…the new possessor could (if sufficiently strong and heroic by nature) challenge Sauron, become master of all that he had learned or done since the making of the One Ring, and so overthrow him and usurp his place.??
Whoa, whoa! Hold on there, stop!
What does this mean? If someone ‘sufficiently strong and heroic’ possessed the One Ring and defeated Sauron, what would they become? Would they necessarily become ‘evil’? What effects would ring have on the new owner?
Maybe Isildur was on to something when he claimed the ring. Was Isildur ‘sufficiently strong and heroic’ enough to challenge Sauron? How about Boromir? He wanted to use the ring as well.
Now I know the smart thing to do was to destroy it, like Gandalf and Elrond advised, but based on Tolkiens above comments, it seems like possessing the ring was an option. Or was it? What am I missing here?
I forgot to add in my OP that I know what the obvious answer is: It’s too risky. Claiming the ring and then challenging Sauron risks being defeated by Sauron, who would then re-claim the ring and all would be lost.
Still, I am surprised that it is even a viable option. The text makes it clear that using the ring is simply not an option. The only option is to destroy it. Yet here Tolkien states that a figure ‘sufficiently strong and heroic by nature’ could possess it and destroy Sauron!!
Shoot, Gandalf wielding the One Ring could woop Saurons ass easily!
They would usurp ‘his place,’ which is El Queso Grande Bad Guy of Middle Earth. Regardless of their intentions, the power of the ring would draw them to evil.
The only person able to defeat Sauron and not become evil was the one heroic enough to do it without using the ring.
But does ‘usurp his place’ necessarily mean becoming the new ‘evil overlord’, so to speak. Couldn’t he simply mean 'take his place as owner of The One Ring?
Also, couldn’t one, theoretically, use The One Ring to destroy Sauron (as Tolkien states in the above letter), and then destroy The One Ring?!!
Once someone had used the Ring enough to overthrow Sauron, they’d probably be hopelessly addicted: they’d never give it up willingly, and no one else would be strong enough to take it from them by force. And the statements of Gandalf, Galadriel, etc. seem to clearly indicate that the Ring would still be eeeeevil even after Sauron’s destruction. (Come to think of it, would it even be possible to really destroy Sauron without destroying the Ring? Since a lot of his power is in the Ring…)
Ah yes, Captain Amazing, Elronds statement is what I was forgetting.
But would the corruption happen quickly? I always got the impression that the wearing the One Ring corrupts the owner over a lengthy period of time. We know this from Gollum and Bilbo.
It still seems feasible that Gandalf could have slipped on the ring, march into Mordor, crush Sauron like a bug, and then chuck the ring into Mount Doom.
Bah, anyway I know it’s a moot point. Don’t mind me.
The letter’s date is significant – Tolkien hadn’t finished writing LoTR, yet.
Reading the volumes of Christopher Tolkien’s “The History of Middle Earth” one finds scores of variations in plot, motivation, history, names. An underlying reason there been much discussion in the SDMB on the nature of the ringwraiths, the ring, and Sauron’s corporeal nature is that Tolkien himself never fully resolved a number of the discrepancies.
Tolkien seems to like to paint the rings (and many characters) in one of two ways: multifaceted and ambiguous, or black-and-white. E.g.:
Gollum is mostly bad, but has significant good parts, Saruman was nearly all good, but became mostly bad.
The Balrog and the orcs are overwhelmingly bad. Gandalf and Elrond are overwhelmingly good.
Master of all that he had done? What does that mean? Well, I’d take it to mean become the owner and inheritor of all the evil that Sauron had done, thus becoming the originator and propagator of evil in Middle Earth. Being the big evil kahuna is the ultimate result of posession of the ring.
It was an option that someone sufficiently strong and heroic could use the ring and take his place, but the problem is they will (as has been posted), become just as bad as Sauron. In fact, after Aragorn struggled with Sauron in the palantir, and especially when he showed up at the gates of Mordor with an army ridiculosly inferior to his own, Sauron probably assumed that Aragorn was wielding the ring himself (and he was probably the only human then alive who could). Isildur claimed the ring only after Sauron was first vanquished, but Aragorn (or so Sauron may have thought) was actually challenging him with it, and so may have usurped his place. It likely never occured to him that they would rather destroy it altogether, and Aragorn’s attack was merely a ruse for Sam and Frodo.
So for arguments sake, lets say someone “sufficiently strong and herioc” defeated Sauron using his ring. (using his own power to defeat his power) This person has most likely become evil now, however, would he now be the master of the ring, or it’s slave since the original master has been destroyed?
Yes, but you would first need to figure out how to use the ring, which takes time.
That’s why, even though Sauron suspected that his enemies had the ring (Aragorn), he knew it would be some time before they’d become proficient with it (and that there would likely be a power struggle for it among his foes, as they all fought over the ring). Therefore, he still had time to squash them.
