It is difficult to overstate the cultural impact that Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy had in the early 2000s. The films were so massive in terms of size, scale, and reception that they managed to bring the iconic works of J.R.R. Tolkien to an entirely new generation of fans and endear them to these fans as stories all their own.
The films were so successful that they not only became some of the biggest commercial success stories in filmmaking history, helping to usher in the boom of fantasy and serialized film franchises that have come in the decades since, but also won numerous Academy Awards and remain revered to this day.
On the one hand, this was great at the time. On the other hand, it has made the job of any subsequent entries or adaptations of Tolkien’s work all the more difficult, because they are held to such a high standard. Despite efforts from Jackson and others, such as the much-maligned Hobbit trilogy or the more recent animated film The War of the Rohirrim, these works have struggled to recapture even a fraction of the cultural zeitgeist that those original films held.
The Rings of Power season 3 to feature important sword
However, if a recently released sneak peek is to be believed, there’s a chance that the next season of The Rings of Power may just break through in a big way.
The sword of the Faithful. pic.twitter.com/dL9erhNJdC
— The Lord of the Rings (@TheRingsofPower) September 10, 2025
Production on the third season of Amazon Prime Video’s Lord of the Rings streaming series, The Rings of Power, is currently underway, and the team behind it has released a minute-long video that teases the inclusion of one of the most iconic elements of the entire franchise. The video sees the production team filming on the shores of a fittingly majestic beach, as some unsheathes a sword which the post refers to as “the sword of the faithful.”
The sword is an instantly recognizable design, which will be known to Tolkien and Jackson fans alike as Narsil, the sword that belonged to King Elendil and which is used by his son, Isildur, in the final conflict with Sauron.
Not only did the sword itself appear in the opening prologue of Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring film, but it was also prominently featured in the final film of the trilogy, Return of the King, which saw Aragorn forging the broken fragments of the sword into his own blade, Andúril.
While characters like Elendil and Isildur have been a part of The Rings of Power from the very beginning, the increased significance of Narsil in this teaser works in tandem with the show’s other marketing efforts to promote a single message: a culmination is coming.
This is fair, given that many a Lord of the Rings fan would be enormously disappointed if The Rings of Power ended without giving fans a fully-fledged confrontation between Sauron and Isildur, ending with the latter cutting off Sauron’s finger and getting the one true ring, which is eventually the crux of the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy.
The Rings of Power season 3 is now filming.