During our set visit, it was revealed that, although the stand that displays the Elven Rings and Celebrimbor’s forge have been redesigned to look a bit more impressive, the design of the Three Elven Rings themselves is already set. In fact, we have already seen the Elven Rings in the trailer: Nenya, the White Ring or Ring of Water, which is made of mithril and set with adamant and worn by Galadriel (Morfydd Clark); Vilya, the Blue Ring, set with a sapphire and worn by the Elven king Gil-galad (Benjamin Walker); and Narya, the Ring of Fire, set with a ruby and worn by Círdan the Elven shipwright, who is a new character for season 2, played by Ben Daniels.
The other advantage the team have in keeping some consistency of design is, of course, the involvement of fan favorite Tolkien artist and illustrator John Howe, who also worked on the Peter Jackson movies (along with Alan Lee) in the early noughties. The team used a combination of Howe’s designs, as well as researching historical rings. Foley tells us, “One of my team went out to different museums, [including] the British Museum, [to] photograph existing beautiful rings.”
Although Tolkien’s story is fiction, that historical research will help to make the rings feel like they belong in his created world. The mythologies that inspired Tolkien the most were Greek and Norse myths. The Ancient Greek philosopher Plato told the story of the Ring of Gyges in his treatise The Republic, a philosophical dialogue about the ideal city-state. The story is about an ancestor of the Lydian king Gyges who took a golden ring from a tomb and found it made him invisible. In Plato’s dialogue, a man called Glaucon suggests that no one would behave in a just way if they were wearing the ring, because there would be no social consequences to their behavior, but Socrates replies that only a man who chose not to abuse the ring’s power would be happy, as anyone who took advantage would be enslaved to its appetites.
Tolkien’s favorite mythological stories, though, were Norse, and there are a few magic rings in those myths too. The god Odin owned a gold ring called Draupnir, for example, which magically birthed more rings every nine days. Another ring was stolen by the mischievous god Loki from the dwarf Andvari, so Andvari cursed it. Loki gave it to a King of the Dwarfs, who was then murdered, and the murderer Fafnir took it and turned into a dragon, and he was then killed by Sigurd, who took the ring, gave it to his sister-in-law, was murdered by her (she had a good reason, actually), then she killed herself, and a few more people die until it is eventually thrown away into a river. This definitely seems to have been an important source of inspiration for Tolkien, whose One Ring also tends to leave a trail of death and destruction behind it for everyone except Bilbo.
Real magical practices from ancient Rome and from medieval Europe also sometimes involved magic rings, and the British Museum has thousands of rings in its collection (magical or otherwise) from all over the world. It’s no wonder the team went there looking for inspiration, and we should expect to see some influence from historical rings and ring-amulets on the design of the new Rings of Power that will be forged this season.
The practicalities of making a TV show also require more than one real-life prop ring for every ring we see on screen. For close-up shots, any ring with a stone in it had to be made with a real stone, because otherwise the camera will pick up on any flaws or giveaway signs that the ring is made of something other than stone. “When a macro lens gets on them, it will pick out any tiny little imperfection” Foley explains. The team hired a jeweler to make those rings (using, we presume, ruby and sapphire but not mithril, as we have not heard of any Balrogs being disturbed in London lately).