They could have fitted the whole ring / tape / mouse assembly into a small paper bag Aragorn could have kept it in his jacket and fed it little bits of lembas on the way how lovely x
I’m sure an invisible mouse with an evil, human-level intelligence in its head and a total commitment to do the latter’s bidding would have gone much better than what happened
Doesn’t the ring sort of connect the subject to Sauron or something? On a Plot level, I thought that was the whole point (thematically, the sheer power is the real reason, of course).
Nope. Sauron isn’t even aware of when someone wears the ring. The ring basically only has a handful of effects:
(Slightly) bends fate to favor Sauron’s interests (e.g.: bouncing in a particularly fateful direction, shining in a particularly noticeable way at a specific moment). This is basically the only thing it can do without an owner.
(Slowly) amplifies the wearer’s worst personality traits (e.g.: greed, powerlust, paranoia, hatred). The ring has enough agency over which traits it brings out to subtly favor Sauron’s interests, though this varies by individual and the extent of exposure.
Grants the owner wraith-like powers such as: invisibility, unnaturally long lifespan, and understanding of black speech.
Grants Sauron (or an equally skilled warlock) immense infuence over the owners of the other rings, including mind reading and partial control.
tl;dr: The ring exists as a tool to control the other wearers and is functionally useless to Sauron when he’s not wearing it. The other properties of the ring basically amount to a contingency plan… though it’s not actually well established just how intentional vs. accidental some of these auxiliary effects were.
I’d love to… but unfortunately that’s more-or-less the extent of what Tolkien has ever written about the One Ring. Tolkien was ultimately writing about Sauron (i.e.: the lord of the rings) and the evil miasma besetting Middle Earth which the lord personally embodied. Viewed through that perspective, the ring is merely a storytelling tool for imposing Sauron’s shadow upon our heroes without compromising his dramatic weight as the big bad.
With that being said, the One Ring became foundational in shaping the modern incarnation of what TV Tropes has dubbed the “Artifact of Doom”, though I’m more partial to the OSP classification of “Cursed Artifact” which focuses more on specifically malevolent & varyingly sentient magical artifacts (e.g.: the Monkey’s Paw, the Picture of Dorian Gray, Nightblood, Gonne, SCP-055). One of the curses (heh) of this particular trope is that it’s quite hard to stake the dramatic weight of a full narrative upon them, since they tend to lose their mystique as the audience gets more familiar – this works very well for short stories, though!
The concept of “fate warping” power, on the other hand, has caught on significantly less in western fantasy. This is actually kind of odd by historical standards because we can see similar explorations of the concept in both eastern and western mythology (e.g.: the (Chinese) Red Thread of Fate vs. the (Greek) Thread of Human Fate). It’s actually a bit of an unexplained mystery as to why the theme only fell out of favor in the western traditions!
Weeb that I am, I would be remiss not to mention the intricate mechanical and thematic power of fate in JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure – specifically in the context of Araki’s (fantastically bizzare) commentaries on justice, power, truth, and inequality which take center stage in parts 4-6. One of my favorite stories of all-time is the weighty JoJo Part 5 epilogue – “Sleeping Slaves” – because it makes such an eloquent and powerful statement about the roles of fate & heroic self-determination in the preceding story.
Biblo not skewering Gollum the first time he met him was kind of understandable and very merciful of him, the fact that no one else did it makes me question the approach to logic people in Middle Earth have.
Literally, my reaction as a soldier of whatever nation when I see Gollum would be ‘ew’, stab
You joke but the disregard for physics in the lord of the rings trilogy was astounding; giving an item to another person is a free action, thus if you create a line of people all the way to mt doom, you can pass the ring all the way from the shire to mt doom in six seconds at the speed of light; heck if the last person in the line just throws the ring at the eye of Sauron it would be like a kinetic weapon with the destructive force of the deathstar.
This is the LOTR equivalent of berdly-actually “ACTUALLY the transporter can do almost anything in Star Trek and should be used constantly to solve every problem and renders every other technology on the show obsolete, including the spaceships themselves” and it is only cute in very small doses.
The original was “why didn’t the eagles fly to mordor and drop the ring in the top of the volcano” which was funnier the first time than the thousandth time. You’re right that these witty workarounds are only funny the first time and tire quickly.
The answer is that the eagles are theologically angels in LotR and both sapient and very susceptible to the Ring, and having a flying Sauron-replacement is not an improvement.
I thought it was that the eagles were basically demigods and they didn’t originally help frodo for the same reason we don’t regularly help carry ants back to their mound with food but then after Gandalf came back he was able to convince them
He’s got the Nazguls riding the Fellbeasts as well as the fact that if the big ass eagles flew directly at Mount Doom, everyone would see them and orcs would be swarming the mountain before they could land.
It was originally introduced because the show’s shuttlecraft prop was not quite ready for the early episodes and was too expensive to easily lug around later. That’s it. That’s why. And now we’re stuck with it and the smug “ACTUALLY” types that remind us constantly at what the tech magic could/should do.
The transporter basically requires it to be a clear sunny day with nothing unexpected in the way to function properly, and even in those conditions we see it malfunction quite a lot. TBH if I were in Starfleet I would invent a religion that eschews transporter use and take a shuttle everywhere because they seem safer.
Yes. There could have been a thousand things that could of happened and then we wouldn’t have had this book, or the trilogy, or the landscape of modern day fantasy as we know it.
Was magic ring ever explained on a technical level? I thought all we know is it wants to be with sauron and it makes angels shit themselves.
For all we know putting it on a mouse gives everyone mouse nightmares and make them worship the mouse as mouse king before they take it straight to sauron.
That, or Boromir would FUCK THAT MOUSE UP and take the ring for himself
The ring can obviously influence people around the ringbearer and not just the ringbearer themselves, as seen by Boromir and Faramir being tempted by it and Smeagle killing his friend for it.
Hobbits are just very good natured and resistant to the evil influence of the ring, especially Sam it seems
Now I’m picturing Boromir cornering the mouse, drawing his sword, and stating “thou hast squeaked thy last squeak” as the mouse runs back and forth in the corner, trying to escape.
Tolkien stated that “Maia is the name of the Kin of the Valar, but especially of those of lesser power than the 9 great rulers”. In the Valaquenta, Tolkien wrote that the Maiar are “spirits whose being also began before the world, of the same order as the Valar but of less degree”.
Basically the same thing Sauron was before he made the rings and corrupted himself for power.
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