‘Tolkien left us the seeds’: The Rings of Power creators on how they mined J.R.R. Tolkien’s writings for stories of the Second Age of Middle-earth
- The writers of Amazon’s mega-budget Lord of the Rings origin story The Rings of Power describe how they pulled strands from Tolkien’s books for the narrative
- They homed in on the Second Age of Middle-earth, where there were elves, dwarfs and humans but no Hobbits, and set about creating a diverse cast of characters
Patrick McKay and J.D. Payne had been writing screenplays together for two decades when Amazon Studios announced it had acquired the rights to make a TV series based on the fantasy world of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord Of The Rings.
And who wouldn’t want to do that?
“We, along with half the other writers in Hollywood, raised our hands and said we’d love the opportunity,” Payne says. “We should be so lucky.”
Both loved the works of Tolkien. McKay’s mother gave him The Hobbit when he was in fifth grade. Payne came to Middle-earth through director Peter Jackson’s film adaptations of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit and devoured the source material.
So they had strong ideas from the start of their quest.
“We started thinking, ‘OK, here’s what Amazon bought the rights to’,” Payne says. “There are hundreds, probably thousands, of potential stories within that material. And as we looked around, very quickly we arrived at the time period of the Second Age.”
