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Shhh! It's a Secret Ring! - Page 11

© Michael Martinez

It would have been difficult for Gil-galad to learn much about the Rings of Power. If he and Galadriel couldn't find the knowledge they required through some sort of scrying (as she did with her mirror in Lorien in the Third Age), they would either have to tell their spies and scouts what to look for, or they'd have to just wait and piece together bits and pieces of information through the centuries. Some readers are of the opinion that the Ring-rhyme in The Lord of the Rings must have been composed soon after the War of the Elves and Sauron. But whomever composed the rhyme would have to know what the fates of the Seven and the Nine were. So far, there is no way to show that the Elves knew anything about the Seven before they were free to talk to the Dwarves. The Dwarves certainly weren't running around telling people they had magic Rings. So the nine sorceror-kings who arose among Men would have been conspicuous only in their longevity and their approximate contemporary lifetimes. And yet, if the Elves were looking for signs of Rings of Power, they would have been looking for sixteen, not nine, or seven, Rings. The fact that Sauron perverted the Rings before he gave them out would further complicate matters for the Elves. Gil-galad may not have really understood what was going on until Durin IV was invited into the alliance. We don't know for sure that Durin IV was the King of the Longbeards at the end of the Second Age, but there is a little evidence pointing to that being his name. And the manner of his entering the alliance isn't provided. It seems that Gil-galad and Elendil formed their alliance and then marched to Imladris. From there, they seem to have sent out messengers to Greenwood, Lorien, Khazad-dum, and perhaps a few other regions. I would say it's most likely that Gil-galad had a second "white council" at Imladris. It would have been as momentous as the Council of Elrond three thousand years later, perhaps more so. For there would have been kings in attendance, and many lords and princes. And it would have to be the first time ever that the Elves spoke openly about the Rings of Power to all their allies. It would be natural for the attendees to want to know why they should join the alliance. Sauron had been terrorizing Middle-earth for a long time. But his death in Numenor and reappearance 100 years later implied that he wasn't just going to go away. And because the problem with the Rings originated in Middle-earth, it may be that any appeals to Valinor would have fallen on deaf ears. The Elves created the problem and they needed to resolve it. But they couldn't do that alone. And it would serve no purpose for the various non-Eldarin kings to deliver recrimination after recrimination. Especially since Celebrimbor and the Ringmakers were all dead. The people truly responsible for the problem had already paid with their lives, and their legacy was becoming an equal burden on everyone.

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