And yeah, throwing my support behind the “Yeah, throwing it in the ocean would have been a terrible idea, since in case you didn’t notice, the good guys only barely held out long enough to destroy the ring.”
I’m particularly baffled by the “If the good guys can’t be bothered to band together…” comment though. What do you think they were doing? Certainly, there seemed to be lots of banding together happening in the book. Maybe you just skipped the appendix where it is noted that pretty much everyone was under siege at some point during RotK?
You know what is even more foolish than sending the Ring into the enemy camp?
Setting yourself up for annihilation to let Frodo sneak through to Mount Doom. For all they knew, Frodo and Sam were dried up Hobbit husks in Shelob’s lair. Or at the bottom of a swamp. Or lying somewhere with their brains scattered over the rocks, while Gollum is 500 miles away.
As it was, they had Sauron bottled back up in Mordor. (At least on that front) Yes, yes…Sauron would regroup and come back out, but for the moment they had him bottled up.
Talk about desperate moves. Sending the Ring into Mordor was desperate enough…now they’re going to let Gandalf and Aragorn just get themselves killed? That was a pretty chancy and ballsy gambit.
That always bugged me. The Silmarillion just sort of wrapped up with the notion that they vanished (ocean, deep pit etc.). Sauron never thought to look for them?
Onto the subject at hand, the free peoples were going to lose so long as Sauron still lived. The Valir couldn’t directly interfere by direct order or Eru. Gandalf et al simply couldn’t have lasted and the world would have been enslaved.
The smart move would have been to skewer Bilbo while he had the ring and dangle him out for Smaug to roast like marshmallow.
Bzzt. “[…] [N]or was there ever any dragon, not even Ancalagon the Black, who could have harmed the One Ring, the Ruling Ring, for that was made by Sauron himself.”
It was their only chance. As other posters have pointed out, if the Ring didn’t get destroyed then Gandalf, Aragorn and the rest of the Free World were going to go under.
The only sensible thing to do was to make a last-ditch effort to optimize the chances of Frodo’s and Sam’s success in destroying the Ring, and that meant everybody else’s putting themselves out to dangle as tasty helpless Sauron-bait.
I don’t know. The whole world seems to be doing a good job of resisting him, and had done so in the past. Even relatively recently, the White Council felt themselves strong enough to confront Sauron head on.
I understand that all the powers of the world are diminished by the time of The War of the Ring, but a an old friend once said, “There are always alternatives.”
I mean…it is the very same scene where Gandalf is beating himself up for sending Frodo into Mordor, when they decide to march to the Black Gate isn’t it?
I’ve always wondered about Sauron’s power. Sure, we know he was a Maiar and was personally very powerful. Could probably toss around fireballs and use death ray eyes on a whole battalion of elves. But it seems that the free peoples could have resisted him if they took away his supporters.
Why did those Easterlings and others follow him? Couldn’t Gondor have made a secret alliance with those men and Corsairs from the East and South? They could be reasoned with, and without their power, maybe the orcs and goblins could be defeated. Then they could have just contained Sauron without having to destroy the Ring
I think you’re right about defeating Sauron in any particular instance. It could have been done without destroying the ring
However, Gondor was isolationist and not paying attention to world issues - they screwed it up so much that they even their alliance with Rohan. Then you had Saruman who was believed to be an ally, but wasn’t, and Saruman was weakening Rohan. The elves were so ready to leave Middle Earth that they had classic short-timers syndrome and couldn’t be bothered. The dwarves seemed focused on internal problems with orcs and goblins, and of course The Hobbit tells the tale of how one of their biggest kingdoms fell into ruin. Then you had regions like the Shire who would say “Sauron? That’s the Buckleberry vintage, right? I usually like sweeter wines, but I’ll give anything a try. Pass the cheese and bread, please.”
So… in that world, having failed to stay vigilant and united, defeating Sauron by traditional methods wasn’t possible.
The other thing to remember is that Sauron cannot be destroyed without destroying the ring. So Sauron gets as many chances as he wants until he either wins or is destroyed. Seen on a scale of millennia, someone was going to have to do it eventually.
Also, LOTR elegantly replicates the attitude of ancient epics in which faraway “Them” are usually assumed to be innately predisposed to become Bad Guys, as opposed to the “Us” who are obviously born to be Good Guys.
Some people, like Sam when he sees the dead Southron warrior, can get beyond that prejudice and wonder if the Bad Guy was really evil or if he just went to fight because he was told to go fight, or what. But in the overall narrative perspective of LOTR, it’s generally pretty much taken for granted that Easterners and Southrons would naturally be easy prey for the blandishments of a Mega-Bad Guy like Sauron because of their own Bad Guy tendencies.
This; It’s less that these folk are “predisposed” to be evil and more that they’ve been treated badly by the folk of Numenor in the past, and it really, really doesn’t take much for Sauron to fan that old grudge.
Also, what possible reason would there be for these folk to make a “secret treaty” with Gondor? As far as they can tell, they’re WINNING.
Also, it’s less that the elves are leaving Middle Earth and can’t be bothered, and more that the elves have already mostly LEFT Middle Earth and don’t have enough power left to oppose Sauron in any sort of armed contest - the LAST time the elves fought Sauron, they had a king and a kingdom and could muster a host. And it was barely enough. That’s not even close to the situation now.
Similarly, the dwarves just aren’t NUMEROUS enough to make a big difference. There were -500- dwarves at the Battle of Five Armies. And while it can safely be assumed that’s not the full strength of the Dwarves of Erebor anymore, they’re not exactly matching even the hastily mustered strength of the Rohirrim who sent 6000 spears to Gondor - AFTER fighting a messy war with Sauruman.
Upon what, Dale Sams are you basing the idea that “the whole world seems to be doing a good job resisting him”? Dale is burned, Erebor, Lorien and the Woodland King’s Hall are all under siege, Rohan is more or less completely undefended, as is the South of Gondor, and the combined forces at Minas Tirith BARELY manage to break the siege thanks to the advantage of surprise, Eowyn killing the Witch King, and a number of other fortunate events. And that’s all in the course of like a week. The entire War of the Ring is less than a month long. It wasn’t winnable. It wasn’t even close.
I expect the song–in fact, most of the songs–was added by a Gondorian redactor later.
I was going to add that Sam added some things to make himself seem less heroic and Frodo more so, but then I rememebered that the Book was all handwritten.
