While The Silmarillion and the posthumous texts organized by Christopher Tolkien deepened the mythology of Middle-earth among scholars and more dedicated fans, the television format remained, for decades, a virtually untouched territory for Tolkien’s work — the audiovisual rights were disputed, expensive, and any adaptation seemed technically impossible given the scale of the original material.
The idea of finally exploring this path only gained momentum decades later, when advances in visual effects and the monumental success of the film adaptations proved that there was an appetite — and now also the technical feasibility — to expand Middle-earth beyond the books and films, exploring eras of its history that the original trilogy had not even touched on screen.
That was how, in 2022, Amazon launched The Rings of Power, set thousands of years before the events of The Lord of the Rings, in the Second Age of Middle-earth — a period that until then had been almost exclusively confined to the appendices and the posthumous material organized by Christopher Tolkien. With one of the largest budgets ever invested in a television production, the series set out to tell the origins of Sauron, the forging of the Rings of Power, and the rise of Númenor, chapters that Peter Jackson’s films had only briefly mentioned.
This late dive into television was therefore not simply a spin-off — it was proof that Middle-earth had always possessed enough depth to sustain formats that Tolkien, decades earlier, could never have imagined seeing brought to life.