On the matter of the effect of a Ring’ of Power on Dwarves, Tolkien himself speaks in “Appendix A”, III
DURIN’S FOLK, page 1076 in current printings (emphasis mine):
The only power over them [the Dwarves] that the Rings wielded was to inflame them with a greed of gold and precious things, so that if they lacked them all other good things seemed profitless, and they were filled with wrath and desire for vengeance on all who deprived them. But they were made from their beginnings of a kind to resist most steadfastly domination. Though they could be slain or broken, they could not be reduced to shadows enslaved to another will; and for the same reason their lives were not affected by any Ring, to live either longer or shorter because of it.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mithadan
One of the things I enjoy most about Tolkien is that his mythos is internally consistent. There are, even if they are speculative, solutions to resolve any apparent contradictions.
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Only if you are very picky about what you count as “solutions to resolve any apparent contradictions”, which is unfair.
The 50th anniversary edition of
The Lord of the Rings, also published in paperback, contains on pages xvi to xvii a “Note on the 50ᵗʰ Anniversary Edition” by Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull on their fixing of various errors in the text. Most of the changes are minor typographical corrections(?). They have been very conservative in their editing and every change has been approved by Christopher Tolkien. They note on page xvii:
Most of the demonstrable errors noted by Christopher Tolkien in The History of Middle-earth also have been corrected, such as the distance from the Brandywine Bridge to the Ferry (ten miles rather than twenty) and the number of Merry’s ponies (five rather than six). But those inconsistencies of content, such as Gimli’s famous (and erroneous) statement in Book III, Chapter 7, ‘Till now I have hewn naught but wood since I have left Moria’, which would require rewriting to emend rather than simple correction, remain unchanged.
All the emendations are listed with short explanations in “Changes to the Editions of 2004–5” published on pages 783–912 of Hammond and Scull’s
The Lord of the Rings: A Reader’
s Companion.
There are other contradictions not fixed as requiring too much rewriting.
For example, in the chapter “The Shadow of the Past” Tolkien has Gandalf explain:
A Ring of Power looks after itself, Frodo. It may slip off treacherously, but its keeper never abandons it. At most he plays with the idea of handing it on to someone else’s care – and that only at an early stage, when it first begins to grip. But as far as I know Bilbo alone in history has ever gone beyond playing, and really done it. He needed all my help, too.
Yet we later learn that at that time Gandalf has been secretly bearing a Ring of Power for close to two thousand years, a Ring given him freely by Círdan its keeper. Either Tolkien intends Gandalf to be uniquely lying, has accidentally typed “A Ring of Power” instead of something like “One of Sauron’s Rings”, intends the reader to understand that Gandalf has made a slip of the tongue, or perhaps had not yet invented the idea that Gandalf was secretly bearing an Elvish Ring of Power freely given to him by Círdan its keeper.
I can bring up other contradictions within
The Lord of the Rings and still more in
The Hobbit and between
The Lord of the Rings and the published
Silmarillion if you wish.