The Dark Lord Rises

Lord of the Rings fans, especially movie fans, are more likely familiar with Sauron when it comes to knowing Tolkien’s Dark Lord. But Sauron wasn’t the first to claim that mantle—in fact, he was a lieutenant of the original, the primordial embodiment of evil itself: Melkor, also known as Morgoth. One of the original Ainur—the angelic first beings of god himself, Eru Ilúvatar—Melkor rebelled against his creator during the creation process of the known universe, attempting to sow his own ideas for creation into the great song Eru composed as the foundational blocks of existence. Ostracized by his fellow Ainur after the initial creation of Arda, Melkor decided to set himself against them out of spite, undermining their efforts to bring more creations to the world in the process.

So yes, it was Melkor all along. Melkor spends the thousands upon thousands of years in the pre-Age era of Arda being a massively evil thorn in the side of his fellow Ainur, destroying the great lamps Illuin and Ormal, attempting to corrupt the elves to his side in what would become the War of Power, and eventually working with the primordial spider-spirit Ungoliant to assault Laurelin and Telperion. Oh, and he stole the powerful gems known as the silmarils, which of course, you can read about in a little book called The Silmarillion—earning him the title Morgoth, which means “Black Foe of the World” in the Sindarin language.