Follow me here. The One Ring makes you invisible, and it lets you control both the other rings and the minds of people around you. Yes?
In the tavern in Bree, how come the Nazgul don’t go away when Frodo (wearing the ring) wants them to?
In Mount Doom, how come Samwise can disobey a direct order to get back when Frodo tells him to? How come Frodo wasn’t invisible? If Frodo was invisible, Gollum woulnd’t have known where to jump for.
My husband says maybe Frodo didn;t know about the ordering-people-about power, but I should think intent would be enough.
Comments?
No. To control the other rings takes a hell of a lot of personal will and power, more than the hobbits can muster.
The Ring gives power proportionate to its wearer. That’s the whole reason Frodo is carrying it instead of, say, Aragorn or Gandalf. It would make Gandalf powerful beyond measure, but only gives lttle mild-mannered hobbits the power of invisibilty. Then it shatters their little minds and bodies and turns them into Gollum. Frodo can’t command the Nazgul because he lacks the power to contol the Ring. The Ring exerts control over him.
IIRC Frodo hadn’t yet put the ring on when he commanded Sam to stay back, and wasn’t invisible yet (h couldn’t have used the Ring on Sam anyway). Gollum jumped where he was before he put the Ring on and disappeared.
Because Frodo isn’t strong enough to do the ring controlling others thing and if he tried it would likely break him immediately. Using the ring, in case you forgot, is a bad thing and using it to dominate the Ringwraiths doubly so. As soon as he did that he would have been lost.
Why invisibility? Is that part of the temptation? Or is that something never fully explained - it just ‘is’?
The ring more placed you partially in the realm of shadow, this is why a person wearing it would be invisible, it was also why Frodo could see the Nazgul as they truly appeared.
I think the invisibility is a leftover from The Hobbit that Tolkien just couldn’t get around. Remember, he wrote The Hobbit long before he even conceived the idea for LotR. Bilbo finds the ring (before it was the Ring) and it makes him invisible. This turns out to be a major factor in the rest of the story.
So time passes, and people start clamouring for a sequel to The Hobbit. JRRT knows this ring will somehow play a part, but he hasn’t figured out exactly where he wants to go with the new story yet. Gradually, it develops into the Ring, the Ruling Ring, the grand-daddy of all Rings, and becomes the MacGuffin of LotR. As he writes and fleshes out the story and the history of the Ring, he endows it with almost supernatural powers of evil and temptation.
But what about invisibility? How come Sauron wasn’t invisible when he wore the Ring during the Second Age? And how come the other Rings of Power don’t seem to turn their wearers invisible?
“Just 'cause”, is really the only reason we ever get from the Tolkster. He goes into the Ring granting power according to the power (will, intention, experience) of its wearer, and I guess maybe this is sort of a reason. Kind of. But my WAG is that he just wrote the ring into The Hobbit and never thought anything else about it until it came time to write LotR. And by that point, he couldn’t just deny the invisibility factor, and any other explanation he put forth would have sounded very clumsy and ad hoc. So he just sort of glosses over the whole thing, and most people don’t really notice it anyway.
Besides, the Ring is Eeeee-vil. It can do anything Sauron wants it to.
The other Rings of Power don’t seem to make anyone invisible. The Ringwraiths are wearing theirs, and they can be seen. (Well their clothes can be seen. But clothes also disappear when someone puts on the Ring. The reason you can’t see the wraith’s faces is because they’re basically ghosts.) The Dwarves’ rings were lost, so we don’t know what they did. The Elven Rings don’t seem to grant invisibility (although nobody seems exactly clear on what they actually did do- we’re told they help the Elves preserve the things they find beautiful, and they stave off weariness, and kind of slow the passage of time, at least within defined areas, but that’s a whole 'nother thread.)
Invisibility can be seen a temptation of the Ring, but it’s certainly not the primary one. Power and strength to dominate are the prime temptations of the Ring, at least for most of the characters. But it’s important to remember that the Ring is just tempting, period. The want and eventual need to possess it need no extraneous motives. Gollum killed his cousin over it and he had no idea what the Ring could do. It seems to be part of its evil power that people just want it, regardless of what they think or know they can do with it.
I dimly recall a bit involving Frodo asking Galadriel (or some other Voice of Wisdom) why it was he couldn’t read peoples’ thoughts when he wore the ring, as he’d heard that was part of the package. Part of her answer was that, really, he couldn’t because he hadn’t really tried. And that trying would be a really bad idea, accelerating the ill effects of it.
I think Sam could defy the Ringbearer’s orders not because it wasn’t directly on his finger yet, but out of love. (I see a parallel with Philip Pullman’s “The Subtle Knife”, which was a magical blade that could cut anything for its wielder…except for that one thing, which it–rather dramatically–couldn’t.)
Do we see anyone besides Hobbits wear the ring? Maybe it turns Hobbits invisible because of their tendencies to be subtle and not want to be seen. Maybe if Boromir put it on it would make him bigger.
