The Motif of the One Ring

In Tolkien's Theme of "The Escape from Death and the Escape from Deathlessness":

Excerpt from a Correspondence Between Two Fans

By Carrie Rouillard

"I'm intrigued by your comment that it 'doesn't really matter what exactly the Ring represents.' Why not?"

As a good Tolkien fan I am obliged to object to the word "represents". It implies "allegory", and Tolkien's dislike of allegory is famous. I could also argue that it's "reductionistic"- "explain what the Ring means in twenty words or less"- where I believe this is simply not possible. I also think it implies a meaning outside of the story- does the Ring represent sin? Nuclear bombs? and so on, where I personally think it is much more interesting to look for its meaning inside the story. LotR is a huge complicated milieu, a giant composition of themes and ideas, and I firmly believe that any one of the ideas needs to be understood in the context of the others. Not that this is an easy task. LotR is incredibly long- over half a million words, and to make things more difficult, much of its context lies outside of the story, in The Silmarillion. For me, one of the basic challenges is to find "landmarks" by which to navigate around this huge landscape of ideas and begin to understand it on its own terms.

Some of these landmarks have to be what Tolkien said about his own story. He said one of the most important themes of LotR was the escape from death and the escape from deathlessness (Letters, p. 284) If we have an idea of how the Ring fits into this theme, we would have the beginning of an understanding of its significance. So I'll go ahead and sketch out the ideas and motifs, including that of the Ring, that make up this central theme. I know by doing this I am still oversimplifying, overlooking many other important ideas about the Ring, but I feel it is not possible to have a discussion about it without laying this groundwork first.

We have two basic kinds of beings in Middle-Earth, elves and men. What distinguishes these beings is the fate of their souls after death. Elves' souls are bound to Arda (the world of which Middle-Earth is a part) and will endure as long as it endures. Elves don't die of old age, and if they are killed they either go to the Halls of Mandos as disembodied spirits or are reincarnated. Men's souls are not bound to Arda, and what happens to them when they die only Eru The One (God) knows. But this fate is called "The Gift of Man" and should be taken on faith as a good thing.

As for the other races. Dwarves are something of a bastard race, created by a disobedient but subsequently forgiven lieutenant of Eru, and the state of their souls is a mystery to all but possibly themselves. It appears they believe in some kind of reincarnation. Hobbits are the same thing as men for the purpose of their souls.

Eru never tells anyone his entire plan, probably because no one could understand it but him, so the poor mortal race has to take it on faith that mortality is a good thing. It's easy to imagine that a mortal race living cheek and jowl with an immortal one would get a little jealous, and that it would be very easy for the resident bad guy to exploit this. In The Silmarillion, Sauron manages to get the men of Numenor all worked up, inspires them to march on the Valar (resident angelic servants of Eru) to demand immortality, and gets them to disobey the ban of the Valar, which prohibits mortal men from visiting their lands. (Again, supposedly a good thing taken on faith, which is easily misunderstood and resented.) The Valar get pissed off, destroy Numenor, stomp Sauron's ass to the center of the earth, and in the process turn the flat earth into a round one. (Some Numenoreans, not believing Sauron, fled Numenor, went back to Middle-Earth, and escaped being stomped. These Numenoreans founded Arnor and Gondor, the two great kingdoms of men on Middle-Earth.)

Before he goes off and gets stomped, Sauron helps forge the Rings of Power and makes the One to control them. Men eagerly accept the Nine, which presumably among other powers grant a kind of immortality. But in this mythology evil cannot create, it can't change Eru's designs and take away "The Gift of Man", it can only pervert and corrupt. The amount of "life" a man has is a fixed quantity. It can't be changed by the Nine, but it can be "stretched". So while the Wraiths endure thousands of years, they do not "live" in any full and meaningful way. Their bodies have faded away, they see the world around them only as shadows, and all they feel is Sauron's will and the presence of The One. The One has the same effect on all its Bearers. Gollum has lived five hundred years, but he can't stand sunlight, can't eat good food, and is barely aware of any feelings except his desire for The One. Bilbo talks about feeling "thin, stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread." Frodo says "No taste of food, no feel of water, no sound of wind, no memory of tree or grass or flower, no image of moon or star is left to me. I am naked in the dark, Sam, and there is no veil between me and the wheel of fire. I begin to see it even with my waking eyes, and all else fades."