More importantly, to wield it like Sauron, you would first have to train your will to the domination of others. That is why the ring has so little (or such a slow) effect over Bilbo, Frodo, Sam, Gollum, and Tom Bombadil. The ring is a tool whose main function is to enslave others. But these guys had no interest in doing such a thing. Only after long exposure, or when near its source of power/forging (Sauron/Mount Doom), does it really assert itself on them.
The only power of the ring’s that really appealed to the Hobbits was the ability to move about unmarked. This was clearly just a side-effect of its overall mission, though, as it enabled Sauron to gather more information with which to crush his foes and sow fear.
So don’t forget the details of how the ring works. Gandalf doesn’t just put the ring on and win. He puts the ring on, uses it to put all of the free peoples of Middle Earth under his heel, and then drives those new slaves into Mordor to defeat Sauron for him. You can see how this might be counter to creating a better world. And once he’s made himself do this for a few months/years (and it would take a while, even with Sauron’s power diminished, for Sauron still had enormous resources at his disposal; even if his “evil” servants–orcs, trolls, Nazgul–quailed, those stubborn foreign Men were still around, still with huge grudges against Gondor), why should he want to give it up?
No difference. He’d be master over the powers of the ring, but at the same time, the slave to its evil will.
I think Tolkien would say that such a corrupt person would never really be free. Look at Sauron: Even though his master, Morgoth was defeated and Sauron was essentially set free, he still finds himself enslaved to his old master’s enduring will, even going so far as to encourage the men of Numenor to worship Melkor, rather than Iluvatar, during the Second Age.
Both, just like Sauron was both master of the ring and its servant. When Sauron made the ring, it strengthend him, and he could use it as a tool to increase his power, but it also weakened him and made him vulnerable, so his desire was first to protect, and later, after it was lost, to find the ring. It would be the same for the new wielder of the ring. His powers would increase, but at the same time, so would his fear that the ring would be lost, or taken from him.
Thank you toadspittle for that wonderfully clear explanation! Thank you, thank you, thank you! And to everyone else who responded, thank you as well.
I was forgetting the essential properties of the ring. [slaps myself in the face]…Of course one wouldn’t be able to slip on ring and wield enormous power, like some silly little wizard in Hogwarts or something! Of course not!
Re read The Council of Elrond in FOTR for the discussion of the power of the ring. I think that Tolkien is deliberately vague about its powers other than invisibility so that people fill in the gaps themselves.
I do think that a sufficiently strong person weilding the ring would command the Nazgul even against Sauron.
The nature of the ring was to give the power to crush the will of other lesser beings to the command of the wielder, to increase the appearance of stature of the wielder, to know and command the other ring wielders and to use the inherent power of Sauron transferred into the ring. While Sauron was probably more powerful inherently than Gandalf or Saruman, had they the ring’s portion of power to confront Sauron with, they probably would have been able to defeat him, either in a magic battle or leading a sufficient army. But in using this power of dominion over others, one exercises a power. We are as much what we have done as what we aspire to do. Tolkien was making a point about the very use of power itself: you can’t undo what you have done. The path you take to success is more important than what the success is. For example, Harry Truman spent the rest of his life defending his decision to drop the atomic bomb as the right thing (which I agree it was), but that didn’t change the fact that it fundamentally changed who he was. The kind of power that the ring was, the power to dominate, makes you someone who enslaves.
Perhaps the answer is in the letter itself. It seems that if Sauron let a “great part of his own inherent power pass into the One Ring” which was then “in ‘rapport’ with himself … Unless some other seized it and became possessed of it.” So if Gandalf were to wear the ring it seems logical that he himself would be in ‘rapport’ with this power of Sauron’s, although not with Sauron’s since it seems as that if he were to wear it he would be able to break Sauron’s rapport with it. The power in the ring, as explained in toadspittle’s post, was of an evil nature and leaves one of the opinion that forming a rapport with it was the very road to corruption itself.
It seems as though Frodo was not sufficiently strong and heroic and hence unable to break the rapport with Sauron when he wore it he saw the eye and the eye saw him. Or did they eventually manage to break it. I can’t recall and I hope this isn’t too movie focused, I haven’t read the books in years so as not to spoil the movies for me.
1948? But he was still writing and revising the history of his world well after 1951.
I’ll stick with my statement that Tolkien was none too clear in his own mind what powers the ring had for Sauron, and even less about the overall effects on others.
1948? But he was still writing and revising the history of his world well after 1951.
I’ll stick with the statement that Tolkien was none too clear in his own mind what powers the ring had for Sauron, and even less about the overall effects on others. I agree with “I am Sparticus” that such matters were intended to be vague. He wasn’t trying to work out all the implications of the magic of Middle Earth, say in the way that Edward Eager did in books like “Half Magic”. He provided enough magical detail to support the adventure and his linguistic bent – and probably wisely avoided trying to rationalize everything – say the way J. K. Rowling tries to do.
