He also has a good point in keeping it. Not to mention any argument about “Well Sauron will just appear again in 1000 years…”
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Not my problem.
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We just kicked his ass when HE HAD THE RING.
That’s an intriguing point. What does the legendarium say about this? Why wasn’t he invulnerable while he had the Ring?
It never made him invulnerable, just really, really powerful. A sufficient force could still beat him. Like, say, the largest human army ever in history working in concert with the largest elf army ever in history with a lot of help from the dwarves.
By the Third Age, nobody’s anywhere near that powerful.
Not to mention a lucky swing with a broken sword that hit him in just the right spot.
Which is movie version and not book. In the book Sauron kills Gil-Galad and Elendil but is overthrown in the processes. Isildur, using the broken sword of his father, cuts the ring from Sauron’s hand.
I dont see much difference.
I think the only real diff is what exactly did Tolkien think happened to Sauron? Did he ‘explode’ like in the movie? Did he abandon his body rather then suffer the vagaries of his captors?
He probably just beat his (ghostly) feet. He was no dummy (at least in comparison to his former boss).
I thought in the book, it’s at least very strongly implied Sauron was defeated by Gil & Elendil while he was still wearing the ring. Isildur cut off the ring afterwards from his fallen body. So more of a mugging and a ring that was too tight to pull off.
From The Council of Elrond:
I beheld the last combat on the slopes of Orodruin, where Gil-galad died, and Elendil fell, and Narsil broke beneath him; but Sauron himself was overthrown, and Isildur cut the Ring from his hand with the hilt-shard of his father’s sword, and took it for his own.
which is not all that different than what is shown in the movie - (except they didn’t show the death of Gil-galad.)
The big difference that is in the book, Sauron was defeated while he still had the One Ring, so he still had all his strength available. In the movie, it was the loss of the One Ring that led to his immediate defeat - had Isildur not gotten that lucky strike with his dad’s broken sword, Sauron would have won.
understood and agreed - but from the single quoted passage, you can get the scene from the movie without much difficulty.
I think another difference between the battles at the end of the Second Age and the end of the Third is that in the former battle, Sauron was actually out there on the field swinging steel, which is what made him (very occasionally) vulnerable to (an unexpectedly successful) physical attack.
Betcha he learned from that mistake, and was firmly resolved never to set foot out of Barad-dur in the Gondor war while there was an enemy left standing.
Which is another reason that the only way to bring him down at that point was to destroy the Ring before he could get possession of it.
ISTR that originally Peter Jackson had planned to have Sauron show up at the scene with Aragorn and the Gondorian army at the Black Gate, but was convinced to leave it much closer to the original book scene (besides Aragorn beheading the Mouth).
If he was never setting evil foot outside of Barad-dur to physically participate, what power did possession of the Ring give him that he didn’t already have? The Nazgûl were already beholden, and he seemed to exert easy dominion over the evil (orcs, etc.).
Which movie is this?
Ah, that we shall never know, I guess, since he never actually got his (nine-fingered) hands on it again. Nazgul teleportation? Direct long-distance mind control without a Palantir? Increased power and invulnerability for Orc warriors? Certainly, part of the leveling-up would include sabotaging the work of the Three Rings that are currently hidden from him, AFAICT from this remark during the Council of Elrond:
Start of FotR, IIRC, showing the war of the Last Alliance when Isildur got the Ring from Sauron.
Thanks. Maybe I’ll rewatch that.
Correct -