CHAPTER 4

THE DARKENING OF THE RING

“It is mine, I tell you. My own. My Precious. Yes, my Precious.”

The wizard’s face remained grave and attentive, and only a flicker in his deep eyes showed that he was startled and indeed alarmed. “It has been called that before,” he said, “but not by you.”

“But I say it now. And why not? Even if Gollum said the same once. It’s not his now, but mine. And I shall keep it, I say.”

Gandalf stood up. He spoke sternly. “You will be a fool if you do, Bilbo,” he said. “You make that clearer with every word you say. It has got far too much hold on you. Let it go! And then you can go yourself, and be free.”1

Gandalf’s face, “startled and indeed alarmed,” seems to reflect the face of the reader as we begin to sense that something terrible has happened since the happy ending of The Hobbit. In the earlier book, the power of sin manifested itself in the dragon sickness and in the darkness that descended upon Thorin Oakenshield, the Sackville-Bagginses, the Master of Lake-Town, and, indeed, Bilbo himself. The Ring was, however, a relatively harmless and seemingly benign presence. Indeed, it was a priceless tool, the magic of which saved Bilbo’s life on more than one occasion. Without its power, the might of Smaug could hardly have been overcome. After reading The Hobbit, we might, in our heart of hearts, wish for such a wonderful thing as Bilbo’s magic ring.

And yet now, in the sequel, the Ring has taken on some terrible and alarming power that seems to have possessed the hobbit with its demonic presence. What horrific thing has happened to Bilbo and his precious Ring?

Well might we and the wizard be startled and alarmed.

We should, however, have guessed that something was afoot as soon as we’d read the ominous fanfare with which Tolkien raises the curtain on the new, darker epic:

One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,

One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them

In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.

At first, even Gandalf seems uncertain of the true nature of the Ring and the power it possesses. It is only when he returns to the Shire some time later that he is able to divulge the dark and deadly secret. He tells Frodo that the Ring is far more powerful than he’d ever dared to think, “so powerful that in the end it would utterly overcome anyone of mortal race who possessed it. It would possess him.”2 Now the Ring’s demonic power is truly and terrifyingly revealed. We discover that those who possess it are possessed by it.

On one level, the Ring has now taken on the function of the dragon sickness in The Hobbit. If we become too attached to our possessions we will become possessed by them, or, as Christ tells us, where our treasure is, there our heart will be also.3

Gandalf reveals to the increasingly frightened hobbit that wearing the Ring not only is perilous but also leads to a fate that is quite literally worse than death. The one who uses the Ring to make himself invisible begins to fade until, eventually, if he uses it habitually, he disappears permanently, being doomed to walk forever “in the twilight under the eye of the Dark Power that rules the Rings.”4 Recalling Tolkien’s signification of the Ring as synonymous with sin, it can be seen that the act of using the Ring is synonymous with the act of sinning. Putting the Ring on is putting sin on. The effect of sin is to cause the sinner to fade from the good world of light and love that God has made, becoming invisible in this world while becoming more visible to “the eye of the Dark Power” that rules the sins and ultimately the sinner. As Gandalf will tell Frodo after the hobbit is almost killed by the Ringwraiths while wearing the Ring, “[Y]ou were in gravest peril while you wore the Ring, for then you were half in the wraith-world yourself, and they might have seized you. You could see them, and they could see you.”5 The one who becomes addicted to the power of the Ring (sin) will ultimately exile himself from the world of light and life, condemning himself to permanent invisibility in the land of shadow.