The Rings of Power | Magic in Middle-earth

[Music] hey squad welcome back as part of my ongoing project to look at the uses of magic in middle earth today i'm going to talk about the rings of power including the three elven rings the 7 and 9 that ended up in the hands of dwarves and men and the one ruling ring made by sauron himself the rings of power have some unique features among magical phenomena in tolkien's writings which means that instead of starting with the broad themes and applying them to specific cases we'll be approaching them in reverse trying to derive general principles from the details were given the rings are some of the clearest examples of overt magic we see in middle earth and they are probably the closest tolkien comes to describing a relatively hard magic system since the rings are subject to a lot of conditions and rules that govern how they can be used in a particular context they are also very much bound to a particular time period generally the motifs of magic in tolkien for example light or music occur in every age of middle-earth even before the beginning of history and are used or recognized by every people the rings are different there is a finite number of them their use is narrowly defined and they only exist from midway through the second age through the end of the third some of this is because tolkien conceived of the rings separately from the rest of middle earth and had to sort of graft them into his created universe magical items especially magical gems and jewelry are common in tolkien's earliest legends that would later become the silmarillion but the first appearance of any of the rings of power was in the hobbit which was initially a children's book tolkien wrote for his family's amusement although he included references to the much darker and more complex stories of his serious project according to biographer humphrey carpenter he likely did not intend the hobbit to be explicitly set in the same world as the silmarillion certainly tolkien had at first no intention that the comfortable world of bilbo baggins would be related in any way to the vast mythological landscape of the silmarillion like the dragons dwarves shapeshifters and goblins that appear in the hobbit the ring that bilbo acquired from gollum was just another example of a common folkloric trope that tolkien threw into the story but when his publishers started asking him for a sequel to the hobbit after they rejected his silmarillion drafts tolkien struggled to find a plausible motivation for the plot since the hobbit was originally a contained story that left very few loose ends there weren't many elements to expand upon he couldn't resurrect smaug or introduce some new dragon out of nowhere because that would make the events of the hobbit feel pointless he imagined bilbo needing to find a wife to avoid an inheritance crisis but that sounds anticlimactic and a little bit goofy he considered having bilbo leave the shire because he'd run out of gold but that didn't sit very well with the character development bilbo shows by the end of his adventures tolkien needed something that would link the motivation for the plot of the sequel to the events of the hobbit in a way that felt logical and allowed him to raise the stakes but would not invalidate bilbo's achievements and eventually tolkien hit on bilbo's magic ring magic rings are common in global legends and myths and tolkien would have been familiar with several examples that seem to have influenced him pretty directly for example there are legends about the biblical figure king solomon owning a ring that allowed him to control spirits in the republic the philosopher plato recounts a myth about a ring which could turn its wearer invisible to make the point that even it apparently just man would be tempted to commit wicked deeds if he could not be held to account for them the phrase ring giver is a metaphorical reference or kenning that denotes a great lord or king in the anglo-saxon poetic tradition including in the poem beowulf a noted influence on tolkien this was due to the ancient practice of giving out arm and neck rings to one's valued vassals or warriors which were seen as marks of honor and signs of a bond of loyalty between the ring giver and the ring wearer in norse mythology we meet the figure of andvari a dwarf who lives under a waterfall and has a strong affinity with fish he owns a ring which gives its bearer the power to amass gold when this is stolen from him and vary curses the ring to bring ruin to its possessor and finally we have the ring of sylvianus an archaeological find that likely belonged to a british roman of the 4th century and which it seems was stolen from its owner in the 1920s an archaeologist consulted tolkien on the translation of some tablets excavated from a temple which asked the god nodens to curse whoever had stolen sylvianis ring the god nodens is believed to be the same as the celtic god nura who is also known as the silver-handed which would also become the english translation of the name of tolkien's elvin ringsmith killer brimbour so tolkien's inspirations suggested that the magic ring of invisibility which bilbo found would also be connected with theft a curse some kind of control or servitude and corruptability to align with this new more foreboding conception tolkien famously tweaked the chapter riddles in the dark to make gollum more sinister and more attached to the ring but he gives even this an in-universe explanation by claiming that the disparate accounts were in fact due to the ring's corruptive power which impelled bilbo to lie about how he'd gotten it another element that emerged was tolkien's decision to expand upon the hints and references to his silmarillion stories that had found their way into the hobbit for example the reference to the sinister powerful necromancer in letters tolkien wrote before he began the lord of the rings he identifies the necromancer as the character sauron who'd also appeared in tolkien's latest version of the tale of baron and luthien it was becoming clear to tolkien that the creative energy of the hobbit depended on the juxtaposition of the simple and humble against an epic backdrop that hinted at distant histories warning his publisher that he could not predict what the hobbit sequel would look like he wrote mr baggins began as a comic tale and got drawn into the edge of the mythology so that even sauron the terrible peeped over the edge and what more can hobbits do they can be comic but their comedy is suburban unless it is set against things more elemental but the real fun about orcs and dragons to my mind was before their time so bilbo's ring would have to serve two narrative functions linking the