If it looks a bit different to the Middle-earth map from the Lord of the Rings, that’s because the intervening few millennia have brought plenty of changes, including a lot of topographical ones. Even if you’re not into Lord of the Rings maps, it’s worth discussing the ways in which releasing a seven-season television show set in Middle-earth has brought about significant changes to the interpretation of the original literature.
Peter Jackson’s saga was the last filmed interpretation of Tolkien’s legendarium, and for all the controversy over the dozens of alterations he made to the original story, it was a blessing for a time. Having seen those films, people’s appetites for seeing more of Middle-earth on the big (and small) screen were satiated for quite a while. People craved new, original stories with big budgets, but no one, no one wanted a white-themed version of a biological possibility that apparently has no literary precedent.
Of course, everyone ended up getting what they wanted anyway: ever since Jackson finished his wildly successful yet polarising Hobbit trilogy back in 2014, there has been an even more aggressive and caterwauling outcry for this seventh Middle-earth saga while Amazon peddled the idea. When the Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power show finally arrived in early 2022, it radically changed the look of Middle-earth, leading to several new films about the Ring of Power, both in live-action and in animation (the highest-grossing anime film) The Rings of Power Fantasy map opted for a more contemporary palette and aesthetic.
Middle-earth’s map in The Rings of Power takes us far from the location of the lands through which Frodo and his Fellowship travelled in The Lord of the Rings. Fair warning: the geography of The Rings of Power’s Second Age is far different from that of The Lord of the Rings. It is (very) loosely similar in some ways, but not others. Kingships that persisted through the First Age remain in Second Age The Rings of Power, for the most part, but many of those kingdoms have fallen into twilight by the time that The Lord of the Rings begins.
Other kingdoms that form during the Second Age live as twinkles in the eyes of their founders when The Rings of Power begins. Looking closely at the fundamental locations from Tolkien’s The Rings of Power map, though, reveals how Middle-earth became the land that viewers know from watching LotR and The Hobbit (1937). To begin with, take a look at the Longbottoms.
So far, after the first few episodes of The Rings of Power season two, I’m willing to leave the ‘improvements’ praise to the critics. The production values are much better (I’m still on about the WIGS) and it’s a richly enjoyable experience to return to a world that, in truth, I was weary of hearing about. Tolkien’s mythology appears everywhere, and the score by Bear McCreary is magnificent and bewitching.
Valinor Lies To The West
Home To The Powerful Valar And Maiar
It lies way to the west of Middle-earth, across the Sundering Seas; that is, the great gulfs between Middle-earth and its neighbours in the World. In The Lord of the Rings, the Undying Lands – as they are described – are where the Elves are emigrating, where Frodo, at the end of it all, goes. In Rings of Power’s Second Age, by all accounts, it’s a place you could arrive at just by setting sail westward at the right spot, where you’d have a chance, though odds are you wouldn’t get far unless you could somehow justify your arrival. A bit later, in the Age of The Lord of the Rings, before that privileged age arrives, long before the story’s climactic Third Age, Valinor had sequestered itself still more from that uninvited approach. There was only one way there, which but a few would or could know how to take.
Valinor is also the home of the Valar and the Maiar – the angels of Tolkien’s mythos – as well as the Elves who stayed put, rather than moving to Middle-earth for reasons that are never spelled out. The Two Trees of Valinor once stood here, glorious trunks of the gods, long burned – by the evil deity Morgoth, but long before The Rings of Power. Nonetheless, the divinity of Valinor and the purity of its heavenliness makes life there stress-free and weightless.
Númenor Sits Between Valinor & Middle-earth
Aragorn And Boromir Are Númenorean Descendants
In between Valinor and Middle-earth lies Númenor, the star-like lump of dry land raised from the seas as a reward to men who helped the Valar shed Morgoth from the world in the First Age. Longer-than-human lives and much sophisticated architecture, culture and skill have developed in Númenor’s sprawling, strong civilisation.
They are allowed to voyage east to Middle-earth (and to permanently inhabit the homeland of their ancestors, which they do, it seems – at least, as of the events of The Rings of Power – if only temporarily). But they are banned from moving in the opposite direction, westward to Valinor. Why did the Númenoreans fail to help destroy the One Ring? The island is destroyed long before The Lord of the Rings begins Aragorn and Boromir are both descended from the Númenoreans.
North-Western Middle-earth: Lindon & Eriador
Where Early Hobbits Settled To Establish The Shire
Two great provinces to the west of Second Age Middle-earth, First we have the coastline with its province of Lindon. Serving as the de facto capital of the Elves with First Age exile Gil-Galad serving as High King, Lindon is established in the Second Age’s early days as High King Gil-Galad is founding this beautiful realm. Here resides many Elves and one of the most populous (but also border to Eriador, so there are many others) realms we see in The Rings of Power is Círdan the Shipwright’s Grey Havens.
This is the last place any elf visiting or leaving Valinor must pass through, indeed even when Frodo goes there in The Lord of the Rings. Lindon was still there in Frodo’s day, but Rivendell had shrunk smaller and smaller with the shaking of the Earth that followed Númenor’s fall, culminating in Gil-galad’s death.