Also, I was under the impression that the nine don’t wear their rings anymore and you can’t see them but you can see their clothes and kind of sense them. Conversely I don’t think they can really see you either, but they can definately smell/hear you. Of course, this all changes when you put the ring on.
Hell I’m talking out of my ass here, someone who’s been through the Silmarallion more times than I will be along shortly to clean this mess up :).
Isildur used it to make himself invisible when he was attacked by orcs. It was shown at the beginning of FOTR.
Tom Bombadil does - but it doesn’t affect him at all. Why not? Well, to answer that is to venture deeper in to the world of Tolkien than he ever intended us to…
Grim
grimpixie: Bah. Everybody knows the truth about Tom Bombadil.
NO! Don’t bring up Tom Bombadil!
We don’t have enough time. 
-A2K
In an alternate reality, the hobbits put the ring on Bill the Pony, figuring that it can’t hurt the dumb beast or drive him insane. Little do they know, Bill has the will to control it.
Bill The Pony, Dark Lord of Middle Earth.
Now, I have to admit, I’m one of the seemingly few people here who have never actually read the books. BUT, I did see every animated version of it, and although I know they are all severe bastardizations of the books, I do recall in the not-Bacshi LotR, there’s a scene where Frodo puts on the Ring and goes on a huge rant of how powerful and great the ring makes him. It scared the hell out of Sam, and at the same time, let Frodo completely visible. Did anything like this happen in the books, and if so, why the lack of invisibility?
Also, from my limited knowledge, I kind of took the invisibility to be a side effect of the fact it was used by a hobbit. as pravnik put it, “The Ring gives power proportionate to its wearer”, so because Hobbits are quiet and stealthy, it seems like a good power to have. Possessing it seemed to be enough to make the men who owned it beforehand incredibly strong and lustful for power, which seem to be severe human traits in these stories. Who knows what it would do for an Elf or Dwarf, but I kind of envision it making them more power hungry and leaving the invisibility faction out of it. Powerlust seems to be something rather devoid in Hobbits from what I’ve seen.
The one ring would make anyone who put it on (with exceptions like Bombadil) invisible, not just hobbits. I don’t have the quote at hand, but when Gandalf tells Frodo in FotR how he figured out that Frodo’s ring was the One Ring, one of the reasons he gives is that the ring makes the wearer invisible, which was one of the characteristics of the One Ring.
I think the ultimate reason for the invisibility is probably what ratty said–and I thought that was a really excellent post all around.
The real answer for why invisibility is because the One works kind of like the Nine, drawing the wearer into a more spiritual realm where they vanish but are still tangible much like the Nazgul. In the One’s case it doesn’t eventually become perminant like the Nine, but I think it’s got some side effects that might be considdered worse.
Note that when the One is worn the Nazgul become visible and the Nazgul despite being invisible do have a physical form (they provide shape to their robes, and the Witch King’s crown floats in mid air above his glowing red eyes).
Another small but telling inconsistency occurs in chapter 1 of Fellowship. During the party, the dragon firework is described as roaring along “like an express train”. This not in keeping with the notion that LOTR is a translation of an ancient manuscript based on the Red Book of Westmarch–written by Frodo et al-- copy of which was brought to Minas Tirith by a descendant of Pippin and there revised.
Elsewhere in the work, things that are familiar to modern ears are treated as though they are unfamiliar to the author, for example the “oliphants”. Also the “devilry of Isengard” used to create a breach in the wall during the battle of Helms Deep is apparently an explosive devised by Saruman, but the word “explosion” is not used since it’s modern. Tolkein uses artistic license to bring tobacco (if that’s what pipe-weed is) to Middle Earth, but the word is never used sinsce it’s Native American in origin. Similarly, in the Silmarillion (or was it Unfinished Tales?) when Turin encounters the petty-dwarves, they eat “earth bread”, which is clearly potatoes, but the author treats them as unfamiliar, as they would be in Medieval Europe. Yet this brings us back to another inconsistency, because at one point in LOTR Gaffer Gamgee refers to his “taters”.
There is nothing in the trilogy that implies that Sauron was not invisible, while wearing the ring. Silmarillion barely mentions the rings, but it does mention that Sauron was detected and revealed while making the one ring, not wearing it. The elves stopped dealing with him at that time.
The three, the seven and the nine are not described as causing any visible magical effects at all, although Gandalf’s tendency toward showy fire effects might well be a product of the ring he wears.
Tris
You need to remember that Sauron poured a large amount of his essence into the one ring, and that he was a Maia. Maia can exist in both the seen and unseen world. They are able to walk invisible or take on visible form (i.e. the eye of Sauron, and the benevolent form of the Lord of Gifts.)
Because Isildur, Bilbo and Frodo can only co-exist and not master the ring, this part of Sauron’s essence spills over, pulling them into the unseen world.
This also explains the 9. Sauron had a hand in their forging, and humans succumb to the invisibility bit. Dwarves being difficult to dominate resist this aspect of their rings.
The 3 on the other hand were solely forged by an elf. While elves have some aspect of themselves that exists in the unseen world they are creatures of the world, and so no invisibility