hobbit with its sequel plus tying back to tolkien's existing mythology which the characters in his novels would see as the remote but still very real past and which would become relevant as the comic hobbits became ever more deeply involved with the fate of the wide world connecting sauron with bilbo's ring satisfies both of these there are a few more concerns that help determine the nature of the rings for one thing none of the characters including some of the wisest initially recognized the ring bilbo finds as an extremely dangerous artifact of doom and to make this uncertainty reasonable that must mean that other magic rings exist the ring must be powerful enough to justify the undertaking of a daring quest but the protagonists must not be able to use more than the merest fraction of that power or else the plot loses any semblance of tension if you are wise to some of tolkien's favorite themes like death sacrifice pride corruptability and creation you could probably guess a few more functions of the ring but i think at this point i've demonstrated that the nature of the rings of power and the unusually specific rules governing their use are determined by the needs of tolkien's narrative in a way that other examples of magic are not the inclusion of radiant gems and enchanting songs seem more motivated by their aesthetic or even metaphysical fitness to the story the rings demonstrate tolkien's novelistic pragmatism i bring all this up because it gives context to just how complicated the ring lore gets and helps explain why some of the most important details about rings are widely scattered and hard to track down tolkien goes a step further by giving us some very good in-universe reasons that the rings remain so mysterious no character in the story has a complete understanding of exactly how the rings work except sauron and possibly killebremore who spoiler alert dies pretty early on what ring lore is possessed by the elves and wizards is kept as secret as possible even from other elves much less from men and dwarves on top of this the reader sees almost everything concerning the rings from a hobbit's eye view that is from the perspective of the most grounded least magically gifted characters and finally most of the rings are deceitful and tend to leverage a person's noblest impulses and deepest temptations which makes it very hard to tell which reported thoughts feelings and actions are truly due to the ring and which are simply due to a character's personal fears and weaknesses especially in the face of potentially untold power nevertheless the genius of the rings is that despite being a pretty obvious graft from other mythic traditions tolkien is able to fit them very neatly into the context of middle-earth admittedly he had to work out a few thousand extra years of history to do it but i think he made a pretty good job of it after the defeat of morgoth and the ruin of belarian during the time period tolkien now designated the second age the elves who remain in middle-earth particularly the noldor are trying their best to establish new kingdoms and heal the damage done to the land by morgoth they find that this is a lot more challenging to do than it would be in valinor and tolkien reports they thus became obsessed with fading the mode in which the changes of time the law of the world under the sun was perceived by them meanwhile sauron formerly among morgoth's chief lieutenants has gone into hiding in the east after around a thousand years he disguises himself as anatar a fair but mysterious figure and visits the elves offering to show them some techniques for holding back corruption and decay some of the elves have actually learned from the mistakes of the past and are in no hurry to trust a beautiful stranger with an offer that seems too good to be true but the smiths of aragon headed by the master craftsman keller brimbour accept anatar's teachings which eventually lead to the forging of magical rings eventually the elvid smiths produce 16 rings of power after which anatar makes himself scarce without anatar's knowledge kelebrimbor forges three rings of his own more powerful than the others bringing the count to 19. in his own realm of mordor sauron forges a ruling ring designed to allow him to dominate the wheels of the elves wearing the other rings to make a ring powerful enough to do so requires that he invest it with a good deal of his own native strength however his plan goes awry because as he speaks aloud the words that are inscribed on the ring the other ring users hear him this in part helps explain why the elves at the council of elrond will have such a strong reaction to gandalf reciting the ring verse yes it's in the black speech which is pretty repulsive but it's not like you see elves cowering and stopping their ears when they face orc and goblin armies that would be a pretty maladaptive strategy more important than the language is the fact that the ring inscription is a kind of spell declaring the purpose to which sauron permanently dedicated so much of his being and the last time the elves heard it it almost resulted in their wholesale enslavement luckily when sauron's malice is revealed the elves immediately take off their rings and cease using them while sauron's grand scheme of controlling the elves through the rings has failed he is still incredibly powerful and tolhin says that while he wore the ring his power on earth was actually enhanced especially now that the elves can't use their rings to counteract him without risking his domination so sauron marshals the army of orcs and corrupt men he's been building over the last few centuries and marches north ruining aragian and acquiring the other rings at this point sauron knows about the three other rings made without his input and he is particularly desperate to get his hands on them knowing that even without being worn or directly used they will strengthen their bearers and unless he can get his hands on them they will remain beyond his power alas kelebrimbor has already sent them into the keeping of the wisest and most powerful elven rulers and refuses to divulge any details of them before his messy death sauron nearly succeeds in overrunning the elves anyway but eventually he is defeated and returns to mordor still in possession of the ruling ring and most of the others there's a bit of textual confusion on that last point which we'll get into later since he's blown his cover with the elves he gives these rings away to men and dwarves and through these rings he succeeds in corrupting the nine men who will become the nazgul saron keeps possession of the ruling ring up until the end of the war of the last alliance when he is physically overthrown by elendil and gilgallot