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I am no Tolkien scholar, but my layman's take is that Sauron failed to see the ring because he was so blinded by the lust for power that could only conceive of

• bigtex88 5y ago
  This is pretty much correct. Sauron kept most of his gaze upon Aragorn and Gandalf and their movements, as he would have suspected one of the two of them would most likely be carrying the ring. As you said, Sauron expected his enemies to act as he acts, and he would never have thought to give the ring to a creature as lowly as a Hobbit.
  • pdonis 5y ago
    > he would never have thought to give the ring to a creature as lowly as a Hobbit. Actually, it is explicitly said (by Gandalf, in Book III, Chapter 5) that Sauron knows the Ring was borne by a hobbit. What Sauron is not clear about is why a hobbit has it or what the Fellowship's destination is. According to Gandalf, he assumes they are going to Minas Tirith, and that once there some more powerful person will take the Ring and use it. In other words, he doesn't expect a hobbit to keep the Ring, much less to be taking it to Mount Doom to be destroyed.
    • bigtex88 5y ago
      Interesting, I didn't remember that part!
• telchar 5y ago
  In AI terms, you could think of Frodo as an adversarial example, specifically chosen to exploit a known bias in the watcher’s model.