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| othernames=Ruling Ring, Master-ring, Great Ring, the One, Ring of Rings, Ring of Power, Ring of Doom, Isildur's Bane, the Burden, Preciouss
| othernames=Ruling Ring, Master-ring, Great Ring, the One, Ring of Rings, Ring of Power, Ring of Doom, Isildur's Bane, the Burden, Precious
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Revision as of 17:43, 18 July 2015

"I shan't call it the end, till we've cleared up the mess." — Sam
This article or section needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of article quality.
The name The One Ring refers to more than one character, item or concept. For a list of other meanings, see The One Ring (disambiguation).
The One Ring
John Howe - The One Ring 03.jpg
Other namesRuling Ring, Master-ring, Great Ring, the One, Ring of Rings, Ring of Power, Ring of Doom, Isildur's Bane, the Burden, Precious
AppearancePlain gold ring with Black Speech inscriptions made visible by heat

The One Ring, also known as the Ruling Ring, Great Ring of Power, and Isildur's Bane, was an artifact created by the Dark Lord Sauron in the Second Age for the purpose of ruling over the Free peoples of Middle-earth, mainly the Elves.

History

Origin and creation

Ted Nasmith - The Forging of the One

During the Second Age the Dark Lord Sauron persuaded Celebrimbor and his people, the Elven smiths of Eregion, to forge the Rings of Power. Secretly, Sauron went back to Orodruin and forged the One Ring in its fires.[1]

It was made as the Master Ring, which would control the others, and dominate their bearers. Sauron had to let much of his will and power go into it. Thus, he was more powerful than ever before when he wore the Ring, as he possessed the power of those he controlled; but the drawback that Sauron never predicted, was that he would become much weaker when he lost it. Though it appeared to be made of simple gold, the Ring was virtually impervious to damage, and could only be destroyed by the very fires where it had originally been forged.[2]

The Dark Years

Celebrimbor and the other Ring-bearers realized his treachery and took off their Rings, and went to war with him: the War of the Elves and Sauron destroyed Eregion and devastated much of Eriador. Sauron was able to claim all the Rings of Power (except the Three) and distribute them.[1] Durin the time known as the Dark Years, Sauron became master of almost all of Middle-earth beyond the coasts and was known as the Dark Lord of Mordor. He raised Barad-dûr near Mount Doom; constructed the Black Gate of Mordor to prevent invasion; and raised massive armies of Orcs, Trolls, and Men, chiefly Easterlings and Southrons.

The power of the Ring allowed Sauron to link with it some of his works, like Barad-dûr.[2] With the Ring he controlled Nine Rings that were given to nine mortal Men, who were corrupted and turned into the Nazgûl, his chief servants. However he was unable to control the Dwarf-lords who held Seven of them, because of their different and more hardy nature.[1]

Sauron's rise offended the arrogant Númenóreans and came to Middle-earth with great force of arms, and Sauron's forces fled. Realizing he could not defeat the Númenóreans with military strength, Sauron allowed himself to be taken as a hostage to Númenor by King Ar-Pharazôn. There, he quickly grew from captive to advisor and was known as Tar-Mairon; he corrupted many Númenóreans using the power of the Ring[3] and eventually convinced the king to rebel against the Valar, resulting to the Fall of Númenor. Sauron was diminished in the destruction and his spirit (presumably with the Ring) fled back to Mordor, where he slowly rebuilt his strength.

When the Faithful Númenóreans founded the Realms in Exile, Sauron begun an offense against Gondor; the Elves and the Númenóreans formed the Last Alliance against Sauron, who was vanquished by Elendil and Gil-galad. Prince Isildur then cut the ring from his fingers and took it for himself.

After Sauron

The Ring incited its corrupting effect on Isildur, who wished to seize it instead of destroying it. Isildur realized its properties, such as the strange letters visible for short time after he removed it; he considered it precious, and an heirloom of his Kingdom of Gondor and documented it in a scroll he wrote in Minas Tirith.[2] He kept it with him on his way back to Arnor, but during an ambush, the Ring betrayed him by slipping off his finger and was lost in the River Gladden just before he was killed in Third Age 2.

The Ring remained hidden in the riverbed for over two millennia, until it was discovered on a fishing trip by a Stoor named Déagol. Again, the Ring's evil powers acted on his friend and relative Sméagol, who murdered him and stole the Ring. Over many ages, he was changed by the Ring's influence into the creature called Gollum (which is what he called himself, as it was similar to a sound he made). The Ring manipulated Gollum into settling in the Misty Mountains near Mirkwood, where Sauron was beginning to resurface. There he and it remained for nearly five hundred years, until the Ring tired of him and, wished to be found by someone else (and eventually find its way back to Sauron), it fell off his finger as Gollum was returning from killing a Goblin.

Darrell Sweet - The Riddle-game

Indeed, the hobbit Bilbo Baggins found the Ring while he was lost in the caverns of the Misty Mountains, near Gollum's lair. After losing the Riddle-game to Bilbo, Gollum went to get his "Precious" (as he always called the One Ring) so he could kill and eat him, but fell into a rage when he found it missing. Deducing that Bilbo had it from his last riddle—"What have I got in my pocket?"—Gollum chased him through the caves, not knowing that the Hobbit had discovered the Ring's powers of invisibility and was following him to the cave's exit. Bilbo escaped Gollum and the Orcs who inhabited the Misty Mountains by remaining invisible, but left that part out of the story he told the Dwarves he was traveling with. Gandalf, who was also traveling with the Dwarves, later forced the real story out of Bilbo, and was immediately suspicious of the Ring's powers and guessed it was more than a handy trinket.

Gollum, meanwhile, eventually left the Misty Mountains to track down and reclaim the Ring. He wandered for decades, only to be captured and interrogated by Sauron himself, to whom he revealed the existence of Bilbo and the Shire.

