The Rings of Power Series: How the Show Tells the Rings' Story

Amazon's The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is set in the Second Age, thousands of years before the films, and its title is its subject: the making of the rings. The first season premiered in September 2022 and the second in August 2024, and Prime Video has announced the third for November 2026. This page sums up how the series tells the story of the rings, where it departs from Tolkien, and what that means if you want a replica.

If you are new to the rings themselves, how many Rings of Power are there? explains the twenty as Tolkien wrote them, and the Lord of the Rings rings overview covers each ring and its replicas.

How the series forges the Three

In Tolkien, Celebrimbor makes the Three last of the nineteen, alone, after Sauron has left Eregion. That is why the Elven rings are the only ones Sauron never touched.

The series turns this around. At the end of the first season the idea begins as a mithril crown for the Elven king Gil-galad, becomes two rings, and finally three, after Galadriel objects that one would corrupt and two would divide. Mithril will only bind with pure metal, so the smiths melt down a dagger from Valinor for its gold and silver. Halbrand, who turns out to be Sauron, helps shape the idea. In the second season Círdan, Galadriel and Gil-galad put the rings on.

The magical mithril and the alloy are inventions of the series; in Tolkien only Nenya is said to be made of mithril.

The Seven and the Nine

The second season moves on to the other rings, made after the Three and under Sauron's influence as Annatar. Durin III, king of Khazad-dûm, uses one of the Dwarf rings to bring light back to his halls, and it quickly makes him greedy, which matches what Tolkien says the Seven did to the Dwarves.

The Nine are forged last. Celebrimbor makes them while trapped in an illusion, and Sauron reveals that they were made with his own blood rather than mithril. Tolkien tells it differently: the Nine were made, like the Seven, by the Elven smiths with Sauron's help, before the Three.

The series also sends Nenya on a journey Tolkien never wrote. Galadriel gives it to Elrond, and it falls into the hands of Adar, a character created for the show. In the books Galadriel keeps Nenya until she sails West.

Can you buy the series rings?

Not as far as we can find. None of the four retailers we follow, Jens Hansen, Wētā Workshop, Badali Jewelry and The Noble Collection, sells a replica of a ring as it appears in the series. Badali groups its rings under a The Rings of Power heading in its menu, but the products themselves are its existing book-based designs of Nenya, Vilya, Narya, the Seven and the Nine, and their pages do not mention the series. We also came across marketplace ring sets that call themselves licensed without naming a licensor; we do not list them.

If a licensed series ring appears, we will add it here. Until then, the licensed Elven rings are covered on the Nenya, Vilya and Narya pages, and the Seven and Nine have pages of their own. To tell a licensed ring from a copy, read is this the real One Ring?