What destroys the Ring in LOTR?

[patrice]

Those who struggle to possess it.

[sakabatou]

1. I thought it was the fires of Mount Doom

DOOOOOOOOOM!

[Rabrrrrrr]

2. No, I think the molten lava destroys the ring.

I don't think "those who struggle to possess it" destroyed it at all.

[patrice]

6. They brought it to the lava and then fought over it.

[bluemarkers]

3. origins

the fire from which it was forged

the struggle of those made it stronger

?

its been a while I think that is right

[Ready4Change]

4. Who says it was destroyed?

Frankly, it's a nice ring. Very reasuring on ones finger. It's beautiful, endearingly lovely. Yesss.

[OwnedByFerrets]

5. My

Preessssiiiiooouuusssssssssssssss!

[TechBear_Seattle]

30. I had a story idea along those lines

In high school, long before I learned that the Tolkein estate protected its copyright with more ferocity than Gollum protecting his Precious.

Basically, the story goes that the Ring was not destroyed; it had cooled for too long away from Sauron's malice for even the fires of Orodruin to unmake it. Instead, it sank into the lava and was eventually encased in basalt.

Fastforward to the early 20th century, about 1903. Some mountain explorers hiking in the Alps find a cave uncovered by a recent earthquake. Within one of the cave's walls, they find a gold ring embedded in the rock. Despite its obvious age, it looks shiny, almost newly made; efforts to chip it out don't mar the precious find.

Over the next few years, this ring goes from hand to hand, usually by violent means. Eventually, it comes in to the posession of one fo the occult groups that were so popular about this time. Unlike most, this group has a few bits of lore held over from antiquity, and they recognize the ring for what it is. A half remembered ritual, and nine other ancient rings in museums and private collections around the world awake, and stark working their way towards Austria. Discontent and desire for power begin to walk the land....

Meanwhile, in England, a young man by the name of John Ronald Reuel Tolkien is about to start his studies at Oxford. The bright young English student with a gift for languages soon comes to the attention of Dr. James Grey, an elderly chap with a long beard who walks with the aid of a most unusual cane....

(What, you think Tolkein made it all up himself?)

[muriel_volestrangler]

7. Advice from Tolkien: LOTR has no "inner meaning or 'message'"

As for any inner meaning or 'message', it has in the intention of the author none. It is neither allegorical not topical.

Chance destroys it, as much as anything; Gollum is doing a victory dance, overbalances, and falls into the volcano. So, chance, gravity, and magma destroy it.

[Random_Australian]

8. Seconded. w00t chance!

[Goblinmonger]

11. I, too, agree with Chance, but...

the English teacher in me calls bullshit on Tolkien's claim that it is not allegorical. Give me a break. Could it be any more biblical in it's theme. I mean Gandolf dies, goes to hell, and comes back from the dead all white and holy. And Tolkien is going to tell me that isn't Christ imagery that leads to an allegorical discussion of how to live our lives? Yeah, whatever J.R.R.

[Igel]

13. Considering that he was a Maya,

it's not surprising that he didn't die. The Maya are far from fitting into a Christian mythology. Silmarillion stuff.

Instead, Gandalf the Gray was purged, and went from Gray to White. I'm unconvinced there's a large Xian stream of thought saying that Christ came to be made pure. Oddly, this was as, IIRC, Saruman, another Maya, and I believe stronger than Gandalf, went from white to multi-colored.

There's as much a claim that Straczynski intended Delenn to be a kind of Christ figure, since she also went from 'gray' (a member of the Gray Council, standing between the Vorlons and the Shadows) to 'white'--in this case, being on her own side against both, ultimately. Of course, that implies a slight switching of genres. But that view is untenable in the light of everything else Straczynski put in Babylon 5.

The old-fashioned kind of literature student in me that relied on authorial intent and materials say that Tolkien's claim shouldn't be dismissed. The mythology that he wrote surrounding--some prior to, some during, some after writing the LOTR book--don't support the Christ figure here. Newer students that believe that an author's work exists independent of any intent by the author, and its 'intent' relies strictly on how people want to interpret it will probably, of course, disagree. But that kind of view relies less on manuscripts and sources and more on introspection.

