Tolkien's Ring: Power Over or In-Service of Others

A brief disclaimer. I’ve been reading J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings since college. I say “been reading” because I’ve never really stopped. I’ve read most of his other works as well, along with a good number of commentaries on them. What follows is an idea I’ve been mulling over for years—not the only way to understand Tolkien, but one that has continued to deepen with time.

Years ago, I worked in a treatment center where the One Ring was regularly compared to addiction. I understand the appeal of the analogy: the Ring exerts control, corrupts the will, creates an inseparable attachment, and eventually hollows a person out. But I’ve come to believe that the Ring is not an especially apt metaphor for addiction—but that’s an article for another day.

In popular comparisons, the Ring is often treated as if it ensnares anyone who touches it through sheer exposure, and as if freedom from its grip depends on exceptional willpower. That framework maps poorly onto how addiction actually works, and it also imports modern assumptions that Tolkien himself did not hold. While the Ring certainly produces compulsive attachment and moral erosion, Tolkien’s focus lies elsewhere.

The Ring is about power—but not just any kind of power.

Throughout the story, the Ring tempts nearly everyone who comes near it to use it. The desire it awakens is not uniform. For some, it is the wish for power over oneself: the ability to hide, to survive, to move unseen in a dangerous world (think Frodo when escaping Boromir or Sam escaping the Orcs at the tower of Cirith Ungol. For others, it is the desire to use power for good—to overthrow evil, restore order, or protect what they love (think about Galadriel and Gandalf as they wrestled with the good they would want to use the ring for). And for still others, it is the desire for power over others in a more overtly domineering and controlling way. Most characters experience some mixture of all three.

Saruman is perhaps the clearest example. He believes he can use the Ring to overthrow Sauron and reorder the world—placing himself at its center, ruling others “for their own good,” at least as he understands it. His failure is not that he seeks good ends, but that he embraces a kind of power that can only achieve them through domination of others.

This reveals the heart of the Ring’s temptation: it offers power OVER others.

Running alongside this temptation is a different vision of power altogether—one the Ring cannot tolerate and actively undermines. In fact, a type of power so foreign to the Ring and its maker, that Sauron cannot even imagine it. This is the power of love, which comes across through service, humility, and mutual dependence. The great tension of The Lord of the Rings is not simply whether Frodo will succeed or fail, but which kind of power will ultimately prevail.

We see this tension throughout Frodo’s journey. At first, his love for the Shire and desire to protect it sustain him. Over time, however, the Ring’s claim narrows his moral world until it becomes centered on the Ring itself and what it promises him—identity, agency, self-possession. At Mount Doom, Frodo does not fail because he secretly desires to rule Middle-earth, but because no one can finally master this kind of power. When he says, “The Ring is mine,” the Ring has completed its work.

And this is the great problem with ‘power-over’. It always turns inward. It is never satisfied, because it must constantly compete with the same desire in others. Tolkien himself was clear that no one could have willingly destroyed the Ring—not Frodo, not anyone. Frodo’s failure is not merely personal; it exposes the bankruptcy of that kind of power altogether.

Tolkien famously resisted strict allegory, preferring instead what he called applicability. Still, his historical context matters. He lived through the rise of fascist regimes in the early 20th century and wrote as a man deeply formed by his Christian faith. Power pursued for domination, even in the name of good, was not an abstract concern for him—it was a lived reality that he himself witnessed.

In that sense, the Ring remains uncomfortably relevant. We all live in its tension. We are repeatedly faced with a choice between power over others and power in service of others. This choice plays out geopolitically in our own day and age, as it did in Tolkien’s lifetime, when small hearted men pursue power over another (often cloaked in the guise of doing for their own good). But it also hits much closer to home—in our families, workplaces, churches, and within ourselves.

Like Frodo’s journey, our own paths are marked by temptation, unexpected help, seasons of rest, and moments of despair. And like his story, our hope does not rest solely on strength of will, but on mercy, relationship, and a power that works through love rather than control. When we pursue power expressed through service and care for the other, rather than power over them, we participate in a deeper strength—one that, in Tolkien’s vision, ultimately proves stronger than the Ring.