The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is one of Amazon Prime Video's flagship fantasy shows, and if the latest leaks about its upcoming second season are true, the series could be about to make some daring moves. Season 1 premiered back in 2022 to mixed reviews. Many enjoyed the show for its music, cinematography and other winning qualities, while others decried how it played fast and loose with the lore established by The Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien. Personal opinions aside, The Rings of Power's first season only had a 37% completion rate among U.S. viewers, so it feels safe to say season 2 has an uphill battle to win over more people.
Amazon may have taken that challenge to heart. This week, fansite TheOneRing.net published a lengthy feature about a leak that made its way onto 4Chan on January 15, 2024. The leak makes all sorts of wild claims about what's coming, including an appearance from Tom Bombadil and major changes to Sauron's backstory as laid out in Tolkien's Legendarium. Some of these claims are probably not true, but nearly half of them are things that TheOneRing.net say they had already confirmed through their "secret channels." At the very least, this means that we have to parse through them and consider the possibilities.
The following article contains MAJOR SPOILER AND SPECULATION for The Rings of Power season 2. I'm not kidding: proceed with caution unless you're fine with knowing what Amazon may have in store for The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, which premieres later this year.
Report: Amazon has secretly acquired the rights to The Silmarillion
One of the more fascinating things about The Rings of Power as a production is what Amazon actually has the rights to adapt. The show is set during the Second Age of Middle-earth, thousands of years before the events of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. It's been widely reported that Amazon purchased television rights to the appendices to that book trilogy, which include plenty of information about the First and Second Ages of Middle-earth. Later, we heard that Amazon also had acquired the TV rights for The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, since they were entertaining pitches for programs like a young Aragorn show. It's all been somewhat murky, but we know for sure that Amazon has the rights to those appendices and that they form the primary basis of The Rings of Power.
But Amazon didn't have the rights to Tolkien's The Silmarillion, a book that covers the First and Second Ages in detail. The Silmarillion gets into the origins of Sauron, the War of Wrath where Sauron's predecessor Morgoth waged war across Middle-earth, the romance of Beren and Lúthien, the forging of the Silmarils, and so on. There's a lot covered in The Silmarillion that was off limits to The Rings of Power, but is nonetheless crucial to the overall lore of the world. Obviously, that puts the show in kind of a pickle.
Well, that may be changing. TheOneRing.net claims it is "now being discussed openly" that Amazon has secretly acquired the rights to The Silmarillion from the Tolkien Estate for use in The Rings of Power season 2. It's hard to overstate how big that is if true. Since The Rings of Power is set in Tolkien's Second Age, which builds on mythology from the First Age, being able to draw from The Silmarillion would be a game changer for Amazon's show. TOR reiterates that Amazon's use of The Silmarillion material is probably limited, so don't expect to see a whole show based on the book anytime soon. But still, it's a big deal.
What sorts of things might this open up for The Rings of Power, you may be wondering? Well, some pretty important scenes regarding Sauron's boss, for starters: