Vilya

Within the narrative published in Tolkien's lifetime the ring is named only once, and very late: in the closing chapter of The Lord of the Rings it is identified as Vilya, a band of gold set with a great blue stone, borne on Elrond's hand and reckoned the greatest of the Three. Everything else the main text supplies comes indirectly. The Tale of Years places the completion of the Three Rings in Eregion in the year 1590 of the Second Age, some sixty years after the Nine and the Seven were begun there, which fixes Vilya's making to the height of the smithcraft of that realm. At the Council of Elrond the essential point about their provenance is stated plainly: the Three were not of Sauron's devising, and his hand never lay upon them, which is why they were neither corrupted nor, at first, betrayed. The narrative offers no description of the ring's powers to match its description of its stone.

The posthumously edited tradition names the maker. In the account of the Rings of Power, Celebrimbor of Eregion is said to have wrought the Three alone, in secret and after Sauron in his fair guise had departed, so that they alone among the Rings of Power were free of his knowledge and his touch. There the three are named together — Narya, Nenya, Vilya — and associated with fire, water and air respectively, the ordering that gives Vilya its usual epithet as the Ring of Air. The same tradition insists that their purpose was not dominion but preservation, healing and the staying of decay, a distinction that governs how the Three are handled in every later account.

A second name is used in the drafts of the Galadriel and Celeborn material, where Vilya is called simply the Blue Ring, matching the White Ring and the Red by the colour of their stones rather than by element. The two naming systems are complementary rather than rival: one classifies by the element the ring answers to, the other by what the eye sees, and the published description of a great blue stone reconciles them. The name Vilya itself belongs to the High-elven tongue and carries the sense of air or sky, so that the epithet is less a title conferred than a translation of the name already given.

What the published narrative says of the ring's virtue is said of the Three together, and said chiefly in one place, at the council held in Elrond's house. Their makers, Elrond states there, did not forge them for battle or for conquest; what was sought through them was knowledge, the making of fair things, and healing, and the keeping of what was loved from spoiling. He couples this with a constraint of equal weight: so long as the One was on Sauron's hand the Three could not be used at all, and they were accordingly hidden and left idle; only in the long interval of the One's loss did their keepers begin to wield them. The bond runs in the other direction as well, for were the One recovered, its master would learn what had been wrought with the Three and read the minds of those who bore them. None of this is particular to Vilya.

The posthumously edited tradition supplies a formulation of what that virtue amounts to in practice. Those who kept the Three, it says, could hold off the erosions of time and put off the weariness of the world — a power of arrest rather than of increase, and the greatest that any of the Rings of Power held. It repeats the qualification that the Three, for all their strength, stood under the One, and that they were left unused while Sauron wore it. The same account follows the consequence to its end: with the One unmade the Three lose their virtue, and what had been sustained by them is given back to the ordinary passage of years. That Vilya stands first among the three is asserted; no faculty is described that belongs to it and to no other, and its association with air rests on the name rather than on any recorded working.

The limits of the record are best measured against how much of Rivendell might plausibly be laid to the ring's account and how little the text lays there. The healing of Frodo's wound, the guarded strength of the valley, the flood that rises against the Riders at the ford: in each instance the narrative credits Elrond's own power and lore, and never the ring on his hand. Vilya goes unmentioned until the last chapter, and even there it is described rather than seen at work — a thing now displayed because concealment has ceased to serve any purpose. The contrast with Galadriel is instructive, for she speaks of her ring, names what it does and does not do, and lets it be seen while the war is still undecided; Elrond says nothing of his anywhere in the narrative. Any statement of what Vilya alone could accomplish is therefore inference from what is said of the Three as a class, not report.

The ring's history begins in Eregion and is bounded almost at once by the ruin of that realm. The chronology appended to The Lord of the Rings sets the completion of the Three in the year 1590 of the Second Age, and the forging of the One in Mordor about sixty years later; Celebrimbor perceived what had been done the moment the master ring was set on its maker's hand, and the Three were taken off and hidden away. War came upon Eregion in 1697 and the land was laid waste, and in that same year, by the same reckoning, Elrond withdrew northward with what remained of the Elves of that country and established the refuge of Imladris. The published narrative does not say who carried Vilya out of the wreck, nor where it lay through the wars that followed; it says only, at the Council held in Elrond's house long after, that the Three were kept hidden and unused while the One endured.

