The Valar didn't forge the Rings of Power. The Rings of Power were made in the _2nd_ Age. Sauron came back from the outlands, conned the elves. He worked with them to make the lesser rings (3 for elves, 7 for dwarves, nine for men) and then he forged the One Ring.
The Valar didn't want anything to do with them - thats why it had to be dropped in the place where it was made. It couldn't be sent across the "sundered seas" to the Valar.
Now, why anyone is surprised at the relation between Tolkien's mythos and that of Norse mythology I do not know - Tolkien himself was quite open about it, and drew many of his Dwarvish names from that source. But some of us are having to bite our tongues these days - those of us who have studied these works in some depth and for some years, and actually, that's quite a few of us, tend to get snippy when johnny-come-latelies start to discover them for the first time and attempt to make profound observations before they've really examined the material. It's going to get worse - once the third movie is released people who have never even read any of the books are going to start waxing philosophical. By then I hope it'll be legal to kill them. In a compassionate way, of course...