Q: Will Amazon Create a New Canonical History for Middle-earth?
ANSWER: This is one of those “asking for friend” or “heard it through the grapevine” questions, where I caught a snippet of a discussion and don’t have all the details. And one does not simply go skipping across a parking lot and say, “Pardon me, but I am Michael Martinez and I couldn’t help but overhear part of your conversation …”
My Original Thoughts from 2019
Besides which, I don’t have any inside information on the topic.
However if you forced me to guess I would guess that, yes, Amazon will create a whole new history for Middle-earth – albeit not necessarily inconsistent with J.R.R. Tolkien’s (almost) canonical timeline. Mistakes can and will happen in creating compatibility between derivative and original works.
And then you have Peter Jackson’s history of Middle-earth, which apparently wipes out the entire history of the Kingdom of Arnor (although there are vague references to “the Men of the North” imprisoning the Nazg– don’t go there).
Worse, to this day people still ask questions like, “Why couldn’t they just write ’17 years later’ on the bottom of the screen when Gandalf returns to the Shire?” (To those of you still waiting for an answer from me – I DON’T KNOW – they didn’t ask for my help in that part of the story).
There Will Be At Least Two Kinds of History in Amazon’s Middle-earth
There will be the individual histories for characters, locations, and things invented by the writers for the sake of telling their stories in these two or more planned television shows. There will be events and leaders and important (and unimportant) people no one has ever heard of. There’s no way Amazon can create two or more series set in Middle-earth without creating an awful lot of small, personal stories.
What kind of stories? Well, go browse TVTropes.Org. That should cover just about everything that Amazon’s writing team could possibly interweave into their shows. What we should all be looking for is good story-telling and presentation. You know there will be characters who have to come to terms with their dark pasts (perhaps a trial or two), a love story (or a whole book of them), a character with a mysterious past, and all those other things we’ve come to expect from our television entertainment.
The other kind of history will be the background stuff, the grand sweeping historical tapestry from which the fabric of individual stories are taken. This is probably where most purists will direct their ire (if ire is to be found in Tolkien fandom any more). There is so darned little actual ‘canonical’ history for either the Second Age or the Third Age.
And We Do Not Know When the First Series Will Be Set
Update 2022: Okay, now we know much more. They’re condensing the majority of the Second Age book events into a short timeline for the TV show.
Oh, yes, we have a map and a cryptic “Welcome to the Second Age” from Amazon’s social media accounts. Thank you for reminding me. But I’m afraid the map and message are rather short on details, specifics about locations, characters, events, motivations, and who the stars of the show are. It’s easy to proclaim the Second Age being the basis of the show, but what if they start off with the War of the Last Alliance? (Well, technically, they could probably drag that out for 10-12 seasons – but I digress).
My point is that Amazon’s team – at the moment they decided “we’ll begin here” (wherever there is) – had almost a completely blank slate to work with. If you could win a sub-contract from Amazon to create your own series under their license, you’d have very little to work with, too. Maybe you could piece together a fairly bland show about the Rohirrim (but I would certainly hope you wouldn’t base it on “Vikings”).
There is so little history covering the more than 6,000 years from the beginning of the Second Age to the end of the Third Age that Amazon could fit five television shows in there without forcing themselves to work around the minor details of Tolkien’s timeline. They could make Tarannon Falastur and Queen Beruthiel the focus of one show (actually, Amazon, if you’re thinking about that, Chris Seeman may be the guy to talk to).
Yes, Virginia, Amazon Will Create a New Middle-earth Canon
Legions of fans not yet won over will take to social media and the various online forums to declare their allegiance to characters we’ve never heard of. They will discuss the geography and history of lands we don’t know. I’m sure Amazon’s writers have some idea of why they put Khand on a Second Age map. I’d love to see the expisode explaining that.
It won’t be Tolkien’s timeline. It should, I hope, be mostly consistent with Tolkien’s timeline. One can hope that if J.R.R. Tolkien says “600 years passed before they returned to Middle-earth” the writers won’t feel compelled to have the Númenoreans show up in Forlond or Mithlond after 50 years.
And, by the way guys, why don’t you have Gil-galad’s city on your Second Age map? — But I digress (and I know someone will demand to know how I know Forlond was Gil-galad’s city).
The new Middle-earth canon is coming, just as the last Middle-earth canon came (and didn’t leave). We have multiple canons for Middle-earth, an entire battery of them, from Iron Crown Enterprises, Decipher, Peter Jackson, and various cable channels that produced strange, inexplicably inventive “documentaries” about J.R.R. Tolkien and Middle-earth.
And while there are no pointy-eared Elves in any of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth stories (nor Dwarves who speak with Scottish brogues – yes, I know “brogue” most often refers to Irish — you digress) — well, let’s just say I’m sure that Amazon will continue the tradition of retconning pointy-eared Elves into Middle-earth.
