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Old 06-10-2016, 10:09 AM   #28
Zigūr
Ghost Prince of Cardolan
 
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Gothmog, LoB View Post
Not to mention that the talk about the Elves being secretive about the Rings isn't very convincing, if you think about it. Not if Sauron truly did give three of the Nine to Nśmenóreans. The fact that Sauron had magical rings and once given them to various people must have been known.
It's possible, but I can also imagine that the possessors of the Nine might have kept them fairly secret in order to not risk attracting the greed of others. I'm also not convinced how well Sauron's identity was known, such that people could realise the following people were actually the same person:
1. The person who had waged a great war against Eregion
2. The person who had set himself up as the 'King of Men' in Middle-earth, with his chief stronghold in Mordor
3. The person who had given Rings to Men and Dwarves (they might not have even known at the time that anyone other than them had Rings; we don't know the circumstances in which Sauron distributed them. Did he just show up one day or did he do it publicly?)
4. The Lieutenant of Morgoth who had suspiciously disappeared at the end of the First Age.

How long might it have taken for people to draw these connections? We as readers operate from the convenient position of reading at the end of the Third Age, when all of these puzzles had been figured out.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Alcuin View Post
But there is no reason for the proud Smiths of Eregion to craft rings for the use of Mortal Men or Dwarves, and there was no particular reason for them to stop making Great Rings until they bored of the effort. After all, they were Noldor, and it was Art. Useful Art, but Art. Why did they make so many? I don’t know, but I think you might as well as ask a famous painter why he continues to paint: He enjoys it. That’s what he does.
To the best of my knowledge, the Seven and the Nine were only delineated as such through the distribution of Sauron; the Elves never intended their use by Men or Dwarves at all. Perhaps they believed that sixteen Great Rings was a useful number for their plans of preserving and beautifying Middle-earth. That being said, I imagine they were probably convinced to produce this number of Rings by Sauron, who had probably already calculated how many Rings he would need to most effectively subjugate the world, and he told them some convenient lie for why sixteen was a good number. That being said, he reckoned without the Three, so perhaps before he seized the Great Rings the distribution plan was somewhat different, because presumably he would have needed to give a few of the Seven-and-Nine to Elves.
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