Longevity of life and invisibility are granted to Bilbo and Frodo. The ring does grant some powers but it didn’t allow Frodo to control the ring wraiths.
Are those actually powers though? It doesn’t render the bearer invisible to the wraiths, or to sauron, so it does have its limits. Moreover, the corruption of the ring works slowly. If the ring were passed from person to person over ordinary lifetimes it would not have very much chance to corrupt its owners, but if its owners lived much longer then it could corrupt them much longer. So the “power” of longevity ultimately serves the interests of the ring more than the ring bearer. It was chance that gollum ended up with the ring for so long, the corruption merely encouraging him to keep deep underground and never see the light of day. In almost any other hand the corruption of the ring would have encouraged its bearer to seek conquests, and power.
In so doing they would have shown up on sauron’s radar. And while they could render themselves invisible to mortal men they could not hide themselves from sauron’s eye or the nazgul. And even with the “powers” of the ring they would likely be unable to standup even to the witch king. Meaning that the most likely outcome of the workings of the “powers” of the ring is that it grants sufficient life to a bearer who is then corrupted sufficiently to become noticed by sauron at which point he dispatches an army or the nazgul and retrieves the ring quite easily. More often than not those powers would actually serve to return the ring to sauron more rapidly than otherwise, and it was only because the ring fell into the hands of creatures who were very much unlike men in certain ways that such a thing didn’t happen.
Given your in depth analysis of the ring, and how it corrupts, could you put together some thoughts on how it is like membership in the Democrat party? There are certainly parallels.
Longevity of life and invisibility are granted to Bilbo and Frodo.
Are those actually powers though?
My take is that longevity of life is tied to one of the primary two powers of the ring, incredible perseverance. The other which a hobbit of modest means and will would be unable to use is domination over others and to a considerable degree, reality itself. Perhaps, he thought of the invisibility power as being a manifestation of domination over others or maybe it was a ring of invisibility repurposed in his later writings as a Wagner-style ring.
If such a ring existed it would’ve shown up on Pawn Stars by now.
Yes, but I think Elrond or Gandalf said that the ring grants power in proportion to the strengths of the bearer, and its full power would only be available to one who wields a great power of their own.
Darn-it now you made me want to watch the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy. There goes 9 hours of my life.
Don’t watch the movies again. Read the books again; they are much richer and better than the movies. I generally like the movies, but they simply don’t compare to the books (although the first movie was very good – but it was also the one that deviated the least from the books).
Maybe it gives strength to those who support the ring bearer? The warriors in the fellowship seemed unnaturally talented.
That’s misleading, though. I think they used stunt men and special effects.
I know that Tolkien gets the last work, but it sort of makes more sense that the ring giving super powers to the ring bearer, who is just one person. Wouldn’t the ring be a greater treasure if it made each member of your army just a little stronger and a little faster?
” that the ring ” should be “than the ring”
Well, it’s worth noting that the One Ring in the books was wielded by the weakest possible users, Smeagol, Bilbo, and Frodo all are notably weak and unassuming. Yet in return they obtained invisibility and a remarkably longevity and unnatural hardiness.
Something that was never explicitly explored is how the Ring came to acquire so much power over other rings in the first place. What common attribute did it have in common with all those other rings of power aside from that Sauron taught the making of them? Recall that the One Ring was forged and could only be unforged in Mount Doom, a continually erupting volcano. What was special about that place?
My take is that what was special was that Mount Doom was probably the resting place of the Silmaril of earth (one of three near indestructible jewels which supposedly contained the light of creation in the form of the “Two Trees” from before the creation of Sun and Moon) which was said in the Silmarillon (which has as its long term theme the attempts to recover these stones when they are stolen by the evil of the world in the form of Melkor/Morgoth) to have been cast into a “fiery pit” by its last holder at the end of the First Age. The elves who forged the many rings of power (aside from the one Ring) would have been inadvertently using that power in the creation of their many rings. And it would take great will, such as the might of Sauron, to corrupt this source of power for the rings.
I think supporting evidence are the primary powers of these rings. The human and elven ones had extraordinary powers of preservation (the human ones more physical, the elven ones more metaphysical). The dwarven ones had the power of accumulating wealth. Both are themes associated loosely with the Silmarils, which were both a source of enduring, near indestructible beauty and light and simultaneously an irresistible spur to deep envy and greed even among the normally virtuous. There is also a story of two mortals (Luthien and Beren) who had a Silmaril for a time and passed on prematurely due to its effects, which is somewhat similar to the wasting side effects of the human rings of power which turn the bearers of those rings into the Ring-wraiths, effectively powerful and lethal ghosts.
It’s also a bit of a process of elimination. Mount Doom is pretty much the only volcano of note in any of his stories. So if the Silmaril were dropped into a fiery pit as claimed, it’s the one obvious choice.
Anyway, with that consideration, the primary power of all these rings aside from the One Ring seems to be preservation and endurance – not just of the bearer, but of the things they most want (life for man, wealth for dwarves, and I guess some sort of nostalgia for the elves). I think that would have been a particular seductive power to the elves who were making these rings since they resided in a world that was changing and leaving them behind as outcasts.
