OK, but the horses aren’t particularly intelligent beings. There’s no indication that they have any agency of their own, more than animals in general have; same with the flying reptilian mounts that the Nazgul have later on. And for that matter, even the Nazgul have to be pretty close to the Ring to sniff it out, as evidenced by their behavior while pursuing Frodo in between the Shire and Buckland. So it’s not like Sauron can just ‘deploy’ these creatures without riders, AFAICT.
Tru dat, but the Nazgul mounts are undoubtedly the best of these flying creatures - and there aren’t any more of them besides the ones the Nazgul ride. So I’m discounting the utility of the others for this task.
And if Sauron could wield spell-casting juju against beings many miles away, what would he need an army for?
The notion that something wouldn’t have worked in a novel because of some reason the author hasn’t made us privy to…well, that’s an end to pretty much every “why didn’t character X do Y instead of Z” discussion about every work of fiction. It basically amounts to “think you see a plot hole? Well, STFU.”
Just in case it comes up, I regard Tolkien’s writings as canonical. I regard the movie as having the same relation to those writings as historical fiction has to history. Others are free to regard these things however they want, but that’s where I’m coming from.
I’m not a Tolkien expert, so take this with a grain of salt, but the God of Middle Earth always makes sure there’s a --key word here chance to stop Sauron before he wins. We saw two of those chances–Isiludur who had his chance and semi-blew it (by not just destroying the damned ring after his billion to one chance with the sword lopped Sauron’s finger off) and Frodo, who did succeed by showing compassion/mercy to Gollum.
The only choices are “Destroy the ring” or “Lose”. We can assume Isildur’s fumble was a one-shot deal.
There’s also some sort of backstory about how the broken sword is like a one-shot Excalibur-ish magic sword forged from some magic gem(? Simirils) from the crown of Sauron’s bigger, meaner boss (Morgoth) and dates back to the Middle-Earth version of Atlantis or something. It’s not just a normal hunk o’ steel.
If you’re only going by the movies, since most of that was left out, it’s easy to see why you’re getting the “schlub with a broken sword” thing, but there’s a lot more to it than that.
I can’t see why not. The books mention that even the crows in Mordor have been corrupted to act as agents of Sauron, so why wouldn’t fellbeasts be the same?
Narsil - later reforged as Anduril - is certainly not made even partly from the Silmarils, which were last seen disappearing into (1) the sea, (2) a volcanic crack and (3) the sky, set on Earendil’s ship Vingilot which is now carrying the last surviving Silmaril as the Evening Star. It was forged by Telchar (mentioned by Aragorn when he’s warning Theoden’s guards to leave it alone) back in the First Age, and I’ve only recently learned that Telchar was a dwarf, a little behind Celebrimbor and Feanor himself in skill.
You’re righter than right when you say it is no normal hunk o’steel, and it was already some centuries old before Aragorn’s ancestors first set foot on the Middle-Earth version of Atlantis. But it’s not made from the Iron Crown either, since that was still firmly on Morgoth’s head at the time.
I’m not sure we have reason to believe that’s so. The tunnel is the pedestrian entrance, so to speak; there’s no reason I can see to believe it isn’t a tunnel into the side of a normal volcano-shaped thing. If the lion’s share of the heat from the fires where the Ring was forged were escaping through that tunnel, it’s hard to see how Frodo, Sam, or Gollum could have entered it without getting fried. That heat would naturally want to find a route to escape straight up. But Frodo and Sam wouldn’t have had reason to go to the top of Mt. Doom, given the existence of the tunnel.
But even if the tunnel were the only way to drop the Ring into the Fire, yet a Hobbit could enter it and live, that would just mean that the Eagle carrying Frodo and Gandalf would have to land at the entrance to the tunnel. Since Sauron, the Nazgul, and most of his armies are kaput as soon as the Ring is in the Fire, there’s no need to allow time to escape Sauron’s agents once they land.
And this is the weakness of the non-plan in the book: it relies on a lot of lucky breaks, like finding a semi-unguarded way into Mordor.
I’m not exactly impressed with Sauron’s sight. He doesn’t sense Frodo with the Ring until Frodo puts it on his finger at the edge of the Fire.
Second, you only need one Eagle, not a convoy. (You don’t really need extra Eagles to deposit Aragorn, Boromir, Gimli, and Legolas outside the Black Gate to distract Sauron by taunting him, and Merry, Pippin, and even Sam can be left behind. Sam will kill the Eagle when he gets back if Frodo says he tries anything.) Is there any indication that Sauron notices the Eagle that rescues Gandalf from the peak of Zirakzigil after defeating the Balrog? I think that would be of significant concern to Sauron, but there’s no indication that he sees it.
