Thus Bombadil appears to be more powerful than the Ring—or at least totally unaffected by its corruption. But at the Council of Elrond Gandalf explains that Tom “is his own master. But he cannot alter the Ring itself, nor break its power over others” (FR, p. 298). If we consider the way the power of the Ring affects an individual’s moral character, then Bombadil is an anomaly. He is not corrupted by the Ring, nor does he seem to desire it. At best, he is curious to see it and to see how it affects the Ring-bearer, Frodo. Bombadil does not need the Ring—he is his own master.
So far, we have seen that the two characters that reject completely the power of the One Ring, Galadriel and Bombadil, are not mortal beings. Is Tolkien telling us that only immortal or divine beings can resist the power of the Ring, that mere mortals—humans like ourselves, such as Boromir—have to succumb to the temptation and corruption of the power of the Ring? To answer this question, we must examine how two hobbits—Frodo and Sam—deal with the possession of the Ring.
Frodo, of course, is the Ring-bearer, the central figure and hero of The Lord of the Rings. He possesses the Ring more than any other character during the events depicted in the trilogy, and he uses the Ring more than any other character. Is he corrupted by the use of the Ring? To a certain extent, yes. Frodo’s use of the Ring becomes ever more conflicted as his journey progresses, so that ultimately he is “captured” by the power of the Ring and is unable to destroy it. Although Frodo is tempted to put on the Ring when he first encounters the Black Riders early in his journey, the first time that Frodo uses the Ring, as we have seen, is in the House of Tom Bombadil. His motivation, in that first use, is relatively innocent: he is “perhaps a trifle annoyed” with Bombadil for treating the “perilously important” Ring in so lighthearted and carefree a manner, and so he decides to make sure the Ring is still his, for Bombadil could have switched rings during his brief magical trick (FR, p. 151). Frodo clearly has confused emotions. Tolkien presents us with two tempered descriptions of Frodo’s pleasure in using the Ring. When he first put on the Ring and saw that Merry was astonished that he had disappeared, “Frodo was delighted (in a way).” Then, when Tom directed Frodo to stop the game, “Frodo laughed (trying to feel pleased), and taking off the Ring he came and sat down again” (FR, p. 151). Tolkien does not explain why Frodo was not completely delighted and pleased. Is it because of the evil power of the Ring? A virtuous individual knows that the use of the Ring is wrong, so when one uses it one is filled with the conflicting emotions of power, satisfaction, and guilt. Frodo is thus already being affected by the Ring.
Frodo dons the Ring two other times in the early pages of The Fellowship of the Ring, once by “accident” in the inn at Bree, and once at the battle with the Black Riders near the summit of Weathertop. Clearly, Frodo does not consciously decide to put on the Ring while singing his song at Butterbur’s inn. So Frodo can only be blamed here for being careless, but this is a carelessness that is probably being caused by the force of the Ring. Then on Weathertop, we see that the Ring answers to the commands of others. As the Black Riders approached Aragorn and the hobbits, Frodo’s “terror was swallowed up in a sudden temptation to put on the Ring.” Although he had the same desire when he was trapped in the Barrow earlier, this time the desire is different: “he longed to yield. Not with the hope of escape, or of doing anything, either good or bad: he simply felt that he must take the Ring and put it on his finger.” And of course he does yield, for “resistance became unbearable” (FR, p. 221). The Black Riders, the Nazgûl who wear the nine Rings given to the human race of men, have exerted their collective wills to force him to put on the Ring. So here we see that Frodo does choose to put on the Ring—unlike the accident at Bree—but his choice is not a free choice; it is a result of compulsion, the psychological power of other ring-bearers on the bearer of the One Ring.
The next time Frodo puts on the Ring it is a free choice without any hint of compulsion: he dons the Ring in order to escape from Boromir and to separate himself from the rest of the Company. Yet as he runs away he climbs to the top of Amon Hen and sits on the ancient stone throne of the kings, where he surveys the lands around him, aided by the power of the Ring. This moment is filled with danger, for Sauron senses that someone is wearing the Ring, and the Eye of the Dark Lord begins to search him out. Frodo is filled with dread and a deep psychological conflict: he resists the Eye, crying out to himself “never” but perhaps he is saying “I come to you.” “He could not tell.” Then he hears another voice urging him to take off the Ring. These two “powers” contend within him. Writhing and tormented, for a moment he is exactly balanced between them.
