So, I got to thinking. How does anyone know that the One Ring can only be destroyed in the fire in which it was forged? And how common is that kind of limitation?
This got me to thinking that there ought to be an urban fantasy in which a car is assembled from bits and pieces of other cars, and it turns out that this car can only be disassembled in the chop shop in which it was made, which is somewhere in the suburbs of Chicago.
It does seem like the question of how a given unique thing can be destroyed is a necessarily hard one to have existing research on. If anyone had done it, the thing wouldn’t be there, so all we really know is what doesn’t work. One imagines specialists who maintain lists of methods of destruction which have succeeded in the past. “Hmm, Class 3, original creator still alive but no longer human. Either melt it down in the fire in which it was forged, or teach it the meaning of friendship.” A couple of My Little Pony episodes later, it’s off to Mount Certainly Nothing You’d Want To Happen On Your Birthday.
Comments [archived]
From: Dave Leppik
Date: 2011-08-19 12:51:48 -0500
You need to reread the book, where they discuss this in length. (Does Tolkein discuss in any other way?)
It’s not because Mount Doom was where the ring was forged, it’s is the volcano in Middle Earth that’s hot enough. Elrond mentions several volcanos which used to be hot enough, but they’ve all cooled. This may be related to the waning power of elves and dwarves, though I won’t speculate on causality.