Did ‘Jeopardy!’ Host Ken Jennings Work On ‘The Rings Of Power’ For Amazon?

Jeopardy! GOAT Ken Jennings certainly has his hands full with co-hosting duties of the trivia game show he’s come to dominate. But depending on how you read a recent tweet of his, there may be another series that got his attention behind the scenes. Earlier this week, Jennings tweeted about the Amazon Lord Of The Rings series The Rings Of Power.

In the tweet, he claimed to actually work on The Rings Of Power as a dialect coach.

“I was a dialect coach on Rings of Power and it was one of the hardest jobs of my life (teaching people to talk regular but say “Morgoth” real weird),” Jennings wrote.

If it sounds like a joke convention to you, that’s because it almost certainly is. He’s not the only person online to note that “Morgoth” is said strangely by some of the actors on the show despite it having a pretty straightforward pronunciation, phonetically, to some. The responses to the tweet are mostly follow-up jokes, but some do take it seriously and actually congratulate him or comment on how “cool” the job is.

Which makes sense in some ways: Jennings is an accomplished author in his own right. He’s also created a trivia board game, so he’s definitely interested in getting facts correct. So it’s entirely plausible that Amazon reached out to a notable Tolkein enthusiast for some help. And some people are going to take what he says at face value because, well, he’s the wholesome face of a very normie game show.

Then again, there’s no evidence this is true at all. There’s no sign of him in the show’s credits, for one. And he’s also joked about Lord of the Rings a number of times on Twitter over the years, including The Rings Of Power itself. Back in 2020, he made a very specific joke about the show’s massive budget.

Jennings has made a habit of joking on Twitter, for better or worse. But he’s truly a huge fan of the books. In a Seattle Times interview in 2020, he made it clear that he read the series every year when he was growing up.

“The books I’ve read most of my life are probably the novels I would just read every year when I was a teenager — “Lord of the Rings,” “Cat’s Cradle,” by Vonnegut, “Dandelion Wine” by Ray Bradbury,” Jennings said. “I feel like I’ve read those all either to my kids or myself in the last few years. Those all hold up.”

It’s worth saying that you’d definitely only make that joke if you had read the books themselves, or maybe watched the movies. So what we’ve made clear is that Jennings is a huge fan of the series and, if you take him at his word, got to play a small part in it making it to the streaming screen. Or he just watched the shows and thought they said “Morgoth” weird for no reason at all.