The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power

[The Brain]

Thanks Brain, so perhaps a stupid question - who figured out that destroying the ring would destroy Sauron power - and how did they figure that out?

Very hard to say, I think. Mostly because Tolkien doesn't appear to have considered this aspect much or at all. Maybe Elrond or Galadriel pieced it together from scraps of information they had gotten from Celebrimbor. Maybe Galadriel saw it in her Mirror. Or some more direct divine revelation?

If it wasn't known until the TA it would stand to reason if Saruman, for many years the greatest of the Wizards and their expert on Ring-lore, somehow figured it out during his centuries of research while still uncorrupted, and shared that information instead of guarding it jealously. One way to make sense of Gandalf's comment to Frodo in The Shadow of the Past that only one power in Middle-Earth knew all about the Rings and their powers is if he meant Saruman. Sauron appears to have had gaps in his knowledge of The One that may not have been filled in until very late, and of course he never touched the Three and is an unlikely candidate to know all about them (Saruman at least knew their wearers very well and they would probably share info fairly freely when Saruman was still in his moral prime). Saruman spoke with authority on the Rings of Power in the Council, which suggests that Elrond and Galadriel couldn't match his knowledge. As I talked about above Saruman is also a reasonable candidate for leaking this information to Sauron in the last decades of the TA.

Addendum: it would also be nice for the Saruman story I think if he was the one who figured it out. Saruman having made an absolutely critical contribution to the cause of Good (even if he later came to regret it) makes his story richer I think.

[grumbler]

I do like the idea of Saruman providing that aid to the Council before he fell victim to his ambitions, and that's a very reasonable take.  I don't think that you can make the argument that "only one power in Middle-Earth knew all about the Rings and their powers" refers to Saruman, though.  While he knew a lot, he didn't know how to make them.  Sauron did.

Speaking of ruing lore, one of the interesting theories I have seen proposed (and one indirectly supported by JRRT) is that the sixteen rings Sauron and Celebrimbor forged were all meant to go to elves. That's why Sauron donned a fair guise and convinced Celebrimbor to help make them, rather than just making them himself.  When Sauron left Eregion (still on good terms with Celebrimbor) he left all the rings behind.

It is unclear why none of the sixteen were given out in the approximately one hundred years between their forging and the forging of the One Ring.  Perhaps they were held back because Celebrimbor had begun heeding Gil-galad's warning about the real intentions of "Annatar."  The precipitating cause of the War of Elves and Sauron was Celebrimbor's refusal to hand over the sixteen rings to Sauron.  It was clear by that point that Sauron's plan to corrupt the elves had failed.

Why the sixteen were left in Eregion to be reclaimed by Sauron is another mystery. 

Anyway, the really interesting part of this theory is that, if the sixteen were meant for elves, there wouldn't likely be real any difference in their power.  Which means that the division into "Seven for the Dwarf Lords" and the "Nine for the Mortal Men" was entirely Sauron's choice. 

One would think that "Seven for the Dwarf Lords" was because there were seven "tribes" of dwarves.  But were there?  Two tribes, the Firebeards and Broadbeams, lost their mansions at Nogrod and Belegost at the end of the First Age and joined Durin's tribe at Khazad-dum.  Did they later leave, to maintain the seven tribes?

I prefer to think that they did, because that explains why there sere seven rings given to them, rather than six or eight.

If all of this is correct, then there are nine rings given to men because 16-7=9.

It's worth noting that JRRT himself said that the reason why the rings didn't work "right" with dwarves was because they were dwarves, not because of the rings.  The rings didn't turn dwarven wearers invisible, nor allow Sauron to control them.  They gave their wearers enough wealth to become targets for dragons and other major enemies, and maybe longer lives, but they were pretty much a flop... possibly because they hadn't been made for dwarves at all.

The most interesting ring-lore abut the Nine is, IMO, the fact that no ring was found when the Witch-King was killed.  It would seem that, once enslaved by the ring and turned to wraiths, they didn't need to (and maybe couldn't, being wraiths) wear their ring.

Anyway, that's my wall of text.  Thoughts?

[The Brain]

Makes sense to me if all the Rings were meant for Elves; they were his main enemy. It also seems to me that the Rings generally didn't care about the race of the wearer, one of the Three worked fine for Gandalf, the One worked for (not out for) Isildur, Gollum, and Frodo/Sam. So the Dwarves seem to have been protected by their inherent rock-like resistance. Is it possible that maybe some Ring-fuelled extra greed and ambition helped make the Dwarves dig too deep in Moria? Even if this were so, this is a very delayed effect and very unlikely to have been what Sauron hoped to achieve with the Rings to the Dwarves.

