The Rings should have been destroyed...

Unfinished Tales; The History of Middle-Earth
Sauron himself departed from Eregion about the year 1500, after the Mírdain had begun the making of the Rings of Power. Now Celebrimbor was not corrupted in heart or faith, but had accepted Sauron as what he posed to be; and when at length he discovered the existence of the One Ring he revolted against Sauron, and went to Lórinand to take counsel once more with Galadriel. They should have destroyed all the Rings of Power at this time, "but they failed to find the strength." Galadriel counselled him that the Three Rings of the Elves should be hidden, never used, and dispersed, far from Eregion where Sauron believed them to be. It was at that time that she received Nenya, the White Ring, from Celebrimbor, and by its power the realm of Lórinand was strengthened and made beautiful;

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Why should they have destroyed them at that time?

PRO: To prevent the danger of someone wearing one of the other 19 rings and falling prey to Sauron? To prevent the emergence of the Nazgul who were ensnared by Sauron and proved to be his most effective and deadly servants?

CON: Lórien (and Rivendell) would not have been strengthened by their respective rings. Would this have had any kind of impact - what and why?
Gandalf would not have benefited from Narya. (It is said his warm and eager spirit was further enhanced by it for those of you who doubt how much Narya could have done for him). Would the ringless Gandalf have had less success in some or most of his endeavours?

ithrynluin said:

Why should they have destroyed them at that time?

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Let us not forget that we are talking about a passage from "Unfinished Tales," passages that Tolkien chose to leave out of the final product. I can only conclude that there was something unsatisfactory to him about them.

While the things that CT chose to publish of his father's writings are fascinating in themselves, and give insight into Tolkien's creative process (and much extra pleasure for those of us hungry for more Middle-earth!), I consider them in the end no more than drafts that didn't make the cut. This to me makes them less important than the final product (TH and LOTR). So the question of why were the rings not destroyed is moot for me, since it was a discarded notion.

Lotho

Let us not forget that we are talking about a passage from "Unfinished Tales," passages that Tolkien chose to leave out of the final product. I can only conclude that there was something unsatisfactory to him about them.

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I don't think we should discredit works such as HoME and UT because Tolkien did not include them in his mainstream works. How could he have included hundreds upon hundreds of pages of additional material into his main works and still retain coherence and dynamics?

This to me makes them less important than the final product (TH and LOTR).

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Well, I can only echo my own disagreement with this view that I expressed above. Take a look at the 'Battles of the Fords of Isen' text in UT, for example. It provides in-depth insight into the battle and a description of the military organisation of the Rohirrim. Now why wasn't this, and a bunch of other valuable texts, make it into the LOTR? Because they were worthless or non-canonical pieces of writing? I don't think so. I think the insertion of this (and other texts) into the narrative would have slowed it down and made it less fascinating/mysterious for the reader.

Bottom line, I think your reasoning is flawed. Now I'd like to return to the topic of this thread, if in fact there are still people out there with zest for discussing these more obscure or lesser known aspects of the mythology.

Tolkien didn't "choose to leave" things out, he died so they could not be published. A lot of these things were written after the publication of LoTR and the second addition and a lot of these things would have been futile to publish and a waste of pages, as Tolkien had to cut down on a lot of his appendixes work.

The Isen battle narrative was supposed to have made it into the appendix but was cut, I believe.

Well, what was the point of having some rings when you couldn't wear them? The Elves never put them on when Sauron had his ring on, as he had it on perpetually from the sacking of Ost-in-Edhil to end of the S.A. Since Galadriel had no fixed habitation at the time, Lorinand would stay the same esp. considering her ring was idle. If Sauron managed to capture them then he could have wreaked havoc. So they were an unnecessary threat.

ithrynluin said:

I don't think we should discredit works such as HoME and UT because Tolkien did not include them in his mainstream works...

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It's not a matter of discreditation.

I guess I'm going at this as if it were music (my main background). If I compose a large work, it's going to take a lot of drafts of various themes that are going to be developed into the finished statement, and some things are going to be discarded.

If I am a musicologist or just a keen student of composition, those drafts are going to be of intense interest to me to see how the piece was put together. But I am not going to argue for their inclusion into the final piece.

Lotho

Destroy them so that they were not around for Sauron to capture and use as he had always intended.

As for the good that came of the Three...

I do not think Gandalf would have had as much success, but on the other hand this is a "what if" so things could have gone so differently in this scenerio that Gandalf would not have needed Narya. For example - where would Arnor and the dwarves be if not for the nine and seven? Could be Sauron would have been defeated even sooner. Who knows.

And Lotho, as Inderjit said, a lot of this stuff was not left out of LotR because it was cut, and much of it was written AFTER LotR was published!

Indeed the passage presented by ithrynluin here was taken from a text written after LotR. I wonder if you knew that.

What if you continued to add to your composition in private after it was released to the public.

Argue for inclusion? I don't see anyone arguing this stuff should be put into some new expanded edition of LotR! I see people discussing it for their own personal enjoyment and imagination of the history of Middle-earth.

'Canon' is a tricky subject, whether for fans of say Kafka or Tolkien. In the end 'canon' may be whatever you want it to be, however fallacious that may seem.

Narya may have given Gandalf the power to instil courage in people, but did it really aid Gandalf's intrinsic characteristics? Well it was useful as Círdan felt it was idle in Mithlond and could be put to use and we do see Gandalf's presence inspire confidence in people (i.e. Minas Tirith) but I wonder if it wasn't Gandalf himself who inspired these men, though the ring may have acted as a catalyst---but was the ring fundamental in Gandalf's mission? I doubt it.

