Q: How Did the One Ring Survive the Downfall of Numenor?
ANSWER: J.R.R. Tolkien answered this question in part in Letter No. 211, where he wrote:
Sauron was first defeated by a ‘miracle’: a direct action of God the Creator, changing the fashion of the world, when appealed to by Manwë: see III p. 317. Though reduced to ‘a spirit of hatred borne on a dark wind’, I do not think one need boggle at this spirit carrying off the One Ring, upon which his power of dominating minds now largely depended. That Sauron was not himself destroyed in the anger of the One is not my fault: the problem of evil, and its apparent toleration, is a permanent one for all who concern themselves with our world. The indestructibility of spirits with free wills, even by the Creator of them, is also an inevitable feature, if one either believes in their existence, or feigns it in a story.
The One Ring could not be destroyed simply by “drowning” it; hence, Sauron would have been aware of it on his “dead” body and thus able to take it up out of the sea.
The implication here is that when Númenor was “thrown down” and destroyed, its land was driven downward into the sea. Of course, the story says that the shape of the world was changed. What had been a “flat” world now became a round sphere. But somewhere in that transformation Sauron was able to escape (as a spirit) and return to Middle-earth, carrying the One Ring with him.
The Ring would ultimately be unmade when Gollum fell with it into the fires of Mount Doom. Hence, we must infer that whatever the calamity was that led to the destruction of Númenor, Sauron was able to preserve the Ring from falling into anything as hot as the fires of Mount Doom. Assuming that the destruction of Númenor and the changing of the world must have resulted in massive volcanic eruptions, one need only guess that Sauron retained sufficient will or presence of mind to take the Ring from his dead body before it could be destroyed.
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Just a thought. I don’t now recall where I read this but I was under the impression Sauron did not take the One Ring with him to Numenor. I thought It was set aside(probably locked away in Barad-dur) before he surrendered to Ar-Pharazon. Once his evil spirit returned from the Downfall he took up again the One Ring.
first off, i am finding conflicting reports on when Minas Ithil fell. the first one says : SA 3429 – Sauron conquers Minas Ithil and burns the White Tree. the other says. In TA 2002 after a long siege, Minas Ithil had been captured and transformed into a foul, evil place.
So why is this important? Well i have long believed the caverns of Angband and the caverns of Utumno to have been connected underground. That is to say, when Tulkas and the other Valar chained Melkor for three ages, only that portion of a vast underground complex was destroyed.
Who, as childeren, didn’t own an ant farm, or at the very least have seen a picture of a cut-away model of one? they can be very expansive. Now Arda in the first and second age is considered flat. but its not. only the surface area is. the whole of Ea is quite bowl shaped. that is to say, tapered in the sky, and at the bottom when viewed from the side. Melkor, if still looking for the flame imperishable and not finding it in the void would reason it must be somewhere not in the void. (ie: Ea) somewhere that he couldn’t see. (underground) he would dig and dig and not stop digging until he found it. heck even the dwarfs had vast underground KINGDOMS! So why not? (this could also be the reason why Beleriand also sank)
If Sauron feel into the Abyss when Numanor was removed from Arda, he could very easily sent his Orcs and trolls to scourer any tunnels that may have reached the abyss and found the ring and returned it to Barad-dur. Now if Minas ithil was conquered in SA3029, that only leaves about 19 years to accomplish this and it seems unlikely. Conversely, if Minas Ithil was taken by the witch king in the middle of the third age, it seems more likely.
Then, of course, there is the obvious, He never took the ring to Numenor thinking Men were already beneath it’s power. I am sure i have read somewhere this is what happened.
The answer for your question about Minas Ithil is very simple: after the defeat of Sauron in war of Last Alliance the fortress was retaken by Gondor, so voila, there you have it. In Third Age it held a garrison which performed the duty of watch over Mordor (now it reminds me a bit of George Martin’s watch on the Wall in his Song of Fire and Ice cycle ;):) he must have felt the influence hehe) and only after it was taken again by Nazgul it was ,,magically” corrupted so to make a new fancy landscape with nice deadly white flowers, beautiful, luminous, ,,demented forms of an uneasy dream” you know so the wraiths could feel at home ;):). But seriously I believe that One Ring even if it fell into the chasm of molten lava it would never be destroyed, cause ONLY the place where IT WAS MADE could do the job, Mount Doom wasn’t a simple volcano but place of special power and affinity with the Ring itself and Sauron, after all otherwise travelling to Mount Doom wouldn’t be necessary if any other volcano or fiery chasm was sufficient (hell, this fissure filled with fire in Moria could be used in that scenario). The conquest of Minas Ithil you mentioned happened AFTER Sauron returned to Middle Earth and made himself new form so he had already the Ring on his finger (though possibly he didn’t recover enough by the time he made his war upon Numenorean Realms-in-Exile).
Thanks for this Michael. Glad to see your niggling again.
A couple things:
I’ve never heard anyone voice this, but I myself imagine that the flat world was *projected* onto a round form. In this conception, instead of physically stretching the world and its rock strata into a round ball shape, with all the cracking, breaking, and suturing that would entail, the Author shone an imperceivable ‘light’ through all things, and recast their image into a round shape in a single moment.
The physical destruction of Numenor would be a distinct event, separate from, but simultaneous with, the bending of the world. The western shore of Middle-earth would’ve been inundated and changed because of the collapse and displacement of water from that single event, not because of the bending of the world.
New Lands appeared not the physical trauma of bending the earth, but because Eru pictured those new western continents, and they appeared in an instant, though perhaps the existing crescent-shaped land of Easternesse (Burnt Lands of the Sun) was incorporated into that image.
In any case, it seems that even molten rock from cracked ocean floor wouldn’t melt the Ring. Once the Ring was made, it wasn’t simply a matter of finding hot-enough lava somewhere. The Ring was imbued with the personal spirit of the Diabolos, of the Archangel Lucifer of that legendarium. It could be umade in Mount Doom because that was the spiritual locus where it was forged, not simply because it happened to be the hottest temperature in the Westlands