elendil's son isildor cuts the ring from his body and takes it as payment for the lives of his father and brother but later loses the ring in the river anduin the rest of the story you probably know a couple millennia later it falls into gollum's hands bilbo gets a hold of it five centuries after that and then frodo inherits it and takes it to mount doom where it is destroyed when the ruling ring ceases to exist sauron is reduced to a mere wisp of spirit and the power of all the other rings is ended again this complex history is great for using the rings as a credible source of epic conflict while giving tolkien a lot of narrative flexibility and keeping suspense high but it also makes understanding the specific powers of the different rings especially tricky nevertheless i'm going to try first and most mysterious are the lesser rings made by the elves gandalf tells frodo that long ago many elven rings were made magic rings as you call them and they were of course of various kinds some more potent and some less the lesser rings were only essays in the craft before it was full grown and to the elven smiths they were but trifles apart from the fact of their existence we are told almost nothing more about them gandalf's assumption that bilbo's ring is one of the lesser rings is an important plot point so it must at least be plausible that some of the lesser rings convert the power of invisibility or at least of concealment and furthermore that some of the lesser rings at least might have been plain unadorned gold since one of the marks of the other rings of power is that each had their gems another distinction of the lesser rings is that apparently none of them had such pronounced power to confer long life as the great rings did one of the ways gandalf tries to figure out the identity of bilbo's ring is to observe him for signs of aging but bilbo comes from a particularly long-lived family so it takes quite a while for this to become clear and i cannot be the only one who finds that a little bit funny a possible appearance of one of the lesser rings is the one gandalf notices saruman is wearing saruman claims to be a ring maker so he may have made this ring but since i don't trust zaraman i think it's also plausible that this is an aspirational claim rather than a factual one and that during his deep research into ringlore he uncovered one of the minor rings which he implies he created in an attempt to browbeat gandalf next we have the 19 great rings or rings of power which can further be subdivided into the 16 made with sauron's direct input and the three calibrimbore made in secret all of these are bound by the power of sauron's ruling ring so when that ceases to exist so will the power of the other rings and everything achieved through them all the rings of power the three the seven the nine and even the one share certain traits they all represent an externalization of personal inherent power and from a philosophical perspective are indistinguishable in tolkien's eyes from what he calls the machine no matter what form it takes or what mechanism it uses this externalization inherently comes with certain payoffs and drawbacks in one of his letters he explains the rings as a mythical way of representing the truth that potency or perhaps rather potentiality if it is to be exercised and produce results has to be externalized and so as it were passes to a greater or lesser degree out of one's direct control less abstractly the rings all share the basic functions of the prevention or slowing of decay the preservation of what is desired or loved or its semblance but they also enhanced the natural powers of a possessor thus approaching magic a motive easily corruptable into evil a lust for domination additionally all the rings appear to have something to do with the distinctions between the scene and the unseen realms which manifests in some form of invisibility either of the wearer or of the ring itself we'll be looking into specific examples later but at this point what needs to be established is that the invisibility rings grant is not really simple invisibility when frodo puts the ring on at weathertop though everything else remained as before dim and dark the shapes of the nazgul became terribly clear gandalf later explains to him that while frodo wore the ring you were half in the wraith world yourself and they might have seized you you could see them and they could see you it's not that someone who puts on a ring ceases to exist in the realm of the scene entirely we already know from bilbo's exploits that one's voice can still be heard objects can still be manipulated and blows to one's head will still result in concussion even the nazgul can still summon the material presence to support cloaks and ride horses but mortals cannot make full use of the power of a ring without being drawn into the unseen realm or without losing some of their ability to perceive the scene another important and often overlooked point is that these rings were all made by elves and presumably mostly intended for elvish use this often gets lost in adaptations the 1978 bakshi film and the jackson lord of the rings trilogy both show the rings distributed to their different bearers before they tell of sauron forging the ring this appears to be an homage to the famous poem on the frontispiece to the lord of the rings books you know the one it starts three rings for elven kings under the sky but this has led to a perception that the rings were intended all along for the use of the various peoples who end up with them the actual text suggests the opposite gandalf refers to all magic rings as elven rings it's sauron who gives the seven rings to the dwarves and the nine to men and that's only after he has sacked a reggian to get a hold of them moreover he distributes them to dwarves and men only because the elves his original target failed to be ensnared by them this underscores that the rings are more similar than different and suggests that many of the perceived differences in their function are due to who or what is wielding them and under what circumstances we know the most about the three elven rings including their names their bearers and their appearances vilija the ring of air ends up born by elrond and is made of gold and set with a sapphire it is sometimes mentioned as being the chief or mightiest of the rings nenya the ring of water is mithril set with a stone of adamant an archaic term for diamond and is worn by galadriel narya the ring of fire set with a ruby is given to gandalf by kierden who tells him herewith maybe thou shalt rekindle hearts to the valor of old in a world that grows chill these three rings have some special properties that set them apart from