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 PowerIt lived up to its name in its final episode, but fans may still have questions. Is there anything else? DoOnce you’ve got it, how do you use the Ring of Power? What did this all look like in 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 Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power episode 8.]

Photo: Ben Rothstein/Prime Video

Finale of Rings of Power’s first season dramatizes the forging of the three elven Rings of Power in succinct fashion. A bit of mithril, a bit of Valnorian gold and silver, a few gems, and boom: You’ve got Vilya, Nenya, and Narya, the legendary artifacts themselves.

However, the episode and season end soon afterwards. To anticipate season 2, and more, it is necessary to look to Tolkien.

What are the powers of the three elven rings?

Image by New Line Cinema

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.

Elrond describes it 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 PowerCelebrimbor, Elrond and others sought to find a way out of the corruption that plagued their Middle-earth people. And, as the Silmarillion says, “those who had [an elven Ring]Their preservation could prevent the decays and delay the weariness of this world by preventing them from happening. […] where they abode there mirth also dwelt and all things were unstained by the griefs of time.”

The elven rings had one major drawback. Sauron’s hand in their forging left them vulnerable to his own One Ring. This is 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.”

Thanks to the power that the elven rings had and the bearers thereof, the flaw was quickly corrected by Sauron. HisThe bearers will be able to look into the ring when they first receive it. Histhey wanted to be rulers over them, and everything that was theirs. The rings were taken off and they solved the problem.

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 in decline? Tolkien is Catholic.

Is it possible to find out how the elven rings were made?

Image by New Line Cinema

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 Rings of Power.

In fact, in Tolkien’s The SilmarillionElrond, Gil-galad, and Elrond both immediately distrusted Annatar. They refused him admission to Lindon. Celebrimbor wasn’t happy about 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.

Elrond explains 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.”

Celebrimbor knew that Sauron was not trustworthy by the time they forged the Elven Rings. 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.

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.

It was much more easy for men to control and corrupt than it was for women. We all know what a nazgul looks like.

Who is responsible for the care of the elven rings

Celebrimbor divided the rings to keep them safe when Sauron started his war against the Elven Rings. He sent Nenya to Galadriel, Vilya to Gil-galad, and Narya to Círdan (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. The Elven Rings could not have been used, regardless of whether Sauron found it or destroyed it.

Galadriel, Elrond, and Galadriel are able to sail above the western ocean at the beginning 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.

This is what it means for Rings of Power season 2.

If things follow the progression of Tolkien’s lore — which Rings of PowerIt hasn’t always been this way! — what happens next is a period of tense calm, as Sauron holes up in Mordor to gather his armies and forge the One Ring. The books say that it takes 10 years, but the truth is, this can be done in a matter of minutes. Rings of Power condensing Sauron’s manipulation of Celebrimbor into forging the elven Rings to a mere Three weeksWe can likely expect this to occur sooner.

Then, 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. That certainly sounds like something. Rings of PowerIt will love to be the director of its cinematic version.