The elven ones in particular had the ability to change a considerable bit of real estate and make it unchanging and near permanent (the primary three abodes of the elves, the Grey Havens, Rivendell, and Lothlorein) as well as various sorts of metaphysical support (“it will support thee and defend thee from weariness. For this is the Ring of Fire, and herewith, maybe, thou shalt rekindle hearts to the valour of old in a world that grows chill”).
So in that light and with that considerable speculation, my take is that the power of the One Ring would be to extend the will of a powerful wielder over a vast region and to provide an incredible degree of perseverance, subsistence, longevity, and obsessive focus to the wielder (primarily enduring domination over others which I think would have been Sauron’s great desire, but with the physical and meta-physical effects similar to the other rings). I think something like Mordor would be possible with the ruler shaping the land and its inhabitants to the ruler’s personal whims and obsessions and being able to hold that change for centuries (assuming the ring didn’t choose in the meantime to corrupt the wielder so that it could return to Sauron).
So IMHO it’s great power and temptation would be the ability to shape a large part of the world as you think it ought to be and holding that change for a very long time. Given that these tales were originally devised in the dark times leading up to the Second World War, it is possible that J. R. R. Tolkien was thinking of some fantastical amalgam of Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle operas and the tyranny of that time.
Everyone forgets Bombadil, and he was written out of the movies. If anyone could have wielded the ring with no ill effects, surely it was he.
This subject has been rather extensively discussed!
Sauron is said to be the greatest of the Maiar on Arda, although Osse (the Maia who controls the shallow seas and is responsible for storms) may be close. Eonwe and Ilmare, the heralds of Manwe and Varda respectively, are also said to be greater than Sauron although since the fall of Numenor their home, Valinor, is no longer accessible from Middle-Earth.
It’s a reasonable assumption that anyone who could master the Ring would have to be more powerful than its current master Sauron. This means that of the Maiar only Eonwe and Ilmare could definitely withstand it, and probably no other being at all could – except presumably any of the Valar, of whom there are 14 excepting Melkor.
Two more who might manage it are Arien and Tirion, the Maiar of the Sun and Moon respectively, but again they do not come down to Middle-Earth.
Bombadil is an enigma, probably deliberately. But those individuals so far mentioned are the only ones who could withstand it. From other fictional universes, since corruption is the major issue then anyone who is not corruptible for any of various reasons, by canon, would be able to ignore it.
There is also another issue. Anyone who could withstand the corruption long enough to get rid of it before it took him over, could manage the task. Perhaps one of the Eagles?
Longevity of life and invisibility are granted to Bilbo and Frodo. The ring does grant some powers but it didn’t allow Frodo to control the ring wraiths.
Are those actually powers though? It doesn’t render the bearer invisible to the wraiths, or to sauron, so it does have its limits. Moreover, the corruption of the ring works slowly. If the ring were passed from person to person over ordinary lifetimes it would not have very much chance to corrupt its owners, but if its owners lived much longer then it could corrupt them much longer. So the “power” of longevity ultimately serves the interests of the ring more than the ring bearer. It was chance that gollum ended up with the ring for so long, the corruption merely encouraging him to keep deep underground and never see the light of day. In almost any other hand the corruption of the ring would have encouraged its bearer to seek conquests, and power.
In so doing they would have shown up on sauron’s radar. And while they could render themselves invisible to mortal men they could not hide themselves from sauron’s eye or the nazgul. And even with the “powers” of the ring they would likely be unable to standup even to the witch king. Meaning that the most likely outcome of the workings of the “powers” of the ring is that it grants sufficient life to a bearer who is then corrupted sufficiently to become noticed by sauron at which point he dispatches an army or the nazgul and retrieves the ring quite easily. More often than not those powers would actually serve to return the ring to sauron more rapidly than otherwise, and it was only because the ring fell into the hands of creatures who were very much unlike men in certain ways that such a thing didn’t happen.
Given your in depth analysis of the ring, and how it corrupts, could you put together some thoughts on how it is like membership in the Democrat party? There are certainly parallels.
Are those actually powers though?
My take is that longevity of life is tied to one of the primary two powers of the ring, incredible perseverance. The other which a hobbit of modest means and will would be unable to use is domination over others and to a considerable degree, reality itself. Perhaps, he thought of the invisibility power as being a manifestation of domination over others or maybe it was a ring of invisibility repurposed in his later writings as a Wagner-style ring.
If such a ring existed it would’ve shown up on Pawn Stars by now.
Yes, but I think Elrond or Gandalf said that the ring grants power in proportion to the strengths of the bearer, and its full power would only be available to one who wields a great power of their own.
Darn-it now you made me want to watch the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy. There goes 9 hours of my life.
Don’t watch the movies again. Read the books again; they are much richer and better than the movies. I generally like the movies, but they simply don’t compare to the books (although the first movie was very good – but it was also the one that deviated the least from the books).
Maybe it gives strength to those who support the ring bearer? The warriors in the fellowship seemed unnaturally talented.
That’s misleading, though. I think they used stunt men and special effects.
