If you’ve wondered what happened to the Harfoots (or as Michael on our podcast has so lovingly named them– the DLS’s, aka Dirty Little Sociopaths) and the Stranger in The Rings of Power Season 3, showrunner J.D. Payne has an answer: they’re stepping aside. Payne confirmed to Empire that the Harfoots and Stoors will take a significant “backseat” when the show returns on November 11, 2026 on Prime Video. “It was time for them to take a little bit more of a backseat,” Payne said, while adding the familiar reassurance: “never count a Halfling out.”
“Stepping aside” is an odd way to refer to completely ignoring a set of characters the first 2 seasons have focused on.
Following the fall of Eregion, the story jumps forward five years and turns its attention to the War in Eriador, the deepening corruption of Numenor, and Sauron’s forging of the One Ring. Those are exactly the events that define Tolkien’s Second Age in The Lord of the Rings appendices, Unfinished Tales, and Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age in The Silmarillion. Harfoots have no place in any of those texts because, in Tolkien’s actual writing, the ancestors of the Hobbits simply were not there. Their migration west is mentioned only in passing in the prologue to The Lord of the Rings, and Tolkien places their entry into recorded history firmly in the Third Age. They are wanderers on the fringes of the great events, not participants in them.
Payne and Mckay decided they had a better way, that they knew better than Tolkien.
Seasons 1 and 2 invented a prominent role for them anyway, pairing the Harfoot Nori Brandyfoot with the Stranger and sending them east toward Rhun. The storyline drew consistent criticism for pacing problems and for feeling disconnected from the central Second Age story unfolding in Eregion and Numenor. Pulling it back for Season 3 at least concentrates the show on what it was always supposed to be about: the forging of the Rings of Power and the rise of Sauron.
Whether the series can actually deliver on that promise is another question. Season 3 has a lot to cover, and Payne’s comment that we should “never count a Halfling out” suggests the Harfoots haven’t been written out permanently, just parked for now. Too bad.
For more on The Rings of Power and Tolkien’s Second Age, check out our Exploring Tolkien YouTube channel.
