In writing his The Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien did not invent the idea of a sorcerer-king ruling by the supernatural power of a ring. The ancient belief in the power of rings has been with the human race since the dawn of history. So much so that - in Europe in particular - the quest for the ring is the basis of much of its mythology. Furthermore, this belief in supernatural rings did not restrict itself to legends and fairy tales; it is very much a part of history itself.
Even Tolkien’s central concept of a ‘War of the Ring’ has a remarkable historical precedent. The idea that an empire could be ruinously consumed by war because of a ring may appear an unlikely historical event, but Tolkien had no less an authority than the ancient scholar Pliny to inform him that a dispute over a ring was the direct cause of the downfall of the Roman Republic. Pliny wrote that a quarrel over the possession of a ring erupted between the famous demagogue Drusus and the chief senator Caepio. The dispute led directly to a blood feud and the outbreak of the Social Wars, which resulted in the collapse and ruin of the Republic of Rome.
Another historical tradition attributes the downfall of the once mighty sea empire of the Republic of Venice directly to a ring. In its days of glory, Venice was the ruler of the Mediterranean by virtue of its ships. To celebrate its maritime power, the Doge of Venice would sail out into the Adriatic Sea with great pomp and ceremony one day each year. To celebrate Venice’s ‘marriage’ as the ‘bride of the sea’, the Doge would throw a gold ring into the deep blue waters of the Adriatic. Several months after one such ceremony, the Doge held a state dinner at which a large fish was served at his table. When the fish was placed on the Doge’s plate it was found to have the gold ring in its belly. The return of the wedding-ring was widely interpreted as the sea’s rejection of Venice as its bride - and a premonition of disaster for the Republic. Historical events soon confirmed the prophecy. That same year marked the reversal of Venice’s fortunes in its battles at sea, and the collapse of the Republic’s empire swiftly followed.
Dactyliomancy, or the use of rings for divination and magic, has been seriously practised throughout history. This belief in the power of rings was not a matter of literary invention; it was a part of everyday life. Its practice has been recorded in thousands of instances. It is worth looking at a few remarkable cases in detail.
Holland, 1548
In the year 1548 at Arnhem in what was then Guelderland, one of the city’s most respected citizens was brought before the Chancellor accused of sortilege, or enchantment. This man was reputed to be the region’s most learned and excellent physician, and knew ‘the cure and remedie for all manner of griefs and diseases’, according to the churchman-scholar Hegwoad. But his wisdom was not restricted to medicine. He was always ‘acquainted with all newes, as well forrein as domesticke.’
Accusers stated that the physician obtained his powers from a ring that he wore on his hand. Witnesses claimed that the doctor - who later became known as the Sorcerer of Courtray - constantly consulted the ring. It was stated that ‘the ring had a demon enclosed in it, to whom it behoved him to speak every five days.’
Despite the marked reluctance of the Chancellor to pass judgement on such a valued citizen, he found the evidence was so overwhelming that he had no choice but to find the man guilty. The physician was immediately proscribed for sorcery, and put to death. Curiously, even greater importance was placed on the fate of the ring than the fate of the sorcerer.
The Chancellor commanded that after the execution of the physician, the ring must be cut from his hand. So that all might witness its destruction, the ring was to be taken immediately to the public market. In full view of the citizens of Arnhem, the demon ring was ‘to be layd on an anvil and with an iron hammer to be beaten in pieces.’
England, 1376
In the St Albans Chronicon Anglais in the year 1376 is recorded the extraordinary trial of Alice Perrers of Anglia, a mistress of Edward, King of England. Alice Perrers was a woman ‘neither voluptuous nor beautiful but of smooth tongue’ whom Parliament charged with having enchanted the King by use of magic rings.
Through the power of these rings, it was claimed, Alice Perrers had alienated Edward’s affections from his queen, involved him in illicit sexual frenzies, and held sway over his judgements in court. In the trial it was revealed that she had a master who was a magician who was found to have effigies of Alice and the King. It was stated that the magician used herbs and incantations devised by the great Egyptian magus Nectanabus, and ‘used rings, such as Moses used to make, rings of oblivion and memory so that the King was unable to act any day without consulting his false predictions.’
Because of the King’s intervention, it proved impossible to bring down the full and fatal force of the law of the time onto the accused. However, Alice Perrers was banished from the court and noble society forever after.
Byzantium, 370
In the year 370, during the reign of the Roman Emperor Valens, a powerful group of aristocrats feared that their monarch was neither strong enough nor wise enough to remain in power for long. Concerned about their own fate and that of the Empire, the aristocrats secretly consulted an oracle.
