Nine Rings for Mortal Men — Transcript

There were, of course, nine rings of power for mortal men, and the men who wore them became the Nazgûl, but how powerful were those rings, and did they have different powers like the three Elven rings, or were they all the same?

Let's take a look.

Hi everyone, this is Robert, welcome to In Deep Geek. If you like theories, background, history and lore about The Lord of the Rings, A Song of Ice and Fire and The Witcher, this is the place for you.

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We know the rhyme, of course, of there being nine rings for mortal men doomed to die, and we understand that they were given to the men who became the nine Ringwraiths.

But are they really just generic magic rings? The three Elven rings all have names and specific powers.

I did a video on that elsewhere on this playlist if you're interested.

So what about the nine? What do we actually know about how powerful they were and what powers they had?

Let's start by recapping on the history.

Sauron devised his cunning plan to create rings of power that would ultimately be under his control about 1,200 years into the Second Age.

He disguised himself as Annatar and ingratiated himself with Celebrimbor, the Elven craftsman, and over many years, literally about three centuries, they crafted 16 rings of power.

The seven that ended up with the dwarves, and the nine we're talking about here that ended up with humans.

But at the time they were just the 16, and all intended for elves, which is probably the first important point.

Celebrimbor may have done some other different things to the three Elven rings, but the nine and the seven were forged as the 16, so were presumably roughly the same.

After Sauron had forged those rings with Celebrimbor, he headed back to Mordor to forge the one master ring.

While Celebrimbor forged the three that ended up with the elves, free from Sauron's influence.

This was when Sauron's plan started to go wrong, as he put on his master ring, which he had hoped would gain him control over whoever wore those other rings, the elves realized what was going on and took off their rings.

Celebrimbor handed over the three he had made on his own to some trustworthy elves, Galadriel and Gil-galad, Sauron, sensing the ruse was over, then launched an attack on Eregion.

He succeeded and captured the 16 rings that were there and set about distributing them to other people.

His plan clearly didn't work with elves, so seven went to the seven dwarf realms.

In some versions of the legendarium, Celebrimbor had already given one to Durin III, but you get the point.

That meant that sometime around the year 1,700 of the Second Age, Sauron had nine rings left in his possession.

He tried the elves.

He could be patient to see what happened with the dwarves.

So that left humans.

The Silmarillion picks up the story from there.

To men he gave nine, for men proved in this matter as in others the readiest to do his will.

And all those rings that he governed he perverted, the more easily since he had a part in their making, and they were accursed, and they betrayed in the end all those that used them.

This, of course, was Sauron's plan: he kept the one ring for himself and through that controlled those who used the other rings.

But who were they, these nine humans?

The short answer is that we don't know exactly, but if you dig through the various collections of Tolkien's notes and unpublished works.

Collated and edited by Christopher Tolkien, we can find some hints.

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The leader of the Nazgûl and indisputably the most powerful was the Witch-king of Angmar.

The Angmar part of his title is a reference to where he ruled in the early part of the Third Age, rather than where he came from, though.

Instead, he was probably one of the three great lords of Númenor that were tempted into accepting rings of power.

The Númenóreans were the height of human power.

Even millennia later, Aragorn's superhuman lifespan and abilities stems largely from his heritage.

So it makes sense that the most powerful of the new ring bearers was Númenórean.

We know the name and place of origin of one of the others, Khamûl, the Easterling.

He rose to be second in command of the nine.

As for the other five, we simply don't know.

It makes sense though that they were spread geographically around Middle-earth.

Sauron's plan was to conquer all the peoples of Middle-earth, not just a few corners of it.

And as for what positions they all held when they received the rings, again, we don't know.

Other than that the Númenóreans were great lords.

But it makes sense for Sauron to pick the most powerful people he could.

The rings of power seem to multiply the existing power of their holders.

Hence hobbits being relatively resistant to the One Ring's power.

And Gandalf and Galadriel daring not to even touch it.

So these will have been lords, kings, magic users and the like.

Those who have power and want more.

