Also Déagol–briefly–between Isildur and Sméagol/Gollum.
How does Gandalf know this? No-one in history had ever actually really wanted or attempted to “abandon” it. Isuldur comes closest, but as far as he was concerned Sauron was dead - at his own hand no less - so why not keep his ring as “an heirloom”?
It is true that at one point Frodo puts this to the test at Gandalf’s request, and is unable to throw it in the fire (he just puts it back in his pocket while he thinks about it), but this isn’t proof that it is absolutely impossible - merely very hard. Similarly, handing it over to someone else is very hard - but, demonstratably, doable.
Fair enough, but arguably he doesn’t count because he failed to live long enough to actually be a “ring bearer”. He has it in his hand, but is killed before he can really claim it.
Similarly, Tom Bombadil is handed the ring, but doesn’t really count, as he had no intention of being a ring-bearer.
Objection. Gandalf didn’t say “The One Ring” he said “A Ring of Power” of which there were roughly 16 others. (The Nine and the Seven - I’m discounting The Three because they are clearly weird fringe cases.).
It’s entirely likely that the Nine and the Seven had never willingly changed hands. The Nine, certainly, hadn’t. The Seven PROBABLY hadn’t, since dwarves seem to have been immune to wraith-ification, they probably only ever changed hands through inheritance or being capture by force.
The Three had, though. Gandalf himself wasn’t the original owner of Narya - and he got it from the previous owner totally voluntarily.
Did you miss the part where I deliberately ignored The Three because in many ways, they are super atypical of the Rings? They certainly appear to have none of the usual ‘side effects’.
Anyway, one could easily suggest that Cirdan seeing that Gandalf would be an excellent bearer for Narya and handing the ring on doesn’t qualify as “abandoning” it.
Certainly - but that undermines the thesis you were presenting: ‘A ring of power has these effects - except, of course, for the one I happen to wear myself’.
Also, as far as I know, it is by no means clear what happened to the seven, or if Dwarves could hand them over to each other.
The thing is, no-one in the story previously had any real motivation to “abandon” a ring of power (if by “abandon” you mean ‘throw away or attempt to destroy’). So it is not clear where the knowledge that one could not throw away or destroy a ring of power comes from - clearly, it was possible to hand (certain ones) over to someone else, such as the One or the Three, because that actually happened.
It stikes me as more sensible that doing anything of that nature - hand over, throw away, or destroy - to the One Ring would take tremendous will-power; it is not so obvious that it would be absolutely impossible. It had simply never been attempted before.
Gandalf has access to all kinds of arcane forgotten lore, and understands the nature of Sauron’s power as well as the elf-craft that went into forging the other rings. There’s no reason, narratively, for him to take the time to explain to Frodo how he knows all this. Tolkien is clearly using Gandalf to establish what’s at stake and what Frodo is up against in becoming a ring-bearer, and I don’t think we have any reason to suspect that Gandalf’s knowledge is faulty or conjectural.
Unless of course he didn’t want to get into a 3 hour lecture on the different properties of the different rings…
Actually, it’s pretty clear. They’ve either been reclaimed by Sauron or destroyed in dragonfire. And presumably Gandalf DOES know.
That’s nice, but it’s not what he said, so what “strikes you as sensible” here is not entirely relevant.
Well, except for the fact that the very issue at stake is whether Tolkien set up a situation in which Frodo was sent to certain doom because the task was, in fact, impossible.
It strikes me as strange thing to fan-wank oneself into by postulating that Gandalf was, on this point, infallible (or could not have been speaking with a certain amount of hyperbole) because of ‘arcane forgotten lore’.
Certainly, the task was very, very difficult.
They could and they did. “Thror gave it {his Ring} to Thrain his son, but not Thrain to Thorin. It was taken with torment from Thrain in the dungeons of Dol Guldur. I came too late”. - Gandalf to Gloin, “The Council of Elrond”.
As to what happened to the dwarf-rings, Sauron got three of them back, and the rest were melted by various dragons. (“The Shadow of the Past”)
I admit, I have no idea what you are arguing about.
