I’ve been thinking about this for awhile. If I were Sauron, I would have sealed off the entrance and/or had some orcs guarding the mountain thus making it impossible for the ring to be destroyed.
Hm. Neat idea. Of course, sealing all the cracks and fissures in an active volcano can be a hell of a trick, even if you have an infinite number of orcs to do it with…
IANATolkien Geek, but I think that he never envisioned the destruction of the ring.
To Sauron the ring was absolutely invaluable. I don’t think he ever considered that his enemies would want to destroy it.
His strategy seemed to be
1-Get the ring from them
2-Prevent them from using it against him (that’s what he thought they’d do)
Soon a Tolkien geek will come after me with a sword or something for getting it all wrong… 
I’m not a Tolkien geek either, Forbin, but I believe you’re exactly right. I believe Sauron’s fear was the ring being used against him. I’ve always felt that the approach of destroying the ring embodied a sacrifice and selflessness that would never occur to the evil Sauron.
Novus
RotK spoiler:
And, of course, it seems that Sauron was exactly right, if he was indeed convinced that a ring-bearer would invariably choose to keep the ring for themself rather than destroy it. If it wasn’t for the unforseen effects of an exuberant little creature, Sauron’s ringwraiths would have made very short work of Frodo, and that would have been that.
Forbin – you’re exactly right. In Fellowship (which I’m re-reading now), in the chapter “Council of Elrond”, Elrond specifically says (about Sauron):
“But the only measure that he knows is desire, desire for power; and so he judges all hearts. Into his heart the thought will not enter that any will refuse it, that having the Ring we may seek to destroy it.”
I AM a Tolkien geek (my 1973 boxed set edition of the trilogy + The Hobbit is my badge of honor), and I’m here to tell you that Forbin is exactly right, as is Monstre…Timmy
Also note that special effort was required to keep the Crack of Doom open at all. In Return of the King it is said that the entrance to the Sammath Naur gazed back east straight to the Window of the Eye in Barad-Dur, and the road from Barad-Dur to the Sammath Naur on Orodruin was often blocked by eruptions, but was always cleared by the labours of countless orcs. So, not only did Sauron not just forget about possibly sealing up the Crack, it seems he needed it to be open for some reason. It doesn’t say why, but we should be thankful he did, or we’d all be speaking the Black Speech, now.
Perhaps since the One Ring was made in Mt. Doom, and could only be destroyed there, that means that Sauron was drawing on some special power there.
Well, Sauron probably thought of Mt. Doom as his workshop, his place to go when he wanted to get out of the Barad Dur and away from Shelob.
There is also an argument to be made that all of Arda was Morgoth’s “ring”, and that Mt. Doom though the one ring was access to that power.
I thought that the passage Genseric is citing referred to the road that went past Mt. Doom and since that was the major road through Mordor they worked to keep it clear. There wasn’t any actual path up the mountain to the Crack of Doom.
No, the road wound up and around the mountain. Frodo and Sam picked it up on the north slope as they approached Mt. Doom across Gorgoroth. Gollum made one last desperate attempt to attack them at a hairpin turn in the road a few miles before they reached the opening. A road definitely went up the mountain.
Of course, the orcs may have been allowed to keep it open for conveinience sake. Gong around that mountain could add a week to any journey, although going over it was bloody hard. And its possible there were some workshops up there.
Not to mention the road was needed for the Mount Doom Bike Trail, and the Mount Doom Workshop Tour, and the Mount Doom Gift Shop at the top.
You know Sauron was evil. He invented those “43 leagues to Mt. Doom Adventure Tours!” roadside signs…
“Look, Gandalf! Can we stop? Can we, please?!”
What I’d like to know is why, after all these years, suddenly now I find the phrase “Crack of Doom” hilariously funny?
My answer to why he kept the mountain open would be because if he didn’t, there wouldn’t be much point in writing a story about it.
Although I’m an avid Tolkien fan, this is another point at which Tolkien’s plot doesn’t hold together too well.
As I recall, there were two places in Middle Earth that a ring of power could be destroyed: Mount Doom, and inside a dragon. The implication is that sheer heat can destroy a ring. Readers are asked to believe there’s only one volcano in Middle Earth and no dragons that are hot enough.
And, what’s even harder to believe, there’s no way to generate that kind of heat any other way.
As for the concept of “sealing a volcano” . . . uh . . . using a really big cork, or what? If the pressure wasn’t released in Mount Doom, it would come out somewhere else, eventually.
Well no , the methods of the rings destruction seems reasonable enough to me.Remember this is a world of magic.
Mount doom is one place because it was where the ring was forged.‘Magically speaking’ if you’ll forgive the phrase, it seems right and reasonable that it can be unmade their as well.
A Dragon is a creature of Magic . A living engine of destruction that destroys everything around it (for example “The Desolation of Smaug” around the lonely mountain). So Dragonfire being able to do the job also strikes me as not unreasonable.
I’m agreeing with Dept. It’s not a matter of heat, it’s a matter of magic.
So, as I jokingly posted once before, would a thermonuclear device have enough heat, or would it fail since it’s pure science?