The oracle practised dactyliomancy, or ‘ring divination’. This form of prophecy was achieved by means of a circle drawn on the temple floor. The circumference of the circle was inscribed with the letters of the alphabet, and a gold ring was suspended from the temple ceiling by a long thread directly over the centre of the circle.
When the question ‘Who should succeed to the throne of the Emperor Valens?’ was put to the oracle, the gold ring slowly but decisively drifted from letter to letter, and spelled out: ‘T-H-E-O-D’.
All who observed the oracle believed this could only mean Theodorus, a man of noble lineage, eminent qualifications and high popularity. However, among the gathering of aristocrats was a spy loyal to Valens. When Valens learned of the oracle, he concluded that Theodorus could only come to power through a conspiracy. Although there was no evidence at all that Theodorus had any intention of plotting against him, the Emperor Valens had the man immediately put to death.
The great British historian Gibbon remarks on the peculiar irony of this well-documented prophecy in his monumental Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. For in the year 378, the wild Visigoth tribes were in open revolt against imperial rule. The barbarian armies had crossed the Danube and threatened to march on the capital itself. The Imperial Army made a valiant and bloody stand at Adrianople but, outnumbered and badly commanded, they were defeated by the Visigoths and the Emperor Valens was killed.
Out of the turmoil that followed conquest, one ruthless general rose to power among the Spanish legions of the west. This man’s name was T-H-E-OD-osius. True to the prophecy of the ring, this unknown warlord seized control of the Empire. He was crowned in Constantinople and became the Emperor Theodosius the Great.
Beyond the vivid testimonies given here, there are thousands of others throughout recorded history which give convincing proof of the widespread belief in the power of rings. In the nineteenth century, Sir Walter Scott wrote in his Demonology and Witchcraft that he knew of many cases of individuals who claimed the ability to compel spirits to enter a ring - and from the imprisoned spirit demand answers to questions proposed.
Valid written testimonies were particularly frequent in medieval Europe. In 1431, one of the many serious charges brought against Joan of Arc was that she used magic rings to enchant and cure. Another well-documented medieval case was that of Hieronimus, the Chancellor of Mediolanum, who was brought to ruin and damnation through the false wisdom of a prophetic ring that ‘spoke’ to him. Still another remarkable case was recorded by a Joaliun of Cambray in 1545. In that case a young child was in thrall to a crystal ring in which he ‘could see all that the demons within demanded of him’. The demons of the ring so tormented their slave that in a fit of despair the child smashed the evil crystal ring and broke its spell.
One of the most vivid historic documentations of the belief in the power of the ring occurred in Venice during the fifteenth century. The incident constituted nothing less than a full Faustian battle for a man’s soul, rather reminiscent of the numerous struggles Gandalf endured as he watched the One Ring enthral and corrupt others; and even threaten his own soul.
The Venetian case involved a talented artist and sculptor named Pythonickes, who was said to possess an enchanted ring. The spirits within this ring seemed full of charm and wisdom, and by its power Pythonickes believed he had gained his reputation as an inspired artist. However, in time, Pythonickes began to fear for his immortal soul and wished to be free of any claim the ring might make on him. Not knowing if he had the strength to rid himself of the ring, he confessed its possession to a preaching friar, whom he knew to be a good and wise man.
Pythonickes begged the friar to listen to the subtle speech of the spirits in the ring, so he might determine whether they be good or evil, but the friar refused outright. The friar commanded that Pythonickes immediately destroy the enchanted ring, but the artist was now so enthralled by the ring that he no longer had the strength of will to do so.
Worse still, as soon as the friar spoke his command, a terrible lamenting cry was said to come from the ring. The evil spirits within offered all manner of wisdom and fame to the friar. Whereupon the friar perceived that soon his own soul would be in jeopardy if he did not act soon. So, in the words of the medieval scholar Mengius, ‘The churchman being zealously enraged, with a great hammer broke the ring almost to dust.’
What is going on here? A lot of hysteria about demons and witchcraft? Perhaps, but why does the image of the ring constantly crop up? Most especially, why this idea of talking and prophesying rings?
If we look at the Anglo-Saxon Exeter Book - which was compiled and written circa ad 1000 - we find a cryptic statement or unanswered riddle about a ring. It reads: ‘I heard of a bright ring interceding well before men, though tongue-less, though it cried not with loud voice in strong words. The precious thing spoke before men, though holding its peace. May men understand the mysterious saying of red gold, the magic speech.’
In part, the Exeter Book may be making reference to oracles that used rings long before the coming of Christ. As we saw in the case of the doomed Byzantine Emperor Valens, dactyliomancy was commonly used in the ancient world. The case of Valens’ prophecy was, however, only one method of allowing a ring to ‘speak’. Another involved water and, as thc Latin scholar Peucer described it, would appear to make a quite reasonable lie-detector test: ‘A bowl was filled with water, and a ring suspended from the finger was librated in water, and so, according as the question was propounded, a declaration, or confirmation of its truth or otherwise, was obtained. If what was proposed was true, the ring, of its own accord, without any impulse struck the sides of the goblet a certain number of times.’