the others they were made without sauron's awareness or input by kelebrimbor and while they share the powers of preservation and enhancement of power they do not have the power to dominate that marks the other 16 rings though i would argue they might still give their owners an exaggerated air of authority at times even before he becomes the white gandalf often seems to grow in power and authority such as when he confronts bilbo over the ring after his long-expected birthday party galadriel is famous perhaps infamous at this point for the moment when she rejects the ring's temptation from the ring that she wore there issued a great light that illuminated her alone and left all else dark she stood before frodo seeming now tall beyond measurement and beautiful beyond enduring terrible and worshipful now these are very powerful and comparatively magical characters even without any consideration of rings and there are other characters who suddenly and radically change their bearing from time to time but at least we can say that the bearers of the three seem able to unveil a very intimidating aura on command tolkien noted in a letter that the three rings do not confer invisibility which seems a bit obvious galadriel and gandalf must be wearing their rings quite often and they do not seem to pop out of existence however the rings themselves seem invisible when they are worn we never see the three on the hands of their bearers until after the ruling ring has been destroyed when the three rings having lost their powers become clearly visible after looking into her mirror frodo assisted by the one that he bears suddenly becomes aware of the ring that galadriel has presumably been wearing this whole time when she raises her hands in defiance of sauron sam who is also present only sees a star through her finger galadriel attributes this to frodo's growing strength of will combined with his possession of the ruling ring it's possible the concealment of the rings is a mere goetic illusion but the weight given to invisibility as concerns the rings overall makes me doubt this explanation so possibly in the case of the three the rings themselves enter the unseen realm without dragging their bearers out of the scene which makes sense because all the known wearers of the three are either maiar or elves of great power and lineage who gandalf says live at once in both worlds and against both the scene and the unseen they have great power the most direct use of rings in general seems to take place in the unseen realm so those elves powerful enough to already be present in both seen and unseen could make use of their rings without needing to vanish with their rings upon donning them even the other rings that are known for invisibility do not turn powerful bearers invisible sauron is quite conspicuous while wearing the one ring and tom bombadil someone else who seems to straddle the scene and unseen not only stays visible when he puts on the one but even appears to make it vanish and reappear a final point is the association of the three elven rings with the three primary elements of middle earth air water and earth or fire an association shared with the three silmarils no one is suggesting that elrond is secretly an airbender though that would be cool but there is some evidence that suggests the elemental associations of the three are relevant to their use from smoke rings to fireworks to sheets of white flame to incendiary pine cones gandolf's magic takes pretty fiery appearances and tolkien notes in a letter that he intended this to be associated with naria the kindler of courage and hope likewise ninja is an appropriate ring for galadriel to wear water is the element most resistant to morgoth's influence and umo the vala of rivers and oceans also frequently brings messages or visions galadriel's mirror and file both rely on water and the realm of lothlorien itself is bordered by rivers nega is set with adamant which means diamond but as tolkien well new also describes a firm and unyielding will which is a quality that allows galadriel to resist the temptation of the ruling ring the elves are even said to have perceived that vilia must be borne by elrond upon whose house the stars of heaven most brightly shown for precisely that reason so it seems to me that the qualities of the three rings corresponding to their namesake elements is more than coincidence but i don't have any more direct evidence for how those associations function or whether the other rings might have similar distinctions speaking of other rings we now need to turn to the 16 rings that sauron did have a hand in making in addition to the general powers already named sauron gave these rings a special power to dominate other wills and his influence on them is considered a taint something that renders the rings more perilous to use even without the power of the one allowing sauron to control them directly seven of these rings were given to dwarf lords and while tolkien is notoriously cagey on the subject of dwarves who are supposedly quite secretive we do know of a dwarven tradition reported in appendix a that the ring possessed by the line of durian which would later be inherited by threanon taken from him in the dungeons of dulguldor was a gift directly from the elves and not from sauron it's entirely possible that tolkien would have later discounted this as a mere flattering legend but the fact is the dwarves were much less affected by rings than other races whether they got them from sauron or not there is no record of any dwarven ring bearers becoming wraiths or turning invisible that is in the final version some of tolkien's early drafts of lord of the rings reference both dwarvish and elvish versions of nazgul nor did the dwarves have increased lifespan or decreased vitality in appendix a we hear the only power over them that the rings wielded was to inflame their hearts with a greed of gold and precious things essentially wearing a ring of power just makes a dwarf dwarfier there are some facts that would account for this oule the vala who made the dwarves went out of his way to make them from their beginning of a kind to resist most steadfastly any domination though they could be slain or broken they could not be reduced to shadows enslaved to another will dwarvish souls also have an unusual relationship with their bodies on the one hand dwarves could be considered mortal like men their death is inevitable but on the other hand our best guess is that dwarven souls do not pass out of arda entirely and a tradition among dwarves tells that their spirits dwell in a special section of the halls of mundos set aside for them by owle the dwarf's greatest ancestral king durin is also said to be literally