Greetings, folks—if you missed my earlier post on the subject, I’m embarking on a little journey that’s an echo of the posts I made, one or two chapters at a time, a couple of years ago about The Lord of the Rings. You can browse all of them, if you like, at https://sites.google.com/view/pandemiclotr/home
My aim at the time was to revisit a story I knew well, both to see what new things I could see in it (maybe especially in light of the pandemic which at the time I, in my naivete, thought might be a brief season in my life and not the rest of my years on the planet), and to share a love of some of the deeper insights into Tolkien’s work I’d gleaned from a lifetime of reading additional things (letters, biographies, critical essays, etc.), both with people who had that background too and with people unfamiliar with anything beyond the novels (or the popular films based on them) but who loved them enough to be interested in the things I had to say. It was a fun experience, and I know from conversations with a number of you that you enjoyed it too – the comments were always fun, certainly!
Anyway, the journey I’m taking now is both like and unlike that experience. It’s like it in that I will be posting things here – probably MUCH too lengthy – that offer reflections and musings and half-baked theories and unresolved questions about my reading of Tolkien’s work, and for that reason may appeal to a similar audience. It’s unlike it, because I knew The Lord of the Rings very well, and the whole point of this new exploration is that I will be plumbing the depths of something I’m distinctly less familiar with. That something is the collection of bits and pieces we know (well, “know”) about the Second Age of Middle-earth—and while I have to keep most of the stories about those bits and pieces for the actual posts, I also figure I need to give you all (especially folks who are less familiar with Tolkien’s work) a little context before I begin.
So, presuming you’re at least broadly familiar with The Lord of the Rings, you know that Tolkien’s most famous novel (along with its companion, The Hobbit) takes place in a setting called Middle-earth, a world in which elves and humans and dwarves have been contending with evil forces (led, it seems, by some “dark lord” named “Sauron”) for a long time. You’ll remember that the hobbit Frodo Baggins (and his “uncle” Bilbo) have a Ring that was associated with Sauron some long age ago, which had been lost a long time but had recently been found again. And you might remember, especially if you read the books, that any references to the timeline of events describe the era of The Lord of the Rings' story as “The Third Age”. Not a lot more than that is said about the timeline in the body of the novel itself, in terms of what happened in distant past ages, how long ago they were, etc., other than a little talk at the Council of Elrond and a remark here and there in poem or song.
There are, however, appendices at the end of The Return of the King, the final volume of the three-volume novel, and those appendices go into a little detail about, among other things, a timeline that extends over millennia. In them, we come to understand that Sauron’s first truly major battles against the forces of good took place a few thousand years before Frodo was born, in the Second Age, which ends with his defeat much as the Third Age does. Tolkien’s relationship to that era of Middle-earth is strange – by the time The Lord of the Rings has been published, he’s made multiple attempts to turn events from the Second Age into a novel without succeeding, and though he couldn’t have known it at the time, he’d ultimately never crack that nut in his lifetime. The Appendices were his last minute attempt to cram some of it into The Lord of the Rings, accomplished at great haste and with very little planning. The result is that, at his death, the world outside the Tolkien family (and an editor or two) knows almost nothing about the Second Age, beyond a handful of pages thrown together and then unread by plenty of people who have the book on their shelves. What little readers did know was astoundingly fragmentary – huge swaths of time pass with Tolkien just saying X happens and then 200 years later Y happens. The level of detail we have from The Lord of the Rings – a work so interested in minutiae that you can literally plot the timing of various events just by following the phases of the moon, which Tolkien paid ridiculously strict attention to – is something Tolkien never achieves in publication about the Second Age prior to his death.
Some of you will say “Wait, James, there’s this big book, really dull, called The Silmarillion, that nerds like you and Stephen Colbert love: it’s all about that stuff, isn’t it?” Okay, first of all, it’s not dull – it’s just that the first few dozen pages are usually considered the least exciting, and that’s where most of you quit on it. Second of all, thank you for lumping me in with Stephen Colbert: what a treat! Thirdly, and most importantly, The Silmarillion, which was this late-1970s publication constructed after J.R.R.’s death by his son and a young grad student named Guy Gavriel Kay, tries to tie together a lot of Tolkien’s loose ideas about Middle-earth into a narrative…and you’d think it would deal with The Second Age and Sauron at length, but in fact no, it’s mostly about the First Age and Sauron’s predecessor as Middle-earth’s Big Bad, a dude named Melkor (or Morgoth) for whom Sauron was just a kind of right-hand vampire (who may have created werewolves….yeah, the Silmarillion, as has been said before, is metal as hell). So even though, yes, you got me, I am the kind of nerd who has read The Silmarillion, it surprisingly is still VERY low on information about the Second Age as compared with what we know about both the First and Third Ages of Middle-earth.
