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Prime Video’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power just premiered a new trailer at San Diego Comic-Con, featuring quite a few new details about what fans should expect from the new season, including the live-action debuts of the mythical Tom Bombadil and the cunning Annatar. Plus, our very first look at the return of one of J.R.R. Tolkien‘s most dreaded villains: Shelob!
Here are all the juicy story hints and easter eggs we found in the new season 2 trailer…
Sauron Is Annatar Now
The new trailer opens, once again, with Sauron (Charlie Vickers). At first we see him as he appeared in season 1, taking on the appearance of the human king Halbrand. But later in the trailer we see him in a different guise, as a beautiful Elf called Annatar, the “Lord of Gifts” – or “sharer of gifts,” as he tells an obviously impressed and overwhelmed Celebrimbor here.
When we met with showrunners Patrick McKay and J.D. Payne on set last year, they were excited to tell us how central Sauron is to the story being told in season 2, saying “this is a story about one world and Sauron is the spine that connects all of it. That’s what season two is about.”
McKay and Payne also told us that, “even Sauron in his own twisted way thinks he’s healing Middle-earth,” but we can hear from Galadriel’s (Morfydd Clark) voiceover that she certainly does not agree. She explains how Sauron “seeks to rule [Middle-earth] not only through conquest, but by bending the minds of all its peoples to his own.” And of course, the way he plans to do that is by using the titular Rings of Power…
New Rings and Ringbearers
We see some gorgeous close-up shots of the Three Rings for the Elven Kings in this trailer and we see their three Ringbearers showing them off – Galadriel wearing Nenya (the white one), Gil-galad (Benjamin Walker) wearing Vilya (the blue one) and new character for season 2, Círdan the shipwright (Ben Daniels) wearing Narya (the red one). Interestingly, Elrond, who by the time of The Lord of the Rings will be wearing one of these himself, seems to be very anti-Ring here, even accusing the Ringbearers of becoming Sauron’s “collaborators” and having a serious conversation about destroying them.
This is quite a difference from the books, in which the three Elven Rings were made last – not first, as in the TV series – and were specifically created to combat Sauron and his influence over the other Rings of Power. Galadriel clearly sees the Ring as a positive force, claiming it is “guiding” her. It will be interesting to see where this thread goes.
Speaking of the other Rings, we are definitely going to be seeing some more Rings of Power this season. According to Tolkien’s lore, the Seven Rings for the Dwarf-lords and the Nine Rings for Mortal Men were forged by Sauron and Celebrimbor working together. Celebrimbor did not know who Annatar really was, and was tricked into helping him, before eventually realizing he had been deceived and forging the Three Elven Rings to counter the One Ring Sauron was forging alone. In the show, the Three Rings have already been forged by Celebrimbor with some helpful advice from Sauron (because apparently using an alloy hadn’t occurred to the Elves’ master smith before), but presumably Sauron will trick Celebrimbor in some way, using this new guise of Annatar, to get him to help make the sixteen Rings that are given to Dwarves and Men.
At one point Prince Durin tells his father, King Durin, “take off the ring” which pretty strongly implies that we will see the seven rings for the Dwarf-lords forged and handed out to seven Dwarves (see what Tolkien did there?!), including King Durin, and that for some reason his son does not like it. This line is followed with a shot of the king whacking his son over the head and knocking him down some stairs, demonstrating both superhero-like strength and villain-level anger, so that might be why.
At another point in the trailer, we see Elrond and a small group in a dark wood, facing off against some very spooky-looking creatures with glowing blue eyes. These could be the Nine Mortal Ringbearers, the Nazgûl or Black Riders, who eventually fade from normal human sight all together and have to wear black robes to give themselves shape. However, if it is them, they have deteriorated rather quickly, so it might not be the Nine after all – another possibility is that these are barrow-wights, revenants who guard their barrow-tombs, and who have for some reason hopped out of said tombs to go and harass Elrond and company.
Whether we actually see the Nazgûl take shape or not, we do see Annatar/Sauron ordering Celebrimbor “you will give me the Nine” which suggests two things – one, that the Nine Rings for Mortal Men will be forged this season, and two, that Celebrimbor will eventually realize that something seriously dark is going on. The only question that remains is whether we will end up seeing the One Ring to Rule Them All that Sauron creates for himself – we might have to wait until season 3 for that one.
Tom Bombadil
We see some more of the hot, eastern desert land of Rhûn, where Nori (Markella Kavenagh) and the Stranger (Daniel Weyman) have found themselves. We also get a glimpse of a character Tolkien fans have been waiting many years to see on screen – Tom Bombadil (Rory Kinnear). Bombadil is a very ancient and mysterious character. In The Fellowship of the Ring, Elrond has even forgotten his existence all together, “if indeed this is still the same that walked the woods and hills long ago, and even then was older than the old.”
