That may have been true during the time of the Reformation, but the modern Church’s teachings are much more nuanced, such that faith, grace, and acts are all relevant in various ways.
Hmmm…
So, who is right? Calvin? Or Hobbes?
I like Oy!'s idea of the One Ring’s dichotomy. Fated to be personally flawed.
I rather think Hobbes: the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. 
I suspect Tolkien had to go through some pretty significant mental gymnastics, because he wrote tales that fit rather perfectly within the structures of classic tragedy/heroic tale, and then had to shoehorn in his religious beliefs.
I mean, look at it. LotR works just about perfectly with no reference to religion or grace or any of that stuff. It doesn’t need a god mechanism to work. I never even realized that JRRT had any religious beliefs prior to seeing the bonus features background material on DVD. I saw, I think it was Tom Shippey, on the DVD talking about early on the Professor was a devout Roman Catholic and C.S. Lewis was an atheist, and I’m saying to myself “Huh? I thought it was the other way around!” (Of course, Lewis subsequently got religion in a big way.) I’d always loved LotR in part because of its total lack of religion beyond reverence for and by the Elves and things past (such as Numenor), and a vague reference to Something driving events (as in Gandalf’s speech saying that perhaps Bilbo was meant to find the ring).
So that drove me to find out more, and in some ways, the more I find out, the less I want to know. The Ring falls not from some inherent flaw in itself, nor from any virtue of the free peoples of Middle-earth, but rather from the caprice of a god not even mentioned. Tolkien despises and detests all industrialization, without which his own life would have been impossible: agrarian societies have little need for professors of dead languages, and warfare was the rule rather than the exception. The ordinary person in a non-industrial society suffers and/or dies from starvation, disease, childbirth, and/or the caprice of the warlords who profess to protect him. The life of an ordinary person in a pre-industrial society truly is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. He reminds me of Plato, nattering on about citizen kings when over half of the people in his society are either slaves or disenfranchised and marginalized women, not even important enough to be considered desirable (that was reserved for young boys).
But I’ll give Tolkien this much: true to his principles, he refrained from what he considered the tyranny of allegory. His work stands without reference to his religious beliefs. Whatever gymnastics he had to perform to reconcile his anti-authoritarian beliefs with his Catholicism, he does not force his readers to do the same.
I think you are again shoving you own self into it. Tolkein saw no real contradiction in it. Neither do I. The divinity in the text is just as appropriate, and raises it to a far greater level, than it could have achieved on its own.
And yet Illuvatar is all through it. You don’t hear the name, but you see, as the characters see, the hand in all things. And he did not force them to do anything, but guided them. From the very first moment, things are coming together in such a way that mortal beings can choose their own fate, for good or ill.
No, you don’t seem to get it no matter how much you’ve read. God doesn’t destroy the Ring. He makes it possible for others to destroy it, and the Ring to destroy itself. Frodo was not strong enough, nor Sam, nor everyone else put together. Sauron’s evil was simply stronger than all of them, all of them together even. But evil was not stronger than even the tiniest guesture of pure good. In the face of that, if Gollum could not or would not be good, then he could die worthily. If the Sauron’s evil could not be broken by mortals from without (Aragorn), then it would be undermined by itself from within (The Ring). Note that previously, when mortals did have the power to stop evil, even less help was forthcoming. But it was there when it was needed.
Exaggerated grossly. In truth, I see little to say that Tokeing particualrly hated industrialization. He disliked ungliness in all its aspects. What angered him was the destruction of what was good, not because it could not be avoided, but out of laziness or lack of respect. Note that Saruman wasn’t much of a builder - his “mind of metal and gears” was almost wholly devoted to destroying things. Likewise, Sauron was a builder, but no more so than Gondor or various other kindgoms. While it isn’t allegorical, it’s definitely related to the industrial age in Britain, which did a great deal of damage to the environment, and the World Wars, where industrial societies eagerly threw themselves into annihilating the work of generations (as well as killing as much of those generations as possible).
