Last Riding of the Keepers of the Rings

The riding of the Three Keepers westward through the Shire to the Grey Havens, from where they set sail into the West, never to return to Middle-earth. The Keepers were Elrond, Galadriel and Gandalf, and they were joined on their White Ship by the two famous Hobbit Ring-bearers, Bilbo and Frodo Baggins.

The Keepers of the Three Rings had changed over history, with the exception of Galadriel, who had been given her Ring Nenya by its maker, Celebrimbor, and held it throughout the centuries that followed until the time of the War of the Ring. She was given the keeping of the Ring of Water shortly before the destruction of Eregion in II 1697, so by the close of the Third Age, she had been a Keeper for nearly five thousand years.

The other two of the Three Rings of the Elves had been sent to King Gil-galad in Lindon for safekeeping, but both Rings found new Keepers over the long years that followed. Elrond was given the Blue Ring, Vilya, to aid in the founding and preservation of Rivendell. The Red Ring Narya was granted to Círdan the Shipwright, who in turn passed it on to a being from the West named Mithrandir by the Elves (a being who would become known to Men and Hobbits as Gandalf).

When the One Ring was destroyed at the end of the Third Age, then, the Three Keepers were Galadriel, Elrond and Gandalf. Though the Three Rings were forged independently of the One, they were nonetheless Rings of Power made with the same lore, and when the One Ring came to its end, so did the power of the Three. With the defeat of the Dark Lord, the work of all three Keepers in Middle-earth was done, and so they set out on a Last Riding to the Grey Havens, where a ship waited to carry them into the West. For Mithrandir and Galadriel, indeed, this journey would be homecoming, as both of them had travelled to Middle-earth out of Aman in the ancient past.

The Last Riding of the Keepers also included Bilbo Baggins the Ring-finder, and passed along the roads of the Shire on their westward journey. In the woods of the Green Hills they met with Frodo Baggins the Ring-bearer and his companion Sam Gamgee, and together the party set out on the long road to the shores the Great Sea. At the Grey Havens, the Keepers and the Ring-bearers boarded the White Ship, and set out for the Undying Lands in the West. Sam Gamgee, who had witnessed their departure, then returned to the Shire and recorded the Last Riding of the Keepers among the final notes in the story of the War of the Ring.