Addiction to power in The Lord of the Rings

• 1. Introduction

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  The theme of addiction to power in The Lord of the Rings begins with a murder. Sméagol, a Stoorish Hobbit, spotted the Ring his friend Déagol had found in the River Anduin and killed him to take it. That Ring had been forged by the Dark Lord Sauron in the fires of Mount Doom during the Second Age of Middle-earth. Sauron poured much of his own power as a Maia, a supernatural being, into it to gain dominion over Middle-earth.

  What the Ring gave Sméagol was five centuries of ruin. Gandalf later described what the creature Gollum had become: "He hated it and loved it, as he hated and loved himself. He could not get rid of it. He had no will left in the matter."

  That loss of will is the question Tolkien builds his entire story around. Why do some characters refuse the Ring? Why do others fall despite their virtue? And what does each person's response reveal about who they truly are?

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• 2. Five Groups

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  Agnes Perkins and Helen Hill, writing in A Tolkien Compass, arrange the major characters into five groups based on how power affects them. The first group is those already wholly corrupted when the story opens. Sauron leads this group, already corrupted long before the Ring was forged. Alongside him are the nine Ringwraiths, who were entirely taken over by their own Rings of Power. Gollum, though a split character rather than an uncomplicated villain, belongs here as well. The problem, Perkins and Hill note, runs deeper than the Ring: some characters were corrupted long before the Rings of Power were forged.

  Shelob, the giant spider, heads the second group: those of an earlier time, for whom the Ring holds no meaning. Shelob is unquestionably evil but interested only in food, not power. Treebeard is, in Perkins and Hill's account, too old to desire power. Tom Bombadil is in complete control within his own domain and "unwilling to go outside his self-imposed boundaries."

  Saruman, Gandalf, and Galadriel form the third group: those powerful enough to wield the Ring, who respond to it in very different ways. Saruman succumbs to pride and desire without ever possessing the Ring. When Gandalf arrives at the ruins of Isengard and offers Saruman freedom, Saruman is too thoroughly corrupted to choose. Galadriel faces the temptation directly, admits her heart has greatly desired what Frodo offers, then refuses entirely.

  Boromir and Denethor, among the Men of Gondor in the fourth group, both desire the Ring. Faramir alone "understands the danger of the Ring" and refuses. Denethor desires the Ring but is destroyed by his own pride before he can act. The fifth group is the heroes: Frodo, Sam, and Aragorn. Aragorn holds the right to rule as heir to the throne and gains power by moral right, needing the Ring not at all.

  The scholar Patricia Spacks argues that Saruman and Gollum share one defining trait: both submit willingly to an evil power. The effect, she writes, is of gradual destruction, even for a character who starts out mainly virtuous.

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• 3. Plato's Shadow

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  Plato's Republic contains a ring more than two thousand years older than Tolkien's. The Ring of Gyges granted invisibility and posed a pointed question: would a just person stay moral if crime went undetected? A character named Glaucon argues the cynical case, that people are only good because they fear being caught. Plato counters that immoral life corrupts the soul. A truly moral person would have peace and happiness without any Ring of Power.

  The philosopher Eric Katz uses this ancient debate as a lens for reading Tolkien. Where Plato argues that moral corruption will occur, Tolkien demonstrates it through the specific choices of real characters. Each character's response to the Ring, Katz writes, is Tolkien's distinct answer to the question Plato posed.

  Gollum is the starkest case. Faramir warns Frodo that while Gollum may not be wholly evil, "malice eats it like a canker, and the evil is growing." Boromir sees himself as a great warrior who will wield the Ring against Mordor for Gondor's sake. He is corrupted by the temptation of power, yet redeems himself by dying to defend Merry and Pippin from Orcs. Galadriel, whom Katz calls "strong and virtuous," sees clearly what she would become and refuses: "I pass the test... I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel." Tom Bombadil is exempt from the Ring's corrupting pull and from its gift of invisibility alike. Sam uses the Ring faithfully in a moment of genuine need, then rejects its offer of further power. Frodo is gradually corrupted but saved, in the end, by his earlier mercy toward Gollum and by Gollum's own desperate longing for the Ring.

  Katz concludes that Tolkien's answer to Plato's question "Why be moral?" is "to be yourself."

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• 4. Power Corrupts

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  The Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey argues that treating power as a corrupting force, rather than a revealing one, is a distinctly modern idea. In medieval thinking, power was believed to show who a person already was, not to change them for the worse.

  The modern view crystallized, in Shippey's reading, with Lord Acton's 1887 statement: "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Acton continued: "Great men are almost always bad men," and Tolkien's narrative takes that assumption as its starting point.

