Quote:
|
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.
|
Yes, that's the excerpt that I was thinking of, phantom. [img]smilies/smile.gif[/img]
Quote:
|
Of course, it doesn't say Gandalf would master him. And what does he mean by "master" anyway. Does he mean that he could defeat his forces, or somehow break Sauron's tie to the ring, or what?
|
You are right. It doesn't say that Gandalf
would master Sauron. But it suggests it as a possibility, indeed an expectation.
"Mastery" suggests to me dominion. The inference being that Gandalf would (or might be expected to) be able to use the Ring to achieve dominion over Sauron. Gandalf would become the new Dark Lord and Sauron his servant. Even if Gandalf was able to destroy that part of Sauron which existed independently of the Ring, a part of Sauron's will would, as you suggest, continue to exist within the Ring as long as it remained in existence.
The question that your argument raises for me, therefore, is whether Gandalf would be able to master the Ring, or whether he would eventually succumb to it, allowing Sauron to return and claim dominion over him. My original view was that this would not happen, since Gandalf is said by Tolkien (in that excerpt which you provided and also in another passage from the Letters that I recall having seen) to be the equal of Sauron, indeed someone who might be expected to master him. The Ring represented only a part of Sauron's will. Therefore, Gandalf, being at least the equal of Sauron's whole, should be able to achieve mastery over that part represented by the Ring.
However, I find your argument that Gandalf would have had to have been corrupted in the first place to consider using the Ring to be a compelling one. Indeed, the fact that anyone using the Ring, even out of a desire to do good, would, it seems, end up using it for evil suggests that it is inevitably a corrupting influence. Gandalf recognises that he would not be able to resist its corruption were he to claim it. That is why he does not seek to use it. And if he could not resist its corrupting influence, then he could not be expected to master it.
As for the others of the "wise" and "mighty" referred to on this thread, they would not even get to first base. As the quote at the top of this post indicates, only Gandalf could be expected to master Sauron, and phantom's logic suggests to me that even that would only be temporary.
Whether or not Sauron conceived all this when he forged the Ring is difficult to tell. The quote given by phantom that "it was part of the essential deceit of the Ring to fill minds with imaginations of supreme power" does indeed suggest that it might have been planned by Sauron. But equally, this "essential deceit" might have been a manifestation of the Ring's will to return to its Lord after it had become separated from him. If, however, it was planned, the one thing that Sauron didn't count on was the intervention of the hand of providence (some would say the will of Eru) in Gollum stumbling on the edge of the furnace as he seized the Ring off Frodo.