So what did Amazon buy? “We have the rights solely to The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, The Return of the King, the appendices, and The Hobbit,” Payne says. “And that is it. We do not have the rights to The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, The History of Middle-earth, or any of those other books.” That takes a huge chunk of lore off the table and has left Tolkien fans wondering how this duo plans to tell a Second Age story without access to those materials. “There’s a version of everything we need for the Second Age in the books we have the rights to,” McKay says. “As long as we’re painting within those lines and not egregiously contradicting something we don’t have the rights to, there’s a lot of leeway and room to dramatize and tell some of the best stories that [Tolkien] ever came up with.”
“We took all these little clues and thought of them as stars in the sky that we then connected to write the novel that Tolkien never wrote about the Second Age,” Payne says. The duo cites songs like “The Fall of Gil-galad” or “The Song of Eärendil” or Fellowship chapters like “The Council of Elrond” and “The Shadow of the Past” or the “Concerning Hobbits” section of the prologue as sources for significant lore dumps. Beyond the premiere, there aren’t, however, any significant time jumps or, thus far, episode-long journeys to the past. The rights to the First Age material from The Silmarillion are still owned by the Tolkien estate.
“We worked in conjunction with world-renowned Tolkien scholars and the Tolkien estate to make sure that the ways we connected the dots were Tolkienian and gelled with the experts’ and the estate’s understanding of the material,” Payne says.
