Everyone knows that everybody in Middle-earth, from Elves to humans to dwarves got certain magic rings made especially for them. Nine rings were given to men, three were given to the elves, Sauron made a sneaky one for himself, and the dwarves got seven rings, which of course are all very famous.
Cue stopping-record sound. Turns out, there’s relatively little to no information about the special rings that the dwarves had during the Second Age of Middle-earth, which constitutes a bit of an oversight on the part of the greatest wizard of them all, J.R.R. Tolkien. And now, with the impending premiere of The Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power Season 2, it looks like everything we ever wanted to know about the dwarf Rings but were afraid to ask, is about to come to light.
Seven Rings to Rule the Dwarves
In the early chapters of The Fellowship of the Ring, Gandalf is very concerned about accounting for where all the various rings are in Middle-earth, and which ones Sauron currently has possession of. This leads him to explain to Frodo the basic history of all the Rings of Power, at least relative to that point in Middle-earth history. Throughout the larger scope of Tolkien’s works, we learn about the uses and whereabouts of the three elven rings, as well as the nine given to men, which basically turned all those ring-bearers into the dreaded Nazgûl. But in the books, there’s not really a sense that dwarves were impacted by their rings in the same way the nine human rings messed up their users. Nor did the dwarf rings grant anybody the power of invisibility.
So what, pray tell, did those dwarf rings actually do? The short answer is that, as far as we know, these rings helped the dwarves in Khazad-dûm get their mojo back within a dying kingdom. Tolkien implies that the dwarf rings helped them find treasure, which had the side-effect of attracting treasure-loving dragons, like Smaug in The Hobbit.
And yet a full understanding of the dwarves' rings within the books is essentially absent. This leaves an interesting amount of canon-building for Rings of Power Season 2.
The new Rings of Power
In a new article about Rings of Power Season 2 in Entertainment Weekly, Owain Arthur, who plays the Dwarf Prince Durin IV, revealed a bit about how we’ll learn a lot more about these rings very soon.
Because the dwarf kingdom in Khazad-dûm “can’t grow crops,” Arthur says the rings made and gifted by Celebrimbor (Charles Edwards) are introduced as a “quick fix.” But he also says that the “knock-on effects of having those rings in Khazad-dûm seeps its way into everything and everyone, primarily with King Durin III (Peter Mullan).”
Arthur makes it clear that Durin will have a “darkness” around him because of the dwarf rings, which makes it sound like these rings will have consequences on par with the One Ring from the better-known stories.
As EW’s Christian Holub makes clear, all of this is intentionally new territory from showrunners Patrick McKay and J.D. Payne. Because the series derives most of its lore from The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings (including the appendices of Return of the King) this creates an interesting opportunity to fill in very big gaps. As Holub writes, the lack of information about these specific rings “presented a perfect opportunity for The Rings of Power to fill a big blank spot in the canon.”
Whether or not The Rings of Power Season 2 will depict every major event from the immediate backstory of Lord of the Rings remains to be seen. But unlike Season 1, there will be plenty of actual rings of power to go around, some of which have never been seen or heard of before.
