Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings TV series gets a name and a teaser video

Amazon has been hyping its Lord of the Rings TV series for a while now, but details have been scarce. That changed a bit this week, as Amazon finally announced the name of the series and released its first teaser video.

The name of the series is The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.

The title is a mouthful (and maybe redundant), but it ties in with the time period in which the show is set. Amazon has previously said the series is set in the Second Age, the era preceding the events depicted in author J.R.R. Tolkien’s most famous books (The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy).

In the Second Age, the leaders of Middle Earth wore rings of power, but some of those rings were controlled by Sauron’s “one ring,” which is, of course, the subject of much drama in the books and films most people know so well.

The title of this series implies that it will tell the story of how those leaders fell to Sauron’s forces or influence. That assumption is backed up by a statement from the series’ showrunners in an Amazon press release:

This is a title that we imagine could live on the spine of a book next to J.R.R. Tolkien’s other classics. The Rings of Power unites all the major stories of Middle-earth’s Second Age: the forging of the rings, the rise of the Dark Lord Sauron, the epic tale of Númenor and the Last Alliance of Elves and Men. Until now, audiences have only seen onscreen the story of the One Ring but before there was one, there were many… and we’re excited to share the epic story of them all.

The teaser video isn’t much help if you’re looking for more information or actual footage, though. It just shows vague imagery (similar to a modern prestige-TV credits sequence) depicting the forging of one of the rings of power. Meanwhile, voiceover shares that famous quote you’ve seen before if you’ve read the books or seen other adaptations:

Three rings for the Elven kings under the sky. Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone. Nine for Mortal Men, doomed to die. One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne in the land of Mordor where the shadows lie.

Amazon has been leaning heavily on genre content to bolster its Prime Video streaming service of late. In addition to the new Tolkien adaptation, Amazon recently premiered a series based on Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time books.

Adaptations extend to video games, too: Amazon is moving forward with a TV adaptation of the Fallout franchise, and a recent report claimed that Amazon is close to landing a deal to adapt Mass Effect.

While Fallout and Mass Effect don’t yet have premiere dates, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power does. It’s slated to begin streaming on Amazon Prime Video on September 2, 2022.

Listing image by Amazon