The Rings of Power showrunners discuss the birth of an iconic Lord of the Rings location
Warning: The following contains spoilers for The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power episode 7! Turn back now if you have not seen the latest installment in Amazon's epic series.
The final moments of The Rings of Power's new episode confirm the inevitable: that The Southlands has become Mordor, the cursed location that will one day act as a base for Sauron. Mordor's origins were never previously revealed in detail by J.R.R. Tolkien, the show's writers instead telling their own version of events.
Speaking to an audience including Total Film following a cinema screening of the seventh episode, The Rings of Power showrunners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay revealed that telling the story of the creation of Mordor was almost inevitable when focussing on characters in the Second Age of Middle-earth.
"From the very beginning in the writers' room, we had a board that had every single one of our characters' stories – Galadriel, Elrond, Elendil – and each of them had an arch going across the board," Payne says. "Running down all of them, there was one event that sort of happened in every single story, and it was basically just a drawing of a volcano.
"One of the joys of being able to go back so far in time, from a time people know so well in Middle-earth, is to see Middle-earth [when it was] very different. We said, 'Mordor is this iconic place, what if we could actually take something that's like beautiful Switzerland, a gorgeous Alpine territory, and watch it evolve into the horrible hellhole that we know so well?' And this storyline presented itself. One of our writers, her Dad is a geologist. And so we were like, 'Could you actually like make a volcano explode? Is it possible?' And they said, 'Yeah, if you got enough steam
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