Exclusive: Sauron’s ambitions revealed for The Rings of Power Season 3

The end of Season 2 of The Rings of Power left us with Sauron holding both Fëanor’s hammer and the Nine rings corrupted with I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-mithril; Durin IV and Disa unwillingly holding the Seven while in a political pickle with questions about inheritance, as well the other Dwarf kingdoms presumably wanting to collect what they paid for; and the refugee Elves with the Three rings in what is almost surely the site of future Rivendell. Nineteen rings of power made, One to go. But that’s what today’s news is about! Today FoF can reveal a Season 3 plot-arc, and some news about an old character and one we don’t fully know yet.

Summary

Exclusive: Sauron’s main objective and ambition going into Season 3 is now focusing on distributing the rings and finding suitable ring bearers from different races. We have already seen some of the future ring bearers.

This last point seems fairly logical, and one easily discerned reason why the show has been building in OC characters from the race of Men, for example.

Excl: Círdan the Shipwright becomes a major character in ‘The Rings of Power’ Season 3.

Círdan was definitely a fan-favourite in Season 2, even if his decision to shave off the iconic beard left some cold.

Excl: Jamie Campbell Bower has mainly shared scenes with Morfydd Clark (Galadriel) so far.

As FoF revealed last time JCB is playing a Elf from Tolkien’s writing, and it’s down to Glorfindel or Celeborn, with Thranduil, Oropher, Amroth and so on knocked out of contention.

Book spoilers and theorising from here on down.

Them Rings, them Rings, them… Nine Rings

First up, we need to situate Sauron in the events concerning him in Season 3, insofar as we know them. The showrunners already said there will be a medium-length time skip so that we are picking up the story when the War of the Elves and Sauron has been going for a while. Unlike Adar, Sauron is going to not stay with his army around as it overruns Eriador, he has bigger plans in mind: looking for people who could do with a “present”. Some of these are of course the “mortal Men” in the Ring poem:

Men proved easier to ensnare. Those who used the Nine Rings became mighty in their day, kings, sorcerers, and warriors of old. They obtained glory and great wealth, yet it turned to their undoing. They had, as it seemed, unending life, yet life became unendurable to them. They could walk, if they would, unseen by all eyes in this world beneath the sun, and they could see things in worlds invisible to mortal men; but too often they beheld only the phantoms and delusions of Sauron. And one by one, sooner or later, according to their native strength and to the good or evil of their wills in the beginning, they fell under the thraldom of the ring that they bore and under the domination of the One, which was Sauron’s
—J.R.R. Tolkien, “Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age”, The Silmarillion [emphasis added, here and below]

… Sauron was ever guileful, and it is said that among those whom he ensnared with the Nine Rings three were great lords of Númenórean race.
—J.R.R. Tolkien, “Akallabêth”, The Silmarillion

Now of course these quotes are not from The Lord of the Rings, the show’s officially licensed source text, but the showrunners and writers absolutely read more widely, and will have this in mind. The Peter Jackson prologue (and Aragorn’s description in Bree) has lodged itself firmly in the mind of many, who assume the Nine were given to “Kings of Men” (“Great kings” or “Kings of Men” do not appear in the text of The Lord of the Rings in connection with the Nazgûl; thanks, Digital Tolkien Project!). I suspect that Sauron is going to pick a real grab-bag of people. He’s going to find people to whom he can give what seems to be a solution to their problems, as we saw with Galadriel and Adar in Seasons 1 and 2. It’s also possible that, due to the time-skip, a few of the Nine are already out there in the wild starting to work on their new owners, on characters we’ve not seen before. As far as The Lord of the Rings itself goes, we have a couple of hints:

Nine he gave to Mortal Men, proud and great, and so ensnared them.
—J.R.R. Tolkien, “The Shadow of the Past”, The Lord of the Rings

“…Minas Ithil, the twin sister of our own city. But it was taken by fell men whom the Enemy in his first strength had dominated, and who wandered homeless and masterless after his fall. It is said that their lords were men of Númenor who had fallen into dark wickedness; to them the Enemy had given rings of power, and he had devoured them: living ghosts they were become, terrible and evil.”
—J.R.R. Tolkien, “The Forbidden Pool”, The Lord of the Rings

It will come as no great shock that the show has introduced fleshed-out original characters that are destined to be Nazgûl. If there’s anything that Rings of Power has done that is innovative in Tolkien adaptation then it is showing more of the character complexity of the antagonists. If Hagen or Theo gets given one of the Nine, and accepted in good faith, it will feel like more of a tragedy than if it were some metaphorical-moustache-twirling scumbag…. oh, wait, we might have one of those, too, in Kemen. But even there, the show has done some groundwork to establish his father Ar-Pharazôn as manipulative and even borderline abusive of his son, who is as a result a bit desperate to impress his daddy. We also have the politician Lord Belzagar, who seems a prime candidate, though he is on Númenor, and not in Middle-earth.

