The Rings of Power

The collective name is a way of counting rather than a title, and it covers objects of markedly different make. The narrative sorts them by number and by the kind of folk who received them — three, seven, nine, and the one that was made apart — and the several groups take their ordinary names from that reckoning. The term Great Rings works from the other direction: it marks these off from the lesser rings that the smiths of Eregion had made earlier as trials of the craft, which Gandalf, setting the matter out for Frodo in the Shire, treats as of small consequence beside what came after. The Three are also called the Elven-rings, a name taken from their keepers and not from their maker, and one used by the few who knew of them at all.

The making is credited to the Gwaith-i-Mírdain, the fellowship of jewel-smiths who had their house in Eregion under Celebrimbor, son of Curufin and of the line of Fëanor, who is named the greatest of them in skill. The Tale of Years sets the beginning of the work at about the year 1500 of the Second Age, when the smiths are said to have reached the height of what they could do. Within that labour the Three stand apart. They were made last and by Celebrimbor alone, and each of them bears a proper name — Narya, Nenya, Vilya — where the other groups are known only by their number. That distinction between what one smith made by himself and what the guild made with counsel from outside it is the point on which the later accounts turn.

The counsel came from Sauron, who appeared in Eregion in fair form and under a borrowed name. Annatar, rendered as the Lord of Gifts, is the name the tradition preserves; a later account adds that he gave himself others among the Eldar, Artano and Aulendil, all of them chosen to fit a friend of craftsmen. The naming was part of the deception, and it worked on the smiths for a long while, though it never worked on everyone in Eregion. The ring he afterwards made in secret for himself received no name of that kind at all: it is spoken of by what it does, as the One and the Ruling Ring, and the older name for the whole set has since been read chiefly through it.

In shape the One is the least remarkable of them: a plain band of gold, without stone or visible device, so ordinary to the eye that it passed for years in the Shire as a curiosity. Only heat brings anything out of it, and Gandalf lays it in the hearth-fire at Bag End before fine letters in a flowing script stand clear on the outer and inner faces of the band, cooling away again as the metal cools. The Three are of another make, each carrying a single stone: Galadriel's is of mithril set with a white gem, Elrond's a gold ring with a great blue stone, and the third bears a red stone. They are not readily seen. Frodo, who had carried the One as far as Lothlórien, could make out the ring on Galadriel's hand where Sam standing beside him saw nothing at all, and the Three were not looked upon openly until the war was over. Of the outward form of the Seven and the Nine the narrative says almost nothing.

What the rings do is set out most plainly by Elrond, and it is a narrow list: to make, to understand, to heal, and above all to hold what is loved from changing — to keep a place or a work unstained while the years run past it outside. That last is the virtue the Elves wanted and the reason the labour was undertaken at all. The One was made to a different purpose. A great part of Sauron's own strength and will passed into it in the forging, which is why it commanded the rest; while he wore it he knew what was done through the others and could turn their wearers to his purpose. That knowledge ran both ways at the first moment. As he set the ring on his hand the keepers of the Three perceived him and understood what had been done to them, and they took their own rings off and did not use them again while he held his.

The limits are stated as carefully as the powers. A Great Ring does not lengthen a mortal life so much as stretch it: its bearer does not die, but neither does he gain anything, and Gandalf's account is of a man simply continuing, growing weary of continuing, and at last fading out of the seen world altogether. The Dwarves proved a different case. The Seven made no wraiths of their keepers, for the Dwarf-lords were of too hard a make to be dominated in that fashion; what the rings worked in them was an appetite for gold, and the ruin that followed came by way of that appetite rather than by any conquest of their wills. As for the Three, they were not made for war or mastery and were never used so, and their virtue was never independent: it hung on the One, so that the same act which undid their maker undid them, and everything they had held unchanged began to change again.

