Tolkien's Gemstones: The Stones of Middle-earth, and What They Meant

J. R. R. Tolkien took gems seriously. This is not a small claim to make about a twentieth-century novelist, but it is the central fact about how Tolkien's gemstones work in the fiction. The Silmarils, the Three Rings of the Elves, the Arkenstone, the Phial of Galadriel, the One Ring, the Greenstone of Aragorn: these are not decorative objects in his writing. They are moral characters with histories, capacities, and consequences. The plot of The Silmarillion turns on the theft of three gems. The plot of The Lord of the Rings turns on the destruction of a single ring without a gem. The plot of The Hobbit turns on a missing white jewel in a mountain. In each case, the stones are doing the work that, in other fantasy traditions, would have been done by armies, by gods, or by prophecy. Tolkien gave the work to the stones themselves.

What I find worth saying about Tolkien's gemstones, and the reason they remain genuinely worth reading carefully a century after Tolkien began his Middle-earth writings, is that the stones operate on a moral economy that almost no other fantasy literature has matched. The Silmarils contain captured holiness, which their thief cannot destroy and which makes them unbearable to anyone of evil intent. The Rings of Power are beautiful and bound up with gems, but the One Ring, the master of them all, is unembellished gold with no stone at all. The Phial of Galadriel is a portable piece of starlight that shines brighter against more concentrated darkness. The Arkenstone is so beautiful that the king who owns it loses his sanity over it. Every stone, in Tolkien's work, has a character. Most of them are unwell.

What follows is a reading of the major stones, in roughly the order they enter Tolkien's narrative chronologically, with attention to what each stone is and what it is doing in the moral structure of the work.

The Silmarils

The Silmarils are the foundational gems of Tolkien's mythology and the source of nearly every subsequent disaster in his First Age writings. They were made by the elf-smith Fëanor, in the early days of the Years of the Trees in Valinor, from a substance Tolkien declines to specify but describes as harder than diamond and impossible to remake. Inside the three crystal forms, Fëanor sealed the unfading light of the Two Trees of Valinor, Telperion and Laurelin, the trees that had given Valinor its illumination before the creation of the Sun and the Moon. The Silmarils, in effect, contained the original light of the world.

This is the founding object of Tolkien's universe. Almost everything that happens in the next three thousand years of Middle-earth history is, at some level, a consequence of the Silmarils' existence.

Melkor (later Morgoth), the great enemy of the gods, stole the Silmarils, killed Fëanor's father Finwë in the process, and fled Valinor with the three jewels set into an iron crown he wore. Fëanor and his seven sons swore an oath to recover them from anyone, including the gods, who held them, and the oath bound their descendants for generations. The wars of Beleriand that fill The Silmarillion are, in their underlying cause, the working-out of that oath. Three Silmarils, three eventual outcomes: one cast into the sea by Maglor, one cast into a fiery chasm by Maedhros, and the third borne through the sky by Eärendil on his ship, where it became the Morning and Evening Star that the readers of Tolkien's later books would know as the light Galadriel captures in her Phial.

What makes the Silmarils work as a literary object, and what distinguishes them from the magic stones of most other fantasy traditions, is that they are unambiguously holy. The light they contain is described as the original light of creation, before Melkor's corruption. No evil hand can hold them without being burned; Morgoth, who steals them, is burned by them constantly throughout his possession. They cannot be remade. They cannot be unmade by anyone living. They are, in Tolkien's terms, sub-creations of unique status: the most successful objects ever made by an Elf, of a craftsmanship so exceptional that the maker himself could not reproduce it.

I think the Silmarils are the most underrated literary object of the twentieth century. They are simultaneously a plot device, a theological argument, a piece of speculative gemmology, and a quiet rebuttal of the assumption that beauty is independent of moral character. The light they hold is the light of unfallen creation, and the suffering that follows from their loss is the suffering of trying to recover that light by violence. This is not a small idea to put in a jewel.

The Three Rings of the Elves

The Three Rings of the Elves are the only Rings of Power that Sauron did not touch directly. They were forged by Celebrimbor (Fëanor's grandson, and the greatest Elven smith of the Second Age) without Sauron's overt collaboration, although under his hidden influence through the Lords of Eregion. Each ring was set with a great stone, and each was given to a senior Elven figure for keeping when the situation with Sauron became clear.

Narya, the Ring of Fire, was made of gold and set with a great red stone, conventionally identified as a ruby. It passed from Celebrimbor to Círdan the Shipwright and from Círdan, on his arrival in Middle-earth, to Gandalf the Grey. It is the ring Gandalf wears throughout The Lord of the Rings, although the reader does not see it explicitly until very late in the narrative.

Nenya, the Ring of Adamant, was made of mithril and set with a white stone of substance Tolkien calls adamant. "Adamant" in Tolkien's usage is an archaic term, related etymologically to "diamond" (both from the Greek adamas, meaning unconquerable) but used in his fiction to refer to a substance more like a paragon-quality diamond than to the mineral diamond as we know it. The ring belongs to Galadriel and is the source of the protective power that keeps Lothlórien preserved against the surrounding decay.

