Where did Isildur (I thought it was he that did it) get the ability to curse the Dead Men? They were doomed to live forever after being cowardly, more or less, but why did that become fact?
Why was Isildur able to cut off Sauron’s hand? If he could do it, who else could?
Re ROTK: where did the Mumakil come from? I didn’t see them in the long shot of the army. Did they just sort of arrive in the nick of time for the Orcs, and coud they really have continued the attack on the city? There didn’t seem to be very many of them. (And I thought their riders were singing, but that may just have been me.)
Another difference between book and movie. In the book, Sauron is killed in your normal hand-to-hand combat with Elendil, Gil-galad and Isildur (Elendil and Gil-galad die in the process). After Sauron is dead and laying on the ground, Isildur uses the shards of Narsil to cut the ring from his hand. In the movie, the process of losing the ring kills Sauron–much more of a “life force is tied to the ring” kind of deal.
Actually, I thought it would have been pretty easy, and indeed was one of the weak points of the movies, as many reviewers noted. Jackson made almost no use of maps. He could have very easily had WETA do some “zoom ins/outs” from footage to maps to show where everyone was and what was going on. A few scenes like this could have broadened and deepened the movie world immensely, and would have taken only seconds of extra time.
Dunno. We know that the blue wizards went far east, and we don’t really know about anything of import to the WotR happening in the east. I think there were hints that Saruman had corrupted them.
Yeah, we don’t hear much about him after his brief appearance. It’s possible that he had some hand in sending the eagles, but there is no evidence, and Gandalf has enough rapport with them regardless. I think Radagast might have been involved with Beorn and his bear-kin though.
I don’t know: Galadriel in the Simil certainly seemed to love him pretty deeply. She wasn’t like a princess/queen who needed to have an arranged marriage. The Elves weren’t really like that. It’s just that Celeborn, being native to Middle Earth, was more loathe to leave it, while Galadriel’s original home was in the West, and she yearned for it in a way he did not, could not.
I think some did return to Moria, actually, but I don’t think it ever really caught on as a city again, that we’ve heard about. We don’t know much about what the Dwarves did as the age of men came on. If Tolkien had lived to write his stories about the decline of Gondor long after Aragorn’s time, we might have gotten more hints, but alas.
In the Simil, it’s pretty strongly implied that Morgoth actually bred them from elves that he kidnapped very soon after they awoke for the first time. He does not create, Morgoth, just twists other things to his purposes.
As far as the Dwarves, we know Gimli led a contingent of kinsmen to Aglarond and founded a colony there, becoming known as the Lord of the Glittering Caves, before he sailed West with Legolas.
Related to this: How many mortals or Halfelven were accorded the privilege of going to the Undying Lands? As far as I can figure, it includes the following:
[ul][li]Tuor[/li][li]Turin (? – allusions to his role in the Final Battle when Morgoth returns suggest it)[/li][li]Earendil[/li][li]Elwing[/li][li]Elrond[/li][li]Bilbo[/li][li]Frodo[/li][li]Sam[/li][li]Gimli[/li][li]Arwen (rejected it to accept the Fate of Men)[/li][li]Elladan (decision unknown at end of LOTR)[/li][li]Elrohir (ditto)[/ul][/li]
Anybody else?
Tuor’s acceptance into the Undying Lands is, at best, a legend of the Elves, unless I’m missing material from HOMES. There’s a lot of “It is said…” to the ending of Tuor and Idril’s story, as they more or less just disappear after sailing off and no one writing this stuff down actually knows what happened to them.
Túrin is dead. He committed suicide after slaying Glaurung and learning that his true love was actually his sister. There is a tradition that he will return at the Last Battle to contend with Melkor, but that seems to be more in the Arthurian tradition of the once and future king than an indication that his spirit was somehow bound to the Halls of Mandos in defiance of the Gift of Men.
Ëarendil, with Elwing, did make it to the Undying Lands, but was then placed in the sky with his ship and the Silmaril, so isn’t actually still in the Undying Lands.
This is not accurate. The cutting of the ring from Sauron’s finger is what vanquished him, as happened in the movie. From The Silmarillion:
But at the last the siege was so strait that Sauron himself came forth; and he wrestled with Gil-galad and Elendil, and they both were slain, and the sword of Elendil broke under him as he fell. But Sauron also was thrown down, and with the hilt-shard or Narsil Isildur cut the Ruling Ring from the hand of Sauron and took it for his own. Then Sauron was for that time vanquished, and he forsook his body, and his spirit fled faw away…
As you can see, Sauron was not “killed” in battle with Elendil and indeed cannot really be killed; at the end of the War of the Rings, he is “utterly vanquished” and just “a shadow of malice,” but as a Maiar cannot be totally destroyed. Isildur, by a stroke of luck or with the help of some higher power (this is not stated, it’s just my idea), he is able to cut the ring off Sauron’s hand and turn the tide of the war.
