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Comment by ineedasername | Hacker News Reader

I’m going to really ruin things for you: eventually, in the end, the ring dies.

The joke is on you. On all of us!

Unknown to all in LOTR, while the volcano is hot, it has cooled in the thousands of years since the ring's forging. It does not completely dissolve the ring, instead, it melts yet remains together.

Fast forward 10000s of years, the area is mined, and the precious metal is used for fillings in teeth.

Surprise! It's Bezos! And he now has part of the ring of power in his lower right molar.

Now he is understood. One sales platform to rule them all, indeed!

> I’m going to really ruin things for you: eventually, in the end, the ring dies.

Well, obviously. I mean, the goodies have access to giant eagles and all they have to do is to give the ring to one of them and drop it in Mount Doom and the whole thing is solved, right?

Mind blown

Wait, it must be that eagles are easily corrupted? Or not fully sentient, and thus the ring can control them?

The eagles could be corrupted, yeah. They're sentient and (some at least) are ancient. One of the central themes of The Lord of the Rings is that the Powers of Middle Earth are very, very tempted by the ring and must overcome the test of the ring at cost to themselves: Galadriel is doomed to travel to the West, Boromir loses his mind temporarily, Saruman becomes a tyrant and eventually his staff broken etc. The eagles are themselves a Power and if they picked a Ring Bearer up they'd be tempted to drop said bearer on the ground and fetch the ring from their dead hand, become some type of eagle tyrant.

Maybe they would, maybe they wouldn't. Big risk either way.

Anyway, this theme is why the most meek people of Middle Earth -- the Hobbits, who desire basically nothing more than a quiet life -- are the only ones in Middle Earth that could actually cart the ring into Mordor. Even then it's not a sure bet, considering Gollum.

Even the hobbits fail - Frodo claims the ring at the last minute and it is only the intervention of Providence (in the guise of Gollum) that saves the day.

Ah yes, fair point. I think it’s Gandalf that says the Hobbits are stouter than even the Wise know or something to that effect but, like you say, they aren’t impervious to the charm of the ring. Except perhaps Sam, with his abundance of hobbit-sense and love for Frodo.

Eagles are literally servants of an angel, they aren't a taxi dispatch service.

Its actually because the eagles are not just a straight up ally. Eaglea are the servants of the highest god, and that god doesn't really care about the concerns of elfes and men. Just like the ents also don't really care unless you fuck with them directly.

The eagles showing up at the end is more like an 'Oh we were so awesome and heroic that even the high god sees considers this a worthy cause'.

The eagles help Gandalf because of a personal relationship

I hate to ruin the upcoming sequel for you, but the ring ends up being coughed back up in mid-2022 by a volcano in Iceland. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnKaZBngPu0&t=1s

Don't be ridiculous. The video narrator specifies that the gold on the basalt must have been present locally at the eruption, but as anyone can tell you who has read the Silmarillion seventeen times and memorized every single historical fact therein (while being unable to, for example, name their legislative representatives), Mount Doom is canonically in New Zealand, thus the gold in Iceland can't be from the One Ring. I give this post a 1/10, it would be a 0/10 but Jeff Bezos is censoring me.

I mean, while we're waltzing around the absurd, how meaningful do you really think the continents remain at magmatic depths? We're literally talking about the space where the bedrock melts and flows in the unknowable oceans of Sauron's marmalade, after all. I think the ring spent eons swishing around before reassembling like a blended up sea sponge before making its way back to the surface in the modern-day land of the elves (Iceland). It's only a matter of time before the trolls in the forests of Norway begin amassing their forces. As for that video's narrator, I think his name is Dave Sméagol, so I'd take his misdirections with a pinch of salt.

As a non-geologist, it seems plausible to me that gold that was somehow subsumed into the mantle in New Zealand could migrate to Iceland in the span of thousands of years. As Sméagol pointed out, though, gold coming up in the magma would be more diffuse and not create an identifiable layer on the surface of the lava rock. You're right, though, he's hardly a reliable narrator when it comes to His Precious, so that could be a misdirect. And perhaps there's some attribute of magically endowed gold that causes it to behave in unexpected ways. I searched Google Scholar, but couldn't find any peer-reviewed studies on the physical properties of magic rings.

Antipode of Iceland is not too far (relatively speaking) from New Zealand. Going the other way around it's really Spain, so if The Ring was slowly traveling through Earth's core, one could imagine that it made "wrong turn at Albuquerque" and instead surfacing in Spain it hit Iceland. QED

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