So the escape from death that the Ring offers is a cruel lie. So now onto the escape from deathlessness. So why would an elf want to escape from deathlessness anyway? (Sometimes to marry a mortal man.) Immortality is not a piece of cake in Middle-Earth. In Middle-Earth mythology there is the vital concept of "diminishment." Good and evil battle time and time again, and regardless of whether good or evil prevails in any particular skirmish the world can never fully heal itself afterwards and so becomes less and less. Our own world is Middle-Earth, after all the magic has left it. There are dozens of examples of this in LotR and The Silmarillion. The Phial of Galadriel, one of the most potent magic objects in LotR, is only the light of the star of Earendil reflected in the water of Galadriel's mirror. The star of Earendil is only the distant light of one of the Silmarils strapped to the forehead of Earendil the Mariner as he travels beyond the edges of the world. The Silmarils were stones of great beauty that contained only a tiny bit of the light of the Two Trees. Each incarnation is less and less of what it had been formerly. The Sun and Moon, by the way, are merely the last two fruits of the dying Two Trees, set in the sky by the mourning Valar. The elves, being immortal, watch all this, and because they love Middle-Earth profoundly, it causes them endless grief. In the chapter "The Great River", Legolas says "for the Elves the world moves, and it moves both very swift and very slow. Swift, because they themselves change little, and all else fleets by: it is a grief to them. Slow, because they do not count the running years, not for themselves. The passing seasons are but ripples ever repeated in the long long stream. Yet beneath the sun all things must wear at last to an end."

The Valar have taken pity on the elves and given them a way out. They can leave their beloved Middle-Earth, sail over the Sea, and live with the Valar in Valinor (or in LotR, in Eressea within sight of Valinor) which while it is still a part of the world to which they are bound, is protected by the Valar's power from many of its skirmishes. Sauron also gave them a way out, in his own fashion, in the Three Rings. The Three's power is largely to heal hurts, hold back time, and delay "diminishment." Presumably Elrond heals Frodo with the power of one of the Three, and Gandalf, who also has one of the Three, heals the despair of Theoden and the soldiers who have been stricken in terror of the Nazgul. Two of the Three sustain Rivendell and Lothlorien, where time passes differently than it does anywhere else in Middle-Earth. In "The Great River", Frodo replies to Legolas: "But the wearing is slow in Lorien… The power of the Lady is on it. Rich are the hours, though short they seem… where Galadriel wields the Elven-Ring." But of course the Three Rings are not in the end the solution to the problem of "diminishment." While they were not touched by Sauron and therefore not corrupted, he did advise in their making and so could make the One to control them. The elves in LotR are in a lose-lose situation. If Sauron regains the One, all of the works of the Three are under his control. If the One is destroyed, the works of the Three will fade and disappear. The elves will either leave Middle-Earth forever for Eressea, or dwindle into "a rustic woodland folk." At the end of the story both Lothlorien and Rivendell begin to fade and disappear.

(There are elves that actually choose to die, but they can only do this with the permission of the Valar, and then mostly only if they are half-elf half-man to begin with. Elrond is a half-elf who chose to be an elf, his brother Elros chose to be a man. Aragorn is descended from Elros. Arwen can also make this choice, being Elrond's daughter, so she can give up her immortality to marry Aragorn and give Frodo the chance to go to Eressea in her place. Yes, Arwen and Aragorn are related, though distantly. Eewww. )

So hopefully I've sketched out here the theme of "the escape from death and deathlessness" and in doing so put the Ring into a very basic context. There is a divine order that cannot be fully understood by anyone but its author. There are two races with parallel and opposite fates, which at best they accept uneasily. One fears its own mortality, the other watches with grief the wearing and the lessening of the world around it. There is an evil force that exploits this fear and sadness. If offers what appears to be a way out, but what is in fact a lie. At the very least it is a postponement of the inevitable, at the worst it is slavery, debasement, and a cruel living death.

Please bring your thoughts and comments on this essay to the Numenor Council.