And we also know that the Misty Mountains somewhat conceal the Fellowship on their journey south. So have an Eagle - Gwaihir, presumably; this isn’t the sort of thing you delegate - with Gandalf and Frodo aboard fly south on the west side of the Misty Mountains, then over the mountains at the Redhorn Pass to Lothlorien. (I’m not assuming this would be one continuous flight, but more likely a few flights over several days.) Then fly low and hug the trees (and the rough landscape of the Emyn Muil, exceedingly troublesome on foot due to its irregularity, when the trees run out), then a last dash over the mountains bordering Mordor and to Mt. Doom.
The key word is ‘corrupted,’ not ‘empowered.’ Crows are quite intelligent, on the scale of birds. A twisted negative image of Radagast working for Sauron could learn a lot from them.
But we have no reason to assume similar intelligence on the part of the prehistoric-style mounts that the Nazgul fly. And really no reason to assume that they’re even out and about before Sauron is ready to have the Nazgul saddle them up, come to think of it. They’d probably be a secret even from the troops in Sauron’s army until they were put into the service of the Nine.
The real problem was not getting the Ring to Mordor. It was getting someone who would willingly throw it away.
Gandalf knew the power would tempt him if he even touched it. So he didn’t. Other high-powered beings were in the same position.
As a simple hobbit, Frodo was able to fight the power for long enough to get the Ring into the general vicinity of the Crack of Doom. Finally, though, he was under its power & could not discard it.
The Ring was only destroyed as a result of the struggle with Gollum. Who was only there because Frodo, through compassion, had not killed him long ago…
Legolas shoots one down just after they leave Lothlorien, but there still appear to be enough for all the Nazgûl to ride. I don’t think there’s any indication of how many of these things there are.
Also, just because the Nazgûl don’t ride them outside the bounds of Mordor until after their horses are destroyed, it doesn’t mean they weren’t riding them within Mordor, or that they’re not being ridden by anything else.
I don’t think anyone really knows what’s happening in Mordor, in fact, which is presumably why the sneak and look approach is taken as the wisest course. Maybe there even was a vague plan of asking the eagles for help when the fellowship (or Gandalf at least) had a better idea of the current situation there; organising a diversion then doing a desperate dash for it. But eagles can’t sneak up to the borders of Mordor unseen like a little group on the ground.
If the ring can do that, why doesn’t it hover itself above the lava or make sure it fails to quite fall into the lava itself?
What exactly is the ring? What bothers me about LoTR is that Tolkien wrote it when he himself didn’t know about many modern ideas so he didn’t really think it through. Is the ring linked to some kind of mystical backup copy of Sauron’s brain? How does it “control them all”? Can’t the other rings that are linked by this security hole to Sauron’s ring just be destroyed so that there are no other rings to control in the first place?
Why can’t the wizards build a buffer or remote control spell that lets them send commands through Sauron’s ring without being exposed to whatever mind altering powers it has?
For that matter, if Sauron’s ring can make people invisible, why can’t the wizards equip the party to destroy it with invisibility rings that are safe to use? If they don’t have them, why don’t they have superhuman beings like Elves in charge of the ring carting instead of relying on weaklings. Why is there a ringbearer at all? That sucker is about as dangerous as a live Cobalt-60 source - why isn’t it kept as far from the party as possible inside some kind of shielded container to block it’s harmful effects?
Those skills are all lost by the Third Age. No one around could have created a new Palantir, or raised another Orthanc.
(I’m actually vaguely dubious that the smiths of Rivendell could truly have re-forged Narsil/Anduril. “A few drops of super-glue, and she’s good as new, sniff.”)
re Gandalf’s power-level…he came close to losing a fairly small battle, up in the trees, surrounded by mere wargs and goblins, in The Hobbit.
And, yes, there was some overt deus ex machine scripting in the book. One of the earliest instances is when Frodo volunteers to take the ring, almost as if some other will were speaking through his voice. (On the other hand, that might have been mental dissociation from stress, the same effect many ordinary people feel when called upon to make momentous decisions. Surely many people have felt exactly that same way when saying “I do” at their wedding ceremonies!)
I feel obliged to point out that the “billion to one chance” of Isildur chopping off Sauron’s finger is a movie-ism not supported by the book (singular). In the book, Sauron is thrown down by Gil-galad and Elendil; after he is dead, Isildur claims the Ring as weregild for his father’s life and cuts it from Sauron’s hand. There’s no lucky strike, and Isildur, valiant though he was, was at best peripherally involved and in Sauron’s death.
ETA: The above was meant to be a response to Fenris. Stoipid Android.
I am guessing you have never read the book, because all these questions are answered at great length. the fact that you are trying to equate magic with computer science isn’t helping. You don’t need “modern ideas” to write about magic rings. In fact doing so is harmful, as you are demonstrating.
