The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is a contender for the biggest TV event this year, and the show’s estimated 100 million-strong audience represents a huge number of potential new readers. This book covers the same fictional period in Middle-earth history, the Second Age. If you want the genuine Tolkien version of the era, here it is in one rather beautiful package. And it could also be the palate cleanser you crave if you disliked the show and prefer to go back to the authentic flavour of Middle-earth and the doomed island nation of Númenor.
“Go back” is right. The book marshals material hitherto scattered through many posthumous publications from 1977’s The Silmarillion onwards. In this, it broadly follows recent editions by Tolkien’s son Christopher, who died in 2020. Editor Brian Sibley made the superb 1981 BBC radio adaptation of The Lord of the Rings and knows his Tolkien. Ending long before that story of questing hobbits, the Second Age runs from the end of the mythological Silmarillion and the defeat of primal dark lord Morgoth to the epochal but temporary defeat of his successor Sauron. That’s three-and-a-half millennia.
