The Rings Of The Raingwraith Where Made Of What?
Q: I was wandering what where the ring of the rigwraith where made of ?
I think I rememeber reading they were made of silver and where plain
like the one ring but made of silver !
A:All of the Great Rings but the One apparently had a gemstone of
some sort set into them. The lesser rings were plain like the One
and thus Gandalf long assumed that Bilbo's ring was of that sort.
The Great Rings of the Nine would thus have had gemstones. What
metal they might be made of is unknown, but I would guess that most
would be gold. Silver would seem (to me) unlikely as JRRT
indicated that silver was largely free of Morgoth's taint, though
individual items of silver could certainly be exceptions to this.
Still, given choice of substance I think Sauron would have
instructed the elves in skills for fashioning things of gold, a
substance more wholly infused with Morgoth's power.
At the Council of Elrond, Gandalf quotes Saruman: '"The Nine, the
Seven, and the Three," he said, "had each their proper gem. Not so
the One. It was round and unadorned, as it were one of the lesser
rings; but its maker set marks upon it that the skilled, maybe,
could still see and read."'
So every Great Ring except Sauron's One Ring had a gem stone.
I went ferreting, and was able to turn up some details about the
makeup of the Three and the Seven but not the Nine.
We know that Sauron's Ring was plain gold; there are many, many
references to this in LotR. We are given mixed signals about
Galadriel's ring (the Ring of Adamant, one of the Three). First, in
"The Mirror of Galadriel", we are encouraged to think of it as gold
gold: "it glittered like polished gold overlaid with silver light,
and a white stone in it twinkled". But then later, in "The Grey
Havens", we read "On her finger was Nenya, the ring wrought of
mithril". The same paragraph tells us that Elrond's ring was gold,
and later in the chapter we read that the stone of Gandalf's
(originally Cirdan's) ring was "red as fire"; but I've been unable
to discover anything about the metal of that ring.
In "Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age" in /Sil/ we read "It
is