Well that's a depressing thought! Let's hope the "Free
peoples" can once again resist.
I have to say, as an aside, that I've never been comfortable with
Tolkien's answer to the question of what happened to
the Ring upon the destruction of
Numenor, and I suspect he wasn't either; it always struck me as a somewhat uneasy rationalisation. I prefer to think that he would have left it behind, safeguarded, if you like, by powerful spells. Reasons could be found in some of the posts above; for one thing, in Numenor, he would not have need to worry about what the
Elves in
Middle Earth were doing; and of course, there were no Rings where he was going. His power and majesty were undiminished, if the Ring was in his possession, whether he was wearing it or not; its physical distance from him shouldn't have mattered. His innate power as a
Maia alone, if turned to
evil, would have been enough to corrupt Numenorians longing for something they couldn't have -- immortality, especially -- even without the Ring.
Which brings us back to the original question: why did he need the ring? And that leads to the question of how the ring functions. Actually, at least two questions: how does it function in the story, and how does it function as a literary
symbol? That Tolkien was interested in the latter is shown from his short discussion of it in "On Fairy Stories", significantly from around the time he was beginning LOTR, and the conception of
Bilbo's ring was changing to that of The Ring.
Of course, the question of what the Ring represents has been a subject of debate and argument ever since the book's publication, some serious, some silly. Many will have read Isaac Azimov's essay from years ago, expressing a then-common idea that the Ring is a symbol for "
technology", pure and simple -- that he then argues against. That seemed a short-sighted strawman argument, to me and others.
Another, more serious conception, is that the Ring represents "Power", which brings Acton's Law into play, as pointed out by T. A. Shippey, and there are certainly cogent arguments to be made in favor of it. But I 've always been a bit dissatisfied with that idea; Tolkien never seemed to me to have conceived of power as inherently evil: witness
Gandalf's answer to
Gimli's observation that he now seems "dangerous", in
the White Rider chapter.
And this early exchange with
Frodo:
"You are wise and powerful. Will you not take the Ring"?
"No!. . .With that power I should have power too great and terrible".
Frodo is not mistaken; Gandalf is indeed powerful; but there is clearly a grave difference between Gandalf's power, and that represented in the Ring. What is it? Notice the ambiguity in his words: "With
that power. . .". Is he talking about a
level of power -- that the amount of power in the Ring is too much for anyone to handle without becoming corrupted? As I said, there are good arguments for that view.
But what if he is referring to a
kind of power, one which is inherently evil, or at least corruptible, in and of itself? What would that power be?
I'll close this already too-long post by offering my own tentative suggestion, an idea sparked by the critic Northrop Frye: discussing demonic imagery, he describes one individual pole as
"the tyrant-leader, inscrutable, ruthless, melancholy, and with an insatiable will, who commands loyalty only if he is egocentric enough to represent the collective ego of his followers".
On that reading, the Ring could be seen as representing pure, unadulterated, or perhaps even unlimited ego, separated from,and therefore unconstrained by (since I'm using Freudian trms here), the "superego" of
Sauron's original
Ainur nature.
Consider Gandalf's words: ". . .
hobbits as miserable slaves would please him far more than hobbits happy and free". Frodo's question,just before this, "Why would he want such slaves?" is a reasonable one; as Gandalf says, he doesn't "need" hobbits; by any rational criterion of power, the payoff for enslaving
the Shire wouldn't be worth the effort.
But from the viewpoint of pure egotism, it would be absolutely necessary; any resistance to the egotist's will is an injury to the self, at least as the ego sees it. For an unrestrained, unlimited ego such as I have in mind, all existence must reflect that self-image; the world, in a sense, must become "me".
That, it seems to me, at least gives one reason for the refusal of
the Wise to take the Ring: the Bearer would simply replace one egocentric world with his own. And that, in terms of Middle Earth mythology, would be a rebellion against
Eru, no matter how "noble" his intent.
