I've wanted to for a while, but I've heard it's a slow read, and I have quite a few books in my backlog at the moment.
It's like reading the Old Testament in the King James Bible (which is kind of deliberate). It can be a very hard slog unless you can get into it.
That being said, it describes literally thousands of years worth of history, and tons of stories which are probably more interesting than anything Bilbo, Frodo, or Gandalf ever did. The only downside being that the scale means that it describes events that take decades over the span of a few paragraphs, and is more historically descriptive than narrative. So it can feel REALLY dry.
DarkKirby2500 posted...
I don't claim to be a Lord of the Rings lore expert, but how far away do you need to be from the Ring to not be effected by it? Lots of people hang out around Frodo are aren't effected by the Ring, can't you just carry it in a very large bag to keep it a good distance from yourself while transporting it?
It's seemingly less about how far away from it you are, and more how much it wants to try and influence you. It clearly reaches out to entice certain people more than others, mainly so that it can manipulate events to get itself back into Sauron's hands.
It generally WON'T reach out to stronger wills like Gandalf because even if it corrupts them they'll still use it for themselves (and will probably destroy Sauron with it even if they eventually become as bad or worse than him over time), and it doesn't bother with people it sees as being worthless to its goals (like Merry or Pippin), but it can apparently stretch its influence pretty far to trigger random orc attacks (to get Isildur killed) or start to subvert people like Boromir over time.
Shinebolt posted...
and after that it's just a matter of desire and lust for power.
Not even that, since it's pretty clearly spelled out that Gandalf doesn't really lust for power or even want the Ring, yet he understands full well that it will corrupt him as soon as he has it (Galadriel is actually a different case, because she IS self-aware enough to understand that she DOES want power - part of why she came to Middle Earth in the first place was to claim land and dominion, and that her younger self probably would have succumbed to the lure of the Ring whereas her older, more world-weary self does not).
And while the movies sort of make Boromir look like a jerk from the start, it's clearer in the books that he's actually a pretty noble soul who doesn't really desire power per se as much as he just wants to save Gondor (in the same way that Denethor was very much a good man until he fell under the power of Sauron via the Palantir). Faramir is probably as close as you ever come to seeing what Boromir and Denethor were like before being influenced by the evil of Sauron through the Ring and the Stone respectively.
But the Ring is clearly limited in just how much control it can exert, because otherwise it would have just turned Gollum into a crazy deathseeker and had him march directly into Mordor and back to Sauron long ago.
I wasn't talking about Gandalf in that post. It was just a general statement on how the ring corrupts. Also, "desire" and "lust for power" aren't meant to be treated as the same thing. I'm well aware of what Boromir's intentions were, but that desire is what led him to be corrupted for a brief moment which honestly is the truly scary part about the ring. It can twist an otherwise noble inner desire to do good into something malevolent. And that part about Gandalf just goes back to what I said earlier about his own personality really. ---
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