But of course, there’s always the lingering idea that Sauron will recruit a somebody or somebodies from out East, with “Khamûl, the Shadow of the East” named in Unfinished Tales. Perhaps the showrunners will get permission from the Tolkien Estate to use this name, like they did with Annatar, but to my mind a Rhûnic person in the show would have a Rhûnic name, i.e. in a vaguely Hungarian-style language. Perhaps we might get a ‘pseudo-Khamûl’: someone from Rhûn but not named. Of course, there’s also the slightly more out-there theory that the Dark Wizard will become the Witch King (as ‘Uncle Melkor’ on the FoF Discord said: he’s practically a “king of witches” i.e. the Mystics), but it’s currently hard to see an arc where he teams up with Sauron. The one thing I can see in favour of this is that it gets around the awkward idea that no one seems to actually be a sorcerer in Middle-earth. A Wizard however is magical in that way, and moreover the Istari are not just regular Maiar, they are actually incarnated in human bodies. This is one for the wait-and-see basket, I think.

So far, I’ve only talked about Sauron finding targets to give out the Nine, but of course we still have the Seven in play. They have to be distributed at some point, too. This makes things tricky, though, because Durin IV is not exactly all friendly with Annatar (even when he didn’t know at the end of Season 2 that he was Sauron). We know from various sources that Dwarves lived in the eastern side of the Blue Mountains at the western edge of Eriador (in fact these were the remnants of First Age settlements by the Firebeards and the Broadbeams), and in the Iron Hills, north of Rhûn and east of the Lonely Mountain. These are prime sources for “other Dwarf lords”, even though a purist might quibble that the Iron Hills Dwarves are also Longbeards, like in Khazad-dûm.

We’ve already seen the show use Tolkien’s in-universe Dwarf-lore that it was Celebrimbor who gave Durin III one of the Seven, the so-called Ring of Durin, not Sauron. But we still have Durin IV’s yet-unnamed brother (perhaps played by Eddie Marsan, if Instagram sleuthing is a reasonable guide) who is evidently ambitious, something Sauron can certainly leverage. Disa is certainly against her husband wearing his father’s Ring, and I suspect Durin IV is too conscious of the negative effects it had to readily use it. That said, whatever they end up doing we know that it stays in the family, because eventually Thorin’s father—a descendant of Durin IV—has the Ring of Durin before it is finally taken from him by Sauron, all the way toward the end of the Third Age. Others get consumed by dragons in the intervening years, so they are certainly going to have to find their way out into the world somehow.

Fans have long guessed that Season 3 will end with Sauron being taken back to Númenor by Ar-Pharazôn, and a previous FoF leak mentioned how Númenor will be asked by the elves to help against Sauron. So whatever Sauron does in gallivanting around Middle-earth, he will almost surely have to be back (say to Gwathló) to bend the knee to Ar-Pharazôn. I personally don’t think that Sauron should be handing out whichever of the Nine he happens to still have once he gets to Númenor, as I think that the time we have left there is not long enough wraithify people, and they’ll have a hard time surviving the Downfall still with their usual bodies. The only way I see that working is if someone on Númenor gets one of the Nine, and comes back to Middle-earth before the end. The show is going to have a hard enough time deciding to either show Sauron floating the One back to Middle-earth, or have him leave it locked in a box in Barad-dûr while in Númenor.

Lastly, I don’t think the show will go so far as to make Celebrimbor a Ringwraith, even though we have seen that Charles Edwards has been listed as doing some work of Season 3 (Thanks to Jessica in the FoF Discord for pointing this out!). This is most likely a flashback scene for Celebrimbor, though some hold out (a fools) hope for a flashback to the full-on Celebrimbanner.

