So there were five godlike beings sent to fight Sauron. Only one of them did his job.
I need to reword it.
You are the big cool powerful god. One of your servants, a minor much less powerful god does bad things to the world. So you send five your other servants just as powerful as the bad one to deal with him.
A lot of time passes. Three of those spend their time chilling. One joins the bad one. The last one turns out too weak. Who solves the problem? Four hobbits.
You really should reconsider your politics after that.
Wait till you learn about Melkor! He’s a Vala, or one of the Valar, which is a higher order than the Maiar, and was basically super-Sauron from the before times
And he was scared of Ungoliant, and we don’t know what she is, besides nasty, and hungry, and shaped like a huge spider (well, spiders are shaped like her, probably).
(He also got his foot almost cut off by an elf in single combat and walked with a limp ever after — well, at least until he got his hands and feet cut off by the rest of the Valar, I suppose —, but elves were mighty back then.)
I always took it that Morgoth spent too much of himself to create bullshit and that’s why an elf could topple a Vala, otherwise it doesn’t really make sense.
He did indeed spread himself out; Arda was Melkor’s “ring” as much as the one ring was Sauron’s.
That said, even at his weakest, it took all the forces of Valinor, plus the men and remaining elves of Middle Earth to finally defeat and banish him. He’s by far the most powerful of the Valar (and probably the Ainur).
Even if diminished, Fingolfin standing his ground against him for as long as he did and permanently crippling him was still a pretty big deal.
(You also have elves standing their ground in single combat against balrogs, and even defeating them; some elves were pretty damn powerful.)
To be fair, the istari were diminished Maiar who weren’t allowed to use their full power, and Sauron was a full Maia with no qualms about flexing his true strength.
Had Manwë been given the license to send just Eönwë, then Sauron would’ve been rekt in a year tops
Why were their powers limited?
It’s complicated but basically the gods learned that flexing their full strength caused cataclysmic events. Not ideal. But in doing so they got rid of Sauron’s daddy, so it wasn’t all gloom. But it did mean they weren’t keen on the idea of going rampage mode to deal with a lesser threat.
The lore reason is essentially that defeating Sauron was mankind’s coming-of-age story (the age of elves was ending, and mankind was set to take over control of middle earth), and having a bunch of maiar come in and wreck Sauron wouldn’t teach men to stand up for what’s right. Instead, Eru told Manwë to send the istari to guide men and elves to defeat Sauron on their own
The “real” reason is that it wouldn’t be a very good story if Manwë just sniped Sauron from the hidden West with magic
Do we know that the Istari who go east were just chilling? I thought they were trying to rally men in the east to fight Sauron. They might even have fought some of his troops in the far off east during the Battle of the Black Gate? Or were those just fan theories and never actually confirmed?
There’s no exact details given for what the blue wizards (the two in the east) were up to. Tolkien only said they were sewing dissent against Sauron
Isn’t much of the power of the Maiar in diplomacy and setting events in motion? Gandalf was as much of an interloper and manipulator as he was anything else, and his hiring Bilbo as a thief was the penultimate piece of his mission, as inadvertent as I’m not entirely sure it was. Right? No, really, I’m kinda asking, I don’t know for sure.
As stated in unfinished tales, Gandalf didn’t know that Bilbo would find the ring on the adventure. He originally wanted to help Thorin since having dwarves in the lonely mountain would prevent Sauron from attacking Gondor and Lothlórien from the north. The ring finding it’s way to Gollum and then Bilbo was almost definitely due to slight meddling from Eru (just as Gollum’s death was due to Eru loosening the rocks under his feet) so Gandalf could orchestrate the fellowship’s journey.
I mean, sure he was alive. But he wasn’t physically there.
Doesn’t matter. While that amazon shitshow tells a different story, Gandalf (as Radagast and Saruman) only arrived in the third age, long after the War of the Last Alliance. Gandalf might be infinitely older than Elrond yet wasn’t there.
The second age ended with the ending of the war of the last alliance, so Gandalf did arrive later, but not “long after”
I assume you forgot a “not” after the “but”. I just looked it up though, Gandalf left Valinor for Middle Earth around 1000 T.A. I don’t know about you, but I’d consider that “long after” the War of the Last Alliance.
I thought the way it was worded, it was still technically the second age?
This does raise the question “Does your age count when you’re in Valinor?”
Because it’s literally the undying lands. Are we really going to pull rank between two functionally ageless beings? Seems petty.
It’s not about rank or age. It’s about who’s been present at the last battle of the War of the Last Alliance. Also, at the time of the depicted scene Elrond never was in Valinor, so at this point in time Gandalf definitely easier Elrond’s senior by orders of magnitude.
Hey Gandalf, fuck off. Were you literally there 3,000 years ago? Or are you just going “You’re younger than me, so you know fuckall”?
Fuckin boomer
“Well I read in a book that I was there. I can’t actually remember more than a few hundred years back.”
Ashildr from Doctor Who was brilliant.
I’m wondering now, how our little brains would adapt to living like for thousands of years. Would we really start forgetting things that are waaaay back?
You would forget most everything. Even big events would become fuzzy. Do you remember what you had for lunch on this date when you were 5?
It’s Friday. Rectangle pizza
I’ve already forgotten most of my childhood and I’m only around 30. So I’d assume, yes.
That’s… that’s not normal.
Thats usually trauma suppressing memories, sorry mate,
Nah, it’s just shitty memory. I have had quite the happy childhood, actually.
I don’t find myself reminiscing a lot and in the rare cases I do, there are quite some gaps. Even in more recent times. If I really try to dig, maybe it comes back, but I assume it’s “use it or lose it”.
That still ain’t normal dude. You’re supposed to be able to recall memories from any point of your life…
You actually can’t. Human memory is really quite terrible. Most of your older memories are likely distorted by other people telling you about them, or even just the natural decay that occurs whenever you recall a memory.
This is a really interesting part of the Red Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson
Small nerd gripe. Maia is the singular form of Maiar. “I am a Maia,” or “I am one of the Maiar” get you there
Maia who?
Maia he
Christian Earth: 6000 years old
Middle Earth: 30,000 years old
Middle Earth wins again
Jesus vs Gandalf power scalers go!!!
Modern depictions of Jesus are correct because after the crucifixion Jesus came back as Jesus the White.
Am I wrong or do the wizards not remember their lives before they were sent to middle earth?
I don’t think the original books ever told anything about it.
Iirc the books themselves didn’t say, but Tolkien’s letters say something to the effect of the Istari only having vague memories of their time as Maia, with the exception of things that they were explicitly meant to remember, e.g. Olórin’s memories of being sent back after his physical death while fighting Durin’s Bane.
They know that they are, in our parlance, embodied angels or minor gods, but they don’t remember a ton of where they came from
Do the balrogs have the same memory issues?
That’s a very good question, and one that I don’t know the answer to. I would guess no, as the point of the Istari losing their memories was to make them more like the people they were sent to save; it’s not something about being embodied that made them lose their bodyless memories, it was part of their mission. The balrogs had no such mission