Yeah, the lack of Ring on the Pelennor suggests that they were kept elsewhere, likely Barad-dûr at the time. AFAIK we're never told much about the "daily life" of a ringwraith, but presumably once you've become one you don't need to wear it to be wraithlike. It could possibly be argued that wearing it would grant some extra oomph power ("it's a desirable magic item so it must have in-game bonuses!"), but the Nine (and the Seven) were designed to enslave, not empower as such, so it's likely that going without it was fine since it had already served its purpose. The power of the Witch-King at this moment in time appears to flow from him channeling/operating under the might of Sauron, as projected over the Pelennor on that day. That's why he felt confident that he could kill Gandalf (in which, I like to think, he was correct). At Weathertop, far from Mordor, and with Angmar long dormant, he didn't dare confront Aragorn even with buddies around, and decided to wait for the Morgul blade to do its work. And AFAIK he didn't even know at that time that Aragorn was the heir of Isildur, even if he likely sensed that he was a noble Dunadan of high lineage.

One possibility of course is that, off-camera in the chaos of battle, a Rider of Rohan found the ring, and was promptly strangled by his friend who kept it for himself.*

*I don't actually think this. If Gandalf had expected the Witch-King to have left a Ring behind he would likely have inquired about it, and wouldn't have simply shrugged off a Ring of Power being loose in camp.

[The Brain]

I have some more questions for Tolkien nerds:

1. When Sauron was still in Dol Guldur, as the Necromancer before revealed as Sauron returned, what did the Council think that he was? A human sorcerer? Some lesser unknown Maia? Something else?

2. Same question but about the Witch-King when he was ruler of Angmar. They didn't know that Sauron had returned, so I guess they didn't think that he was a Nazgul? Or? I mean some of the elves that confronted Angmar likely had encountered him in SA, did they recognize him? And if so, what did they make of the fact that he was around again?

3. When the Witch-King falls at the Pelennor his second-in-command, Gothmog, takes over. AFAIK the name is all the info we get in LOTR. Is there any more info from Tolkien on his identity? Middle-Earth Roleplaying (Gorgoroth campaign module) has him as a Half-troll, and Peter Jackson has him as John Merrick. Is this based on anything?

[Jacob]

I have some more questions for Tolkien nerds:

I'm definitely a nerd, but not an expert - so all of this is caveated by "this is how I always understood it"...

1. When Sauron was still in Dol Guldur, as the Necromancer before revealed as Sauron returned, what did the Council think that he was? A human sorcerer? Some lesser unknown Maia? Something else?

I'm pretty sure Gandalf speaks to this at some point in LotR. IIRC it was some sort of "lesser eviL, there are so many"... so lesser unknown Maia or lesser Shelobesque bad thing, with a lack of specificity, or maybe some corrupted mortal. I don't get the impression that they felt like they had a comprehensive catalogue of all the beings - mortal or not - in the world, and that they assumed they could neatly fit the Necromancer into that theoretical catalogue.

Like... Tolkien nerds have a very clear and delineated canon of what exists in Tolkien's world, so there's perhaps a pretty clean process of elimination that can let the reader reach reasonable conclusions. But for the characters in Tolkien's world it's a lot less cut and dry. I think they knew there were all kinds of uncounted bad things lurking in the corners of the world, left-overs from Morgoth and Sauron's times. The Necromancer was one such, of whatever magnitude, who had remained hidden until then.

2. Same question but about the Witch-King when he was ruler of Angmar. They didn't know that Sauron had returned, so I guess they didn't think that he was a Nazgul? Or? I mean some of the elves that confronted Angmar likely had encountered him in SA, did they recognize him? And if so, what did they make of the fact that he was around again?

I always thought the Witch-King became a Nazgul after the fall of Angmar. That sure, with the ring and the evil sorcery gave him inhuman terrible power, but the "bound supernatural slave of Sauron" state of being came afterwards.

3. When the Witch-King falls at the Pelennor his second-in-command, Gothmog, takes over. AFAIK the name is all the info we get in LOTR. Is there any more info from Tolkien on his identity? Middle-Earth Roleplaying (Gorgoroth campaign module) has him as a Half-troll, and Peter Jackson has him as John Merrick. Is this based on anything?

No idea.

[The Brain]

2. Same question but about the Witch-King when he was ruler of Angmar. They didn't know that Sauron had returned, so I guess they didn't think that he was a Nazgul? Or? I mean some of the elves that confronted Angmar likely had encountered him in SA, did they recognize him? And if so, what did they make of the fact that he was around again?