Bolding mine. That is yet another bit of you you are stuffing into the work. Tolkein was not anti-authoritarian. Never. He was against evil. He was against it when it had power and when it didn’t. He was for the Just King and against the Unjust Tyrant at the same time and for the same reasons.
Boy, talk about your monstrous mother-in-law…
The destruction of the Ring is the very essence of eucatastrophe:
[QUOTE= RRT in On Fairy-Stories]
the sudden joyous “turn”…is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur.
[/QUOTE]
which is to say, not merited by its beneficiaries, but capricious benevolence, unearned and unlooked for. And, as I’ve pointed out repeatedly, this grace construct is both unnecessary (in that arguably the Ring destroyed itself because it is the nature of Evil to be self-destructively short-sighted) and unsatisfactory (for the many reasons that many people question in religion and boil down to 'why does a omnipotent, omniscient, and omni-benevolent god allow the innocent to suffer? And, no, Original Sin is not a good answer.).
And Tolkien is an anti-industrialist. In Mythopoeia, JRRT writes:
[QUOTE=JRRT]
It is not they that have forgot the Night,
or bid us flee to organized delight,
in lotus-isles of economic bliss
forswearing souls to gain a Circe-kiss
(and counterfeit at that, machine-produced,
bogus seduction of the twice-seduced).
[/QUOTE]
The first “they” being the mythmakers. That reads to me as a pretty strong condemnation of technological solutions to the general misery of life.
I didn’t say anti-monarchist. I said anti-authoritarian, and I mean it in a very broad sense. Tolkien disliked allegory because it is tyrannical; it locks the reader in to a single interpretation of a text. He has no objections to a king, but has every objection to a Dark Lord, who forces his subjects into a single thread of action, a single viewpoint. I do not mean that Tolkien was an anarchist, but he was absolutely anti-tyranny, anti-slavery. How he reconciled the concept that one man’s justice is another’s tyranny, I’m not sure. How do any of us reconcile that?
I think Sauron is at fault, having clad himself head to toe with seemingly impregnable razor armor, he inexplicably left the one vulnerable aspect of his person - the finger upon which he wore The One Ring - exposed!
Not to mention the fact he could have simply thread the thing through a necklace, hung it around his neck and tucked it under his mithril… :rolleyes:
In the book, Isildur gets choppy on Sauron’s pinkies after Elendil and Gil-Galad have taken him down.
I never really thought about it this way before, but does this mean that Frodo was going steady with Sauron?
I don’t think that’s fair to Frodo or Sam.
For one thing, I don’t think Sam would “normally” be considered a negligible character. Tolkien himself said the story was basically about him, not Frodo; he’s explicitly in the quest from the very beginning, and I’d be willing to bet that more of the story is told from his point of view than from his master’s. He gets the last word, and if I’m not mistaken, he gets introduced in dialogue before Frodo as well.
I also don’t think it’s fair to criticize Frodo’s performance, or to say he was less heroic than Sam. Of course Sam is stronger, physically and mentally, by the time they reach Mount Doom; he hasn’t had to carry the Ring all that time, hasn’t had it tormenting him and eating at him the entire time, hasn’t had an ultimately unhealable Morgul wound inflicted on him. Frodo was carrying a hundred-pound weight the entire journey; Sam was not.
There are more references, but they’re hidden. Most notably, when Gandalf on the bridge says to the Balrog “I am a servant of the Secret Fire”, “Secret Fire” should be read as “Holy Spirit”. And then, in the Appendices, there’s a reference to death as the great gift the One gave to Man (the One, in this context, being the One God).
As for the claim that Tolkien despised allegory, he may have said that, but just read “Leaf by Niggle” some time and try to say with a straight face that that’s not allegory. I don’t know if Tolkien was deluding himself or if the “hating allegory” thing was supposed to be sarcasm, but either way, it’s definitely not actually true.
There’s a book?
Yeah, I think it was an adaptation by Terry Brooks of the screenplay.
Gurrr… ‘book’?! 
