“This process is in itself a creator of bigger work with more fullness of form.” “I use a hammer to bend metal where a jeweler would use pliers,” Jens himself explained in a 1999 jewelry exhibition catalogue. Justine Olsen, Curator of Decorative Arts and Design at Te Papa Tongarewa/Museum of New Zealand, told Polygon via email that “His practice was founded on a love of materials and process. The necklace looks like it weighs a ton, reflecting Hansen’s commitment to substance as a style. “The detail in his stuff was evident,” he said. Image: New Line Cinema/Photo: Sara Murphy (Hensen’s workshop designed the Ring’s chain as well.)ĭan Hennah displays his wife’s Jens Hansen pendant and chain over Zoom. Hennah pointed out the gentle curve of the clasp and held up the round-linked chain reminiscent of one owned by the Baggins family. During our conversation, Hennah pulled out a necklace he and his wife Chris bought from Hansen in the ’70s: a convex half-sphere of New Zealand greenstone mounted in silver. “He was a very capable, big guy,” Hennah remembered. Local leaders, eager to woo artists, offered Hansen financial help to set up shop.ĭan Hennah had relocated to Nelson around the same time in his work as an architectural draftsman, and he soon crossed paths with Jens. In 1968, the picturesque New Zealand town of Nelson, where the mountains meet the beach on the northern tip of the South Island, came calling. He returned to Auckland with wife Gurli in 1965, and immersed himself in the bold, simple, geometric designs that characterized postwar Danish jewelry. To satisfy his growing artistic sensibility, Jens studied at Copehagen’s School of Applied Arts and Industrial Design. “He would have cut his teeth on diamond engagement rings and wedding rings and other stuff that he personally didn’t have an aesthetic taste for,” Halfdan said. Four years and eight thousand working hours later, Hansen returned to Denmark as a journeyman for the jeweler firm A. Never fully comfortable in the classroom due to the language barrier, Hansen left school at the (then) legal age of fifteen to begin a jeweler’s apprenticeship in 1956. “Jens, to me, was very much a Viking,” Hennah said.īorn in the town of Gram in 1940, Hansen sailed east to Auckland with his parents and three sisters in 1952, one of many families who left the war-scarred lands of Europe for better opportunities. Tall, bearded, and boisterous, Jens Hansen appeared to many Kiwis like a Nordic god himself. “ would have had innately in his soul and upbringing some exposure to Viking and Nordic mythology.” “My family tree is very mono-culturally Danish for the last couple of hundred years,” said Halfdan. Tolkien would have been delighted to know that the trilogy’s Ringmaker hailed from Denmark. “He was making this work that was kind of bold, big, organic, sculptural surfaces,” said Halfdan, “which in hindsight meant that he was a logical person to make a ring such as the One Ring.”Īs a scholar of Old English, Old Norse, and other Germanic languages, J.R.R. Called “the grandfather of modern jewelry-making in New Zealand,” Jens Hansen reshaped the idea of what jewelry could be.

However, the Ringmaker deserves appreciation for more than this one piece.

The films’ success introduced a global audience to Hansen’s work, and customers around the world now purchase the official licensed prop replicas his workshop produces for Wētā Workshop. The condition took his life four months later at the age of 59.Īs Halfdan Hansen, Jens’ eldest son and current manager of Jens Hansen Gold & Silversmith, told Polygon, seeing his father’s design on screen without him “was definitely a moment of bittersweetness for my brother and I.” Not long after he began work on the One Ring in 1999, he was diagnosed with the pancreatic cancer. Plus, “he was never mean with his gold.” (Unlike some dragons we know.)īut Hansen never got to see his tiny creation on the big screen. “He was capable of understanding without needing to put his own stamp on it,” Hennah explained.

Trained as a jeweler but a smith and sculptor at heart, Hansen had been making bold, clean statement pieces since the 1960s. A physical giant of a man with a larger-than-life personality, Hansen already had a reputation as one of the most influential contemporary artists in New Zealand. Hennah knew exactly who had the skill and aesthetic to forge the most famous piece of jewelry in Western literature: Danish-born artist Jens Høyer Hansen. So each Wednesday throughout the year, we'll go there and back again, examining how and why the films have endured as modern classics. 2021 marks The Lord of the Rings movies' 20th anniversary, and we couldn't imagine exploring the trilogy in just one story.

Noble collection lord of the rings