I always thought the Witch-King became a Nazgul after the fall of Angmar. That sure, with the ring and the evil sorcery gave him inhuman terrible power, but the "bound supernatural slave of Sauron" state of being came afterwards.

According to the Tale of Years in LOTR Appendix B the Nazgul or Ringwraiths first appeared around SA 2251. And in SA 3441 when Sauron was defeated "the Ringwraiths pass into Shadow".

But now I see something very interesting in the Tale of Years (emphasis mine): "[TA] c. 1100 The Wise (The Istari and chief Eldar) discover that an evil power has made a stronghold at Dol Guldur. It is thought to be one of the Nazgûl". So that answers my first question. According to the same source the Nazgûl reappear  TA c. 1300, but of course this is not known to the Wise, who thought that at least one of them had returned at least two centuries before. So the Wise may have thought that the Nine could reappear without Sauron reappearing. Or maybe they thought that Sauron had reappeared somewhere, but not in Dol Guldur.

[Threviel]

3. When the Witch-King falls at the Pelennor his second-in-command, Gothmog, takes over. AFAIK the name is all the info we get in LOTR. Is there any more info from Tolkien on his identity? Middle-Earth Roleplaying (Gorgoroth campaign module) has him as a Half-troll, and Peter Jackson has him as John Merrick. Is this based on anything?

As far as I know it's not specified anywhere. He's presumably named after the leader of the Balrogs from the first age and probably Numenorean, easterling or an orc if I were to guess.

[Threviel]

2. Same question but about the Witch-King when he was ruler of Angmar. They didn't know that Sauron had returned, so I guess they didn't think that he was a Nazgul? Or? I mean some of the elves that confronted Angmar likely had encountered him in SA, did they recognize him? And if so, what did they make of the fact that he was around again?

When Angmar fell to Earnur, eventually the last king of Gondor, the witch-king fled to Mordor and took up residence in Minas Ithil turning it to Minas Morgul. He taunted Earnur and tricked him to his death. For the learned in the White Council and in Gondor his identity ought to have been very clear by then.

So sometime in the centuries that Angmar lasted his existence and identity became known.

[grumbler]

The Witch King was not known to be a Nazgul until the Battle of Fornost, when he "revealed himself."  Certainly he could not have hidden his identity from Glorfindel, the most powerful elf in Middle Earth in the Third Age.

Gothmog (the Lieutenant of Minas Morgul) was probably not a Nazgul, as Tolkien would have probably acknowledged that in the text.  If I had to guess, I'd guess that he was a Black Numenorean like the Mouth of Sauron, as the Witch King would have found it very useful to not have to train a new lieutenant every few decades.  If not that, then I'd guess an Orc.

We know that three of the Nazgul were Numenoreans and one an Easterling.  The other five must have been Southrons, I guess, given the lack of other "bad guy candidates" in the Second Age.

[The Brain]

Btw, how old is the Mouth of Sauron? We know from LOTR that he "entered the service of the Dark Tower when it first rose again". This means roughly 70 years before the War of the Ring (Sauron began rebuilding Barad-dûr in TA 2951) . As a Black Numenorean he has a good number of decades left in him at 100+ y/o. I know that in some derived works (like MERP modules) he is thousands of years old, but I am not aware of anything by Tolkien that suggests that he is unnaturally old. He has forgotten his own name, but that seems more connected to his focus and priorities than to old age.

[grumbler]

Btw, how old is the Mouth of Sauron? We know from LOTR that he "entered the service of the Dark Tower when it first rose again". This means roughly 70 years before the War of the Ring (Sauron began rebuilding Barad-dûr in TA 2951) . As a Black Numenorean he has a good number of decades left in him at 100+ y/o. I know that in some derived works (like MERP modules) he is thousands of years old, but I am not aware of anything by Tolkien that suggests that he is unnaturally old. He has forgotten his own name, but that seems more connected to his focus and priorities than to old age.

I had missed the "again" part of Barad-dur's rise and the arrival of the one who would become the Mouth of Sauron.  He's thus not nearly as old as I had believed before you pointed this out.

[Threviel]

So... Happened upon the Rings of Power pitch meeting and I suppose this might as well be documentary.

Just about sums up my view.

[viper37]

I always wondered why the Queen didn't shut her eyes.

[grumbler]

I always wondered why the Queen didn't shut her eyes.

It would have been super easy... barely an inconvenience.

[Darth Wagtaros]

Queens are tight!