Rings of Power Season 3 Will Have a Big Time Jump (and Sets Up the LOTR Trilogy)

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Season 3 will take fans to a much more recognizable version of Middle-earth than they’ve seen before. Prime Video officially announced the renewal and production plans on Thursday, and the Season 3 logline reveals that the story will take a big jump forward in time. The series will skip ahead so that the war against Sauron is already well underway. This will also put the focus on Sauron’s forging of the One Ring, which will begin to set up the events of The Lord of the Rings trilogy. The connections to the larger franchise will become more and more clear as the series heats up.

“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,” reads the official logline published by The Hollywood Reporter. It will be interesting to see what “several years” means for this series — Rings of Power has condensed many events from J.R.R. Tolkien’s books into a timeline that better suits the TV format, but this could be a chance to spread things out more and placate some book-readers.

The Rings of Power tells the tale of the Second Age of Middle-earth, while The Lord of the Rings is set in the Third Age. The characters and events are already in place to bring these two stories together — Sauron has manipulated the elves into forging rings of power for each race, and he is poised to take control of forces including the orcs and the humans of the south. Some of the long-lived characters like Galadriel and Elrond will carry over, while names like Isildur should be familiar from flashbacks in the main trilogy.

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Some die-hard Tolkien fans have been displeased with how the show has condensed the timeline of these events, so a time skip may help them get on board. Either way, most of the characters we’re seeing on screen are practically immortal — even the humans from Numenor can live for centuries, which is why their descendant, Aragorn, is 87 years old in the main trilogy. The show must also take some liberties since it is not based on The Silmarillion, but on the appendices of The Lord of the Rings.

The Rings of Power Season 3 will begin filming this spring, but there’s no projected release date yet. The first two seasons are streaming now on Prime Video. Tolkien’s books are available now in print, digital, and audiobook formats.