Did Amazon give away when its Lord of the Rings show is set?

Last week, Amazon started to tease its upcoming, very expensive Lord of the Rings series. The first drop? A map of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth, with the place names removed:

Being big Lord of the Rings fans, we freaked out over even that. And then, Amazon played us like a fiddle when it released a second map, this one with…words!

And here’s where invaluable commenter Calvin Scholtz comes in. Writing on that first post, he points out that, on this map, the area we know as Rohan, home to the horse-riding Rohirrim, is labeled as “Calenardhon.” That’s what the land was called before Gondor granted it the Rohirrim in the year 2510 of of the Third Age. For reference, that’s 431 years before Bilbo Baggins sets out for the Lonely Mountain in The Hobbit, and 489 years before he passes the One Ring to Frodo in The Lord of the Rings.

Will Amazon’s show tell the story of how Calenardhon became Rohan? Will it be set some time before that? Either way, if we’re to take this map as a clue, the show will be set hundreds — maybe thousands — of years before the story we know.

Up to now, the best rumor we had about Amazon’s series was that it would be about the life of a young Aragorn, but he was born 421 years after the Rohirrim renamed Calenardhon to Rohan, so that idea is suddenly in doubt.

Or it could be that Amazon is just playing and this doesn’t mean anything in particular. But we find its more fun when we read too much into things. If you’d like to join us, feel free to peruse this exhaustively detailed Lord of the Rings timeline at The One Wiki to Rule Them All.

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In other Lord of the Rings news, Amazon Studios chief Jennifer Salke told The Hollywood Reporter that the writers on the show are hard at work…under sterile conditions:

"There’s a fantastic writers room working under lock and key. They’re already generating really exciting material. They’re down in Santa Monica. You have to go through such clearance, and they have all their windows taped closed. And there’s a security guard that sits outside, and you have to have a fingerprint to get in there, because their whole board is up on a thing of the whole season."

See? Security is so tight they couldn’t spoil anything if they wanted to. It’s up to us to over-interpret everything.

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