Comments by "Bruce Tucker" (@brucetucker4847) on "Actual Justice Warrior"
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@Agrestic All of that is just the movies. Almost none of it happened that way in the book, least of all Aragorn shirking any responsibility. He knew Gondor would never accept him as king unless he proved victorious in the war against Sauron - they had already rejected one of his ancestors many centuries earlier, and that was when the northern Dunedain still had a kingdom to rule (though a much reduced one by then). He had spent his entire life fighting against Sauron and preparing himself to be king, and he also had an understanding with Elrond that he would never wed Arwen, which was what he wanted more than anything else in life, until he was king of the reunited realms of Gondor and Arnor. Also, in the book, his original plan was to leave the Fellowship at the Falls of Rauros and let Gandalf take Frodo to Mordor while he went to Minas Tirith with Boromir to fight in the war; his plans only changed because Gandalf died in Moria and then again because Frodo left without him and Merry and Pippin needed rescuing.
You have to remember that in the book Isildur had lived and died 3,000 years before their present day, and it had been 1,000 years since Aragorn's ancestors had ruled anything but a ragtag band of rangers - their kingdom had been destroyed by the Witch-king a thousand years earlier and centuries before Sauron had returned. And Isildur and his descendants had never ruled any part of Gondor; they ruled Arnor in the north while the descendants of Isildur's younger brother Anarion ruled Gondor. It would be about like a long-lost descendant of Harold Godwinson whose ancestors had been living in rural Norway since that time showing up today and claiming to be the King of Scotland.
Aragorn's (IMO questionable) self-doubting character arc in the movies is entirely PJ's creation.
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That is one interpretation, but it's at least as controversial as Balrog wings. I believe the prevailing view is that this was another example of Tolkien's flowery language and Merry's blow with the barrow-blade (in the book) simply wounded the Witch-king - for one thing, if he had already died, neither Eowyn nor her sword would have suffered the drastic effects of striking him. Another interpretation is that Merry's blow wasn't fatal in itself, but it removed the protection spell which was necessary for him to be vulnerable to a normal sword like Eowyn's. Certainly in the film he is only wounded by Merry and is very much alive (or at least undead) until Eowyn stabs him.
There was never a reason that no man could kill him, btw. There was a just an ancient prophecy by Glorfindel that he would not fall by the hand of a man. This is very much in the literary tradition of prophesies like no one born of a woman being able to harm Macbeth, or Oedipus being doomed to kill his father and sleep with his mother. Macbeth wasn't magically immune to being harmed by anyone, it was just fated that one not born of a (live) woman would be the one to kill him. Likewise the Witch-king wasn't immune to harm by men, it was just foreordained that he would be killed by a specific person who was not a man, and Glorfindel had seen this end in a vision. The Witch-king and others who were familiar with the prophecy assumed that "Man" referred to race, not sex; apparently no one ever thought to ask Glorfindel for clarification on this point and Tolkien leaves it ambiguous - although the very dramatic reveal of Eowyn being a woman seems to me to indicate that sex, not race, was the significant factor.
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@dying0d You're all wrong. The Three Rings don't corrupt their wearers because they were never touched by Sauron, and because they were never worn or used while he still had the Ruling Ring. But because Celebrimbor learned the art of ring-making from Sauron, Sauron was able to influence the design of the Three (even though he didn't yet know they even existed) so that they would also be subject to the rule of the One and, according to Galadriel, lose their power when it was destroyed. It is never explicitly revealed whether the Three actually would lose all their power after the One's destruction, but since their wearers took them into the West at the end of the novel it became a moot point. From a thematic POV, it is made clear that the decline and departure of the Elves was a foreordained part of God's plan, so the use of the Three to delay those things was to some extent a sin of pride, and it was necessary that they either leave Middle-earth or stop working for the dominion of Men to come about..
Sauron absolutely had dominion over the Three, which is why the Elves who wore them had to take them off the moment Sauron tried to use the One to control them and never wore or used them again while he still had his. It was only after the One was lost that they dared use them again. This is stated many times in the novel and in other sources.
The Nine were never worn by anyone after Sauron lost the One, so we don't know how its loss would have affected them. By that point he had so enslaved the Nazgul to his will with their Rings and the One that he no longer needed the rings to control them. And the Dwarves were largely immune to his control through their rings with or without his having the One by virtue of their own nature, but their rings still had a corrupting influence because they were made with Sauron's direct participation. (It is also never clear whether he made any changes to the rings after he recovered them and before he gave them out to Men and Dwarves, nor is it ever revealed whether the Dwarves' belief that Durin's Ring was given to him by Celebrimbor and never held by Sauron. But even Durin's Ring had a corrupting influence.)
In short, anyone other than a Dwarf who wore any of the rings while Sauron still had the One would have become subject to his control, but anyone of any race who wore the Three that were never touched by Sauron would not be corrupted by them once he had lost the One, at least, not to anything like the extent the Nazgul or Smeagol became corrupted. (They might still be very difficult to give up because they still represented the lure of power, although Cirdan apparently didn't have any problem giving his to Gandalf after having worn it for a good thousand years by then.)
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