[catbert836]

19. Maiar! Maiar!

Sorry, my LOTR geek past combined with the English teacher inside me for a minute.

[catbert836]

18. Also

the struggle that Frodo goes through on the way to Mt. Doom is rather representative of Jesus on the way to the cross, except Frodo's carrying a ring. I suppose that would make Samwise Simon of Cyrene.

Also, the setup is obviously a Christian crusader motif.

[ozone_man]

21. It's a Christian allegory.

He obviously didn't like to describe it as an allegory, but that doesn't mean that it isn't. In his own words:

"The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work," wrote J.R.R. Tolkien about his masterwork, "unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision. That is why I have not put in, or have cut out, practically all references to anything like "religion", to cults or practices, in the Imaginary world. For the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism"

http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/arts/al0108.html

A Mythology for England

Although The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia represent the flowering of that agreement about mythopoeics, Tolkien and Lewis disagreed about their religious purposes, which explains why the literary styles they used to create Narnia and Middle-earth are so different.

Lewis, the evangelical Anglican, hoped his stories would bring the reader closer to the truth of the Christian Gospel. As a result, The Chronicles of Narnia bristles with obvious Christian symbolism, allegory, and moments of overt moral and religious instruction. In short, Lewis wanted his writing to be evangelistic.

For the Catholic Tolkien, however, it was more important that Middle-earth was successful as "sub-creation." Using his vast literary, linguistic, and historical talents, Tolkien created Middle-earth as an act of divine praise. The more convincing Middle-earth was as a real place, the purer that praise would be because it would more closely approach God’s own act of creation.

Unlike Lewis, Tolkien was unwilling to direct his fictive world according to any overt pedagogical design. He believed that the moment readers are made aware of any connections between our world and the "secondary world" of fiction, the literary spell is broken; readers reemerge from the imaginary world and realize that it is "just a story." Tolkien wanted them to believe that Middle-earth really exists and is not merely a tool for evangelism.

Few readers of The Lord of the Rings know that Tolkien hoped Middle-earth would become England’s native mythology. He thought that the Arthurian legends were weak compared with the Homeric epics and Norse legends. Middle-earth, with its inspirational heroics and warnings about the hazards of the will to power, was created to preserve a uniquely English cultural heritage from modernity’s infectious errors.

With this in mind, we can understand why Middle-earth seems to embrace magic and soft paganism. The historical framework for Tolkien’s imagination was England’s pre-Christian past—the scattered and disconnected Norse and Anglo-Saxon legends, with their tales of heroic valor and pagan mysticism. Tolkien purposely set Middle-earth before the advent of Christianity because he feared that it might otherwise lapse into a kind of enervated allegory.

http://www.crisismagazine.com/november2001/feature7.htm

Tolkien source materials.

http://www.sacred-texts.com/ring/index.htm

Faith and Fantasy: Tolkien the Catholic, The Lord of the Rings, and Peter Jackson’s Film Trilogy

By Steven D. Greydanus

J. R. R. Tolkien once described his epic masterpiece The Lord of the Rings as "a fundamentally religious and Catholic work." Yet nowhere in its pages is there any mention of religion, let alone of the Catholic Church, Christ, or even God. Tolkien’s hobbits have no religious practices or cult; of prayer, sacrifice, or corporate worship there is no sign.

To make matters more difficult, Tolkien was equally emphatic that The Lord of the Rings were not to be understood allegorically. In fact, Tolkien was famously hostile to allegory in general, disliking even the allegorical children’s stories of his friend and fellow Christian C. S. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia. How then can The Lord of the Rings be in any sense described as a fundamentally Catholic work, or even a religious one?

Creation and corruption in Middle-earth

Part of the answer is found in Tolkien’s other great chronicle of Middle-earth, The Silmarillion, which recounts the larger mythic context of Middle-earth, beginning (notwithstanding his antipathy for allegory) with a magnificent allegorical retelling of the Creation and the Fall according to Genesis 1-3.

