u/Immediate_Error2135

And this I remember of Boromir as a boy, when we together learned the tale of our sires and the history of our city [...] It was these records that brought the Grey Pilgrim to us. I first saw him when I was a child [...] it is hard indeed to believe that one of so great wisdom, and of power – for many wonderful things he did among us[...]

So I was reading this chapter and 'wonderful things' linked itself to 'boy' and 'child'. As if Faramir's boyish self had come near the surface. 'Wonderful things' sounds boyish and innocent. He had not understand those wonderful things back then...nor did he now, as an adult.

As it happens, 'wonderful things' appears just twice in the whole book. This is the other instance of it:

It’s wonderfully quiet here. Nothing seems to be going on, and nobody seems to want it to. If there’s any magic about, it’s right down deep, where I can’t lay my hands on it, in a manner of speaking.’

‘You can see and feel it everywhere,’ said Frodo.

‘Well,’ said Sam, ‘you can’t see nobody working it. No fireworks like poor old Gandalf used to show. I wonder we don’t see nothing of the Lord and Lady in all these days. I fancy now that she could do some wonderful things, if she had a mind. I’d dearly love to see some Elf-magic, Mr. Frodo!’

In the book the wonderful things was the Mirror. Notice 'Elf-Magic':

What you will see, if you leave the Mirror free to work, I cannot tell. For it shows things that were, and things that are, and things that yet may be. But which it is that he sees, even the wisest cannot always tell. Do you wish to look?’

Frodo did not answer.

‘And you?’ she said, turning to Sam. ‘For this is what your folk would call magic, I believe; though I do not understand clearly what they mean; and they seem to use the same word of the deceits of the Enemy. But this, if you will, is the magic of Galadriel. Did you not say that you wished to see Elf-magic?’

And Galadriel knowing what Sam had said

I fancy now that she could do some wonderful things, if she had a mind. I’d dearly love to see some Elf-magic, Mr. Frodo!’

is in itself magic. How did she know?

So what would have been Wizard-Magic in Faramir's case? What wonderful things?

Well it is curious how the mirror is related to seeing, to vision, and how Faramir dreams a lot and has a lot of visions or dream/visions in the book. Numenor's fall, Boromir's boat, him recognizing Aragorn's face as the King's in the houses of healing, the Imladris dream.

Gandalf was of course Olórin. Tolkien:

Olor is a word often translated “dream”, but that does not refer to (most) human “dreams”, certainly not the dreams of sleep. To the Eldar it included the vivid contents of their memory, as of their imagination: it referred in fact to clear vision, in the mind, of things not physically present at the body’s situation. But not only to an idea, but to a full clothing of this in particular form and detail.

But of Olórin that tale does not speak; for though he loved the Elves, he walked among them unseen, or in form as one of them, and they did not know whence came the fair visions or the promptings of wisdom that he put into their hearts. 

'Many wonderful things he did among us' says Faramir. Who's 'us'? 'We in the house of Denethor', it seems.

We in the house of Denethor know much ancient lore by long tradition, and there are moreover in our treasuries many things preserved: books and tablets writ on withered parchments, yea, and on stone, and on leaves of silver and of gold, in divers characters. Some none can now read; and for the rest, few ever unlock them. I can read a little in them, for I have had teaching. It was these records that brought the Grey Pilgrim to us.

And here they seem to reappear. Gandalf's 'wonderful things' had left some sort of mark in these men, maybe children back then.

And we of Gondor grow like other Men, like the men of Rohan; for even they, who are foes of the Dark Lord, shun the Elves and speak of the Golden Wood with dread.

*‘*Yet there are among us still some who have dealings with the Elves when they may, and ever and anon one will go in secret to Lórien, seldom to return. Not I. For I deem it perilous now for mortal man wilfully to seek out the Elder People.

'Not I'. And yet it was Galadriel the cause of Sam 'stumbling' and revealing the Ring to Faramir. Again Faramir...and Gandalf:

Not I. For I deem it perilous now for mortal man wilfully to seek out the Elder People.

That's wisdom. That's also Olórin:

the promptings of wisdom that he put into their hearts. 

You don't seek the Elder People out. You will be found by them if need be. Sam was maybe fated to 'stumble', as Faramir says.

