Folks, this one’s going to be a two-fer – I’d hoped to get this post done more quickly and have time for one last “here’s what I’d do with a Second Age series” before the show itself launches, but the episodes drop tomorrow night. Also, HoME XII: The Peoples of Middle-earth isn’t full of a ton more detail, so I can keep that portion short. There’s a nugget or two, though, that will really fire up a couple of you, I'm sure.
The Peoples of Middle-earth is a grab bag of materials that Christopher Tolkien hadn’t quite gotten to in the previous eleven volumes – some drafts of the Appendices to The Lord of the Rings (which is of course where these #JamesAndTheSecondAge posts began a few weeks ago), some bits about dwarves and people from his father’s late work on the legendarium, a scrap of this and that, right up to the final little scribblings that J.R.R. left behind him in the final months of his life. As a result, there’s no overarching message here, unlike the last couple of weeks, but there’s sure some interesting material to ruminate on.
A piece I’d never read before really captured me: it’s an abandoned draft of a short story (Tolkien does a lot of this, as we now know) about a young man named Tal-Elmar, written sometime in the 1950s, probably around the time LOTR was published. The story’s content is drawn from somewhere in the middle of the Second Age, and what struck me about it was the perspective – Tal-Elmar is a dude living in Middle-earth proper. His human village is in the lands of an unnamed King who, it increasingly seems clear, is likely to be Sauron the Great, under whatever name. But Tal-Elmar’s not some cackling villain. He’s just a kid who loves his dad and cares about his village and worries about those sails he sees on the horizon. Because they’re the sails of those guys from the island in the West, and no friends of his people. And of course the Numenoreans on those boats aren’t some noble heroes, either. Sure, they show up with sails that bear the stars of Elbereth, and they invite Tal-Elmar to come with them and see the Eldar – an offer he’s tempted by, though he rejects it. But they also pretty clearly have come to these lands for their own gain. The Numenoreans call Tal-Elmar and his community “the people of the Dark” who are their enemies, but Tal-Elmar argues that his people fear the Dark but have no loyalty to it, or love for it. And when he rejects their offer to sail with them, telling the Numenoreans he wants to stay in his village, they reply, “Your time of dwelling in these hills is come to an end. Here the men of the West have resolved to make their homes, and the folk of the dark must depart – or be slain.”
Now, we can say all we like about how Numenor was the only strength sufficient to oppose Sauron – or how Tal-Elmar and his village might be naive or deluded in thinking that they don’t really “serve the Dark” despite living in Sauron’s lands. But there’s no denying that Tolkien’s narrative thrust here seems really pointed and intentional, calling attention to the ways in which Numenorean forays into Middle-earth against the alleged dangers of Sauron’s influence look a lot like colonialism and imperialism. It’s one thing to loose a volley of arrows at an orc contingent you know is prepared to do the same to you. It’s another to tell Tal-Elmar’s aged father that he has to leave his family home or die, because it’s a Numenorean home now. I think it’s important not to go overly far in praising Tolkien here – clearly he can’t manage to land this plane, either because he doesn’t know how to write a really good critique of imperialism or because he doesn’t want to do it and chooses to abandon the story once there’s no other way out. But I do think he should get a lot more praise than he often does for being an author who wants to grapple with the implications of his creation – a lot of folks like to say flatly that Tolkien writes a “black and white” moral world in which characters are all good or all bad. Now, I have no idea how that argument can survive contact with Boromir or Gollum or Denethor, or Lobelia Sackville-Baggins for that matter. But certainly I look at a passage like this one and say to myself that Tolkien’s aware that his universe can sometimes seem too easily divided between the good noble folks and the cruel evil folks, and he wants to explore how a change of perspective can really radically alter your sense of who has the moral high ground. I think there’s some moral complexity, too, in the later edits he makes to his First Age narratives, but we’ll save that for some other time – here, at least, the ethical gray areas of the Second Age are in view, and I appreciate it. I wish he’d finished the story.
