After years of silence, apart from slight stirrings in the darkness, the marketing machine for Amazon Prime Video's billion-dollar Lord of the Rings prequel series, The Rings of Power, has awakened. Teaser images showing the torsos of many different characters were posted via the show's Twitter account last week, and on Thursday the folks at Vanity Fair published an exclusive that adds faces and, most importantly, names to those characters.

Exciting as they are, these breadcrumbs are leading the Tolkien-obsessed (myself included) to join the rest of the world in watching the first trailer, expected during the Super Bowl on Sunday. But even before that trailer airs, there's a ton of intriguing and worthwhile information to take away from the tidbits offered so far.