About the year 1600 of the Second Age, Sauron secretly forged the One Ring. His mistrust was well founded, for Annatar was in fact Sauron. He was the first of the Eldar to mistrust a stranger who called himself Annatar, and forbade him from entering Lindon. Gil-galad did not take a wife and had no children. King Tar-Aldarion of Númenor presented Gil-galad with the gift of some seeds of the Mallorn tree he in turn gave some to Galadriel, who grew them in the guarded land of Lothlórien.

At its height, his realm extended eastward as far as the Misty Mountains. After the War of Wrath and the end of the First Age, Gil-galad founded a realm in the coastal region of Lindon along the shores of Belegaer, the Great Sea. He became the High King of the Noldor-in-Exile in Beleriand after the fall of Gondolin and the death of the previous High King, Turgon. Christopher Tolkien rejected these changes for The Silmarillion, a decision he later regretted. Alternatively, he was a son of Orodreth, who became a son of Angrod, son of Finarfin: Tolkien made these changes to allow Turgon, Fingon's brother, to inherit the crown before Gil-galad (leaving Fingon childless). According to The Silmarillion, he was born into the house of Finwë as a son of Fingon sometime in the First Age, and as a child, he was sent away during the Siege of Angband for safekeeping with Cirdan the shipwright in the Falas. Gil-galad was an Elf of a royal house of Beleriand beyond that, accounts of his birth vary.

Gil-galad briefly appears at the opening of Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings film trilogy, and features in several video games based on Tolkien's Middle-earth. Both Gil-galad and Elendil were killed, and Elendil's son Isildur took the Ring for himself. In the Last Alliance of Elves and Men, Gil-galad and Elendil laid siege to the Dark Lord Sauron's fortress of Barad-dûr, and fought him hand-to-hand for the One Ring. He is mentioned in The Lord of the Rings, where the hobbit Sam Gamgee recites a fragment of a poem about him, and The Silmarillion. Tolkien's Middle-earth legendarium, the last High King of the Noldor, one of the main divisions of Elves.

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