Let’s break down The Rings of Power teaser shot by shot
By Daniel Roman
Nori the Harfoot
"There’s wonders in this world beyond our wanderin’. I can feel it."
From there, it’s on to our first look at a character up close. The lucky folks at Vanity Fair have already gotten to watch the first few episodes of the show and confirmed that this character is named Elanor “Nori” Brandyfoot (played by Markella Kavenagh). She’s the one narrating the trailer’s opening moments.
Nori is a harfoot, the Second Age ancestors of hobbits. And boy does the particular accent and speech pattern she’s using here remind us of Samwise Gamgee.
Galadriel goes mountain climbing
Next up is another vista revealing a massive waterfall. Galadriel (Morfydd Clark) is climbing it, using a dagger to pick her way up the icy cliffside. To our knowledge Tolkien never wrote about this particular adventure of Galadriel’s, but she was known to go her own way.
Note the sunburst designs on her shoulders. It’s slightly different than the one on the bridge in the teaser’s opening shot, but similar enough to have us intrigued.
Halbrand makes his escape
We cut to a stormy sea, and a guy on a raft struggling to stay afloat as his little craft is tossed about by the ocean. From the Vanity Fair piece, we know that this is Halbrand (Charlie Vickers), a new “mortal” character made up for the show. We’re taking the mortal to mean human, which we’ll touch on again when he reappears later in the teaser.
Arondir the Silvan elf
Next up we have a couple of slow motion shots of an elf catching an arrow in mid-air and then restringing it onto his own bow. It’s been confirmed that this character is Arondir, played by Ismael Cruz Córdova. He’s a Silvan elf (aka a wood elf) who will have a relationship with a human village healer named Bronwyn.
Gil-galad, High King of the Ñoldor
From there, we see what appears to be a meteor flash across the sky, with a rather concerned-looking elf watching from the ground. Vanity Fair confirms this is Gil-galad (Benjamin Walker). He is High King of the Ñoldor, a clan of elves who left the blessed realm of Aman even before the beginning of the First Age. Gil-galad is a pretty central figure to the Second Age, and eventually leads the elves in fighting Sauron at the end; that’s the battle we see at the beginning of Peter Jackson’s The Fellowship of the Ring movie.
As for that meteor, we’ll circle back to that in a minute.
A wizard is never late…and Galadriel doesn’t want to be either
Our next shot is pretty self-explanatory: Galadriel races across a grassy field on horseback with mountains in the background. Judging by the fact that the other horses are wearing similar armor to her own, we’re betting she’s leading this group somewhere and not being chased.