The impending release of Amazon Prime’s Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power has fans of the franchise in a frenzy.
The original trilogy of films were released more than 20 years ago, with the first hitting theaters in 2001. In the years since, The Lord of the Rings has become a titanic franchise, with several film spin-offs and now a blockbuster television series helping to maintain its popularity over the decades.
As fans look ahead to the upcoming series, many are finding themselves with questions. Rings of Power is set in the Second Age, before the events in The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit take place. This is leaving fans — those without encyclopaedic knowledge of the books behind the popular media franchise at a loss, as they look ahead to a series that they know next to nothing about.
This is prompting a flurry of questions about how the new series will relate back to the stories and characters we know from the existing films. While many of the main characters, like Frodo and Sam, weren’t born until long after the Second Age had passed, other characters could conceivably crop up in the new series.
Like Legolas. The titular Elf of the original trilogy is quite old, as are many of his race, and fans want to know if he is old enough to crop up in Rings of Power. Could this Fellowship favorite appear in his youth in the upcoming series?
Could Legolas appear in Rings of Power?
The short answer to this question is, unfortunately, no.
While we would all love to see Legolas return to our screens, the Sindar Elf is all but guaranteed to be absent from the Rings of Power series. This is mostly due to the year of his birth, which came about long after the events of the upcoming series transpired.
Legolas’ exact birth date isn’t definitively known, but it’s generally accepted that he wasn’t born in the Second Age. An official guidebook for the Peter Jackson trilogy of films bestows Legolas with a birth date of Year 87 of the Second Age, and this has more recently become a generally accepted date among fans of the franchise. This is very early in the Second Age — and a few thousand years before the events of both the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings trilogies — but it’s far removed from the setting of Rings of Power.
We don’t know precisely when, in the Second Age, Rings of Power is set, but it’s likely that it’s not at the tail end. Quite a bit transpired in the Second Age, based on Tolkien’s extended works and extensive notes, which gives the show runners plenty of story potential. None of it, more than likely, will include Legolas.
