the Lord of the Rings has lots of
different kinds of people elven people
dwarven people tree people half sized
people even people people there's like a
million pages of background explaining
this world that goes much deeper than
the books or the movies but if you don't
want to read it all here's a four-minute
summary
starting with Wizards it's easy to
mistake the Wizards as humans trained in
magic like elsewhere but in the Lord of
the Rings Wizards are low ish level
angels they're called istari get ready
for lots of names in this video and
there are five of them Saruman the white
gandalf the grey radagast the brown and
the two blue wizards their power comes
mostly from being supernatural and not
so much from book learnin they're sent
by who we'll get to that in a second to
help the people of the world stand
against evil not wildly successfully
either Saruman the leader of the five
with a mind at metal and wheels gets
corrupted
radagast gets distracted by all the
pretty nature the blue wizards just kind
of fade into the east possibly starting
cults of magic and it's only Gandalf
that stays true to the quest now where
there's angels there's a God and in this
universe that's arrow Aluva tar in the
beginning there was not but arrow and
the infinite timeless nothing which is
rather boring so he created lots of
angels to keep him company
the Luba tars angels are called the i
nor and are divided into two groups the
Valar guardians of the world of which
there are 14 or 15 depending on who you
want to count and their servants the my
are so the Wizards are the istari a
subset of the my art which serve the
Valar all created by Aluva Tarr Aluva
Tarr and all his angels sang together to
make the world the harmony started out
great but there was one of the lard
named Melkor and just from the name
Melkor you know what's going to happen
even before learning he's also the
smartest and the most powerful of the
Angels and also a bit of a loner
Melkor didn't want just to be part of
the chorus like his dimmer Valar
co-workers he wanted his own song and
creations and so his voice became
discordant from the others and created
all the suffering and evil in the world
but melkor song also attracted some my
art to his side including the Balrogs
which means the Balrog is a low-level
angel making him on the same level of
the power org chart as Gandalf which
explains why an old man can hold his
ground against a giant lava monster
through his discordant singing Melkor
also created some of the evil creatures
in the world such as the dragons and
trolls which finally gets us to things
that aren't angels other valor also made
their own non angelic creations though
in a more cooperative spirit with
Luva tar mono makes the great eagles a
lay made the dwarves and his wife Jana
vom made all of the animals and plants
in the world before capping off that
minor task with the ents her own race of
sentient creatures while Alou Betar
seemed happy to leave it to his valor to
make most of the stuff he did personally
create men and elves which makes them
special and kind of above all the other
living creatures sorry dwarves and of
these two the men are Aluva tars favored
children and he shows this by giving men
shorter lives than everybody else and
also the gift of death thanks a lot dad
but their short lives set them apart
from the other creatures and they aren't
tied to the music of creation and the
world like everyone else and so are able
to forge their own futures these
qualities make them to get stuff done
species of middle-earth elves on the
other hand are so connected to the world
they're practically made of nature same
with the dwarves in their own way and
the ents of course these species all but
follow the flow of nature and it's
partly why the humans have such a hard
time getting them to do anything even
when faced with armies of Orcs which
brings us to orcs melkor was powerful
but couldn't make his own creatures as
great as the elves and men and so
cheated by corrupting some of them in
the beginning and selectively breeding
them over the generations into these
creatures this business Melkor was up to
of torturing elves making monsters
recruiting angels from the other side
eventually but unsurprisingly led to a
war that Melkor losses and got him
banished into the void all of the
conflict in the Lord of the Rings comes
long after the epic good versus evil
fight of that universe sour on the big
bad who caused all of the trouble in
these books was just one of the Maya
though an unusually powerful one who
started his career as Mel Coors
lieutenant after the war he did make a
ring to focus his strength but that's a
story for another time
last but not least we have the hobbits
even though they seem related to dwarves
what with the living underground and the
vertical challenge hobbits are a
subspecies of men for such an important
and pivotal race there is little written
of their origin other than the phrase
related to men turns out with a million
pages you still can't talk about
everything just like in a four-minute
video
I don't know if you have this experience
but I have often found that if you have
a low expectation of a movie it often
improves your experience of watching
them yes the perverse is the reverse is
true if you have really high there's
nothing worse than if everybody tells
you something is the greatest thing ever
and then you go to watch