With One Reunion, Rings of Power Finally Reversed A Controversial Timeline Change

Since The Rings of Power began in 2022, serious fans and scholars of Middle-earth lore have been troubled by the absence of one somewhat obscure, yet crucial character. In Tolkien’s Appendix B of The Return of the King, the section called “The Tale of Years” spells out who was born when and why it mattered. Save for background information about Sauron and the Rings of Power, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings take place in the Third Age, while the entirety of The Rings of Power prequel TV series takes place in the Second Age. And yet, long-lived characters like Gandalf, Elrond, and Galadriel (Morfydd Clark) lived in both ages, which is why fans have been wondering for a while about Galadriel’s missing husband, Celeborn (Jamie Campbell Bower).

The Rings of Power Season 3 attacks the Celeborn timeline problem head-on, reminding us that in Season 1 Galadriel said that he had gone missing. By Episode 4 of The Rings of Power Season 3, however, we find that Celeborn is alive, but has been toiling in an Orc prison for a very, very long time. By the end of Episode 4, his reunion with Galadriel essentially pushes the events of the Rings of Power timeline much closer to the “correct” timeline of Tolkien. Here’s why.

Spoilers ahead.

Celeborn and Galadriel’s reunion fixes canon

There’s nothing in the original Tolkien text that suggests that Celeborn and Galadriel were separated or that Celeborn went missing for a while. That said, Tolkien’s appendices have given Rings of Power showrunners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay quite a bit of room to maneuver, especially when you consider this line from Appendix A: “The legends, histories and lore to be found in the sources are very extensive. Only selections from them, in most places much abridged, are here presented. Their principal purpose is to illustrate the War of the Ring and its origins, and to fill up some gaps in the main story.”

In other words: You could read this as Tolkien saying, with a wink, that everything in The Lord of the Rings appendices is there to make The Lord of the Rings itself (the Third Age) more explicable, and if there are missing pieces, then that’s just how it is. The “sources” Tolkien refers to are fictional, of course, which also suggests a lot of wiggle room for interpretation. We are reading one version of The War of the Ring with The Lord of the Rings, which is based on other (pretend) historical sources, meaning that there could be all sorts of stuff that “happened” in Middle-earth which was not recorded in The Lord of the Rings, even in the appendices.

So, sure, Celeborn and Galadriel could have been separated for several years during the wars of the Second Age and reunited, and maybe the various historical sources just never knew. Funnily, real historical texts partially inspired the decision to bring Celeborn back this way, Patrick McKay tells Inverse. “If somebody’s believed dead, but they’re not, a lot of times it’s because they’ve been taken captive,” McKay says. “There’s stories like this in the real world throughout world history, but the thousand-year time is unique to Middle-earth.”

McKay and Payne had apparently thrown around other ideas to explain Celeborn’s long, long absence, but “nothing ever could beat that idea” that Celeborn was “on the far end of the world in some dungeon and he’d been forgotten by the prior regime,” McKay says. “And maybe he’d escaped a few times and they keep moving him. That was always something we had a lot of gravity around... That felt right that [Galadriel] thought he’d gone away to battle and died in the wars thousands [of] years ago [in the] First Age.”

But when Celeborn and Galadriel get on the back of that eagle at the end of Rings of Power Season 3, Episode 4, they’re basically soaring back into regular canon.

Celeborn and Galadriel have major impacts on the Third Age

Though Celeborn is by no means a super-famous Lord of the Rings character, he is crucial insofar as he and Galadriel, together, produce a child named Celebrían, an Elven princess of Lothlórien. Celebrían later becomes the wife of Elrond, which leads to a daughter named Arwen. (This was why fans were weirded by the Elrond/Galadriel kiss in Season 2; Galadriel is technically Elrond’s future mother-in-law, since Elrond will marry her daughter.)

While it’s unlikely we’ll see a young Celebrían by the end of Season 3, it seems very possible, with some time jumps, that we could see an adult Celebrían in Season 4, depending on how the series wants to handle that detail. Elves obviously age at strange rates, but in order for the Tolkien family trees to all work correctly, Celeborn and Galadriel need to be back together as a power couple, at least for the rest of this season, and probably for all of Season 4.

Interestingly, Tolkien’s lore tells us that Celeborn will actually end up remaining in Middle-earth even after Galadriel heads to the Undying Lands after the end of The Return of the King. So, although Celeborn was locked up in an Orc prison for ages in The Rings of Power, in theory, his story should end up being a long and happy one.

The Rings of Power streams on Prime Video.