Spoilers Rings of Power is back!

Paul Farquhar said:

Well the Withywindle does, just ask Old Tom!

There is more on this in the Tom Bombadil book.

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Paul Farquhar said:

Why is it so hard to understand that the “mechanical process” is magic? The same way as Saruman blows up the deaping wall without saltpetre and sulphur.

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Micah Sweet said:

How do we know Saruman lacked saltpetre and sulphur? In the movie, at least, he was formulating what looked an awful lot like black powder to me (don't recall a similar scene in the books). Also not magic, by the way.

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It is not unlikely that [goblins] invented some of the machines that have since troubled the world, especially the ingenious devices for killing large numbers of people at once, for wheels and engines and explosions always delighted them.

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Stalker0 said:

One question I had. They mentioned that the king was digging again, and that if not stopped he would release “the beast”

So…do they know about the balrog? When was tbst revealed I missed that.

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Stalker0 said:

One question I had. They mentioned that the king was digging again, and that if not stopped he would release “the beast”

So…do they know about the balrog? When was tbst revealed I missed that.

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Sepulchrave II said:

There sre more than a few continuity issues in this episode. One of the more outrageous is the sudden appearance of walls around Eregion:

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It seems like a fairly obvious retcon when Gil-Galad mentions the dwarven defensive wall early in S2, because the showrunners didn't really plan anything ahead.

We're stuck with making assumptions about the wall being built between S1 and S2 (charitable reading of the show). But this has implications for the passage of time - which is one of the primary issues which the show grapples with: it seems like such a project would take at least a few years to complete. How does this dovetail with the logic of other events at the end of S1 leading into S2? It can't.

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Micah Sweet said:

How do we know Saruman lacked saltpetre and sulphur? In the movie, at least, he was formulating what looked an awful lot like black powder to me (don't recall a similar scene in the books). Also not magic, by the way.

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Paul Farquhar said:

Which movie? In the animated Bakshi movie Saurman sends literal fires out of Orthanc (the wording in the book) to blast the wall.

Of course, the truth is in the book Tolkien leaves it open to interpretation. He describes it in terms of magic, but leaves it open to be interpreted as gunpowder, which is what Peter Jackson does. But it's pretty clear Sauruman has none of the infrastructure required to manufacture non-magical gunpowder. I'm not a sapper, but I'm pretty certain the delivery system used in the Peter Jackson movie would be ineffective with real world gunpowder too, especially given how hard it was raining. Gunpowder don't work too good when wet.

Of course to Tolkien, all modern technology, from steam power onwards, was dark magic.

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MarkB said:

And, of course, Saruman is a very smart wizard, so nothing says he couldn't have (A) skipped straight past gunpowder to something with a little more kick, and/or (B) enhanced whatever he was using with actual magic.

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