Lord of the Rings show “supposed to [have] 20 episodes” in first season

Amazon is being very cagey about its upcoming Lord of the Rings series, only releasing revealing a short video about the creative team behind the project. Check out who’s working on this little $1 billion endeavor:

Among those names is Tom Shippey, a retired professor of Middle and Old English literature and a leading authority on the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. Amazon has brought him on board to be the show’s resident “Tolkien scholar,” which is a pretty big get. Surely he’d have insight into where this thing is going, right?

Well, let’s see. Shippy recently spoke to German-language fansite Deutsche Tolkien, detailing the period when the show is set, how faithful to Tolkien’s work it will be, and a few other stray factoids. Let’s take a closer look.

As you probably know if you’ve been following the project so far, Amazon’s show is set during the Second Age of Middle-earth, which lasted for 3,441 years. (“Makes for a great, long-running series,” quipped Amazon television co-head Albert Cheng at the TCA press tour. Ha ha.)

As Shippey notes, a lot of pretty cool things happened in that time period, including that time Sauron gave himself up to the powerful Númenóreans, stayed for a time as their prisoner on the island of Númenór, corrupted their society from within and convinced the king to sail on the forbidden land of the elves, which he did, which resulted in GOD HIMSELF intervening and wrecking the entire Númenórean fleet, sinking the island of Númenór, and removing the Undying Lands from the earthly sphere of existence.

So yeah, I’d watch that.

But as Shippey notes, a lot of the finer details are left up to the imagination — Amazon will be working off notes in appendages here, not full books. “Amazon has a relatively free hand when it comes to adding something, since, as I said, very few details are known about this time span,” he said. “The Tolkien Estate will insist that the main shape of the Second Age is not altered. Sauron invades Eriador, is forced back by a Númenorean expedition, is returned to Númenor. There he corrupts the Númenoreans and seduces them to break the ban of the Valar. All this, the course of history, must remain the same.”

"But you can add new characters and ask a lot of questions, like: What has Sauron done in the meantime? Where was he after Morgoth was defeated? Theoretically, Amazon can answer these questions by inventing the answers, since Tolkien did not describe it. But it must not contradict anything which Tolkien did say. That’s what Amazon has to watch out for. It must be canonical, it is impossible to change the boundaries which Tolkien has created, it is necessary to remain “tolkienian”."

Presumably, Shippey will be on hand to make sure Amazon sticks to the text. He also confirms that the Tolkien Estate has veto power over certain aspects of the story. “[T]he Tolkien Estate keeps a very careful eye on everything and is quite capable of saying no.” And the First and Third Ages of Middle-earth “off-limits.” The show can reference things that happen in the First Age, but the story must be firmly planted in the Second. “[I]f it is not described or mentioned in the Lord of the Rings or in the appendices, they probably cannot use it.” That also means we won’t be seeing Frodo or Gandalf or Aragorn or any of those folks, since they only arrived in Middle-earth in the Third Age.

All in all, it sounds like the Tolkien Estate will keep a pretty tight leash on things, but perhaps that’s for the best. Again, there are still some pretty cool things that happened in the Second Age, as for example the Last Alliance of Elves and Men and Isildur chopping the One Ring off Sauron’s finger, as we saw in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies:

Shippey also said something very interesting when asked about where in the world the show might shoot. Long story short: he doesn’t know — as a Tolkien scholar, the shooting schedule isn’t really his department — but he did say this:

"There’s supposed to be 20 episodes for the first season. So until they’ve decided what the end is going to be, they can’t start filming."

First of all, according to Shippey, it doesn’t sound like the writers have quite blocked out the full first season yet. No rush, people; make sure to get it right. Perhaps more importantly, to my knowledge, this is the first we’re hearing of Amazon aiming for a 20-episode first season. Now, Shippey isn’t intimately involved with the production side of things — he admits he “[doesn’t] know what their timetable is — but he’s a lot closer to it than most, so his word carries some authority.

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Not long ago, we learned that Amazon was in talks to cast Australian actor Markella Kavenagh in an unknown role. We can expect more announcements like this as time rolls on. We are hungry for details over here.

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h/t The Salt Lake Tribune