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

Last week we finally got some further details about Amazon's upcoming Lord Of The Rings prequel series, rumoured to be the most expensive TV show ever made with a first season due in 2021.

Earlier rumours had taken Amazon's desire to "explore new storylines preceding The Lord Of The Rings", as announced in 2017, as possibly promising a young Aragorn story or giving this jewellery-fixated series a mega-budget version of The Silmarillion's War of the Jewels. But Amazon's Twitter announcement, which simply read "Welcome to the Second Age", along with a map, now gives us a different and more specific focus.

Of course, this doesn't entirely narrow things down. The Second Age of Tolkien's enormously rich "legendarium" covers a period of about three and a half thousand years. Still, the prominence of the island of Númenor on Amazon's map (that particular section being the header for their twitter account) does suggest that the new series will pay particular focus to the dying days of the Second Age and adapt the Akallabêth appendix to The Silmarillion, essentially Middle-earth's Atlantis myth.

So, what can we expect from a show that has the potential to mix Game Of Thrones-style political machinations with Lord Of The Rings' epic scale? Let's take a look at ten plot points that it should include...

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.