So, I’m watching How It Should Have Ended Lord of the Rings:
And they have Eagles help drop the One Ring into Mount Doom in a very short amount of time. I've heard others mentions this, too. Would Sauron go down that easy?And, it occurs to me:
Saruman is still around and has an army.
Aragorn is not King of the West
Wormtongue still rules in Rohan
And what else?
You can’t trust an eagle with the One Ring, they’re too arrogant already.
An oversight by Tolkien and wasn’t in the direction he wanted to take his narrative.
I do not discuss PJ’s … “movies” on doctor’s orders.
But as regards the BOOK: it ain’t that kind of story. It’s a mythic quest, not a police procedural. You might as well ask why Atlas didn’t just let the sky rest on whatever mountain Herakles was standing on while subbing for him.
Anyway, the Eagles would have been too conspicuous, they might have been corrupted themselves, the Vala for whom they worked wouldn’t allow it because the Ring needed to be destroyed by mortal action, blah blah blah.
Saruman’s army is orcish, and will collapse when Sauron dies. Also, Saruman is tightly tied to Sauron via the Palantir of Orthanc, and when that bond is broken, Saruman will regain some of his reason. He’ll slap his forehead and cry, “I was almost in thrall to Sauron!” in great shame and woe. He’ll kiss and make up with Gandalf.
(Also, all of this is before he’s torn up the grounds of Isengard and pissed off the Ents.)
Wormtongue is also dependent on Saruman. With Saruman’s patronage withdrawn, Wormy will be less powerful. The Rohirrim will settle down to internal feuding, Theoden will get older and older, and, when he dies, if he names Wormtongue as his successor, there will be a nasty succession crisis. Eomer will be able to rally a bigger army than Wormtongue can, and so Eomer will be King by right of conquest. (And Theoden might not be so very far gone that he tries to supplant Eomer with Wormtongue.)
Denethor, too, is free from Sauron’s mind-control, and will regain his will and wit. Aragorn presents himself openly, brings out all the documentation of his ancestry, Denethor frowns, but has to accept it. “The King has returned out of the North…the pushy bugger. All hail the King.” Denethor will then retire to a villa in Dol Amroth, and subsequent audits will show a mysteriously depleted treasury in Minas Tirith.
i.e., neo-medieval “business as usual.”
Frodo, never having left the Shire, goes insane with boredom and becomes a serial killer of young hobbitesses that he lures deep into his burrow. Eventually even this gets to be boring, plus with the heat on him from the hobbit inspectors closing in, he eventually blows his brains out after drinking a bottle a bourbon. Hobbit CSI finds Frodo brains in his last glass of bourbon on the table, surrounded by various Hobbit bits from his victims.
Not the question.
I certainly understand that.
He didn’t get the Lego Movie either. As well as many others.
[QUOTE=Skald the Rhymer;18658081
But as regards the BOOK: it ain’t that kind of story. It’s a mythic quest, not a police procedural. You might as well ask why Atlas didn’t just let the sky rest on whatever mountain Herakles was standing on while subbing for him.
[/QUOTE]
LOL.
Never thought of that.
So, destroying the One Ring kills Sauron? Did not know that.
Won’t the Dead Men of Dunharrow still be cursed?
I swear this is like the hundredth time there’s been a thread on this topic.
Short answer; the Eagles are Maiar and just as prone to the Ring’s temptation as any other Maia, just as Saruman was tempted by it, just like Gandalf feared what he might do if it fell into his possession, and there’s absolutely no reason to assume that any given Eagle wouldn’t claim the Ring as its own and use its power to establish air superiority over all of Middle-Earth.
Not exactly. Sauron is a Maia, and thus immortal. However, he has bound so much of his power into the Ring that its destruction will render him unable to take physical form, communicate, or pretty much do anything at all; he’ll just be another spirit drifting on the wind.
I’m pretty sure that Sauron controlled the airspace over Mordor. Any eagle entering his no-fly zone would have been toast.
Yep…but they’ll probably just get weaker and weaker with time, so the valley and tunnel and all are just another local “haunted site” legend.
Maybe not: it’s unclear when the flying mounts for the Nazgul first came into existence. If they’d been around from the beginning, wouldn’t they have used them from the beginning? So much for the race to the fords!
(So much for the flooding of the fords! “Hey, boss, lotta water comin’ downstream.” “So what? Fly, you fools!”)
We honestly need a FAQ Sticky at the top of this forum about this question, pointing to the several thousand* threads we’ve already had on it.
A very slight exaggeration.
Warning: NSFW
Oglaf: Ornithology
Sidenote: one of my faves from Oglaf.
It’s not a plot hole, a mistake, an oversight, etc. It’s people not understanding the books.
Frodo did not drop the ring into Mount Doom from above. He entered a tunnel in the side was going to drop it off a platform over the lava. An eagle couldn’t have gotten into the cave.
