The Corruption Process of the Ring

  The One Ring serves as a corrupting force throughout the entirety of The Lord of the Rings. What does this corrupting process look like for the ring bearer? What are the long-term effects of bearing the Ring? How does the Ring affect different people in different ways? The Ring wears down its bearer over time and uses traits already possessed by the bearer to corrupt them.

The Ring itself is inherently evil. Elrond says this himself, stating, “‘It belongs to Sauron and was made by him alone, and is altogether evil. Its strength, Boromir, is too great for anyone to wield at will, save only those who have already a great power of their own. But for them it holds an even deadlier peril. The very desire of it corrupts the heart’” (348). According to Elrond, since the Ring was forged by Sauron, it took on Sauron’s characteristics. When someone bears the Ring, they are taking on some of Sauron’s evil into their lives. This evil is powerful, and only the powerful can wield the Ring. However, the evil is still very much present and leads to corruption. Even though Sauron made the Ring, the Ring can act independently. Gandalf tells Frodo, “‘A Ring of Power looks after itself, Frodo. It may slip off treacherously, but its keeper never abandons it. . . . But as far as I know Bilbo alone in history has ever gone beyond playing, and really done it. He needed all my help, too’” (73). The Ring’s power and independent will is so strong that no one seems to fully let go of it, for even Bilbo only left it behind under particular circumstances. This shows how difficult it would be to destroy the Ring, since the Ring would not wish for itself to be destroyed. This essentially forces the corruption process on the ring bearer.

Books I and II of The Lord of the Rings give insight into how Bilbo was affected by the Ring. When Gandalf explains how Bilbo found the Ring and spared Gollum, he says, “‘Be sure that he took so little hurt from the evil, and escaped in the end, because he began his ownership of the Ring so. With pity’” (78). Bilbo’s pity reveals his character prior to being a ring bearer. Gandalf believes that because he started with good morals, this slowed some of the effects of the corruption of the Ring. This could also be why he was able to give it up at all, since some of the previous ring bearers killed the former bearers to take possession of it, but Bilbo began his ownership with the complete opposite action. This does not mean Bilbo was unaffected by the Ring, however, as Frodo observes, “To his distress and amazement he found that he was no longer looking at Bilbo; a shadow seemed to have fallen between them, and through it he found himself eyeing a little wrinkled creature with a hungry face and bony groping hands” (302). Bilbo still felt the effects of the Ring long after having given it to Frodo. The Ring is addictive, and this allows Frodo to later have a better understanding of Gollum.

        Gollum’s character was also taken into consideration when he gained ownership of the Ring. Gandalf recounts, “‘He was very pleased with his discovery and he concealed it; and he used it to find out secrets, and he put his knowledge to crooked and malicious uses. . . . The ring had given him power according to his stature’” (70). Gollum was not previously a powerful figure, but the Ring did take advantage of his characteristics to further corrupt him. The phrase “according to his stature” suggests that the Ring led Gollum to do evil in the simple ways that he could. However, Gollum was not fully consumed by evil. The Two Towers presents a fascinating moment in which Gollum has a brief moment of redemption before reverting back to his conniving ways: “For a fleeting moment, could one of the sleepers have seen him, they would have thought that they beheld an old weary hobbit, shrunken by the years that had carried him far beyond his time, beyond friends and kin, and the fields and streams of youth, an old starved pitiable thing” (935). This removed the evil from Gollum for a brief moment and revealed a tired, pitiable hobbit. The use of the word “hobbit” gives Gollum his personhood back and shows an opposite reaction to Bilbo. Bilbo had a fleeting moment of evil, whereas Gollum had a fleeting moment of good. The Ring’s hold is incredibly strong on a bearer even after it has been lost, but it is still possible for hints of morality.

        Frodo’s corruption by the Ring is gradual over the course of The Lord of the Rings. It starts innocently by thinking a lot about it or putting it on a couple times, but by the time he is about to reach Mount Doom, there is a particular instance in which he threatens Sam and “A wild light came into Frodo’s eyes. ‘Stand away! Don’t touch me!’ he cried. ‘It is mine, I say. Be off!’ His hand strayed to his sword-hilt” (1225). By the point Frodo refuses to give up the Ring in the Cracks of Doom, he is fully taken by it. Frodo at the beginning of the story would not threaten to attack Sam under any circumstances. At one point, Sam views Gollum and Frodo fighting over the Ring as “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 spoke a commanding voice” (1234). Gollum is the crouching shape that has been very eroded by the Ring, yet still has a burning passion to get it back at all costs. Frodo is the powerful figure with a wheel of fire and a commanding voice. The Ring has given him power over Gollum and turns Frodo into something completely unrecognizable to Sam. This is right before his refusal to give up the Ring, and this shows how much he has changed over the course of the story. 

