The Role of Stealth in the Lord of the Rings

[Huinesoron]

Originally Posted by Marlowe221

The agents of Sauron and Saruman use stealth as well. Even the Ring itself turns you invisible to mortal eyes (though it makes you more visible to the Nazgul).

No kidding! In fact, Sauron himself achieves his greatest successes when engaged in stealth and sneakiness, but tends to fail catastrophically when using open war. I may be wrong, but I think the only army-based combat in which Sauron achieved his goals while operating openly was the capture of Tol Sirion back in the First Age! He did defeat Eregion in the War of the Elves and Sauron, but he failed to capture the Three Rings, and was driven back by Lindon and Numenor. He spent the entire Third Age sneaking around pretending not to be there, and when forced out into the open by the fall of Dol Guldur, lasted less than a hundred years before his final defeat.

And what were his greatest servants, the 'apple of the Great Eye', if not professional sneaks? When Sauron wanted to create Nine followers to stand above all the others, he didn't gift them with enchanted weapons, or cursed armour to grant them magical strength - he gave them Rings which turned them invisible (among other things). The Nazgul are, and always were, stealthy spies, and if it weren't for the Witch-King forgetting that in his grandstanding (in Angmar and on the Pelennor), things would have gone very differently.

~

So where does all that come from? Well, if there's one lesson Tolkien must have learnt from the Great War, it's that charging the enemy with guns blazing rarely achieves anything. I don't think anyone could come out of the battlefields of the Somme and think 'the way to achieve victory is to keep throwing armies at it!'. Yes, there's room in Middle-earth for things like the Rides of the Mark (under Eorl and Theoden) to bring total military victory - but even those were a matter of misdirection, of help coming from somewhere the enemy didn't expect, rather than sheer weight of numbers.

The only comprehensive military victories that spring to mind form the end of the First and Second Ages - the first destroyed an entire subcontinent, and the second led to the death of practically every king of the Free Peoples. Tolkien was clearly under no impression that hitting things with swords was the way to defeat evil.