The labour at Eregion ran for the better part of two centuries. The Tale of Years places the beginning of the forging at about the year 1500 of the Second Age, sets the completion of the Three at 1590, and dates to about 1600 both the making of the One in the fires of Orodruin and the founding of the Barad-dûr, which was raised to hold it. The secret did not keep long. Celebrimbor learned what had been done as soon as the One was worn, and the smiths of Eregion turned against the counsellor who had taught them; in 1693 the Three were hidden away and open war began between Sauron and the Elves. Eregion was overrun in 1697 and Celebrimbor was killed, and it was in that ruin that Sauron laid hands on the rest of the Rings — the Sixteen that were not the Three. Elrond withdrew northward with what remained of the people of the land and made his refuge at Imladris in the same year, and the gates of Moria were shut. Sauron held Eriador until a fleet out of Númenor broke his power there and drove him east again in 1701.

The Sixteen were given out again, and the giving was itself an act of war. Nine went to Men — kings, warriors and sorcerers among them — and their bearers gained great power and long life in the short term and were lost in the long one. The Tale of Years marks their first appearance as shadows in about the year 2251 of the Second Age, some six centuries after the rings had been distributed, which is the interval the narrative allows for the process it describes elsewhere as a slow fading rather than a sudden change. From that point they served Sauron as the Nazgûl and had no history apart from his. Their rings are never afterwards spoken of as objects in separate keeping; the account treats bearer and ring together, held by the master of the One.

The Seven went to lords of the Dwarves, and here the tradition splits. The Dwarves of Durin's line did not accept that their ring came from Sauron at all, holding instead that it had been given to Durin the Third by the smiths of Eregion themselves, before the breach; the Elvish account is that Sauron distributed all sixteen. Whichever is true, the fate of the Seven is not in dispute. Four were destroyed with the hoards they had helped to gather when dragons came upon them, and three Sauron took back into his own keeping. The last of those recoveries can be dated: Thrór carried Durin's ring out of Erebor and gave it to his son Thráin before going to Moria, and it was taken from Thráin in the pits of Dol Guldur in 2845 of the Third Age, five years before Gandalf found him there dying and learned from him what had been lost.

The One had the longest and least intentional history of them all. It was cut from Sauron's hand at the end of the Second Age, in the year 3441, and passed to Isildur, who refused to destroy it; two years into the Third Age it slipped from him in the Anduin at the Gladden Fields, where he was killed. It lay in the riverbed for some twenty-four centuries. About the year 2463 it was found by a fisherman of a small river-folk and taken from him by his kinsman Sméagol, who carried it under the Misty Mountains for close on five hundred years, until Bilbo Baggins came upon it in the dark in 2941 and bore it out of the mountains without knowing what it was. It went to Frodo in 3001 and was unmade in the fire that had made it on the twenty-fifth of March, 3019, whereupon Sauron's power ended and the Nazgûl with it.

The Three alone had an unbroken line of keeping, and it was a quiet one. Nenya remained with Galadriel; Vilya passed from Gil-galad to Elrond; Narya was held by Círdan at the Havens until he gave it to Mithrandir at his coming out of the West, judging that it would be of more use in another's hand. None of the three was worn openly while Sauron held the One, and their existence was known to very few even among the Wise. Their end came with his: the destruction of the ruling ring ended their virtue also, and their keepers, having nothing left to preserve, took ship from the Grey Havens in the year 3021, which closes the Third Age in the reckoning of the Elves.

The plot of The Lord of the Rings is organised around an object rather than an adversary. Its central council does not debate strategy or the disposition of armies; it debates what is to be done with a thing, and the alternatives are raised one by one and set aside — to use it against its maker, to keep it hidden, to send it over Sea, to give it back to the river. What remains is the least promising course, and the errand is given not to the strongest of those present but to a hobbit, on the reasoning that the wise and the mighty are precisely the ones the Ring would take. From that point the narrative follows an errand of destruction rather than a campaign of conquest, and the war in the west is fought largely as a distraction to buy the errand time.

