culture; religion · 11 min
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Niccolò Machiavelli wrote that a prince must learn how not to be good. Thomas Hobbes argued that without an absolute sovereign, human life is brutal and short. Orwell imagined a system in which power exists for its own sake and wants nothing beyond its own perpetuation, and Kissinger built a whole career on the idea that power is a fact to be managed, and that treating it as a moral problem waiting to be solved is a waste of everyone’s time. Brilliant men, every one of them, and none went as far as a Catholic philologist from Birmingham who wrote stories about hobbits.
Tolkien put what he understood about power into a gold ring, inside a novel the literary academy looked down on for decades, and what he understood is something Western political theory tends to sidestep. The trouble with absolute power is not that evil people use it but that it corrupts the good, and it does so always and without exception, without waiting for time to pass or for some aggravating factor to turn up. That is the premise The Lord of the Rings is built on, and no political treatise has had the honesty, or the nerve, to follow it through to its final consequences.
First, then, what the Ring is not, since bad readings are everywhere. It is not an allegory of the atomic bomb. Tolkien said as much, explicitly and with some irritation, because people kept asking; the novel was conceived in the thirties, long before Hiroshima, and he loathed allegory as a literary form anyway. Nor is it “technology,” or “capitalism,” or “totalitarianism,” or any other abstraction you might care to plug in. The Ring is power, plain and unqualified, a force loose in the world that warps everything it touches.
The distinction matters. An allegory’s meaning is closed: it stands for X, you crack the equation, and there isn’t much left to say. A symbol gets inhabited, which is a different business from decoding, and the Ring as a symbol of power is inexhaustible for the same reason power is, because every generation and every person finds out how it works all over again, as though for the first time.
In a 1951 letter to Milton Waldman, his editor, Tolkien set this out with a clarity he didn’t always manage when talking about his own work. The Ring is the will to domination made into an object. It is not a weapon; it won’t destroy armies or conquer territory, at least not directly. It amplifies the bearer’s will until that will turns into dominion over others, and the trap is that the more powerful the bearer, the more useful he finds the Ring and the faster it corrupts him. So a hobbit can carry it for years, having no will to dominate anyone, while a wizard or a king would fall in days.
The first great political scene in The Lord of the Rings takes place in the Shire, in the sitting room at Bag End. There is no battle and no speech, only a conversation in which Frodo offers Gandalf the Ring.
Gandalf’s answer is, to my mind, the most intelligent thing ever said about power in a work of fiction. You might expect “I don’t want it.” He says the opposite, that he would want it too much, that with the Ring he would wield a terrible power, and that the urge to use it for good would be more than he could resist. “Do not tempt me,” he tells Frodo. “I dare not take it, not even to keep it safe. Through me it would wield a power too great and terrible.”
Gandalf understands, and this is where his wisdom really lies, that the Ring grows more dangerous the better its bearer is. A wicked being would simply do what he already meant to do, only more efficiently. A good one would start out wanting to heal the world and end up enslaving it, because the gap between “I want the world to be better” and “I want the world to be as I say” is a great deal narrower than anyone cares to admit.
There is something thoroughly anti-modern about this. Since the French Revolution, modern politics has rested on the premise that power in the right hands produces right outcomes, and that the thing to watch is who holds it. Tolkien disagrees. Power, for him, corrupts the right hands just as it corrupts the wrong ones, and only the route differs: the wrong hands reach for it out of cruelty or greed, the right ones out of compassion or a sense of justice, and both arrive at dominion. Once you have decided you know what is best for other people you no longer need their consent, and by then there isn’t much left to separate the tyrant from the saviour.
The Galadriel scene in Lothlórien is, in a sense, the most frightening in the novel, more so than Mordor or the Nazgûl, or Shelob for that matter. Frodo offers her the Ring and Galadriel hesitates. She is one of the oldest and most powerful beings in Middle-earth; she lived in Valinor and saw the light of the Trees, and has spent thousands of years resisting Sauron with wisdom and patience, and still she hesitates. For a moment she pictures herself with the Ring, and what she sees, far from any kingdom of terror, is a queen beautiful and terrible, adored by everyone and feared by no one, a power made of pure benevolence, all light and beauty. What drives her back is how perfect the fantasy is. “In place of a Dark Lord you would have a Queen, not dark but beautiful and terrible as the morning.”
She passes, though by what feels like the thinnest of margins, and she says so herself: “I pass the test. I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.” There is an enormous renunciation in that sentence, made by someone who agrees to shrink and grow old, which is what it costs to refuse power when power offers itself.
With Galadriel, Tolkien shows something political realists would rather not see. Virtue means resisting a temptation that doesn’t go away, and the resisting costs something. Galadriel leaves that scene older and nearer the end; she turns down the Ring and pays for it by accepting that her time in Middle-earth is running out. Refuse power and you lose the power you already had. Any honest politician would recognise that, since stepping down in time is the hardest decision there is. It means accepting irrelevance, and to a politician irrelevance feels a good deal like death.
