[adastra22]

It's not really based on the books at all. Amazon has rights to the Lord of the Rings only, but not the stuff that was used to make the Peter Jackson films. Rather than remake The Lord of the Rings (can you imagine the outrage?), they decided to focus on the brief summary of the history of the rings of power given as an appendix to the last book of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Basically a couple of paragraphs in the epilogue where Tolkien says "btw, 6,000 years earlier such-and-such happened and that's how the rings were made." Amazon invented this entire show out of those couple of paragraphs.

There are larger bodies of work (The Silmarillion, The History of Middle Earth, etc.) which go into great detail about this era and the conflict which involved, incidentally, the crafting of the rings of power. But Amazon doesn't have the rights to those books. So they're creating a storyline out of what little scraps were provided in the appendices of Return of the King, while reusing some of the characters in the Lord of the Rings which would have been around back then--Elrond, Galadriel, etc.

And I agree. Forget about the books and watch it as high fantasy on TV, and you'll be enjoyed. It is well made, and so far is following a couple of interesting plot lines.