The first bearer named anywhere is Gil-galad, the last High King of the Noldor in Middle-earth, and the naming is made only in the posthumously edited tradition. There the Three are distributed after Sauron's designs are uncovered: the ring of air is given into Gil-galad's keeping, while another passes to Galadriel and a third comes at length to Círdan of the Havens. That the ring was Gil-galad's is not stated in the narrative published in Tolkien's lifetime, which never traces its descent at all; the reader of the main text meets it for the first time on Elrond's hand at the end of the Third Age, with no account of how it came there. The gap is real, and everything said below about the years between belongs to the editorial tradition rather than to the story as Tolkien printed it.

How the ring left Gil-galad is told twice, and not in the same way. The account of the Rings of Power has it passing to Elrond only at the end, when the Last Alliance moved south against Mordor and the king committed it to his herald before the war in which he fell. The drafts of the Galadriel and Celeborn material set the transfer far earlier, at the founding of Imladris in the aftermath of Eregion's fall, when Gil-galad is said to have given the Blue Ring to Elrond and appointed him his lieutenant in Eriador. The difference is not trivial, since on the second reading Vilya was already in the valley through the whole of the Second Age's later wars, while on the first it came there only after Dagorlad and the siege of Barad-dûr. Both accounts agree on the outcome and on Gil-galad's death in the overthrow of Sauron in the year 3441, with which the Second Age ended.

Through the Third Age the ring is simply absent from the record. Elrond held Imladris for the whole of that age and the narrative gives no notice of the ring in his keeping, neither in the councils that opposed Sauron from Dol Guldur, nor in the White Council's deliberations, nor in the long years in which the refuge sheltered the heirs of Isildur. When the One was found again and the question of what to do with it was laid before the Council in Rivendell, the keeping of the Three was discussed in general terms and no keeper named himself; only afterwards, at the departure of the Company, did Elrond speak of the Three at all, and then without saying which was his. The concealment held to the last: the hobbits who lodged in his house over months never learned what he wore.

The end comes with the destruction of the One in the year 3019 of the Third Age, which stripped the Three of their virtue and left their keepers no reason for secrecy. In the last chapter of the narrative the ring is seen at last, in the autumn of 3021, as Elrond rides down to the Grey Havens to take ship with Galadriel and Gandalf and the Ring-bearers: gold on his finger, and the great blue stone plain to be seen. Vilya passed out of Middle-earth with its bearer, unbroken and unremarked; nothing in the text suggests it was destroyed, only that it went west and that whatever it had sustained was thereafter left to the ordinary wearing of the years. The last thing said of it is its rank among the Three, and that is also the first thing the main narrative ever says of it.

In the plot of The Lord of the Rings Vilya functions less as an instrument than as a stake. The debate in Elrond's house turns on whether the One may be used against its maker, and the reasoning that closes off every alternative is put by the man who is himself a keeper: the ring must go to the fire, and those who have laboured longest against Sauron will be the chief losers by its unmaking. The ring on Elrond's hand is in the room for the whole of that argument and is never appealed to, which is precisely the point — the counsel given is against the counsellor's own interest. Much of the moral weight of the Council rests on this unstated arithmetic, and the reader who returns to the chapter after the last one finds it there.

The one scene in which the ring is actually shown is a scene of departure, and it shows it at the moment its virtue is spent. Riding to the Havens, the three keepers pass through the Shire together, and the rings that were kept apart and secret for an age are gathered into a single company; what had been a hidden power becomes an ornament and a token of what is over. The narrative thereby withholds the object until it can no longer signify anything but memory, and in the same stroke invites a rereading of the valley in which the story twice takes shelter. Nothing in Rivendell is retrospectively explained by the ring, but everything there is coloured by the knowledge that it was sustained by something now leaving.

In the larger scheme set out by the posthumously edited tradition, Vilya is the fullest expression of a wish the legendarium treats as understandable and mistaken: the desire of the Elves of Middle-earth to keep what they had made from changing, to arrest rather than to relinquish. Tolkien himself described that impulse as a kind of embalming, the error into which love of a fading world betrayed them, and the Rings of preservation are its craft. That the mightiest of them belonged to the keeper of the last refuge, and passed over the Sea when preservation had failed, is the shape the theme takes in the object.

The ring has no part in the older screen adaptations and only an implied one in the best known. Ralph Bakshi's animated film breaks off after the fighting at Helm's Deep, so the material in which Vilya would be named lies outside it altogether. In Peter Jackson's trilogy the Elven rings are established at the outset, in the prologue that summarises the distribution of the Rings of Power, but Vilya is never named and Elrond, played by Hugo Weaving, is never identified as a keeper. Of the Three only Galadriel's is made explicit, shown on her hand and spoken of during the Lothlórien sequence, which leaves the other two as an abstraction. The effect on the council scene is substantial: Elrond argues there for the unmaking of the One, as in the book, but the audience is given no means of knowing that he argues against his own keeping, and the quiet arithmetic of that speech is lost.