Welcome, dear readers, as ever.

In the Star Wars fan world, there has been a lot of recent chatter about a Star Wars “What If?” film.  So far, it seems to be just chatter, but the speculation has gone in all sorts of directions and some very creative people have even produced potential posters, like this one—

with Anakin in his Darth Vader suit, which is real, but Obi Wan and Ahsoka as Imperial officers—a very grim idea.  (For more on possible scenarios, see:  https://thedirect.com/article/star-wars-what-if-disney-plus-2024  I think my favorite is the idea of Jar Jar Binks as a Sith lord—

see this especially silly version here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dB4sKebTr5k  )

What Ifs are common in the world of fictions of all sorts, from Sci-Fi to Historical, and I’ll bet that you can immediately produce a few titles—from 1984

(a very complex “What If?” in which, unlike many of the genre, we don’t begin with actual history taking a left turn, as in something like some of Harry Turtledove’s books, where, for instance, the South has won the Civil War,

but a world in which something has changed things earlier, producing a series of three large warring states, at least one of which, Oceania, is a reflection of a kind of Stalinist UK)

to The Man in the High Castle,

as well as many more. 

It’s always an interesting approach to a story and, when well done, can be anything from entertaining to disturbing.  One which comes to mind as a dead failure, however, might begin with this:

“ ‘I have come,’ he said.  ‘But I do not choose now to do what I came to do.  I will not do this deed.  The Ring is mine!’ And suddenly, as he set it on his finger, he vanished from Sam’s sight.”  (The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 3, “Mount Doom”.)

(Alan Lee)

We all know what happens next.  Sauron is suddenly not so sure of his triumph:

“And far away, as Frodo put on the Ring and claimed it for his own, even in Sammath Naur the very heart of his realm, the Power in Barad-dur was shaken, and the Tower trembled from its foundations to its proud and bitter crown.”

But then:

“Suddenly Sam saw Gollum’s long hands draw upwards towards his mouth; his white fangs gleamed, and snapped as they bit.  Frodo gave a cry, and there he was, fallen upon his knees at the chasm’s edge.  But Gollum, dancing like a mad thing, held aloft the ring, a finger still thrust through its circle.”

And then:

“ ‘Precious, precious, precious!’ Gollum cried.  ‘My Precious!  O my Precious!’  And with that, even as his eyes were lifted up to gloat on his prize, he stepped too far, toppled, wavered for a moment on the brink, and then with a shriek he fell.  Out of the depths came his last wail Precious, and he was gone.”

(Ted Nasmith)

In a brief space, we’re confronted with not one, but two, What Ifs, but let’s deal with the second one first, as, after all, Gollum had actually had control of the Ring long before Frodo even became aware of it—for 478 years.  During that time, what had he done with it and himself?

1. he had murdered a friend to obtain it

2. taking up eaves-dropping and petty theft, he’d eventually been exiled from his people

3. finally, he had crept under the Misty Mountains, where he lived on a diet of fish and goblins (when he could catch one) until he lost the Ring (or, perhaps more correctly, the Ring lost him) 80 years before The Lord of the Rings.

The only use he seems to have had for the Ring all that time was as a kind of cloaking device.  I think that we can presume that, had he successfully escaped Sam and Frodo, he would have been quickly apprehended by Sauron’s agents and deprived of his Precious, and worse.

This leaves us with Frodo—and yet we shouldn’t forget the Ring’s other previous possessors.  First, there was Isildur, who cut the Ring from Sauron’s hand at the Battle of Dagorlad—only to have it betray him to orc archers at the Gladden Fields.  Perhaps he hadn’t time to do anything with it, having held it so briefly, it being only 2 years after Dagorlad, but Tolkien never shows him doing anything more than wearing it as a kind of trophy.

And then, of course, there is Bilbo, who, in fact, uses it rather as Gollum did, to disappear from time to time, both in the adventure to the Lonely Mountain and back again and in the years afterwards.  If a king who had actually defeated Sauron did nothing with the Ring’s power, what could one expect from a hobbit?

This brings us back to Frodo.  He is recorded as having put the Ring on only twice:  at Weathertop, when he was almost mortally wounded by one of the Nazgul, and, later, on Amon Hen, where he was terrified by the sudden attention of Sauron:

“And suddenly he felt the Eye.  There was an eye in the Dark Tower that did not sleep.  He knew that it had become aware of his gaze.  A fierce eager will was there.  It leaped towards him; almost like a finger he felt it, searching for him.  Very soon it would nail him down, know just exactly where he was.  Amon Lhaw it touched.  It glanced upon Tol Brandir—he threw himself down from the search, crouching, covering his head with his grey hood.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book Two, Chapter 10, “The Breaking of the Fellowship”)

The problem is that, as JRRT explains:

“[Sauron] rules a growing empire from the great dark tower of Barad-dur in Mordor, near to the Mountain of Fire, wielding the One Ring.

But to achieve this he had been obliged to let a great part of his own inherent power…pass into the One Ring.  While he wore it, his power on earth was actually enhanced.  But even if he did not wear it, that power existed and was in ‘rapport’ with himself:  he was not ‘diminished’.”

And yet—

“Unless some other seized it and became possessed of it.”

There is, however, a condition to this—

“If that happened, the new possessor could (if sufficiently strong and heroic by nature) challenge Sauron, become master of all that he had learned or done since the making of the One Ring, and so overthrow him and usurp his place.”

At the same time:

“Also so great was the Ring’s power of lust, that anyone who used it became mastered by it; it was beyond the strength of any will (even his own) to injure it, cast it away, or neglect it.” (draft of a letter to Milton Waldman, “late in 1951”, Letters, 214)

It appears, then, that the Ring enhances the power of him who holds it—but consider those who had, beyond Sauron—what power did any of them, besides Isildur, have?  And what power did Isildur have, when, faced with the Ring’s destruction, as Elrond tells us:

“ ‘Isildur took it, as should not have been.  It should have been cast then into Orodruin’s fire nigh at hand where it was made.  But few marked what Isildur did.  He alone stood by his father in that last mortal contest; and by Gil-galad only Cirdan stood, and I.  But Isildur would not listen to our counsel…

…and therefore whether we would or no, he took it to treasure it.  But soon he was betrayed by it to his death; and so it is named in the North Isildur’s Bane.  Yet death maybe was better than what else might have befallen him.”  (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book Two, Chapter 2, “The Council of Elrond”)

If Gollum used it for burglary and Bilbo for concealment and Isildur is brought to his death by it—and might have fared worse, had he lived—what would have been the fate of Frodo, had he been able to retain the Ring, as he attempted, at the last minute, to do?  Heroic he might be, but with a strength to equal Sauron’s?

I suspect that the consequences would have been the same as those of the Gollum What If and as described by the Mouth of Sauron in his gloating threat to Gandalf when it was suggested that Frodo was in Sauron’s hands:

“And now he shall endure the slow torment of years, as long and slow as our arts in the Great Tower can contrive, and never be released unless maybe when he is changed and broken…” (The Return of the King, Book Five, Chapter 10, “The Black Gate Opens”)

For all that Frodo suffers from the Ring before and after Gollum’s attack, better those sufferings than that possible What If.

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

Stay well,

Say with Faramir, “Not if I found it on the highway would I take it”,

And remember that, as always, there’s

MTCIDC

O