooked as unimportant, so my presumption here as an interpreter of the original manuscripts (with gratitude to J.R.R. Tolkien for translating them) is that 1150 T.A. is only the first time any Elf or Man happens to NOTICE hobbits in Eriador, which someone familiar with the three strands of hobbitdom has guessed must be Harfoots since the legends say they were the first ones into Eriador. Myself, I’d place the passage over the mountains earlier than that on the timeline, then, but a thousand years earlier? That’s hard to believe. Unless I really want to bend the chronology, I’d put hobbit villages east of the Mistys, maybe very close to Moria’s eastern door, since Harfoots were well known to have close relationships with Dwarves in the old legends? Nobody has ever adequately explained when hobbits originated or why, except to say that they must be closely related to Men, so there’s no reason to doubt that they were around in the Second Age. Would they have met a passing Lord Sauron on his way to Eregion? Or conversed with one of the many Durins who ruled that cavernous Dwarf kingdom? If I’m making the series, I have to figure out how to get them into the mix somehow, but it’s not easy to see how.
Who else might be around? Well, to name a couple of enigmatic and VERY ancient characters from The Lord of the Rings, we know that Tom Bombadil (in one of his many guises) must be haunting some wood or glen in Eriador when the Second Age rolls through. Could a character meet him by a stream somewhere? What would that be like? Or what of the Ents, who in the Second Age maybe had not yet lost the Entwives—might Fangorn/Treebeard be a younger and slightly more hasty Ent in this time? Living maybe close to the Gap of Rohan (which probably doesn’t have that name yet), or maybe wandering much farther afield in wooded landscapes that haven’t yet been torn up by all the wars yet to come? Look into those impossibly ancient eyes, depicted here by Soni Alcorn-Hender: http://tolkiengateway.net/w/images/7/7c/Soni_Alcorn-Hender_-_Treebeard.jpeg Could HE have met Sauron, as some deputation from Mordor made its way through one of the few passes in the Misty Mountains? I don’t see why not, though I can’t imagine what they would say to each other. But if I’m making this series, I’d love every cameo I can get out of characters genuinely old enough to actually be around for these events.
The last big possibility, which I’m sure has been on your mind, is the question of wizards—could the Istari (that is, Gandalf, Saruman, and Radagast plus Mfflnmm and Brrgglrrrr [Tolkien coughs into his jacket] [seriously, the dude struggled SO much to even settle on NAMES for the other two wizards, why did he say there were five instead of three?]) actually be around in the Second Age? I mean, from my perspective this is a no. A capital NO. The whole point is that Gandalf and Saruman weren’t around the last time Sauron’s plans reach the kind of peak they did in the battle with Elendil and Gil-galad. Appendix B clearly places their arrival in Middle Earth around 1000 T.A., around the time that Greenwood the Great is given the name “Mirkwood” . . . which is, coincidentally or not, also associated in hobbit legend with the timing of the hobbits crossing the Misty Mountains. Personally, I would really rather not push wizards into the mix in the Second Age—I think you’d have to do a lot of story gymnastics to explain their presence (and why they are left out of the talk about the Second Age in The Lord of the Rings). If you did do so, to me you could only pair them with the hobbit journey . . . essentially compressing the first thousand years of the Third Age, also, so that all of this takes place at once, with hobbits and the armies of Sauron all heading into Eriador at the same time (seems HIGHLY implausible, to me). But if Gandalf had been around then, surely he wouldn’t have needed to chase down all that lore about Isildur thousands of years later just to try and work out what happened to the One Ring—he never would have let it leave his sight. So I just think the wizards can’t really be involved, and certainly not the wizard we know best.
Okay, so, as I look back at the canonical Second Age, and consider the kind of series I could make of it, here’s the elevator pitch: once I compress the timeline, this is a chance to tell stories about good leaders learning restraint and bad leaders finding the dangers of excess, a chance to weave in a theme about how the touch of evil can corrupt even things meant for good, and an opportunity to tell a big story about how human arrogance can remake the face of the earth (and drown whole civilizations). This is, in other words, a space in which to tell stories the 21st Century needs to hear. It involves multiple arcs stretching over vast distances, but all converging in whatever the final season of the series will be at the battle where Sauron is defeated at the end of the age. If we want the characters we love from The Lord of the Rings, though, we’ll have to create opportunities for them beyond what the canon envisions, for the most part—and if we want HOBBIT characters of any kind, we know they can’t be central, since the whole point of the Third Age and The Lord of the Rings was that no one involved on either side really understood what hobbits were capable of, other than Gandalf the Grey. I’m intentionally not trying to draw parallels to existing trailers or released photos of characters, etc., since a) I figure I’ll get to all that in late August if there’s time, and b) you can do that yourself and have some fun. For now, I need to press onward to The Silmarillion, and see what new ideas about the Second Age I can find there: I’ll post about that later this week.