Like season 1, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power season 2 ended with a lot of seismic shifts for the world of Middle-earth. Which makes sense, since there was a lot covered in the second season of The Rings of Power; between a full-on battle, a political coup, growing concern about the orc babies at home, and Tom Bombadil bomba-stumbling his way through the story, there are a lot of threads to pick up on in a third season premiere alone.

Prime Video has been a little tight-lipped about what exactly we can expect from a season 3 of The Rings of Power — but, obviously, with the extent J.R.R. Tolkien wrote about it, we’re not totally in the dark. Here’s everything we know so far about The Rings of Power season 3.

[Ed. note: This post contains spoilers for the end of The Rings of Power season 2 so that we can talk about what might happen in season 3.]

Prime Video hasn’t yet formally confirmed if the Lord of the Rings show will be returning for a third season. But unlike other shows on the bubble, The Rings of Power exists in a strange space: The show cost Amazon a cool billion before they even got to the first season. And the show has been claimed to have a five-season plan in place. So it seems safe to assume that Prime Video will want to continue the show, even if it hasn’t formally announced it. It’s… never great to not hear formal plans taking shape. But plenty of producers and crew seem hopeful, even if showrunners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay have been more circumspect about future opportunities.

It’ll take a little bit of time! The gap between the first and second season was almost exactly two years, and that was with season 2 starting production before season 1 had even premiered. The showrunners for The Rings of Power have started in some sense — possibly just writing and outlining; in August 2024 they said, “All we can say is, we’re working on it. We’re cooking. Let us cook!” — but it seems much earlier in the process than season 2 was at the same time in 2022. So if season 3 does get the green light, we might be looking at an even longer gap between seasons.

Given the five-year plan for the show and the known end point (give or take a few licensing rights) for the narrative, we can guess that the next part of the show will more or less follow the lore Tolkien wrote. After the fall of Eregion, Sauron occupies the city and starts threatening Lindon. His orcs and the elves start to fight more in earnest. The timelines are different (by about a couple hundred years), but Númenor starts to spread out and get more involved with the conflict elsewhere in Middle-earth.

Again, the pacing of Tolkien’s writing is different. But it provides the broad strokes to guess at where the show might pick up on the dangling threads of season 2: With Isildur headed back to Númenor, Pharazôn firmly in power, and the village Arondír is in under Númenórean martial law, it seems like the city is firmly in its expansion era.

Meanwhile, both the elves and dwarves have suffered losses that put them on their back foot. After tussling with Sauron in the season finale, Galadriel is more amped up than ever to push back on the Dark Lord. And now, with Elrond and the High King backing her efforts, the elves are in a place to step up and fight. It’s hard to say if the dwarves will do the same; following the death of King Durin at the hands of a balrog (not to mention the introduction of the dwarven rings), Moria seems poised to have a lot on its hands that might prevent it from engaging with the outside world. Dare I say, they might even dig too greedily, and too deep — if they haven’t already.

Plus, the Stoors are now marching toward the Harfoots (maybe to find some sort of promised land?), while the Stranger ventures off to go find himself (or other Istari) or whatever. All that and now we’ve got 19 Rings of Power circulating in the world, with all but the One Ring created. With the nine rings for the human kings in hand, Sauron will likely do a tour of the leaders of men, and entice them to also take on the Rings of Power.

Well, while Prime Video’s Lord of the Rings spinoff might take a second, you have no shortage of Lord of the Rings media to engage with. There’s the books and the original trilogy of movies — never a bad time. On the horizon we have The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, a feature-length anime set in Middle-earth; it’s due in theaters Dec. 13. And coming in 2026 is The Hunt for Gollum, which is possibly a secret Aragorn movie!

If you get really desperate, there is also the Lord of the Rings: Gollum game, though possibly the less said about that, the better.