Nenya

Within the narrative of The Lord of the Rings the ring is named only once by its bearer, and then in a moment of deliberate disclosure. In Lothlórien, after Frodo has looked into her mirror, Galadriel lets him see what the Company had not perceived: a ring on her finger, wrought of mithril and set with a single white stone whose light she likens to a star. She names it Nenya and calls it the Ring of Adamant, declaring herself its keeper. The epithet turns on the stone rather than on any element or virtue: adamant is the older English word for the hardest of gems, and the naming fixes attention on the clear, unyielding brilliance that Frodo sees. Elsewhere in Tolkien's published narrative the ring is not described at all, and its bearer does not speak of it again in such terms.

The second and more familiar name belongs to a different register. In the account of the Rings of Power appended to The Silmarillion the three Elven-rings are set out together as Narya, Nenya and Vilya, and glossed as the Rings of Fire, of Water and of Air. Nenya is thus the Ring of Water by systematic assignment within a triad rather than by any deed recorded of it, and the name itself is transparent in Quenya: the element nen, 'water', recurs across Tolkien's invented nomenclature. The same source ascribes the making of the Three to Celebrimbor of Eregion, working alone and after the other Rings of Power, so that Sauron neither handled them nor learned their names; it also insists that they were not forged as instruments of dominion, but for preservation, understanding and healing.

The chronology places the completion of the Three in Eregion in the year 1590 of the Second Age, some ninety years after the smiths there had begun the forging of Rings of Power under Sauron's tutelage. Elrond, recalling that history at his council, keeps to the same distinction drawn in the later account: the Three were not made as weapons of war or conquest, and their virtue lay in another direction. The date and the ascription are the whole of what the published narrative offers about Nenya's origin; how it came into Galadriel's keeping is nowhere set down in the works Tolkien saw into print.

What the published narrative shows of Nenya is confined to a single scene, and even there the ring is glimpsed rather than used. It rests on Galadriel's hand and is invisible to those about her; the Company had walked and rested in Lothlórien without any of them remarking it, and Frodo perceives it only because he carries the One Ring and his sight has been altered by that burden. Galadriel says as much: it cannot be hidden from one who has borne the Ruling Ring and has looked upon the Enemy's eye. Nothing is said of its being put on or laid aside, and no gesture, word or working accompanies the disclosure. Beyond that one description of its metal and stone, the text supplies no further account of its form.

The single virtue the narrative attaches to it is preservation, and it does so by implication rather than statement. Galadriel sets out the alternatives plainly enough: should the errand to Mordor fail, the keepers of the Three stand exposed to the Enemy; should it succeed, their power will wane, Lothlórien will fade, and the years it has held off will overtake it. The unchanging quality of the land is thus bound to the ring, but the connection is never spelled out as a mechanism, and no effect in Lothlórien is anywhere ascribed to a particular act of Nenya's. The Mirror, which stands at the centre of that same chapter, is Galadriel's own and is nowhere said to depend on the ring she wears.

The systematic account is scarcely more specific. It records that the keepers of the Three set them aside and left them unused for as long as Sauron wore the One, since he would otherwise have perceived and commanded all that was done with them; that they were taken up again only after the One passed out of his keeping; and that what was made or held by their means was kept from the wearing of time. Elrond states the same contingency at his council: recovery of the One would lay open everything wrought with the Three. What neither source provides is any function belonging to Nenya alone. The elemental epithets distribute the triad but are matched by no distinct operations, and no deed is recorded of the Ring of Water that is not recorded of all three together.

Barely a decade separated the completion of the Three from the act that put them in danger. About the year 1600 of the Second Age Sauron finished the One Ring in the fires of Orodruin, and in the moment he claimed mastery by it the Elven-smiths became aware of him and of his purpose; they drew off their rings at once, and the Three were not worn again while the One remained in his hand. Open war followed in 1693, and the Three were put out of sight before the fighting reached Eregion. The land was laid waste in 1697 and Celebrimbor was taken and killed, having yielded under torment what he knew of the Seven and the Nine but nothing of the Three, which Sauron never handled and whose keeping he could not trace. That silence is the reason the later account gives for the survival of Nenya and its fellows through the ruin of the realm that produced them.

