“One ring to rule them all, One ring to find them/ One ring to bring them all and in the darkness blind them/ In the land of Mordor where the shadows lie.” (p. 8) This was said at the beginning of the story telling a brief summary of the ring of Sauron. The poem tells you how the ring will blind you to the point that the need that you will feel of it will be bigger than anything in the world. It will be so big that it becomes an addiction, worse than any drug in the word, because there is no cure for it, and the only way you can save yourself is by the destruction of this powerful ring. Addiction, this is what the ring symbolizes; a psychological need to have something. It changes everything in you. First, it wins you over and then, you will never be the same person. Addiction can change anyone from the best person you have ever known to the worst. It controls and blinds you to the point where you lose yourself. We see this addiction mostly in every character in the story; even the most powerful were tempted by it. In the book we see the addiction of the ring in many different ways throughout many different characters; three of these different ways are: the possession of it, the fear of losing it, and the wanting of it.
We first see the change of the characters when they have in possession of it throughout Gollum and Bilbo, then throughout the story we begin to see it in Frodo, but it will grow stronger and stronger every second of every day. Gollum wasn’t always this repulsive creature, but he was a regular hobbit named Smeagol; he was just another victim of the ring. He possessed the ring for approximately five hundred years, and not much of a surprise this ring ruined him fiscally and emotionally. The fist terrible thing he did for the possession of the ring was to kill his brother; then he went to a cave and stood there all alone with only the company of “his precious”, the ring of Sauron. He turned from this hobbit to an old deformed
References: Tolkien J.R.R. (2005). The Lord of the Rings (50th anniversary). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt