What Rings of Power’s elven rings do, and who has them by Lord of the Rings

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power made good on its title in the final episode of its first season, but it also may have left fans with a lot of questions about what happens next. What does one do with a Ring of Power once you have it? How did all this play out in the books?

And the most important question of all: Who’s actually gonna own this magical jewelry? They’ll have to start planning a wardrobe update.

[Ed. note: This piece contains spoilers for the first three episodes of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power season 2.]

Season 2’s premiere episodes step in to answer some of these questions, and give viewers a better sense of why exactly the elves would even bother with their rings, given how much Sauron was involved in their creation. The answer, as with many of Tolkien’s stories, has to do with the limits of nature and their own changing place in it.

There’s a bit of a bait-and-switch with the elven rings, for modern viewers at least. Vilya (the sapphire ring), Narya (the ruby ring), and Nenya (the adamant ring, which alone of all of them was made of mithril) are all named for the elves’ “principal elements” of the world: air, fire, and water.

But they don’t have elemental powers at all.

As Elrond explains in The Fellowship of the Ring, “They were not made as weapons of war or conquest: that is not their power. Those who made them did not desire strength or domination or hoarded wealth, but understanding, making, and healing, to preserve all things unstained.”

It’s pretty close to the reasons for their forging in The Rings of Power: Celebrimbor and Elrond sought a solution to the deadly corruption their people faced in Middle-earth. And, as the Silmarillion says, “those who had [an elven ring] in their keeping could ward off the decays of time and postpone the weariness of the world […] where they abode there mirth also dwelt and all things were unstained by the griefs of time.”

But the elven rings had a pretty big drawback. Sauron’s hand in their forging left them vulnerable to his own One Ring. Again from The Silmarillion: “While he wore the One Ring he could perceive all the things that were done by means of the lesser rings, and he could see and govern the very thoughts of those that wore them.”

Thankfully, due to the power of the elven rings and their bearers, this flaw was realized the moment Sauron put on his ring for the first time, creating a window for the bearers to see into his intentions to rule them and all that was theirs. They solved this problem quite easily by simply taking the rings off.

Once Sauron was defeated and the One Ring was lost, it became safe to wield the elven rings again for their intended use: preserving pockets of Middle-earth from the wastes of time and the world’s slow decay. (Why was the world decaying? Tolkien was Catholic.)

Early in the Second Age, after the defeat of Morgoth, Sauron appeared to the elves of Lindon and Eregion in a “fair-seeming” guise, calling himself Annatar and claiming to be an emissary of the Valar — so already you can tell this is a little bit different from The Rings of Power, with Sauron first using the Halbrand guise in the first season, and only appearing to Celebrimbor as Annatar in season 2.

In fact, in Tolkien’s The Silmarillion, both Gil-galad and Elrond immediately distrusted Annatar, refusing him entry to Lindon. Unfortunately, Celebrimbor was totally down for it. Sauron preyed on the Noldorim elves’ love of Middle-earth, the land they had defended for so long, and their conflicting desire to return to the splendor and bliss of their homeland. The Silmarillion says that he argued, “Wherefore should Middle-earth remain for ever desolate and dark, whereas the Elves could make it as fair as Eressëa, nay even as Valinor?” and encouraged them to devise ways in which to convert and preserve their surroundings.

As Elrond tells it in The Fellowship of the Ring, the smiths of Eregion “received his aid and grew mighty in craft, whereas he learned all their secrets, and betrayed them, and forged secretly in the Mountain of Fire the One Ring to be their master. But Celebrimbor was aware of him, and hid the Three which he had made.”

Yes, you read that right: By the time the elven rings were forged, Celebrimbor had already figured out not to trust Sauron. The Silmarillion states pretty clearly that the rings “were forged by Celebrimbor alone, and the hand of Sauron had never touched them.” Still, Celebrimbor had learned enough of his craft from Sauron that the elven rings were unavoidably subject to the One Ring.

This is fundamentally different from Rings of Power’s timeline, with Galadriel well aware of Sauron’s ruse (or at least the possibility of nefarious influence he wielded as “Halbrand”) before the rings are done, and Celebrimbor very unaware of Sauron’s ruse during the manufacturing of the elven rings. With Sauron now appearing to Celebrimbor as the “lord of gifts” Annatar, the other rings still seem to be closer to Sauron’s influence. Although Galadriel — along with, now, Elrond, Gil-galad, Círdan, and a handful of other elves present at Lothlorien — is aware that the rings contain some influence of Sauron’s, they aren’t quite sure how just yet. (More on that below.)

