Amazon teases its Lord of the Rings series with a map and WHAT DOES IT MEAN?

Not long after starting an official Twitter account for the show, Amazon has dropped a hint about its still-mysterious, tremendously expensive Lord of the Rings show. It is…a map:

That’s Middle-earth, right there. We’re looking at Middle-earth. What does it mean? WHAT DOES IT MEAN?

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Maybe not much. Speaking of his famous epic, J.R.R. Tolkien said, “I wisely started with a map, and made the story fit. Maybe Amazon is doing the same thing. After Tolkien quite, after all, was the first-ever tweet from this account:

And there’s more: Amazon also invites you to explore the map up close. Is there something we’re supposed to find?

The map is a pretty standard map of Middle-earth, although nothing is labeled. You’ve got Mordor, Gondor, Rohan, the Shire, Mirkwood, the Misty Mountains, etc. This is the way Middle-earth looks in the Second and Third ages, so…I guess we know Amazon’s show won’t take place in the First Age, before the War of Wrath sunk the region of Beleriand into the sea? But we could have already guessed that.

Then there’s the text. “Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky.” This is part of a suite of lines from the books:

"Three rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,Nine for mortal men doomed to die,One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne;In the Land of Mordor where the shadows lie.One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them,One ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them;In the Land of Mordor where the shadows lie."

We’re not sure how much of this text Amazon wants us to think of, although they do include a comma at the end of the line, making us think there could be more tweets coming.

Anyway, the three rings in the tweet were forged in the Second Age by the elf Celebrimbor. He learned the tricks of the trade from Sauron himself, who at that point had assumed a false identity, because deviousness. The rings are Narya, Nenya and Vilya. By the time of The Lord of the Rings, they’re wielded by Gandalf, Galadriel and Elrond respectively, although they changed a few hands before that.

Does this mean that Celebrimbor will be part of the Amazon series, or that these three rings of power will play a big part? Or maybe Amazon is just tweeting out a well-known line? I have no idea.

As sindar propaganda (great name) says, that mountain range is worth looking at. That area is often left off maps of Middle-earth, so its inclusion feels deliberate. We don’t know exactly what that mountain range is, but they could be the Red Mountains, an eastern range thought to be the birthplace of the dwarves. And there’s the compass in the lower left-hand corner of the map, which looks kind of dwarfe-y:

What do you make of all this? And is more on the way?

UPDATE: Yes there is.

And discuss.

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h/t The A.V. Club