Anyway, all of this wouldn’t matter much to anybody but the biggest of Tolkien nerds, except that, as you may have heard, Amazon Prime is launching a huge TV series on September 2nd called The Rings of Power, and as we’ve heard rumored for a while and finally had confirmed for us in the last few months, the events of that series take place essentially totally in the Second Age (though you can tell from the trailers there’s at least a couple First Age flashbacks planned). This came as a shock to a lot of folks (me included) who, when we heard Amazon had picked up LOTR TV rights a few years ago, just assumed it would be a Young Aragorn + Arwen romance/adventure show, or else maybe a Legolas & Gimli buddy comedy travelogue like those “The Trip” Coogan/Brydon movies, etc. They’re setting a whole series in The Second Age? How? And honestly, we don’t know. We don’t know precisely what Amazon has the rights to. We don’t know how much they’ll be making up and how much they’ll be trying to follow canon (to the extent that there is anything “canonical” about an era that Tolkien published almost nothing about prior to his death). The trailers have me excited, the things I’ve read about the production sound really promising, and even if it’s second-rate by comparison with the films we fell in love with twenty years ago, there’s a lot of space below “as great as the LOTR movies” that’s still above the line of “this is a worthwhile TV show”. I figure to get the most out of my enjoyment, I’d like to go into watching it as a person really up to speed on what Tolkien’s own thoughts about the Second Age were. We know, of course, that the showrunners will change things from his vision just as Peter Jackson changed things in the films from how they were in the novel. But I appreciate PJ’s films more by knowing the novels (even, and maybe especially, when they diverge), and I bet the same will be true of this series if I know what the Professor was up to in his tinkering with the Second Age.
Now, some of you will probably want a reading list, and I’ll give it to you, but I have to be honest: a) I would be astonished if any of you own all of these books since I sure don’t and I’m exactly the kind of guy who would, b) we’re on a pretty tight schedule which I should have started on earlier but you know, time got away from me, and c) I am not sure that the books themselves will be gripping reading. You may get more fun, in much less time, out of my ramblings, is all I’m saying. But I welcome fellow travelers here, just as I did with the LOTR read-through, and am happy to answer questions about these readings if it helps you get some fun out of them.
In a nutshell, here’s what we’re taking on—firstly, some pages from early in Appendices A and B in The Return of the King along with a few lines from The Fellowship of the Ring, which comprise the only canonical stuff we know about the Second Age and which may (if the original rumors were correct) be the only stuff Amazon has actually paid to license for television (which may mean everything else I read is off-limits to the showrunners….nobody knows, though). Secondly, the portion of The Silmarillion known as The Akallabeth (as well as the Second Age material from the beginning of the subsequent narrative about the forging of the Rings of Power which, just a guess, may be significant to a TV series entitled The Rings of Power), which comprises about fifty pages, as published. Then the big chunk of material on the Second Age from a book called Unfinished Tales of Numenor and Middle-earth—this is a publication right after The Silmarillion, where instead of trying to turn his dad’s hodgepodge of notes into a coherent narrative (as he did in The Silmarillion), Christopher Tolkien (about whom more later) left things fragmentary. And then even more fragmentary still, I will be taking giant bites out of three volumes from Christopher Tolkien’s massive History of Middle-earth series, in which he tries to march through his dad’s papers chronologically and trace how his thinking about the setting of Middle-earth changes over the years – this is drafts and scraps by JRR along with commentary and notes and explanations by Chris. The volumes in question will be V: The Lost Road and Other Writings, about the Second Age in the late 1930s, around the time Tolkien published The Hobbit and when he was tinkering with a time-travel novel that never came together; IX: Sauron Defeated, about the Second Age in the mid-1940s, when Tolkien took a break while writing The Lord of the Rings to attempt a totally different novel project that crashed half-finished; and XII: The Peoples of Middle-earth, about the work Tolkien did late in life, after the publication of The Lord of the Rings in the 1950s, to reshape the history of the Second Age yet again. The total material from Unfinished Tales and the History of Middle-earth series is by FAR the bulk of this read-through, maybe 500-700 pages in total, and again, none of it is presented as a traditional narrative (although for stretches it is, of course, drafts of narratives that Tolkien had hoped to publish more traditionally someday). And, to be clear, none of these books is all about the Second Age – the fraction of Second Age material in each one is between 1/5 and 1/2 of each book’s total length.
Sounds fun, eh? Well, it does to me, anyway, and perhaps getting to experience it vicariously will be interesting for you. I’ll be musing about characters and themes, I’ll be thinking about what it’s like to try to find a story in all the chaos of Tolkien’s ideas about this time period, and I’ll be making some guesses as to what the showrunners for the new series might be thinking (or at least what I might do in their place). My guess is that you’ll hear from me once every few days, maybe once a week – not quite as relentless a pace as I kept on The Lord of the Rings, but again, I only have so much time for reading (and yet I also have only so much time before the series launches). My first post on Appendices A and B will be up sometime soon, I bet, since there’s not much material to work with!
Again, for those who look at all this and say “no thanks”, go in peace, friend. Not everything is for everybody, and this is for hardly anybody. But if you look at all this and pop some popcorn, ready to settle in with long, long Tolkien rambles from me again, well, welcome comrade to #JamesAndTheSecondAge. Let’s see where the Lost Road takes us. I bet we’ll have fun on the journey.