By the time of The Lord of the Rings, Bombadil has marked himself out a small section of land just outside the borders of the Shire and settled there with his wife, Goldberry, the river-daughter. He refuses to leave the boundaries he has himself set on his land and although he is well aware of what the Ring is and what Frodo is trying to do with it, he takes little to no interest in anything beyond those borders. It’s interesting that we see Tom in this trailer say to the Stranger, “every soul in Middle-earth is in peril. Will you abandon them to their doom?” In The Lord of the Rings, Bombadil is so hands-off the Council of Elrond don’t even bother asking him for help – though I suppose his rescue of Frodo and friends from first a cranky willow tree and later a barrow-wight does mean he played some small role in keeping Middle-earth safe that time.
Considering the Stranger has made it all the way out to Rhûn in the trailer, it’s a little unclear exactly where Bombadil is. The books imply that he used to wander more and was not always settled in the same plot of land near the Shire, so he could very easily be in Rhûn and his rocky, cave-like home with bright sun streaming in through the windows does suggest that. The only flaw will come if there are barrow-wights anywhere near him here, as Tolkien would not approve of putting Viking-inspired barrow-wights in a desert country – but it is very likely that Tom will have nothing to do with barrow-wights in this particular story.
Entwives
Towards the end of the trailer, we see a talking tree with a female voice – an Entwife! The Ents, who look like walking, talking trees, are familiar from The Two Towers, in which Pippin and Merry convince Treebeard and his fellow Ents in the forest of Fangorn to take down wicked wizard Saruman in his Tower of Orthanc. But when Pippin and Merry meet the Ents, they are all male. They are very long-lived, but their population is slowly declining because they lost the Entwives in a very literal sense – as Treebeard tells Pippin, they did not die, they lost them “and now we cannot find them.”
In Tolkien’s lore, the Entwives left the Ents to go and create gardens rather than living in wild forests, but their gardens are now wastelands called the Brown Lands, just south of Mirkwood, and the Ents have not seen them for centuries. Treebeard is still looking, telling the hobbits that the Shire sounds like a place they might like, but without much hope. We see an Ent on the attack in the dark a little further on in the trailer, but it’s not entirely clear whether they are in a wood or a garden – it would be very cool for Tolkien fans if we could actually see what the Entwives’ gardens looked like before they were ruined.
The Entwife here is saying “forgiveness takes an age,” probably meaning an Age in the sense Tolkien often used the term, for a period in history. The Rings of Power is set in the Second Age, while The Lord of the Rings takes place at the end of the Third Age, and each Age is made up of many centuries, so she’s emphasizing that forgiveness takes a really long time here.
Nasty Creatures – Shelob and the Balrog
Of course, we see some scary monsters on display here – McKay and Payne assured us that we will be seeing lots of different creatures of Middle-earth this season, with at least one new one popping up almost every episode.
Poor Isildur accidentally got left behind, mistakenly assumed to be dead, when the Númenoreans returned home in Season 1. From the looks of this trailer, his lot hasn’t improved much, as some familiar-looking giant spider legs crawl across the screen in front of him. Check out our exclusive first look at the return of Shelob here!
We also get a sweeping shot of a flaming Balrog attacking someone with a fiery weapon – presumably this is the Balrog that lives under Moria and was awoken by the Dwarves mining too deep for mithril in season 1, the same one that will eventually kill Gandalf the Grey.
The Palantír
We see Chancellor Pharazôn of Númenor (Trystan Gravelle) using a palantír, the magic seeing-stone that was the undoing of Denethor in The Lord of the Rings, and which nearly got Pippin caught by Sauron. The series has made some slight changes to the lore on the palantíri. In the books, there are a few palantíri around in the Second Age, and Elendil brings seven of them to Middle-earth. They are used for telepathy and communication, though Sauron also uses them to show only selective truths to Saruman and to Denethor to corrupt them in The Lord of the Rings.
In season 1 of The Rings of Power, the palantír seemed to work a bit more like the Mirror of Galadriel from The Fellowship of the Ring, showing “many visions” that Galadriel says “may never come to pass” – in the books, they showed things that were happening at that moment but did not reveal the whole truth, which is not quite the same thing. We were also told in Season 1 that there were only seven of them, and that the other six have already been “lost or hidden.” In this new trailer, we see Chancellor Pharazôn using the Númenorean palantír and a combination of first blue light, and then fire coming out of it – so whatever he is doing with it, it seems like he is using it for a bit more than just fantasy-facetime.
A Big Battle
At one point we see Annatar doing a classic walking-away-from-an-explosion shot on a balcony that’s obviously Elven architecture. This is most likely somewhere near Celebrimbor’s forge in Eregion, since it is Celebrimbor he has been working with.
We also see glimpses of a pretty huge battle in which Elrond is fighting, probably the same one where we saw someone being filmed plunging off a battlement when we visited the set. So we think this is probably the great battle at Eregion described in Tolkien’s books. We see Prince Durin giving a rousing speech to his people to “fight with our friends,” which backs up that theory as the Dwarves of Khazad-dûm were involved in that battle – we won’t say more here as we want to avoid plot spoilers. You’ll have to watch the series to find out!
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power season 2 premieres Thursday, Aug. 29 on Prime Video.
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