Frodo did not drop the ring into Mount Doom*** at all***, remember? He was overcome by the temptation to wear it, and only Gollum biting off his finger and accidentally falling in caused the ring to be destroyed. It was the sparing of Gollum’s life that made the difference, and very few in Middle Earth would have done so. Gandalf said so.
Frodo was highly unusual in being able to go as far as he did without falling to temptation. Boromir didn’t hold out. Gandalf and Galadriel both said that they couldn’t do it. Most people would have failed the test before they even got to Mordor. And, in the end, so did Frodo, as mentioned in point 2.
The eye of Sauron was looking for threats that Sauron expected. Frodo avoided detection because Sauron 1) didn’t expect it and 2) was distracted. Presumably, Sauron knows about eagles and was looking for them. Therefore, an eagle would have been spotted and killed - remember, the eagles come to rescue Frodo only after Sauron is dead. So “fly it into Mordor” is equivalent to “hand it over to Sauron and plead for mercy” except for the pleading for mercy part.
Why? We’d need such a posty on EVERY thread in the SDMB! There’s nothing new under the sun. Sufficient unto the day are the posts thereof: excessive use of the search function annoys the hamsters and doesn’t shed any light on the actual topic.
We don’t know whether or not there was a central caldera with vertical drops to fresh lava. There might very well have been.
And, if not, the Eagles could have flown someone to the tunnel entrance.
With less time exposed to the ring, its power over him might have been less – enough less to allow him to drop it with a brief moral struggle.
True. Cool, huh? Hobbits are tough as old roots.
How, exactly? We don’t know if the Nazgul had flying mounts, or if Sauron had other flying subjects. We know of the Spying Birds Saruman sent over Dunland, but the Eagles would have eaten them for breakfast. We have no way to know if Sauron had an active air-defense system and flying creatures on CAP…or not.
Now, yes, Tolkien himself did say some things about the Eagles that imply the idea wouldn’t work. That’s the only authoritative (literally) argument against the plan. Too much of your arguments depends on speculation and interpolation.
Besides, it’s a joke! It’s a lovely, funny joke, which most of us first saw in a cartoon in Dragon Magazine. It was a good joke, specifically because the D&D ref had spent years creating his version of Middle Earth, with stats for all the characters and maps of all the locales…and the players just flew in on eagles and ended the game.
(Much as if someone had played Quidditch to win, instead of just to show off.)
ETA: AND, if that weren’t enough, the OP is not asking about thsi main point, but about what the other ramifications would have been!
Saruman’s army is largely half-orcish, possibly entirely so. As noted in the Scouring of the Shire, the half orcs survived quite well after Suaron’s demise. So Saruman retains a very large part of his army, possibly all of it. He also retains control of Rohan, making him a superpower that easily rivals Gondor.
Maybe, or more likely it will play out as a recaptiluation of what happened to Sauron after Morgoth was defeated. IOW Saruman becomes the new big bad, albeit a league below Sauron. Gandalf and the Elves depart after Sauron’s defeat, just as the Maiar departed after the defeat of Morgoth. And the story continues forever, with men, the threats they face and the aid they receive diminishing forever until the remaking of the world.
Or Denethor rejects the claim, with a none-too-subtle push from Saruman. Remember, they both have palantirs and with Sauron gone will be in direct contact with each other. An alliance of Rohan, Isengard and Gondor is formed against the pretender from the north
Civil war ensues.
Excellent points all! These are not extremely unlikely consequences! I especially like the idea of a Denethor/Saruman “Axis.” Wormtongue would continue to be hugely important, keeping Rohan divided, until the big boys could divide it, like Hitler and Stalin dividing Poland. (Heh! Even the names are somewhat similar!)
Eagles help drop One Ring into Mount Doom?
I came to this thread with a notion it had something to do with Tim Tebow.
Carry on.
Eru Iluvatar didn’t want it done that way. End of discussion.
I’m having a fond thought of Christopher Tolkien learning of this discussion, and “discovering” some old papers of his father’s, addressing the matter in a unique way.
(“Actually, there’s a bigger volcano way down in Ruhn, with open lava-flows. And there’s a snow-capped volcano in Forochel. Of course, if the Dwarves learned how to make fluoric acid, that would solve the problem too. Also, the One Ring has a self-destruct sequence: if you say, ‘Destruct sequence 1, code 1-1 A’ – in Quenya, of course – the Ring quietly melts away.”)
Or just laying down the law himself: as heir, he now “rules the universe” and if he were to say, “Gandalf has pointy ears,” that would now be canon.
You still get there faster and avoid more dangers by flying to the mountain, even if you still need to make the final hike.
And just because Frodo went through a cave doesn’t mean that the volcano didn’t have an open top. Does the book mention?
He was overcome by the ring, because he took so damn long walking and had to use it so many time to get out of danger. If he had flown, he would have spent less time and seen fewer dangers.
Ditto.
This is true. Though, if Sauron had no anti-aircraft capabilities (any mention in the books?) and if the volcano had an open top, then it doesn’t matter whether he knew they were coming or not.