A wealth of unseen The Lord of the Rings material has been released from author JRR Tolkien's estate.
As reported by The Guardian, the new material includes photographs, paintings depicting various locations in Middle-earth, as well as Tolkien's letters and draft manuscripts from The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy. The Tolkien estate's official website has been updated with the new material.
Also among the new material are multiple audio recordings and videos featuring both Tolkien and his son Christopher, who passed away in 1973 and 2020, respectively. Among the audio recordings is the first recording of Gollum, as he was imagined by the author, when he first meets Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit. The Tolkien estate relaunched its website with this unseen material on Feb. 26, a significant date in Tolkien lore, as Feb. 26, 3019 is the date that the Fellowship of the Ring was broken, leaving Sam and Frodo to set out on their journey towards Mordor.
For Tolkien, his creative process included writing, painting, creating maps and inventing languages, which he did for The Hobbit, The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings trilogy, which was originally published between 1954 and 1955. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings was adapted into the acclaimed film trilogy directed by Peter Jackson. The most recent adaptation will be a Prime Video series, Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, which will take place during the Second Age of Middle-earth, thousands of years before the events of The Hobbit.
"We talked with the Tolkien estate," co-showrunner J.D. Payne said of the series, which is intended to be a 50-hour, five-season series. "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."
Prime Video's sweeping, big-budget fantasy series began filming in Feb. 2020 but paused for several months before resuming in September that same year. Amazon made an official announcement for Season 2 after committing $250 million for the franchise's television rights, reportedly aiming for a five-season run. Season 1 wrapped filming in early August, and it was later announced that the series would be moving from New Zealand to the UK for filming on Season 2.
Developed by J. D. Payne and Patrick McKay, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power will premiere on Prime Video on Sept. 2, 2022.
Source: The Guardian, Tolkien Estate