To my mind, the present topic discussion is pretty clear: I am debating with Nonsuch as to whether Tolkien’s book has, in effect, no dramatic tension because Frodo’s failure at Mount Doom was inevitable - because, for one, Gandalf said at one point that it was impossible to simply abandon the Ring. Therefore, according to that theory, Frodo could not, in any way, completed the task - it was literally impossible. No-one could do it.
Do you agree, or not?
Malthus: I don’t agree…in two ways.
Most readers are, in fact, quite surprised by the events at the cracks of doom, so the “inevitability” you perceive in the dramatic content of the book doesn’t seem to bear out so much.
And, no, the mission wasn’t absolutely impossible, only incredibly risky. It’s a “Hail Mary” pass when there’s two seconds left on the clock. What else are you going to do? Just kneel and concede? Or go down trying something, no matter how shitty the odds.
So, by external logic (a reader enjoying the book) and by internal logic (what other choice does Gandalf have to offer?) I think you’re wrong.
Frodo’s “sin” at Mount Doom was human nature Frodo’s assertion of control over his own destiny and “property” and in the theology of Tolkien, it required the intervention of the divine.
I see where I misremembered the passage in question, in which Gandalf alludes to not just the One, but to any of the Great Rings of which there nineteen in addition to the One–Durin’s Bane for one. The reader is quite reasonably expected to accept the fact that Gandalf knows all about the other rings and their keepers without the author having to elaborate on it. He does mention three of the Seven having been recovered by Sauron, presumably by torture or threats, from their Dwarvish holders and the other four havin been consumed by dragons.
Durin’s Bane is what the dwarves awakened when they delved too deeply. Which we find out in the books is a balrog. In the movies the wizards strongly suspect or know for a fact that what took over Moria is a balrog.
I thought I had corrected my post during the edit window; Durin’s Bane was the Balrog, certainly. Mea culpa. The specific Ring I was thinking of was the one supposed to have been wrested by force from Thrain II, during his final captivity in Dol Goldur.
It’s not so much that the book has no dramatic tension — of course you want to know how it turns out. As a young reader, I didn’t see how Frodo could possibly destroy the Ring given what we knew about it and what we’d seen of its effects on him. At the same time, I knew the bad guys weren’t going to win. So it was a question of how Tolkien would get himself out of that conundrum, and I think he actually did a very neat job of it. Lord of the Rings works very well on its own terms — it’s just that those terms, as I’ve labored to make clear, very much fly in the face of what’s been expected of “literary” fiction since the onset of Modernism, which is why literary types tend not to revere it, which is the question that started this whole discussion.
Anyway, a more productive avenue might be: instead of concluding that Gandalf was either guessing, mistaken or lying in explaining the power of the rings (which I think is to take on far more work than Tolkien expected of his readers —Professor T doesn’t go in for unreliable narrators), where is the textual evidence that Frodo, in fact, could have mustered the strength to resist the power of the Ring and choose to destroy it of his own volition? I don’t remember anything really fitting that bill, but am willing to be convinced.
You also didn’t completely not include a double negative.
But I definitely see your point; I fondly remember A Change Of Hobbit in Santa Monica, which used to be one of the finest bookstores specializing in SF and fantasy in the area. While they might have had SF and retro/alternative fantasy in separate sections, I don’t remember the categories being broken down any more than that. Reading LOTR early in my college career, I met few if any other Tolkien fans who weren’t also SF fans, and vice versa.
I’m not sure how anything like LOTR could work without these heroic tropes, as commonplace as they were in historical literature which obviously inspired JRRT to some extent. If nothing else, the “wordiness” and sometimes esoteric word choices should stifle anyone who thinks LOTR is kiddie lit. As an imagined history and mythology that takes place over three years and has antecedents stretching back over millennia, LOTR is the long version of that history, written mainly for adults who like to read.
Without the tropes and his use of language, LOTR would be…something else, obviously, but what that is I don’t know. Maybe a 100 page novella?