The rings that bind: how Marvel’s Ten and Tolkien’s Nine tell the same story of power and loss

In Marvel’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, ten mystical weapons pass from father to son, wrapped in ritual and violence. In The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, we finally see the nine rings forged for men, their promise heavy with destiny.

They’re shaped the same. Perfect circles, ancient metal, bound to the skin. Yet neither set of rings carries a fixed outcome. Each one responds to the hand that wears it.

Both Marvel and The Lord of the Rings franchises understand that rings are not just weapons or heirlooms. They are instruments of revelation. A man driven by control bends them toward destruction. A son willing to rebuild shapes them into something new. The will behind the gesture is what sets the story in motion.

Across Middle-earth and the Marvel Universe, these artifacts serve the same narrative purpose. They crystallize a character’s core, then push it to the edge. Power does not arrive from the outside. It rises from within. And in that emergence, something always breaks.

Marvel's Shang-Shi & The Rings of Power: Legacy written in circles

An object passed from one hand to another can carry memory. A ring, more than most, stores intent. In Tolkien’s legendarium, the nine rings given to men did not destroy their wearers by design. Corruption came from the inside. The rings offered endurance, strength, power over others, and amplified whatever desire drove their bearer.

In The Rings of Power, this becomes visible through a new generation. A man who inherits the ring of his father holds it in his palm, weighs it, and walks away. He sees what it preserved. And he chooses a different shape for his future.

Marvel’s ten rings follow the same curve. In Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, Wenwu builds an empire with them, unchallenged and eternal. Shang-Chi receives them at the end of a battle that could have sealed his fate. But he does not become his father. The rings circle his arms, ready for violence, but rest under new command. The tools remain the same. Only the story changes.

In both cases, the ring is a mirror. It reveals more than it imposes. It grants power, but only in the image of the one who holds it. And whether that image breaks, bends, or rebuilds is never the ring’s decision.

A legacy reshaped

Marvel never treated the Ten Rings as a neutral force. From the moment Wenwu appears, their movement and sound carry weight. They are beautiful and brutal, elegant and merciless. Each strike confirms his authority, each return to his wrist marks territory reclaimed. But Marvel shifts the tone. The son inherits the same tools, and with him, the narrative shifts. In his hands, the rings follow intention. They adjust to a new rhythm, no longer bound to conquest.

The power of the rings never leaves the body. It fuses with memory, rhythm, breath. What Marvel constructs here is a story about inheritance not as burden, but as potential. The Ten Rings are transformed not through destruction, but through redirection. Marvel's Shang-chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings closes with integration, the old power reshaped through gentler hands.

It is this flexibility that gives the rings their mythic weight. Like Tolkien’s artifacts, they reflect the will that moves them. Their history begins again whenever someone chooses to forge a different path.

What Tolkien built into the Nine

Tolkien never framed the Nine Rings as singularly evil. They were crafted to preserve, to empower, to resist decay. The tragedy came from how easily they aligned with ambition.

In The Rings of Power, we see their birth not as an act of malice, but as part of a wider plan of unity. They gleam with promise, given to kings and lords who already sought permanence. Corruption, in Tolkien’s world, is rarely imposed. It grows from within, nurtured by fear, pride, and the hunger for legacy.

The most striking revision the series offers comes through a son. He holds the ring of his father, stares at it, and makes no move to claim it. In that moment, Tolkien’s logic sharpens. The ring has power, but not agency. It cannot seduce without a mind already primed to listen. What The Rings of Power makes visible is the subtle truth of the original lore: no one is doomed by the object alone.

This reading shifts the meaning of the Nine. They are not chains cast over innocents. They are reflections of choices already in motion. Tolkien built a world where decline begins with compromise. The rings merely hold up the mirror.

Design as mythology

A ring always speaks before it is worn. Marvel’s Ten are not delicate or subtle. They whirl, spark, split and return with impossible momentum. They are kinetic language, forged for a world where power is seen in motion. Each movement becomes part of their meaning. They extend the arm, lengthen the strike, crown the body with action. In contrast, Tolkien’s Nine are still. They gleam with restraint, almost ceremonial. Symbols of order, of heritage, of promise. Yet beneath their polish, something ancient sleeps.

These differences are not cosmetic. They reflect how each universe defines power. Marvel builds myth through energy. Tolkien builds it through weight. The Ten scream presence, velocity, control. The Nine whisper legacy, silence, decay. One is a storm called into the body. The other is a slow spell, binding from within.

To wear these rings is to enter a system of meaning. Before they amplify intent, they frame it. Form precedes function, and the design of each ring becomes prophecy. In what it attracts. In what it reveals.

The bearer and the bloodline

In stories shaped by inheritance, choice always carries more weight than blood. Wenwu passes the Ten Rings to Shang-Chi not through ceremony, but through crisis. The son returns to a past he tried to bury, and from it, gathers the pieces of something else. He takes what was forged for war and teaches it rhythm, softness, precision. Not because he was chosen, but because he stayed long enough to choose.

In The Rings of Power, the transfer is quieter. A son watches his father fall. He sees the cost of ambition, the hunger that once built a kingdom and now leaves it hollow. He takes the ring into his hand and does not wear it. That refusal becomes its own inheritance. A reminder that legacy offers more than one door.

Across both narratives, the heir matters not for what they carry, but for how they carry it. The bloodline opens the path. But it is the bearer who decides the direction.

Mirrors that shape, not chains that bind

Across both mythologies (and some others), the rings serve less as origin and more as amplifier. Marvel and Tolkien position them not as curses, but as structures that echo the will of their bearer.

Wenwu’s violence lives through the Ten because he feeds them with purpose. Shang-Chi shifts their rhythm by refusing the same path. The men who fall to the Nine in Tolkien’s world do so because they were already reaching for permanence, for dominion, for something that could outlast death. The rings only sharpen what they already were.

This symmetry reveals why the symbol endures. The ring is never blank. It arrives charged with meaning, but its final form remains open. Neither Marvel nor Tolkien suggests that fate is fixed. What matters is the one who takes the ring, not the ring itself. A child may inherit a legacy shaped by ruin and choose to reforge it. A kingdom may welcome a gift and let it hollow the throne from within.

These are not weapons that twist the mind. They are vessels that wait. And when filled, they reveal more than any prophecy ever could.

The weight of inheritance

The power of rings in fiction has never been about spells or metallurgy. It is about the shape of legacy. Marvel and Tolkien return to this symbol not because it promises spectacle, but because it offers tension. A circle has no beginning or end, only movement. Once placed on a body, it becomes part of a rhythm, a memory, a lineage. It asks who you are and what you are willing to become.

The Ten Rings and the Nine speak to the same fear: that power outlives the person who held it, that it remembers, that it waits to be used again. But they also carry the hope that something old can take a new shape. That legacy is not destiny. That even a closed circle can be drawn again, slightly altered, slightly kinder.

In stories built to last, the ring is not a relic. It is a question. And every generation answers it differently.