[mhagain]

Apologies for dragging up Hobbits again, but Tolkien did describe them as clearly having a prehistory before they became known, having already divided into the three subtypes. As for where they are located in this time period - the objections are making assumptions that stretch credibility. Why can they not be living around the Sea of Rhun, for example?

I'm not saying it's a good thing that there are Hobbits in this, and I'd personally prefer if there weren't. What I am saying is that their presence doesn't actually contradict anything written, and it shouldn't take huge feats of mental agility to see that.

On the other hand, Nori Brandyfoot is a terrible name, and really shows how little the creators understand the naming schemes Tolkien used. The correct approach would have been to pull something from an ancient language. Westron didn't exist yet (well it did, but only in the sense that Westron is Adunaic) and anyway if the Hobbits were further east they wouldn't have mixed with those Mannish cultures, but there are plenty of alternatives.

Disa is an OK name for a Dwarf woman. Dís already exists in the Appendices as the mother of Fili and Kili so Disa is OK.

Most of the other created names are of the Nori Brandyfoot type to me - something that sounds Tolkien-ish in a throwaway handwavey sort of way, but nothing he would have actually used himself.

I think I don't like the trailer, but there's really too little in it to form a fair judgement on. I'm keeping faith that the Tolkien Estate will prevent obvious stupidity like changing how Finrod dies.

I don't buy that the creators have rights to nothing aside from the Hobbit and LotR material. That map of Númenor they released is straight out of Unfinished Tales, and Unfinished Tales is the only place it exists, so there must at least be some kind of arrangement for selective use of other material.

Right now my biggest concern is around the Celebrimbor stuff, and the trailer did nothing for that. Númenor can be covered by material from the LotR appendices, G&C did a whole lot of moving around and not much else, so their story would need to be invented anyway, but the full Celebrimbor story only exists in Unfinished Tales (with a very compressed overview in the Silmarillion) and it's such an essential part of the overall story of the Rings. If the creators don't have access to this material I can't see them being able to do this story properly at all, and that's a huge concern: the series is called "Rings of Power" after all.