reborn in his descendants the final distinction the dwarves bear is they were conceived of and created within the history of arda and not before it as was the case for elves and men owlet created the bodies of the dwarves before aru granted them sentience motivated in part by a desire to share his great love of the materials of which the world is made so they are physically and spiritually one with the substance of arda in a way that elves and men are not all this gives some explanation for why on the one hand the dwarves seem fairly immune to the negative effects of the rings but on the other they don't seem to use their rings for anything particularly spectacular my hypothesis is that dwarves exist almost entirely on the scene plane both in body and in spirit and it is beyond the power of the ring to forcibly sever them from that realm all the ring can really do for them is to enhance their existing natural talents and bend those talents in a direction that will eventually serve sauron this is something that is seen even enduran's ring the one that supposedly didn't fall into sauron's possession until late in the third age the dwarves now believe that sauron by his arts had discovered who had this ring and that the singular misfortunes of the heirs of durian were largely due to his malice throar is driven to re-enter the orc thronged balrog haunted realm of moria because he is a little crazed perhaps with age and misfortune and long brooding or the ring it may be was turning to evil now that its master was awake driving him to folly and destruction the restlessness of his son thrain is also attributed to the ring and it leads him to set out for erebor passing close by merkwood where sauron abducts him his ring is taken and his mind eventually breaks due to torment which i prefer to think was the torment of seeing the ring that had held such influence over his mind on the hand of sauron finally in the nine rings given to men we see clearer examples of how the rings function when possessed by mortals like us first and most obviously mortals who wear rings get jerked straight into wraith world whether they choose to or not this is unlike the dwarves who don't seem able to access much of the unseen realm even with rings and unlike the powerful elves einer and bombadils that are already active enough on both planes that they can use rings without having to become unseen to do so i'm attributing this to the fact that men's spirits are distinct from their bodies and yet do not have the same degree of control over their bodies as the souls of elves do to dissolve a man's soul from his body holy would result not in the man's disembodiment but in his death and his soul's permanent departure from arda so to give human souls access to the unseen realm requires that the rings drag some aspect of their bodies along for the ride as it were tolkien mentions that this power of making invisible things visible was one of the elements directly derived from sauron which supports the idea of the invisibility of mortal wearers being itself a form of force or domination we are told in of the rings of power that those who used the nine rings became mighty in their day kings sorcerers and warriors of old they obtained glory and great wealth so it would seem that rings give men at least the semblance of these abilities however a mortal who uses or even possesses a ring of power becomes increasingly obsessed with it tolkien equates mastery of the ring with being mastered by it so the more you exercise your own power through the ring the more control you cede to it until you are unable to function except through the ring on top of this is the ring's power of preservation and resistance to the effects of time which is something they have in common with even the unsullied elven rings now shown in a different and devastating context tolkien notes that every kind has its span and in the third age the souls of men are definitely intended to depart physical reality if not by choice than by forced severance from their disintegrating bodies after a century or so the rings confer preservation of the physical body albeit in a twisted and attenuated form such that the soul does not need to forsake it and once someone's will is fully enslaved to a ring they cannot die by choice either even if they wanted to the logical conclusion of this process is the ringwraiths eternally bound to the realm of the scene even though they've long since lost the ability to participate in or even perceive it whatever agency they still possess so closely bound to the action of their rings as to be indistinguishable from them aragorn tells the hobbits that the ringwraiths do not see the world of light as we do but our shapes cast shadows in their minds which only the noon sun destroys due to their wraithishness they have a permanent sensitivity to any unshielded uses of power in the unseen realm this is why it's dangerous for frodo to put on the ring near them another power they seem permanently blessed or cursed with is the ability to terrorize and dishearten their enemies with the black breath which is a double-edged sword because it's involuntary and unless the nas will take pains to conceal themselves the terror they inspire alerts people to their presence even when they are unclad and invisible another variable we can't neatly account for is the degree of sauron's control which actually appears to involve several degrees of separation when sauron gave the nine rings to men he still had the ruling ring and so could read the minds of the men using their rings and exert direct control over them even before they became wraiths eventually the nine fell under the thraldom of the ring that they bore and under the domination of the one which was saurons so the nine are immediately controlled by their rings which are dominated by the one ring and the nine are of course aware that sauron is the one's master but this by itself is an imperfect domination especially when sauron loses the one ring tolkien speculated that where the nazgul less the witch king to face off against frodo at the cracks of doom despite sauron very urgently wanting them to get the ring away from the lava they would not have been wholly immune from its power i do not think they could have attacked him with violence nor laid hold upon him or taken him captive on the other hand in the same letter tolkien notes that through their nine rings which he held sauron had primary control of their wills there are several references to sauron holding or possessing the nine rings and while some interpret this metaphorically i think it's literal this explains why no rings are found after the nazgul are defeated in the brunen or after the witch king's