The new season of The Rings of Power opens in a land called Forodwaith, which we’ve seen before.

The first three episodes of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power season 2 are now available to watch on Prime Video. The first episode opens with a flashback to the dawn of the Second Age, after the fall of Morgoth, the original Dark Lord of Middle-earth. Morgoth’s chief lieutenant Sauron has gathered Morgoth’s orcs in a great fortress. He’s trying to rally them to his side, but he is betrayed by the twisted elf named Adar. Adar and the orcs beat the crap out of Sauron, who seems to explode in a burst of cold, leaving the region where they’re meeting covered in ice.

That region is Forodwaith, one of the northernmost regions of Middle-earth. Forodwaith is mentioned in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings books, but we don’t get many details on it. It’s said to be near the former location of Utumno, a great fortress that Morgoth dug into the earth before even the First Age had begun. Before Sauron’s Barad-dûr and before Morgoth’s Angband, Utumno was the original big dark home base for all things evil in Middle-earth.

Utumno was destroyed by the divine Valar before the start of the First Age, and Morgoth returned to build his new stronghold of Angband over a thousand miles away. Then Angband was destroyed at the end of the First Age in the War of Wrath, a war so destructive that it reshaped the continent of Middle-earth. Much of the Iron Mountains, which also border on Forodwaith, were destroyed.

But Forodwaith itself remained. The region is populated, but not densely so. It’s known to be a place of extreme cold. We actually saw Galadriel travel there with several elves in the series premiere of The Rings of Power. She was looking for Sauron. Now we know he was here.

In Tolkien’s book, it’s not said how Forodwaith became so freaking cold, just that it is. The idea that Sauron would explode cold all over the region seems invented for the show. In the books, it’s more likely that Forodwaith is cold on account of the wicked Morgoth having holed up there for so many milennia in the distant past, or just because it’s in the far north. Alaska is cold and so is Forodwaith, it’s not rocket science.