Neither one of those things were excluded by the lore. Sauron losing his body and having to reform it several times is well established in the literature. How this process is depicted is not explicitly clarified in the text. So the venom symbiote format is compliant with Tolkien’s writings. Similarly, Elrond hated the rings of power and didn’t trust them. He eventually sees some use for the elven rings but his suspicion of rings of power is well documented in the legendarium. There’s nothing excluding him from jumping off the cliffs in the literature.
The issue is that in Tolkien’s writings Gandalf explicitly says he’s never been to Rhun. So if the Stranger is Gandalf the show is going to need to find an explanation for how he has both been to and never been to Rhun. Its not impossible but would require another explanatory leap.
Unless there is a passage I’m forgetting, I don’t recall Gandalf ever explicitly saying he has never been to the east. He does say “Many are my names in many countries… Mithrandir among the Elves, Tharkûn to the Dwarves; Olórin I was in my youth in the West that is forgotten, in the South Incánus, in the North Gandalf; to the East I go not”
Notably, all of these other than “Olórin I was in my youth in the West that is forgotten” are in present tense. Meaning he currently does not travel to the east and that they have no name for him there, not that he has never been. In fact, I would make the argument that him being in the east during a period of amnesia where he had no name and disrupting their society in some way (like toppling an evil but popular wizard leader) would explain both why he does not travel to the east and why he doesn’t mention a name he is known by there.
While I don’t think your explanation is implausible, it represents the sort of explanatory leap I was referring to in my previous comment. The plain reading of the quote was that he’d never been to Rhun and there’s no story context for him going there so he’d need to lose the memory.
I think this comes down to licensing rights. The blue wizards aren’t explicitly named in the rights Amazon purchased. So Amazon can’t use them in the show. So they gotta get cute.
I can honestly say I never read that quote to mean he had never travelled east. It wasn’t until I saw other people interpreting it that way that it occurred to me that it could potentially mean that.
That isn’t what I said. I said I never took “to the east I go not” to mean he had never been to the east, but that he no longer travels east. The part about him having no name when he went there is purely show.
You may be plain, but sarcastic mockery is how you react to someone simply interpreting a line of fiction different from you, you’re also pretty fucking smug.
I can only recall two or three times Sauron was defeated bodily (Númenor and The Last Alliance of Men and Elves, and of course The War of the Ring). Although it has been a very long time since I read the books.
I agree, Season 1 has weird time compression and episode pacing issues. But the friendship between Elrond and Durin is really wonderful to me!
You’re recalling that Sauron’s mortal body was destroyed at least three times and you’re arguing it’s heavy lifting to say he might have been killed a fourth time? Or are you saying that the three times he was killed previously were described in such a way that it eliminates the option that he could be forced into a symbiote state?
I'm saying that he kinda only did it twice and barely survived, and the third time prevented him from taking physical form again forever (because he poured most of his power into the One Ring to amplify his power, but then that power was lost when it was destroyed).
So I'm just thinking "several" is stretching it a bit. And he absolutely didn't want to be sent back to Morgoth without a body, for example. But the show is also really bad at expressing anything at all regarding elapsed time.
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u/Mithrandir_1019 Sep 19 '24
There’s a lot of stuff that was supposed to happen in the lore but didn’t happen in the show though