which is why it was so surprising he was a part of their efforts to sell the TV rights. It's not as surprising though once you consider he made sure that the Tolkien estate had some degree of a voice in the production, especially considering the Tolkien estates own guidelines forced the showrunners to fill in a lot of gaps uncovered by the master himself. The fact that Tolkien wrote generally about the Second Age meant he left a lot of story beats and plotlines not even half baked, so the Amazon show will need to fill those in, and they wanted to make sure they did so in the spirit of Tolkien and remain faithful to his Middle-earth.