        The Ring is evil, powerful, independent, and is only fit for Sauron. Anyone else who uses the Ring inevitably succumbs to its influence. It erodes a person’s character and desires, but this can be slowed by having a strong moral character prior to bearing the Ring. Bilbo, Gollum, and Frodo all have vastly different journeys with differing results but also common threads.

-KW

Tolkien’s Metaphysics

What I find far and away most intriguing about Tolkien’s treatment of Sauron is that he does not merely give the Dark Lord a name, but a voice—an utterance that is itself a kind of magic. In The Lord of the Rings the very sound of Sauron’s words can be felt in the marrow, a resonant echo that reaches even to the hidden halls of Dol Guldur. Yet this is only one strand of a richer tapestry in which Tolkien’s philological sensibility and his belief in the creative potency of names intertwine with a world that is capable of producing physical objects of power. The One Ring, the Palantíri, and the many swords forged by the Elves are not mere artefacts; they are embodiments of word‑power made manifest in matter. From this duality we can read an argument that words are more than labels, that the essence of beings in Tolkien’s universe is partible, and that such partibility invites us to reconsider the Aristotelian notion of actuality in light of a world where form can be reshaped by name and craft.

Tolkien saw names as linguistic scaffolding on which reality is understood and conceived, which his philological work cannot have but emphasized. In this sense Sauron’s voice, is not simply a narrative device but an operation that transfigures the world (literally, in many senses, as when the world darkens when his name is mentioned). The words, imbued with the very essence of his malice, become a conduit for fear and domination. The Sindarin, “Lammen Gorthaur,” make him quite literally the “Voice of the Abomination.”

This is not an end in itself. “The magic of Faërie is not an end in itself, its virtue is in its operations,” Tolkien reminds us. The power of Sauron’s voice lies not merely in the fact that it exists but in its effect: to corrupt, to manipulate, to command. The voice is a tool of sub‑creation that works in tandem with the physical objects he creates or controls. Thus, while Sauron’s words are a form of “magic,” they are an instrument whose purpose is to create (or, in some perverse sense, create by destroying). 

But Tolkien’s world is not limited to the linguistic. He also created a material culture in which objects can hold power. The One Ring, forged by Sauron in the fires of Mount Doom, is a tangible manifestation of his will. It contains a portion of Sauron’s own power, an echo of his voice that is bound to the metal. The ring does not merely represent Sauron; it is a vessel through which his voice can be felt even when he is physically absent. The ring’s power to corrupt, to bind, and to dominate is a direct translation of the linguistic potency of Sauron’s name into a physical form.

Similarly, the Palantíri—those seeing-stones—are objects that allow communication across distances. They are not merely tools; they are conduits of influence, channeling the words and intentions of those who wield them. When Sauron looks into a Palantír, he is not merely seeing; he is speaking across the stone, his words becoming a force that can be felt by those who peer into it. Thus, the physical objects in Tolkien’s world are not passive; they are active participants in a network of word‑power.

If words can shape reality and objects can embody word‑power, then the essence of beings in Tolkien’s universe must be partible. In The Silmarillion we see that the Elves, though created by Eru Ilúvatar, possess a capacity for sub‑creation that allows them to shape their own destinies. The fact that Sauron can carve his voice into the One Ring, and that Frodo can wield the ring to influence others, suggests that essence is not a fixed, monolithic property but a malleable one. The very act of naming or crafting can alter the essence of an object or being.

Aristotle’s metaphysics distinguishes between ousia (essence) and hylē (matter). In a purely Aristotelian view, the essence of a thing is immutable; its actuality is merely the realization of that unchanging form. Yet Tolkien’s world suggests a different trajectory: essence can be reshaped by the application of words and craft. The One Ring’s essence is not purely that of a simple metal band; it is the essence of Sauron’s will, condensed and made tangible. The essence of a ring can be changed if the ring is destroyed or if its name is altered—think of the destruction of the One Ring, which severs Sauron’s link to his own essence.

This has interesting implications for the modification of actuality. In Aristotelian terms, actuality is the state in which potential becomes real. In Tolkien’s world, the potential for power within an object can be actualized through the act of naming or crafting. The ring’s potential to corrupt is actualized when Sauron’s voice imbues it; it is also diminished when the ring is destroyed. Thus, the Aristotelian chain of potentiality to actuality becomes a dynamic process that can be altered by linguistic and material intervention.

