The Letter of the Law

[Legate of Amon Lanc]

Originally Posted by Formendacil

So I'm looking for the opposite examples: where Tolkien heavily infers that Æ happened, but since he didn't SAY it did, you can argue that anti-Æ happened.

Are you literally still fishing for material you could give to the Amazon series' makers?

Originally Posted by Formendacil

This is, admittedly, a broad, conceptual topic and I don't have a ready example.

My first thought upon seeing this was that I am rather afraid that there are gazillions of such things, countless examples, many of which have been already exploited by various game-makers or at least fan-fiction writers, Peter Jackson included. For instance, it is pretty much implied that, say, spiders of Mirkwood pretty much existed only in Mirkwood and they were the offspring of the offspring of Ungoliant, but I recall some video games where you had them in random small forests in the Shire because, well, you need to have random killable "mobs" and they can't just all be Orcs.

That's just from the top of my head, and that is even a fairly broad thing.

Something like that might concern the Nazgûl, meaning, the original Men. I remember that under the I.C.E. license, various roleplaying games and the Middle-Earth: The Wizards card game operated with one of the Ringwraith being female (for those interested, her name was Adûnaphel). I personally kinda like the idea (and could have been more than one), but I am pretty much convinced that when Tolkien said the Nazgûl were "Men", he meant "men". Even though, arguably, who knows. It's rather based on "circumstantial evidence", such as that as a rule of thumb, female characters in such positions in Middle-Earth are rare, and if one happened to be a Nazgûl, Tolkien would likely have pointed it out as a notable exception.

While we are on the topic of the Nazgûl, you could probably come up with lot of things about that. It is for example also heavily implied that they were some nobility, some of them of the Númenorean stock, but likely NOT Númenorean kings. So, like, it isn't that Ar-Gimilzôr became a Ringwraith. BUT, it is not specifically mentioned. So I can easily imagine a writer who is lazy to come up with a Númenorean name, or a character for that matter, to just pick one of the later kings and be like "ok, this is one of the Nazgûl!" (Or, even better, pick three of the last kings and be done with it.)

And on that note, it is also implied that the Ringwraith appeared more or less all at once at roughly the same time, considerably earlier than many of the "bad kings" lived, but that is also not said explicitly. So, I am pretty sure, somebody could come up with a case that Pharazôn became one. (Because among other things, nobody also says that Sauron did not go and pick him up from wherever he ended up under an avalanche at the outskirts of the Undying Lands.)

Thinking of it, it is not even said that the Nine were always the SAME Nine, was it? As in, maybe the Ring #9 was for instance worn by one person the first two hundred years, then he was killed, Sauron gave it to another, who became the wraith then, then he gave it to Ar-Pharazôn...

Well, clearly one can come up with lots of things...