Quote:
Originally Posted by Kuruharan
....some item like the Ring was necessary to provide that tie to the world that would allow Sauron to keep coming back as long as the Ring existed, in a way it embodied a form of pessimism for Sauron in that the Ring provided him a safety valve to come back in case he was defeated.
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I don't think Sauron ever considered the idea that he would ever be without the Ring.
The passing of part of his
fea into it could have been a mere byproduct of his deliberate act of putting his power in it. That would make the Ring an unintended Horcrux of a sort, pardon the Potterism.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Kuruharan
Second, to pose a silly question, could even the Ring have worked in this manner indefinitely? Say Sauron gets defeated repeatedly but the Ring still exists? Would the power provided by the existence of the Ring allow Sauron to keep coming back until he wins? In thinking about it, my belief is that it wouldn't have. Even in his origins, Sauron was not an infinite being and neither was the Ring an object of infinite power as it was created by a finite being. Given those limitations, I believe eventually one and or both of them could be depleted to the point of final impotence.
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Tolkien touched on this somewhat in
Letters # 200:
Quote:
After the battle with Gilgalad and Elendil, Sauron took a long while to rebuild, longer than he had done after the Downfall of Númenor (I suppose because each building-up used up some of the inherent energy of the spirit, which might be called the 'will' or the effective link between the indestructible mind and being and the realization of its imagination.
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So I think you might be correct. Each re-embodiment for Sauron would have taken longer, and resulted in a weaker form. The problem for his Third Age enemies was that they lacked the power of the Last Alliance, and destroying his physical form while the Ring existed would in practice have been close to impossible,