Vilya, the Ring of Air, was made of gold and set with a great sapphire. The ring belonged to Gil-galad in the Second Age, then passed to Elrond, who wore it at Rivendell through the events of The Lord of the Rings.

The thing that distinguishes the Three Rings, and what makes them safer than the lesser Rings of Power, is that Sauron's hand never touched them. They were forged by Celebrimbor alone, in secret, away from Sauron's direct workshop. They are still bound to the One Ring (when the One falls, the Three lose their power), but they have not been corrupted in the way the lesser Rings have. They preserve and heal. They do not dominate.

The choice to set each Elven ring with a major coloured stone, while the One Ring has no stone, is one of the most significant gemmological decisions in Tolkien's writing. It is worth a slightly longer pause.

The One Ring

The One Ring is gold, a plain band of unembellished metal, with no stone. The inscription in Black Speech of Mordor, which appears only in the heat of fire, is the ring's sole decoration. The Ring contains a substantial portion of Sauron's personal will and power, but it carries that capacity without any of the visual signals that the other Rings of Power use.

This is a choice Tolkien made deliberately. The lesser Rings of Power, given to the kings of Men and Dwarves, are described as set with stones. The Three Elven Rings are set with stones. The One Ring, the master of them all, has none.

What I think Tolkien was arguing here, although the argument is buried in the iconography rather than stated explicitly, is that domination does not need to make itself beautiful. Sauron's ring is not seductive in the way a great gem-set ring would be seductive. It does not promise wealth or status by virtue of its visible material value. It promises something more interior than that. The corruption of the Ring is not the corruption of greed for a beautiful object. It is the corruption of the will to power itself, dressed in the simplest possible vessel.

The choice mattered enough to Tolkien that he was clear about it across multiple drafts. The Ring's plainness is part of its character.

The Arkenstone

The Arkenstone is the central jewel of The Hobbit, the gem that drives the plot of the final third of the novel and the cause of the near-catastrophic conflict between Thorin Oakenshield and the assembled armies of Elves and Men. It is described as a great white gem, with internal radiance that gives it the appearance of containing its own light source. The Dwarves of Erebor found it in the mountain rather than mining it; the implication is that it formed naturally, although Tolkien's drafts are not entirely consistent on this question. By the time Smaug took the mountain, the Arkenstone was the most prized object in the Dwarven treasury.

The reader meets the Arkenstone through Bilbo, who finds it during his second descent into the dragon's lair and takes it on impulse. He keeps it secret, then uses it as a bargaining chip with the besieging armies, giving it to Bard the Bowman as a means to compel Thorin to negotiate. When Thorin discovers what Bilbo has done, his fury is sufficient to threaten Bilbo's life. The Arkenstone, in Thorin's reading, has been stolen twice: first by the dragon, then by the hobbit who was supposed to have helped recover it.

There is a long-running debate among Tolkien scholars about whether the Arkenstone is, in some sense, one of the lost Silmarils. The textual evidence is suggestive but not conclusive. The internal light, the white colour, the implied uniqueness of substance, and the way Thorin's possession produces the kind of obsessive attachment characteristic of Silmaril-influenced individuals in The Silmarillion all point toward a connection. Tolkien's published letters discuss the possibility but stop short of confirming it.

What is certain is that the Arkenstone is Tolkien's most clearly stated argument that beauty and possession do not mix safely. Thorin's response to the Arkenstone is not greed in the simple sense; it is identification. He needs the stone to be himself. The recovery of the Arkenstone has become the recovery of his kingship, his lineage, and his sense of what the Dwarves are owed by history. When Bilbo takes it from him, even temporarily, the loss is not the loss of property but the loss of self.

This is a sophisticated argument about what jewellery does to the people who own it. Tolkien was clear-eyed about the problem.

The Phial of Galadriel

The Phial of Galadriel is given to Frodo at Lothlórien as the company prepares to leave. It is a small crystal vial filled with water from Galadriel's mirror, into which has been captured the light of Eärendil's star. The light, as Galadriel tells Frodo, will shine in dark places when all other lights go out.

The Phial is the only one of Tolkien's major gem-objects that is, in any straightforward sense, a tool. It does what it is supposed to do, repeatedly, without corrupting its bearer or producing complications. Frodo uses it twice in the second half of the quest: once at the encounter with Shelob in her tunnels, and once at the gates of Cirith Ungol. In both cases, the light's brightness scales to the darkness around it. The greater the evil, the brighter the Phial shines.

What makes the Phial work as an object, and what distinguishes it from the morally ambiguous gem-objects elsewhere in Tolkien's writing, is that the light it contains is not contained in the conventional sense. The light is from Eärendil's star, which is the Silmaril that Eärendil bears through the sky. Galadriel's gift to Frodo is, in chemical terms, a small piece of the original light of Valinor, captured at fourth remove and contained in a glass vessel. The Phial is, more or less, a portable Silmaril. The fact that it does not produce any of the disasters associated with Silmaril ownership is presumably because no one is trying to keep it as a possession; it is a gift, designed for use.

This is, possibly, Tolkien's quietest argument about gemstones: that the problem with the Silmarils was not the stones themselves but the kind of relationship the owners insisted on having with them.