Ah well, sir,’ said Sam, ‘you said my master had an Elvish air; and that was good and true. But I can say this: you have an air too, sir, that reminds me of, of – well, Gandalf, of wizards.’

A wizard's pupil indeed.

But what wonderful things?, I wonder.

Morgoth's Ring:

>It is therefore a foolish and perilous thing, besides being a wrong deed forbidden justly by the appointed Rulers of Arda, if the Living seek to commune with the Unbodied, though the houseless may desire it, especially the most unworthy among them. For the Unbodied, wandering in the world, are those who at the least have refused the door of life and remain in regret and self-pity. Some are filled with bitterness, grievance, and envy. Some were enslaved by the Dark Lord and do his work still, though he himself is gone. They will not speak truth or wisdom. To call on them is folly. To attempt to master them and to make them servants of one own's will is wickedness. Such practices are of Morgoth; and the necromancers are of the host of Sauron his servant.

>

>Some say that the Houseless desire bodies, though they are not willing to seek them lawfully by submission to the judgement of Mandos. The wicked among them will take bodies, if they can, unlawfully. The peril of communing with them is, therefore, not only the peril of being deluded by fantasies or lies: there is peril also of destruction. For one of the hungry Houseless, if it is admitted to the friendship of the Living, may seek to eject the fëa from its body; and in the contest for mastery the body may be gravely injured, even if it be not wrested from its rightful habitant. Or the Houseless may plead for shelter, and if it is admitted, then it will seek to enslave its host and use both his will and his body for its own purposes. It is said that Sauron did these things, and taught his followers how to achieve them.

Necromancy here and elsewhere means 'elves'. Men do not remain in the world when they die.

So an Elf would die and remain 'unbodied' or 'houseless'. Then they could be enslaved or mastered by a Necromancer and used to 'eject' the fëa from another body 'or the Houseless may plead for shelter, and if it is admitted, then it will seek to enslave its host and use both his will and his body for its own purposes'.

Now let's say the unbodied and the rightful habitant are the same person. A rightful habitant, a man of 50 years of age and then, 700 years later say, an unbodied/unhoused/Ringwraith, enslaved by a Necromancer: Sauron.

In other words, is wraithification the result of necromancy, or necromancy-related arts, applied to Mortal Men? Of course, the 9 rings were not to be used by Men. But Sauron used them to enslave the 9.

Wraithification is after all the gradual obliteration of the Bodied by the Wraith, or of the Mortal by the Undead: the Nazgûl taking over the Man.

In the Morgoth's Ring example above, what we have is close to demonic possession. Two fëa, one hröa. In Mortal Men we would have one hröa stretched and made to fade across time by a demonic influence, and it could also be called demonic possession of the (mortal) Self by the (demonic) Self.

This is not in Tolkien, of course. But the nature of wraithification and of necromancy is, and also the fëa/hröa nature in Elves and Men, so theoretically these ideas could be made to cohere.

'He reckoned without the subtle perception of the elves', writes Tolkien.

If the elven-rings had a backdoor built into them by design, and that had been a part of Sauron's evil plan, then it seems Sauron didn't count on the backdoor working both ways.

Or maybe he did, but thought he would not be perceived. In that case, he must have thought something else would mask his presence. What?

According to Tolkien, Saruman and Sauron were of a similar cast of mind. Both cynically projected their own power-based view of the view on others. Saruman, to Gandalf:

"There need not be, there would not be, any real change in our designs, only in our means.”

Gandalf's reply:

“Saruman,[...]I have heard speeches of this kind before, but only in the mouths of emissaries sent from Mordor to deceive the ignorant.  

Is this how the elves perceived Sauron? They were not corrupted by mere power, so maybe they sensed Saruman-like thoughts in their heads and then they fixed their attention on them and more a more they felt those thoughts not to be theirs, but the voice of Sauron saying the ring-verse.

Not only that. Maybe Sauron counted on the elves thinking those thoughts to be their own thoughts because he had been there during the 'design' phase and the elves had listened to him. This is what Sauron's master had done once with some of the Noldor's minds:

Ever Melkor found some ears that would heed him, and some tongues that would enlarge what they had heard; and his lies passed from friend to friend, as secrets of which the knowledge proves the teller wise. Bitterly did the Noldor atone for the folly of their open ears in the days that followed after.

