Rebel Acacia

Lo so, siete a bocca aperta. L’opera è di Darian Rodriguez Mederos, classe 1992, artista cubano di cui sentiremo parlare ancora.

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This was so obvious when I realized it, but I think most people miss it, because we’re so desensitized by D&D-style magic with immediate, visibly, flashy effects, rather than more subtle and invisible forces of magic. When Gollum attacks Frodo on the slopes of Mount Doom, Frodo has the chance to kill him, but he doesn’t. Instead, he says:

Frodo: Go! And if you ever lay hands on me again, you yourself shall be cast into the Fire!

Frodo’s not just talking shit here. He is literally, magically laying a curse. He’s holding the One Ring in his hands as he says it; even Sam, with no magic powers of his own, can sense that some powerful mojo is being laid down. Frodo put a curse on Gollum: if you try to take the Ring again, you’ll be cast into the Fire.

All the other people in the franchise who were offered the Ring declined to take it because they were wise enough to know that if they used its power – and the pressure to do so would be too great – they would be subject to its corruption.

Could he have been drawing on the Ring’s power at this point in the story? At this point in the story we’re relying on Sam’s narration, and Sam doesn’t know what’s going on in Frodo’s head, so it’s hard to say for sure. Having used it once, after spending so long holding out against it, was that the breach in the dam?

Which means that the moment that Frodo succumbs to temptation is not the moment at the volcano – it was already too late by then. The moment he is taken by temptation was when he used the power of the Ring to repel Gollum.

‘I would ask one thing before we go,’ said Frodo, ‘a thing which I often meant to ask Gandalf in Rivendell. I am permitted to wear the One Ring: why cannot I see all the others and know the thoughts of those that wear them?’

‘You have not tried,’ [Galadriel] said. ‘Only thrice have you set the Ring upon your finger since you knew what you possessed. Do not try! It would destroy you. Did not Gandalf tell you that the rings give power according to the measure of each possessor? Before you could use that power you would need to become stronger, and to train your will to the domination of others.’

In other words:

Frodo asks Galadriel, herself carrying a Ring of Power, “Could I, hypothetically, use the power of the One Ring to do something magical aside from turning invisible?” and Galadriel replies, “Yes, hypothetically, you totally could, assuming the magic you want to do involves laying compulsions on others, but I strongly recommend against it, because it would fuck up your brain.”

This was in the first book. At the end of the third book Frodo uses the Ring to fuck Gollum up, forcing him to throw himself into lava if he disobeys Frodo’s commands.

‘Down, down!’ [Frodo] gasped, clutching his hand to his breast, so that beneath the cover of his leather shirt he clasped the Ring. ‘Down, you creeping thing, and out of my path! Your time is at an end. You cannot slay me or betray me now.’

Then suddenly, Sam saw these two rivals with other vision. A crouching shape, scarcely more than the shadow of a living thing, a creature now wholly ruined and defeated, yet filled with a hideous lust and rage; and before it stood stern, untouchable now by pity, a figure robed in white, but at its breast it held a wheel of fire. Out of the fire there spoke a commanding voice.

‘Begone, and trouble me no more! If you touch me ever again, you shall be cast yourself into the Fire of Doom.’

Then the vision passed and Sam saw Frodo standing, hand on breast, his breath coming in great gasps, and Gollum at his feet, resting on his knees with his wide-splayed hands upon the ground.

…

Frodo is sparing Gollum’s life here, and shaping that into his curse. He is only cursing Gollum—can only curse Gollum—as an effect of this mercy; if Gollum were dead, he could not be cursed by Frodo or the Ring; his survival makes the curse possible and serves as payment for the curse: they are in effect making a bargain here, wherein Golllum’s life and his sentence of dying in the Fires of Doom should he take the Ring again are as one, a package deal, which Gollum “accepts” by retreating with his life.

Then, once Frodo comes to Mount Doom, he cannot cast the ring into the fires; the Ring has him in thrall, since he has used it. Now into the picture again comes Gollum, whose greed for the Ring has surpassed his love of his own life—even having been cursed with death should he touch it again, he craves it and demands it for himself, taking it from Frodo by force.

Thus we see the Ring’s power divided against itself—it has defeated both Frodo and Gollum, and its defeat of Gollum inspires Gollum to fight Frodo for it, invoking the curse. And thus Sauron, who has it, now, by virtue of both its erstwhile Bearers falling under its (and therefore its Lord’s) sway, is cheated out of it by the effects of Frodo’s act of mercy.

Frodo spared Gollum, and used the Ring’s power to set a curse, and when Frodo faltered, it was Gollum whom he spared who took the Ring from him and invoked that curse, falling into the Fires of Doom and, due to the same greed that defeated Frodo, taking the Ring with him.

If there had been no sparing Gollum, there would have been no curse, and Frodo would have had the task Isildur failed at—destroying the (beautiful, useful, lovely ring)—set before him alone, and he may have succeeded, or he may have failed, or he may have tarried too long in the struggle for Sauron’s destruction to come in a timely fashion, or the resolution and the Ring’s destruction may have hurt him far beyond the loss of a finger.

Instead, there was Gollum, in thrall to Sauron yet doomed by Frodo, to take from Frodo both the Ring and the burden of destroying it. Frodo, in his mercy-tinged use of the Ring, effectively shifted the impetus behind the Ring’s destruction from himself to the doom laid on Gollum—and Sauron’s hold over Gollum made it a near certainty that the doom would come to pass: Gollum would die, and not surrender the Ring, and thus the Ring would fall with him into the fires of Mount Doom.

The warrior-poet-king Cú Chulainn was, eventually, brought down because he was bound by a geas. His geas was to never eat the flesh of a dog (I believe by Culann, but I’m not sure on that). Well, he got served some dog stew. He couldn’t eat it, because it was dog. But he couldn’t not eat it, because that would be extremely rude, according to cultural custom at the time - a custom so strong, it might as well have been a geas on its own. Either way, he was breaking a geas’ rules, and this magically weakens him before an upcoming battle. He - and his charioteer and horse - are slain