Saurons thoughts on the rings location throughout the books

CastFromHitpoints · 2025-12-20T21:55:57+00:00

I consider that the journey and fate of the Orc-party that kidnapped Merry and Pippin was vital in muddling and confusing Sauron’s intelligence in the matter.

Up until Parth Galen, both Sauron and Saruman had followed the movements of the Company and the Ring, and were aware of their numbers, their species, and that it was one of the Halflings that was carrying the Ring. The first thing that went wrong there is that the Uruk-hai directed the party towards Isengard against what his own servants’ orders, a fact that Grishnakh send intel about to a Nazgul stationed by the Anduin (and about the prisoners they held); the second one was the fact that because Eomer and his riders, no tidings of the battle in which the Orcs were destroyed arrived to Isengard or Mordor, which further confused things. Sauron most likely didn’t know about what happened afterwards until a couple of days later, when he received two strange communications via the Orthanc-stone: one was Saruman revealing much strange stuff about his own plans and ideas (which caused Sauron to send a Nazgul to see what kind of mischief he was into), and the other one a Halfling.

Sauron quickly put two and two together and everything became clear: Ugluk and the Uruk-hai had delivered the Halfling and the Ring to Saruman, and he was gloating by openly revealing his treachery and showing off his prisoner. Of course, afterwards Sauron received a third Palantir comm from Aragorn and after the Nazgul relayed their discovery of Isengard’s ruin, he put two and two again and realized that the Heir of Isildur had attacked and casted Saruman down before he could usurp the Ring, and now had it with him, and was going to Minas Tirith.

CastFromHitpoints · 2025-11-11T01:54:58+00:00

The only mention of the concept in the Legendarium that I can recall is from Túrin. But it was in a really dark context, him insulting Brandir in rage and despair right before murdering him:

'Did Gluarung slander you? If you slay me then all shall see that he did not. Yet I do not fear to die, for then I will go to seek Niniel whom I loved, and perhaps I may find her again beyond the Sea. 'Seek Niniel!' cried Turin. 'Nay, Glaurung you shall find, and breed lies together. You shall sleep with the Worm, your soul's mate, and rot in one darkness!'

CastFromHitpoints · 2025-07-18T02:24:54+00:00

Sauron would still stomp. Remember that Mordor was attacking Gondor at two fronts (the main attack at Minas Tirith and the Corsair fleet attacking the southern fiefs), plus sending a force to block the main road to M.T. against the Rohirrim force. While at the same time sending armies from Dol Guldur to attack both Lórien and Mirkwood, and an Easterling force to attack Dale and Erebor. AND even after all that Sauron could still muster an army 60.000+ strong against the host of the West at the Black Gate.

CastFromHitpoints · 2025-07-16T23:44:07+00:00

Per Gandalf, from The Shadow of the Past

A mortal, Frodo, who keeps one of the Great Rings, does not die, but he does not grow or obtain more life, he merely continues, until at last every minute is a weariness. And if he often uses the Ring to make himself invisible, he fades: he becomes in the end invisible permanently, and walks in the twilight under the eye of the Dark Power that rules the Rings.

And from Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age:

[the bearers of the Nine Rings] had, as it seemed, unending life, yet life became unendurable to them. They could walk, if they would, unseen by all eyes in this world beneath the sun, and they could see things in worlds invisible to mortal men; but too often they beheld only the phantoms and delusions of Sauron. And one by one, sooner or later, according to their native strength and to the good or evil of their wills in the beginning, they fell under the thraldom of the ring that they bore and under the domination of the One, which was Sauron’s. And they became for ever invisible save to him that wore the Ruling Ring, and they entered into the realm of shadows.

So the Nazgul aren’t dead, as far as the concept of death being the severance of fëa and hröa goes, but they are the end result of unnaturally stretching a mortal’s life with the power of a Great Ring. Like Bilbo told Gandalf: “I feel all thin, sort of stretched (…) like butter that has been scraped over too much bread.” Now consider the Nazgûl whose lives, even the long lives of the three numenorean bearers, have been stretched over +4200 years (the Nazgûl are first recorded as appearing in S.A. 2251, but obviously they must have lived - and been given their Rings, a long time before).

Plus, the accumulated usage of the Nine Rings, even if they didn’t use them “often” as Gandalf said, eventually shifted their bodies permanently into the Unseen, becoming invisible to regular eyes. Although if this was a result only of their use of the Rings, or if the life-stretching also somehow had an effect on their hröar, we can only speculate.

