The Lord of the Rings: The timeline collapse will be the biggest risk of the series!

• The Lord of the Rings series is set in the Second Age of Middle-earth, spanning several thousand years.
• In order to create a better series dramaturgy, the events are compressed and the timeline tightened.
• The downside of compression is that some expansive events lose emotional impact.

On September 2, 2022, “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” will start streaming on Amazon Prime Video. The series represents a prequel to Peter Jackson’s “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy and is therefore not intended to rewrite or change any events from the films. But the series itself is of course based on other JRR Tolkien stories that need to be changed.

It has already been confirmed that The Lord of the Rings series will compress the timeline of the Second Age in which the series is set and compress the events. Logically, after all, the events extend over a thousand years. This makes sense for the series so that main characters stretch through the series and don’t change every five episodes. But the story is also stripped of its emotional impact.

Thus, the sinking of the island of Númenor is shown in Amazon’s series, which extends over several generations in the books. In the series, however, this will happen within a generation. With this, the failure of the people who are seduced by Sauron is built up significantly less intensively.

Viewers may not have arrived on the island yet and have taken the characters to their hearts before the island falls and people are corrupted. As a result, we would miss any emotional connection to the characters and the events.

So let’s hope that Amazon will walk the fine line between useful summarizing for good dramaturgy and good storytelling for emotional impact. We’ll find out in September when the series starts in the Amazon Prime Video news program.

Fans can already look forward to the fact that “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” Season 1 is far from over. There are several seasons to come and Season 2 of The Lord of the Rings series has already been officially confirmed and is in production.