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Originally posted by Marvin the Martian:
People tend to forget that in The Hobbit The Ring was no more than a fancy MacGuffin that enabled Bilbo to do virtually everything he does in the second half of the book. It only acquired its massive significance when Tolkien was searching for a 'hook' on which to hang the proposed sequel, which of course became LOTR.

This artifact/Wagner/Norse myths/etc may have helped to inform some of the mythology that subsequently got attached to The Ring, but they weren't the initial inspiration.

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This.

But people love to say stupid things, and for some reason LOTR attracts inanities like few other magnets (than religion).
 

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Posted by Laurelin (# 17211) on :
 
It's easy to see why people compare Tolkien with Wagner, but Tolkien distanced himself from Wagner's work, maybe because Hitler liked Wagner and Tolkien hated 'that ruddy little ignoramus' (i.e. Hitler) and the Nazis for perverting the Northern legends he loved with their malicious racism.

There's a school of thought that LotR was written as a sort of anti-Wagner ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._R._R._Tolkien's_influences#Wagnerian_influences

Anyway, the good Professor had this to say on people comparing his Ring with Wagner's: "Both rings were round, and there the resemblance ceases." God love him.

I think he'd have found people linking this Roman ring with his fictional One Ring a bit silly. To be honest.

Having said that, that Roman ring is wonderful and it would be cool to see it on display at the Vyne.
 

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Posted by Adeodatus (# 4992) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by Laurelin:
Anyway, the good Professor had this to say on people comparing his Ring with Wagner's: "Both rings were round, and there the resemblance ceases." God love him.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Nicolemr:
Marvin has the right of it. The ring was just a plot device in The Hobbit.

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Originally posted by venbede:
I've never worked out how Wagner's ring works: if you need to renounce love to use it, how come Siegfried can use it after his, er, meeting Brunhilde? And how come the Gods perish when it is returned to the Rheinmachen?

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You really want to know? I could do you about 20000 words on the subject ...

Briefly, you don't need to renounce love to use the Ring, only to steal the gold in the first place. And at that stage in the operas, love means sex: you can only get to the gold if you don't fall for the Rhinemaidens' sexual advances.

Later on, you get love re-presented as self-renunciation, which opposes the Ring, which is the embodiment of power as self-assertion. It's Brünnhilde's renunciation of her own existence that overcomes the Ring's (and Alberich's, and Hagen's) self-asserting desire for power.

Wotan has already realised that he can only be redeemed by renouncing his (and the Gods') existence, and that's why he willingly and deliberately dies in the fire at the end.
 

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Posted by venbede (# 16669) on :
 
Thank you, adeodatus. That makes sense. And it is very different from how the ring works in LOTR.
 

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Posted by ken (# 2460) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by venbede:
I've never worked out how Wagner's ring works: if you need to renounce love to use it, how come Siegfried can use it after his, er, meeting Brunhilde?

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quote:

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And how come the Gods perish when it is returned to the Rheinmachen?

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Because of a sudden attack of timey-wimey neo-Hegelian Gothic-Romantic deathwish-ineveitable-progress Teutonic-master-race handwaving bollocks.

OR because the last of the alliances and treaties and oaths that Wotan made to establish his rule has now been broken., The Rune-Spear is gone - Siegfried broke it himself - the Norn's weaving has unravelled, and now the price paid to the Giants is finally and irrevocably been taken back from them (Fafner was entitled to all that treasure, it was his due payment, when Wotan's grandson killed him and took it he was sort of cancelling the contract that built Valhal in the first place) so nothing now maintains the fortress and the bridge and other manifestations of Wotan's power. He didn't rule because he was some kind of demigod - he starts out as a mortal man in many of the stories that aren't in the opera - but because he did deals with all sorts of supernatural beings to give him powers under certain conditions. The conditions are broken, the deals are off, his power is gone. And also because the ring has been returned to the daughters of the Rhine returning the world from the cosmic pattern imposed on it by Wotan and Alberich and re-establishing a State of Nature from which a New World Order can emerge - one which seems to belong to the mortals. And also because Alberich and his family, the flip side of Wotan's rule, can not now regain the Ring or the other symbols of their anti-Wotan status. The same trick won't work twice (though Hagen is still wandering around trying to think up another one)

You pays your money and you takes your choice.

[ 05. April 2013, 15:50: Message edited by: ken ]
 

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Posted by Adeodatus (# 4992) on :
 
I keep promising myself I'll withhold further comment until a thread I was planning to start around 22 May ...

But now look at what y'all have made me do! - I'm listening to the last scene of Götterdämmerung while I do my end-of-week paperwork!
 

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Posted by Robert Armin (# 182) on :
 
Excuse me, but surely this ring looks nothing like Tolkein's? Without being able to put my hands on the text, I thought the latter was described as perfectly plain, with no decoration or visible inscription. And that website doesn't look wonderful to me: it contains links to, "'Gate to Hell' found in Turkey" and "Tiny 'Cthulhu' monsters discovered".
 

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Posted by mousethief (# 953) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by venbede:

quote:

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Originally posted by Nicolemr:
Marvin has the right of it. The ring was just a plot device in The Hobbit.

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But having created it, it became far more than that in LOTR.

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