When the bearers of the elven rings took them off in defiance of Sauron’s will, he rallied the armies of Mordor to conquer Eregion and take them by force, and when that didn’t work he made the Seven and the Nine, dealing them out to the dwarves and men.

Rings never really worked on the dwarves, because they “proved tough and hard to tame,” according to The Silmarillion. “[Dwarves] ill endure the domination of others, and the thoughts of their hearts are hard to fathom, nor can they be turned to shadows.” It didn’t allow Sauron to control the seven dwarf bearers, merely to increase their base emotions, like greed, and indirectly help the great dwarven civilizations into ruin and dragon-fire.

Men, however, proved much easier to corrupt and control; we all know what a nazgul is.

When Sauron began his war on the elves for the elven rings in the books, Celebrimbor split the rings up for safekeeping. He sent Nenya to Galadriel, Vilya to Gil-galad, and Narya to Círdan (who, as the show also states, is the leader of the faction of elves that lived on the western coast of Middle-earth, closest to Valinor, and built all the boats that sailed west and never came back). But with the exception of Galadriel’s Nenya, the rings wouldn’t stay with those owners.

Gil-galad eventually gave his ring to Elrond, before he perished with Elendil in Sauron’s defeat, and Círdan eventually gave his to Gandalf for reasons you can just read about here.

“Thus it was,” The Silmarillion says, “that in two domains the bliss and beauty of the Elves remained still undiminished while that Age endured: in [Rivendell]; and in Lothlórien […] where the trees bore flowers of gold and no Orc or evil thing dared ever come.”

But Sauron’s hand in the creation of the elven rings means that their power was, at least in part, dependent on Sauron’s existence. This was among the reason that Bilbo’s mere rediscovery of the One Ring was something of a death knell to elves on Middle-earth. Whether Sauron found the Ring or the Ring was destroyed, the elven rings would have been rendered unusable.

This is why Elrond and Galadriel sail over the western sea at the end of The Return of the King — they sacrificed their power to hold back the tides of time and keep Middle-earth as it was during their youths, to preserve at least two places in Middle-earth where elves can live unburdened lives, in order to keep Sauron from gaining total dominion.

In Tolkien’s lore, there’s a 10-year period of tense calm, as Sauron holes up in Mordor to gather his armies and forge the One Ring. But that was when Sauron’s deceit was revealed much later in the process; in Rings of Power season 2, the elves are already struggling to fully understand what power they now control — or if it’s in fact Sauron’s power that’s controlling them.

Galadriel is already having weird, ominous visions, and when she shares this with King Gil-galad she also shares that she fears these are glimpses of the future. Unfortunately, Gil-galad has had similar premonitions: “I have seen mountains crumbling; waters running dry; and the clouds, black, gathering over white towers.”

So far, Círdan, at least, isn’t that worried; for him, the rings seem more like a rare opportunity, a power they can “exert over every form of life” that they shouldn’t be afraid of. “You are wise to fear this power,” Círdan tells Elrond. “But do not let that fear blind you to the ways it can be used for good.”

This is the conflict that Payne and McKay hoped to explore by moving the creation of the elven rings up in the storyline. “We [talked] about a nuclear age,” McKay told Polygon in a junket ahead of the season 2 premiere. “A nuclear power can be used for good, but it’s very dangerous, and it can also be used for evil. And it can be incredibly creative or incredibly destructive. And the rings are all of these things.

“I think there are things that feel really timeless and relatable about, you know, a new power entering into the world that you’re not sure how it’s going to change you, and change the world.”

Considering Rings of Power condensed Sauron’s manipulation of Celebrimbor into forging the elven rings to a mere three weeks, there will probably be a handful of other parts of Tolkien’s timeline that get sped up as we explore exactly what the fallout of that decision is. But theoretically, the bones of the world (if not the season) will be the same from here: Once the One Ring is on Sauron’s finger, the elves defy him — throwing Middle-earth back into war with a dark lord, with the men of Númenor on their side. And that certainly seems like something Rings of Power will want to have its own cinematic take on.