defeat i think this also fits best with what we know about the relationship of the 9 to the 1. i find it unlikely that sauron could trust the nazgul to hunt down the master ring itself without directly possessing their rings sauron's possession of the nine rings that had wholly dominated the nazgul by this point would have cemented his control over them even after he lost the one ring so the nazgul truly became mere extensions of sauron's will little more than the manifestation of their ring's power this leads us back to a consideration of the ruling ring forged by sauron for the purpose of discovering and binding all the other rings and their bearers the one ring contained the powers of all the others and controlled them so that its wearer could see the thoughts of all those that used the lesser rings could govern all that they did and in the end could utterly enslave them if properly wielded this last detail is an important one because having poured most of his power into its creation sauron is the only one who can fully exploit the one ring's potential in most of tolkien's magical devices the affinity one has for an object and the right one has to use it help determine the use one can make of it the palanteria are a good example aragorn and denethor each rightful heirs of numenor in their own way have a right to use the palantiri which prevents sauron from directly overpowering them through this avenue even though he undoubtedly possesses the greater strength with regards to the ring sauron as its maker has the greatest right to the power that is after all originally his even when the ring is lost tolkien writes even if he did not wear it that power existed and was in rapport with himself he was not diminished laying aside sauron's undeniable mastery questions of right do come up a lot with regard to the ring isildor justifies keeping the ring as a wear guild in honor of his slain kinsmen smegel argues passionately that the ring belonged to him as a birthday present justifying his murder of his friend deagle with this rationale even after his finessing of the truth is uncovered bilbo is still at pains to argue that he technically did win the ring as a prize in his riddle contest with gollum the prologue of the lord of the rings goes so far as to include a tangent on the laws of the riddle game specifying that gollum had to surrender the ring much is made of the fact that bilbo freely leaves the ring to frodo gandalf can see and handle the ring with apparently little trouble but is horrified when the hobbits try to give it to him sam undergoes a lengthy debate with himself when he has to dare to take the ring from what he believes is frodo's dead body even in la florian when the whole fellowship is very much in galadriel's power it's only when frodo offers to give the ring to galadriel freely that she suffers her last greatest temptation but the most important factor is probably the raw power of the person using the ring this is partly a simple question of mathematics if the ring does not give a fixed amount of power but rather magnifies the talents someone already possesses well it's just not going to be able to do much with someone who is naturally weak or ignorant plus a certain amount of strength and skill is required to even use the ring for its intended purposes so the potential of the ring is most dependent on who is using it tolkien actually speculated on this in one of his letters and a combination of this and my own paltry ring lore gives us the following scenarios the simplest and most terrifying is the ring being used as intended by its maker sauron while sauron has possession of the ring he can use all of his native power and he can use it more efficiently for his intended ends control defense and domination because so much of his power has been put into the apparatus of the ring he will know the details of everything achieved by the other rings and can determine the outcome of anything that involves their power he can dominate the mind of anyone attempting to use any of the rings including the three that he was presumably unaware of when he forged his ring if the ring is lost sauron loses the specific bonuses the ring grants but he still has access to all his power he just needs to use it the old-fashioned way it'd be a bit like if you had a digital and a physical copy of a report that you wanted to revise if your computer crashes you still have all the information in the report but to do anything with it is a lot more time consuming sauron poured a lot of his power into the ruling ring but it's still his power he's still capable of taking physical form exerting control over his armies and spreading fear distrust and deceit he just can't do these things as efficiently as he could if the ring were facilitating them sauron would still control everyone whose ring he holds like the nazgul and he would still have influence over the effects of the 16 rings that he had a part in making plus everything achieved through the one he loses the ability to directly dominate other ring bearers and as long as he does not have access to the ruling ring he has no say in how the three elven rings are deployed something their bearers exploit when it becomes clear that the ring is no longer in sauron's possession if the ring were to fall into the hands of someone at least as powerful as gandalf sauron is potentially in a world of hurt such a person could feasibly contest directly with sauron for mastery of the one ring and were he to overcome sauron then as the new master of the one he could rest the power that sauron imbued it with out of his control with the result that would have been for sauron the same as the destruction of the ring for him it would have been destroyed taken from him forever at this point the ring's master would become master of all that sauron had learned or done since the making of the one ring even though one who mastered the ring in this way would gain absolute control over the power that sauron formerly possessed the technique of using the ring would still result in a tendency toward evil ends and this combined with the temptations of absolute power would result in the bearer becoming as corrupt in their own way as saron was but for sauron himself this is still decidedly sub-optimal ending with him as a powerless ghost another potential problem for sauron though one that would be more frustrating than devastating is that a powerful elf or even a rogue maya would get a hold of the ring these individuals would likely not be able to wholly master the ring so sauron would remain sauron with as much power as if the ring had remained lost but someone like galadriel or elrond already operating on both the scene and unseen levels