Paul Rivoche - Frodo and Gandalf

In T.A. 3001, following Gandalf's counsel, Bilbo gave the Ring to his nephew and adopted heir Frodo. This first willing sacrifice of the Ring in its history sparked the chain of events which eventually led to its unmaking. Gandalf was suspicious about the effect it had on Bilbo and went to Minas Tirith and found Isildur's account on the Ring, being lost since his death. He returned to Hobbiton and tested Frodo's Ring in fire, only to confirm his fears, since the letters described by Isildur appeared inside its rim.

By this time Sauron had begun to regain his power, and the Dark Tower in Mordor had been rebuilt. The War of the Ring had begun. Gandalf urged Frodo to carry the Ring to Rivendell where the Wise would decide their actions. Despite Gandalf's warnings, Frodo did wear the Ring several times during his journey. On Weathertop he was tempted by the Ring to wear it and evade the Ringwraiths, only to to make him more visible to them, and to be wounded by a Morgul-blade.

In order to prevent the recapture of the Ring, Frodo and eight other companions set out from Rivendell for Mordor in an attempt to destroy the Ring in the fires of Mount Doom. During the quest, Frodo gradually became more and more susceptible to the Ring's power, and feared that it was going to corrupt him. When he and Sam discovered that Gollum was on their trail and "tamed" him into guiding them to Mordor, he began to feel a strange bond with the wretched, treacherous creature, seeing a possible future of himself that he felt he had to save in order to save himself. Gollum gave in to the Ring's temptation, however, and betrayed them to the spider Shelob who stung Frodo. Believing Frodo to be dead, Sam bore the Ring himself for a short time, and glimpsed its power, although he never gave in to it.

Sam rescued Frodo from a band of Orcs at the Tower of Cirith Ungol and returned the Ring to him, but feared that the toll it was taking was too great. It nearly was: although Frodo and Sam, followed by Gollum, eventually arrived at Mount Doom, Frodo decided to keep the Ring for himself rather than destroy it, evincing its corruptive nature. However, he was attacked by Gollum, who bit off the finger holding the Ring before falling into the fires of Mount Doom, finally destroying the Ring, and Sauron with it.

Appearance

Physically the Ring resembled a geometrically perfect circle of pure gold, this perfection and purity being part of its allure. Unlike the lesser Rings, it bore no gem. It seems to have been able to expand and contract, in order to fit its wearer's finger or slip from it treacherously. Its identity could be determined by a simple (though little-known) test: when heated in fire, fine lines of fire, forming a script, would appear running along on the inside and outside of the Ring.[4] The letters were an inscription in Tengwar of the Black Speech of Mordor, citing a section of poetry from part of its lore:

Ash nazg durbatulûk, ash nazg gimbatul,
ash nazg thrakatulûk, agh burzum-ishi krimpatul.

Whose translation is:

One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.

Effects

The One Ring by Roger Thomasson.

Being endowed with Sauron's will, the Ring was completely evil, and even when separated from him, it had somehow a will of its own, ultimately serving its master. When a person wore the Ring, he would be partly "shifted" out of the physical realm into the Wraith-world. There, if he managed to consciously subdue the Ring's will with his own, he could theoretically wield a large portion of the powers that Sauron had before he lost the Ring; notably, he could control and enslave the will of others. A side effect (but usually the first effect noticed) of the Ring was that it made the wearer invisible to physical beings like living Men (but highly visible to spiritual beings like the Nazgûl), dimmed the wearer's sight, and sharpened his hearing. When mortals wore the ring, only their faint and shaky shadow could be seen, and only in the full light of the sun.[5] This "shadow world" was the world which Wraiths inhabited, but also where the Calaquendi (Elves of Light) lived at the same time as the normal world and held great power: as was evidenced by Frodo viewing Glorfindel at the Ford of Bruinen near Rivendell[6] and later explained by Gandalf[7].

Part of the nature of the Ring was that it slowly but inevitably corrupted its wearer, regardless of any intentions to the contrary. Whether this was specifically designed into the Ring's magic or is simply an artifact of its evil origins is unknown. (Sauron might be expected to endow his One Ring with such a property, but he probably never intended anyone besides himself to wear it. It may be a side-effect of the portion of Sauron's will that lies within the Ring, influencing the wearer.) For this reason the Wise, including Gandalf, Elrond and Galadriel, refused to wield it in their own defence, but instead determined that it must be destroyed. It appears that Hobbits, being more pure of heart than Men, and far less powerful than Elves, were the ideal vessels to resist its seductive power; this explains why Frodo and Bilbo bore it for long periods of time with very little ill effect. Even Gollum had not turned into a Wraith after 500 years of bearing the Ring.

The enigmatic Tom Bombadil was unaffected by the Ring, or rather, the Ring had no effect on him. This may be explained in many ways. (See the article on Tom Bombadil, which includes some theories.)

Inspiration

The One Ring may have been inspired by the Ring of Silvianus and its inscribed curse. The hypothesis is based on Tolkien gaining knowledge about the Ring of Silvianus through the archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler, for whom Tolkien wrote the text "The Name 'Nodens'".[8] However, Tolkien scholars Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull have pointed out that there is no "evidence, or good reason to believe, that Tolkien was inspired by the Roman ring".[9]

Portrayal in Adaptations

2011: The Lord of the Rings: War in the North:

The One Ring is shown in the introduction of the game. In the Prancing Pony Aragorn refers to Frodo and the Ring as a "Hobbit with an important burden".[10]

See also

References


Rings of Power
The One Ring | Three Rings (Narya · Nenya · Vilya) | Seven Rings (Ring of Thrór) | Nine Rings