I’m sure they must have plastic surgery and went through a phase or something. But like the Klingons, they don’t talk about that. So it’s canonical to many fans even though there is no canon.
What is the Point of Speculating about New Timelines for Middle-earth?
Well the point is that I heard this snippet of a conversation and it’s been rolling around in my head and I needed to say something at some point just to get it out of my system.
Across the decades I’ve become accustomed to speaking of “Tolkien’s Middle-earth” versus “Peter Jackson’s Middle-earth” or ICE’s Middle-earth. So what’s one more Middle-earth to speak of? People don’t seem to have a problem with all the Middle-earth fan fiction spread across the Internet. One could hope they won’t have much trouble reconciling one more take on Middle-earth fan fiction with the original story.
And I cannot help but wonder if Homer and the Epic Poets didn’t go through some sort of staged revision of their mythological history in much the same way. Some people say the Epic Poets were active for 200 years, although that’s just one version of their history …
What We Know in 2022 (So Far)
Amazon has now confirmed that they are compressing the events of the Second Age into a much shorter time-frame. In 2019 I listed 5 Tolkien stories I felt could be turned into 5 seasons. A show like that would be more like 5 different shows. Sure, you could have a handful of characters appear in all 5 seasons: Gil-galad, Elrond, Galadriel, Sauron, and maybe some secondary characters. But you would have to rely on flashbacks to bring short-lived characters forward.
Amazon’s showrunners, J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay, decided to cover a much shorter period of time so they could plausibly keep all the main characters in the same timeframe.
If this were any other fictional world that would work fine. But since it’s an interpretation of Middle-earth, we’ve already heard a fair amount of moaning and groaning from “fans” over changes being made to Middle-earth.
As I said above (in 2019), changes were inevitable. Both Ralph Bakshi and Peter Jackson changed Middle-earth for their movies. And the BBC and Mind’s Eye productions changed Middle-earth for their radio shows. It just goes with the territory.
So we’ll be getting 5 seasons of Amazon’s Middle-earth, inspired by J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth. I’m sorry if anyone has a problem with that, but I don’t.
What Does Amazon’s Canon Mean for Tolkien Fandom?
Before the Peter Jackson movies taught millions of people that orcs come out of pods (Tolkien’s orcs do not come out of pods), online Tolkien fans were frustrated – some even infuriated – by the Middle-earth Role-playing gamers who would quote the MERP sourcebooks. You always knew someone was a MERPer if they started naming the Nazgûl or asking questions about tribes and kingdoms never mentioned in the Tolkien books.
While Peter Jackson (or New Line Cinema, I guess) did authorize some companion books for the movies that introduced bizarre changes in the Middle-earth timeline, I haven’t received many inquiries from fans asking about the Jackson version of Middle-earth’s history. And that’s probably because there isn’t much. They literally wiped out all the kings of Arnor after Isildur. I don’t know why they did that. I don’t care why they did that. I didn’t have to learn a secondary history.
Even so, the Peter Jackson movies did more to settle some fan debates than all the fan debates in the world. When 100 million or more people see a smokey Balrog on the screen, they begin to understand how “wings” could be made of something other than flesh and blood. Maybe somewhere on the Internet people are still arguing over whether Balrogs have wings – but that issue hasn’t landed in my lap for many years.
There was pushback against Tauriel, the female elf played by Evangeline Lilly in the “Hobbit” movies. Okay, some people were downright hostile. I liked Tauriel. I even enjoyed the relationship between her and Kili. That’s not a Tolkien love story – it’s a Peter Jackson love story. And I don’t see people complaining about it any more. Maybe someone, somewhere, is wringing their hands in fury over it – but done is done and they’re now part of the Peter Jackson Middle-earth canon.
Soon there will be an Amazon Middle-earth canon. I expect it will be very different from Tolkien’s canon, and Peter Jackson’s canon. And some people will wring their hands in fury and type angry rants on the Internet, or make flabbergasted videos on YouTube. But in 10-20 years, the Amazon canon will be accepted by millions of people.
See Also
Could Amazon Have Covered 3441 Years of Second Age History in 5 Seasons? (2022)
How Faithful Is Amazon’s Rings of Power to J.R.R. Tolkien’s Books? (2022)
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Canon (Classic Essay)
Is Your Canon on the Loose? (Classic Essay – aka “Choir of a Thousand Voices” in Hebrew)
Middle-earth Revised, Again (Classic Essay)
The Other Way Round (Classic Essay)
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Have you read our other Tolkien and Middle-earth Questions and Answers articles?
I think using the word “canon” here is like throwing a single piece of raw meat to a pack of starving dogs. While Amazon will certainly have their own timeline or history, calling it canon just seems to be a way to make people angry in advance. Granted, I think using the word canon in regards to anything Tolkien is a bad idea, given its ever shifting conception.
LOL! I understand what you mean, but there will be discussions where “the Amazon canon” is what matters. I’ve got a few “Peter Jackson canon” articles on this blog, so it’s not like I’m the most hard-hearted of purists. I will do my best to make good distinctions.
