They were selling the rights to the Appendices that outlined what the author had referred to as the Second Age of Middle-earth, along with any references to that time period in The Lord of the Rings itself. But in 2017, as he was preparing to retire, the Tolkiens held a surprising auction. Over the years Christopher Tolkien left lucrative bids for other Middle-earth material on the table.
Tolkien dreamed up whole kingdoms, then collapsed them for background. Their journey, after all, was not about confronting a new danger but finally eradicating an ancient one-a scourge of malevolence that had tormented the land for eons.
#Tales runner global full#
Along the way, Tolkien wanted the characters to pass through a scarred landscape full of the remains of the many civilizations and battles that had come before. In that story, an unlikely fellowship ventures into Mordor to destroy Sauron’s ring. This, of course, was The Lord of the Rings. (A more complete version was published posthumously as The Silmarillion.) So, as the second world war of his lifetime raged around him, Tolkien crafted an adventure about beings from very different societies putting aside their differences to stamp out an overpowering evil. After the success of his 1937 children’s story, The Hobbit, Tolkien turned his attention back to a volume of Middle-earth history, which his publishers rejected. Previously, this part of the story was most famous as ruins. ‘Oh, my God, is anyone going to understand what we’re trying to do here? Is this way too ambitious? We have no idea what’s going to happen tomorrow.’ ”
The panic metastasized, setting off other anxieties, big and small. “We’re all just going, ‘Oh, my God, what are we going to do? We’re going to have to shut everything down,’ ” says McKay. There’s music and light.” But despite the momentous scene in front of them, the show’s crew were glued to their phones: Within 45 minutes, word spread that in nearby Australia Tom Hanks had contracted COVID, the NBA had canceled its season, and the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic. “Morfydd was a few days into being Galadriel, which is probably terrifying,” says McKay. Galadriel’s survival at sea is not just a crucial story point at the start of the series-the showrunners remember it as a pivotal moment on set in New Zealand back in March 2020.
#Tales runner global series#
It’s the story of the creation of all those powers, where they came from, and what they did to each of those races.” The driving question behind the production, he adds, was this: “Can we come up with the novel Tolkien never wrote and do it as the mega-event series that could only happen now?” “Rings for the elves, rings for dwarves, rings for men, and then the one ring Sauron used to deceive them all. All this will center, eventually, around the incident that gives the trilogy its name. Their series will juggle 22 stars and multiple story lines, from deep within the dwarf mines of the Misty Mountains to the high politics of the elven kingdom of Lindon and the humans’ powerful, Atlantis-like island, Númenor. The showrunners, Patrick McKay and JD Payne, are agonizingly aware of the pressure. Amazon needs to definitively make the case that it can produce giant prestige shows, and with this series, it’s courting the additional danger of amending and elaborating on the canon of a beloved storyteller.
Because of Bezos’s immense wealth, The Rings of Power is actually less of a financial risk than it is a reputational one.
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