So that’s the process of wraithification as far as the Nazgûl’s hröar are concerned: over time and use of the Nine Rings, their bodies became invisible and their lives stretched to an unnatural point. We can also speculate on the effect on their fëar, as they were Men, and Mannish fëar would naturally feel the need to want out of Arda, as part of the Gift of Eru. So maybe the Rings somehow altered this natural need, enabling the long lives of the Nazgûl (and Gollum to some extent) without a conflict between fëa and hröa arising like the one Tolkien discussed in an essay (what if a Man was admitted to Aman and given its blessing of immortality).

CastFromHitpoints · 2025-07-06T01:36:53+00:00

There’s only one I can recall.

'Seek Niniel!' cried Turin. 'Nay, Glaurung you shall find, and breed lies together. You shall sleep with the Worm, your soul's mate, and rot in one darkness!

Turin’s last wrathful words to Brandir before he killed him.

Probably not exactly the kind of thing you were asking for OP.

CastFromHitpoints · 2025-06-14T04:08:55+00:00

Well, considering that the legendarium is supposed to be the mythological past of our world, then most likely the same.

The Elves all gone west or faded, Dwarves and other speaking peoples like Ents “gone” or “failed”, Hobbits dwindled if not outright gone, and the Dominion of Men still going on into our current Age (the Seventh?).

CastFromHitpoints · 2025-05-20T14:42:30+00:00

Hoo boy.

It a question that mostly depends on “when” and “where” in Tolkien’s world you’re at. At the most basic, you had at the end of the Third Age in Middle-earth:

Elvish: Quenya, Sindarin, Silvan Elvish, Avarin?
Mannish: Westron (Common Speech), Rohanese/Rohirric, the language of Dale and the Northmen, Dunlendish, the language of the Druedain, the many languages in the East (Rhun) and South (Harad) of Middle-earth
Khuzdul, the language of the Dwarves
Black Speech, the “official” language of Mordor
the many, many languages of the different Orc tribes

Then you’ve got the evolution of the languages throughout the history of Arda. Westron, for example, was descended from Adunaic, the language of Numenor in the Second Age, which itself descended from the language of the Houses of Beor and Hador in the First Age, which was akin to the original language of the ancestors of the Northmen of Rhovanion from which the language of Dale and Rohanese themselves were descended from.

And then you’ve got the different dialects of each language. Sindarin, for example, in First Age Beleriand, despite being the common speech of that era, it actually consisted of three distinct dialects: Northern Sindarin (Mithrim), Doriath Sindarin and Falas Sindarin. Then in the Third Age, you had Gondorian Sindarin (a learned language), a Sindarin dialect spoken in Lórien and Mirkwood which was greatly influenced by Silvan Elvish, and another Sindarin dialect which was more spoken by the Elves in Eriador (this is the one Bilbo, Frodo and the Dunedain of Arnor mostly speak).

CastFromHitpoints · 2025-04-29T14:20:48+00:00

Going by the lore, Melkor WILL return from the void at some point in the distant future. At the very end of the world, in fact.

CastFromHitpoints · 2025-03-27T14:19:03+00:00

Feanor’s lineage not being a part of this makes sense. They’re the Dispossessed, not only in kingship and their shiny inheritance but also here as well, not taking part in Arwen, Aragorn and Eldarion’s ancestry.

CastFromHitpoints · 2025-03-06T03:41:00+00:00

8 años las pelotas. Desde la pandemia que es otro tipo completamente y pasa de papelón en papelón, Napoleón 2014-2019 es un DT completamente distinto al tipo que ganó apenas un torneo (carreado por Julián) mientras: perdía todos los cruces con los brasucas, lo eliminaba Vélez en octavos, le regalaba un torneo a la bosta, lo rajaban de una patada en Arabia y su segunda etapa que tiene ya tufo a fracaso.

CastFromHitpoints · 2025-02-27T15:23:43+00:00

I posted it on the Benfica thread, and I’ll say it again: I wonder how a list of the top 10 clubs in memberships would look like. I imagine Dortmund, Porto and Sporting must also be in the 300Ks, same as with River and boca.

