She had received anonymous e-mails from a stalker. The previous year Magnus had been involved in the investigation of the rape and murder of a woman in the middle-class suburb of Brookline. There was a much greater chance that it would tip Isildur off that the police were on to him, and he would go quiet. There was a small chance that sending him an e-mail asking him to help the Reykjavik police with a murder inquiry would elicit a response. The question was, how could Magnus find out who he was? Isildur’s address indicated an Internet Service Provider from the US. Fortunately the web page included a link to the e-mail address of the people posting the commentaries. Magnus strongly suspected that this was the same Isildur who was Steve Jubb’s partner: both of them shared an interest in the Volsung Saga. This seemed to unite Minshall and Isildur in defence of their hero, and the subject was laid to rest there.
#WHAT FINGER TO WHERE THE LORD OF THE RINGS RING SERIES#
There followed a series of ever more heated postings back and forth, until a third commentator appeared calling Tolkien a liar and a plagiarist. Tolkien and Richard Wagner had read the Saga of the Volsungs, which explained the similarity between the two stories. Isildur seemed to believe that both J.R.R. During the rest of the saga the ring passes from person to person, creating mayhem wherever it goes. Andvari laid a curse on the ring and disappeared into a rock. Andvari tried to keep back a magic ring, but Loki spotted it, and threatened to send the dwarf to Hel, who was Loki’s daughter, the goddess of death, unless he gave the ring to Loki. Loki caught him, and stole some gold from him. He claimed that Tolkien had read the Volsung Saga when he was still a schoolboy and that it had inspired him for the rest of his life.īoth these sources describe how three gods, Odin, Hoenir and the trickster god Loki, were travelling when they came upon a waterfall where a dwarf named Andvari was fishing in the shape of a pike. Then Isildur launched on a long discourse quoting from the Saga of the Volsungs and the Prose Edda, both written in Iceland in the thirteenth century. He quoted Tolkien himself who denied that there was a connection, claiming that ‘both rings are round, and there the resemblance ceases’. This idea seriously upset the present-day Isildur. Minshall argued that the powers of the ring showed that Tolkien had been inspired by Wagner’s Ring Cycle of operas, in which the gods compete to take control of the Ring and dominate the world. This becomes the quest for Bilbo’s nephew, a hobbit named Frodo. The only way the Ring can be destroyed is if it is taken to Mount Doom, a volcano in the centre of Mordor, Sauron’s own country, and thrown into the ‘Crack of Doom’. When he finds it he will gain total domination of Middle Earth.
But most importantly, Sauron, the Dark Lord, is searching for the ring. Over time, the ring exerts a power over its keeper, causing him to lie, cheat or even kill to maintain possession of it. If the holder wears the ring, he becomes invisible to normal mortals. The keeper of the ring does not grow old, but eventually he becomes weary and fades away. Over time Smeagol was consumed by it, becoming a slithering, obsessive creature called Gollum, until eventually, centuries later, the ring was taken from him by Bilbo Baggins, the hero of Tolkien’s first book, The Hobbit. Smeagol was overwhelmed with desire for the beautiful glittering ring, and when his friend refused to give it to him, he strangled him and put the ring on his own finger. The ring lay at the bottom of the river for centuries until it was discovered by a hobbit-like creature named Deagol who was fishing there with his friend Smeagol. Soon afterwards the orcs caught him and he was shot through with arrows. As Isildur tried to escape he jumped into a river, where the ring slipped off his finger and was lost. But afterwards, on his march home, the victorious Isildur and his men were waylaid by orcs. The ring was cut off the Dark Lord’s hand by a man named Isildur. Long before the events of the book took place a desperate battle was fought between the evil Sauron and an alliance of men and elves a battle which was won by the alliance. There are a number of rings of power in Tolkien’s book, all made by elves, except for the greatest of them, the One Ring to rule them all, which was made by Sauron, the Dark Lord. It consisted of several paragraphs commenting on a long academic article by someone called John Minshall on the nature of the power of the One Ring in The Lord of the Rings. After two hours he found a posting from a man named Isildur.