The Barrow-wights are coming in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power season 2

The second season of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is coming this August to Amazon Prime Video, and star Morfydd Clark is promising that it steps up the spectacle. “The scope is just going to become bigger and bigger with every season,” she told Empire. “It’s constantly on this big trajectory to massiveness.”

Whether massiveness will be enough to sway fans unconvinced by the show's first season remains to be seen, but it's fun to see the show dive deeper into Tolkien lore. For instance, season 2 will feature Barrow-wights, a monster from J.R.R. Tolkien's book The Fellowship of the Ring. “The Barrow-wights are ancient, reanimated heroes, acting for evil against their will,” Rings Of Power VFX supervisor Jason Smith told Empire. “It was super-exciting to take on something I hadn’t seen before. We’ve seen undead before, but not like this. We’re doing a little horror movie in Middle-earth.”

The Barrow-wights attack Frodo, Sam, Merry and Pippin pretty early in their journey after they leave the Shire. They're mostly left out of Lord of the Rings adaptations, possibly because the hobbits are saved by Tom Bombadil, a baffling character producers rarely know what to do with. But The Rings of Power season 2 will include Tom, so why not throw the Barrow-wights in there as well?

Empire got its hands on the first images of what the Barrow-wights will look like. Check them out on the cover of the magazine:

“It’s a menace that is just going to encroach an inch at a time until you have nowhere to go and you die,” Smith continued. He was particularly taken with descriptions of the creatures' glowing blue eyes. “The eyes are one key thing we took from the writing. I used to walk around by my grandma’s farmhouse in Idaho at night, and there’s something about a forest at night that can be so frightening. And if you come across a tree and think you see a glimpse of eyes that are glowing blue, it’s just horrific.”

When I think of undead creatures with blue eyes, I think of wights and White Walkers from Game of Thrones, but of course, The Lord of the Rings came out long before George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, so if anything, Martin borrowed the idea of blue-eyed undead (and possibly the name "wight") from Tolkien, not the other way around.

Galadriel is desperate to redeem herself in The Rings of Power season 2

The Rings of Power is set thousands of years before The Lord of the Rings, so Frodo, Sam and the rest aren't around. But perhaps the elven warrior-queen Galadriel might encounter Barrow-wights. According to Morfydd Clark, Galadriel will be eager to prove her mettle after being duped by Sauron (Charlie Vickers) in the first season. “She really messed up so badly,” Clark said. “There’s a desperation to redeem herself, and through redeeming herself protect Middle-earth, which is in more danger than it ever has been.”

In the first season, Sauron disguised himself as a man named Halbrand and gave the elven smith Celebrimbor the idea to make three magical rings. Galadriel is now in possession of one of these rings: Nenya. Maybe that can help her redeem herself. “Even Sauron doesn’t know exactly what they’ll do,” Clark said. “But it’s an extra-weird connection between Galadriel and the baddest man in Middle-earth.”

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power returns on Amazon Prime Video for its second season on August 29. And that's not the only Lord of the Rings thing in the works...

Andy Serkis teases classic Lord of the Rings characters returning in The Hunt for Gollum

While Amazon readies more of The Rings of Power, Andy Serkis — who played the wretched creature Gollum in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies from the 2000s — is going to star in and direct a new movie called The Hunt for Gollum.

Serkis teased a couple of details about The Hunt for Gollum at ACE Superhero Comic Con 2024, per Games Radar. "It is so early; it would be unfair to commit to anything at this point. But I will say that it will be a deep dive where we investigate Gollum’s character. There may be characters that we recognize that might be coming back. I’m not going to say who."

The Hunt for Gollum sounds like it's about the offscreen stretch of The Fellowship of the Ring when Gandalf and Aragorn go on a...well, a hunt for Gollum, so I always kind of expected those popular characters to return, although it's up in the air if original cast members like Viggo Mortensen would come back for that sort of thing. We'll find out more when The Hunt for Gollum comes out in 2026.

To stay up to date on everything fantasy, science fiction, and WiC, follow our all-encompassing Facebook page and Twitter account, sign up for our exclusive newsletter and check out our YouTube channel.