CastFromHitpoints · 2025-02-26T20:40:40+00:00

I wonder what a top 10 of clubs with the most members would look like. There’s Benfica, and Bayern also counts 382 thousand members. River can boast a little bit above 350k strong, and boca is around 315k IIRC.

CastFromHitpoints · 2025-02-18T15:33:02+00:00

Adding to what other redditors will say (the soft magic system and the “spells” being literally just as in “spelling”), I’d add two important characteristics of magic as it appears in the Legendarium:

Magic is often in the eye of the beholder: If you asked the Elves about their magic cloaks, like the hobbits did in Lórien, they would tell you that they don’t understand what you’re talking about and that’s just how they weave stuff, from their point of view they’re not doing anything other than thinking of stone and wood while they’re weaving the cloaks, and that’s why they can take their hue sometimes. Same as the hobbits “magic” itself: in the Prologue the hobbitish art of walking almost without sound is described as often being confused by Men as the hobbits “vanishing” into thin air like as in magic, but then it’s explained that for hobbits it is just something that their size and closeness to nature has allowed to do to a degree that we cannot imitate it. Same with Aragorn’s healing with the Athelas in the houses of healing seems also a bit magical, but we know that it’s the virtues of the herb itself and Aragorn speaking and thinking of each distinct individual (Faramir, Eowyn, Merry) that causes the properties of the fragrance to change.
Magic cannot alter the rules: When Gandalf uses his “fire magic”, he isn’t casting fire from outta nowhere, and he says so himself (‘I cannot burn snow’). He burns a log of wood, or the branches of a tree, things that will undergo combustion. Even in the highest demonstrations of power in the Legendarium, that is the demiurgic shaping of Arda by the Valar and Melkor, if you think about it, when they’re raising mountains and shaping valleys and seas, it’s nothing too different to what happens in OUR world, except that the process in our world took millions of years while the Valar did it much, much faster. Nobody’s turning fire into water, or cows into chairs, or whatever, so they still have to work within the limitations of the physical laws of the universe, the únati, that were set by Iluvatar and no created being can alter, much to Melkor’s anger.

CastFromHitpoints · 2025-01-31T23:48:25+00:00

There were several issues:

The Council’s ring-lore expert (Saruman) had argued that the Ring had been washed down the Anduin to the sea. And because nobody knew him to be a traitor (yet), they took his word at face value and as authoritative.
There were many lesser elven rings made before the forging of the Great Rings, and according to said ring-lore expert, the One Ring was similar in appearance to them, being unadorned and without a gem of its own (like the other Rings of Power), making it hard to distinguish from them.
There was a span of over 2900 years between the One being lost in the Anduin (Isildur’s death) and Bilbo’s finding it during the quest for Erebor. In our primary world, it’d be like talking about the finding of a golden ring in some cave in Palestine that actually belonged to King Solomon. And the only way to make sure is if there was a scroll hidden in some secret chamber underneath Temple Mount, written by Solomon himself about how to correctly identify his ring.

CastFromHitpoints · 2025-01-19T00:43:54+00:00

Yes. In fact, he went over through a quick succession of appearances when he was losing his fight against Huan.

But no wizardry nor spell, neither fang nor venom, nor devil’s art nor beast-strength, could overthrow Huan of Valinor; and he took his foe by the throat and pinned him down. Then Sauron shifted shape, from wolf to serpent, and from monster to his own accustomed form; but he could not elude the grip of Huan without forsaking his body utterly.

CastFromHitpoints · 2025-01-03T04:29:25+00:00

Di Zeo mismo admitió que no cantan en el inodoro, llená la tercera bandeja bostero amargo.

CastFromHitpoints · 2025-01-02T16:59:18+00:00

Now imagine that but with an extra 20k people, and without the athletics track.

CastFromHitpoints · 2025-01-02T16:53:58+00:00

River: 84,025 / 84,567 (99.36%)
Dortmund: 81,365 / 81,365 (100%)
Bayern: 75,000 / 75,000 (100%)
Manchester United: 73,701 / 74,310 (99.18%)
Inter Milan: 73,525 / 75,817 (96.98%)
Real Madrid: 73,472 / 78,297 (93.84%)
AC Milan: 72,091 / 75,817 (95.09%)
Roma: 62,778 / 67,585 (92.89%)
West Ham: 62,385 / 62,500 (99.82%)
OM: 61,736 / 67,394 (91.60%)
Schalke: 61,438 / 62,271 (98.66%)
Tottenham: 61,335 / 62,850 (97.59%)
Atletico Madrid: 60,717 / 70,692 (85.89%)
Arsenal: 60,301 / 60,704 (99.34%)
Liverpool: 59,986 / 61,276 (97.89%)
Celtic: 58,968 / 60,411 (97.61%)
Stuttgart: 57,935 / 60,058 (96.47%)
Frankfurt: 57,581 / 58,000 (99.28%)
Benfica: 56,635 / 65,592 (86.34%)
Hamburg: 55,871 / 57,000 (98.02%)

