Grond said:
And we arrive smack dab back at the beginning of the problem most scholars have with
Letter 211...
Can you demonstrate “most scholars”?
How does a disembodied spirit manage to carry a "physical"
Ruling Ring back to
Mordor? Answer is that it doesn't.
But
Tolkien’s answer was that it does. Whose answer takes precidence?
I would imagine that Tolkien just didn't think out this response to Ms. Beare.
Tolkien obviously did think it out. That Tolkien saw the difficulty is clear when he states that one need not
boggle at accepting that the disemboded spirit could carry back that physical Ring on which much of its power depended.
From
Morgoth’s Ring (HoME 10), “Myths Transformed”
Text VIII, Orcs, on Orc-formed
Maiar:
... (or would not a very dwindled dead Orc-state be a poltergeist?)
Poltergeists are bodiless
spirits that move physical
objects.
Sauron was more than an Orc-formed
Maia, especially since much of power was transferred to
the Ring but still remained accessible to him.
Also there is this...No mention of a Ring here. Just cunning and knowledge. And there is no mention of the matter at all in CT's version of
The Silmarillion. My quote from it is pretty clear. He went back to
Barad-dur and again took up the Ring. If he's wearing a Ring in
Numenor... why would it be necessary for him to "again take it up"???
A disembodied spirit would probably be unable to
wear the Ring. Also, wearing the Ring would alert the
Elves that Sauron was still alive (or again alive).
But your citation is from “
The Rings of Power and
the Third Age”, a work for which Christopher Tolkien has provided no history.
A version of “The Rings of Power and the Third Age” existed by about 1948, the year in which Tolkien finished
The Lord of the Rings as it is mentioned in Letter 115 to Katherine Farrer as being mislaid. This work was likely written very soon after completion of
The Lord of the Rings and perhaps never subsequently revised. The Milton Waldman letter
dates to 1950. The letter to Rhona Beare was written in 1958 and states Tolkien’s thoughts when the matter was called to his attention. Possibly he had not considered the matter before. Originally there was no Ring in the story of Sauron and
Númenor.
But his explanation there does not conflict with anything previously written.
The suggestion that
Ar-Pharazôn probably knew nothing about the Ring covers the problem that Ar-Pharazôn did not seek the Ring for himself and lack of mention of the Ring in Númenor in later tradition. That was Tolkien’s answer.