Amazon's Lord Of The Rings: 10 Crucial Second Age Events It Must Include

10. Tar-Palantir's Prophecies

Where should the story of the Downfall of Númenor and the end of the Second Age begin? This is likely to be the first question that the writers of Amazon's series will have to address.

Taking the model of other series about kings and rulers, both fantasy and historic, then the last days of the previous ruler is often a good place to establish the world, its people and what's at stake, before that ruler's death provides the inciting incident for the main story.

The reign of Tar-Palantir, the penultimate King of Númenor (an island given to the best of men by Middle-earth's godlike beings the Valar, in gratitude for their role in the war with the previous dark lord Morgoth), would make a good introductory point.

Prior to Palantir's reign the Númenóreans had grown distant from their previous allegiance to the Valar and friendship with the elves and had become prideful and greedy. Palantir's reign was an attempt to reverse this trend and make the Númenóreans a more faithful people.

Crucially for the narrative tension of the story of the TV show going forward, Tar-Palantir (his name means "far-sighted") was also a dab hand at that epic fantasy staple: prophecies.

Palantir's prophecies set up the themes and stakes of the show, predicting that the kingdom will fall if the Númenóreans pursue a path of hubristically defying the gods. Specifically, he tied the fate of the island kingdom and the line of kings to the White Tree of Númenor, predicting that if the tree died then so would the kingdom.

This would be a familiar thread to those who remember the importance of the iconography of the later White Tree (a descendant of this one) in Gondor in Return Of The King, highlighting where things are likely to go in future.