The other piece I want to talk about is actually the little jumble of pieces from the final year of Tolkien’s life, which Christopher labels his father’s “Last Writings”. There are a couple of Last Writings sections I’ve at least skimmed before, but it’s clearly been too long, because this time around I realized I had forgotten some major important details. First of all, you may remember my passion for the elf, the myth, the legend – the Lord of the House of the Golden Flower, Glorfindel. Everybody’s got their LOTR faves and mine are Glorfindel and that fox (you know the one I mean). Anyway, at the end of his life, Tolkien apparently decides that he really needs to resolve the question of Glorfindel’s return from death – a problem he’d created initially by reusing the name of Glorfindel of Gondolin in the text of The Fellowship of the Ring, not remembering he’d killed Glorfindel off in a truly glorious (and successful!) fight with a Balrog. (And I do mean glorious: https://tolkiengateway.net/w/images/b/b0/Steamey_-_Glorfindel_and_the_Balrog.jpg) He’d initially “fixed” this by saying that Glorfindel came back with Gandalf, when the wizard’s first deployed to Middle-earth in the Third Age. It’s only at the end of his life that Tolkien suddenly realizes that really, after the world is made round, no “embodied” person should be able to return from Valinor. So Glorfindel really has to make it out of Valinor and back to Middle-earth before Numenor sinks beneath the waves. Which is super cool, clearly, because it means that (again, if Amazon has the rights, blah blah) Glorfindel could be a player in the Second Age – that in fact he really ought to be, since he’s a big freakin’ deal. J.R.R. theorized that he helped Elrond in the war in Eregion, positioning himself as a right hand dude in Imladris – it would make sense that many centuries later that’s why he’s still hanging around Rivendell running important errands for Elrond like finding a bunch of hobbits and Elrond’s future son-in-law. I am, needless to say, stoked.
But that’s not all! So, I’ve made some comments in conversations on earlier posts about wizards, drawing from what I then remembered about the Istari – that is, that their coming to Middle-earth occurs a good thousand years into the Third Age, which is what Appendix B of The Lord of the Rings says (and which is basically what the other accounts I remembered about wizards confirmed). Well. As will delight at least one of you, for whatever reason, J.R.R. tinkers with a big rewrite here in Last Writings – specifically, that the two Blue Wizards were probably sent in the Second Age. Maybe at the same time as Glorfindel? Because these two were, unlike Saruman, Gandalf, and Radagast, sent to deal with Sauron in the Second Age and not the Third – specifically, their jobs (as captured in their names, Morinehtar / Darkness-slayer and Romestamo / East-helper) were to head to the eastern portions of Middle-earth, disrupting Melkor cults and stirring up rebellion among the human subjects of Sauron in those lands and basically rooting out the dark lord so that he’s more easily perceived and dealt with by Middle-earth’s less-angelic occupants. J.R.R. editorializes that they must have done a decent job since the forces of western Middle-earth are able to beat Sauron repeatedly in the war in Eregion, in the Last Alliance at the end of the Second Age, and ultimately in the War of the Ring at the end of the Third Age. Way to go wizards, and apologies to anybody I misled – though, to be fair, unless Amazon negotiated access to this particular scrap of paper and what it contains, they’d be stuck with Appendix B and its kibosh on Second Age Wizards.
Now, how would Glorfindel or a Blue Wizard get to Middle-earth? Well, before I’d seen any trailer for The Rings of Power, I would have said, “not naked in a meteoric fireball arcing through the sky and cratering in the wilderness somewhere.” But now I would say….that still doesn’t make sense to me. :-) But since Fireball Dude (that is, “the Stranger”) is clearly an element in the show, he’s got to be SOMEBODY. And my guess is that those three are the most canonical choices, unless he’s Sauron, whose “return” to Middle-earth is not clearly described by Tolkien that I can recall. I’d still put my money on one of these three, I think.
