Amazon's 'Lord of the Rings' Prequel Series Title Revealed

Lord of the Rings fans got a lot of big news on Wednesday concerning Amazon's upcoming prequel series. The show will be called The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, and will premiere on Friday, Sept. 2, 2022. The details announced this week have fan theorists buzzing with new predictions about the mysterious series.

Amazon Studios released a title sequence for The Rings of Power on Wednesday, which featured a woman's voice reciting a familiar monologue about the various rings in J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth. It comes from Tolkien's "Ring Verse," describing the 20 rings of power forged as gifts for the peoples of Middle-earth, which fans of the main series know were used as traps to try and bind their users to Sauron. According to Prime Video's press release, the video below was not created with CGI, but instead carved and forged by hand for the sake of authenticity.

Showrunners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay offered a statement alongside this revelation with a bit of explanation about the title. They said: "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 on-screen 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."

Most fans are primarily familiar with the stories of Bilbo and Frodo Baggins told in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Those are set in the "Third Age" of Middle-earth, according to Tolkien's other writings such as The Silmarillion. Amazon Video has previously announced that this prequel will be set in the Second Age – thousands of years before the Baggins family's exploits.

The new announcements confirm that the show will take place around the time the rings of power were forged – as many fans had speculated. These events have been described in Tolkien's writing, but not in the traditional narrative form of the main novels. The show will flesh out these stories which, up until now, have only been understood as legends and myths by both fans and Hobbits alike.

There is plenty of room for new fan theories now as fans await a full trailer and more insights on this iconic fantasy adaptation. The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power premieres on Friday, Sept. 2, 2022 on Prime Video. In the meantime, the Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogies are both streaming on HBO Max.