We all know Sauron: Big flaming eye, used to look like a very Death Metal suit of armor. Distorted voice. But why do people call him "The Deceiver"? How on earth did he get involved in creating the Rings of Power? Did he look like that all the time? Where did Sauron even come from?

If you don’t already know the answers to these questions, you’ll probably get them in Amazon’s Lord of the Rings series. This is part of the point of the series, one could guess, since it takes place in the Second Age: to show Sauron’s rise to power and subsequent fall and rise again.

But really, what is Sauron?

Sauron was a Maia, one of those slightly lesser, sort of “angelic” powers of Tolkien’s world. Originally, he was a Maia of Aulë’s following, very into craftsmanship (a.k.a. shaping things to his will), until he was persuaded to join the cause of Morgoth, the Great Enemy.

As described by Tolkien in an essay in Morgoth’s Ring, Sauron loved to bring order to chaos, and that ended up being his fatal flaw. He sought to impose his own ideas of order onto, well, the whole world, eventually — and the only way to impose your will onto the entire world is to enslave it. Sauron, Tolkien wrote, was not afflicted by the same “nihilistic madness” as his former boss: “He did not object to the existence of the world, so long as he could do what he liked with it.”