Here Tolkien does name the creator-God of Middle-earth, Eru ("the One," also called Il�vatar, "All-Father"), as well as the mighty spirit Melkor, who rebelled against Eru and went into darkness. We also learn that Sauron, maker of the One Ring, is himself an agent of this Melkor. Tolkien thus establishes a direct relationship between the theistic, even Judeo-Christian cosmology of The Silmarillion and the war for the One Ring recounted in The Lord of the Rings.

http://www.decentfilms.com/sections/articles/2559

[patrice]

12. Your assumption is that authors have absolute power over what they

create, ergo their intentions are significant. Neither of these assumptions is necessarily true nor desirable.

[muriel_volestrangler]

14. But I don't think your claim that "those who struggle to posess it"

destroy it holds water. Sauron is striving to posess it, but has no part in its destruction. At the last moment, Frodo decides he wants to keep it - but he then loses it. It's more accurate to say that the joy of posession destroys it. If the struggle was meant to destroy it, consciously or unconsciously on Tolkien's part, then it should have fallen in during a conflict, not after one.

[SidDithers]

9. If I recall, the ring was destroyed by...

"Liquid hot magma"



Sid

[Random_Australian]

22. Mag-ma. The Evil pronounciation. And Sauron's armies (when not

up his sleevies) were fed to ill-tempered mutated sea bass.

[SidDithers]

24. Yup, before the sharks with frickin' laser beams...

there were only ill-tempered mutated sea bass.

:toast:

Sid

[LaurenG]

10. Courage was instrumental in destroying the ring

w/o it the ring would have consumed Frodo. It took strength and courage to get it to Mt. Doom. However, the hot magma melted it thus changing it's form and destroying it...

[silverweb]

15. I'm afraid you have that backwards.

Those who struggled to possess it were themselves destroyed by their own desire.

Frodo was aware of that corruptive influence of the ring and was one of the few able to resist it, which was why he accepted the perilous task of returning it to the fires of Mount Doom. On the other hand, Gollum and Sauron were the ultimate examples of humanity destroyed by greed and lust for power.

[moggie]

16. A pointer

There may, conceivably, be someone who hasn't read LotR yet, and who consequently feels left out of this important theological discussion. For their benefit, I'd like to point them at ultra-condensed versions of the three volumes, here:

The Fellowship of the Ring
The Two Towers
The Return of the King

[Rabrrrrrr]

20. ROTFL!

:rofl: :rofl:

Those are hilarious, especially the The Two Towers summation. :rofl:

[JerseygirlCT]

26. Oh my! Those are great! Thank you. nt

[muriel_volestrangler]

17. It wasn't destroyed at all, I tell you

There's an advert offering it for sale, right at the top of this thread - "Own the One Ring of Power". :evilgrin:

[TechBear_Seattle]

23. I don't think you understand

The power of the Ring was to inflame the lust and greed of its bearer. (To a lesser extent, that was also the power of the Nine and the Seven.) The reason Gandalf and Galadriel were so afraid to even touch it was that they desired strongly to end Sauron's influence; that desire gave the Ring something to bend to its own will. Hobbits were largely immune, as they desired little beyond a full tummy and an a cozy fire. Smeagol was an exception, as he was filled with malice before he "acquired" the Ring. You may remember the scene with Tom Bombadil (sadly cut from every movie ever made, even though it is vitally important in explaining things) when he put the Ring on... and did not vanish, then gave it back to Frodo gladly with no wish to keep it. That was because Tom already had everything he could possibly want, and the Ring had no way to control him.

The reason people struggled to posess the Ring was because... they wanted to posess the Ring. All it had to do was make itself known to strong people it could control.

[hunter]

28. Bilbo and Frodo sought adventure.

Unusual for Hobbits.

[TechBear_Seattle]

29. That wasn't quite enough, though

That Bilbo was able to leave the Ring behind was enough to give Gandalf doubts that it was, in fact, the One. And even though Frodo failed at the last moment as he stood at the edge of Orodruin, he got much, much farther than anyone other than a Hobbit could have possibly gotten.

I'm inclined to agree that Tolkein did not consciously put in any special messages, but his values are definitely expressed. One of the values that is central to the story is: Desire for power, even power to do good, will ultimately be turned towards evil. Excercise of power, even with good intentions, will become corrupted towards malice, greed and ultimately harm.

At its heart, LotR is pretty Buddhist. :hi:

[sutz12]

25. Nothing, it commited suicide. nt

[JerseygirlCT]

27. Doesn't the bumper sticker say Bush has it? nt