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The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Will Introduce the Ringwraiths, And Has Invented an Early Version Named the Nazgnagôl
Amazon’s The Rings of Power will introduce earlier versions of the Ringwraiths in its forthcoming third season, calling them the Nazgnagôl, or “Ring-servants”. The change expands on Tolkien’s Nazgûl by depicting the nine ring-bearing human rulers before they become the wraiths familiar from The Lord of the Rings, further linking the prequel series to later events in Middle-earth.
Showrunner J.D. Payne said the name was derived from the Black Speech, with “nagôl” interpreted as “servant”. The season will feature Khamûl, one of only two Nazgûl named by Tolkien, played by British actor Zubin Varla; the show presents him as a warlord drawn to Sauron’s promise of restored status. The series is expected to run for five seasons, despite reports of its roughly $1 billion cost.
In short
- Season three introduces proto-Ringwraiths called the Nazgnagôl.
- Khamûl will be played by Zubin Varla.
- The show remains planned as a five-season series.
Steelman: both sides, in good faith
The strongest fair case each way — we don't pick a winner.
The case for
This represents thoughtful expansion of Tolkien's deliberately incomplete worldbuilding. Tolkien himself evolved Middle-earth's mythology over decades, leaving many gaps—the Nazgûl's origins and character arcs are areas where careful extrapolation is entirely reasonable and consistent with how literary mythologies develop. By showing human rulers before their corruption, the series creates meaningful narrative arcs illuminating Tolkien's own themes, whilst demonstrating linguistic care by grounding invented terms in Black Speech conventions Tolkien established. This is how living mythologies work: successive artists building meaningfully on strong foundations.
The case against
This crosses a line from adaptation into invention. Tolkien deliberately left the Nazgûl's pre-wraith lives mysterious; that absence is meaningful and integral to the work's power. Creating entirely new terminology and character arcs for figures not substantially detailed in published sources—even if etymologically plausible—represents authorship rather than stewardship. With a billion-pound budget making this an industrial product rather than modest homage, the scale of creative liberty raises ethical questions about whether this respects Tolkien's artistic choices or merely uses his name to justify original fiction marketed as adaptation.
Explained simply
The Rings of Power is an Amazon television series set thousands of years before The Lord of the Rings, exploring the creation of magical artefacts called the Rings of Power and the rise of the dark lord Sauron. The Ringwraiths are nine creatures in The Lord of the Rings lore, once human rulers who became enslaved by magical rings and transformed into invisible, supernatural servants under Sauron's control.
In Tolkien's original texts, the Ringwraiths appear only in their final corrupted form as shadowy creatures with almost no history or identity of their own. Their origins as living human kings with ambitions, status and agency are left largely unexplored in the existing stories, leaving significant gaps in the broader narrative.
The Rings of Power series fills in these narrative gaps by depicting events from earlier Middle-earth history. Understanding how these powerful rulers were drawn to Sauron and what they were before their transformation provides context for understanding the larger mythology of The Lord of the Rings.