The Rings Of Power Finally Explains Where Celeborn’s Been Hiding
The short answer? Prison.
The Elf Lord Celeborn became an immortal meme template when, in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, he asked, “Tell me, where is Gandalf?” Ironically, we’ve been feeling much the same way about Celeborn himself — at least when it comes to his whereabouts in Prime Video’s Lord of the Rings prequel, The Rings of Power. The series takes place a good thousand years before the events of Fellowship, but it’s taken major creative liberties with J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings legendarium. While Galadriel (Morfydd Clark) is the ostensible star of this series, her husband Celeborn has been missing in action since The Rings of Power Season 1.
According to Galadriel, Celeborn disappeared centuries prior in a battle with Morgoth, the original Dark Lord of Middle-earth. As he never turned up afterwards, Galadriel assumed he’d been murdered — and though she grieves in the quiet way of the Elves, she’s more or less moved on. In The Rings of Power’s first two seasons, she accidentally stumbled into a situationship with Morgoth’s successor, Sauron (Charlie Vickers). In Season 3 — which picks up after a major time jump — she’ll still be dealing with the fallout. Our heroine’s life will get all the more complicated with the return of Celeborn: Stranger Things’ Jamie Campbell Bower joins the series as Galadriel’s long-lost husband, but where has he been all this time?
Celeborn is naturally changed by millennia in prison: “He’s not like, ‘Ta-da, here I am! Smiley, smiley!’”
At this year’s San Diego Comic-Con, Inverse caught up with the cast and showrunners of The Rings of Power to talk all things Celeborn. Co-creators Patrick McKay and JD Payne have been finding loopholes in Tolkien canon for years now, and the act of bringing Celeborn back into the fold made use of a big one. The Lord of the Rings appendices mention that Celeborn fought against Morgoth and his allies, but don’t offer many details about what he did throughout the Second Age. At least, not many interesting details — so just as McKay and Payne updated Galadriel into a hardened warrior, Celeborn likewise gets a more militant background in the show.
“He’s been in prison for the last sort of thousand years,” Bower tells Inverse.
“He’s in a series of prisons,” McKay clarifies, “being shuffled around by different orcs.”
Naturally, that kind of fate would break anyone’s will — even an Elf, for whom a millennium passes by relatively quickly. Bower describes Celeborn as a “lover boy,” as the memory of Galadriel has been holding him together. “Certain things that have been keeping him alive... that first meeting and everything that happened in that First Age,” the actor continues.
Galadriel is dealing with a lot by the time Celeborn returns.
How Celeborn escapes his imprisonment is a question for another day, but McKay is excited to bring audiences into a new vision of Middle-earth. He and Payne were intrigued by “the idea of starting the third season in a place where everyone has changed, everyone has shifted.” Many years — maybe even decades — have passed since we last saw Galadriel and the Elves, the Dwarves of Khazad-dûm, or the kingdom of Men. “And then having Jamie come out of nowhere, you’re dropping the audience into a situation where, if you’re a fan of the show and you watched the first two seasons, suddenly you’re now being reoriented and trying to put together the pieces.”
Celeborn and Galadriel are both fundamentally different people when they reunite in The Rings of Power Season 3. Galadriel is still dealing with her psychic link to Sauron, who’s still striving to forge the final Ring of Power, the One to rule all the races of Middle-earth. Celeborn, meanwhile, will undoubtedly be struggling with the horrors he faced over thousands of years in Orc imprisonment: “He’s not like, ‘Ta-da, here I am! Smiley, smiley!’” Bower says. That primes the series for another dose of romantic angst, but McKay insists that this season will deliver its first true-blue love story all the same.
“We’ve never done a full-on romance the way we do this season,” McKay tells Inverse. “It is a complex love story, a love story of people who are, in some ways, damaged and have to find their way back to each other.” It’s about as far from a “fairytale love story” as this series can get, yet McKay believes that “people are really going to respond to the way they play off each other, and the things he brings out in her and the things she brings out in him.”
