I have always wondered why the ring was so powerful? What would hapen if Sauron got it? Would he just become super powerful and destroy Gondor himself? Would evil creatures become more powerful?
I have always wondered why the ring was so powerful? What would hapen if Sauron got it? Would he just become super powerful and destroy Gondor himself? Would evil creatures become more powerful?
Right, I forgot about that, but I don't believe he lost it again when the Ring was taken, as the movies seem to believe.
It seems likely that Sauron did lose his physical form after his defeat in the War of the Last Alliance. In killing Gil-galad and Elendil, he sustained such wounds that his physical body was close to death (though of course his spirit would endure in any case). Given time to recover with the Ring, he may have kept the form, but Isildur cut the Ring from his finger. It seems unlikely then, after all that, that Elrond and Isildur would have simply left his body on the battlefield while it was still living; so either his spirit had already fled, or they disposed of the body by burning it. Since the latter is not mentioned in the text, the former seems the more likely of the solutions.
Personally I believe the true power of the Ring to lie in it's connection to the wraith-world. I believe that Sauron was trying to somehow manipulate the connection to the wraith-world to allow him to further increase the strength of his army(by mixing their souls into the wraith world thus making them wraiths) and to eventually try and free Morgoth from the void... somehow.
I like that idea.
But Gollum says that he saw Sauron, and that he was missing a finger.
OneBehindTheHair wrote:
But Gollum says that he saw Sauron, and that he was missing a finger.
Spirit forms can be missing fingers too? Idk, it was just speculation. Perhaps Sauron looked dead enough to them but he later got up and kept going in the same body.
No, access to the wraith-world was just a side effect that happened to appear for mortals who used it. Sauron (and the Noldor who came from Valinor) could already see in the Unseen at will, and needed no Rings to do it.
Sauron was also unable to mix souls into the wraith-world, and didn't want Morgoth back. Their goals were different--Morgoth was a nihilistic, hotheaded madman, while Sauron was a collected, ordered, control freak. Having Morgoth return would see Sauron a servant again, and interfere with his divine restructering of the world for its greater efficiency and his supreme power.
Just a theory. I thought he was going to build off this side affect using the other powers as a mist to keep people from realizing his true plans. Your right on that last part, should've realized that earlier.
So, about Rings of Power: Men are the most easily corrupted by the Rings. Men have the greatest amount of choice in Tolkien's work, they cover the widest array of roles and cultures. This choice, however, have downsides. Men, not Elves, and only very, very rarely Dwarves, serve the powers of evil.
Dwarves are stubborn. Incredibly stubborn. Dwarves are so stubborn that the First Age dwarves stared down the Father of Dragons and didn't burn. They cannot be corrupted by the Rings, but Sauron does bend his will towards destroying the Dwarves (since he can't corrupt them). This results in the amplification of their greed, as well as an increase in their wealth-building skills.
Elves, of course, are also incorruptible, but not capable of fighting Sauron's full strength. Thus, they take off their Rings when Sauron forged the One.
As for why they have power...nobody knows why the Three, the Seven, and the Nine have power. The One, of course, has power because Sauron put his power (and, yes, part of his soul) into the Ring.
Remember Morgoth? When he was creating dragons, trolls, orcs etc, he poured an enormous amount of his own power/will into these things. By the end of the war of wrath when the Valar came to rescue middle earth from Morgoth, he was living in a crippled, worn body.
The same could be said of Sauron. He used his will/power to drive his conquest of middle earth. The ringwraiths only exsitsted as an exstention of Sauron's will, as a simple example.
Therefore, it is quite possible that when he taught the elves to create the rings of power, he was really teaching them to create rings that were connected to him as a power source. That is why when Sauron was destroyed, diminished in power for all time, the rings simply ceased to function.