A Dark Tower Rises
A fascinating shot of a verdant valley buffeted with bright magical light, transforming it completely into a frozen landscape… and a giant, blackened tower rising amid the mountains. Although this certainly doesn’t look like Mordor as we saw it at the start of the trailer—and the sudden appearance of the tower doesn’t really jibe with the little we know of its construction—there stands a not-altogether-unlikely chance that this is our first look at Sauron’s dark tower, Barad-Dûr, being raised.
In Tolkien’s histories, Barad-Dûr was actually built over a period of six hundred years in the Second Age, finishing approximately a century before the war between the elves and Sauron breaks out. Given that, once again, Rings of Power is playing with a much more compressed timeline, it perhaps wouldn’t be too surprising to see Barad-Dûr built much more closely and quickly to those events. Especially so if it can be magically formed like it seemingly is here.
