Jumping forward several years from the events of Season 2, Season 3 takes place at the height of the War of the Elves and Sauron, as the Dark Lord seeks to craft the One Ring that will give him the edge he needs to win the war and conquer all Middle-earth at last. pic.twitter.com/jEkntXQOPc
— The Lord of the Rings (@TheRingsofPower) February 13, 2025
The time jump makes sense when you consider the thousands of years of history that make up J.R.R. Tolkien’s Second Age of Middle-earth, the age in which the show is set. For example, in the book timeline, 100 years pass between the forging of the first 19 rings and the creation of the One Ring in Mordor, and the War of the Elves and Sauron kicks off almost 100 years after that. The fall of Numenor, an event we expect to see at some point on this show, doesn’t happen until over a 1,000 years after that war has already ended. The War of the Last Alliance (the big battle featured in the prologue of Peter Jackson’s The Fellowship of the Ring) caps off the Second Age over 100 years later.
The first two seasons of The Rings of Power compressed quite a bit of that timeline already, on top of remixing the order in which certain events happened in Tolkien’s text, so it’ll be interesting to see what the result of a time jump will be. If we had to speculate, we imagine this will allow for season 3 to deliver new locations such as Rivendell, the founding of which was teased in the season 2 finale, as well as a Mordor more like the one we know from the movies. In the book timeline, the construction of Barad-dur, Sauron’s fortress, was completed just as the Dark Lord forged the One Ring in the fires of Mount Doom, an event it sounds like we’ll see by the end of the third season.
In other words, it looks like The Rings of Power season 3 wants to move things further along after two seasons that have largely served as setup for the major battles of the Second Age. This is undoubtedly a good thing. There are a few other threads the third season will have to address, of course, including what’s going on over in Numenor and in Khazad-dum—two places we expect will be in even worse shape in season 3—as well as who will be the nine Men to receive rings of power from Sauron. Oh, and whatever Gandalf and Nori are up to in the deserts of Rhun ruled by the Dark Wizard. If we’re lucky, we might even finally learn what the hell happened to Celeborn!