[radagastly]

Originally posted by littlemanpoet:

I think Mithalwen has one of the keys to this mystery.

I suspect this is correct, insofar as Tolkien's motive in mentioning these 'lesser rings' in the first place. It does not explain them in a Middle-Earth context, however. Tolkien is exceptional at devising sources and explanations within his creation (much like Kipling's Just So Stories, "How the Elephant Got its Trunk" and so forth) and I guess that's closer to what I'm interested in, though Tolkien seems to have provided precious little on this particular topic.

littlemanpoet:

I also think it worthwhile to distinguish between the Elvish Arts and Dark Sorcery. The former the Elves did not even name "magic", whereas the latter were not called "magic" either, but sorcery. Is there reference to the Dark Arts in the ouvre?

I must confess to using the term "magic" as shorthand for readers of Tolkien rather than contextually. For Samwise, it was still all "magic," so not completely unprecedented. As for the term "Dark Arts," I don't recall it anywhere in Tolkien. Sounds more like a 'Harry Potter' thing to me.

elempi:

A ring to explain Beorn shape shifting? I doubt it. I think, again, it's too mechanistic an approach to the way Tolkien did his myth making. If you look at his mythic sources, there were shape shifters aplenty and they needed no ring.

Of course, you're right. In fact, I can't think of a world mythology that doesn't include shapeshifters, though I admit my familiarity with mythology is, at best, quite limited. Still, it does provide an amusing recollection of that thread from some years ago that speculated on the source of Beorn's shapeshifting abilities.

elempi again:

As for the lesser rings, is not the template is the Silmarils rather than anything Sauron might contrive? Thus, it requires that the Elves must take from either themselves (their own spirits/fea), or take something from nature/Arda and form it into a ring. So perhaps anything that something from nature could do, they made their "trifle" rings to be able to do?

Certainly the Three Elven Rings reflect the template of the three Silmarils, but I'm not sure how much that applies to the lesser rings, unless you're talking about how they're made. The elves would have put some of themselves, their fea, into the rings they made, but Sauron did the same when he made the One. Does the distinction between Elven Arts and Dark Sorcery lie in the motivation of the artist? At what point does storytelling become propaganda (or, Eru forbid, allegory?)