Narya

Narya is the proper name of one of the Three Rings of the Elves, and it is one of the few Rings of Power to be named at all: of the twenty rings made in Eregion, only the Three are given individual names in the narrative, while the Nine and the Seven are counted rather than called. Narya appears in The Lord of the Rings both plainly and in the expanded form Narya the Great, a qualifier that marks its standing among the greatest of the Elven-rings rather than any claim of primacy over its two companions. It is described as a ring of gold set with a red stone, and from that stone comes the byname the Red Ring, used of it in the later accounts. The corresponding descriptive title, the Ring of Fire, is the phrase used when the ring changes hands at the Grey Havens, and it is by that title that the ring is most often identified in the tale.

The name belongs to Quenya and stands in a set with the names of the other two: Narya, Nenya and Vilya are given together in the account of the Rings of Power, and each is associated with one of the elements — fire, water and air respectively. The naming is therefore descriptive rather than possessive; it identifies the sphere with which each ring is bound, not a dominion exercised through it. This distinguishes the Three from the One, whose designation is a statement of mastery, and it sits with the tradition that the Three were not made as instruments of coercion.

The maker is Celebrimbor of Eregion, chief of the smiths of that realm and grandson of Fëanor. The Three were made last, after Sauron in the guise of Annatar had departed, and they were wrought by Celebrimbor alone, untouched by Sauron's hand and unknown to him at the time of their making — which is why the sources hold them to be unsullied, though still subject to the One. Their completion is placed in the year 1590 of the Second Age, and the accounts agree that they surpassed the earlier rings in power. What Celebrimbor did with Narya afterwards, and by what steps it left Eregion, is reported differently in the posthumous material and belongs to the record of its keeping.

The Three were shaped by Elven craft to Elven ends, and the account of the Rings of Power is explicit about what those ends were: the smiths who made them sought neither strength in arms nor mastery over others nor increase of wealth, but understanding, making and healing, and above all the keeping of what they loved unstained by the wearing of time. A ring of the Three is therefore a conservative instrument. Its work is to hold, to sustain and to preserve rather than to extend the reach of the one who wears it; nothing in the tradition assigns to it a power of command. The same account records that the Three were withdrawn from use and hidden the moment Sauron set the One upon his hand and their makers perceived him, which establishes from the outset that their virtue could be suspended and that secrecy was a condition of their keeping.

What Narya in particular is said to do is stated once, briefly, at the moment it passes to its last bearer, and everything else the narrative reports of it is consistent with that single description. It is offered as a support in weariness to one who has taken a heavy labour upon himself, and as a means of rekindling hearts in a world that grows cold. The virtue is thus bound to its element by figure rather than by any account of literal flame: warmth, courage, and endurance in long and largely thankless work. The effect is described as kindling, which is to say the strengthening of another's will rather than the bending of it, and this fits the general character of the Three as set out elsewhere.

The limits are as instructive as the claims. No scene in the narrative shows Narya being used, and no deed is attributed to it by the narrator or by any speaker; its bearer's dealings with fire are nowhere traced to the ring, and it is worn concealed until the very end. Elrond states plainly that the Three were not made as weapons of war or of conquest, and that their power runs in another direction altogether; he also states the condition on which they depend, that if the One is unmade the Three will fail and what has been maintained by them will pass. The text, then, credits Narya with an inward and sustaining influence, bounded by secrecy and by a dependence it cannot escape, and it declines to credit it with anything more.

The recorded history of Narya begins not with a bearer but with a concealment. As soon as Sauron completed the One in Orodruin and the Elven-smiths perceived what he had done, the Three were taken off and put out of use, and Celebrimbor set about placing them where Sauron could not reach them; Narya was sent out of Eregion before the land was overrun. The war that followed is dated in the annals: Sauron's assault opened in the year 1693 of the Second Age, and in 1697 Eregion was laid waste and Celebrimbor killed. Sauron gathered up the lesser rings that remained in the realm and in time distributed them, but the Three were not among his takings, and nothing he learned in Eregion told him where they had gone. That failure is the reason the later accounts can treat Narya as unstained: it was out of his hands from the first, though never out of the reach of the One.

Where Narya went is stated plainly and then immediately unsettled. Celebrimbor entrusted it to Gil-galad in Lindon, and the account as written has Gil-galad passing it at once to Círdan of the Havens; but a marginal note further on in the same material has the High King retaining it himself until he set out for the War of the Last Alliance, and Christopher Tolkien prints both without choosing between them. The editorial candour matters more than the discrepancy, since the two versions differ only in the length of Gil-galad's tenure and not in the outcome. Under either reading the ring was in Círdan's keeping before the Second Age closed, and it was not carried into the last battle: Gil-galad fell before the Barad-dûr in the year 3441, and it was Vilya, not Narya, that passed from him to Elrond. Narya thus escaped the general dispersal of the Second Age by never leaving the far western shore.

