New The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power teaser falls to earth

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is the most expensive TV show that Amazon — or anybody, really — has ever made. Set thousands of years before The Lord of the Rings story most of us know, the series will feature a (mostly) new cast of characters who deal with the rise of Sauron, then the new Dark Lord on the block.

Author J.R.R. Tolkien sketched out the events of this time period in The Silmarillion and in the appendices to The Lord of the Rings, although he didn’t go into great detail. Amazon will be making a lot of stuff up, as we can see in the latest teaser for the show. Watch below!

What is the meteor in the teaser for The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power?

This teaser features various characters from all the races of Middle-earth — elf, dwarf, men,

hobbit

harfoot — looking up as a meteor streaks across the sky, before finally crash landing near a female harfoot. What’s with that?

First of all, this doesn’t resemble anything in Tolkien’s work; to my knowledge, at no point did a meteor land in the Shire (or anywhere else) during the Second Age of Middle-earth. This is an Amazon invention, so all we can do is speculate about it.

We do know that there’s a person in that meteor. They make contact with the female harfoot. The harfoot’s little hand holding the visitor’s huge hand is one of the cooler images we’ve gotten from the series thus far. We saw it in the first teaser trailer for the show:

So who is this meteor-riding sky man? If I had to guess, I’d say it was a Maia or even a Vala, essentially a god fallen to earth for some heretofore-unknown reason.

The cosmology of Middle-earth is extensive. In the beginning, a god-like being named Eru created the Valar, angelic beings who sung Middle-earth into existence. Many of the Valar went to dwell in Middle-earth afterwards. Eru also created the Maiar, lesser angelic beings. We’ve actually met a lot of them. Sauron is a powerful Maiar who went bad…really bad. Gandalf and Saruman are also Maiar, albeit less powerful.

Again, Tolkien never wrote anything about a Maiar crashing to Middle-earth in a meteor during the Second Age, but I can’t think of any other being being capable of doing something like that. And clearly it’s an important part of the show if Amazon is highlighting it like this.

What do you make of this? Who’s in that meteor? And we’ll find out for sure when The Rings of Power premieres on September 2.

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