Origins and Names
In the works published in Tolkien's own lifetime the name Celebrimbor is met only in passing, and always as that of a craftsman of an older age. When the Company of the Ring stands before the western door of Moria, Gandalf reads the emblems and letters upon it and names their designer as Celebrimbor of Hollin, working in concert with the Dwarf Narvi; Hollin is the Mannish name for the holly-country that the Elves themselves called Eregion. The pronunciation follows the general rule for Elvish names set out in the appendix on writing and spelling: the initial c is always the hard sound of k, never a soft s, so that the name is spoken roughly ke-le-BRIM-bor, with the weight falling on the long penultimate syllable.
The name is Sindarin and describes its bearer by his craft. Its first element is the adjectival form of the word for silver, which denotes not the metal itself but the hue and worth of silver; its second is the word for fist, used commonly of the hand at work. The compound is therefore best rendered Silver-fist, or more loosely silver-hand. The Quenya form of the same name is Telperinquar, and it is by this that he would have been known in the tongue of his kindred before the Noldor took up Sindarin speech in Beleriand. He was himself a Noldo of the house of Fëanor: the published account of the Rings names him as the son of Curufin, and so a grandson of Fëanor and a descendant in the fourth generation of Finwë, first lord of the Noldor.
His standing within that house was not simple inheritance. While his father and his uncle Celegorm dwelt as guests in Nargothrond and turned its people to their own purposes, Celebrimbor set himself apart from what they did, disowning their conduct and remaining in the city when they were driven from it. What the sources emphasise thereafter is not lineage but skill: among the Noldor who stayed in Middle-earth he was reckoned the foremost worker in metal and stone, and in Eregion he became the head of the guild of jewel-smiths, the Gwaith-i-Mírdain, and lord of that realm. The craftsman's name he bore and the reputation attached to it thus point the same way, toward a maker rather than a prince.
History
Celebrimbor belongs almost wholly to the Second Age. When the wars of Beleriand ended and the greater part of that land was broken and drowned, he was among the Noldor who did not take ship into the West but remained east of the sea, and in time he passed over the Blue Mountains into Eriador. About the year 750 of the Second Age the Elvish realm of Eregion was founded in the holly-country under the western flanks of the Misty Mountains, and there he came to rule. The choice of ground was deliberate: the delvings of Khazad-dûm lay immediately across the range, and the Dwarves there had opened the veins of mithril, a metal the smiths of Eregion desired above all others. A friendship grew between the two peoples closer than any that Elves and Dwarves elsewhere maintained, and the traffic through the mountain gates enriched both.
About the year 1200 a stranger came into Eriador in a fair and gracious shape, professing friendship to the Elves and calling himself a giver of gifts — Annatar in the tongue of the Noldor — and claiming to be an emissary of the Valar sent to help the exiles heal Middle-earth. In Lindon he was refused: Gil-galad would not receive him, and Elrond likewise mistrusted him, though neither could say what he was. In Eregion he found what he sought. The jewel-smiths were hungry for knowledge they felt had been withheld from them, and Celebrimbor, whose ambition was the ambition of a maker rather than a conqueror, welcomed the instruction. Over the years that followed the guild learned much of the lore of the deep arts from him, and their craft surpassed anything they had achieved before.
The making of the Rings of Power began around the year 1500 and occupied the smiths for nearly a century. Sauron laboured with them and had his part in all of them save the last: about 1590 Celebrimbor completed three rings alone, in secret and by his own design, and no hand but his was laid upon them. These were the Three, named for fire, water and air — Narya, Nenya and Vilya. Some ten years afterwards, in the fires of the mountain in the land he had taken for his own, Sauron forged the ruling Ring in which he set the greater part of his own strength, intending that it should govern all the rest. But he put it on, and at that moment the Elves who wore their rings perceived him and knew what had been done to them. They took the rings off, and did not use them again while he held his.
Fate veiled — revealFate revealed — veil againThis passage gives away how it ends.
Fate
Sauron demanded that the Rings be surrendered to him, and when Celebrimbor refused, the long enmity became open war. About 1693 the War of the Elves and Sauron began, and the Three were taken out of Eregion and hidden: one was entrusted to Galadriel, and two went to Gil-galad in Lindon, of which he afterwards gave one to Círdan of the Havens. Two years later Sauron's armies broke into Eriador, and Gil-galad sent a force under Elrond to the aid of Eregion. It came too late. In 1697 the land was overrun and laid waste and Celebrimbor was killed. The Dwarves of Khazad-dûm shut their gates and withdrew behind them, and the old commerce between mountain and holly-wood ended; Elrond, cut off and pressed northward with what remained of the Elves of Eregion, withdrew into the valley where he founded the refuge of Imladris.
A fuller account of the end survives in the writings on Galadriel and Celeborn. There the last defence is set at the house of the jewel-smiths itself, where Celebrimbor stood at the doors and fought until he was overpowered and taken alive. Sauron sacked the house, seized the rings kept there, and put him to torment. Under it he told where the Seven had been bestowed, valuing them less than what he had made unaided; of the Three he would say nothing, and no torture drew it from him. He was killed, and his body, pierced with arrows, was fixed upon a pole and carried before Sauron's host as a standard when it turned north against Elrond. The three rings he had refused to betray were never touched by Sauron's hand, and this is the reason they remained unstained and could still be used, though only in secret, in the ages that followed.