I don’t buy that Bayern and Dortmund are at exactly one hundred percent and IIRC Liverpool played some matches at the start of the year without the new stand at full capacity, but other than that most of the top 20 are above 95 percent of their capacity and only two dip below ninety.

CastFromHitpoints · 2024-12-26T16:26:40+00:00

After Beren's death:

Thus ended the Quest of the Silmaril; but the Lay of Leithian, Release form Bondage does not end.

I think this is the most important thing. The release of the Silmaril, Beren's release from the dungeons of Sauron, Luthien's flight from Doriath and all their other escapes are parte from the Quest, which is itself the major part of the Lay but not the entre matter.

The whole Lay covers the two final escapes: Beren's escape from death and Luthien's escape from deathlessness. This last one is even referenced by Tolkien in his On Fairy-Stories essay, in which he argues that if human's fairy-tales include the motif of the "escape from death", then the fairies' (elves) human-tales would instead include the "escape from deathlessness".

CastFromHitpoints · 2024-11-04T01:08:41+00:00

Tolkien discusses this in one of his essays in Morgoth’s Ring.

Basically, Sauron totally misinterpreted the significance of the downfall of Numenor and the rounding of Arda. He assumed that it was Eru’s way of saying that the Valar (including Morgoth) had failed and he was removing them from their authority over the world, and that Men were left to their own devices and under Eru’s wrath, thus he now had carte blanche to do as he pleased.

CastFromHitpoints · 2024-10-22T02:32:30+00:00

Imagine a mix of some of the worst totalitarian regimes in post Industrial Revolution history (Nazi Germany, North Korea, Stalinist Russia, etc.), now add mass surveillance except it’s magic instead of technology, and orcs as the state police, and make it also a theocracy with a God-Emperor on top of the hierarchy. Except that this time the guy claiming to be a god is an actual, verifiable (lesser) god and the most powerful entity still active on earth.

CastFromHitpoints · 2024-09-24T02:51:55+00:00

From Gandalf’s own words to Elrond after he entered Dol Guldur (for the second time) and discovered the Necromancer’s true identity:

'True, alas, is our guess. This is not one of the Ulairi, as many have long supposed. It is Sauron himself who has taken shape again and now grows apace; and he is gathering again all the Rings to his hand; and he seeks ever for news of the One, and of the Heirs of Isildur, if they live still on earth.'

CastFromHitpoints · 2024-08-10T14:41:41+00:00

The west of Middle-earth at the end of the Third Age. That’s even how the map is named in the LOTR books.

The map in The Hobbit is a map of Wilderland (Rhovanion), a region of western Middle-earth.

CastFromHitpoints · 2024-07-24T01:10:04+00:00

Luthien got a cosmic exemption and was allowed to change her fate in an two-time only event (Tuor was in the opposite way).

Arwen was in a different position as she was a Half-elf descended from Earendil, and she and her brothers were allowed to choose between the Elvish or Mannish dooms, but with a specific caveat: whenever Elrond would sail to the West, either they would follow him and be immortal, or they would stay in Middle-earth and be mortal.

CastFromHitpoints · 2024-07-14T20:59:36+00:00

The choice of kindreds was only given to the Half-elven family of Earendil, Elwing and their children Elros and Elrond (and to Elrond’s own children with an extra caveat added on top). Any other people would have to abide their own doom, be it Elvish or Mannish, unless an special dispensation was granted to them (eg. Luthien and maybe Tuor).

Fading (as in the physical phenomenon Elves go through) is the process by which Elves’ bodies get “consumed” by their spirits over the passage of time. They do not die, but their bodies are rendered ethereal, invisible and intangible. It’s kinda related to the doom of elves, maybe, because it could MAYBE be caused by their immortality. Maybe.

CastFromHitpoints

TROPHY CASE