Tolkien’s treatment of Sauron offers a rich case study in the interplay between language, matter, and essence. The Dark Lord’s voice is a magical operation that does not exist in isolation but functions within a broader system of word‑power. The physical objects he creates—most notably the One Ring—are not merely artefacts but embodiments of that power, channels through which his voice can be felt even in his absence.

These observations invite us to reconsider the Aristotelian notion of actuality. In Tolkien’s universe, the essence of a creature or object is not immutable; it can be reshaped by name and craft. The process of sub‑creation—whether through the forging of a ring or the naming of a place—transforms potential into actuality in ways that Aristotle would have found both familiar and novel.            

 —NH

The Ring Versus Free Will

In The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien drives his narrative forward through the crucial decisions which his characters have to make. This style, which Shippey calls entrelacement, intertwines each individual’s will in the culminating fate of Middle-Earth. Throughout the course of the tale, no decisions prove more crucial than those regarding the fate, or the ownership, of the One Ring. From Gandalf and Galadriel’s refusal to accept it to Frodo’s failure to destroy it, the Ring is consistently portrayed as a symbol of temptation itself: something which corrupts through its evil nature. While seemingly simple, a more interesting question arises when we consider what exactly makes the Ring evil in itself.

Shippey offers us one word: addiction. This interpretation is most evident in the movie adaptations and the character of Gollum, but falls short when considering what the Ring does more functionally. The addictive quality of the Ring lies in the feeling of righteous power which it grants its user: Gandalf desires it to fight Sauron, Boromir to save Gondor, and Smeagol justifies murdering for it simply because it was his birthday. Far more tempting than the euphoria of a drug addiction, the Ring’s allure lies in the power to impose your will on others. This is why Tolkien writes in Letter 246 that Gandalf would be “far worse than Sauron” if he obtained the Ring. His desire to do good would make him self-righteous, a convincing form of evil which masks itself in good intentions. Despite wanting to change Middle-Earth for the better, Gandalf still would have been evil with the Ring because he would have assumed a position of absolute power. This revelation clues us in on why the Ring is inherently evil: it was made to control.

When analyzing the powers of the Ring, it is easy to forget why it was forged in the first place. Crafted by Sauron, its original purpose was to control the people of Middle-Earth—particularly the owners of the lesser Rings of Power. Fittingly, the temptation of total control awakens a lustful desire for the Ring itself, undermining the free will of both the wearer and his victims. The desire for control literally creates the Ring and underlies its usage throughout the tale. Tolkien portrays this kind of temptation as a force of evil but stops short of categorizing individuals as inherently evil themselves. This interpretation of sin reveals the influence of The Lord’s Prayer on Tolkien’s work, as Shippey notes. The lines “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil” imply a responsibility for men to resist temptation, but ultimately leaves deliverance from evil up to God’s will. In other words, the prayer leaves open-ended the question of how much temptation man can reasonably be expected to resist. For example, Frodo fails to destroy the Ring at the Crack of Doom despite his overall innocent characterization throughout the tale. While Tolkien admits that this is a failure, he specifies in Letter 246 how it was not a moral failure: “At the last moment the pressure of the Ring would reach its maximum — impossible… for anyone to resist.” The impossible circumstance which Frodo faces explains his decision, not his nature. In fact, fate saves his morality when the Ring is finally destroyed by Gollum, a character which Frodo takes pity on throughout his journey. The Ring’s final moments therefore reveal how succumbing to God’s will redeems man from the temptation of evil.

The flip side of Tolkien’s conception of evil is portrayed earlier in The Lord’s Prayer: “Thy will be done.” Contrary to the temptation of the Ring, Tolkien’s Christianity asks man to pledge total obedience to God’s will. That task, however, is easier said than done. As Tolkien points out—not even Sauron intended to fall, but sometimes people are mistaken by what constitutes God’s will. To understand how to make decisions in light of temptation, one can look to the character of Samwise Gamgee. In the company of Frodo, Sam and Gollum serve as opposing figures. Both seemingly abide by Frodo’s will before their own, and both are exceedingly passionate about their loyalty to their master. They differ, however, in the essence of their obedience. Gollum is ultimately loyal to Frodo as Ring-bearer, the current owner of his “Precious,” while Sam genuinely sacrifices for Frodo out of love. This difference is clearest in the chapter “Choices of Master Samwise,” where Sam takes the Ring but is too distraught by losing Frodo to feel tempted by its power. His obedience to Frodo fundamentally opposes Gollum’s infatuation with the Ring because it is founded on love, not a self-serving desire for power. Gollum, constantly conflicted between “Slinker” and “Stinker,” is a slave to the Ring while Sam remains free.