Well regardless of the role Narya ended up playing, the elves would not have known of it. I mention this because CT wrote this stuff in his own words from his father's text... except of course what is quoted. We can't know what exactly JRRT said. That the rings should have been destroyed might have been presented as what the elves thought, or it might have been a statement of the narrator.

Anyhow, in the end I agree they should have been destroyed and so don't realy question the statement.

Nóm said:

...Lotho, as Inderjit said, a lot of this stuff was not left out of LotR because it was cut, and much of it was written AFTER LotR was published!

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Okay, if you say so! I don't know enough about it one way or the other. So I'd appreciate it if you could cite references for my benefit.

Indeed the passage presented by ithrynluin here was taken from a text written after LotR. I wonder if you knew that.

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I didn't know that, so please help me out here: cite sources and references so that I can fill myself in.

What if you continued to add to your composition in private after it was released to the public.

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That virtually never happens. Historically, the only one I can think of who might have done that may have been Berlioz, and I'd have to check. Generally, a composer doesn't let a score out of his hands until he's fully satisfied with it, and once it's gone to the publisher and is issued to the public in its engraved form (In it's "tuxedo," as Brahms used to say), then the composer feels a psychological release — the child has been kicked out of the nest so to speak, and is now on its own, and the composer by that time is generally in the middle of something else.

Argue for inclusion? I don't see anyone arguing this stuff should be put into some new expanded edition of LotR! I see people discussing it for their own personal enjoyment and imagination of the history of Middle-earth.

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Now there's an idea — hmmmmmmm... I have hopes of PJ doing exactly that some day with his version of LOTR: releasing a special director's cut on DVD with every single blessed shot put back in — wahoo!!!

Lotho

I didn't know that, so please help me out here: cite sources and references so that I can fill myself in.

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It was taken from 'Of Galadriel and Celeborn'. This is a collection of essay which C.T amalgamated into one chapter' or a collection of essays loosely dealing with Galadriel and Celeborn along with other things such as the S.A, Celebrimbor, Aragorn's gift from Galadriel etc. They were written in the 1960's, prim. after 1965, I think.

I agree with Lotho about the difference between The Hobbit and LOTR on one side and all the posthumously published material on the other. It is not a matter of discrediting the the latter material. It is a case of realizing it is fundamentally different than The Hobbit and LOTR. The difference is that JRRT did not choose this material and prepare it for publication; someone else did. It would be different if the material had been prepared for publication by JRRT and he didn't live to see them actually printed and published. There is no way to know if JRRT would have chosen this material or published it in the form it has been. That the choice was made by his son Christopher is really irrelevant. In reading the HoME series several things that are very important to the way the this material should be treated relative to TH and LOTR are apparent. 1) JRRT rewrote and rewrote and rewrote. Tolkien also seems to have had a habit of using scrap paper for his drafts. Apparently not all of these scraps of paper have been preserved and/or found. 2) CT indicates that his father's handwriting (apparently most of these materials were handwritten) is difficult to read and CT has to sometimes guess. 3) JRRT was constantly rethinking things. He was never really satisfied with what he had written (few writers are). For all of the above reasons the posthumously published material is fundamentally different than what JRRT himself published. The Hobbit and LOTR are what is known as "primary sources" and the rest are "secondary sources". The secondary sources can be, and are, of tremendous interest, especially as they give as a chance to "watch" JRRT create his world of Middle Earth, but we must always remember that we are looking in through CT's window. In the case of The Sil and UT not only are we looking through CT's window but we are looking at CT's version of JRRT's Middle Earth. None of this is to say that all this material should be ignored. It is just important to always remember the fundamental differences between The Hobbit/LOTR and the rest.

Anyone else have something to say on the actual topic of this thread? I really dislike it when someone keeps popping up in (semi-)speculative threads and reminding everyone that 'Tolkien may not have decided on that' or 'HoME is full of inconsistencies and that's that!' without actually trying to contribute something to the subject at hand. It's of course worth remembering that some writings are unfinished or far from what the professor would want them to be finally, but I'm quite confident most participants in this thread are aware of that.

ithrynluin said:

...but I'm quite confident most participants in this thread are aware of that.

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Yes... Inderjit, you and I are most certainly aware of all that Greenwood says.. I guess we need to state all of that whenever we discucss text published in the HoME or else be reminded of it.

It is very insulting that someone thinks we could have read the HoME without having known these simple basic facts... how braindead must one be to have done so?

Anyone else have something to say on the actual topic of this thread?

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Not me!

ithrynluin said:

I really dislike it when someone keeps popping up in (semi-)speculative threads and reminding everyone that 'Tolkien may not have decided on that' or 'HoME is full of inconsistencies and that's that!' without actually trying to contribute something to the subject at hand. It's of course worth remembering that some writings are unfinished or far from what the professor would want them to be finally, but I'm quite confident most participants in this thread are aware of that.

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ithrynluin,

Lotho's response was a perfectly reasonable one. I would suggest a polite response along the lines of: "Yes, but I was wondering if anyone had any thoughts on what JRRT might have been thinking when he wrote the passage I quoted.", would have put the thread back on the topic you wanted and not opened it up for discussion of your response. Instead your response made it appear that you thought all of the posthumously published JRRT material should be placed on an equal footing with The Hobbit and LOTR, something that is done all too frequently in discussions.

On the issue of the topic your raise, I believe you have answered the point quite well with the arguments you place under "Pro" in your first post. The "Con" arguments all fail because they deal with mostly with events in the future. The Three could not be worn or used while Sauron possessed the One so their power was a potential threat rather than an aid. Thus they could not be used to strengthen Lorien and Rivendell whose roles as refuges all lay in the future (Rivendell itself not being founded until 1697 SA). As for any aid Narya gave to Gandalf, his arrival in Middle Earth was still nearly 3000 years in the future.