What the Elven Rings from Rings of Power do and who has them from Lord of the Rings

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power lived up to its title in the final episode of the first season, but it may have also left fans with many questions about what happens next. What do you do Do with a ring of power once you have it? How was this all portrayed in the books?

And the most important question of all: who will actually own this magical jewelry? You have to think about updating your wardrobe.

[Ed. note: This piece contains spoilers for the first three episodes of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power season 2.]

The first few episodes of the second season answer some of these questions and give viewers a better sense of why the Elves would wear their rings in the first place, given how involved Sauron was in their creation. The answer, as with many of Tolkien’s stories, has to do with the limits of nature and their own changing place within it.

At least for modern viewers, the elven rings are a bit of a bait and switch. Vilya (the sapphire ring), Narya (the ruby ​​ring), and Nenya (the adamantium ring, the only one of them made of mithril) are all named after the “primary elements” of the elven world: air, fire, and water.

But they have no elemental powers at all.

Like Elrond in The Companions“They were not created as weapons of war or conquest: that is not their power. Those who made them did not seek strength or dominion or the accumulation of wealth, but to understand, create and heal, to keep everything immaculate.”

It is quite close to the reasons for their forge in The Rings of Power: Celebrimbor and Elrond sought a solution to the deadly corruption that their people faced in Middle-earth. And as the Silmarillion says, “He who [an elven ring] in their care the decay of time could be averted and the exhaustion of the world delayed […] Wherever they lived, there was also happiness and everything was untainted by the cares of the time.”

But the Elven Rings had one pretty big drawback. Sauron’s hand in making them made them vulnerable to his own One Ring. Again from The Silmarillion: “While wearing the One Ring, he could perceive all that was done with the help of the smaller rings, and he could see and control the thoughts of those who wore them.”

Fortunately, thanks to the power of the Elven Rings and their bearers, this mistake was recognized at the moment when Sauron be Ring for the first time, creating a window into which wearers can see be Intention to control them and everything that belonged to them. They solved this problem simply by removing the rings.

After Sauron was defeated and the One Ring was lost, the Elven Rings could safely be used for their original purpose: to protect parts of Middle Earth from the waste of time and the slow decay of the world. (Why did the world decay? Tolkien was a Catholic.)

At the beginning of the Second Age, after the defeat of Morgoth, Sauron appeared to the Elves of Lindon and Eregion in a “beautiful” form, called himself Annatar and claimed to be an emissary of the Valar – so you can already see that this is a little different from The Rings of Power, Sauron first takes the form of Halbrand in the first season and only appears as Annatar to Celebrimbor in season 2.

In fact, in Tolkien’s The SilmarillionBoth Gil-galad and Elrond immediately distrusted Annatar and refused him entry to Lindon. Unfortunately, Celebrimbor was all for it. Sauron took advantage of the Noldorim Elves’ love for Middle-earth, the land they had defended for so long, and their conflicting desire to return to the splendor and happiness of their homeland. The Silmarillion says he argued, “Why should Middle-earth remain desolate and dark forever, when the Elves could make it as beautiful as Eressëa or even Valinor?” and encouraged them to find ways to transform and preserve their environment.

As Elrond tells it in The Companionsthe smiths of Eregion “received his help and grew mighty in their craft, while he learned all their secrets and betrayed them, and secretly forged the One Ring in the Mountain of Fire to be their master. But Celebrimbor was aware of him, and hid the Three he had made.”

Yes, you read that right: When the Elven Rings were forged, Celebrimbor had already realized that Sauron could not be trusted. The Silmarillion makes it quite clear that the Rings were “forged by Celebrimbor alone, and Sauron’s hand never touched them.” Nevertheless, Celebrimbor had learned enough of his craft from Sauron that the Elven Rings inevitably succumbed to the One Ring.

This is fundamentally different from Rings of Powerwith Galadriel being aware of Sauron’s wiles (or at least of the possibility of the nefarious influence he wielded as “Half-Rand”) before the Rings are finished, and Celebrimbor being completely unaware of Sauron’s wiles during the making of the Elven Rings. With Sauron now appearing to Celebrimbor as the “Lord of Gifts” Annatar, the other Rings still seem to be closer to Sauron’s influence. Although Galadriel – along with Elrond, Gil-galad, Círdan, and a handful of other Elves present in Lothlorien – knows that the Rings some Influence of Sauron, but they are not quite sure how. (More on that below.)

