Meet Isildur, Pharazôn, and other Rings of Power players

Amazon is rolling out the marketing for The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, its wildly expensive series based on the work of J.R.R. Tolkien…

…mostly. You see, the new show isn’t based on any book Tolkien wrote; rather, it’s based on the appendices to The Lord of the Rings, which described events that happened thousands of years in the past. It’s kind of like creating a show based on a bunch of bullet points.

And that means that Rings of Power showrunners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay have a fair bit of wiggle room when deciding how to tell the story of the Second Age of Middle-earth, since Tolkien didn’t give us many details. As McKay and Payne point out to Entertainment Weekly, Tolkien did  write in letters that he wanted “other minds and hands” to create art within his legendarium. “We feel like we’re taking up the gauntlet that he himself put down,” Payne said. “He gave us what we like to say are the stars in the sky that we have to connect and draw the constellation in.”

Translation: Payne and McKay are adding and changing things, although there’s also much that Tolkien fans will recognize. The EW article focuses a lot on the people of Númenor, an island nation of men that flourished during the second age. Let’s meet some of the key players there.

Meet Pharazôn and Míriel

At the time the show is set, Númenor will be ruled by the queen regent Míriel (Cynthia Addai-Robinson), who assumes the throne as this idyllic paradise faces a time of tension. Númenor has always had close contacts with the elves of Valinor, who live to the east on a sacred land the Númenoreans are not allowed to visit. As the nation grows more powerful, some Númenoreans begin to resent this ban. Rather than worship the Valar, the creators of Middle-earth who dwell with the elves in Valinor, they look for other sources of inspiration. I hear this Sauron guy is pretty cool, for instance…

Anyway, Míriel is advised by her counselor Pharazôn, played by Trystan Gravelle.

All of this is more or less how Tolkien lays it out in the appendices and in The Silmarillion. The difference is that, in Tolkien’s version, Míriel never actually rules. As the daughter of the last king, she’s supposed to, but upon her dad’s death her cousin Pharazôn seizes the Scepter of Númenor for himself and forces an unwilling Míriel to become his wife. He rules for a while and runs the place into the ground, but we’ll leave the details for you to discover in season 3 or whenever they get around to it. In any case, it looks like the show will lead up to his takeover.

Meet Elendil and family

Pharazôn is an absolute knob-goblin of a ruler who rejects the elves and takes up with Sauron, which is a terrible idea; didn’t he watch The Lord of the Rings movies?

But there are those Númenoreans who remain faithful to the Elves and to the Valar, including the sea-faring Elendil (Lloyd Owen). In fact, he’s patriarch of a whole family of people who keep to the old ways, including his sons Isildur (Maxim Baldry) and Anárion as well as his daughter Eärien (Ema Horvath).

Now, Isildur is probably a name that any Lord of the Rings fan knows. He’s the guy who eventually cuts the One Ring from Sauron’s finger, effectively ending the Second Age…but then he doesn’t have the follow-through to throw the Ring into the fires of Mount Doom and unmake it, which will cause all sorts of trouble for Frodo and company thousands of years later. Thanks a bunch, Isildur.

But at the start of The Rings of Power, he is just “a young man at a crossroads,” as Baldry puts it. He’s a sailor like his dad, and has his whole life ahead of him. Don’t tell him it ends in disappointment. Anárion is around, but apparently offscreen, at least for now.

Eärien, on the other hand, is invented for the show. She’s bright, ambitious and dreams of being an architect, and you would too if you lived among the crazy-beautiful buildings on Númenor. Horvath says that she’s “on the cusp of womanhood” and is “still quite insecure and naïve about the way the world works.”

Tolkien famously didn’t feature a lot of prominent female characters in his work, so I can understand why the producers of this show would want to add some to the mix. That said, if I were writing this show, I think I’d just make Anárion Isildur’s sister rather than his brother, instead of adding a whole new character. But hey, I’m not writing this show, for some unfathomable reason, so here we are.

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power premieres on Amazon Prime Video on September 2, and McKay is hoping it’s worthy of sitting alongside other adaptations of Tolkien’s work. “It needs to feel the way you feel when you are in Middle-earth,” he said. “It needs to pull you in and make you fall in love the way you fall in love with those books.”

“If people come out of this feeling like they’ve gone to Middle-earth, that’s such a special thing,” Payne added. “Middle-earth fills us with hope, and it inspires us. There’s a reason why people reach to Middle-earth when they’re going through hard times.”

We’ll find out how we feel about it very soon.

To stay up to date on everything fantasy, science fiction, and WiC, follow our all-encompassing Facebook page and sign up for our exclusive newsletter.

Get HBO, Starz, Showtime and MORE for FREE with a no-risk, 7-day free trial of Amazon Channels