The One also serves as the book's chief instrument of characterisation, since almost everyone of consequence is measured by what they do when it is within reach. Gandalf refuses it at Bag End and says why: he would take it out of pity and wield it out of a wish to do good, and that is exactly how it would master him. Galadriel, offered it freely in Lothlórien, sees what she would become and declines. Boromir argues that it is a weapon Gondor is entitled to use and then tries to take it, which breaks the Company. Sam, carrying it a short while in Mordor, is shown a vision of himself as a great captain and recognises it as a fraud fitted to his own smallness. The Ring is written throughout as an active party to these encounters, with something like intent — it slips from fingers, changes size, abandons one keeper and finds another, working its way back toward its master.

What the Rings stand for, taken together, is the wish to hold on. The Elves who made them are not accused of malice but of a misjudged love: they wanted Middle-earth to stay as they had known it, and they laboured to slow a passing they could not stop. That wish is what Sauron found and used. The consequence is that the story cannot end well for its winners in any simple sense. Elrond and Galadriel argue for the destruction of the One knowing it will end their own work, and the closing chapters treat the departure of the ring-keepers as the price of the victory rather than a reward for it. Success means that the thing they preserved will now change like everything else.

The ruling ring was not present at the outset. When Tolkien began the sequel to The Hobbit the object his hobbit had found was still what that book had made it, a serviceable ring of invisibility with no history behind it, and the drafts printed in The Return of the Shadow show him working out what it might be while the journey was already under way. In the early forms of the chapter that became The Shadow of the Past — drafted under the title Ancient History — Gandalf's explanation shifts from one stage to the next: rings are made by the Necromancer and given out to ensnare their keepers, mortal users are said to fade and pass into his service, and the question left open is whether this particular ring is a minor one of that making or something else. The decision that it was the master ring, that all the rest had been gathered back and this alone had gone astray, appears in the working notes as a discovery rather than a premise, and it is what turned a travelling tale into the book that was written.

The late essays gathered in Morgoth's Ring set the whole matter in a longer frame. There Tolkien compares what Sauron did in the forging with what Morgoth had done before him: Morgoth spent his strength outward into the substance of Arda itself, so that the world became the vessel of his power, while Sauron gathered his into a single small thing. The comparison makes the second the lesser act and at the same time the more precarious one, since concentrated power can be lost with the object that holds it; Christopher Tolkien took the volume's title from the passage. From the same late period comes the genealogical note in The Shibboleth of Fëanor which fixes the smith of Eregion as a son of Curufin who stayed behind in Nargothrond and disavowed his father's deeds — an ancestry given him only in Tolkien's last years, and the one the published account follows.

Every adaptation has to decide how much of the rings' history to state before the story can move, and the older ones answer differently. The Rankin/Bass television film of 1977 does not answer at all: adapting the earlier novel, it keeps the ring Bilbo finds as a simple means of going unseen, with no maker behind it and no other rings beside it. Ralph Bakshi's animated film of the following year opens instead with a prologue that lays out the forging, the division among Elves, Dwarves and Men, and the loss of the One before the hobbits are introduced — material the book withholds until the Council. The Rankin/Bass Return of the King of 1980, beginning near the end, reaches the unmaking of the ruling ring without ever having shown its making, and bridges the gap by narration. The BBC Radio dramatisation of 1981 has the room the films lack: across twenty-six half-hour parts it keeps the Council of Elrond as a long scene of testimony, and that is where most of what a listener learns about the rings is placed, much as the book arranges it.

Peter Jackson's trilogy of 2001 to 2003 gives its prologue to Galadriel, spoken by Cate Blanchett, and shortens the history considerably: Gil-galad has no part in it, and the ruling ring is cut from Sauron's hand after Elendil falls. The years between Bilbo's departure and Frodo's are compressed to a short interval. Galadriel is shown wearing her ring, but the dependence of the Three upon the One — and with it the reason the keepers take ship at the close — is left mostly unspoken. The Hobbit films of 2012 to 2014 move in the opposite direction and add what no source supplies: the Nine are given tombs in the High Fells of Rhudaur, found empty, and their bearers appear as wraiths at Dol Guldur to be driven off by Elrond, Saruman and Galadriel. The appendices the trilogy otherwise draws on record no such burial and no such encounter.