The One Ring

The Ring was Sauron's own work, wrought in secret in the fires of Orodruin in Mordor while the smiths of Eregion were still labouring at the other Rings of Power. Its purpose, as Gandalf sets it out in his long explanation at Bag End, was to govern the rest; and to give it that mastery Sauron let pass into it a great part of the strength that had been his by nature, so that the fate of the thing and the fate of its maker were thereafter bound together. The Tale of Years assigns the deed to the middle years of the Second Age, some sixteen centuries in. Outwardly it was the plainest of things — a smooth band of gold, without gem or graving to the eye — and that plainness was itself a kind of concealment.

The fuller account of the making belongs to the posthumously edited matter. There Sauron comes to Eregion in fair seeming and under an assumed name, offering counsel and craft to the Elven-smiths, who took him for a friend of their labour; Celebrimbor and his people learned much from him, though the greatest of their own rings were made without his hand upon them. The One was the fruit of that long deception, and the deception failed at the moment of its success: when Sauron first set the Ring upon his finger the keepers of the others perceived him and understood what had been done, and drew their rings off. Tolkien himself, writing to a publisher about the shape of the whole legendarium, described the Rings as instruments of a will to dominate other wills, and the One as the master of that design.

Its names follow its offices and its history rather than any single naming. It is most often simply the One, or the Ruling Ring, or the Great Ring — terms of function, marking it off from the Nine, the Seven and the Three. Among the Wise it could also be spoken of as the Master-ring. In Gondor it was remembered by the harm it worked, and the riddling verse that sent Boromir north to Rivendell named it as Isildur's Bane, a title that records a disaster rather than describes an object. Gollum's word for it was neither title nor description but possession, and Bilbo in his turn came to use the same endearment. The Ring bore writing after all: fine lettering in Elvish characters that appeared only in heat, but the words were of the Black Speech of Mordor, and Gandalf, who had seen the like before, could give their sense at the Council of Elrond.

What the Ring did to a mortal who put it on is set out most fully by Gandalf at Bag End and borne out by what happens to Frodo on the road. The wearer passed out of sight of ordinary eyes, but this was a by-product rather than the thing itself: he was drawn into another mode of seeing, in which the world grew grey and shapeless while certain figures — the Ringwraiths above all — stood out clear and terrible. The exchange ran both ways, for in that condition the wearer was far more open to the notice of the Enemy and his servants, so that each use of the Ring drew the danger nearer; the wounding beneath Weathertop followed directly on Frodo's putting it on. It also worked on the bearer over time, stretching a mortal life without enlarging it, so that the years passed without death and without growth, and the keeper came at length to a thin and weary continuance. In Mordor Frodo felt it as a physical burden that grew heavier the closer he came to its birthplace.

The text is equally careful about what the Ring did not do. Its gifts were measured by the stature of whoever held it: in hobbit hands it yielded little beyond concealment, and to turn it to mastery a bearer would have needed strength and training of a wholly different order — which is why the Wise feared its use by the great rather than by the small. It was not simply an instrument to be picked up and directed, having a disposition of its own that inclined it to slip from a finger, to be mislaid, or to be surrendered at the worst moment, always tending back towards its maker. Nor was its hold universal: in the house by the Withywindle Tom Bombadil handled it, wore it without vanishing, and saw Frodo plainly when Frodo wore it in turn — an exception the narrative records without explaining. Against destruction it was proof by any ordinary means; the fire of a hearth left it unheated and unmarked, no smith's craft could touch it, and the Council concluded that not even the fire of the greatest dragons of the elder days would have served.

The later published matter states the design in flatter terms. While Sauron had the Ring on his hand he could apprehend what was done by means of the lesser rings and bend the minds of those who wore them, which is why the keepers of the Three never used theirs in his presence or while he held it. Because so much of his own power had gone into the making, his continued existence in strength was tied to the thing's continued existence, and its unmaking would take his dominion with it. Tolkien, writing in his own person about the tale, treated this as the essential point of the Rings altogether: they were engines for the domination of other wills, and the One was the master of that whole scheme rather than a merely potent ornament.