Suddenly he was aware of himself again. Frodo, neither the Voice nor the Eye: free to choose, and with one remaining instant in which to do so. He took the Ring off his finger. (FR, p. 451)
Just as with Galadriel’s test, Frodo finds the power within himself to resist the force of the Ring. He overrides the power of the Ring when he becomes himself again. But he has used the Ring as a matter of conscious choice to escape danger and to gather knowledge. The Ring is having more and more of an effect on him; he is closer to becoming a wielder of the Ring, not simply its bearer.
Ultimately the force of the Ring overpowers even Frodo. Throughout the long journey into the heart of Mordor, we are constantly told of the physical and psychological weight of the Ring. The closer Frodo gets to Mount Doom, the more resistant the Ring is to his will and the harder it is for Frodo to go on. But when he reaches the Cracks of Doom, he is unable to perform his mission. Sam witnesses the scene as Frodo stands before the fire and proclaims: “I have come . . . But I do not choose now to do what I came to do. I will not do this deed. The Ring is mine!” Then Frodo puts the Ring on his finger and vanishes (RK, p. 239). It is thus left to Gollum to wrestle with the invisible Frodo, and in a desperate attempt to grab the Ring for himself, he accidentally destroys it in the fires of Mount Doom. Gollum bites off Frodo’s finger, holds the Ring aloft and in his joy loses his footing and falls into the fire. The Ring is destroyed and Frodo is saved.
While Frodo is slowly eaten away by the corruption of the Ring, his companion Sam defeats the Ring’s power in the short time that he is the Ring-bearer. Sam takes the Ring at the end of The Two Towers, for he believes Frodo to be dead and the task has fallen upon him to complete the mission of the Fellowship to destroy the Ring. But he discovers that Frodo is alive and has been captured by orcs, and he therefore abandons the overall mission in an attempt to save his master.
“They must understand that—Elrond and the Council, and the great Lords and Ladies with all their wisdom. Their plans have gone wrong. I can’t be their Ring-bearer. Not without Mr. Frodo.” (TT, p. 390)
Sam must remain true to himself, and the central mission in his life is to protect Frodo.
Sam, though, is stymied in his attempt to follow the orcs into the Tower of Cirith Ungol, and eventually he stands alone on the high path that leads into Mordor. It is here that Sam encounters his fundamental moral decision. He feels the power of the Ring, even though he is not wearing it, for “as it [the Ring] drew near the great furnaces where, in the deeps of time, it had been shaped and forged, the Ring’s power grew, and it became more fell, untameable save by some mighty will” (RK, p. 185).
Sam now feels himself “enlarged, as if he were robed in a huge distorted shadow of himself, a vast and ominous threat halted upon the walls of Mordor” (RK, p. 185). The Ring tempts him, “gnawing at his will and reason,” and he sees a vision of himself as “Samwise the Strong, Hero of the Age, striding with a flaming sword across the darkened land, and armies flocking to his call as he marched to the overthrow of Barad-dûr.”
And then all the clouds rolled away, and the white sun shone, and at his command the vale of Gorgoroth became a garden of flowers and trees and brought forth fruit. He had only to put on the Ring and claim it for his own, and all this could be. (RK, p. 186)
But Sam is equal to his test, and he knows that it
is not for him to bear the Ring and challenge the Dark Lord. Tolkien explains that two things keep Sam safe from the seductive power of the Ring: his love for Frodo and his own sense of self. First and foremost was Sam’s love of his master, Frodo, but there was also Sam’s “still unconquered . . . plain hobbit-sense.” Sam knows that he is not big enough to bear such a burden, “even if such visions were not a mere cheat to betray him.”
