The third season of the lavish but controversial Amazon Prime series The Rings of Power will debut on November 11th. We are promised that it will focus on the forging of the One Ring by Sauron, and his wars with the Elves and, one presumes, with the Numenoreans. This general outline of the plot reveals an interesting conundrum caused by the series’ compressed timeline, since Tolkien’s own chronology separates the forging of the One Ring and his war against the Elves on the one hand, and his brief war with the Numenoreans that results in his infiltration of the island kingdom on the other, by many hundreds of years. Now, Sauron will somehow have to go from overwhelming victory to seeming total defeat in an extremely short span of time. A similar problem presents itself with the origin of the Ringwraiths; canonically these were all seduced and then gradually enslaved by Sauron centuries before his confrontation with Ar-Pharazon the Golden. But now, this must happen contemporaneously with the other events of the television series, with several characters obviously being set-up to become Wraiths themselves, requiring a rapid enslavement and degeneration on their part rather than a gradual corruption and decline. All of these events will have to involve the power of the One Ring being used in full force, at the same time that Ar-Pharazon must remain totally oblivious as to what the One Ring is and what it can do for the plot to advance coherently at all.

How the show’s writers will handle these and other issues caused by the compressed timeline remains to be seen. Likely the show is best enjoyed as high-budget fan fiction “inspired by Tolkien” so to speak, though as a fan fiction author myself I can’t find that a cause for complaint. The nice thing about fan fiction is that if you like it, it expands your literary universe, and if you don’t like it, you can always fall back on the canonical texts which can never be changed by anyone.