LOOK WHOS TOLKIEN NOW
CHANCES ARE YOU’VE got a version of this story on your bookshelf, though you may not have read it. When The Return Of The King, the final instalment of JRR Tolkien’s now-legendary The Lord Of The Rings trilogy, was published in 1955, it came with extensive appendices. These colossal footnotes provided a crash-course in Middle-earth history to complement the story, and now they provide the inspiration for Amazon’s mega-budget fantasy TV series The Rings Of Power.
“The appendix that comes after The Lord Of The Rings is basically like a historical chronicle,” producer Belén Atienza tells SFX. “It’s like reading a history book where a king here did this, or this is where the battle of that happened. We weren’t really worried about people knowing the broad strokes of the story, because everyone knew the broad strokes of The Lord Of the Rings movies – and in this case people know even less!”
If you’ve struggled your way through , you can now breathe a sigh of relief. While certain pivotal events in the appendices appeared in that distinctly non-page-turny history of early Middle-earth, isn’t quite