The ring is a channel to the primal evil force of the world. In order to control that force and the the other rings, Sauron had to embed a lot of his essence, his soul if you like, into the the ring.
It controls the other rings because that is what it was created to do. It does so magically. It is a magic ring. The other rings are magic rings. They are connected by magic.
The other rings can be destroyed, but what would that achieve. If they are destroyed, then everything they ever created is also destroyed, which means that Rivendell and Lothlorien will crumble into dust over the next few hundred years. So how does destroying two of your four best fortresses help win a war? What would be the point of that?
The wizards can’t build a “remote control” because the rings don’t work that way. Once they are created, they are incorruptible and unalterable. The only way to do that sort of thing would be to put the “remote control” into the ring when it was being made, which is exactly what Sauron manipulated the Elves to do when they created the other rings. Since no such “remote control” was put into the one, it can never be placed there.
The ability to construct invisibilty rings was always very rare and accomplishable only be the greatest artisans. Nobody knows how to do so any more. It’s as silly as asking why the characters in Mad Max don’t just build a nuclear power plant. It’s not something that was easy or accomplishable by normal people when civilisation was at its peak. Post apocalypse, it’s impossible.
The reason for not sending superhuman beings off with the ring is discussed at length in the novel. In short, a division of tanks still couldn’t fight its way into Mordor, and would be spotted a mile off. The only chance of success is stealth. If you want to stealth you don’t send tanks.
“Why is there a ringbearer at all?” At this point I have to question whether you even watched the movie. This is like asking why they needed the Death Star plans in Star Wars. If you don;t know the answer, you weren’t watching the movie and it can’t have made any sense.
The ring doesn’t emit anything, so their is nothing to shield anybody from. I have no idea where you got the idea that it did.
The ring did make sure that it fails to quite fall into the lava, remember? It only fell because the person carrying it also went in. Nothing else would have caused it to fall.
The exact abilities of the ring are deliberately left vague, but it gets more powerful and more abilities as it gets closer to Mount Doom. The ring can’t fly or hover, but it can choose when to fall off someone’s hand and it can manipulate the mind of the person carrying it. At full power it can prevent the owner from dropping it at all, force them to out it on or take it off and so forth.
Try throwing dropping a coin into a bucket while running past without stopping. Now try doing that when you can only release the coin when it lets you, the coin will make sure that you drop it when it wants you to, and the coin doesn’t want to go into the bucket. Oh, and if you miss the bucket, the world ends.
The plan is a non-starter. No way are you going to make that shot
To take the other side of the argument for a bit, there are two arguments on the “Eagles won’t work” side that drive me nuts.
I accept the primary reason(s) that A) it would be interfering too much; B) the Eagles have their own agenda and C) even if they had flown Frodo (or the fellowship) straight to the Crack of Doom, the Ring wouldn’t have let Frodo toss it in. Only Frodo’s compassion to Gollum allowed the destruction of the Ring–those reasons trump the arguments I’m making below.
So I’m not arguing the “Eagle Taxi Service” theory, but I am debating two points that show up in this type of thread.
The Eagles would have been corrupted by carrying the Ringbearer:
Bill the Pony wasn’t corrupted by carrying Frodo (and thus, the ring), neither was whoever carried him from Weathertop to Rivendale. That’s what, a couple of days? Carrying the ringbearer clearly doesn’t corrupt instantly or even quickly. How long was the trip from Rivendale to the breaking of the fellowship? Months? An Eagle should easily have been able to carry Frodo with no corruption, given that.
Sauron would see the Eagles all flying to Mt Doom and target them.
Only if our heroes are really, really stoopid. There are, what? 50, 100 eagles out there, minimum? (There have to be a sizable number or they wouldn’t have counted as an “army” in the Hobbit any more than Beorn did). So you sit Frodo and (say) Sam on the back of one eagle and have all Eagles fly roughly towards Mordor and then scatter. Put people on their backs, so it’s not obvious who’s going where. There are only 9 Ringwraiths and they’re none-too-bright (clever in a feral sort of way, sure, but these guys are not tough chess opponent), so they’re likely to split up and start chasing Eagles. Sauron doesn’t have any sort of anti-aircraft artillery, so the odds are really good that the Frodo carrying Eagle would get through or only have to deal with one Wraith. And one Eagle vs one Wraith? My money’s on the Eagle.
There are a lot of reasons why the Eagle Taxi Service theory doesn’t work, but those two reasons? No.
Bill doesn’t carry Frodo for very long; perhaps a couple of weeks between Weathertop and the Fords. Most of the time he’s a packhorse. Also, then power of the Ring increases considerably the closer to Mordor it gets. When Bill was carrying Frodo, they were a long way from Mordor.