When he saw that many leaned towards him, Melkor would often walk among them, and amid his fair words others were woven, so subtly that many who heard them believed in recollection that they arose from their own thought.

Tolkien, letter to Milton Waldman, 1951:

But many of the Elves listened to Sauron. He was still fair in that early time, and his motives and those of the Elves seemed to go partly together: the healing of the desolate lands

They took off the three rings immediately. Ultimately, I think Sauron assumed his own power-based attempt would go unnoticed because of the elven-rings being rings of power too. But they were not really. They were powerful rings with a purpose. Power was the servant, and not the lord, of that Purpose.

If not, then maybe they had a function; they were a part of the ring 'technology'. What do you think?

It's easier to say 'no' to that than it is to prove it.

Without Sauron the rings of power wouldn't have been made. It was his 'technology'.

And Tolkien says Sauron and the elves motives coincided in part: healing Middle-Earth. But Sauron also wanted to dominate the elves.

The Three were not weapons and they had to do with 'healing', and therefore, in part, with Sauron's initial and not wholly evil purposes. The One Ring was made to rule the others: and that was Sauron's deepest, tyrannical, hidden motive.

His idea was, it seems, to 'subcontract' the healing of Middle-Earth to the elves while at the same time ruling their minds and wills without them noticing - or without them noticing until it was too late.

So maybe Sauron counted on his technology, when developed by the elves themselves, would in time create the Three Rings. Then he would make the One and become the ruler of the Three.

The timeline seems to fit. The Three were completed in 1590, and the One just 10 years later. Why not forging the One in 1570 or 1580? Because the Three had to be forged first. So Sauron knew the Three had been forged and then he made his Ring.

And then, when he sprung his trap, the elves noticed him, so he was doomed by the very act of creating the Ring. (He had reckoned without the subtle perceptions of the elves, according to Tolkien)

Sith sorcery, in other words. Not Palpatine. Another sith faction. Let's call them Dyad Sith.

As we see in the Kylo comic, little Ben had already The Shadow inside on him, as Ren calls it, and the voice of Snoke (of Palpatine) was in his head.

He was 11 at the time. That same year Rey was born.

The dyad was createe through balance. Consider little Ben's little darkness and these lines from TLJ:

-"Death and decay that feeds new life. [...]Balance".

-Darkness rises and light to meet it.

So the sith 'bridged' that little darkness ('decay') with a womb in order to create a little life: Rey. The dyad was also created, but it remained dormant until TFA, when Rey's powers woke up.

Rey had no biological father, which fits with:

-Kylo: Han solo. You feel like he's the father you never had. [Not 'never knew'. And 'feel': Luke 'felt' Vader to be his father even before knowing it to be true]

-Anakin: bring back the balance Rey, as I did.

If Rey had a father, it was the sith, or a male sith sorcerer. Not a biological father.

The mother was then 'raped' by the sith. Mothers are pretty important in SW, and in this theory maybe Rey's mother 'died' in the sense Anakin died when he became Vader and then she, an agent of evil, failed and walked away and went into hiding, like Luke, and that's why she's not in the films...or maybe she is somehow. I'll write a post about, or around, this idea.

In any case, and according to this post, Rey Palpatine was a lie. Palpatine lied to Kylo and to Rey. And Luke and those ghosts followed Palpatine's lie because that lie was good jedi training (confronting fear) for both Leia and Rey. Blood wasn't the be all and end all anyway, as Luke sats to Rey, and Palps didn't give a shit about family.

Her not being Palpatine's grandchild. Palpatine lying to Kylo and to her.

If we assume it to be a lie, we would have the same film we have now, because every character behaved as if it was true.

In that case, the parents we see in TROS were \*not\* her biological parents. They were more like what the Organas had been to Leia.

And this would fit with Palpatine's son not being FS. Kylo equated him with Leia while comparing his own lineage to Rey's. But Leia was FS. Did Kylo know Dathan was not FS? Did Palpatine tell him that?

Why telling us Dathan was not FS after the film's release? Many assumed Dathan to have been FS, just like Leia in Kylo's case. Why clarifying that? It does sounds like 'there's more to this'.

Also, what about Anakin saying to her 'bring back the balance as I did'? This sounds like Chosen One. Like fatherlessness.

