Gimli ringbearer?

[Max Brown]

Can anyone tell me why it wouldn't have been wiser to give Gimli the One Ring to bear to Mordor if dwarves are so highly resistent to its dark ways? As far as I know, the only effect it could have had on him was to increase his desire for gold, so unless he was in danger of going on an impromptu gold-panning on the way to Mordor, he seems ideal to be the one to physically handle the ring.

[Legolas]

He'd be extremely reluctant to let go of it, whether he turned to evil or not.

[lord_of_rohan2003]

Give a piece of shiny jewlery with power over to a Dwarf?I think that would of been a mistake,no matter how good his intentions would be at the start.

[Olorin_TLA]

Well, like Elrond and Gandalf said, it seemed fate that Frodo was "meant" to have the Ring, and bear it...also, he'd shown already that he had remarkable resistance to its evil.

[Lord of Angmar]

Yes, Frodo was fated to bear the Ring, either by destiny or by appoinment. Gimli certainly was not meant to have the Ring, nor would he have been a wise choice in the event that Frodo could not take it.

[Aragorns Twisted Angel]

It was Frodo's task...

You could even make the same argument about Sam...

[Finwe]

Frodo was simply the only one who even had a chance to succeed. Yet even he failed at the end. How much earlier in the story would Gimli have failed? A failure like that, at the wrong point in the story, could have resulted in a great catastrophe. For example, Denethor could have gotten the Ring. Now THAT would have made all hell break loose, and Sauron would have definitely defeated the Free Peoples.

[Lyta_Underhill]

I just thought you might be interested in this older thread that has a few insights about the Dwarves and the Great Rings and all and what might have befallen a Dwarven ringbearer: A dwarf as ringbearer? (http://forum.barrowdowns.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=1&t=001523)

Cheers!
Lyta

[Gurthang]

Um...let me think... NO. Gimli would have been overwhelmed by the desire to go somewhere and become exceedingly wealthy. He would have thought "Hey, I have it, He doesn't, so let's make a profit." But he didn't, so he got to go to Valinor. Which would you choose?

[Finwe]

Initially, he didn't know that he would ultimately get to go to Valinor. Even if he did, he wouldn't have wanted to go. At the Council of Elrond, Gimli was staunchly anti-Elf, so telling him that he'd get to Valinor would only result in a reaction like "So what? I don't want to go to some poncy Elf paradise where they sing and dance all day long." Gimli wouldn't have chosen that alternative, even if he had it.

[Lord of Angmar]

"So what? I don't want to go to some poncy Elf paradise where they sing and dance all day long."

smilies/biggrin.gif

Maybe he would have wanted to go to the Undying Lands if there was a chance of meeting his, erm, great great great granddad, Aule.

[Olorin_TLA]

As far as I know, Finwe, Gimli didn't say a word in the Council. smilies/evil.gif

[Lord of Angmar]

Perhaps Finwe meant, "At the time of the Council of Elrond..." or, basically, prior to becoming a member of the Fellowship.

[Finwe]

That's what I meant. I meant "Council of Elrond" as a general time-marker, not a specific one.

[Kalimac]

Well, first of all, you would have had to persuade him to take it. I'm not sure anyone was very eager to do so, and reassurances about how Dwarves are more immune to the evil than most might not have helped very much. But even so, I can't see Elrond wanting to offer it to him, or any Dwarf; the Dwarves have been undone by their greed for gold before, and there was no guarantee that Gimli wouldn't be sidetracked along the way, especially in a place like Moria. (Granted, they don't know at that time that they'll go through Moria, but it had to have entered their heads as a possible trouble spot, especially with everything that's said about Balin's disappearance). Plus, it was clear that the only real hope for destroying the Ring was in stealth, and Gimli is not the stealthy type. It's true that in "The Hobbit" Tolkien mentions that Dwarves can move quietly enough that men couldn't hear a dozen of them a few paces off, but the hobbits are quieter still; Bilbo thinks of "Dwarvish racket."

Furthermore, Gimli likes to fight too much - a great talent for a supporting Fellowshipper, but not for the Ringbearer himself; if the Ringbearer is too aggressive, there's every chance that the Ring will be lost in battle, or that he'll be killed and the Ring taken from him, or any number of things. The Ringbearer also has to know when *not* to fight - can you imagine Gimli, or any Dwarf, hiding himself while those tracker-Orcs go by in Mordor? The Dwarves hate Orcs with a passion because of history - unlike the hobbits, who just hate them because they're trying to kill them at the present moment - and they might not be capable of containing themselves at moments like that. And that could lead to a bad end.

