Another Elf Lord, at the very beginning of the Second Age he founded the Grey Havens, the port from which the Elves’ ships set sail when they leave Middle Earth for ever. He may also have used its healing powers to heal Frodo after the hobbit was stabbed by a Morgûl blade when he was attacked by the Ringwraiths.Ĭírdan the Shipwright appears at the very end of the book of The Lord of the Rings. Like Galadriel, we assume that Elrond started wearing and using the Ring again at some point, and that he used it to preserve his safe haven of Rivendell (Imladris in Elvish) and to keep it secret. Vilya’s exact powers are a bit murky, but they seem to include preservation, like Nenya, and also healing.
Just before the battle where he was killed in action, Gil-galad gave Vilya to Elrond, who continued to carry it until he left Middle Earth after the destruction of the One Ring. Gil-galad bears Vilya, the Ring of Sapphire, or Ring of Air. In Tolkien’s lore, he was the greatest of the Elven Kings, and he actually appears briefly in the film of The Fellowship of the Ring, in the Prologue. He is High King of the Elves and of the Elf kingdom of Lindon, an image of which we saw in a recent Vanity Fair article.
It’s a bit unfair to Gil-galad really in Tolkien’s timeline (which will be compressed for The Rings of Power TV series) he lives for thousands of years and presumably for most of that time he ruled very successfully. This is the first verse of the song Sam sings about Gil-galad, whose name means “Starlight” in Elvish, in the book version of The Lord of the Rings.
A brief line in Tolkien’s Unfinished Tales suggests that Celebrimbor was in love with her, and he made the Elessar, the Elf-stone, for her, which eventually went to her grand-daughter Arwen. Galadriel was already married to Celeborn by the start of the Second Age, and they had a daughter, but they spent some time apart, partly because Galadriel was not quite as vehemently opposed to friendship with Dwarves as Celeborn was. Although all the bearers of the Three Rings take them off at the point Sauron first forges and puts on the One Ring, she obviously started wearing it again at some point, as she is wearing it when she meets Frodo in The Fellowship of the Ring, and she uses it to preserve her realm of Lothlórien and essentially stop time there. She bears Nenya, the Ring of Adamant, or Water. The only Ringbearer to be given a Ring of Power and actually manage to hang onto it isn’t in fact a King, but a Queen, Galadriel. The Ringbearers Three Rings For The Elven Kings, Under The Sky Galadriel The One also had more direct power over the other sixteen Rings of Power. Sauron could perceive the Ringbearers of the Three and they could perceive him, and their power became tied to the One if it was destroyed, their power would fade. Although he had never touched the Three Elven Rings, Celebrimbor had used the skills Sauron had taught him when he forged them, so the One Ring still had some power over the Three. Not to be outdone, Sauron forged the One Ring alone, in the fires of Orodruin, otherwise known as Mount Doom. Sauron had no part in making these and he never touched them. The chief of the Elven-smiths eventually realised that he had been tricked and, using the skills he had learned from Annatar, went away in secret and forged three more Rings of Power, made specifically for the Elves to use themselves. The Elven-smiths had made many lesser rings, as Gandalf would tell Frodo many centuries later, but working with Annatar they made sixteen Rings of Power, which were far more dangerous. He convinced the Elven smith Celebrimbor and his jewel-smiths the Gwaith-i-Mírdain to start creating Rings of Power. He took on a beautiful appearance and claimed to be an emissary of the great spirits the Valar, and tried to persuade the Elves to work with him. The Lord of Gifts, Annatar is a disguise adopted by the Dark Lord Sauron during the Second Age.
Please note there may be some spoilers for the series here, since we don’t know what the writers may choose to keep mysterious early on! The Forgers Of The Rings Annatar But what are the Rings of Power, and who wields them? Read on for our brief beginners’ guide to these MacGufffins at the heart of Tolkien’s mythology. We know that the timeline has been compressed so that the series will cover all the major events of the Second Age of Tolkien’s Middle Earth, and we know that the forging of the Rings of Power will be at the heart of the series. The information that’s been coming out about Amazon’s new Lord of the Rings prequel series has started to give us a much clearer idea about what sort of things we might see.