Role and Powers
Within the legendarium Celebrimbor occupies the position of the maker rather than the ruler or the captain, and his works are the measure taken of him. Of the smiths who gathered in Eregion he is reckoned the greatest, and among those of the Noldor who remained east of the sea none was held to approach so nearly the skill of Fëanor. Yet the only work of his hands described at any length in The Lord of the Rings is a door. The emblems and lettering upon the western gate of Moria were laid in ithildin, a substance that gives back no light except that of moon and star, and shows nothing at all until the proper words are spoken before it; the making was shared with the Dwarf Narvi, whose name stands beside his own upon it. This is craft of a particular kind — concealment, courtesy between allies, a token of friendship rather than a weapon — and it is characteristic of what the sources ascribe to him.
The same limitation is set out explicitly for his greatest work. At the council held in Rivendell it is said of the Elven-rings that they were never devised for war or conquest, and that those who made them sought neither strength nor mastery nor the hoarding of wealth, but understanding, the power to make, and the power to heal, so that what they loved might be kept from staining. The Three therefore preserve and sustain; they do not command, and they give their bearers no authority over the wills of others. Their virtue was also conditional in a way their maker could not alter, for they had been made within the same lore as the ruling Ring, and both Elrond and Galadriel state plainly that if the One were unmade the Three would lose their power and everything upheld by them would begin to fade.
Fate veiled — revealFate revealed — veil againThis passage gives away how it ends.
Fate
His own limits are drawn as sharply. The knowledge that carried the Mírdain beyond their former skill was not his to begin with but received from a teacher whose nature he did not discern, though others of the Eldar mistrusted the same visitor without being able to name what troubled them; the failure was of judgement, not of hand. He commanded no strength that could hold his country when it was attacked, and the writings on Galadriel and Celeborn present his lordship as resting on the guild he headed rather than on descent or dominion, an authority in craft that for a time overbore older claims in Eregion. What remained to him at the last was the power to withhold: he could not undo what had been made, but he could refuse to say where the Three had gone, and that refusal is the one act of his that changed the shape of the ages afterwards.
Kin, Friends and Adversaries
Of his own household the sources say almost nothing. He is given a father and no mother, and no wife or child is anywhere ascribed to him; the line of Fëanor is not traced beyond him in any account. The one episode of family life recorded at length is a breach rather than a bond, and it is told to his credit: he would not be answerable for what Curufin and Celegorm did among the people who had sheltered them, and he did not follow them out of Nargothrond. Thereafter his kin appear in his story only as an inheritance of temperament. What he kept from that house was its particular hunger, the desire to make things of surpassing worth and to master the lore that would allow it; what he did not keep was its readiness to compel others. The distinction matters, because it is the first of the several relations in which he chose differently from those nearest him.
His friendship with the Dwarves is the one attachment presented without shadow. Gandalf, reading the western door before Moria, remarks that Elves and Dwarves once stood on terms no longer to be looked for, and the door itself is the evidence he offers. The tradition of Durin's folk goes further: they held that the ring which came to their kings was not a gift of Sauron at all but was given to Durin the Third by the Elven-smiths themselves. Whether or not the claim is sound, it shows how the Dwarves remembered Eregion — as a partner rather than a patron, and its master as one of their own kind of craftsman.
Fate veiled — revealFate revealed — veil againThis passage gives away how it ends.
Fate
With Galadriel the relation was one of counsel. The writings on her and Celeborn report that when he understood at last what had been done to him, it was to her that he turned, and that the course afterwards followed — the Three to be parted, hidden and left unused — was taken on her advice; the ring of adamant he put into her own keeping. Against this stands the single bond he entered upon in error, with the fair-seeming teacher whose pupil he became, and whose malice toward him afterwards exceeded anything Sauron showed to other enemies of that war. Gil-galad and Elrond, who had refused the same visitor without being able to say why, inherited what Celebrimbor's judgement had failed to protect: two of his three rings passed into their keeping and Círdan's, and the survivors of his people into Elrond's.
Drafts and Variants
Celebrimbor is a late arrival in the legendarium. Neither the earliest tales nor the prose versions and annals of the 1930s know a smith of that name, and the whole matter of Eregion and the Rings of Power lay outside the story as it then stood. The elements from which the name is built were nevertheless already in place, for the etymological word-lists compiled beside those writings record both the stem for silver, with its derivatives in the two Elvish tongues, and the stem for fist, from which the Noldorin word paur descends. The compound was therefore assembled out of material long since prepared, at the point where a bearer for it was wanted: the figure himself emerged in the course of writing The Lord of the Rings, when the doors of Moria and the empty holly-country west of the mountains had to be given a past that would account for them.
Among the latest writings his descent from Curufin was reasserted rather than settled. The essay on the sound-change that divided the speech of the Noldor, in which Fëanor's household kept the older pronunciation against the general drift, carries with it a body of genealogical notes on that house, and there Celebrimbor appears as Curufin's son and as the only grandchild of Fëanor recorded at all; the same discussion accounts for the Quenya form Telperinquar, observing that this shape of the word for silver was properly Telerin and was taken up in preference to the strictly Quenya form. Other late notes, however, gave him an origin altogether outside the house of Fëanor, so that the parentage printed in the published Silmarillion represents a choice among competing statements of Tolkien's last years rather than a fixed position. The chronological frame of his life was no more settled: the drafts toward the appendix of dates show the founding of Eregion, the forging of the Rings and the war that destroyed his realm being shifted and adjusted before they reached the form in which they were published.
Adaptations
No other adaptation gives him a part. The dramatisations of The Lord of the Rings are set in the Third Age, long after his death, and none introduces him in flashback: he has no speaking presence in the BBC radio series, in Ralph Bakshi's animated film, or in Peter Jackson's trilogy, and in the last of these the attribution of the western gate of Moria to him and to the Dwarf Narvi, which Gandalf makes in the novel, is not carried over into the film's dialogue.