The Greenstone

The Greenstone, also called Elessar, is the green gem worn by Aragorn in a brooch through the events of The Lord of the Rings. The history of the stone is one of the more contested questions in Tolkien's drafts; the published version in the Appendices suggests that Celebrimbor made it for Galadriel, who later gave it to Arwen, who gave it to Aragorn at their betrothal. Earlier drafts had alternative provenance involving a stone of similar character made in Valinor that was lost and re-made.

The Elessar is the closest thing in Tolkien's writing to a conventional fantasy magic gem: a beautiful stone with healing and renewal properties, of significant lineage, worn by the rightful king. It is not particularly complicated as a gem-object compared to the Silmarils or the Rings of Power. It does, however, serve to confirm Aragorn's identity through the line of the Númenorean kings, since the stone (as recorded in earlier drafts) was a token of that lineage.

On the gemmology of imagination

What Tolkien teaches anyone interested in gemstones, and what is genuinely worth taking away from his Middle-earth writings as a piece of practical gemmological thinking, is that the most interesting stones are the ones with character. The Silmarils are characters. The Arkenstone is a character. The Rings of Power are characters. The Phial is a character. They have motivations, in some functional sense; they have effects on the people who own them; they have histories that travel with them.

This is not an accident. Tolkien was a philologist who took the medieval and Norse literature of jewelled objects seriously, and he understood that the great medieval gem-objects (the ring Andvari cursed in the Volsunga Saga, the brooches and torcs of Beowulf, the gems of Arthurian romance) all worked this way. They were characters with effects. They moved through narratives doing work that decoration alone cannot do.

The contemporary jewellery industry, which generally treats stones as broadly passive material to be set into beautiful mounts, has lost the medieval understanding that a great stone has a story and that the story is part of what the buyer is acquiring. Tolkien's gems are a reminder of how much the medieval understanding gave us, and how little we still know what to do with it.

The stones, in Tolkien's writing, are not the setting. They are the subjects.

Frequently asked questions

What are the Silmarils in Tolkien's writing?

The Silmarils are three jewels created by the elf-smith Fëanor in the First Age of Tolkien's mythology, made from an unspecified crystalline substance and containing the unfading light of the Two Trees of Valinor. They are the foundational objects of Tolkien's Silmarillion and the cause of the wars of Beleriand. The three stones eventually end up in the sea, in the earth, and in the sky (as the Morning Star, borne by Eärendil).

What is the Arkenstone in The Hobbit?

The Arkenstone is a great white jewel discovered by the Dwarves of Erebor in their kingdom under the Lonely Mountain. It produces its own internal light and was the most prized object in the Dwarven treasury before Smaug took the mountain. In The Hobbit, Bilbo finds the stone during his exploration of Smaug's lair and uses it as a bargaining chip in the negotiations between Thorin Oakenshield and the besieging armies. Some Tolkien scholars have suggested the Arkenstone may be one of the lost Silmarils, though this is not definitively confirmed in the published texts.

What stones are the Three Rings of the Elves set with?

The Three Rings of the Elves are each set with a major coloured stone: Narya (the Ring of Fire, worn by Gandalf) is set with a ruby; Nenya (the Ring of Adamant, worn by Galadriel) is set with a white stone Tolkien calls adamant; Vilya (the Ring of Air, worn by Elrond) is set with a sapphire. Each ring is made of a different metal (gold for Narya and Vilya, mithril for Nenya).

Why does the One Ring have no stone?

The One Ring is gold, unembellished, with no gemstone. The choice was deliberate on Tolkien's part: where the lesser Rings of Power and the Three Elven Rings are all set with stones, the One Ring is plain. Tolkien's iconography appears to argue that domination, unlike beauty or healing or preservation, does not need or use the visible signals of gem-setting. The Ring contains Sauron's will and power without the decoration that the other Rings of Power use. The plainness is part of its character.

What is the Phial of Galadriel?

The Phial of Galadriel is a crystal vial given to Frodo by Galadriel in Lothlórien, filled with water from her mirror and containing the captured light of Eärendil's star (which is itself a Silmaril). The light shines more brightly against greater darkness and serves Frodo at critical points in the quest, notably at the encounter with Shelob and at the gates of Cirith Ungol.

Was Tolkien interested in real gemmology?

Tolkien's interest in gems appears to have been substantial but amateur. His training was in Anglo-Saxon and Norse philology, and his gemmological vocabulary draws heavily on medieval English and continental European terminology (adamant, carbuncle, beryl) rather than modern scientific gemmology. His use of stones in fiction reflects medieval understanding of gem character and properties rather than contemporary gemmological grading. The seriousness with which he treats stones as moral characters is genuine and unusual in twentieth-century literature.

What is mithril in Tolkien's writing?

Mithril is an invented metal in Tolkien's Middle-earth writings, called "true-silver" in Sindarin, found only in the mines of Khazad-dûm (Moria). The metal is lighter than steel, harder than steel, and described as the most precious and beautiful of all metals. The mithril shirt that Bilbo acquires from the dragon's hoard, and which he later gives to Frodo, is one of the great treasure objects of Middle-earth.