Círdan’s the man

This item, that Círdan will get more prominence, will be very welcomed by viewers, I feel. Ben Daniels nailed his performance in Seaons 2. We know that Tolkien placed Círdan at the Battle of the Last Alliance, despite the film adaptation relegating him to a bit-cameo at the very end:

‘Alas! yes,’ said Elrond. ‘Isildur took it, as should not have been. It should have been cast then into Orodruin’s fire nigh at hand where it was made. But few marked what Isildur did. He alone stood by his father in that last mortal contest; and by Gil-galad only Círdan stood, and I. But Isildur would not listen to our counsel.
J.R.R. Tolkien, “The Council of Elrond”, The Lord of the Rings

So it may well be to set Círdan up for being present at the big climax in Season 5, that he is getting more screentime now. Certainly, while fans clamour for more of their favourite characters now, for a show with this many characters and plotlines, there needs to be a rationing of who gets time when. And if a character’s more important story is later, we can afford to wait until other plotlines have been wrapped up. It seems to me also that Círdan ‘outranks’ Elrond, not just in being older, but the way Elrond puts himself last among the three in the quote. It will help to establish Círdan as someone who would indeed be accompanying Gil-galad to Mordor for the siege and/or battle. Rings of Power has shown Círdan to be a mentor to Elrond, so having him be a very level-headed advisor to Gil-galad, for instance, will also help balance Galadriel—though she seems to be getting more mellow as her arc progresses.

One big event that should be happening his season (it can’t really fit later) is the forging of the One. This has been teased a lot by the cast in interviews during Season 2 promotion, and one of the really concrete facts around Sauron making the One is that the Elves know when he puts it on for the first time. This includes Círdan, because he has Narya (no, not this Narya), and he needs to be shown doing something in response. And it would be good to see Narya at work before then, as Nenya and Vilva have been shown to have direct healing powers in the show (and I suspect also in a deleted scene of Gil-galad and Arondir), while Narya has only been show to manipulate some fish, and participate in the collective healing of the great tree in Lindon.

Given that the Elves are sending messages asking Númenor for help in the coming season, this will of course require ships, and so there’s a natural slot for Círdan to fit in with a role in this plotline. This would also echo the history in The Silmarillion (and in “Aldarion and Erendis“), where Círdan is friendly to Númenóreans including Aldarion, before the political turn on the island towards anti-Valar and anti-Eldar sentiment.

The big open question here is whether Círdan will meet the future Gandalf in the show, perhaps in Season 5. Will the show have Narya be handed over at that point in time? It’s possible, and not unrealistic. Gandalf’s timeline has been bumped up a lot, and him using Nenya for the whole Third Age isn’t illogical.

Jamie Campbell Bower is clearly playing…

…someone who’s spending a lot of time with Galadriel in Season 3.

Suppose for the sake of argument that he’s Glorfindel, as the current state of public knowledge still permits. As someone militarily very accomplished (he took down a Balrog, even though he died and had to get better), a hypothetical Glorfindel could be teaming up with Galadriel as a commander of Gil-galad’s forces. There could be a scouting party to Greenwood or Lothlórien (or possibly they’ll use the old name Laurelindórenan?). Would he be a secondment to Galadriel’s team, or would she play second-fiddle to him, because he’s returned from Valinor and leveled-up? We can be fairly confident JCB’s character not going to drop out of the sky, though, based on comments by Poppy to Nori in Season 1 about Meteor Man the Stranger proto-Gandalf.

The more straightforward assumption is that he is Celeborn. Would he have the same armour as when he left, the “silver clam” armour? Would he found in Lothlórien? Blurry set photos from Wales seem to indicate Galadriel, Arondir and Theo together, even if the photos may be of stunt doubles. What might be more interesting is to think who else JCB’s character is sharing scenes with that don’t involve Galadriel. Popular theories involve a) memory loss, b) long-term imprisonment, c) ignorance that Galadriel is still alive after the First Age, d) did actually die in the First Age and has now come back from Valinor, Glorfindel style. Each of these would potentially need additional characters to carry that backstory. Tolkien’s own writings about Celeborn changed wildly in the years after the publication of Lord of the Rings, not least the many contradictory versions published in the History of Galadriel and Celeborn, in Unfinished Tales (notice it’s not “Celeborn and Galadriel”…).

Ultimately Tolkien, shortly before he died, wrote a version outright contradicting The Lord of the Rings, where Celeborn and Galadriel met in Valinor and he made them a boat to come to Middle-earth independent of the rest of the Noldorin Elves. I could just about imagine the showrunners pulling on this version of the story, as well as that of Glorfindel, and having a Rings of Power Celeborn make a boat and sail from Valinor to Middle-earth. Independent of who JCB is playing, exactly what Celeborn has been up to all these years is one of the unsolved mysteries of the show.