What really happened in Lord of the Rings’ war against Morgoth, in under 1,000 words

polygon.com:

Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power begins with an info dump. Elves! Trees! War! Destruction, death, and finally — a great peace.

But is it enough exposition? Due to the unusually specific way in which author 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. And the biggest of those is the war against the dark god, Morgoth, which forms the bulk of the events of The Silmarillion.

You might have heard 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 Power is set after the close of that war, which the writers can allude to without detail because the film rights to The Silmarillion have never been sold. 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.

So, what happened in the war against Morgoth? We have to start at the creation of the universe as Tolkien imagined it.

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 was among the Valar, but from the beginning desired mastery of living things, until that