It seems as if Palpatine had told Kylo about Rey Palpatine so Kylo would try to convince her to join him based on their common bloodline-related dark side powers, and knowing that Rey would refuse, and knowing there would be a duel and Kylo would betray himself in anger and kill Rey. It almost happened, but Leia intervened. Palpatine, to Gen.Pryde: "the princess of Alderaan has disrupted my plan".

Palpatine feared Rey (maybe he had foreseen his own death, maybe he remembered his own death in ROTJ), and didn't want to face her. He wanted Kylo to kill her. He didn't fear Kylo, and maybe the part of his plan we never got to see involved making Kylo angry getting killed by him and then possessing his body.

ALONSO

Therefore my son i' the ooze is bedded, and

I'll seek him deeper than e'er plummet sounded

And with him there lie mudded.

PROSPERO

I'll break my staff,

Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,

And deeper than did ever plummet sound

I'll drown my book.

Sons. My son/my book. A literal son and a book like a son.

Now 'fathoms'. The word only appears twice in The Tempest. A literal father and...a staff, maybe a phallic symbol. The literal father suffers a sea-cange. But the staff is buried in the earth, just like literal humans are.

PROSPERO

I'll break my staff,

Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,

And deeper than did ever plummet sound

I'll drown my book.

ARIEL sings

Full fathom five thy father lies;

Of his bones are coral made;

Those are pearls that were his eyes:

Nothing of him that doth fade

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.

Thoughts? These parallels/'rhymes' don't seem to be coincidental.

Meaning: Was that the case or did he make it while keeping that Eye of his on how the Three worked and/or were being used by the elves?

The second possibility would imply Sauron adding new knowledge to the forging of his ring while forging it.

The same would apply to the Three. Their making took 90 years. Do you think the end product was the result of a fixed 90 year old plan being enacted or rather the result of the plan plus further developments during those 90 years?

Seems as if Tolkien had some mythological idea in mind when he described Khamul as a) being the most ring-sensitive of the 9 save the Witch-King and b) having his power the most diminished/unconfounded by the sunlight among the Nazgul.

Because in the texts we have Khamul and the Witch-King seem to be oddly paired.

The Witch-King had been, in all probability, been a numenorean. One from Westernesse. A man close to the West. By contrast, we have Khamul the Easterling.

So we have West-East. The Witch-King's power was relatively (compared to the other Nazgul: and relative to Khamul most of all) undiminished/unconfounded by sunlight.

What would be the mythological idea? How and why would Khamul's particular sensitivity and weakness relate to each other, and those two the East-West idea?

The sun -the sunlight- rises in the East. It's born there. So was Khamûl. So maybe the sunlight stroke his physical being more deeply -through the thraldom of the ring, and that's why he senses it so keenly- than it did others.

But why would The Witch-King sense the ring even more strongly? Maybe because he didn't belong to the race of the Sun as completly as the other Ringwraiths - less so than any of the others.

Was or had he been a member of the house of Elros? That would have meant a descendant of Melian. A Maia. Just like Sauron.

PROSPERO

This blue-eyed hag was hither brought with child

And here was left by the sailors. Thou, my slave,

As thou report'st thyself, wast then her servant;

And, for thou wast a spirit too delicate

To act her earthy and abhorr'd commands,

Refusing her grand hests, she did confine thee,

By help of her more potent ministers

And in her most unmitigable rage,

Into a cloven pine[...]

What commands? 'Earthy' must mean 'human': and Caliban's father had not been human. So, was it sex? 'Act', says Prospero.

And if it was not sex, then what?

Sycorax confined Ariel 12 years before Prospero arrived, and that's when Sycorax had arrived herself. She was pregnant with Caliban.

So if it wasn't sex maybe her earthy and abhorred commands had to do with her pregnancy. Did she want Ariel to take her child and give her a fairy child in exchange?

Or, did she want an abortion? In RJ Mercutio calls Queen Mab 'midwife': in Shakespeare's time, a wise/cunning woman figure who could provide an abortion. Sycorax is no fairy, but as the son of a devil, Caliban seems to inhabit 'naturally' the human and non-human world. That of Sycorax and that of Ariel.

