The 'Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power' Opening Credits Have a Secret Meaning

Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power is building into every bit as rich and dense a world as the original Lord of the Rings trilogy, a lavish production packed with diverse characters, races, languages and customs.

It's also got a bunch of runes, as you'd expect. Tolkien loved a rune. Couldn't get enough of runes. He invented whole alphabets full of symbols to lend mythic weight to his fictional world.

In keeping with this, the opening credits of Rings of Power are a long sequence of symbols forming and re-forming, grains of sand vibrating and quivering into life before forming new shapes and collapsing again.

They suggest earth, mysticism, elemental forces and magic all at once, while the meaning remains tantalizingly out of reach.

Twitter user Alexander King, however, spotted an unlikely inspiration for the sequence, which has since been confirmed by its designers.

"Chladni figures?" you ask. "Sounds very Tolkien. Was he an Elf smith?" No, sadly–not to our knowledge, anyway. Ernst Chladni was an 18th-century German scholar who noticed that sound vibrations can result in two-dimensional patterns being formed in grains of sand.

To prove it, he drew a violin bow along the edge of a metal plate dusted with sand and saw 'nodal patterns', as they're called, emerging from the sand.

So what's their significance to Tolkien's world? Well, as King describes it: "In Tolkien's legendarium, the creator god Ilúvatar sort of creates the world out of music. The beauty of these figures is just a physical manifestation of the harmony of the 'Music of the Ainur'?"

And Plains of Yonder, the film studio responsible for the credits sequence, has confirmed the theory in a blog post: "We set out to portray a universe both primordial and timeless. Taking inspiration from JRR Tolkien’s Ainur, immortal angelic beings that sing such beautiful music that the world is created from their very sound, we conceived of a main title sequence "built from the world of sound".'

The nodal patterns are also known as cymatics. As Plains of Yonder go on to explain, "Cymatics is a natural phenomenon that makes sound visible to the eye. Vibrations of fine particles on a flat surface display striking symmetrical patterns that reflect audio frequencies. Cymatics are understood by physicists and mathematicians, but to us mere mortals, they are nothing short of magic.

"The sequence conjures an ancient and invisible power, struggling to be seen. Symbols form, flow, push, and disappear as quickly as they came. The unknowable realms of sound create fleeting visions of conflict and harmony that move in lockstep with Howard Shores’ opening title score."

So there you have it: you thought you were seeing something cool, earthy and runic – and you were–but you were also watching a manifestation of the world being brought into existence through music. Let there be light!

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