July 25, 2002

Concerning Ring Invisibility
Jeff C.

To reply to Baldrick and Lily Bumbleroot, there are some other things you should consider on this subject.

For one thing Baldrick:

"leaves me to suspect that Tolkien may have considered the elves inhabited two parallel 'planes of existence', the original land of stars under the two trees' and the human world. "

The land of stars and the land under the two trees were actually in two different places and their time passed when Melkor and Ungoliant destroyed the two trees, and the land UNDER the stars ended with the first dawn. You may want to read the Silmarillion to clear yourself up on that.

"This presumably derives from Sauron's Maiar (super-elvish?) power "

Actually, Maiar were more spirits than Elves but did impart some knowledge to the Elves. Elves did not consider their knowledge as magic, as much as we do not consider the microwave oven as magic.

Lily Bumbleroot, you should also consider the fact that the ring did not make itself invisible to everyone, or better to say, not everyone was fooled by the rings powers. In my opinion, this really didn't have much to do with your race, but with your power of your mind.

You see, many Elves could not see the ring bearer when the ring was on (Read The Hobbit), yet Gollum could see Frodo when Frodo put the ring on in Mount Doom.

Of course, Gollum could not see Bilbo when he placed the ring on to escape, so there are some inconsistencies there.

In my opinion, Tolkien intentionally never set any ground rules on this, but if I had to guess, one would have to have some sort of experience with either the ring itself, or the power that was used to make such a thing. The Elves did not teach this to Sauron, he taught them. In fact, the Elves really did not teach Sauron anything.

Most Elves probably could not see the ring bearer as I would believe that the ring making knowledge was probably as secretive as present day military secrets.

Bombadil was not tricked by the ring because his knowledge was greater than just about anyone else's in the entire Middle Earth. I have read many articles that speculate that Bombadil was Eru himself since he obviously was not bound to follow the same rules as the Maia. Again, Tolkien left this out, so we probably will never know. In fact, his son Christopher still doesn't have any idea on it.

Just my two cents,

Jeff C