The one small garden of a free gardener was all his need and due, not a garden swollen to a realm; his own hands to use, not the hands of others to command. (RK, p. 186)
Deep down in his heart, Sam knows who he is. As Galadriel knew to remain Galadriel and to reject the Ring, Sam knows that he can never be other than the plain commonsense hobbit, Samwise Gamgee, the small and caring gardener of the Shire. Fortified by his love for Frodo, he remains true to himself and rejects the power of the Ring. In Sam’s rejection of the One Ring during his most extreme crisis we learn that the virtuous and strong-willed person can turn away from a life of evil, a life of almost unlimited power, by focusing on his or her true self.
It is clear that Tolkien is demonstrating to us the progressive forces of corruption of the possession and use of the One Ring, for even Frodo, the hero of the book, succumbs to its corruption in his failure to destroy the Ring. He begins with innocent and accidental uses of the Ring’s power, but eventually gives over to its seductive power by making conscious and deliberate decisions to wear the Ring, and even, at last, not to destroy it. And as in Plato’s argument, the key feature of the corruption caused by the Ring is the corruption of the soul, the “heart,” or the personality of the wielder of the Ring. To resist the Ring is to remain oneself, to be the person you are without any extraordinary powers. All who come in contact with the Ring (except, it appears, Bombadil) lose themselves (at least momentarily) in the desire to be greater than they are.
Personal Choice, Power, and Morality
Why be moral? What kind of life should I choose? What kind of person should I become? These are the fundamental questions of ethics, or moral philosophy. In Tolkien’s tale of the One Ring of Power we find the answer to the challenge to the moral life first proposed by Plato almost 2,400 years ago. Faced with the ability to satisfy one’s desires without limit and without consequences, can a person choose the path of virtue and renounce immense power? For Plato, the answer was yes, for the moral person can realize that a life of immoral power will corrupt the heart and soul. Power without love, friendship, and personal fulfillment will lead to unhappiness, a fundamental unhappiness that is beyond relief.
In Tolkien’s characters we see vindication of this Platonic vision of the importance and meaning of the moral life. All of the characters who encounter the Ring are given a choice; all are tempted to wield the Ring, and some find within themselves the power to reject it. Indeed it is the one character without a choice—Gollum, for his choice was made long before the events of The Lord of the Rings begin—that perhaps most exemplifies the fundamental unhappiness that is the result of the ceaseless quest for power without a moral life. The moment of choice is essential—the moment when a rational being must decide what kind of life he will lead.
Plato returns to the idea of choice at the conclusion of the Republic. There he calls the selection of one’s fundamental character “the supreme hazard for a man” and one that must be guided “with his eyes fixed on the nature of his soul” (Republic X, 618b–e). Tolkien also has his characters fix their gaze on the nature of their souls. For Galadriel, Bombadil, and Sam, the characters who most clearly reject the Ring, who remain uncorrupted by its seduction of unlimited power, their strength comes from their awareness of their own being, who they are and what they can accomplish. These characters know their own limits. Why be moral? Plato asks. And Tolkien answers, “to be yourself.” What kind of life should I choose? A life that is in accord with my abilities. If you need a Ring of Power to live your life, you have chosen the wrong life.
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1 Both rings render their wearers invisible. The One Ring, however, has many powers that Gyges’s ring does not. In particular, the One Ring gives power to a possessor according to his or her stature (FR, p. 411); is morally corrupting; prevents or slows aging and decay (FR, p. 285; L, p. 152); sharpens hearing, dims sight, and enables a wearer to understand unknown languages (TT, pp. 388–89); permits a wearer to see, and to be seen by, things in the invisible world (FR, p. 249), and enables a sufficiently powerful wearer to perceive all that is done by means of the lesser Rings, and to see and govern the thoughts of those who wield them (S, p. 288). Interestingly, the Ring affects different individuals and races differently. Dwarves, for example, are apparently immune from some of the ordinary effects of the Ring (S, p. 283).