Oh, you must mean that they put out a novelization of the movie.
I believe you are confusing the online prequel book someone wrote with the actual books. It’s not at all clear what happened in Tolkein’s books, where we see that the other two died while beating up Sauron, and that Isildur survived and cut off Sauron’s ring. But we dont’ get a good sense of how it happened.
Actually, come to think of the OP, I am not even certain that Elrond could have killed Isildur. He was a true-born son of Numenor and a badass in his own right.
You are confusing unexpected with purposeless. And even if it were, so what? The fact that you don’t like being dependant on somebody else’s charity doesn’t mean it’s not true.
If that is your evidence, well, that’s a pretty slender reed to hang your hopes on. Tolkein definitely didn’t like the nastier aspects of industrialization. That does not mean that there is a significant strain of anti-industrialism in his works. In fact, he seems to be protesting against the misuse of industrial power here, not against industry.
Blinks
Do you actually read what you write? This is among the largest and craziest leaps in logic and topic I have ever seen. Nor is it backed up by the text particularly. To equate his dislike of allegory with his supposed dislike of authority with his certain love of justice is… well, you’re nuts.
I have a question that ties back to earlier conversation. You guys mentioned that Galadriel was powerful, arguably the most powerful elf. You say similar things about Elrond. Gandalf, too, is incredibly powerful.
How does this power manifest? How would Galadriel fight someone? For instance, how would she deal with a simple brigand? An assassin? Aragorn? Sarumon? I can’t picture how they’d fight, and I can’t visualize what their power is.
“Power” in Tolkien’s works is very subtle. It’s hard to say how it would manifest, but chances are that a brigand who wandered into Galadriel’s realm wouldn’t even realize it was inhabited, but would simply get lost and eventually die of starvation or exposure. Or, even more likely, would make damned sure to not even wander into Lothlorien in the first place.
The closest to an answer to what you’re looking for would probably be the duel between Finrod (a powerful First-Age elf) and Sauron in The Silmarillion. No actual action is described; rather, they duel with songs of power, with Finrod’s songs dealing with hope, light, love, and the like, and Sauron’s songs being of darkness and despair.
What makes them so powerful in the first place, then? What is imbuing Finrod’s words with strength? And how would his song affect Sauron?
Nope, I can’t be getting confused by something I’ve never read. I was responding to Sablicious, who asked why Sauron didn’t wear the ring under his armour. That’s obviously a reference to the prologue of the film. We can be fairly sure it doesn’t show events as they were intended. There is no reason cutting the ring off Sauron’s finger would have caused his body to disintegrate.
I’d always understood it as happening this way:
- Elendil and Gil-Galad destroy Sauron’s mortal body, but die in the attempt.
- Isildur takes the ring from Sauron’s body. Without the ring, which contains the greater part of his native power, Sauron cannot take shape again for nearly three thousand years (compare this to the loss of his previous body in the drowning of Numenor).
- Elrond, Cirdan and Isildur are the only witnesses to this final combat.
Having another look at the Council of Elrond and the Tale of Years in the appendix, you’re right, it’s not entirely clear. Elrond, Cirdan and Isildur could have been active participants. However, there is some evidence to support my interpretation. Going into Sherlock Holmes mode, here it is:
- The Tale of Years says “Sauron overthrown by Elendil and Gil-Galad, who perish. Isildur takes the One Ring”.
- In Tolkein’s world, those who fight Maiar don’t survive the experience. Feanor vs Gothmog, Ecthelion vs Gothmog, Glorfindel vs un-named Balrog, Gandalf vs Durin’s Bane, they all die.
- Narsil was broke under Elendil as he fell (symbolically), it wasn’t broken by Sauron.
- Isildur cut the ring from Saurons finger using the hilt shard or Narsil (again, symbolism). If Sauron was still on his feet at this point, why was Isildur attacking him with a broken sword?
- Sauron has 9 fingers (Gollum tells us this). It’s hard to see how Isildur could have cut off just his ring finger in combat.