Who is Morgoth? Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power key war, explained

Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings – The Rings of PowerIt all starts with an information dump. Elves! Trees! War! Destruction, death, and finally — a great peace.

It is enough to merely elucidate? J.R.R. Tolkien’s work has been licensed for film, there are many things that the creative team can allude to but not explain. The war against Morgoth the dark god is what forms most of the story. The Silmarillion.

Maybe you’ve heard it. The Silmarillion referred to as a “sequel” to The Lord of the Rings. But it’s actually something more complicated: an entire history of Middle-earth, from before the dawn of time to the end of the War of the Ring, compiled from Tolkien’s drafts and notes to the best of his son’s ability. It’s less a novel than a collection of myths about the creation of the world and the great, millennia-long struggle against an evil god.

The Rings of PowerIt is set in the aftermath of the war. The writers are able to allude without further detail due to the film rights. The SilmarillionThey have never been purchased. In the first two episodes characters mention names like Fëanor and Morgoth, but it falls to nerds like me to unpack it for the layperson as succinctly as possible.

What happened during the War against Morgoth then? It is necessary to begin at the creation, as Tolkien envisioned it.

Morgoth is who?

Image from New Line Pictures

In the beginning, the supreme creator-god Eru Ilúvatar created a host of subordinate gods, the Valar, with whom he sang Middle-earth into existence. Only Eru could create life; the lesser gods’ job was to prepare Middle-earth for his most important creations, Elves and Men.

Morgoth belonged to the Valar and he yearned for the mastery over all living beings. But, despite his status among them, he was not a fan of hate. “From splendour he fell,” Tolkien writes, “through arrogance to contempt for all things save himself.” How powerful was Morgoth? Sauron had the Witch King of Angmar, but Morgoth had Sauron.

What caused the War to Begin?

Image: Prime Video

The Valar and Morgoth clashed when their power would move mountains and level hills. They eventually feared going to war to prevent the destruction of any new born elves. They built Valinor the heavens and then invited the Elf to live in it. Middle-earth didn’t come with a sun or moon out of the box, and so the Valar created two massive, glowing trees in Valinor that waxed and waned to provide golden light during the day, silver light at night, and mingled light in between. The only light source on Middle-earth was starlight.

Morgoth despised and coveted the trees’ light, and plotted to destroy what he could not make his own. That brought him to conflict with the Noldor (a Valinorian Elves tribe), and set off much of the story. The Silmarillion.

Meet Fëanor, the freakin’ worst

Photo: Ben Rothstein/Prime Video

Tolkien called Fëanor the greatest of the Noldor (Valinor’s craftsman elves) in mind and skill, and said that he invented the written Elven alphabet — high marks from a professor of linguistics. But Fëanor is best known for gem-craft, fashioning jewels more brilliant than could be discovered in the earth. Three gems, the Silmarils that capture the light from Valinor’s tree branches, were created by Feanor.

Fëanor was egotistical and suspicious, and he became paranoid that the Silmarils would be stolen. He wasn’t wrong. Melkor invited Ungoliant to Valinor as an ancestor from Shelob. He was there to make the trees dry. He plundered Silmarils in the dark and confused and fled across the ocean. In response, Fëanor made the worst decision in the history of Middle-earth: He swore himself and his seven sons to an unbreakable oath that they would kill anyone, god or mortal, who kept them from the Silmarils.

It’s not that the final war against Morgoth wouldn’t have happened without Fëanor, it’s that this one guy’s hubris would cause it to happen in the worst way. In defiance of the Valar’s advice, Fëanor rallied the Noldor to chase Morgoth across the sea, but they needed ships. Even the Teleri coastal elves who were the only shipwrights on Aman, refused to aid.

So Fëanor made another contribution to elven history: He invented elf-on-elf murder, an act on which the Noldor maintain a gruesome historical monopoly. For slaughtering the Teleri, the Valar banned Fëanor and all who went with him from returning to Aman, denied them their right of resurrection in Valinor, and cursed them with eternal longing for their homeland.

There were six centuries of betrayals, bloody battles and tragic events that followed. Fëanor himself died long before it was over, and there were plenty of times that Morgoth might have been defeated sooner or with fewer casualties if he and his sons had just gotten over it.

Is it possible to end the war against Morgoth?

Photo: Ben Rothstein/Prime Video

Their homes destroyed and children presumed dead at the hands of Fëanor’s last living sons, two mortals of mixed elf and human ancestry mounted a Silmaril — obtained by inheritance and tragedy — on the prow of their boat and sailed to Aman. Eärendil the Mariner and his wife, Elwing, convinced the Valar to intercede.

Middle-earth submerged under the water after the War of Wrath between Valars and Morgoth. The Silmarils were lost forever, Fëanor’s sons took their own lives, and Morgoth was, to quote Tolkien, “thrust through the Door of Night beyond the Walls of the World, into the Timeless Void.” The Valar pardoned the Noldor who had aided in Morgoth’s defeat and rewarded new allies: the men of Middle-earth’s western shores, who were given wisdom, power, knowledge, and Numenor, a new island between Middle-earth and Aman.

Happily, Eärendil and Elwing’s sons were It is not dead, and given that the Valar couldn’t decide whether they were more elf or more human, the twins were allowed to choose themselves. Elros chose death and was the first king in Numenor. The other, Elrond — well, you know who Elrond is!

But the Light of the Two Trees was still there at the end. The Valar transformed Eärendil and his Silmaril ship into a star. The star’s light was collected into a vial that Galadriel eventually gave Frodo, and Sam brandished at a giant spider in their own quest to defeat a Dark Lord. As Sam says: “Why, to think of it, we’re in the same tale still! It’s going on. Don’t the great tales never end?”

While the stories may not be true, this story about the battle against Morgoth is. If you want to find out what happens next, you’ll have to pick up The SilmarillionYou can also call it: The Lord of the RingsOr, just continue watching Rings of Power.