I am happy to post this interview what is binary option with author Benita J. Prins, fellow lover of all things Tolkien and a great writer in her own right too! I read her fantasy, Sea of Crystal, Sea of Glass recently and recommend … Continue reading
Tolkien’s nineteen Rings of Power form one of fantasy’s most consequential acts of distribution. Three pass to Elven-smiths, seven to dwarf-smiths, and nine to Men; each group receives a version of the same coercive principle. The dwarf-rings matter beyond their place in the wider scheme. They are honours for ingenuity, instruments of self-aggrandisement, and evidence that a beautiful object can turn a craftsman’s finest capacity towards ends he did not initially imagine.
The temptation of the seven rings is easy to define as greed. Tolkien’s account is more searching, because the dwarves already prize mastery, invention and durable things. Nor were the rings dwarven work in the ordinary sense: Sauron forged them and presented them as rewards. Their corruption lies in the gift, the secrecy around it, and the way each recipient’s capacities are redirected. To read the rings closely is to see creation itself placed under moral pressure.
The dwarf-smiths who receive the Seven occupy a proud place in Middle-earth’s history of craft. Their hands have shaped halls, mechanisms and heirlooms, and Sauron’s disguise as Annatar allows him to approach their self-image with apparent respect. He offers knowledge that answers their deepest professional longing: mastery greater than any smith can attain alone. The gift confirms their identity before it distorts it.
Desire is therefore prior to enchantment. A ruler can provide what a dwarf already wants, and the ring magnifies that want until it begins to rule the wielder. The temptation resembles an extreme version of a familiar artistic bargain, where acclaim promises freedom while quietly making the work serve the patron’s needs. The Seven do not manufacture greed from nothing; they give existing longing a supernatural instrument.
A comparable emotional charge surrounds Australian opal. At Lightning Ridge in New South Wales, mining produces stones prized in rings sold through Australian jewellery markets, including Sydney retailers. Buyers may treat such a ring as a birthstone, an heirloom or a token of luck. Tolkien sharpens the ambiguity: a ring may carry inherited value while quietly acquiring the power to demand more, and personal significance can become possession.
For Tolkien, making is a moral activity rather than decorative work. The celebrated dwarf-smiths have handed down techniques, solved difficult problems and created objects that outlast their lives. Their knowledge is communal, patient and cumulative. Yet Sauron’s gifts offer a shortcut of a different kind. The rings grant power without demanding open instruction, making their keepers feel autonomous at the very moment their agency is being captured.
At Melbourne’s Rose Street Artists’ Market, handmade jewellery, ceramics and small wooden objects carry visible traces of their makers. The market rewards visible labour, originality and a story that connects an object to the person who made it. A Saturday visit often begins with a flat white in a reusable cup and ends with a difficult purchase. The scene makes the stakes behind Sauron’s offer unusually clear: skill can earn admiration, but admiration can also become a hook.
Greed, in this context, is not simply the desire for money. It is the desire to be solely the best, the unbeatable maker, the master whose preferences can never be checked. Sauron identifies that wish and supplies a counterfeit completion. The dwarf who values the ring has not been taught something new; his established virtues have been enlisted in a project that turns excellence towards domination. Craftsmanship is corrupted when its fruits become proof that the world should arrange itself around the maker.
It would flatten Tolkien’s tale to portray the dwarf-lords as simple dupes. They possess the same inventive intelligence that makes their societies admirable, and they recognise the rings’ value. Sauron deceives them by withholding the full truth, yet deception requires desires the deceiver can use. Their choices matter. Tolkien’s moral universe leaves room for temptation without erasing responsibility, and the dwarves’ subsequent resistance makes their earlier choices more consequential.
Australian consumer law offers a limited but revealing parallel. The Australian Consumer Law, applied through state and territory fair-trading codes, requires jewellery sellers to supply goods of acceptable quality and prohibits misleading claims about materials, origin or authorship. A workshop cannot call an object handmade while concealing how it was made. Tolkien’s exchange is darker because the deceiver controls both the desired gift and the terms of disclosure, but the principle is recognisable: trust in a maker’s reputation can become a route to exploitation.