I second rubystreak’s assertions. It took the combined might of the King of the Noldor in exile and the King of the Faithful men of the West to throw down Sauron, though it cost them their own lives. This bought the time needed for Isildur to cut the ruling ring away. Not a lucky stroke like in the movie, but rather taking the advantage offered by the sacrifice of others.
Either way, Sauron was diminished by the loss and his spirit fled far away. But by his nature Sauron is not “killable”.
As Qadgop points out, it’s worth noting that several times during the One Ring’s history, highly unlikely and unpredictable events take place surrounding it that are NOT in Sauron’s favor. The Ring seems to have a homing instinct (for lack of a better word) that wants to take it back to its master, as when it deserted Isildur at a crucial moment; however, on several occasions the Ring is moved in ways that foil and confuse Sauron. The way Isildur was able to take a broken sword and cut the Ring right off Sauron’s finger (which prefigures the struggle between Frodo and Gollum at the end of RotK in a most ironic way), how Smeagol “found” the ring, how the Ring “fled” from Gollum to Bilbo, all seem to indicate that some higher power other than Sauron is interested in the Ring, and is working against Sauron to prevent its return to him.
I always got the impression that the Valar took a hands-off approach to Middle Earth, but would intervene indirectly via Gandalf, and through little strokes of luck as above. Isildur’s defeat of Sauron is an egregious example of this, IMO.
I understand that there is some controversy about Tom Bombadil’s origins (Maia? Vala? Elf? Something else?) because Tolkien apparently never mentioned anything explicitly about him. Well, that’s okay, then.
What I’d really like to know is, does Tom have a purpose of existence?
Eugene Hargrove wrote a very interesting essay called “Who is Tom Bombadil?” which asserts that though Tolkien was evasive on the subject, he embedded enough clues in his canon to indicate the true identity of this enigmatic character:
This essay gives compelling evidence that Bombadil was the Valar Aule, and offers reasons why Aule would be hiding out in Middle Earth as Tom Bombadil. A must-read, even if you disagree with it.
Rubystreak, that is interesting. I do think most attempts to uncover the “secret” of Tom Bombadil are pretty useless, as Tolkien seems never to have really had a deeper, deeper meaning for him, and never seems to have decided that he was this or that. But that’s a very good analysis.
And it reminded me that both Sauron and Saruman were Maia of Aulë. I usually think of Melkor as the opposite number of Manwë, but he really fits much better as the dark mirror of Aulë when you look at Aulë’s attributes as noted in that article.
It is a fascinating article, but so hung with unsubstantiated assumptions, conjecture, and even outright discounting of some stuff that JRRT actually wrote on the subject that I would tend to doubt in the extreme that Tom and Goldberry were really Aulë and Yavanna on vacation at their summer home, as it were.
Interesting reading, though.
We should keep in mind though, the unfinished nature of JRRT’s works. Many characters he wrote about in his earliest drafts got left out, such as the Vala Makar, Measse, Omar-Amillo, Nielìqui,
and Salmar. Who knows how they might have influenced the origins and character of Bombadil?
Bombadil was a character from a children’s poem first, and got added to LoTR later. It’s just doubtful that he was a character of consequence: he was put in the story before Tolkien even decided that LoTR really fit solidly into his Simil mythology.
Indeed, he was already “killed” in a pretty huge way when Numenor was destroyed, and all it did was ruin his ability to appear fair.
Interestingly, one of my more annoyingly pedantic Rings geek friends used the absence of Tom Bombadil in the movies as evidence that Peter Jackson is a “f***ing greedy hack” and that the movies are “terrible”. Because, if you believe him, Tom Bombadil is one of the most important characters in the story.
I think you are eliding the death of a body Sauron was using with the death of Sauron himself. Killing his body is a temporary setback for the likes of him, as has been shown by your example and the “death” of the body he was using when Isildur cut the Ring from his finger. But as it says in the Simil, as you call it, his spirit fled and hid, just as it did when his body at the time drowned with Numenor. Even after he was utterly vanquished with the destruction of the Ring, he is still “a shadow of malice.”
Maiar cannot be destroyed. That’s the bottom line. (They can be harmed, though–Sauron wasn’t able to recreate the finger he lost to Isildur in his recorporation during the Third Age, but anyway…)