of reality would probably not be forced into invisibility or have their access to the scene realm restricted they would have sufficient wisdom and strength to use the ring in opposition of sauron's immediate goals and could use the power of the ring to defeat mordor militarily eventually the ring would enslave even their wills but this could take a while and having spent several centuries building up his current empire sauron would be rather put out if he were defeated so he'd rather not see the ring fall into galadriel's hands already these two distinct scenarios indicate that there are many modes by which a person can interact with the ring sauron or someone who proves to be of equivalent power can master the ring that is place all of the power it contains entirely under his or her control but even someone with lesser power though unable to master the ring could still effectively wield it almost anyone foolhardy enough can claim the ring which amounts to declaring their intent to possess it and use it as they see fit this usually signals that psychological identification with the ring that amounts to surrendering to it by wearing the ring mortals are pulled into the unseen realm making themselves visible and therefore vulnerable to sauron's perception and that of any other spiritually gifted individuals but it's important to note here that despite what the film suggests visible does not necessarily mean seen much less magically levitated to sauron's great flaming eyeball sauron has to be looking in the right direction geography and proximity have to physically allow it and as always the intent of the wearer matters proximity to the ring and knowledge of what it is appears to affect people's relationship to it frodo doesn't really give much thought to the ring or often use it until after gandalf describes its significance and there are multiple examples of people struggling against temptation after they get an opportunity to take the ring even boromir only fails his final test when he is alone with frodo but on the other hand despite what the films might suggest merely coming into contact with the ring does not guarantee a person's corruption aragorn and pharamir both shrug off any temptation to use the ring gandalf handles it in bag end someone picks it up to put it around frodo's neck while he sleeps in rivendell and sam actually wears it for a while and then gives it back to frodo with barely a hiccup possessing the ring apparently requires a person to justify their ownership of it to themselves and one can draw on some of the ring's powers merely by possessing it as frodo does when dealing with gollum on the slopes of mount doom where although he is not wearing the ring he briefly appears as a figure robed in white at its breast it held a wheel of fire possession is also apparently sufficient to trigger the ring's preservative powers and mortals will continue to feel these effects even after the ring has passed from their guardianship when gollum loses his ring he is already over 5 centuries old and he survives without the ring for another 60 hard years well beyond the span of even the heartiest hobbit he also states that when the ring is destroyed and its power ends he too will be destroyed as the effects of his age will catch up with him all at once and when the ring is destroyed bilbo who just a year ago had seemed nearly as sharp as ever despite being almost 130 years old suffers a rapid decline arwen tells frodo you know the power of that thing which is now destroyed and all that was done by that power is now passing away but your kinsmen possessed this thing longer than you he is ancient in years now according to his kind and indeed when the hobbits next see him he is a drowsy easily confused frail individual as befits someone at the end of an extraordinarily long lifespan when gandalf first tells frodo about the ring frodo asks in horror if bilbo was going to be okay and gandalf admits he isn't sure he doesn't believe that bilbo would continue the wrathification process having freely given up the ring and suggests that he might live on for years quite happily just stop as he was when he parted with it but it would seem from the evidence that if the ring were not destroyed neither gollum nor bilbo might have resumed the normal aging process and as we've seen with the nine when mortals achieve indefinite longevity they eventually turn into wraiths so the prospect of gollum and bilbo and even frodo and sam being denied the release of death as long as the one ring exists even after they surrendered possession of it remains a deeply upsetting possibility some of you might be remembering that another mortal did carry and even use the one ring isildur the one who cut the ring from sauron's hand in the first place but isildor was slain which appears to be a possibility for any mortal ring bearer in light of this bilbo's sudden thirst for adventure as the ring becomes more draining takes on a more sinister light rivendell apparently offers him some respite but his original plan was to go engage in risky behavior with no apparent goal and no plan to return perhaps subconsciously he was seeking a clean violent death even the witch king though his death was foretold was defeated through fairly straightforward means a distraction from behind and a sword through the face from the first woman to threaten his alpha vibe in all his 4 thousand years of disembodied peacocking on top of this we're told that the witch king may not have been thoroughly killed tolkien only refers to him as being reduced to impotence one possible explanation for this lies in the degree to which he was bound to his ring so as long as his ring had power that is as long as the one ring continued to exist some aspect of the witch king would also still have to exist albeit in a state that precluded him taking physical form in addition to longevity a person possessing the ring can draw on its powers of authority as well as begin to use it to gain knowledge and insight particularly regarding those things that the ring is most closely concerned with frodo for example perceives galadriel's ring despite not yet being strong enough to presume to read her mind in other places frodo reveals insights that may have been facilitated by the ring such as his growing understanding of gollum's nature gollum possesses an understanding of sauron's plans and a knowledge of mortar's geography that is uncanny even allowing for his explorations of that land sam while wearing the ring can understand the speech of the orcs perhaps the ring gave understanding of tongues or simply understanding especially of the servants of sauron its maker so that if he gave heed he understood and translated the thought