Jens Hansen and the One Ring

If you are mildly familiar with the story of The Hobbit or of the Lord of the Rings, or the Rings of Power (but surely you haven’t read the Silmarillion), you will know that rings are important to the story. The evil Sauron created 20 magical rings to help further his evil plans in Middle Earth, and of course he intended a single ring for himself. The One Ring it is called, the One Ring to Rule Them All.

In the movies and TV shows then, rings were needed. In fact, in the Lord of the Rings movies by Peter Jackson, the One Ring is a character itself, pushing the other characters to behave against their will. An important ring maker was needed to create this ring for the films, and the job went to Jens Hansen in Nelson, New Zealand. He was a fan of Tolkien’s stories and excited that Peter Jackson chose to make the movies there. He was “thrilled and honoured” their website says, to get the job. Hansen made about 15 ring prototypes and from those, one was selected for the movie. Then many copies of the ring had to be made, in multiple sizes.

Halfdan Hansen is an excellent spokesperson for the jewelery company. He first brought us into the small room where the ringmakers do their work. (The artisans knew we were coming and had all vacated, presumably to collect some flat whites at a distant location)

I had turned off the auto focus on my camera so the following images are blurry. But I loved the workshop so much that I am going to include the images anyway. They give you a sense of how wonderful the workbenches in there are.

Then Halfdan brought us across the street to another building where there was room for us to sit and watch a demonstration with a slide show and the actual rings made for the movies, passed around. We held them in our very own hands.

Hansen explained some of the history behind his father and brother’s making of the rings. Their website says, “Jens and his son, goldsmith Thorkild Hansen, made more than 40 variations for the films. These were scaled for different scenes and sized to suit its various owners -from smaller solid gold versions that perfectly fit Hobbit’s fingers, to the 8 inch ring seen in the prologue spinning and turning through the air.”

First he talked about the star of the show, what Jens Hansen jewelers believe is the most famous ring in the world. “It is gold, the design is classic, but this ring needed to have gravity,” said Halfdan Hansen. “In the movies, Frodo wore 18 carat yellow gold in a size 11. It weighs approximately 17 grams (0.6 ounce). A ring has no business being this heavy.”

He told us that, as each ring was rejected by Peter Jackson, Jens Hansen naively put the ring out in the shop and sold it. The jeweler had no idea what worldwide blockbusters the movies would be. Today, they realize that each one would have been a valued collector’s item. “Hopefully someone who bought one of those rings has realized what they have,” he said.

A great tragedy is that Jens Hansen became ill soon after making the ring. He died before seeing his work on the screen.

Jens Hansen jewelers sells other rings that resemble those in the movies, but for legal reasons, cannot call them by the names used in the books or movies. Thus, they also sell The Ring of Hugo, Our Ring for Cate, Our Ring for Viggo, and Our Ring for Sir Ian.

The enormous ring that Halfdan held up is also a movie ring. For some of the shots, a gigantic ring was needed when a zoomed-in shot simply wouldn’t be enough for what the scene called for.

After the presentation, we returned to the shop and I took that opportunity to sneak back to the workshop and get photos of the creators having returned from their coffee break. Many people made purchases but Pedro and I did not. The jewelry is absolutely lovely, and I do love rings, but we weren’t here for purchasing.

Others from the tour group left to take a helicopter flight to some remote movie film locations, but Pedro and I had decided it was too expensive to take this optional excursion. We invited fellow traveler from Germany, Peter, with us, and went for a long hike instead. That will be shown in the next post.