For the first millennium of the Third Age the ring lay at the Grey Havens with Círdan the Shipwright, and the annals report nothing of it in that span. Its next and last transfer is placed about the year 1000, when the Istari came over the Sea and landed in Middle-earth. Círdan — of whom the Tale of Years says that he “saw further and deeper than any other in Middle-earth” — judged at once what manner of spirit had arrived in the grey-clad wanderer who came to his quays, and gave the Red Ring into his keeping rather than retaining it for himself — a surrender of a thing entrusted to him, made on his own authority and to one who had no claim on it. The words he spoke as he handed it over supply the only description of the ring's virtue that the narrative offers, and they are set out elsewhere in this article.

The gift was made privately and stayed private. Gandalf wore the ring for something over two thousand years without display, and it plays no part in the account of his labours; the later material notes only that Saruman came to learn of the transfer, and that the knowledge fed the resentment he already bore towards his colleague. That resentment is instructive about the ring's standing among those who understood such things: what Saruman grudged was not a weapon, since the Three were none, but the mark of Círdan's judgement in choosing whom to trust with it. Through the long watch of the Third Age the ring remained where the Shipwright had put it, unnamed and unremarked in the daily record of events.

Narya is seen only once, at the very end. When the ship was made ready at Mithlond in the autumn of the year 3021, the ring was worn openly for the first time in the narrative, a band of gold on Gandalf's hand with a stone in it red as flame, and the hobbits who had come to the shore saw it. He went aboard with Elrond and Galadriel, so that all three of the Elven-rings and their bearers left Middle-earth together, and with that departure the Third Age is reckoned to have ended. The ring was neither destroyed nor lost nor taken; it simply passed out of the world's history with the one who carried it, its work in Middle-earth finished and its power already spent with the unmaking of the One.

As a narrative device Narya is remarkable chiefly for how little it does. The Lord of the Rings turns on a ring, but not on this one: the plot is driven by the One, and the Three are held back at the margins of the telling, named once at the Council of Elrond and then set aside while the story of their sustaining work in Rivendell and Lothlórien is left largely to inference. Narya specifically is withheld longer than either of its companions. Its bearer is the character the reader spends most time with, and yet he carries a Ring of Power through the whole book without it solving a single difficulty, without a hint dropped in his own speech, and without the hobbits who travel at his side ever suspecting it. The information arrives only at the end, and in the chronology appended to the tale.

That withholding has a purpose, because it protects the meaning the book assigns to Gandalf's authority. Nearly everything he accomplishes in the war is accomplished by argument, counsel, refusal and the steadying of frightened people — the rousing of a king who had given up, the ordering of a defence in a city sunk in despair, the insistence that small courage matters at the end of hope. Had the ring been declared early, every one of those scenes could be read as an artefact working through a man. Disclosed last, it colours them retrospectively without explaining them away, and the narrator never draws the line himself. The same restraint governs the epithet by which Gandalf names his own allegiance in Moria: it belongs to a different and older order of things, and the text makes no connection between it and the ring on his hand.

What the ring finally stands for is the price of the victory. The whole logic of the Three is that they preserve, and the whole logic of the quest is that the thing on which they depend must be destroyed; the war is therefore won at the cost of everything the Three were made to keep. Narya makes that argument visible in a single image at the Havens, where the ring is uncovered at precisely the moment it has ceased to matter, and the reader is shown a treasure only as it is carried out of the world. The story ends not with a power seized but with three powers relinquished, and the Red Ring is the one the reader has been living beside without knowing it.

In the screen and radio versions the Red Ring is almost as reticent as it is in the book, with the difference that most of them never disclose it at all. Peter Jackson's trilogy names the Three collectively in its opening narration but gives none of them a name, and although Nenya is worn visibly by Galadriel and Elrond keeps a ring of his own, the film Gandalf — played by Ian McKellen, who returned to the part in the later Hobbit films — is never identified as a Ring-bearer. The scene at the Havens with which the last film closes is built entirely around the departure of the hobbits, so the disclosure that ends the book has no counterpart on screen; a viewer of the films alone would have no reason to suspect that Gandalf carried one of the Three. Ralph Bakshi's animated version cannot reach the question, since it breaks off after Helm's Deep, and the Rankin/Bass television film that takes up the last part of the story does so without reference to the Elven-rings held by those who sail. The BBC Radio 4 dramatisation, the most complete of the older adaptations, follows the narrative to the Grey Havens with Michael Hordern as Gandalf, but the ring's earlier history belongs to the appendices, which none of these versions treat.