By what route the ring reached its keeper is a question the narrative published in Tolkien's lifetime leaves open. The material gathered after his death is more forthcoming: in the writings on Galadriel and Celeborn assembled in Unfinished Tales, Celebrimbor is said to have given Nenya to Galadriel himself, and her long employment of it in the preservation of the country she ruled east of the Misty Mountains is spoken of there as a settled fact. Those writings are also the least stable body of material Tolkien left concerning her, revised repeatedly and never brought to a single form, and the editor of the volume says as much plainly. What they supply is a bearer continuous from the making onward, so that Nenya alone of the Three is never recorded as changing hands.

The Ring passed out of Sauron's keeping at the end of the Second Age and was lost in the Anduin in the second year of the Third, and from that point the Three could be used without betraying their bearers. Nenya was thus in service for the length of an age without once appearing in the record of events: no council, battle or embassy in the histories of the Third Age turns on it, and no one outside its bearer's own household is said to have known where it was. Galadriel came to hold Lothlórien and kept the ring there unremarked, so that even the Company that lodged in the wood in the first months of 3019 walked past it without knowing. When Frodo, having seen it, offered her the One in its place, she refused and let the offer pass; she named the refusal a diminishing and accepted it, and the disclosure ended there.

The One was unmade on 25 March 3019, and with it went the conditions under which the Three had been worth wearing. Galadriel rode south that summer with the rest of the great company that attended the wedding at Minas Tirith, and afterwards north through Rohan and Isengard before turning east over the mountains; nothing in those chapters marks any change in what she carried. Two and a half years later, on 29 September 3021, she came to Mithlond with Elrond, and there the last three keepers stood together in the open, their rings named on their hands in the narrator's voice for the first and only time. They took ship with Bilbo and Frodo and Gandalf, and the Tale of Years sets the departure as the point at which the Third Age is reckoned to have ended and Nenya to have passed out of Middle-earth. Nothing is said of its being destroyed or laid aside; it simply goes west with its bearer, and the records that follow do not mention it again.

The Lothlórien chapters are the long pause in the middle of the journey, set between the loss in Moria and the breaking of the Company, and they work first as an experience rather than an explanation: the wood is presented as a place where time is not felt, where nothing is stained or ailing, and where the travellers cannot afterwards say how long they stayed. Only at the close of the stay is a cause supplied for any of it, and the disclosure of the ring on Galadriel's hand functions as a retrospective key. What the reader has taken for the native quality of the land turns out to be something maintained. The same chapter has Sam groping for a word for what he has seen and settling on the elves' magic, and Galadriel objecting mildly that he uses the same word for the Enemy's devices; the ring is the concrete thing behind the vague term, and its late appearance is what converts a mood into a fact.

Nenya is also what gives the scene of temptation its weight. When the One is offered to Galadriel, the offer is not made to someone who merely covets power in the abstract but to someone already exercising it by a Ring, and who has just been shown to have kept a realm out of the reach of years by that means. The narrative has established both her competence and her motive before the moment arrives, so that the refusal costs something measurable and the alternative is imaginable. Her power over the wood is real, and Nenya is the reason the reader credits it; without the ring the offer would be a formality and the refusal a foregone conclusion.

In the larger design the Three carry the book's central concession, that the destruction of the Enemy's work will also destroy much of what the wise have made against him. Elrond states the terms at the Council and Galadriel restates them privately to Frodo, and Nenya is the instance the reader has actually seen: a power turned wholly toward keeping things as they are, admirable in what it protects and doomed in the same motion as the thing it opposes. Preservation is offered as a form of resistance that cannot outlast the victory it helps to buy, and the ring is its emblem rather than its instrument.

In Peter Jackson's three films Galadriel is played by Cate Blanchett, and the ring is treated as a visible property of the costume rather than as a concealed thing brought forward at a chosen moment. It sits plainly on her hand from her first appearance in Lothlórien and is seen again in the closing sequence at the Grey Havens, so the disclosure that the novel stages as a deliberate act of revelation, and that depends on Frodo's altered sight, becomes in the films a detail the audience has already registered. The Mirror scene and the offer of the One are both kept, but the accompanying explanation of what the ring maintains and what its keeper stands to lose is heavily compressed. Blanchett returns in the Hobbit trilogy, where Galadriel is given a direct confrontation with Sauron at Dol Guldur and a display of power staged for the screen; the appendices record the White Council's assault at that date but nothing of the sort attributed to her personally. The 1981 BBC radio dramatisation, having no images at its disposal, can register the ring only in speech, and its Lothlórien episodes accordingly retain the naming and the refusal much as the book has them.