Amazon's 'Lord of the Rings' show is set in the Second Age. Here's what that means.

Amazon is taking us back to Middle-Earth's Second Age in its upcoming Lord of the Rings show, giving us a much firmer grasp on what we can expect to see (or rather, what we know we won't see).

The Twitter account for Amazon's untitled Lord of the Rings show tweeted out an image of a map of Middle-Earth and the message "Welcome to the Second Age," seemingly confirming that the show will take place long before the events of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, which took place toward the tail end of the Third Age. That means we won't be seeing young Aragorn, but there's still a chance that we'll see Elrond, Galadriel, and possibly some other elves.

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You can check out a large version of the Second Age map in the tweet above on Amazon here, which includes some familiar landscapes to anyone familiar with maps of the Third Age.

The Second Age is a period of time in Middle-Earth's history that began with the destruction of a large portion of northwest Middle-Earth known as Beleriand and the banishment of the evil Valar (a god-like figure) called Morgoth. The Second Age ended after the Last Alliance of Elves and Men fought and seemingly defeated Sauron (the establishing scene from the beginning of The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring).

That's a lot of time to work with in between. There's the aftermath of the destruction of Beleriand, everything that happened with Aragorn's ancestors in the new realm of Númenor (seen in the bottom left corner of the map) and on Middle-Earth, the rise of Sauron and the forging of the Rings of Power (including the One Ring), and a whole bunch of battles.

A chief storyline of the Second Age was everything that happened with Númenor and the men who lived there (known as Dúnedain, of which Aragorn was one of the last). The Dúnedain traveled to Middle-Earth and began taking large swaths of land in the Second Age, and some of them fell under the influence of Sauron (who was, as far as we know, probably very attractive back then) and tried to attack the Valar.

The Valar retaliated by changing the shape of the entire flat realm into a round planet, kind of like the Earth, which had the consequence of sinking Númenor and sending Elendil, Aragorn's grandfather, to Middle-Earth. Pretty big stuff.

Meanwhile, the elves were elving and the dwarves were dwarving. There was a lot of action in the Second Age, most of it only gleaned from references in The Lord of the Rings books and a couple of chapters from the Middle-Earth history book The Silmarillion.

We know it was a time before Moria became known as Moria thanks to the Balrog, a time before hobbits established The Shire, a time before Minas Tirith became the capital city of Gondor, and a time before the ghost army seen in Return of the King became a ghost army.

There's a lot of space to explore in the Second Age and a good amount of freedom from strict narratives, considering the lack of source material. Let's just hope Amazon handles it well.