Did you watch The Lord of the Rings trilogy and wonder to yourself what Sauron really looked like? Anything could have been under that armour.

The books explained it, to some degree, and the new Amazon Prime show, The Rings of Power, will likely try to show the dark lord in a variety of forms. But the information we have leaves fans rather torn.

The Lord of the Rings trilogy is still considered by many to be a perfect set of films

For this discussion, we go to Reddit, where fans talk about what we do know.

The one thing we need to keep in mind is that Sauron lived a long time, he appeared in many forms before he donned the armour. He was a shapeshifter, after all.

One Redditor, MikeOfThePalace, gets right to the point, quoting the books. They say that Sauron’s “usual description is something like “a dark Lord, great and terrible.” It’s short on specifics, save that Isildur described his hand as being black but burning like fire and that in the Third Age he only had nine fingers.”

Most of us are familiar with Sauron from Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings films, clad in spiky armour, however as another Redditor points out, “I actually can’t recall any description of Sauron wearing armor or wielding a weapon. The depiction of Sauron in the films was basically a copy of Morgoth.”

Of course, the films had to make Sauron fearsome and scary, so a bit of creativity was used to convey his evilness visually.

A user called epaleon posits that there was no armour, “the armor as seen in the movie could have been his actual “skin” and his entire form, so to speak. Sauron being a shapeshifter, it’s possible that the “armored giant” was all there was to that particular shape he chose, and there was nothing underneath it to “remove” the armor from.”

Ultimately, Tolkien left it up to the minds of his readers and if it wasn’t for the film trilogy, we’d still have little to go on. After all, what’s more scary than what our own imaginations can come up with?