2
The Cracks of Doom: The Threat of Emerging Technologies and Tolkien’s Rings of Power
THEODORE SCHICK
The Rings of Power forged by Sauron and the elves are the most powerful technology in Middle-earth. Some, like science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov, take the Rings to be a symbol of industrial technology. He writes:
One day, [my wife] Janet and I were driving along the New Jersey Turnpike, and we passed a section given over to oil refineries. It was a blasted region in which nothing was growing and which was filled with ugly, pipelike structures, which refineries must have. Waste oil was leaking at the top of tall chimneys and the smell of petroleum products filled the air.
Janet looked at the prospect with troubled eyes and said, “There’s Mordor.”
And, of course, it was. And that was what had to be in Tolkien’s mind. The ring was industrial technology, which uprooted the green land and replaced it with ugly structures under a pall of chemical pollution.1
Tolkien explicitly rejects any such interpretation, however. In the Foreword to The Lord of the Rings, he says of his work, “As for any inner meaning or ‘message’, it has in the intention of the author none. It is neither allegorical nor topical” (FR, p. x).
Although Tolkien denies that The Lord of the Rings is allegorical, he admits that it is applicable, that is, that it can be applied to our earthly situation (L, p. 262). In a letter to Rhona Beare, for example, he says:
If I were to ‘philosophize’ this myth, or at least the Ring of Sauron, I should say it was a mythical way of representing the truth that potency (or perhaps rather potentiality) if it is to be exercised, and produce results, has to be externalized and so as it were passes, to a greater or less degree, out of one’s direct control. (L, p. 279)
In this chapter I explore just how applicable Tolkien’s solution is to the problem of externalization that we face, namely, what should we do with those technologies that threaten to destroy us? Should we adopt the solution proposed by the Council of Elrond and destroy them? Or should we follow the advice of Boromir and try to use them to our advantage?
Scientists tell us that we’re on the brink of developing technologies that will give us powers exceeding those that the Rings of Power give their possessors, namely, nanotechnology, genetics, and robotics. Recognizing the danger inherent in these technologies, some, like Bill Joy, Chief Scientist for Sun Microsystems, argue that we should throw them back into the fire, or at least not forge them in the first place, for they have the potential to destroy the human race.2 Others, like Eric Drexler, the first to systematically explore the possibility of nanotechnology, maintain that if developed and used prudently, these technologies can eliminate poverty, eradicate disease, and grant us immortality.3 To see what light The Lord of the Rings throws on these alternatives, we’ll need to know more about the nature and purpose of the Rings.
The Rings of Power
In the Second Age of Middle-earth, elven jewel-smiths led by Celebrimbor and aided by Sauron, forged a number of Rings of Power (S, pp. 287–88). The most important of these Rings are mentioned in the verse from which the inscription on Sauron’s Ring comes: there are three rings for the elven-kings, seven for the dwarf-lor
ds, nine for Mortal Men, and one for the Dark Lord of Mordor, “One Ring to rule them all.”
Although the elven jewel-smiths used knowledge gained from Sauron to make the Rings, Elrond informs us that the three elven Rings—Vilya, worn by Elrond; Nenya, worn by Galadriel; and Narya the Great, worn by Gandalf (RK, pp. 337, 339)—“were not made by Sauron, nor did he ever touch them” (FR, p. 301). Similarly, the elves never handled Sauron’s Ring. It was forged in secret in the Mountain of Fire (Mount Doom) by Sauron himself. Sauron did have a hand in forging the Rings of the dwarves and humans, however, and as a result, they had a power to corrupt that the elven Rings did not.
Although the Rings created by Sauron were designed to give their possessors wealth or dominion over others, that was not the purpose of the elven Rings. According to Elrond, “Those who made them did not desire strength or domination or hoarded wealth, but understanding, making, and healing, to preserve all things unstained” (FR, p. 301). This motive is peculiar to the elves of Middle-earth and derives from their decision not to return to the West at the end of the First Age.
The elves were the first rational incarnate creatures created by Ilúvatar (the supreme God of Middle-earth) and thus are sometimes referred to as “Firstborn.” Humans were created sometime later and have thus acquired the appellation “Followers.” The most significant difference between these two races is that elves are immortal while humans are mortal. Tolkien explains:
The Lord of the Rings and Philosophy Page 3