Why I Think Killing Celebrimbor Was Sauron's Gravest Mistake in Rings of Power

I've said it before: Sauron's greatest, or should I say gravest, mistake was taking Lord Celebrimbor off the board. When Sauron set out to craft the most powerful object in Middle-earth, the ring meant to rule them all, find them and bind them, he failed several times. That happened because he let his rage and anger get in the way of his success, and by murdering Celebrimbor, he sealed his own fate.

Sauron looks untouchable. He has the army and he has the tower. Then he goes back to his forge and can't finish the one thing he actually needs. The one man who understood rings and could have made this easier for him was Celebrimbor, and Sauron destroyed him. He also destroyed the records. Who does that? Maybe the time he spent with Celebrimbor deceived him into believing he could forge a ring on his own.

The plot twist is that he eventually succeeds. It would be ridiculous to suggest otherwise after we've seen the ring used in The Lord of the Rings. This piece is about the failed years before that success. Even so, I still think the ring wasn't what he intended it to be. It wasn't perfect, and it had flaws which made it nastier.

Rings of Power season 3 opens five years after Eregion falls, with Sauron still struggling

Every innovator faces setbacks, but Sauron's case is different. This isn't a little setback on the way to greatness. Every attempt to get the ring working brings him back to a decision he can't undo. This is someone who wants everybody else under his control, and yet he lost control of himself to an object he crafted. He was a slave to the ring.

Season 3 of Rings of Power begins five years after Eregion falls. I'm not making that up; it's been confirmed by Prime Video. It makes sense, because we don't want to begin the season stuck in the past, though maybe we need a little of it. By the end of season 2, Sauron was the winner. He gained command, including of the orc army, after a rocky start that included betrayals, losing his body and losing his foot soldiers.

So you might expect things to get easier for him. Nobody needs convincing that Annatar is wonderful anymore. He can drop the performance and be who he actually is, the dark lord. Except removing the disguise also removes the convenient illusion that everything good coming out of that workshop belongs to him.

In season 3, Sauron's orc test shows a prototype that destroys itself

From what we've seen in the recently released trailer, his armies are advancing while he works at Barad-dûr. While they run the war for him, he has his own personal project, and it goes horribly wrong. Conquest is easier than craftsmanship. Wars are fought with might and strength, but you can't threaten a failed experiment into becoming a successful one. His response to resistance has always been a sharper blade or, when he prefers diplomacy, manipulation with a soft voice.

He thinks he has it all, but five years remind him that he doesn't know it all. Whatever he took from Eregion and learned from Celebrimbor still doesn't get him there. In season 3, Sauron finishes a prototype of the ring and uses an orc as his test subject. He puts the ring on the orc, fire consumes the wearer down to bone, and afterward the band disintegrates in Sauron's hand.

Obviously the thing kills the orc, but those things are lab rats anyway. The fact that the ring itself crumbles is what we can't ignore. If it only killed the wearer, I could at least imagine Sauron deciding he had invented another horrible way to execute people. The object destroying itself takes even that away. He can't keep it, which shows he isn't anywhere near success yet.

How he made the prototype and what the process involved, we don't know yet. I guess we have to wait for season 3 to tell us what he failed to include or should have taken out. Maybe the temperature was too low, or maybe he added alloys he shouldn't have. What we can say is that it went horribly wrong. The ring is a weapon, but its distinctive purpose is dominion, and something that burns its subject and itself can't deliver dominion that lasts. Maybe he knew it wasn't good enough, which is why he let somebody else take the risk instead of wearing it himself. But killing everyone in reach would leave him with considerably fewer people to rule.

Burning Celebrimbor's records was folly, and I was wrong about who ordered it

All of this can be connected to Sauron's decision to burn Celebrimbor's records, what Elrond calls the knowledge of all those who dwelt there. Elrond understands that the accumulated work matters beyond whoever wins the battle, and Sauron's difficulties prove he was right.

Maybe Sauron was right to kill Celebrimbor, since the elf couldn't be useful to him after discovering his secrets. No amount of threats or torture could have made Celebrimbor bend. But burning the records was folly. Perhaps he didn't think he would need them.

In my earlier analysis of the events at Eregion, I doubted Sauron ever gave that order and put it on the orcs. In fact he ordered the records destroyed, then sent orcs out hunting for whatever survived. I was wrong there, and being wrong makes this argument stronger.

Sauron knows enough ring lore to be dangerous, but not enough to finish the One

I'm not saying he's completely naive about ring lore. He isn't an idiot who knows nothing about smithing, and he hasn't forgotten everything he learned from the dead man. He contributed to the craft, manipulated its development and understands enough that we should be worried. But what he knows doesn't give him the knowledge to achieve what he wants.

That's the whole thing. If he were as ignorant as he was before he entered that workshop, he might know he needs help. Because he contributed, interfered and took credit, he may convince himself that Celebrimbor's contribution is replaceable. It was his suggestion that let them forge the three elven rings with so little mithril, so you can imagine why he feels so bossy. He mistakes his power over the workshop for possession of everything the workshop knows. Then the workshop is gone, and he's stuck.

Before Celebrimbor breathes his last, Sauron still describes what happened as though the elf brought it on himself. He shifts blame, as humans have done since the first man and woman. When there's nobody left to blame, there are still orcs, somebody lower down to punish. That soothes his anger, but it doesn't provide the solution he might have gotten from the late lord of Eregion. He can lie his whole life about why Celebrimbor died, but he can't make the dead craftsman explain his work. As funny and hopeless as it sounds, the smith he brutalized remains necessary after his death. Celebrimbor made mistakes too, but that doesn't mean he deserved his fate, and in a way death relieved him, because he no longer has to be Sauron's puppet.

The One Ring has to dominate the Three, the Seven and the Nine

Making the One Ring isn't the same as making the Three, the Seven or the Nine. The One has to dominate all of them, so Sauron has to establish a connection between them. He wants authority over works already made, through a craft he no longer fully has available to him. Getting a band to survive is only the beginning of the difficulty.

In the books, Celebrimbor forges the Three with no direct hand from Sauron, but as I pointed out in my Eregion analysis, they still answer to the One because of the ring lore behind them. To make it work, Sauron has to understand how to bring all of these together under one. And each race responds differently to the rings. Men are easily corruptible, and they fell enslaved through the Nine. Dwarves were not enslaved; they resisted, though it increased their appetite for wealth. The elves removed their rings the moment they saw what Sauron was about to do.

So even though he ended up with the One Ring, it failed, because he still couldn't get everyone under his control. Even the successful ring doesn't abolish every obstacle to his ambitions.

The finished ring in the trailer doesn't mean Sauron succeeds

In the trailer Prime Video released, Sauron can be seen in his armor wearing the One. You might ask how he can fail if he's already wearing it. The right question is whether the finished ring makes him succeed in his plans, and the trailer doesn't say how difficult it was to get it on his finger. There's Sauron before the ring and Sauron after it, and what happens in between is what makes this interesting: one version falls apart and the other finally claims it.

The good news is that the show's creators have said the forging of the ring gets substantial attention, so we should get the answers we're waiting for: the difficulty before he completed it, and how he poured his own essence into it, so that destroying it leaves him unable to recover. Who even gave him that awful idea? Maybe he found it was the only way to get it working or to bind the rings. For somebody who can't bear depending on another craftsman, that's an extraordinary destination. He removes the person he needs, then makes something he can't afford to lose. If he had known the consequences, perhaps he would have taken a different approach.

So does spending five years unable to finish the ring make Sauron less frightening? To me it makes him worse. He has five years to confront what his arrogance costs, and the thing he finally makes still demands that everybody else submit.