The Rings of Power star discusses playing the elf Celebrimbor

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power will tell a story not many are familiar with, mostly because author J.R.R. Tolkien never wrote about it in great detail. The upcoming Amazon show is based on the appendices to Tolkien’s landmark trilogy, which are filled with bullet pointed detail about the Second Age of Middle-earth, when elves were still plentiful, the Númenóreans were the greatest power in the land and Sauron was coming into his own as a dark lord.

All this happened thousands of years before Bilbo, Frodo, or Aragorn were born, although we will see a couple of familiar faces: the elves Elrond and Galadriel are important in The Lord of the Rings and they’re still important during this period in Middle-earth’s history. And there’s one hugely important elf who didn’t survive past the Second Age: Celebrimbor, ring-maker.

You see, the Second Age is all about rings. Sauron, who was already known to the elves as a seriously bad dude after the atrocities he committed during the First Age, comes to the elves disguised as Annatar, the Lord of Gifts. He teaches them the art of making magical rings. We all know how that went, right?

"Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,Nine for Mortal Men, doomed to die,One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne"

Sauron made the One Ring himself. When he put it on, he had control of the other rings (and their wearers); that was how he planned to take over Middle-earth. But Celebrimbor made the three elven rings without Sauron’s help, so they weren’t quite as corruptible, although they still were tied to the One Ring because Celebrimbor used the knowledge Sauron taught to create them. Celebrimbor and his co-conspirators hid the three rings from Sauron, which displeased him greatly.

In Amazon’s show, Celebrimbor (which is pronounced with a hard “c” sound at the start, BTW) will be played by English actor Charles Edwards. Fandom got to chat with Edwards about what to expect from this important character.

Celebrimbor is cautious, gullible, vain and brilliant

To hear Edwards tell it, Celebrimbor is quite the complex character. “He’s cautious, he can be quite gullible,” Edwards said. “He’s vain. He’s a brilliant craftsman. And he’s very meticulous. He can be a bit of a user. But he can also be used. He’s proud. He prefers seclusion; he’s not a people person. He is not terribly socially interested. He can be quite blunt. He’s very ambitious. Colossally ambitious.”

"He’s in pursuit of something bigger that no one else understands. And therefore he can be single-minded. He can use people, but just to get somewhere he thinks is going to be for the betterment of everybody and bring him great glory. He’s very vain…He’s reached a point, in our story, in his existence where he is starting to doubt himself. And I think what drives him is a manic obsessive desire to create. Above and beyond what he has already created, he wants to surpass all that has gone before. And because he’s reached this juncture, he starts to doubt himself and his validity. He lives in a very long shadow of an ancestor, shall we say, whose achievements were considerable. And he has always wanted to try and eclipse [that]. Some would say he’s already done that, but he doesn’t believe that he has."

The “ancestor” Edwards is referring to is almost definitely Fëanor, a legendary elf who created splendid jewels called the Silmarils in the time before the rising of the sun and moon, before even the First Age had become. The whole First Age was taken up with a bloody war to possess the Silmarils. Celebrimbor does indeed have a lofty legacy to live up to, although not all of it was good.

The Rings of Power is “an opportunity” to tell a different story in Middle-earth

Again, there’s going to be a fair amount of room to develop Celebrimbor’s character because Tolkien didn’t write overmuch about him; Edwards and the producers will have to expand on what little they have.

“What we are spoiled with in this enterprise, particularly in my case, is that Celebrimbor is mentioned in The Lord of the Rings as the forger of the Rings — briefly,” Edwards said. “He’s not a footnote, but he’s a sidenote. The other source for our shows is the appendices for The Lord of the Rings, in which Tolkien makes lots of notes and ideas about characters that aren’t quite set in stone. Tolkien had two or three versions of Celebrimbor, none of which he settled on.”

"There’s actually a little note scrawled in a margin by Tolkien saying ‘not sure about this, should have changed it’, or something along those lines. In order to start building a character, that’s very exciting. There’s a blueprint, but there hasn’t been any colouring in and it’s down to me and everyone else to create him. That has been really exciting. So, considering the two or three versions that Tolkien had of the character, which in themselves differ from each other, our version is a composite. And then a little bit more."

For Edwards, the lack of robust source material is an opportunity to do something exciting and new. The Rings of Power won’t be like Peter Jackson’s famous Lord of the Rings movies — this happens 3,000 years prior, after all — nor will it be like any Lord of the Rings adaptation before. This team is running with what Tolkien once wrote in a letter to his publisher, where he said he’d welcome other creatives eventually coming in and elaborating on the worlds he’d started to build. “That’s precisely what’s happening, and that makes it a very unique opportunity,” Edwards said. “And one that, as you’ll see, has been seized with all hands and made [into] something really very special.”

Celebrimbor will reach out to the dwarves in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power

So that’s a lot of vague big picture stuff about Celebrimbor. But what will he actually do in the first season of the show?

“He’s the Lord of Eregion — and being a lord is something akin to royalty — which is very close to Khazad-dûm,” Edwards said. Eregion is the region mostly occupied by elves in the Second Age, while Khazad-dûm is the great cave system where dwell the dwarves. In the Second Age, there was known to be a flowering of friendship between the two races, and Celebrimbor had something to do with that. “He’s actively trying to turn Eregion into a place of excellence,” Edwards continued. “And he is working with the Dwarves towards that end to try and capitalize on their talents and their creativity.”

"In our story, Celebrimbor encourages and assists Elrond to visit Khazad-dûm and to court the Dwarves. He may have an ulterior motive for that, but Celebrimbor is very much in support of working together … neither race would have produced the wonders that they had, that they created, without the aid of the other. So clearly, we’re in a time of peace, certainly in terms of working relationship, and [Celebrimbor] has a great respect for them. And Dwarves have a reputation as being fanatical workers, and jewellers and crafters, and Celebrimbor very much respects that."

Of course he does. After all, Celebrimbor is a craftsman himself. It sounds like Edwards has a bit of that in him as well; at the least, he was bowled over by Celebrimbor’s workshop set. “When I walked on set I was astonished…simply to see the forge … and all his extraordinary antiquities around the place,” he said. “To see his tools, and he has a little antechamber with a velvet chaise longue in it. Love that. I didn’t know that that was going to be there. I love that … he likes to go and have a little lie down on his velvet chaise longue when things get [a bit much]. Made total sense to me. And the challenge that day was not to just run around like a puppy looking at everything. [People would say] ‘Yeah, Charlie, can you come on now, we need to get on’ because I was just going, ‘Look at this!’”

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power premieres on Amazon Prime Video on September 2.

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