The ancient Roman Numa Pompilius evidently used this method of divination; while Execetus, the tyrant of thc Phocians, used a means of divination based on sounds emitted by the striking of two large rings together. Still other practitioners of dactyliomancy chose to throw rings or stones into pools of water and read the ‘rings’ as they formed on the still surface. (This particular form of divination is not far removed from that of the prophetic images that appeared in the watery rings of the ‘Mirror of Galadriel’, which the Elf Queen commanded by the power of her ring, Nenya.)
Curious and entertaining as dactyliomancy may be, however, I do not find it an entirely satisfactory answer to the Exeter riddle about the ‘magic speech’ of the ring. I do not believe the physician of Arnhem was burned, nor Alice Perrers banished, nor Theodorus impaled for playing ‘Ouija’ with rings.
What was the answer to the riddle of the ‘magic speech’ of the ring? Was there a tradition based on the symbol of the ring that runs parallel to the tradition of the symbol of the cross? Is it possible to trace that tradition and understand where and why and how it maintained its force and power through centuries of suppression?
The answer is that the ring was actually the primary symbol of a tradition that the Church saw as being in conflict with orthodox doctrines of Christianity. To understand this one must look at the cult of witchcraft. In Murry’s The Witch Cult in Western Europe, the author concludes that the so-called ‘cult of witchcraft’ in one sense was not entirely a figment of the Church’s imagination. ‘The only explanation of the immense number of witches who were legally tried and put to death in Western Europe is that we are dealing with a religion which was spread over the whole continent and counted its members in every rank of society, from the highest to the lowest.’ Murry identifies this ‘religion’ as the remnant of primitive pagan cults which survive in various states of imperfection throughout Europe.
It is a more than reasonable supposition that aspects of pagan religions survived Christian conversion. In fact, a common tactic in the conversion of pagans was absorption of many aspects of pagan worship into the gospel of the Church. At other times, however, the Christian fathers found that if they had sufficient power it was easier simply to crush any pagan practice that was believed to pose a threat to orthodox Christian doctrines.
If these surviving pagan beliefs were to be represented by any single image in the way that Christianity is represented by the Cross, there is no doubt that that single image was the ring. As we shall see in this book, in Europe the ring was the dominant symbol of all the pagan Teutonic tribes. It was especially the dominant symbol of the Viking warrior culture, which was Christian Europe’s greatest scourge at the end of the first millennium.
Above all others, the Viking’s one-eyed sorcerer god, Odin, was ‘the God of the Ring’. (He was Tolkien’s primary source of inspiration for his sorcerer ‘Sauron, The Lord of the Rings’.) In the same way as the worship of Christ was symbolized by the Cross, the worship of Odin was symbolized by the ring. After the collapse of Roman authority, European Christian settlements, churches and monasteries experienced centuries of relentless Viking terror. It is little wonder that in the simplest terms the Church saw in the symbol of the ring the greatest threat to the authority of the Cross.
It is more complex than this, of course. The ring was a much older symbol of authority than Christianity, and the Church itself adapted its authority in many forms. The Pope wore a ring as the symbol of office; as did all other officers of the Church. Christian marriages were enforced by what amounted to the pagan custom of swearing an oath upon a ring. Nuns were ‘wed’ to Christ with a gold ring; and in the form of the Celtic Cross, the image of the ring and the Cross were even united as an image suitable for worship in a Christian church.
It was a matter of where a particular ring’s power was rooted. In the figure of the early Christianized Viking King Olaf, we see a real blood and thunder missionary who believed he knew where the source of one particular ring’s power was to be found. When the Faroe Islands were converted by Olaf, the heroic Faroese chieftain Sigmund Brestesson accepted Christianity as the new faith of his people. However, Olaf learned that Sigmund had kept in his posses-sion one sacred gold ring from the pagan temples. Knowing exactly the symbolic implications of Sigmund’s act, King Olaf demanded it be given up to the Church. The milder Christian virtues were not yet apparent in King Olaf. When Sigmund refused to give up the ring, Olaf had him murdered in his sleep.
The ring was also the symbol of the alchemist. The alchemist’s ring - in the form of a serpent swallowing its own tail - represented a quest for knowledge that was forbidden by the Church. Alchemists were often executed as sorcerers or magicians. The practices of these alchemists were often linked with their rings. The real or imagined use and trade of such ‘rings of power’ were perceived as an evil that must be eradicated.
