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.