But seriously, having one with great power claim it and take your chances is a lot better plan on the face of it then having nine guys march off with it.
Give it to Aragorn, he has little innate magic. Certainly not on a level like Gandalf and Galadriel. Then after the war when he’s carping about ‘spoils and great deeds to be done’…the great powers gang up on him, give it to a hobbit, catch an eagle ride and destroy the ring. Ta-da!
Besides, no matter who ‘becomes another Dark Lord’ they will not be as great as Sauron. The ring serves only Sauron. I would think that the new Dark Lord simply wouldn’t be as powerful as Sauron.
That’s nice, but my copy of LOTR doesn’t include the ever-increasing text from these boards.
Where in Hobbit or LOTR are these properties ascribed to the Eagles?
(And if you tell me it doesn’t say that in either of those works, but if I go to page such-and-such of the Silmarillion or the Book of Lost Tales or whatever other pieces of JRRT apocrypha are out there, it’s a reasonable assumption that for purposes of understanding LOTR, my understanding of Middle-Earth and its flora, fauna, and intelligent races should be sufficient as gleaned from LOTR and Hobbit alone. Not because it’s the last word, but because that’s how books work.)
Sauron’s blind spot was regarding Power. He could not conceive of a plan which involved sneaking in to destroy the Ring. He (and all his creatures) were prepared to face a great Elf or Man leading and inspiring his armies with the strength of the Ring.
(Besides, having the Eagles fly them to Mordor is not the same as an incursion into Mordorian airspace. The Fellowship would have arrived at the borders of Mordor intact and well-rested, and would likely have developed a better action plan than “have two exhaused beings crawl up the side of a mountain” and they probably could have avoided the whole “get stung by a giant spider-demon” thing entirely.)
While Ulmo was the most sensible Vala, I’m not sure he’d necessarily get his hands on it just because it ended it up in the sea. I fear that Ossë would find it first, and wreak havoc with it. He did switch sides more than once.
If Ulmo did get his hands on it, he might safeguard it for a while but I expect his long-term plan for keeping it safe would involve elves and men, and hence get screwed up. Look at how well things turned out for Gondolin, with Ulmo counting on Turgon to listen to Ulmo’s messenger, Tuor.
It is ‘accepted canon’ that doesn’t really fit with the character or the eagles as shown in LoTR or (and especially) the Hobbit. They’re sheep stealin’ slightly grumpy big birdies, that don’t get on well with humans, and have a definite home and home range.
That doesn’t really square well with being non-temporal beings that exist only to serve the will of Manwë.
Are you saying that you don’t understandt LotR? Because you’re doing a pretty good job arguing about it for someone who ‘doesn’t understand’ it.
Look.
A) You can’t fly the ring to Mordor from the ‘start’ (or anywhere before Rivendell) because you haven’t decided what to do with it yet. That was sortof the whole point of taking in there
B) You have no way to get ahold of the eagles. You can maybe go looking for Radagast, who does, but it’s really not clear what has become of him at this point. You could also flail wildly around in the wilderness and hope, but odds are, they’re just going to ignore you. And not in the “Hey, let me explain about this ring!” sense, but rather in the “Why would I even fly down and listen to you talk?” sense. You can’t climb to their eyrie because you have to be able to fly to get there.
C) What makes you think you could fly to “right outside Mordor” without being noticed? Flying things are pretty obvious, and you STILL have the problem of “How do you get in?” You really, REALLY think that an eagle or 5 could FLY into Mordor unnoticed? Or that a bunch of them would sign up for a suicide run? Or any of the other similarly far fetched suggestions here? And even if you think this IS feasible, you have no way to actually GET to this point because of issues A and B. AND there’s the fact that, essentially, no one really KNOWS what resources Sauron has available. No one has been peeking into Mordor to see how many Fell Beasts he’s been breeding, or where his troops are stationed, or anything. And the “eagle plan” doesn’t leave a lot of room for quick course corrections.
ALL OF THIS is obvious from reading LotR and the Hobbit. Maybe if you’re still fixated on the movie “Gandalf uses a magic moth to summon an eagle” thing then it seems like a better question, until you realize that that is garbage made up by Peter & Co, and therefore is no more useful in a discussion than “Why didn’t Sauron know where the ring was after Frodo almost HANDED it to a Nazgul at Osgiliath?”
No, I’m saying I understand it perfectly well from having read the trilogy a dozen times, and The Hobbit probably 4-5 times over the years, and that should suffice. Like I said, Tolkien didn’t expect me to read his unpublished works in order to understand the ones he’d published.
Maybe you’re confusing me with someone else - someone who’s actually made arguments in this thread to the effect that some variation on “How Lord of the Rings Should Have Ended” would have been a plausible solution to the dilemma the characters in LOTR were facing.
I have made no such arguments here. All I’ve argued is that it’s legitimate to make whatever arguments you’re going to make about the plausibility of such a solution just on the basis of what’s in The Hobbit and LOTR, without having to access Middle-Earth lore from books published many years later.
I’ll just add, first, that I agree with your point A, and second, that I’m not placing any reliance at all on anything in the Peter Jackson movies, which I detest and remember little of.
The Balrog of Moria was not under Sauron’s control, and it’s implicit that it is the last of the breed (which, Tolkien says in Letters, probably numbered no more than seven at most).
Well, Tolkien also says in other written material that there were small armies of them, the kind of thing that Sauron could still have many of skulking about the dungeons of the dark tower.
Anyway, it was just an example of a winged[citation needed] creature. Purely chosen as an example by chance, and not in any way a reference to famously unresolved and passionately argued questions about The Lord of the Rings.
Well, sure. It make as much sense as Frodo and Sam going into Mordor.
If the Ring is not destroyed, then either Sauron wins and controls Middle Earth, or one of the ‘good guys’ grabs the Ring and defeats Sauron, only to ultimately become a Dark Lord him/herself. Right?
Assuming the Eagles are mortal creatures, then in either of the ‘Ring not destroyed’ alternatives, things will ultimately be just as bad for the Eagles as for everyone else in Middle-Earth. Maybe they can hold out a while longer due to the remoteness of their eyries, but ultimately they will be tracked down and killed if they do not accept enslavement.
So if they become aware of the stakes, then of course they’d be willing to do what they could to aid in the destruction of the Ring.
That doesn’t address the questions of (a) whether a “how LOTR should have ended” gambit would have a reasonable chance of success (though we should remember the chances of success of what Frodo and Sam ultimately did were 100% only after the fact, and were probably pretty long-odds themselves beforehand), or (b) how they’d get the attention of the Eagles in the first place, but that’s because I haven’t yet joined that debate. [ETA: snark deleted.]
No prob - thanks for acknowledging! (And the end of my latest post had some followup snark that, in view of your apology, I have deleted, and for which I in turn apologize.)
I’m of mixed opinions here. I agree that such a view is legitimate…but the other approach is also legitimate. We have these other writings, and they answer some questions. It would be wrong to ban them from the discussion.
I don’t think either approach is exactly right…or wrong. (A little like reading the Biblical Apocrypha, Nag Hammadi mansucripts, and so on, when doing Bible Study. They aren’t in the Bible…but they are hugely relevant.)
To me, the most interesting things to be discovered from Tolkien’s other writings were: 1) that he didn’t know who Aragorn was when he wrote of him climbing over the wall at Bree, and 2) that he (Tolkien!) appeared to be falling more and more infatuated with Galadriel, over time attributing greater power and wisdom to her.