The Lord of the Rings has lots of different kinds of people. Elven people, Dwarven people, tree people, half-size 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 Ishtari, get ready for lots of names in this video, and there are five of them,

Sauraman the White, Gandalf the Grey, Radagas 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 of 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 Eru Iluvatar.

In the beginning, there was naught but Eru and the Infinite Timeless Nothing, which is rather. The Valar, guardians of the world, of which there are 14, or 15, depending on who you want to count, and their servants the Maiar.

So the Wizards are the Ishtari, a subset of the Maiar, which serve the Valar, all created by Aluvitar.

Aluvatar and all his angels sang together to make the world. The harmony started out great, but there was one Val-Arr 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's song also attracted some Maia 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 valour also made their own non-angelic creations, though in a more cooperative spirit with Aluvitar.

Manway makes the great eagles, Aule made the dwarves, and his wife Yannava made all of the animals and plants in the world before capping off that minor task with the ants, her own race of sentient creatures.

While Aluvatar seemed happy to leave it to his valar to make most of this stuff, he did personally create men and elves, which makes them special and kind of above all the other living creatures.

Sorry dwarves.

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