Okay, let’s take that as a segue. Now, I am not going to try to break down all the trailers and interviews and production leaks out there – if you’re someone who wanted to keep up with all The Rings of Power news, maybe you did already, and if you didn’t, I can’t imagine how I’d tackle that. My “job” here, as I see it, is to act as an interpreter of the legendarium for those of you who haven’t read these texts before, or who have but are curious to see someone else’s take. So my wrap-up is going to take the following format: if Amazon had come to me and said “we’re going to throw a billion dollars at a five season Second Age series. Compress the timeline all you like, and invent things where you need to, as long as the canon is basically preserved: whaddaya got?” well, what would I actually have? Here’s where I’m at.
Structurally, the five seasons would basically work if laid out like so: 1) Primarily about the naivete of the Elves, especially in Eregion, being taken in by Annatar, Lord of Gifts, and assisting him in forging Rings of Power – the big reveal at season’s end would probably be Sauron putting on The One Ring; 2) Primarily about the war in Eregion, narrowly won against Sauron thanks to an Elf-Dwarf alliance and big aid from Numenor at the right moment – the big reveal at season’s end would, I think, be Sauron’s escape from near-certain destruction by a Numenorean turncoat, a general who could have prevented Sauron’s retreat, who reveals themselves to have one of the Nine Rings, probably the person we will later know as the Witch-King of Angmar; 3) Primarily about Numenor’s deception and fall as Ar-Pharazon pursues Sauron to Mordor, takes him back in chains, and then is so bewitched that he makes war on Valinor and dooms the whole civilization – the big reveal is just the incredible setpiece of the destruction of Numenor and Elendil and sons’ miraculous escape; 4) Primarily a rebuilding season in which Elendil befriends Gil-galad and settles in Arnor, his sons tackle the building of the mighty cities of Gondor we know and love, and everyone else adapts to the changed world – the big reveal at season’s end being Sauron taking form again in Mordor maybe; and 5) The Last Alliance of Elves and Men (and Dwarves... they’re always left out of the name) with Isildur nearly dying against Sauron, and then managing to triumph over him at the end despite the loss of his family….we all know what the final moments of that would be like. Isildur refusing to destroy the Ring, and the haunted face of Elrond watching as he disappears.
Now, to be clear, those are not the only ways I can imagine doing five seasons. And there’s a LOT I’m leaving out, since I’m focused on just the major arc for each season. Still, I think it works – you have to compress thousands of years into a generation or so of human existence, but Numenoreans have longer generations, generally. The sequence of events is preserved, and honestly much of the Second Age, as we’ve seen, is bullet points and half-finished notions of Tolkien’s – there’s lots of room here to compress things without leaving out a ton of important stuff, and I think some new characters could be invented to fill gaps that are needed for given story beats. Ultimately a lot of things need setup to pay off – we need to love Numenor way before Season 3 so that its destruction is devastating. We need to see the good, the just, the hero in Isildur so that his inevitable fall to the Ring is a weight on us too. I can’t imagine trying to storyboard all this out. But when I look at my very loose outline, it feels like a really good show to me – a lot of things hinted at or barely spoken of in LOTR given form and depth, and a bunch of thematic content that’s both fully Tolkien and in a lot of ways really “modern” in terms of where media has come (that is, it scratches a lot of the itches people felt from things like Game of Thrones).