For the greater part of the Second Age the Ring remained with its maker, and the history of the one is largely the history of the other: the war that broke Eregion, the long extension of Sauron's dominion eastward and southward, and the sea-borne assault of Númenor that ended in his own captivity and the drowning of that land. It came out of his keeping only at the very end of the age. In the last battle of the Last Alliance of Elves and Men, fought before the gates of his tower in the year 3441 of the Second Age, Sauron was overthrown in person, and Isildur son of Elendil struck the Ring from his hand, using what was left of the hilt of Narsil, the sword his father had carried. Elrond and Círdan, who stood by, counselled that it be carried at once to the fire in which it had been made and unmade there, while the way was open and the will to do it still fresh; Isildur would not, and kept it, reckoning it a payment owed him for the deaths of his father and his brother in that same war. With the Ring taken but not destroyed, Sauron's spirit endured, reduced and formless, and the Third Age began under that unclosed account.

Isildur held it barely two years. In the second year of the Third Age he rode north from Gondor towards Imladris with three of his sons and a small guard, and was ambushed by Orcs at the Gladden Fields, where the river of that name joins Anduin. He escaped the slaughter by putting the Ring on and taking to the water, but it slipped from his finger as he swam and left him visible to his hunters, who shot him in the shallows. The Ring went down into the riverbed, and there it stayed for some two and a half thousand years, while the kingdom Isildur had left behind forgot what had been lost and remembered only that a bane had gone with him. Before he rode, however, he had written an account of the thing and of the writing he had seen upon it, and that scroll survived unread in the archives of Minas Tirith until Gandalf sought it out in the year 3018.

The later editorial matter treats the ambush at length and adds what the earlier telling passes over: the size and composition of Isildur's company, the deliberate character of the attack, and the decision to send his esquire away with the shards of Narsil before the end. It records also that the Ring's slipping was not accident but its own disposition working against a bearer whose usefulness to it had run out, and that Isildur understood at the last that it had betrayed him. The same body of writing sets the loss in its wider frame, noting that Sauron, for all the diminishing of his person, never ceased to seek the thing while it lay hidden, since so much of him remained in it that he could not be finished while it survived.

It surfaced again about the year 2463, when a small river-dwelling folk of hobbit kind lived near the Gladden Fields. One of them drew it from the bottom while fishing; his kinsman Sméagol demanded it, was refused, and took it by murder. What followed was a long shrinking: he was driven out by his own people, went under the Misty Mountains, and there kept the Ring for close on five centuries, becoming the creature Gollum. In the year 2941 the Ring left him, as it had left Isildur, and was picked up in the dark of those tunnels by Bilbo Baggins, who did not know what he had and won his way out past its owner by a wager of riddles. Bilbo carried it home to the Shire and kept it for sixty years, and in 3001, at his farewell feast, he left it behind for Frodo — the first holder to give it up alive, though he did so only under Gandalf's steady pressure and with great reluctance at the door.

Frodo held it for seventeen quiet years before Gandalf returned with proof of what it was, and left Bag End in September 3018. The Council at Rivendell on the twenty-fifth of October resolved that it must go to Mordor, and the Company set out at the year's end; at Amon Hen in February 3019 the Fellowship broke, and Frodo went east with Samwise Gamgee alone. For a few days in March, believing his master dead beneath the pass of Cirith Ungol, Sam carried it himself, and gave it back when he found Frodo living — the only bearer to surrender it unasked. On the twenty-fifth of March the two reached the chamber within Orodruin where it had been made, and there Frodo's will failed: he claimed the Ring for his own and put it on. Gollum, who had followed them the whole way, fell upon him and bit the Ring from his hand, and in his triumph went over the edge into the fire. The Ring was unmade, the tower and the armies of Mordor fell with it, and Sauron's power passed out of the world for good.

Structurally the Ring gives the book its shape by reversing the ordinary direction of a quest. The errand is not to win a treasure but to be rid of one, and the object that would elsewhere be the prize is carried the whole way as a liability, growing more dangerous to its bearer the nearer he comes to the goal. Because it cannot be used without serving its maker, every shorter or bolder road is closed off in debate at Rivendell in turn — arming a champion with it, hiding it, sending it over the Sea — until only the least promising course remains, and the plot is committed to two hobbits walking. The Ring also holds the scale of the narrative together: through it the domestic affairs of a village become continuous with wars fought an age before, and widely separated strands of action all bear upon one small burden moving east. Its unmaking is announced in advance as a loss as well as a victory, since the Three drew their virtue from it and must fail with it, so the reader is told the price of success before the attempt begins.

In its handling of persons the Ring works chiefly as a test, and the book measures characters by their answer to it rather than by their deeds in battle. Gandalf will not so much as take it into his keeping, judging that he would begin from pity and end in mastery; Galadriel, offered it outright by its bearer, weighs what she might become and lets the offer pass. Boromir's patient argument for using it against the Enemy, and the grasp that follows, are the clearest working of the pattern, while Faramir, given the same knowledge in the same circumstances, declines to have anything to do with it. Even Samwise, wearing it within Mordor, is shown a brief vision of himself as lord of a great garden and finds the proportions of the thing absurd. The temptation is scaled to the capacity of the one tempted, which is the reason the Wise entrust it to bearers with least appetite for rule.