I know that Tolkien gets the last work, but it sort of makes more sense that the ring giving super powers to the ring bearer, who is just one person. Wouldn’t the ring be a greater treasure if it made each member of your army just a little stronger and a little faster?
” that the ring ” should be “than the ring”
Well, it’s worth noting that the One Ring in the books was wielded by the weakest possible users, Smeagol, Bilbo, and Frodo all are notably weak and unassuming. Yet in return they obtained invisibility and a remarkably longevity and unnatural hardiness.
Something that was never explicitly explored is how the Ring came to acquire so much power over other rings in the first place. What common attribute did it have in common with all those other rings of power aside from that Sauron taught the making of them? Recall that the One Ring was forged and could only be unforged in Mount Doom, a continually erupting volcano. What was special about that place?
My take is that what was special was that Mount Doom was probably the resting place of the Silmaril of earth (one of three near indestructible jewels which supposedly contained the light of creation in the form of the “Two Trees” from before the creation of Sun and Moon) which was said in the Silmarillon (which has as its long term theme the attempts to recover these stones when they are stolen by the evil of the world in the form of Melkor/Morgoth) to have been cast into a “fiery pit” by its last holder at the end of the First Age. The elves who forged the many rings of power (aside from the one Ring) would have been inadvertently using that power in the creation of their many rings. And it would take great will, such as the might of Sauron, to corrupt this source of power for the rings.
I think supporting evidence are the primary powers of these rings. The human and elven ones had extraordinary powers of preservation (the human ones more physical, the elven ones more metaphysical). The dwarven ones had the power of accumulating wealth. Both are themes associated loosely with the Silmarils, which were both a source of enduring, near indestructible beauty and light and simultaneously an irresistible spur to deep envy and greed even among the normally virtuous. There is also a story of two mortals (Luthien and Beren) who had a Silmaril for a time and passed on prematurely due to its effects, which is somewhat similar to the wasting side effects of the human rings of power which turn the bearers of those rings into the Ring-wraiths, effectively powerful and lethal ghosts.
It’s also a bit of a process of elimination. Mount Doom is pretty much the only volcano of note in any of his stories. So if the Silmaril were dropped into a fiery pit as claimed, it’s the one obvious choice.
Anyway, with that consideration, the primary power of all these rings aside from the One Ring seems to be preservation and endurance – not just of the bearer, but of the things they most want (life for man, wealth for dwarves, and I guess some sort of nostalgia for the elves). I think that would have been a particular seductive power to the elves who were making these rings since they resided in a world that was changing and leaving them behind as outcasts.
The elven ones in particular had the ability to change a considerable bit of real estate and make it unchanging and near permanent (the primary three abodes of the elves, the Grey Havens, Rivendell, and Lothlorein) as well as various sorts of metaphysical support (“it will support thee and defend thee from weariness. For this is the Ring of Fire, and herewith, maybe, thou shalt rekindle hearts to the valour of old in a world that grows chill”).
So in that light and with that considerable speculation, my take is that the power of the One Ring would be to extend the will of a powerful wielder over a vast region and to provide an incredible degree of perseverance, subsistence, longevity, and obsessive focus to the wielder (primarily enduring domination over others which I think would have been Sauron’s great desire, but with the physical and meta-physical effects similar to the other rings). I think something like Mordor would be possible with the ruler shaping the land and its inhabitants to the ruler’s personal whims and obsessions and being able to hold that change for centuries (assuming the ring didn’t choose in the meantime to corrupt the wielder so that it could return to Sauron).
So IMHO it’s great power and temptation would be the ability to shape a large part of the world as you think it ought to be and holding that change for a very long time. Given that these tales were originally devised in the dark times leading up to the Second World War, it is possible that J. R. R. Tolkien was thinking of some fantastical amalgam of Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle operas and the tyranny of that time.
Everyone forgets Bombadil, and he was written out of the movies. If anyone could have wielded the ring with no ill effects, surely it was he.
This subject has been rather extensively discussed!
Sauron is said to be the greatest of the Maiar on Arda, although Osse (the Maia who controls the shallow seas and is responsible for storms) may be close. Eonwe and Ilmare, the heralds of Manwe and Varda respectively, are also said to be greater than Sauron although since the fall of Numenor their home, Valinor, is no longer accessible from Middle-Earth.
It’s a reasonable assumption that anyone who could master the Ring would have to be more powerful than its current master Sauron. This means that of the Maiar only Eonwe and Ilmare could definitely withstand it, and probably no other being at all could – except presumably any of the Valar, of whom there are 14 excepting Melkor.
Two more who might manage it are Arien and Tirion, the Maiar of the Sun and Moon respectively, but again they do not come down to Middle-Earth.
Bombadil is an enigma, probably deliberately. But those individuals so far mentioned are the only ones who could withstand it. From other fictional universes, since corruption is the major issue then anyone who is not corruptible for any of various reasons, by canon, would be able to ignore it.
There is also another issue. Anyone who could withstand the corruption long enough to get rid of it before it took him over, could manage the task. Perhaps one of the Eagles?