That's necromancy, right? The idea is not in the original rhyme; it came from Tolkien. Just as the mythological dimension of the Sun and Moon. Maybe the Sauron/Prince Of Cats/Necromancer continuum was on his mind, just as it seems to be the case with 'his pupil, yellow as a cat's' in LOTR (Mirror of Galadriel chapter).

(In musical terms, the devil and the violin have been associated culturally, forming a trope, since the 16th century. The original cat nursery rhyme seems to date back to that period, which is also the period of protestantism and of Faust, of anti-catholicism. Which may be relevant here. In Marlowe's Faustus, necromancy is a satanic mockery of the catholic mass)

And when I say 'retired' I mean retired from Authorship.

He still collaborated -Kinsmen, Henry VIII- before retiring for good. But the last play written solely by him seems to have been The Tempest. And if that's the case, and looking at the play, it might gave been a conscious and deliberate choice on his part.

Was he tired, was he directionless, was he too prosperous to care as he used to?

The song dates back to 1926. We only hear the first line in the film but here are the complete lyrics:

"Down on the East side, on the East side/that's my home, sweet home./Some people think it's the home of black eyes./Just because guys don't wear collars and ties./ That's all the bunk, they just say that in fun./ Real East side folks is the best what come./ They'd give you their shoit only they ain't got none./Down on Thoity Thoid and Thoid./   

Folks buy pianos for one dollar down/Then wait with sticks For the guy to come 'round/Gawd help collectors when they come to call/Three flights of stairs is a helluva fall/Speshly with hard marble floors in the hall/Down on Thoity Thoid and Thoid.

Down on the east side of toidy toidy and toid/That's my home sweet home, sweet home./When a guy dies it's the best time of all,/ We go on out and we hire a hall./ We gets a bathtub and fills it with gin,/Pick up the corpse and we throw the stiff in./Dead or alive you should see that guy grin,/ Down on toidy toid and toid." 

That last stanza is creepy.

In the book father Dyer seems to be gay, and that's maybe the case in the film too.

I say this because if that is the case...well, if you're gay and a catholic priest you will have to live in the closet, and your head will be filled with demons somehow. And you maybe will drown yourself in alcohol. Or they will. Again:

When a guy dies it's the best time of all,/ We go on out and we hire a hall./ We gets a bathtub and fills it with gin,/Pick up the corpse and we throw the stiff in./ Dead or alive you should see that guy grin,/ Down on toidy toid and toid." 

Those shirtless 'we' ("they'd give you their shoit only they ain't got none") makes one think about possessed Regan saying 'us'.

Caliban is 24 in the play, and we know she was dead by the time Prospero and Miranda arrived. Caliban was 12 back then.

But at some point before that Sycorax died.

PROSPERO

This blue-eyed hag was hither brought with child

And here was left by the sailors. Thou, my slave,

As thou report'st thyself, wast then her servant;

And, for thou wast a spirit too delicate

To act her earthy and abhorr'd commands,

Refusing her grand hests, she did confine thee,

By help of her more potent ministers

And in her most unmitigable rage,

Into a cloven pine; within which rift

Imprison'd thou didst painfully remain

A dozen years; within which space she died

And left thee there.

Now Caliban remembers a number of things about her: her, to begin with; and Setebos, the mother's god.

I guess Sycorax was alive when Caliban was 3, for example, and probably later.

What about the other mother, Miranda's? A piece of virtue, we're told.

But Miranda doesn't remember her...

PROSPERO

Canst thou remember

A time before we came unto this cell?

I do not think thou canst, for then thou wast not

Out three years old.

MIRANDA

Certainly, sir, I can.

PROSPERO

By what? by any other house or person?

Of any thing the image tell me that

Hath kept with thy remembrance.

MIRANDA

'Tis far off

And rather like a dream than an assurance

That my remembrance warrants. Had I not

Four or five women once that tended me?

PROSPERO

Thou hadst, and more, Miranda. But how is it

That this lives in thy mind? What seest thou else

In the dark backward and abysm of time?

...and yet Miranda has memories of herself being 2/3!

Did the mom die giving birth? Maybe this is key, in a fairy tale sort of way.

Miranda is 15. Caliban 24. 24-15=9.

So maybe Sycorax and Miranda's mother died at the same time, when Caliban was 9.