How Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power forged its real elven rings

It’s funny that someone on the team of producers has to actually make these rings. For The Lord of the Rings – The Rings of Power, the production had a whole “Ring Team,” according to producer and VFX veteran Ron Ames.

“We took months to do it,” Ames told Polygon. Ames said that all the research, testing, filming, and preparation was for Rings of Power’s first season finale, in which Celebrimbor, Elrond, and Galadriel — with some help from a disguised Sauron — forge the three fabled elven rings. It’s a monumental moment in Tolkien lore that demanded a monumental effort.

A strange machine that processed mithril and fire was used to show the process. “We really researched that,” Ames said (though we suspect there was not a lot of information out there about The mithril processing, exactly). “And we shot for a couple of days, shooting inserts of fluids and things going down there, but clearly not [actual] molten flame.”

Ames joked that both he and the team were responsible for this. You can also read about the following: been able to shoot the flames of actual molten metal poured into grooves for one of the show’s trailers, as if to say that he’d pour hot metal in front of a camera lens at the drop of a hat.

But practical special effects work had to be enhanced for the show’s namesake props. “No ring that we could have built practically would have been special enough,” Ames said. “We had rings that were the shape and had the feel of them, but we also augmented them heavily to make them really unique and special,” he said, with the addition of “glints and flecks of gold and things.”

Season 2 will see a lot more rings. The Rings of Power, currently filming in the U.K. and expected to premiere in 2024 — and certainly more of the work of Ames and his Ring Team, as Sauron’s unfolding machinations are met by Middle-earth’s newly minted elven ring bearers.