to himself certainly the ring had grown greatly in power as it approached the places of its forging these considerations leave us with the most likely scenario that of an ignorant mortal of greater or lesser strength of will becoming the possessor of the ruling ring upon which all sauron's thought is bent meaning that as finding the ring becomes his primary goal all those beings and things under his domination to a greater or lesser extent will take steps to facilitate sauron's reclamation of the ring without even necessarily involving conscious thought or will gandalf notes the sinister watcher at the gates of moria just so happens to target the ring bearer despite the presence of nine other plump targets the ring will exert some growing psychological force on this bearer according to some of the factors described earlier as the ring exerts greater pressure on its user some discomfort is incurred isildor can't use the ring because it burns him to do so and bilbo describes the sensation of being butter scraped over too much bread gollum eventually found that the ring was too tiring to use very often left in possession of the ring a mortal bearer would eventually become wholly obsessed with it and with the powers of longevity it imparts at this point it's highly likely that the ring's inherent affinity with sauron would somehow compel the bearer to bring the ring within sauron's reed had gollum not been around to take the ring from frodo after he claimed it we would have seen an example of the culmination of such a process and while tolkien says that frodo had gained the maturity to more effectively wield the ring and could possibly stave off direct attacks from the nazgul he still had no hope of truly controlling it the outcome would have been a direct confrontation with sauron which would have resulted in frodo being pulverized there are still a few outstanding questions that i feel reasonably confident in answering many have suggested that the rings are sentient and indeed this language is used by characters in the book describing the rings looking after themselves choosing bearers calling for aid and trying to achieve goals in casual speech especially on complex matters people often attribute willfulness to inanimate objects i was temporarily made very anxious when my science teacher spoke of unstable molecules wanting to become stable but the teacher quickly assured me that the molecules were not so far as we knew sentient and the word want was only a shorthand for an observable tendency that could best be explained to lowly students like me through the metaphor of a desire this sounds very much like what gandalf's attitude toward frodo might have been when emphasizing how dangerous using his uncle's funny gold ring might be the rings may be capable of taking independent action in response to certain stimuli but i personally doubt they have what we would call a personality or consciousness insofar as they display tendencies i think this is technically just due to the nature of their existence and the programming of sauron we might be able to describe the ring as trying to return to sauron but the way it goes about it isn't very smart by betraying isildur it ends up lost in the river when it could have potentially let isildor take it all the way into rivendell and completed its corruption of him in close proximity to sauron's most powerful enemies it attracted gollum as its next bearer who carried it deep beneath the mountains and stopped using it for anything other than catching fish and strangling goblins another question is why it took sauron 500 years after the ring was found to locate it if wearing the ring exposes the user to sauron at his wraiths proximity is a factor here tolkien took the landscape of middle-earth very seriously even in the realm of the unseen things that are physically closer appear closer and things that are hundreds of miles away appear distant and heck things that are hidden under mountains may not be very visible at all moreover we have to remember that the most obvious effect of wearing the ring is invisibility so an innocent bearer would only be likely to wear the ring when they wanted its power of concealment and thus by default wearing the ring would have been an action motivated by the desire to hide so when bilbo slipped on his ring in merkwood because he wanted to be invisible to unfriendly eyes the ring might have done just that concealing him on the scene and unseen planes it may or may not also be relevant here that one of the few supposedly supernatural powers possessed by hobbits is their uncanny ability to go unnoticed by others as sauron's search grows more urgent and frodo becomes more aware of what using the ring implies his continued use of it becomes more and more risky especially in the presence of the nazgul again the naz will have been reduced to extensions of sauron's will to the point where one could even argue that nazgul are the means by which sauron uses the nine rings so if sirens will were generally bent on finding his ring the nazgul as manifestations of that will would awaken a corresponding intensification of the ring's tendency to bring about sauron's goals by making itself known in their presence this would be felt by the bearer as a burning desire to put the ring on and by a sick paradox the more the bearer rationally understands the ring the greater his capacity to make use of it which results in greater susceptibility to its temptations this would explain why bilbo can use the ring off and on for decades in the safety of the shire but every time frodo uses it or is tempted to use it gets riskier and riskier there are naturally more speculations to be made but while i have opinions on some of them i don't really have answers and ultimately i believe that's by design though the powers of the rings were conceived in service to his plot tolkien viewed the rings as an example of the temptation to dominate other wills including the will of nature itself for the sake of short-sighted and arrogant goals this deceptively pretentious device has led many to see the rings as metaphors for everything from opiate drugs to nuclear weapons but the very broadness of their applicability is what makes the ring so hard to define logically despite their elven origins the rings represent a very fundamental temptation of human nature and the terror they wreck takes its inspiration from our own darkest desires if you enjoyed this video sneak up behind 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Channel: GirlNextGondor

Views: 44,121

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Id: ygjKTz7dDBo

Length: 48min 38sec (2918 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 23 2022