Does it have agency of its own, independent of its wearer? Or is it just the perception of the one who possesses it, some strange paranoid psychosis which makes him both attached to and suspicious of the Ring? This theme will come up again in the book, and is fascinating precisely because of its ambiguity. The way he describes it, it seems as though the Ring is not an inanimate object after all, but it is sentient, surveilling everything that is going on. It’s creepy – the Ring is like an eye? An eye that watches Bilbo. But when I read that line this time, it made me stop. When the rest of the epic fills your reminiscences, it is easy to overlook early details like this. Sometimes I have felt it was like an eye looking at me.” Had it not been for Gandalf’s intervention, Bilbo Baggins might have been wandering in the wilderness with the Ring, with no protection, and – unbeknownst to him – in mortal danger.Īs for that Ring, Bilbo’s own words corroborate Gandalf’s suspicions about it: If we didn’t know him better, we would wonder why it matters so much that Bilbo wants to keep his ring – why should he not? But we innately trust Gandalf’s reasons, and thank goodness he prevails in the end. It is a surprise, therefore, to see Gandalf raising his voice against the old hobbit, it’s a sudden jolt after the light-hearted Shire-talk and the Party. His cantankerousness was never a real threat. Moreover, we always saw Gandalf sticking up for Bilbo, and we got used to seeing the paternalistic side to him in the prequel. Tolkien did such a good job in setting Gandalf up as a figure of wisdom and confidence in The Hobbit, that when he is troubled by something, the reader knows the matter is serious. The two traits, or rather curses, bestowed by the Ring on its owner – unnaturally long life and covetousness – are exposed to the reader via Gandalf. It is Gandalf’s reaction in particular that raises the alarm for the reader – he watches Bilbo, “curiously and closely”, and when Bilbo calls the Ring his “precious”, it is Gandalf who reminds him and us that “it has been called that before”. When Bilbo uses it again to disappear from his Birthday Party, we don’t think much of it it is only when Bilbo has his unsettling quarrel with Gandalf at Bag End that we sense something is not quite right. One final thing we took note of from The Hobbit was that it was once obsessively possessed by Gollum.
This power was used by Bilbo to help him and his company get out of several tricky situations, and thus we have no reason to fear the Ring, rather we are inclined to see it as something useful. Despite its plain appearance, it also has the extraordinary capacity to make the wearer invisible. All we know about it before now is that it is a plain gold band, picked up by Bilbo in the dark depths of the misty mountains. It is in this chapter that we get our first glimpse of the power and evil influence of the Ring. The morning after the night before – Drawing with ink and wide nib
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