The Rings Of Power Season 3 Explores The Origin Of One Of Middle-Earth's Scariest Creatures

Contains spoilers for "The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power" Season 3, Episode 4.

Episode 4 of "The Rings of Power" Season 3 opens with a chilling scene. Sauron (Charlie Vickers) talks to one of his new Nazgnagôl servants and an Orc assistant about a flying creature they're trying to tame. That creature is referred to as a "fell beast" in Tolkien's writings, and its kind show up often in the "Lord of the Rings" story in the Third Age, thousands of years after Prime Video's Second Age show.

It's fun to see showrunners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay work the fell beasts into the "Rings of Power" story, and even provide some backstory for the creatures. In the episode, Sauron explains how the fell beasts were once Eagles until his own master, the Dark Lord Morgoth, perverted them — or as Sauron puts it, "blessed them with his touch and taught them to crave his lash." The villain (who has had an increasingly dark role in the prequel series) goes on to say the show's version of these disturbing creatures feeds on living flesh — in this case, including his Orc assistant.

How much of this is accurate to Tolkien's own descriptions? The creatures themselves are pretty spot on, as far as looks go. In the "Return of the King" book, Tolkien gives us a detailed depiction, writing, "It was a winged creature: if bird, then greater than all other birds, and it was naked, and neither quill nor feather did it bear, and its vast pinions were as webs of hide between horned fingers; and it stank." So far so good. But the origin of the fell beasts is where things get confusing.

"The Rings of Power" is staking a claim that fell beasts are directly descended from Eagles. Warped and changed, like so many of the Dark Lord's servants, they were transformed into their present form in the show over endless years of torment. But Tolkien's original take is less clear. First off, the author never definitively answers the question. But he does offer a suggested answer in "The Return of the King," where he writes, "A creature of an older world maybe it was, whose kind, lingering in forgotten mountains cold beneath the Moon, outstayed their day, and in hideous eyrie bred this last untimely brood, apt to evil."

Translation: The fell beasts of "The Lord of the Rings" appear to be the survivors of ancient airborne creatures from a long-past era. Sound familiar? Fans of archaeology, this is your moment. Because while Eagles are one option for an ancient race like that fits this timeline, another likely explanation for the origin of fell beasts in "The Lord of the Rings" could be a long-lived line of dinosaurs.

In a letter to an inquisitive reader in October 1958, published in the book "The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien," Tolkien identified the creature further by saying that while it isn't exactly a pterodactyl as we would call it, the fell beasts are certainly "pterodactylic." Here are his exact words: "I did not intend the steed of the Witch-King to be what is now called a 'pterodactyl' ... but obviously it is pterodactylic ... and its description even provides a sort of way in which it could be a last survivor of older geological eras."

There aren't a ton of details around the fell beasts. One of the main pieces of information we have centers on their food. In the show, the Orc says they've been feeding it carrion, to which Sauron retorts that they eat the foulest of meats and specifically crave living meat. This builds off the source material, where "The Return of the King" simply states that to create the fell beasts, "The Dark Lord took it, and nursed it with fell meats, until it grew beyond the measure of all other things that fly."

The other detail from the book is that Sauron doesn't personally ride the fell beasts in "The Lord of the Rings." Instead, it says, "He gave it to his servant to be his steed." (In other words, the Nazgûl ride them.) 

In "The Rings of Power," the Dark Lord himself saddles up and turns a multi-week ride across Middle-earth into a quick flight. This has some inspiration in the source material again. In "The Two Towers," Gandalf actually gives us some vague numbers, saying, "It is two hundred leagues or more in straight flight from Barad-dûr to Orthanc, and even a Nazgûl would take a few hours to fly between them." To put it another way, these things can fly faster than the wind — and Sauron having them in "The Rings of Power" Season 3 is a game changer for the Dark Lord as the War of the Elves and Sauron plays out.