:smack:
of Boron.
Toadspittle, thank you. The hacker analogy just cracks me up!
Lots of cool info in this thread!
Fanghorn (Treebeard) is said to be the oldest person on Middle Earth. Does this mean, oldest mortal? I guess the Ents are mortal? But presumably some of the older individuals of the imortal races would be older then Fanghorn?
Among the imortals, is Tom Bombadill older then everyone?
Right scholarly, Osiris. I was going from memory, and a quick check of Silmarillion. It seems the figure of forty seven generations was inclusive of the line in Numenor. I had assumed it to be a list of only the house of the Cheiftans of the Dunadain.
Long generations, these Numenoreans. Six thousand years, in forty nine generations means the average numenorean had his eldest child at the age of 122.
Tris
whats an ent?
That’s dealt with in around midTTT or so. They’re basically walking, talking trees. Most of them are really old and really slow, at least until they get mad.
Yavanna, wife of Aule, two of the Valar were interested in very different things. Aule cared for the making of things, and delving into mysteries, craft, creation of tools, and things of beauty with his hands. He made dwarves, and had to put them away, until the proper time, and Elu gave them life, because Aule was willing to give up his dwarves, when he realized they were not truly living things, only pretended.
Yavanna feared that the things she loved, growing things that gave flower and fruit, would become victims of the dwarves, and of men and elves, who wanted wood. She knew that trees would suffer, and because they were so long in the growing, would not be able to thrive under that suffering. But Elu created the Onodrim, the Ents, as the protectors of the forest, to assure her that he too loved the forest, and had appointed powerful beings to safeguard it.
Tris
Here’s something I’ve been wondering.
What exactly was Boromir planning on doing with the ring, provided he got it away from Frodo? Other than turning the wearer invisible, it didn’t seem to do anything spectacular in the hands of anyone but Sauron. Did he think he could have used it to take command of the ringwraiths or something?
I think that Boromir turned out to be the tragic hero, his tragic flaw being that he had a fundamental misunderstanding of what the ring was all about. He remembered what it was when being used by Sauron and thought that that kind of power could be used by anyone. What he didn’t realize was that Sauron was the only one who could use the ring in that way.
You never see the Ring do anything, because no one ever does anything with it. Using it in any way hurries its corrupting influence. Turning the wearer invisibile seems to have been a side-effect, and probably one that could be turned off, if you know how the Ring works. But if you know how the Ring works, you’ve already fallen under its power and are well on your way to becoming the next Sauron. Had Boromir gotten his hands on it and used it the way he wanted to, he’d have been doing the same thing Sauron was in the movie’s prologue: mowing down orcs by the thousands with every swing of his sword.
Bilbo wore the ring, and bolted through a room full of orcs, killed a couple of hundred spiders, and challenged a dragon in his lair.
Frodo wore the ring, and defied the Nazgul twice, face to face, and turned the test of Galadriel back on to her.
Sam just carried the darned thing, and orcs fled from him, on sight.
It gives power according to the stature of the wielder. Boromir had the stature of a Crown Prince among his people, a leader of men, and a Champion. To him it would have given power far greater than it did to a couple of quiet little hobbits out of the west. Keep in mind that hobbits are very resistant to the power of the ring. None of the wise could have born that burden, according to Elrond. To Aragorn it would have given the greatest power of all, excepting perhaps Gandalf. All would have followed Aragorn’s standard, and he could have raised armies even among Sauron’s allies. The orcs would have fled at a rumor of his comming, and trolls and the like quailed at his gaze.
Yes, it would allow the wearer to command the Nazgul, if the wearer were master of the ring.
Tris
Something that’s not conveyed in the movie (and I don’t blame Peter Jackson; you either simplify the story or stick an hour of talking heads in the middle of it dragging the whole thing to a halt) is that giving it to Frodo and saying “Off you go to Mt. Doom!” wasn’t necessarily the best course of action. Yes the Ring must be destroyed but for all they knew it didn’t have be done right then. Just twenty years ago Gandalf, Sauraman, and the rest of the White Council kicked Sauron’s butt out of one of his ancient strongholds. There was no reason to think that they couldn’t put him down again and then drop the Ring off at their leisure. Why send it straight into Sauron’s lap when instead you could just go south to Gondor to wait out the war, coincidently bringing a great deal of assistance to the beseiged kingdom with it.
