There has been endless speculation on what the One Ring in The Lord of the Rings might be said to represent. While Tolkien was famously dismissive of all suggestions of ‘allegory’, he was open to the idea of ‘applicability’. That is, while the Ring should not be said to ‘stand for’ one thing in particular, a critical analysis need not deny that it has resonance with many things familiar to our own world.

The possibilities are numerous. Nuclear power, capitalism, the rise of industrialisation… The Great Evil takes countless forms and is necessarily subjective, and it is not my intention to displace any of those possible examples of ‘applicability’.

But I want to begin my own analysis from a feature of the Ring that is often overlooked. There is one aspect of it which I feel deserves more attention, and which is the most apparently harmless of its properties. This is the Ring’s power to make its wearer invisible.

Close your eyes for a moment and imagine. Imagine that you have the power to become invisible. Let me suggest that some of the thoughts immediately entering your head are decidedly mischievous? Perhaps immoral? Wicked even? No matter how strict your personal code of morality, did not the thought that you could become invisible instantly tempt you towards behaviour that is not normally in your character? You can become invisible. You can spy, steal, eavesdrop, blackmail, terrify, gain and use forbidden knowledge — the list is long. And you can never be caught. You are above any kind of retribution. The unspoken moral code you were living by a few moments ago now seems not merely outdated, but positively irrelevant.

That is not to say that everyone who possessed this ability would at once become a bad person. On the contrary, one may desire only to use one’s invisibility for good — as a mother might read the secret diary of her daughter to see if she’s in some kind of trouble. But once you cross that line, once you begin to break the rules, it becomes harder and harder to make a distinction between right and wrong. Is it right to steal, invisibly, money to feed the poor? Is it right to hurt, invisibly, people who deserve to be hurt? It is? Is it right to decide, invisibly, who deserves to be hurt? Already the boundary is blurred — indeed, the dividing line between good and evil is fading into invisibility just as you have done.

To restate the point: to be invisible is to be beyond the reach of everyday morality. For human morality depends upon outside eyes watching us. For Tolkien this includes God, but even for atheists there are countless observers to define our moral boundaries. If one cannot be seen, one cannot be held to account. If one cannot be held to account, then one is effectively above and beyond responsibility (responsibility insofar as it means ‘having to answer for one’s actions’). But, you say, what about conscience? What about the ‘superego’, one’s own inner ‘observing eye’? There is no doubt it could keep the you in check for a while, depending on how strong a sense of right you had initially. But just as, when standing on one leg, you will eventually overbalance if unable to keep your eyes fixed on a point of reference, so, as an entity outside morality, you will eventually and inevitably begin to drift.

One may protest that this model is merely a kind of ‘moral relativism’ — the widely discredited idea that good and evil are simple dictates of society. Tolkien himself as a theist would disagree with this philosophy. I am not trying to suggest that good and evil are constructs that cease to have meaning if one removes oneself from society — becomes ‘invisible’. What I am suggesting is that invisibility, literal or metaphorical, creates overpoweringly fertile conditions for evil impulses to flourish. A person with no evil impulses at all would be quite unaffected by invisibility (=unaccountability). But who on Earth (or Middle-Earth) can claim to be that?

And so to the Ring. The Ring is an attractive trinket that renders the wearer invisible. When Smeagol first starts to wear the Ring, it is as an aid to pranks and acts of minor malice. Aside from his initial deed of murder, none of Smeagol’s early acts with the Ring involve any great evil. He uses it as we would surely use such a power — for mischief — and gradually it ostracises him from the social and moral world.

Gandalf describes the Ring’s power of invisibility as a kind of toy to ensnare the curious. But, as illustrated above, it is also a device to appeal to the capacity for evil hidden in all of us. It can take something as simple as invisibility for this evil to surface. H. G. Wells demonstrates this effectively in The Invisible Man — it was Wells’s hypothesis that an invisible man would necessarily become a tyrant and psychopath.

So what is the Ring? What does it represent? The Ring’s superficial power (invisibility) can be seen to symbolise its wider power as wielded by Sauron. Just as invisibility removes the individual from the world of human morality, so the Ring can be said to remove the wielder from a world where right and wrong have any meaning. Put another way: the Ring lets the wielder make their own rules, irrespective of good or evil. The Ring has the capacity to put you beyond reproach — which surely is one definition of Power.

As an invisible man will make up his own morality as he goes along, so the Ring’s wielder can pass outside existing ‘rules’ and define his own. Just as Satan in Paradise Lost says, ‘Evil be thou my Good’, so Sauron can prescribe his own actions and what he considers to be ‘right’. Since Sauron, like Satan, is alone and friendless, this ‘right’ comes down to the whims of his dark mind and no other considerations. This travesty of a morality, devoid of all responsibility, is clearly no morality at all. It is the absence of morality. It is Evil.

By its superficial power of rendering its wearer invisible, the Ring echoes its deeper power. It represents a breaking away from morality — a license to listen only to oneself. It might thus be described as symbolising something like ‘anti-morality’ (fittingly, there seems to be no existing word to describe it more elegantly than that). When you are outside morality, with no-one and nothing else guiding your actions — surely no power could be more ultimate, or ultimately hollow, than that.

Gandalf, Galadriel and Sam are quick to understand this. Such power is not really power at all, but a seductive shadow. Those who would become a law unto themselves — even with initially ‘good’ intentions — quickly become like the Dark Lord himself: alone, friendless, and thoroughly evil.

It is my assertion that this aspect of evil is what Tolkien sought to highlight through the symbolism of the Ring. Through it, he seems to be making a point that to be good involves visibility — living in the eyes of others — and that no-one can withdraw totally into themselves and remain good. This is seen in the turning to evil of Melkor (see The Silmarillion) and in the behaviour of Ungoliant and Saruman too, amongst others. Good is not an absolute, it is not a set of rules or something one can maintain by oneself. It involves a responsibility towards others, towards the beings we share the world with, perhaps even to a higher wisdom — which of course is what makes it so much harder than Evil.

--Nick Green