Tolkien contrasts Gollum and Sam in this way to demonstrate the real nature of free will. Faced with endless decisions, mankind constantly wrestles with the issue of purpose in the world. By whose will should we act? What distinguishes right from wrong? Selfishness and hedonism tempt man into believing that he is his own master, creating Gollums who endlessly chase the promise of the Ring. This temptation, as Tolkien conveys, subjects them to their own unconstrained desire. On the other hand, Sams find a master to obey before themselves, combating base temptation with love. Sam realizes his free will through his ability to distinguish temptation from loving desire, an existential challenge at the heart of The Lord of the Rings.

- MJS

Sharing Silent Speech

Not super relevant to my post, but I thought this mural near my apartment looked similar to the illustrations of the Silmarils.

“The Palantíri could not themselves survey men’s minds, at unawares or unwilling, for the transference of thoughts depended on the wills of the user on either side, and thought (received as speech) was only transmittable by one stone to another in accord.” (Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth, 411)

This is the final paragraph of Tolkien’s chapter on the Palantíri in the Unfinished Tales. The mention of “wills” sparked something in me, especially in relation to the discussion we had in class on Tuesday about whether the Palantíri were good or evil. Rereading this paragraph, I noticed that there was a footnote attached to it. A few pages later, I was reading Footnote 21, an elaboration by Tolkien on the nature of transferring thoughts via the Palantíri. It reads: “Two persons, each using a stone ‘in accord’ with the other, could converse, but not by sound, which the stones did not transmit. Looking one at the other they would exchange ‘thought’ – not their full or true thought, or their intentions, but ‘silent speech,’ the thoughts they wished to transmit (already formalized in linguistic form in their minds or actually spoken aloud), which would be received by their respondents and of course immediately transformed into ‘speech,’ and only reportable as such.” (Unfinished Tales, 415)

This footnote both illuminates the process of transferring thought via the Palantíri and muddies it. Jumping off the page is the oxymoron “silent speech,” which in its description seems more like thought because “silent speech” is not voiced. But Tolkien uses the term “silent speech” to differentiate this kind of communication from sharing thoughts, even writing that “silent speech” might have been spoken aloud before being communicated via the Palantíri. Silent speech is “already formalized in linguistic form in their minds or actually spoken aloud,” and so is differentiated from “full or true thought” which is not “formalized in linguistic form.” This characterizes silent speech as something more intentionally shaped (dare I say created) than thought. Where else do we see speech as a creative act? Well, Genesis.

This differentiation of silent speech from thought suggests that, in his description of the Palantíri, Tolkien figures the mind and its multitude of thoughts as a kind of nothingness out of which somethingness, or speech, arises. The mind, then, mimics the nothingness of the cosmos before creation, which Dorothy Sayers says only became nothingness when God spoke. “What I want to suggest is that Being (simply by being) creates Not-Being, not merely contemporaneously in the world of Space, but also in the whole extent of Time behind it…Or, to use the most familiar of all metaphors, ‘before’ light, there was neither light nor darkness; darkness is not darkness until light has made the concept of darkness possible” (Sayers 101). So thought is the darkness that is only darkness when the light of silent speech comes into being, and the Palantíri are the plain upon which silent speech is expressed. The instrumental role of the wills of each communicator then makes sense. Communicating through the Palantíri is only possible through an act of creation that establishes both being, the “silent speech,” and not-being, thought.

The Seven Palantíri - Art by Peter Pracownik, via tolkiengateway.net

            What nags is that this suggests that thought, as a kind of not-being, is evil, or has the potential to become evil. Even the suggestion that thought is a form of not-being bothers me, a frequent woolgatherer. My thoughts feel very much like “being” to me, even if I do not always verbalize them. This reminds me of what Sayers says about writers sharing their creations: “his creation is safe from the interference of other wills only as long as it remains in his head” (Sayers 104). Perhaps my thoughts are neutral objects inside my head, and only by sharing them do they gain the potential for good and evil.

This brings to my mind a quote from Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando regarding the poet’s duty: “We must shape our words till they are the thinnest integument for our thoughts” (173). What a naïve and romantic thought, that a poet should craft their words to most accurately depict their thoughts! Throwing other important aspects of poetics aside, such as rhyme or meter, Woolf’s narrator takes the position that poetry’s value lies in how accurately it expresses thoughts. On the opposing side, we have the Palantíri, which appear as battlegrounds for two wills and what they wish to reveal and conceal (at least when we encounter them in The Lord of the Rings). Even our hardy hero, Aragorn, returns exhausted following his battle of wills with Sauron through the Orthanc stone. Like poetry, “secret speech” is a medium for conveying thoughts, but unlike poetry in Orlando, it seeks to conceal thoughts rather than reveal their full nature. I use the word “conceal” because that is how I envision the interaction between Aragorn and Sauron going. That said, I do not think that the secret speech is meant to conceal thought so much as it is meant to refine it. After all, who would want to reveal the entire messy contents of their mind to another (even if to spare the other person from all that disorganization)?