Gandalf refuses the temptation and Galadriel resists it by a hair. With Boromir it is consummated, and what makes him such a good character is that his arguments are impeccable.
Boromir wants the Ring for Gondor, to defend his people and win the war, saving lives along the way, and never once asks for it on his own account. Any reasonable person sitting in a situation room would accept every argument he makes for using it. We have a weapon that can defeat the enemy and save thousands of lives, and we’re going to destroy it out of moral scruple? Seriously, with Sauron marching on our cities?
His is the realism of necessity, the strongest argument there is in politics, because with the enemy at the gate principles become the most expensive luxury going. Kissinger would have understood perfectly well. In many respects Boromir is a Kissingerian, a practical man who looks at the world as it is rather than as it ought to be and will use whatever comes to hand to deal with the problem in front of him.
But the real problem is the Ring, and the immediate one hides it. Using the Ring against Sauron is like borrowing the enemy’s logic to beat him, which works in the short term and destroys you in the long. Boromir can’t see this, and he’s no fool. It is his courage that blinds him, and courage sometimes blinds more than cowardice does; the coward at least distrusts easy solutions.
Boromir dies defending Merry and Pippin after having tried to take the Ring from Frodo, and it is the cleanest redemption in the novel. He dies repentant, still what he had always been, a good man who made a terrible mistake for the most understandable reasons in the world. That is sadder than if he had died a villain, because it bears out what Tolkien has been saying all along, that the Ring goes looking above all for good people with good reasons to use it.
Which brings us to the centre, and to a fact a great many people would rather not look at squarely. Frodo fails. He reaches the Crack of Doom having carried the Ring across half the world, after all that suffering, and at the decisive moment he cannot throw it in. He puts it on his finger and claims it. “The Ring is mine,” he says, and in that instant the mission fails and the hero loses.
The world is saved by an accident, and Frodo’s heroism has nothing to do with it. Gollum, crazed, bites the Ring from his finger and in his ecstasy falls into the fire. What fulfils the mission is something Tolkien, as a Catholic, would have understood as providence, an intervention that exceeds the characters’ wills and retroactively gives meaning to decisions that had seemed inexplicable at the time. Bilbo’s mercy towards Gollum in the caves of the Misty Mountains, and Frodo and Gandalf’s insistence on not killing Gollum when they could have, both feed into a moment none of them planned, or could have planned.
There is more theology here than storytelling. This is the specifically Catholic idea that grace works through history in ways the individual actors cannot comprehend or control, and that mercy, which looks for all the world like weakness, behaves like a long-term investment whose return can’t be calculated, because it depends on an order beyond human reckoning.
No realist can accept this. Political realism does not admit providence, nor does it admit that mercy is a viable strategy, since in the short term it almost never is. In realpolitik terms sparing Gollum was foolish, an unnecessary risk, and without that foolishness the world would have been lost. Tolkien leaves realism standing; he simply finds it incomplete. There are forces at play which strategic analysis cannot capture, and wisdom consists in acting as though those forces exist even when you cannot prove them.
Tolkien’s political genius, and I use the word “genius” carefully, lay in diagnosing a problem that political theory does not solve and that political practice confirms in every generation. Absolute power cannot be managed, whether by the wicked or by the good, with institutions or without them, and its only fate is destruction, preferably its own.
Naïveté would be the opposite, believing that absolute power can be used for good if the right people are in charge. That is what Boromir believes, and Saruman, and Denethor, and everyone who fails in the novel. The wise response, Gandalf’s and Galadriel’s and in the end the Council of Elrond’s, takes it as given that there are no right people, that the instrument always and inevitably deforms whoever uses it, and that the only answer to absolute power is to destroy it.
Machiavelli would have found this absurd. If you have a weapon that gives you an advantage you use it, and deal with the moral consequences later. Kissinger would have agreed, politics being the art of the possible and the possible including whatever tools the world provides. Within their framework they are right enough. Tolkien works in a wider one, which takes in what realism excludes by definition, the possibility that there exists a moral order operating on a timescale strategists cannot measure.
Nor was Tolkien an idealist. He fought at the Somme and saw what power does when it is let loose without restraint. He believed neither that the world was good nor that people were. He saw a fallen place, where goodness was possible but came dear and mercy was a necessary risk, and where power was the most dangerous temptation of all because it always arrived looking like a solution and never like a problem.
What the Ring teaches belongs to the metaphysics of power more than to its politics, which is Machiavelli’s and Kissinger’s terrain. Only saints and novelists dare to go into metaphysics, and of the two, the novelists tend to be more honest.