When the bearers of the Elven Rings abandoned them against Sauron’s will, he gathered the armies of Mordor to conquer Eregion and take the Rings by force. When that didn’t work, he created the Seven and the Nine and distributed them among Dwarves and Men.

Rings never really worked with the dwarves because they proved to be “tough and difficult to tame,” according to The Silmarillion. “[Dwarves] They cannot endure the domination of others, and the thoughts of their hearts are hard to fathom, nor can they be turned into shadows.” It did not allow Sauron to control the seven Dwarf Bearers, but only to increase their base emotions such as greed, thus indirectly helping the great Dwarf civilizations to ruin and dragon fire.

Men, however, proved to be much easier to bribe and control; we all know what a Nazgul is.

In the books, when Sauron began his war against the Elves for the Elven Rings, Celebrimbor divided the Rings up for safekeeping. He sent Nenya to Galadriel, Vilya to Gil-galad, and Narya to Círdan (who, as the series also says, is the leader of the Elven faction that lived on the west coast of Middle-earth, closest to Valinor, and built all the boats that sailed west and never returned). But with the exception of Galadriel’s Nenya, the Rings did not stay with these owners.

Gil-Galad eventually gave his Ring to Elrond before he perished with Elendil in Sauron’s defeat, and Círdan eventually gave his Ring to Gandalf, for reasons you can read about here.

“That’s how it was,” The Silmarillion says, “that in two areas the happiness and beauty of the elves remained undiminished during this age: in [Rivendell]; and in Lothlorien […] where the trees bore golden blossoms and no orc or evil creature ever dared to venture there.”

But Sauron’s involvement in the creation of the Elven Rings meant that their power was at least partially dependent on Sauron’s existence. This was one of the reasons why Bilbo’s mere rediscovery of the One Ring was something of a death sentence for the Elves of Middle Earth. Whether Sauron had found the Ring or whether it had been destroyed, the Elven Rings would have been rendered useless.

That is why Elrond and Galadriel sail at the end of the The Return of the King – they sacrificed their power to stop the passage of time and keep Middle-earth as it was in their youth, to preserve at least two places in Middle-earth where Elves can live carefree lives, and to prevent Sauron from gaining total control.

In Tolkien’s lore, there is a 10-year period of tense calm while Sauron holed himself up in Mordor to gather his armies and forge the One Ring. But that was when Sauron’s deception was not revealed until much later in the process; in Rings of Power In Season 2, the elves are already struggling to fully understand what power they now have – or whether it is actually Sauron’s power that controls them.

Galadriel is already having strange, ominous visions, and when she shares them with King Gil-galad, she also says that she fears these are glimpses of the future. Unfortunately, Gil-galad had similar premonitions: “I have seen mountains crumbling; waters drying up; and black clouds gathering over white towers.”

So far, at least, Círdan is not that worried; to him, the rings seem more like a rare opportunity, a power they can “exercise over any life form” that they should not be afraid of. “You are wise to fear this power,” Círdan tells Elrond. “But do not let that fear blind you to the ways it can be used for good.”

This is the conflict that Payne and McKay wanted to explore by bringing the creation of the elven rings forward in the plot. “We [talked] about a nuclear age,” McKay told Polygon in a junket ahead of the season two premiere. “Nuclear power can be used for good, but it’s very dangerous, and it can also be used for evil. And it can be incredibly creative or incredibly destructive. And the rings are all of those things.”

“I think there are things that feel really timeless and relatable, you know, when a new force comes into the world and you’re not sure how it’s going to change you and the world.”

In view of Rings of Power Sauron’s manipulation of Celebrimbor by the forge of the Elven Rings was reduced to a mere three weeksthere will likely be a handful of other parts of Tolkien’s timeline that will be sped up as we explore exactly what the consequences of this decision are. But theoretically, the framework of the world (if not the season) will remain the same from here on out: once the One Ring is on Sauron’s finger, the Elves defy him — plunging Middle-earth back into war with a Dark Lord, with the men of Númenor on their side. And that certainly seems like something Rings of Power will want his own cinematic interpretation.