[The Saucepan Man]

Assumption, Assumption, Assumption!

Of course! [img]smilies/biggrin.gif[/img] But, as Lord of Angmar said:

It seems to me that speculation makes for some of the most interesting conversation on this website.

Tolkien himself was not above speculating on whether his more powerful characters might be able to use the Ring to defeat Sauron, as this extract from The Letters of JRRT (246) indicates:

Of the others only Gandalf might be expected to master him – being an emissary of the Powers and a creature of the same order, an immortal spirit taking a visible physical form. In the 'Mirror of Galadriel', 1381, it appears that Galadriel conceived of herself as capable of wielding the Ring and supplanting the Dark Lord. If so, so also were the other guardians of the Three, especially Elrond. But this is another matter. It was part of the essential deceit of the Ring to fill minds with imaginations of supreme power. But this the Great had well considered and had rejected, as is seen in Elrond's words at the Council. Galadriel's rejection of the temptation was founded upon previous thought and resolve. In any case Elrond or Galadriel would have proceeded in the policy now adopted by Sauron: they would have built up an empire with great and absolutely subservient generals and armies and engines of war, until they could challenge Sauron and destroy him by force. Confrontation of Sauron alone, unaided, self to self was not contemplated.

As I understand it, Tolkien is saying here that, of the Wise, only Gandalf might be expected to use the Ring to defeat Sauron. And I am assuming that he means here Gandalf the White, since the suggestion is that Saruman would not have been able to do so. Tolkien goes on to speculate whether Galadriel or Elrond might have been able to overcome Sauron with the Ring. There is a suggestion that Galadriel might have been deceiving herself in believing that she would be able to defeat and supplant him. But the point is made that neither would have contemplated challenging him on a one to one basis, but rather would have built up armies until they felt able to challenge and defeat him by force.

My original assumption that the Balrog would have been defeated if it attempted to use the Ring against Sauron was based on my belief that a Maia of the lower order would have been unable to succed against such a powerful Maia as Sauron, even with the benefit of the Ring. And this seems to me to be supported by the extract quoted above, particularly:

Of the others only Gandalf might be expected to master him

It is difficult to see how a Balrog could succeed in using the Ring directly to challenge Sauron if the likes of Saruman, Galadriel and Elrond could not be expected to.

I suppose that the Balrog might try to raise armies to defeat Sauron, as Tolkien suggests Elrond and Galadriel might have done. Balrogs had commanded armies in the First Age, so there is no reason to suppose that this one would not have been able to do so. But let's not forget that the Ring was by no means neutral in all of this. It was imbued with a part of Sauron's will and wished for nothing more than to return to its Master. So it is likely that it would have betrayed the Balrog in some way in order to do so, perhaps by persuading it that it would be able to take on Sauron in a direct challenge.

So, I remain firmly of the view that, had the Balrog taken the Ring, it would have ended up in Sauron's hands one way or another.