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The White CouncilRe: on lyingTolkien and Inklings Discussion |
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The White CouncilRe: on lyingTolkien and Inklings Discussion |
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Posted by macadamia on March 11, 2000 at 02:52:50 In Reply to: Re: on lying posted by Michael Martinez on March 11, 2000 at 02:13:42:
I do have a copy, though a page number would be helpful next time. I flipped through the chapter on the Palantiri and couldn't find anything helpful on my own. In the process, though, I remembered a relevant tidbit I then looked up (RK p. 154, "The Last Debate"): (Gandalf): "The Stones of Seeing do not lie, and not even the Lord of Barad-dur can make them do so." So I think it's hard to maintain that Aragorn used the palantir to lie. But it's difficult to even keep track of why this came up. If I recall, (1) Gandalf said Sauron thought his ring might have been destroyed (2) This implies that Sauron thought that he (Sauron) could have survived the destruction of the one ring (3) But Gandalf, speaking in the last debate, clearly is certain (as, in fact, _The Silmarillion_ shows him to have been for 1000 years) that destroying the ring would destroy Sauron (4) And unless Gandalf has a source of ring-lore that Sauron lacks (which he does not), then if he knows this, Sauron knows this I propose that the easiest way to solve this puzzle is to think that (1) was a minor mistake -- just a false inference on Gandalf's part. No big deal. One alternative proposed is that Gandalf didn't really mean it when he said (3)...that he was just trying to inspire the troops. First of all, I think that's a less elegant solution to the puzzle to begin with. But really more importantly, I think that the good guys in Middle-earth never lie. They're amazingly scrupulous. That lead to this debate over whether Aragorn lied to Sauron using the palantir. I can't see that he did. But IF he did, I don't think that would make it likely that that was what Gandalf was doing in the last debate (when, I ask, did Gandalf ever lie to his friends?). C'mon, guys. These are too many contortions to go to simply to avoid the possibility that Gandalf made a slight mistake.
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