The dwarves also learn to value secrecy, another danger for a craft culture. Knowledge once shared among workshops becomes private leverage, and a public benefit becomes a hidden claim over other minds. Their cleverness helps them detect aspects of the deception, yet it also enables them to exploit the rings in turn. Tolkien refuses a clean divide between victim and villain. He is more interested in how a capacity such as ingenuity can be organised for mastery, and how easily mastery can absorb the person who first uses it.
The One Ring anchors the system. Sauron poured into it much of his strength, malevolence and will to dominate, then used lesser rings to extend that influence among peoples whose talents he understood. The arrangement looks like generosity because each recipient receives an enhancement suited to what they already prize. For the Elven-smiths it resembles pure knowledge; for the dwarf-lords, personal supremacy; for Men, military power and fame. The apparent fit is the mechanism of control.
Objects in modern Australia also travel through hidden systems after they leave a workshop. Since July 2022, New South Wales has run a producer-funded e-waste scheme through the Environment Protection Authority, allowing households to drop unwanted electronics at participating collection points at no charge. Recovery can preserve useful materials and reduce landfill, yet the familiar label “recycled” may conceal where components came from and who performed the difficult work. Tolkien’s rings similarly separate a comforting surface from a buried history of influence.
Tolkien is often read as a critic of machinery and mass production, but the dwarf-rings complicate any simple opposition between handwork and industry. Their making is supernatural, centralised and politically calculated, yet their appeal grows from intimate recognition of individual craft. The catastrophe is not a machine replacing a person. It is a crafted object becoming a system of distribution so efficient that every recipient can believe the enlargement of power is a personal benefit. The workshop has expanded into a network, and the network has entered the will.
The word that matters most is will. Tolkien distinguishes a Ring’s external compulsion from a person’s inner drive, and the overlap between them creates much of the horror. A ring can compel obedience, but it can also expose what the bearer was already prepared to desire. The dwarf-lords’ strength is not an accidental setting; their formidable wills give the enchantment something to push against. Resistance makes their eventual ruin more tragic than a simple moral collapse.
The stories of Thrór and his heirs show the costs of this bargain. Rings intensify pride, suspicion and the need to control access to treasure. At the same time, the dwarves endure and fight back in ways Men cannot, so the account never reduces them to passive victims. Their history moves between freedom and enslavement, with the craft of ring-making and the craft of resistance informing one another. To be corrupted is not to lose every noble trait; it is to let one virtue grow until it devours the others.
A reusable cup offers a modest Australian counter-image. Many commuters carry one for a flat white or a takeaway coffee, making a small daily choice to resist disposable packaging. Its value lies in repeated use rather than display. Tolkien’s ring inverts that relationship: instead of an object serving the user’s settled intention, it directs intention back towards the object. A useful thing becomes an idol, and an innocent habit can turn into compulsion.
The dwarf-rings ask a creator-focused question. A maker may produce something brilliant, useful or beautiful, but capability does not absolve a maker from considering what the finished thing will do in the world. Tolkien separates invention from moral imagination. The dwarf-smiths can understand how a thing works without asking what a world organised around it would become. Sauron’s corruption of making begins precisely there: technique advances while responsibility for consequences recedes.
That contrast returns in the Druedain’s role during the closing war of The Return of the King, where the wild men defend their home without seeking to command it. Their resistance grows from attachment and knowledge of place, not from hunger for mastery. They also confront a foe who has made domination into an art, and their victory depends partly on refusing his terms. Tolkien places destructive will beside creative power so readers can judge them together, rather than treating craft as innocent by definition.
Canberra’s National Library preserves books, manuscripts, maps and recorded voices, giving permanence to creative work within a public collection. Such preservation celebrates the value of making, but it also implies stewardship: an artefact remains meaningful partly because a community accepts responsibility for its care and interpretation. The dwarf-rings offer the darker version of that responsibility. They do not cease being objects once made; they keep acting upon those who use them. Tolkien’s deepest warning is that every creation carries a future beyond its maker’s control, and that future can be governed by the maker’s highest dream or by its most corrupted one.
An essay I wrote about the desire of Tolkien and the TCBS to be a light to their darkening world. A century later, he still provides light. Thank you, Professor and God trade binary option bless! Art by Justin Gerard … Continue reading