  Shippey points to three writers contemporary with Tolkien who worked the same theme. George Orwell addressed it in Animal Farm in 1945. William Golding took it up in Lord of the Flies in 1954. T. H. White's The Once and Future King appeared in 1958. All three were exploring an idea that had little place in medieval thought.

  The nearest medieval equivalent, Shippey notes, is an Old English proverb: "man deþ swa he byþ þonne he mot swa he wile." A man does as he is, when he can do what he wants. Tolkien's world looks medieval in its setting but applies a thoroughly modern assumption about power's corrupting effect.

  Jack Brown observes that Tolkien witnessed the rise of communism and fascism after the First World War with disgust. Gandalf refuses the Ring for fear that using it would lead directly to tyranny. Shippey finds a contemporary political register in Boromir's speeches to the Fellowship. Boromir praises "the fearless" and then "the ruthless" as the way to victory. He portrays himself as a leader with "power of Command" and ends, in Shippey's reading, with a naked appeal to force.

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• 5. A Single Explanation

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  The literary critic Colin Manlove challenges what he calls an inconsistency in Tolkien's design. The Ring can be handed over relatively easily, as Sam and Bilbo both do. Removing it from Frodo by force, which Gollum does, does not break Frodo's mind as Gandalf had warned it would. Characters like Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli appear barely touched by the Ring at all.

  Shippey replies to Manlove's doubt with a single word: addictive. In the early stages, as with Bilbo and Sam, the addiction can still be shaken off. For those not yet hooked, the Ring's pull is no different from any ordinary temptation.

  Shippey calls the pattern "creeping corruption" and finds it in a series of quiet signals spread through the narrative. Bilbo grows sharply angry when Gandalf tries to coax him to give up the Ring. At that moment, he is briefly glimpsed as "a little wrinkled creature with a hungry face and bony groping hands." Isildur, centuries earlier, used language that echoes Gollum's: "It is precious to me, though I buy it with great pain." Later, when Bilbo encounters the Ring again in Rivendell, he experiences a powerful longing to hold it once more.

  Frodo's own progress follows the same arc through specific episodes. He uses the Ring cautiously at first, checking that Tom Bombadil has returned the real Ring. He slips it on by accident at the inn in Bree. At Weathertop the Nazgul compel him to use it. By Amon Hen he uses it freely, to escape from Boromir. He is, as Katz describes him, progressively weighed down physically and psychologically.

  Gollum's disintegration runs further and deeper. By the time Frodo meets him, Gollum has divided into two voices. One carries faint traces of the original Sméagol; the other is given wholly to the Ring. He is, in the end, "utterly destroyed" by its pull.

  Peter Jackson's film trilogy brought the addiction reading to a wider audience. Andy Serkis, who played Gollum, cited drug addiction as his inspiration for the performance. Douglas Kellner, a critical theory scholar, reads Gollum as "a cautionary warning as to what obsession with the Ring and addiction to power can do to someone." The film presents, in Kellner's reading, "a parable of addiction, as Gollum is torn apart by his need for the destructive substance."

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• 6. Overcoming the Pull

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  Sam alone, among all the Ring-bearers in Tolkien's story, gives up the Ring entirely of his own accord. His greatest temptation is a vision of himself as "Samwise the Strong, Hero of the Age, striding with a flaming sword across the darkened land." The vale of Gorgoroth becomes, in this vision, a garden of flowers. He sees it clearly, recognizes how quickly it would lead to defeat, and hands the Ring back to Frodo. What saves him, in Katz's analysis, is his love for Frodo and his "still unconquered plain hobbit-sense."

  The Tolkien scholar Patrick Curry argues that the addiction is not broken by any single, sweeping act of will. What ends it, he writes, is "countless acts of courage, kindness and help, both small and great, from unknown people and forces, in unforeseen circumstances." These moments together create the opportunity to do the right thing. What sustains those acts is a commitment to "the simple good things of life: food, water, green and growing things." Curry reads this as the principal message of Tolkien's writings and a source of genuine hope. One passage from Sam captures this: "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."

  Saruman's contrasting path is expressed in the three-word formula he uses to tempt Gandalf: "Knowledge, Rule, Order." The Episcopal priest and Tolkien scholar Fleming Rutledge notes that Saruman capitalizes these words "as though they were Powers." She finds in the phrasing an echo of Nazi slogans delivered in the German fashion. Against Saruman's formula, the half-elf Elrond describes the lust for power as "strength, domination, and hoarded wealth," then offers a counter-triad: "understanding, making, and healing." These softer, gentler things are, Rutledge explains, "more powerful than any conventional weapons."

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