Thus the region serves as the primary setting for
The Fellowship of the Ring
From there, to the east across the Blue Mountains is the homeland of Eriador proper, a land of soft rolling plains, grassland and hillocks – but a place of little moment, in the short run, in The Rings of Power compared with The Lord of the Rings. In the millennium or so after Amazon’s story starts, the plains of Eriador are home to Elrond’s Wood-elven stronghold at Rivendell and the great kingdom of Men now known as Arnor; its history in the following evil ages of power struggles with the Witch-king of Angmar makes this region one to avoid unless you crave painful memories. This verdant arc of lands is also where the first (‘halflings’ or hobbits) settlers on Middle-earth came ashore to found the Shire, so the region forms the nucleus of The Fellowship of the Ring.
Elves In Eregion & Dwarves In Khazad-dûm
Where Rivendell Was Born
Travel even further east to the Misty Mountains and you will find The Rings of Power’s second great elven kingdom, Eregion. By the time the Lord of the Rings begins, Eregion has been ruled for generations by the famous elven-smith Celebrimbor – he of forging the Rings of Power. Eregion is yet another elite realm in the tradition of Lindon and Rivendell. But unlike the two earlier realms, it has been obliterated by the time the Lord of the Rings begins, destroyed by Sauron’s forces in the battle between the Elves and the Enemy during the Second Age. From Eregion’s ruins was born Rivendell.
Just northeast of Eregion in the belly of the Misty Mountains is the cavernous, sprawling settlement of dwarves – the Mines of Moria, more properly called Khazad-dûm. While Moria is well-known for its integral, contents-heavy bit in the Fellowship of the Ring, the underground mountain becomes derelict and devastated when the fellowship of Frodo rolls through. In The Rings of Power, though, it’s a thriving, bustling civilisation at absolute peak. Khazad-dûm isn’t the only dwarven city in Second Age Middle-earth; it wouldn’t be logical, as they were everywhere that there were mountains, but it’s easily the most narratively important.
The Enemy Lies North
Not In Mordor
And so Amazon’s series The Rings of Power begins in an era when Morgoth has been defeated but Sauron has not yet ascended to his old master’s mantle as the resident Evil Overlord of Middle-earth. Meanwhile, much as Sauron’s is the devil we know in The Lord of the Rings, the evil of the south, and the sinister rockiness of Mordor, await the Amazon timeline – Sauron’s citadel is empty.
Places such as Forodwaith remain as blighted regions, unpacified and still haunted by the ghosts of evil.
Instead of a southern direction, the prime direction for adversarial gazes will be the north, from where danger can seem to originate. Morgoth’s two great strongholds, Utumno and Angband, had both been situated in the bitter, ice-bound north, among the Iron Mountains at the very northern edge-lands of Middle-earth. These evil cold spots would have been obliterated long before the beginning of The Rings of Power, yet places like Forodwaith still remain as bitter chill spots on the map carrying the profound residues of evil.
Rhovanion (The Hobbit’s Setting) Is Very Different
Like Eriador, it remained more important in the Third than Second Age – but nearly all of its most famous places still exist, just with different names. Just to the east of the Misty Mountains lies the elvish-land of Lórinand, later renamed Lothlórien for reasons we will explain shortly. No one is expecting the show’s Galadriel to be weeding the gardens.
Further to the east still lies the great forest destined to become Mirkwood but, in the year 1600 of The Rings of Power, is not yet sullied in that way. Finally, although Tolkien’s mountain of Erebor stands as forlorn as ever alongside the edge of an unnamed sea, the action of The Hobbit takes place so long after the events of the second season of The Rings of Power that there has yet to be any Dwarven mining operation there. Tolkien’s notes on Hobbits speculate that early breeds such as Harfoots crossed the Misty Mountains and migrated west, before themselves permanently settling in what would become the Shire. This is where season two of The Rings of Power places its Harfoot action, and it is an awful long way from the Shire that Frodo (and the Harfoot’s fellow hobbit ancestors) ultimately ended up calling home.
Gondor & Rohan Aren’t Yet Founded
The Two Key Human Kingdoms In LotR Don’t Exist Yet
To the south of Rhovanion lies the great golden plains of Rohan, immortalised in The Two Towers, and – further south still – the great city of Men, Middle-earth’s imperial capital, Gondor, from The Return of the King. Neither exist in any recognisable form when The Rings of Power begins. The pre-Rohan territory is called Calenardhon, and barely resembles the treeless Théoden’s Scandinavian-inflected kingdom from The Lord of the Rings.
Gondor does exist as a settlement of Men in Tolkien’s Second Age, but it’s a far cry from an imperial kingdom that Aragorn will inherit after Sauron is defeated; Minas Tirith is not yet built, and no true king is there to place Gondor on to the world stage until Isildur moves to Middle-earth from Númenor and makes Gondor a true powerhouse.
