August has been a big month for Tolkien fans.

Season 2 of Amazon’s The Rings of Power is slated to premiere on Thursday, August 29th, two years after the first season (with its billion-dollar budget) dropped and garnered mixed reviews. You can read my own two cents on The Rings of Power here and here. The question a lots of Tolkien fans are probably asking now is whether the show can recover from a slow start, some poor character development and cliche dialogue, and some basic plot issues that made many of us wish more time was invested on the story than the stratospheric budget. We’ll see. Here’s the trailer for Season 2:

The Rings of Power isn’t the only Tolkien-themed entertainment coming your way, though. The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim is an upcoming animated film that takes place 200 years before the story of The Lord of the Rings. Coming from Warner Brothers studio, the trailer begins with footage from Peter Jackson’s trilogy involving the land of Rohan, and then transforms into the anime-style format of the new film.

The War of the Rohirrim follows the storm of King Helm Hammerland of Rohan and his daughter Héra. When a vicious clan tries to overthrow Rohan, they must retreat to an ancient fortress called the Hornberg, which would eventually come to be known as “Helm’s Deep.” Those who have watched or read The Two Towers will be well familiar with the Battle for Helm’s Deep, in which the corrupt wizard Saruman sends his orc forces to try and destroy Rohan once and for all.

Based on the trailer, it looks like the film will be in step with Peter Jackson’s epic trilogy while offering something fresh and new that the fanbase might be hungering for. Of course, not everyone is excited about the cinematic expansion of the LOTR universe. With franchises like Marvel and Star Wars continually replicating and bloating their universes, studios seem all too eager to turn Tolkien’s beautifully rendered world into a “brand” that can milked as an eternal cash cow. I have more hope for the animated film than The Rings of Power, simply because I was underwhelmed by the first season and don’t really anticipate a massive change in vision for the second. In any case, there’s nothing stopping any of us from revisiting the Middle-earth the way it was originally intended: on the crisp pages of what popular opinion considers the best novel of the twentieth century, The Lord of the Rings.