The medieval Frenchman Le Layer, in his curious study Des Spectres, wrote about the trade and believed use of such rings:
With regard to demons whom they imprison in rings, or charms, the magicians of the school of Salamanca and Toledo, and their master Picatrix, together with those in Italy who made traffic of this kind of ware, knew better than to say whether or not they had appeared to those who had them in possession or bought them. And truly I cannot speak without horror of those who pretend such vulgar familiarity with them, even to speaking of the nature of each particular demon shut up in a ring; whether he be a Mercurial, Jovial, Saturnine, Martial, or Aphrodisiac spirit; in what form he is wont to appear when required; how many times in the night he wakes his possessor; whether benign or cruel in disposition; whether he can be transferred to another; and if, once possessed, he can alter the natural temperament, so as to render men of Saturnine com- plexion Jovial, or the Jovials Saturnine, and so on.
Because of constant persecution, alchemists cloaked their studies in secrecy and wrote up their experiments and formulae in codified records. The twentieth century’s leading historian of religions, Mirca Eliade, concluded that alchemical studies were transmitted mystically, just as poetry uses fables and parables. In alchemy, Eliade wrote: ‘What we are dealing with here is a SECRET LANGUAGE such as we meet among shamans and secret societies and among the mystics of the traditional religions.’
This ‘secret language’ is strongly reminiscent of the Exeter Book’s ‘magic speech’ of the ring. It seems likely that we are dealing with the same kind of cryptic communication. The ‘magic speech’ of the ring and the ‘secret language’ of alchemy are one. The dominance of the symbol of the ring in pagan religions - and in all shamanistic tribal cultures who use metal - is related to the ring’s alchemical origins.
The secret of the ring is in its making. To make a ring, one must have the knowledge to smelt and forge metal. The ‘secret language’ of the alchemist symbolized by the ring was his knowledge of metallurgy. Ultimately, this is concerned with the secret of the smelting and forging of iron, which is believed to have been discovered around 1000 bc in the region of the Caucasian Mountains. It was the atomic secret of its day, a secret that was closely guarded: where the ore was mined, how the metal was extracted, how it was forged into weapons and tools.
Those who possessed the secret conquered and often exterminated those who did not. The Iron Age transformed nations of timid shepherds and farmers into ferocious warriors capable of catastrophic feats of destruction on their once powerful, and now subjugated, neighbours. The hero who won the alchemist’s ‘ring’ in the form of the secret of iron-smelting literally saved his nation.
The arts of the smith and the occult sciences are overlapping techniques handed down as trade secrets with their own rites and rituals. The mysteries of initiation rites and the secret language of the rituals of the trade became symbols in mythic tales.
Robert Graves, the poet and scholar of myth, gives us an excellent example of decoding the ‘secret language’ of myth in his analysis of the Cyclopses, those one-eyed giants of Greek mythology. The Cyclopses were the counterparts of the Teutonic Dwarfs. Like the Dwarfs (and even Tolkien’s Dwarves) they were a race of smiths who lived beneath the mountains and forged wondrous weapons.
Cyclopses seem to have been a guild of early helladic bronze-smiths. Cyclops means ‘ring-eyed’ (not ‘one-eyed’) and they are likely to have been tattooed with concentric rings on their forehead, just as the Thracians continued to tattoo themselves until classical times. Concentric rings are part of the mysteries of smith-craft … The Cyclopses were one-eyed also in the sense that smiths often shade one eye with a patch against flying sparks. Later, their identity was forgotten and became fanciful.
Many scholars, from J. G. Frazer in The Golden Bough to Jessie Weston in From Ritual to Romance, have demonstrated how the rituals and rites of fertility cults connected with agriculture have manifested themselves in the language of mythology. What is less commonly recognized is the profound impact the rituals and rites of metallurgy have had on myth.
However, it is not so much the techniques of metallurgy that are conveyed in these myths, but the secret rituals of initiation into those cults and the spiritual rites practised within the guild, which evolve into the symbols of myth. The symbolic language of the ring quest, at its most profound, is concerned with the ‘spiritual’ consequences of the Bronze and Iron Ages, which changed forever the human condition and perception of the world.
Mirca Eliade emphasizes this point: ‘Before changing the face of the world the Iron Age engendered a large number of rites, myths and symbols which have reverberated throughout the spiritual history of humanity.’
If one looks at the ring quest myths of most cultures, there are certain constants for the hero in his pursuit of the ring: the magician, the smith, the warrior, the sword, the dwarf, the maiden, the treasure, and the dragon. These all relate originally to the rites and processes of metallurgy, and later to the symbolic ‘secret language’ of the alchemist’s ring.
In the Lord of the Rings we have all the elements of the ring quest, and yet something wholly original in his own War of the Ring.