I’m in a Tolkien book club and we’re discussing the Rings of Power. I know that when Tolkien wrote the Hobbit, Bilbo’s ring was just a magical trinket that made him invisible. Then when he wrote LotR, he created the whole “3 for the Elves, 7 for the Dwarves, 9 for Men” thing.
Question for you HOME people: Were there intermediate steps in the writing/thinking process where there were other numbers of rings? Was there any point where someone had 5 rings?
Bonus question: each of the rings (save the One) has it’s own stone. Do we know what rings have what stones. Except the 3, of course, those are well documented.
Oh, the deep lore. My physical copies of HOMES are up two flights of stairs from me, and my e-copy of the entire HOMES text is poorly indexed.
But here’s a quote I dug up from my e-copy, from somewhere in “shadow of the past”:
"Bingo shuddered. ‘But why should we?’ he asked; ‘and why
should the Lord want such servants, and what has all this to do
with me and the Ring?’
‘It is the only Ring left,’ said Gandalf. 'And hobbits are the only
people of whom the Lord has not yet mastered any one.
'In the ancient days the dark master made many Rings, and he
dealt them out lavishly, so that they might be spread abroad to
ensnare folk. The elves had many, and there are now many elfwraiths
in the world; the goblins had some and their wraiths are
very evil and wholly under the command of the Lord. The
dwarves it is said had seven, but nothing could make them
invisible. In them it only kindled to flames the fire of greed, and
the foundation of each of the seven hoards of the Dwarves of old
was a golden ring. In this way the master controlled them. But
these hoards are destroyed, and the dragons have devoured them,
and the rings are melted, or so some say.
Men had three rings,
and others they found in secret places cast away by the elf-wraiths:
the men-wraiths are servants of the Lord, and they brought all
their rings back to him; till at last he had gathered all into his
hands again that had not been destroyed by fire - all save one."
I hope that holds you for a bit, until I can get up those steps. Later, I hope
Here’s a somewhat earlier version of that passage, which is largely similar:
In the very ancient days the Ring-lord made many of these Rings: and sent them out through the world to snare people. He sent them to all sorts of folk – the Elves had many, and there are now many elfwraiths in the world, but the Ring-lord cannot rule them; the goblins got many, and the invisible goblins are very evil and wholly under the Lord; dwarves I don’t believe had any; some say the rings don’t work on them: they are too solid. Men had few, but they were most quickly overcome and … The man-wraiths are also servants of the Lord. Other creatures got them.
So at this (very early) stage of writing LotR, the later conception of 19 Rings of Power under the One Ring was less well defined. By the way, at this stage it was apparently Gildor rather than Gandalf who was explaining this to Bingo (later renamed Frodo).
In the next revision of this part of the story, Gandalf still says “the Dark Lord Sauron made many magic rings of various properties” and “he dealt them out lavishly and sowed them abroad to ensnare all peoples, but specially Elves and Men”, but now adds “Three, Seven, Nine and One he made of special potency” and Christopher Tolkien notes “Here appears expicitly for the first time the distinction between the lesser Rings and the Rings of Power”.
So in summary, the earliest conception was that there were many Rings and many ringwraiths, but when this was revised down to a specific number, it became the 3, 7 and 9 of the final story without any intermediate steps.
IIRC, even in the published material, there’s a distinction made between the twenty (or maybe twenty-one) Rings of Power and the unspecified but presumably larger number of lesser magical rings.
There’s something of an inconsistency in this part of the story that has always bothered me a bit. In the published story, Gandalf says that he knew immediately that BIlbo’s ring was one of the Great Rings (“that at least was clear from the first”). Yet he also knew that the Three were hidden by the Elves, the Nine were in the hands of Sauron and the wraiths, and the Seven were consumed or recovered by Sauron. Yet he spent years of research before he finally realized that Bilbo’s ring must be the One. What did he think that it was all those years? The only explanation I can see is that he didn’t actually know the whereabouts of the Seven until after his research (he must have known where the Three and the Nine were), but this seems rather unlikely.
The possible 21st was Saruman’s. It’s implied in the book that he created a Ring of his own; left unsaid was whether it was Great.
It’s quite possible that Gandalf didn’t know the fate of the Seven at that time: One of them, he certainly didn’t know about until shortly before the events of The Hobbit.
And it’s interesting from those rough drafts that Tolkien seems at that point to still consider invisibility to be the primary purpose of the Rings, rather than an incidental side-effect as in the published LotR.
You mean Thrain’s ring? He met Thrain in Dol Guldur 90 years before the events of The Hobbit. I guess that could be considered “shortly before” in terms of Gandalf’s entire life. But Thrain told him it was “the last of the Seven” so Gandalf should have known by then at the latest that there weren’t more Dwarf Rings floating around, unless he didn’t believe Thrain’s delirious statement. From his description of his actions, it seems he was only interested in learning about the history of the One during the years between The Hobbit and LotR. And there’s really no hint of the idea that he or anyone else suspected that Bilbo had one of the Dwarf Rings, which if it were the case, would add another complexity to the various claims and counterclaims that make up the conclusion of The Hobbit. (That is, why didn’t the Thorin and the Dwarves, who knew about his Ring, claim it, if there was even a suspicion that it was one of the Seven?)
I think there’s something in Return of the Shadow about how Gandalf thought that Bilbo’s and later his son Bingo’s/cousin Frodo’s ring might have been one of the lesser ones that had snared goblins and elves and turned them into wraiths. Might have been mentioned by Trotter, the mysterious hobbit ranger with wooden feet. I’ll pull that volume and look around a bit.
I’ve often wondered about this meeting. Was Thrain being held prisoner, but allowed visitors?
Elf-wraiths…there’s a concept never considered before.
Apparently the whole back-story of dozens of rings, bestowed lavishly by Sauron, was condensed into a single throw-away line in the early chapters of Fellowship, where Gandalf refers to “many magic rings in the world”.
Yeah, the idea that Gandalf was apparently able to secretly infiltrate Dol Guldur, visit a prisoner, and escape undetected is not very plausible. Also the idea that Thrain was able to hide a key(!) during his imprisonment suggests an uncharacteristic laxity on the part of Sauron.
Unfinished Tales (Ballantine 1980) p. 351 quotes a passage in Tolkien’s manuscripts that addresses this issue. Gandalf is speaking:
Presumably the “pits” of Dol Guldur were more like a trash dump for the miserable and helpless (and possibly also a recreational resource for Orcs, like humans going ratting in the barn?) than high-security cells, and hence more easily infiltrated.
What use would Sauron have for a map or a key? It’s as likely that he left them intentionally as that they were not noticed. The only reason to keep Thrain alive would be to torment him and relish in his agony. Would you care if a certain twig was left in your rat’s cage? That’s probably as close of an analogy as possible to how unimportant Sauron would view a mortal and his possessions (once the ring was removed).
They were called “oubliettes”. Modern archaeologists think they were probably a myth, but in Tolkien’s day, it was accepted that they were a standard part of a dungeon…
I agree about the map, but it seems to me that keys are pretty high on the list of things you don’t want your prisoners to have access to. In Tolkien’s universe at any rate, keys seem to have a propensity for being unexpectedly useful.
I just spent about an hour this morning cleaning my rats’ cage and setting up new toys, boxes, hammocks and play areas for them. So it’s actually not all that apt an analogy for me personally.