What increasingly emerges to me is the essential communal nature of secret speech, and the relationship between communality and good and evil. Secret speech is only necessary when one person wants to share something with another. This is also when artistic mediums like painting, writing, or music become necessary. Sayers writes that “we may redeem the Fall by a creative act” (107). In his writings about exchanging thoughts via the Palantíri, the value of the stones is not only in translating one’s disordered thoughts into secret speech, but also in sharing this secret speech with another. Sayers does not emphasize community too much in “Maker of All Things—Maker of Ill Things,” but I think it underlies this statement about the anti-Hamlets: “That is to say, it is possible to take its evil Power and turn it into active good. We can, for example, enjoy a good laugh at David Garrick” (106). Key here is the “we.” Collectively, we can laugh at David Garrick, and this turns the evil into a new form of Good. We can all detest the Amazon adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, but in discussing it with each other, we have made it Good. To further disrupt Amazon’s attempt to profit off Tolkien’s creation, we are doing so in a very low-tech way: in the classroom, and simultaneously persuading anyone who was thinking of watching it to avoid that at all costs. A clever transformation of evil indeed.

-ACB

My edition of Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle Earth is the following: 

Tolkien, J. R. R. Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. Houghton Mifflin, 1980. 

The Shadow with no Source

There is something that reading Augustine, Sayers, and the description of Numenor share that remains hard to articulate. The impression, after working through all three, is not simply that they are making the same argument but that they are making it defined by absence, by what is deliberately withheld, and by the theological weight that absence is made to carry.

Augustine's privation theory in Book 12 of the City of God shows that evil has no positive ontological status but is a deficiency, a falling away from being rather than a rival force. This is illustrated most precisely in Chapter 7, where seeking the cause of evil will is compared to trying to see darkness or hear silence. Darkness is known by the eye only where it ceases to see, and one does not encounter it as a thing but notices it through the failure of the faculty that requires light. Evil is structured identically: not something encountered but something registered through the absence of what ought to be present.

 

Sayers’ Hamlet analogy in Chapter VII of The Mind of the Maker explains something Augustine leaves underdeveloped; namely why passive privation becomes active depravity. When Shakespeare writes Hamlet, everything outside the poem acquires retroactively the character of exclusion, and the category of the wrong word does not exist before the right word is chosen. Not-Being, once a conscious will make it a centre of opposition, draws its power from the Being it negates, which is shown most clearly when Garrick rewrote Hamlet with good intentions and commercial success, producing a worse corruption than a malicious alteration would have, since the stronger the will behind a distortion the more power it draws back into contact with the original.

 

What both texts leave unresolved is whether the agent is culpable if the defection of will was constituted rather than caused. Augustine's two-men thought experiment argues that only the will itself can explain why one falls and the other does not, but a will whose defection has no efficient cause is also a will whose defection has no prior condition, and Sayers's Hamlet analogy sidesteps rather than answers this, since poems do not have free will and misquoters are not fallen creatures in the theological sense.

 

Ultimately, Tolkien combines both the doctrine and the tension in the Meneltarma. The sacred mountain is defined by absences so systematic they read as some form of theological argument: no building, no altar, no tool, no weapon, no word except the king's at three prescribed occasions. The silence on the summit, so profound that a stranger ignorant of all Numenorean history would not have dared to speak aloud, renders Augustine's darkness analogy in spatial form, where the sacred is felt through the complete withdrawal of everything that would ordinarily mark a place as significant. Sauron's temple introduces not a different religion but the wrong relationship to the same reality, what Augustine in Chapter 8 describes as inordinate love, and the will that places itself at the centre of worship rather than its object is precisely the Anti-Hamlet figure Sayers identifies, constituting itself through active opposition. 

 

Although Sayers argues that the act of recovery is structurally identical to the Incarnation, taking catastrophic material and transmuting it through creative interpretation into a new form of good, and Christopher Tolkien's work assembling fragments into continuity is this act at the philological level. Of all the great heirlooms of Numenor, only the Ring of Barahir survives, passed through the Lords of Andunie to Elendil and eventually to Aragorn. The fall is not undone, but something carried through the catastrophe and arrives in the Third Age still recognisable as what it was, just as the record itself exists against the avoidance of most survivors who refused to study Numenor because it bred only useless regret. 

- RS