The ‘lack of detail’ seems to be the main characteristic of recently announced Tolkien related projects, be it video games or the tv show 🙂 (apparently some ‘Tolkien renaissance’ is happening, Athlon Games wants to make some online game, supposedly MMO, Daedalic Entertainment wants to make a game with…Gollum as protagonist 🙂 and this Amazon show and it’s possible spin-offs, nothing is really known except few lines in the announcement :)). Also one thing is certain the tv show can’t really make any canon, because no adaption makes canon, every adaptation is in some manner fanfiction 🙂 because of the changes, though we are yet to see whether the changes will be as awful as in video games Shadow of Mordor and Shadow of War, THOSE were real travesty in adapting source material, including ‘sexy woman Shelob’ ;).
Speaking of Khand, do we really know when it was founded? 🙂 Maybe they just couldn’t avoid using the name since it’s used in Third Age map 🙂 so they assumed that the land was inhabited back earlier too hehe (after all in the Second Age there was already loads of people living east under Sauron’s dominion). Though more seriously, there are number of mistakes on the map from what I gathered, the Second Age map is naturally their invention that extrapolates things from what we know of that earlier era (hence the marked woodlands in Eriador), it will be a shame to see stupid alterations once again, a la the Hobbit films, as they irked me many times with the creative decisions they made with them, though I’m actually curious do they have rights to parts of The Silmarillion, Akallabeth, other works such as The Unfinished Tales and maybe others? As the map seems to imply that (Numenor map from UT), the western islands Tol Fuin, Tol Morwen, Himling, either UT or Silm references, the Lotr appendices alone contain only rough sketch of timeline for Second Age and some info on Numenorean kings and major events (though in appendices even First Age stuff gets references as well including Feanor and his Great Jewels), one thing is certain you should offer your services to the Amazon team you would make it hundred times better :). Though I’m foolishly hoping that involvement of Tolkien Estate means there will be some manner of ‘fidelity to source material’ in a loose term :).
J.R.R. Tolkien never said when Khand was founded. The only references to it are from the late 3rd age.
Well Khand doesn’t seem to be a state or a kingdom, simply put a land that was named so that was inhabited by various peoples, a region like Calenardhon or Eriador probably. Though Tolkien usually put some info in the meaning of words.
“Of the speech of Men of the East and allies of Sauron all that appears is múmak, a name of the great elephant of the Harad. … my father in a similar addition named beside múmak also Variag and Khand….”
The Peoples of Middle-Earth, HoME Vol 12, Part 1, Ch 2, The Appendix on Languages: Commentary
I wonder what sort of etymological meaning he had in mind :).
Maybe some day someone who cares enough about the point will ask the Amazon team what their thinking was behind their inclusion of Khand on a 2nd Age map. I don’t know of a real historical context for “mumak”. So far as I know, Tolkien completely made up that word. Both “khand” and “variag”, however, have real historical contexts. Much ink has been shed in attempts to divine any possible significance between those words and their real-world counterparts.
I actually doubt the knowledge of the Amazon lore team quite a bit now, since somebody noticed that Ost-in-Edhil is located where Tharbad should be.
As I said many mistakes in that map were made, even though there is no ‘canonic’ location of the Ost-in-Edhil it is highly unlikely it was where they put the name on map (I always imagined that this city was located somewhere along Glanduin river closer to the mountains but not near it’s sources, but that’s just my personal interpretation :)). There is a reference though in The Unfinished Tales which may, or may not, be source of that mistake (this is highly conjectural on my part since we don’t know whether they had rights to UT though all signs seem to indicate that)
“It is also slated that “no records are now left of the later voyages that Aldarion made,” but that “it is known that he went much on land as well as sea, and went up the River Gwathló as far as Tharbad, and there met Galadriel.” There is no mention elsewhere of this meeting; but at that time Galadriel and Celeborn were dwelling in Eregion, at no great distance from Tharbad (see p. 246).”
Even if this was the source of mistake (and mind you that’s pure speculation on my part) it’s still doesn’t explain why they would set Ost-in-Edhil so close to Tharbad’s location. 🙂
It’s not canon and neither is Jackson’s.
Don’t get too caught up with “telling stories”, that was the problem with LOTRO, you were railroaded through a linear story. And never has a game felt so dead. When I first played, I wanted to explore Middle Earth, to venture into the seldom-seen areas and see what might be there. Instead, I was made a prisoner of a story and routed through “chapters.” Blah.
The devs should be focusing on world-building, creating an environment for an online community to “live in”. Think “Lore”, not “stories.” Think spontaneous adventuring and emergent gameplay, not follow the quest breadcrumb-trail.
And please, oh please, oh please, keep the cutscenes to a minimum. As a good rule of thumb, anything that can be portrayed in a cutscene can be portrayed inside the in-game reality instead.