In the end that would have been a disastrous strategy but throughout The Fellowship of the Ring right up to the breaking of the Fellowship it was a reasonable option. In the book even Aragorn hadn’t made up his mind about what to do when Frodo runs off on his own. Boromir was a big advocate of the keep it in Gondor plan since he thinks the result of doing that, even without using the Ring, would be saving his people.
Unfortunately the result of clipping that is that it makes Boromir look a bit denser than he does in the book. He brings up the idea of using the ring once at the council who explain to him that it really isn’t something they should do and then he once more says he wants to try to use it when the Ring gets its hook into him.
One thing I never understood is what exactly the purpose of the rings is. For example, if the elves had powers of some kind why did they give some up to put in a ring. Were the rings meant for other elves to use, thus giving the original “donors” time to grow their power back as another poster implied?
I don’t believe the elves put their own personal powers into the rings. The just used them as tools of healing, preserving, understanding, and inspiration.
It was Sauron who had to pour his own personal might into the ruling ring, so he could dominate whoever was wearing any of the other rings of power.
Untrue. Sauron had planned for their maneuver quite nicely, and while pretending to flee, and offering only token resistance, he moved back into Barad-dur in Mordor, a real triumph, and assertion of his true might. The white council would have had no real chance to “kick his butt”.
Ah, No Just Some Guy it is made quite clear in the book what their choices were.
A) Use the ring against Sauron; Utter folly, and would only at best give them a new dark lord with the ring, so that one is out. It is however, one of the only two courses that Sauron could concieve of being done in his malice.
B) Send the ring over the sea; The Valar would not accept it, it was a thing of middle earth and as such not permitted there.
C) Hide the ring by casting it into the sea; At best a temporary solution, since the sea had mysteries of its own, and who knows how the ring could influence them in its quest to return to Sauron.
D) Hide the ring in Rivendell or Lorien or the Shire; Sauron would quickly learn of its location, and contrary to what you said JSG they did not kick Saurons butt at Dol Golider[sp]. Sauron simply fell back to gain time to grow his forces in Mordor. Elrond said it fairly bluntly that Rivendell would fall if Sauron attacked it in his full strength, as would all others, even Bombadil would fall in the end. To keep the ring there would only delay the inevitable. This was the other plan that Sauron might consider as being done.
E) Destroy the ring; At first look, it would be folly as well, but its audacity was the one reason it might succeed, Sauron wouldn’t even consider it. One of the reasons that the fellowship was made up of the people it was made up of, was to help lead Sauron to the conclusion that the ring was going to be used against him directly.
Well, we know that but the White Council and everyone else thought they had Sauron pretty much in check until the Ring showed up. Sauron played them well at that point and at the time of the Council of Elrond when all of this was decided Sauron looked like he was massing.
Yes, those were their five choices broke down but the point that was raised even by Aragorn was that they didn’t have to destroy it right that second. Take a look at the ending chapters of Fellowship of the Ring as he debates charging straight into Mordor with the Ring or taking it south to Gondor to wait out the war before destroying it.
As for Treebeard, by the way, he’s not the oldest being in Middle Earth. He’s the oldest being under the sun. While there are a handful of individuals older than Treebeard in Middle Earth (the Five Wizards, Sauron, the Balrog, Bombadil, Galadriel, and Cirdan: OK, two handfuls), all of them predate the Sun. And after Galadriel and Cirdan, Treebeard is the next oldest being in Middle Earth, and he properly belongs to the era of Sun and Moon.
Why wouldn’t the Valar accept the ring? The argument is that it is a thing of Middle Earth. But Sauron wasn’t. Sounds like the Valar are saying “Anything that goes to Middle Earth becomes Middle Earth’s problem.” Given the Sauron was a Maiar, surely he is the responsibility of the Valar. Same for Morgoth. Trashed the source of light for the world, fled to Middle Earth and what do the Valar do? Forbid Feanor et al from going after him. If Feanor hadn’t followed, the Valar would have left Middle Earth alone, under Morgoth’s rule.
I would argue (weakly, admittedly) that the Valar did a lot of hand washing when confronted with evil Valar and Maiar. It was only when a specific appeal (by Elros) got to them that they opted to deal with Morgoth and only when directly threatened by the Numenoreans that they dealt with Sauron. Basically, they let Middle Earth and its inhabitants suffer from evil gods and demi-gods and only sent a token force (the Isatari) to help out.
Mind you, if they’d done their job properly, there’d be no LotR.