So the nine rings were given to nine powerful humans in various places in Middle-earth.

Including three in Númenor and at least one to the Easterlings.

The Silmarillion picks up the story again.

Those who used the nine rings became mighty in their day, kings, sorcerers, and warriors of old.

They obtained glory and great wealth, yet it turned to their undoing.

They had, as it seemed, unending life, yet life became unendurable to them.

They could walk, if they would, unseen by all eyes in this world beneath the sun, and they could see things in worlds invisible to mortal men.

But too often they beheld only the phantoms and delusions of Sauron.

And one by one, sooner or later, according to their native strength and to the good or evil of their wills in the beginning.

They fell under the thraldom of the ring that they bore and under the domination of the One, which was Sauron's.

And they became for ever invisible save to him that wore the Ruling Ring, and they entered into the realm of shadows.

There's a lot in there.

But first, whoever these nine were when they received the rings, they became mighty rulers, magic users and conquerors.

The power of the rings increased their own powers and ambitions and abilities, much like the One Ring can.

In addition, the nine rings could turn their bearers invisible when they wanted.

And allow them to see things on the ethereal plane.

An unscrupulous mind could think of a thousand uses for that to help build power.

In their day, they must have been some of the most powerful people in the whole world.

And most people probably didn't know the source of their power.

And their natural lifespans were extended.

So their reign and rule would have been long.

Until slowly they descended into the wraiths we know.

As an aside, this actually plays against the theory that perhaps one of the Nazgûl might have been a Númenórean king.

We know how they died and none of them slowly faded from the mortal plane.

The Nazgûl, the Ringwraiths as they now were, first officially appeared in the year 2551 of the Second Age.

Though I suspect some of the ring holders fell before others.

Still, that's perhaps up to 800 years or so of slowly fading.

Gollum, for comparison, had the One Ring for less than 500 years, and he used it less than you might think.

You don't need to be invisible in the pitch black under the Misty Mountains, for example.

Intriguingly, we have no physical description of the nine rings themselves.

Perhaps because once the bearers were under his control, Sauron took the rings from them and kept them himself.

At least that's what the consensus view is among scholars.

It's likely to be another of those things Tolkien changed his mind on over time.

At the Council of Elrond, Gandalf mentions the nine, the seven and the three, each had their proper gem.

Unlike the One Ring, which was plain and unadorned.

Which implies that they weren't all the same.

And may have had different powers.

Take the three Elven rings as an example.

Vilya was set with a sapphire, Nenya with adamant, and Narya with a ruby.

And although they shared many characteristics, it's clear that they also had their own abilities.

Gandalf's dependence on fire magic, fireworks, lighting the way, fiery pine cones, making damp logs burn and so on, was surely because he possessed Narya, the Ring of Fire, set with a ruby.

It's a reasonable assumption that the nine were the same.

They shared a particular set of abilities, but each one offered additional power in different ways.

One, given to a great warrior, might bestow great strength.

Another, given to a leader, might make them very persuasive and so on.

Sadly, we will probably never know or have seen their unique powers.

Because Sauron took them back at some point, probably well before the start of The Lord of the Rings.

The point about these rings, though, is that this is how we see what Sauron's plan was for the rings of power.

How it was supposed to work.

The three Elven rings escaped the taint of his personal involvement in their forging.

The seven Dwarven lords proved more resistant to the rings' powers than anticipated.

But the nine rings.

This was what Sauron intended.

More of East and South Middle-earth fell under his control.

Númenor fell into increasing decline.

Other nations weakened.

Surely much of this was down to the power of those rings and the ring bearers being under the control of Sauron.

That was what he wanted to happen to the elves in the first place.

Humans were more susceptible to a lust for power than elves or dwarves, and so ultimately they came under the rings' control more easily.

For a long time, they must have thought that they were in control.

But once they realized, it was too late.

The tragedy of the nine rings and their bearers is that it wasn't Sauron forcibly taking control of the ring holders.

It was them and their desire for power that led to their own end.

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