With Game of Thrones entering its eighth and final season this spring, many of us are curious to see if anything can possibly take its place. With the proliferation of streaming services in the years since Game of Thrones debuted (such as HBO NOW), it’s hard to imagine any show ever having quite the same impact, but if any TV show can do it, it just might be Amazon’s upcoming original series based on The Lord of the Rings.
We still know virtually nothing about the show, other than that the company paid a massive amount of money for the license, but Amazon’s marketing push appears to be coming to life as the official Twitter account for the show shared an image of a map of Middle-earth and the line: “Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky.”
In addition to the still image on Twitter, Amazon also shared a link to a page on its website with an interactive version of the same map. Nothing on the map has been filled in (yet), which makes it virtually impossible for anyone without Stephen Colbert-levels of knowledge about Tolkien’s fictional universe to detect where in Middle-earth (or when, for that matter) the series might take place. There’s no telling how Amazon will handle this rollout, but perhaps in the coming weeks and months we’ll begin to see the map fill in, revealing more about the setting.
One of the few plot details that Amazon has been willing to divulge is that this series won’t retell the story of the War of the Rings, which we already saw (in great detail) in the Peter Jackson trilogy. Rumor has it the series will instead follow young Aragorn, before the events of the movies, but this hasn’t been confirmed.