Tolkien's later correspondence with readers who thought the ending a failure of nerve states the Ring's narrative function directly. At the last chamber, he argued, no will of any incarnate creature could have let the thing go, so what happens there is not a fault to be charged against the bearer but the point at which a strength greater than any bearer's asserts itself; the task had already been carried further than endurance could reasonably reach. What completes the errand is the mercy shown long before to a creature everyone else would have killed, returning as the means of the end. On that reading the resolution rests on pity and on a working beyond the characters' reckoning rather than on the hero's strength — which is the opposite of what an object of such power would ordinarily be made to demonstrate.

When Tolkien began the sequel at the end of 1937 the ring was still what it had been in the earlier book: a serviceable magic trinket, useful for vanishing and little more, and the reason for a second journey had to be sought elsewhere — in a hobbit's restlessness, in the notion that the family money had run out, in a wish to see dragons again. The traveller himself was not Frodo but Bingo Bolger-Baggins, a name carried through a great deal of writing before it was given up, and the opening party was drafted several times over while the shape of the errand remained undecided. The decisive change came with the long conversation between the wizard and the hobbit that would become the chapter of the shadow of the past; here, in successive versions headed with a working title about ancient history, the ring was identified as the ruling ring of the Necromancer, and the whole tale was thereby fastened to the older legends of the Elder Days. Once that identification was made, matters that had been mere colour became consequences: the fading of mortals who used such rings, the impossibility of simply keeping the thing, and a destination in the fire where it had been made. Christopher Tolkien's commentary shows how much of the finished conception arrived in a single burst of thought, and how much of the earlier comedy had to be dismantled to accommodate it.

The new conception also left an inherited difficulty behind it. In the first edition of the earlier book Gollum had staked the ring itself upon the riddle-game and, on losing, behaved with a certain wretched courtesy, apologising when he could not pay and showing the way out — conduct impossible for a creature bound to such an object. Tolkien rewrote the passage in 1947 and the new version was printed in the second edition of 1951, and rather than suppress the discrepancy he turned it to account, making the first account the story Bilbo had told under the ring's influence and the second the truth got out of him afterwards. Early outlines for the ending were likewise unlike the finished chapter: in one of them Gollum, brought to some measure of repentance, was to destroy the ring deliberately by casting himself with it into the fire, an act of sacrifice quite different from the accident of triumph that the narrative eventually reached.

Because the Ring is an object and not a person, adaptations differ chiefly in how much presence they are willing to give it. The BBC Radio 4 dramatisation of 1981, in twenty-six half-hour parts, is the most complete of the older versions and generally the most faithful, and it necessarily conveys the Ring's working through narration and through what the bearers say of it; its one substantial loss to this entity is the excision of the Old Forest, which removes the single episode in which the Ring visibly fails to take hold of anyone. Ralph Bakshi's animated film of 1978 sets out the making and the loss of the Ring in an opening sequence, moving that history in front of the story instead of leaving it to the wizard's explanation partway through; since the film breaks off after Helm's Deep and the intended second part was never made, its Ring is never carried to Mordor at all. The Rankin/Bass television film of 1980 takes up the closing part of the story but was made by another studio and does not continue Bakshi's, so between the two the middle of the Ring's journey is simply absent. In the same studio's Hobbit of 1977 the ring is only the vanishing-device of the earlier novel, with nothing of its later significance attached.

Peter Jackson's trilogy of 2001–2003 goes furthest in the other direction, giving the Ring an audible voice — supplied by Alan Howard — so that its pull on a bearer is externalised rather than reported. Three departures bear directly on it: the seventeen years between Bilbo's farewell and Frodo's setting out are compressed to a short span; Faramir, who in the novel refuses the Ring almost as soon as he understands what it is, instead takes the hobbits and their burden towards Osgiliath before releasing them, which erases the contrast the book draws between him and his brother; and in the chamber within the mountain the Ring goes into the fire out of a struggle between Frodo and Gollum rather than through Gollum's own heedless triumph. The Hobbit films of 2012–2014 read the finding of the ring backwards from the later book, treating Bilbo's keeping of it as ominous from the first. A further film under the title The Hunt for Gollum has been announced with Andy Serkis directing, but nothing of its content is fixed.