[Lord of Angmar]

But even so, I can't see Elrond wanting to offer it to him, or any Dwarf; the Dwarves have been undone by their greed for gold before, and there was no guarantee that Gimli wouldn't be sidetracked along the way, especially in a place like Moria.

That brings up an interesting point. If Gimli, or any Dwarf, for that matter, had possessed the One Ring, they probably would have tried to overthrow the Balrog and rebuild and gain lordship over Khazad-dum.

[Firnoreion]

Whether or not Gimli would have been a good choice for ringbear might be debatable but he never would have been given the chance. At the time of the Council of Elrond there is a lot of distrust between Elves and Dwarves (as well as between the other races) I don't think the Elves would have allowed a Dwarf to bear the ring.

[Lord of Angmar]

Welcome to the Downs, Firnoreion.

I think it has already been established, and can be said with assuredness, that Gimli definitely would not have been chosen, under almost any realistic circumstance, to bear the Ring to Mordor.

[Olorin_TLA]

I don't think the hostility between Durin's line and Elves (out of Lórien anyway) was very great here. Juts look at how they act during the Council - Glóin remembers his imprisonment by Thranduil and gets angry, but Gandalf tells them to get along and put aside their differences, and they do. After all, if they didn't trust them they could have had a powerful Elf-lord go isntead og Gimli.

This talk of Moria has got me interested...Dwarves need revenge. They've been wronged a lot, and Glóin even cries out in the Council, "When will come the day of our revenge!" - echoing Thorin's words about the Necromancer in The Hobbit. It really does seem that at Moria, if not before, Gimli would decide (if he had the Ring) that he had the strength to destory Sauron in the name of the Dwarves and the Free Peoples, and then retake all that Sauron had taken from the Dwarves and avange all that had been done to them.

In fact, my opinion of him goes up now...he could well have done a Boromir in Moria, or anywhere, for almsot the same reasons, but he resisted. smilies/smile.gif

[Gurthang]

I've heard this exact arguement in a different post, only about Gandalf. And they came to this conclusion. If anyone did have power enough to overthrow Sauron using the Ring, they would eventually become corrupted by it. Therefore, Sauron in the end would still have the mastery, for his Ring would prevail.

I've got an interesting thought. [take note, for this does not happen often] What would happen to an elf who put on the Ring. For it takes men and hobbits into the shadow world, but could it take an elf their also, or a dwarf even?

[Tuor Turambar,Cursed by the Valar]

Just wondering, why wouldn't it bring a dwarf or an elf into the shadow realm? Do you actually have a reason why it would not? I always thought it would.

[Lobelia]

Hi. I actually started a thread on this topic some time ago, so obviously I'm not the only one who has thought of it.

I still think Gimli is the *logical* Ringbearer, and I am not so sure he wouldn't have been given the job if he'd volunteered. The quarrel, in any case, is mostly between the forest elves and the dwarves, rather than the likes of Elrond. But it would have been a different Fellowship that set out. Would the hobbits have gone at all? I don't know. And who would have accompanied him to Mordor? Legolas didn't make friends with him till Lothlorien. The others had their own problems. I suspect he would have strangled Gollum five minutes after they met - that, or reluctantly made an alliance, but would have kept more of an eye on him than Frodo and Sam. Shelob wouldn't have stung Gimli, thank you - indeed, chances are she would have been minus a few legs by the time his axe had gone into action. I keep having this vision of him tossing the Ring into the Cracks of Doom, dusting his hands off (after tossing Gollum in after the Ring) and saying, "Right! Let's go kill some Orcs before Aragorn gets them all." (g)

[VanimaEdhel]

The problem with having any being other than a Hobbit take the ring is that the ring fed off of a desire for power. The reason that Frodo got as far as he did was that Hobbits did not display the ambition that the others races displayed. Hobbits enjoyed being separated from the strife that took place in the rest of Middle Earth. Frodo's pure intentions were what guided him through the ordeal, in my opinion. The other races present did have an innate desire for power. Although they start out with a determination to destroy the ring, it would, for example, take Gimli's basic Dwarf love for treasure combined with the desire for revenge to take back Moria, and eventually destroy him. And for those that say "Legolas could have taken it", as I've seen many people say over the two years I've been here, Elves did not have a record for being the most modest race on the Earth. And most races of Men were quite obviously corrupt. If one looks at the choices for taking the Ring, the Hobbits are the only ones that could really be trusted at all with the ring. And towards the end, even Frodo felt the power of the ring strongly.

[Orominuialwen]

The problem with having any being other than a Hobbit take the ring is that the ring fed off of a desire for power. The reason that Frodo got as far as he did was that Hobbits did not display the ambition that the others races displayed. Exactly. The reason the Hobbits succeed is because of their humility. They have no desire for power, which is why they are able to resist the Ring so well.