what dies the lord of the rings ring say

When characters in the book are confronted with evil, its effect on them is terrible. You get a sense of how powerful and oppressive Evil is from this story – how seemingly immovable, how unlikely to ever be overthrown. Just as Grima says of Saruman, “how I hate him! I wish I could leave him!” (983) – but he cannot. Evil is thus portrayed as ensnaring – a force that can capture the will, a power to which one may lose control, a trap from which what half-longs to be released, but half-desires to retain. Gollum both loves and hates the Ring – and is consumed by it. Much more true to life, and more dramatic in a movie, is a character like Gollum, with his many rises and falls, his two sides, his internal battles – his wretchedness, pitiable state, his final inability to break away from evil. James Bond movies have a basically two-dimensional view of evil – you have the good guys, and the bad guys, and its all pretty superficial. The character Gollum and his moral ambivalence speaks volumes about a realistic view of evil. All of this points to, I think, the seductive nature of evil – its a force that allures us from within as well as attacks us from without, and thus must be resisted as well as opposed. Its interesting that Tolkien in his letters insists that Frodo did not fail – that his captivity to the Ring was inevitable. But I do not choose now to do what I came to do.

Equally significant is the fact that – at what I think is the most dramatic and most powerful moment in the story’s plot – Frodo cannot destroy the ring. Of all the plots Tolkien could have chosen, he chose this one, where the great goal toward which all the good characters are working is not the conquering of a powerful evil with even greater power, but the destruction of evil by resisting its power. Its very telling, for example, that the Ring must be destroyed rather than used (as Boromir thinks it should be) or even hidden (as Denethor thinks it should be). I understand fallenness and evil much better from reading this book. The greatest theme of this book, for me at least, is the seductive, enslaving, oppressive power of evil. Looking at evil, good, and good’s triumph over evil, each in turn, will bear this out. If I had to condense what I learned from The Lord of the Rings into one sentence, I would say this: good does not need to destroy evil good needs only to resist evil, and when it does that, evil destroys itself.

What dies the lord of the rings ring say