Tolkien Heads: A Rings of Power Season 3 Primer for People Who Bailed

Amazon has basically admitted some of you bailed on The Rings of Power, and they're telling you to just start at season three. Like starting Star Wars at episode four. So Nick Polk and I sounded the horn of Gondor and recorded the on-ramp: everything you need to know before season three, plus a guided tour of the inside jokes from our 26 hours of talking about the first two. This is also, officially, the Waldreg memorial and/or eschatological hope livestream. You may not know who Waldreg is. He made Mordor. We'll get to that.

Nick walks through the time-compressed Second Age: sexy Sauron as Halbrand, then as Annatar the Lord of Gifts, and Celebrimbor forging the rings and dying for it. From there we hit the show's best moves, especially how it gets Tolkien's big theme right. Every villain starts out wanting to fix something good, then reaches for a shortcut. Adar, the most morally serious character in the series, makes every orc slaughter in Middle-earth complicated. Then we make our season three predictions: a Sauron-versus-Balrog fight with Morgoth's crown, Gandalf redeeming the Dark Wizard, Sauron surrendering to Númenor, and which Númenórean most deserves to become the Nazgûl who sucks. Get me the meat and give it to me raw.

You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube

Watch along with us: Season three premieres on Prime Video Wednesday, November 11, with multiple episodes dropping at once. Nick and I will hang out on Monday nights after each drop so you have time to watch twice. Every Tolkien conversation I've done, including our interviews with John Garth, Alan Sisto, and Tom Emmanuel and the Theology Beer Camp sessions with Craig Boyd, is now on its own ⁠Tolkien Heads podcast feed⁠. Nick's work lives at the Tolkien Pop Substack and podcast.

Nick Polk is production editor of Mallorn, the journal of the Tolkien Society, and hosts⁠ Tolkien Pop⁠. He slid into my DMs years ago when I asked if anyone liked both theology and Tolkien, and we've been co-hosting Tolkien Heads, teaching Tolkien classes, and running the Tolkien session at Theology Beer Camp ever since.

⁠Join me in Berlin for the Bonhoeffer Travel Learning Trip⁠

In June 2027, Andy Root and I are leading two Rise of Bonhoeffer travel-learning weeks. The Seminar (June 12–17) reads Bonhoeffer’s sources where they were fought over — Luther in Wittenberg, Schleiermacher and Barth in Berlin, the prison letters in his own house. The Pilgrimage (June 17–22) is for pastors and fait