I’ll admit, there’s stuff in what we know right now about The Rings of Power that, understanding nothing about how it integrates, doesn’t really fit my big outline. Like, there’s ZERO room for Harfoots (let alone any other proto-Hobbits) here, and I can’t work out what they’d do. Call me skeptical but curious on that front. Also, I haven’t really envisioned a role for Galadriel, just because Tolkien really struggled to figure out who she would be in this era – but there’s no question she would be a big presence in my series somehow. And to be honest, the Galadriel character I’ve seen glimpses of in their marketing feels totally consistent with the legendarium to me – a different interpretation than I would have thought of, but a valid one and one I’m really excited to see deliver. All her voyaging in the trailers seems to tie some things together – the reveal of Sauron’s continued presence and the naive optimism of the Elf nobility in Lindon and the potential for alliance with Numenorean strength. Maybe if I’d tried to write an outline of my five seasons, I’d have found I needed glue, and thought of her as the right pick – who knows? I’m certainly happy to take some time to see how it’s fitting together before issuing any pronouncements.
And for the record, a lot of what I’m seeing DOES fit my big outline. Like, the rumors of us getting to see Elves and Humans living in or near what will become Mordor? A great chance to invest us in those landscapes and therefore to feel moved by Sauron’s conquest and twisting of them to his ends. The fact that seemingly Numenor’s timeline is set at the moment Tar-Miriel is “regent” but not yet Queen – with a trusted counselor named Ar-Pharazon close at hand? That’s perfect if we want to get Season 3 to land the way I need it to – I want to know them both really well before everything comes crashing down. Already we’re seeing glimpses of Elf/Dwarf friendship (or at least communication) that’s a great setup for my seasons 2 and 5, and Celebrimbor’s being so visible in the marketing (plus the name – "The Rings of Power") tells me that it won’t be long before we see some forging. Even some of the “invented” characters suit me – like, this human man that Galadriel meets and seemingly travels with, Halbrand….who is he? I don’t care if they make him Sauron in disguise, or maybe one of the Nine who will become the Nazgul, or maybe an unlikely hero in the war for Eregion, I can see a lot of potential uses for a free agent like that. So even though Amazon didn’t ask for my opinion or my blessing (the fools!), I’m pretty content with what’s in front of me – and I think it’s worth noting, a year ago I was deeply ambivalent about this whole thing and thought it was probably going to be a dumb cash grab by some people who see Tolkien as just an easy label for a generic fantasy brand. Whatever the series becomes, the glimpses I’ve seen of it so far don’t look anything like that. That’s why I bothered getting up to speed on the lore – until recently it didn’t seem like there would be a point, but lately I’ve been thinking that there would be.
I think it’s worth repeating what I said about the Peter Jackson LOTR films, when I viewed them and critiqued them from the perspective of the novel, back in the summer of 2020. I love those films, but they take huge liberties with the story on multiple occasions, and I am not a big fan of some of his moves. I just recognize that at least some of Jackson’s choices are genuinely different interpretations of the story (and I don’t like his take), and that others are at least plausibly necessary outcomes of having to compress and alter the story to fit the medium of film and the limited runtime (I don’t think that’s always true but I understand I know as little about how to write a three film treatment of LOTR as I do about how to write a five season treatment of the Second Age). So if I never really like the Harfoots’ presence in this series, or I come to find the Galadriel characterization as “off” – well, anybody who’s tried to talk with me about Peter Jackson’s take on the Ents, or PJ’s depiction of Galadriel, for that matter, knows that I can find a lot to love (and even obsess over) in a Tolkien adaptation that comes with some flaws onboard. Maybe not everybody could wear both a hat saying “meticulous Tolkien canon nerd” and a hat saying “broad-minded appreciator of anyone brave and foolish enough to try and put some of this legendarium on screen” but I have a big head. :-)
And that’s it, folks. In the last five weeks you and I have taken in every scrap of canonical material I’m familiar with about the Second Age. I’m probably silly enough to at least attempt some written reaction/review of the first couple episodes this weekend, and perhaps weekly after that. I like chatting with you folks here, and you seem to have an inordinate level of patience for (and even curiosity about) my opinions on these things. Happy viewing to those of you planning to watch The Rings of Power this weekend, and to those feeling a little too purist for them, well, happy re-reading, maybe, of Tolkien or whatever else floats your boat. Until we cross paths again, namárië.