Mordor Is The Southlands
Sauron’s Shadowy Stronghold
Synonymous with Sauron’s dark domain in The Lord of the Rings, Mordor is a scorched, black-blasted, treeless wasteland: an ash and fire-strewn expanse where only ‘noxious things’ flourish. The textual record is almost silent on the prior history of the region; Sauron – that spiky-hatted jerk – plunked his dark throne there sometime long after Tolkien’s fantastical version of the world. The Rings of Power publicity materials describe a Southlands settlement that the show’s creators plan to make ‘the core of Men’s ancient realm’.
But the regions south of the river, the Southlands, will eventually become Mordor, as the Middle-earth of The Rings of Power is known. Amazon’s The Rings of Power will take viewers into this place just before Sauron made Mordor his HQ, and the Lord of the Rings prequel show will show us what the landscape of the land south of the river looked like before its transformation into a volcanic wasteland.
How The Lord Of The Rings And Rings Of Power Maps Are Similar
The Basic Geography Of Middle-earth Remains Unaltered
LotR map and The Rings of Power map. There are plenty of differences between the two (for better or worse), but there’s a great deal that they have in common too – such that, for viewers who are familiar with the real geography of what was on screen throughout Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy back in the 2000s, Amazon’s Great Return’s series will feel much less visually disorienting than it might originally. Tolkien’s great creative energies have been focused on the history of Middle-earth rather than its geography, and Amazon’s creative team haven’t seen fit to risk reverting to 2D fantasy maps as a means of fictionalising it.
Most of the important parts of the geography remain where they were in Lord of the Rings. Valinor is still in the West, Mount Doom still to the east of the lands that will be Gondor and Rohan in the Third Age, the Dwarven city of Khazad-dûm is still beneath the Misty Mountains. The great difference between The Rings of Power and Lord of the Rings lies in the island kingdom of Númenor.
Númenor doesn’t feature on any of the maps of Middle-earth that appear in The Lord of the Rings for a very simple reason. By the Third Age, Númenor simply isn’t there. The fall of Númenor is one of the major events we’re awaiting in the later seasons of The Rings of Power from later in J R R Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings timeline – the city’s sinking beneath the waves being the exact reason it isn’t shown on the maps of Middle-earth you see in the Lord of the Rings adaption movies.
Why the maps in Lord of the Rings and The Rings of Power are different.
Thousands Of Years Have Passed Between LotR And The Prequel
There’s one obvious reason for the multitude of dissimilarities between named locations on The Rings of Power map and those of Lord of the Rings and, as I prepare to get into the details a touch, it’s perhaps best that I just say it openly. The reason for the disparity between the two maps is time. Partly because characters like Galadriel, Elrond and quite a few others appear in The Rings of Power, it’s altogether too easy to forget just how many millennia pass between Lord of the Rings and this new show. To make timeframes more tangible, consider this: if (as I just did) I consider the aforementioned elves to be inhabiting the Earth today at that specific point within their Lord of the Rings timelines when they’re finally featured in The Rings of Power, they are living within the debates taking place in Ancient Rome (or earlier still), when they’re only as old as they are in The Rings of Power.
To the elves, the creation of Minas Tirith was a quite recent event in what would seem to them something like the late middle-age.
In fact, The Rings of Power is set thousands of years before The Lord of the Rings, and this difference is the central explanation for why all the major LotR locations that matter are not on The Rings of Power map – Gondor, Rohan, the Shire, and even Mordor. Gondor may have been a ‘first age’ kingdom by the time of Lord of the Rings, but that term still refers to the age of humanity. The establishment of Minas Tirith is far older to us in Lord of the Rings, but this is looking back from an elven perspective – ie, it happens much closer to the end than the beginning of their lifespan.
What The Differences In The Rings Of Power And LotR Maps Mean
Changes Between the Rings of Power Map and LotR Are Bigger Than They Seem At First Glance.
Lots of the series has been outright controversial reworkings of established Middle-earth history. But when we compare the Amazon Middle-earth map with Peter Jackson’s Middle-earth map for The Lord of the Rings trilogy, the differences are clearer yet much less controversial than scholars might expect. Essentially, they are just the effect of thousands of years passing. People forget how different Middle-earth was in the Second and Third ages.
These ages of Middle-earth are divided by great changes in the world – ages that “blink off” due to some event or upheaval. The destruction of Sauron was the moment declared the end of the Second Age by the elves, and the destruction of the One Ring was the Third. But even then, literally thousands of years are covered per age. Given that, in the Third Age, much of the eponymic map of Middle-earth is made up of named places that are inhabited by men (who do not get up to several thousand years like Elrond or Galadriel) this all makes perfect sense.
And as for Mordor, the wasteland of Sauron, which is an early plot point in The Rings of Power – hence something that doesn’t exist yet on the map’s Amazon version – that, too, was a given by Tolkien’s canon anyway. In other words, there are plenty of reasons why even ardent fans of JRR Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings might quibble with the changes Amazon made for its Rings of Power, but the map of Middle-earth created for the show is hardly likely to be near the top of the list.