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In order to counter the notion that The Lord of the Rings was inspired from World War II, Tolkien himself provided a "what if" scenario in the Foreword to The Fellowship of the Ring that shows what would happen should the Ring be used against Sauron. Tolkien explained that if he had WWII in mind, then the Free peoples would enslave Sauron with the power of the Ring against him, and occupy Mordor. Saruman (whose treachery would remain secret) would then use the Ring-lore found in Mordor to create a Great Ring of his own with which to challenge the self-styled Ruler of Middle-earth.[18]
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Tolkien scholar John D. Rateliff has at length discussed five different rings of invisibility which occur in works that predate Tolkien's:
Plato's Ring of Gyges (ca. 390 BC),
the magic ring in Chrétien de Troyes' Yvain, the Knight of the Lion (ca. 1177);
Angelica's ring, of French Renaissance literature;
the Fairy's ring appearing in the tale "The Enchanted Ring" (by François Fénelon) in Andrew Lang's The Green Fairy Book (a collection of fairy-tales referred to by Tolkien in his Andrew Lang lecture);[note 1]
the witch-maiden's ring in an Estonian folktale (ca. 1866) from the Kalevipoeg, translated as "The Dragon of the North" in The Yellow Fairy Book (1894).
Rateliff's proposes that the ring most likely to have provided an inspiration for Tolkien is a version of Chrétien's tale, namely Owein's ring in the Welsh Owain, or the Lady of the Fountain. He also regards the rings in Fénelon's and Plato's stories as possible influences, but concludes that: "the primary influence on Frodo's ring is in fact The Hobbit itself: here, as so often, Tolkien is his own main source".[15]
It has also been suggested that the One Ring may have been inspired by the Ring of Silvianus and its inscribed curse. The hypothesis is based on Tolkien gaining knowledge about the Ring of Silvianus through the archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler, for whom Tolkien wrote the text "The Name 'Nodens'".[16] However, Tolkien scholars Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull have pointed out that there is no "evidence, or good reason to believe, that Tolkien was inspired by the Roman ring".[17]
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