LOTR: The Rings of Power Showrunners Confirm a Shortened Timeline

Amazon is ready to premiere their Lord of the Rings series later this year, and fans have a lot of questions as to what to expect. Since we only know so little about what happens in the Second Age of Middle-earth, showrunners Patrick McKay and J.D. Payne confirm they’ll be compressing the timeline so that important events could happen closer to each other.

Talking to Vanity Fair, Payne explains:

“We talked with the Tolkien estate… If you are true to the exact letter of the law, you are going to be telling a story in which your human characters are dying off every season because you’re jumping 200 years in time, and then you’re not meeting really big, important canon characters until season four. Look, there might be some fans who want us to do a documentary of Middle-earth, but we’re going to tell one story that unites all these things.”

From a storytelling standpoint, it certainly makes sense. It’s more practical for pivotal events to happen years or centuries apart in paper, but as a series—especially one where characters don’t age the same way—the story wouldn’t go as smoothly.

If anything, this isn’t the first time the timeline has been altered to service the story. In the original Lord of the Rings book, Frodo actually waited 17 years in the Shire after Bilbo’s birthday before he went off to destroy the Ring; the movies had to speed the events up so the plot could get going right away.

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power comes to Amazon Prime Video on Sept. 2.