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 where power exists for power’s own sake, with no purpose beyond its own perpetuation. Kissinger built an entire career on the premise that power is a fact to be managed, not a moral problem to be solved. Brilliant thinkers, all of them. And none of them went as far as a Catholic philologist from Birmingham who wrote stories about hobbits.
What Tolkien understood about power, and placed inside a gold ring in a novel the literary academy looked down on for decades, is something Western political theory tends to sidestep: the problem with absolute power is not that evil people use it. The problem is that it corrupts the good. And not eventually, not under certain conditions, not if certain aggravating factors are present. Always. Without exception. That is the premise of The Lord of the Rings, and it is a premise no political treatise has had the honesty or the courage to sustain to its final consequences.
What the Ring Is Not
You have to start with what the Ring is not, because the bad readings are plentiful.
The Ring is not an allegory of the atomic bomb. Tolkien said so explicitly and he said it with irritation, because he was asked many times. The novel was conceived in the thirties, long before Hiroshima, and Tolkien loathed allegory as a literary form. The Ring is not “technology,” nor “capitalism,” nor “totalitarianism,” nor any other abstraction you might wish to plug in. The Ring is power. Not a particular form of power. Power as such, as a thing, as a force that exists in the world and warps everything it touches.
The distinction matters. If the Ring were an allegory, its meaning would be closed: it would represent X, and once the equation was decoded there would not be much left to say. But the Ring works as a symbol, which is something else. A symbol is not translated, it is inhabited. And the Ring as a symbol of power is inexhaustible because power is inexhaustible, because every generation and every person discovers its mechanisms anew, as though for the first time.
Tolkien explained this in a 1951 letter to Milton Waldman, his editor, with a clarity he did not always have when discussing his own work: the Ring is the will to domination made object. It is not a weapon. It does not serve to destroy armies or conquer territories, at least not directly. What it does is amplify the bearer’s will until that will becomes dominion over others. And there lies the trap: the more powerful the bearer, the more useful the Ring, and the faster it corrupts him. A hobbit can carry it for years because a hobbit has no will to domination. A wizard or a king would fall in days.
Gandalf and the Refused Temptation
The first great political scene in The Lord of the Rings is not a battle or a speech. It is a conversation in the Shire, in the sitting room at Bag End, where Frodo offers the Ring to Gandalf.
Gandalf’s answer is the most intelligent thing ever said about power in a work of fiction. He does not say “I don’t want it.” He says the opposite. He says he would want it too much. He says that with the Ring he would wield a terrible power, and that the desire to use it for good would be too strong to 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.”
What Gandalf understands, and what makes him wise in the deepest sense, is that the Ring’s danger is not proportional to the bearer’s wickedness but to his goodness. A wicked being with the Ring would simply do what he already wanted to do, more efficiently. A good being with the Ring would begin by wanting to heal the world and end by enslaving it, because the distance between “I want the world to be better” and “I want the world to be as I say” is much shorter than anyone admits.
There is something profoundly anti-modern in this idea. Modern politics, from the French Revolution onwards, is built on the premise that power in the right hands produces right outcomes. That the problem is not power but who wields it. Tolkien says no. He says power corrupts the right hands exactly as it corrupts the wrong ones, only by a different path. The wrong hands use power out of cruelty or greed. The right hands use it out of compassion or justice, and the result is the same: dominion. Because once you have decided that you know what is best for others, you no longer need their consent. And there the difference between the tyrant and the saviour has vanished.
Galadriel and the Narrowest Margin
The Galadriel scene in Lothlórien is, in a sense, the most terrifying in the novel. More than Mordor, more than the Nazgûl, more than Shelob.
Frodo offers her the Ring. And Galadriel, one of the oldest and most powerful beings in Middle-earth, who lived in Valinor and saw the light of the Trees, who has spent thousands of years resisting Sauron with wisdom and patience, Galadriel hesitates. For a moment, she imagines herself with the Ring. And what she imagines is not a kingdom of terror. She imagines a queen beautiful and terrible, adored by all, not feared but loved. A power that is pure benevolence, pure light, pure beauty. And that is precisely what makes her pull back: the perfection of the fantasy. “In place of a Dark Lord you would have a Queen, not dark but beautiful and terrible as the morning.”
Galadriel passes the test, but by a margin that feels razor-thin. She says so herself: “I pass the test. I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.” And in that sentence there is an enormous renunciation, an acceptance of diminishment, of ageing, of loss, which is the price of not taking power when power offers itself.
What Tolkien does with Galadriel is show something that political realists prefer not to see: that virtue is not the absence of temptation but resistance to temptation, and that the resistance has a cost. Galadriel does not come out of that scene untouched. She comes out smaller, older, closer to the end. She says no to the Ring and the price is accepting that her time in Middle-earth is finishing. The cost of not taking power is losing the power you already have. Any honest politician would recognise this: stepping down in time is the hardest decision there is, because stepping down means accepting irrelevance, and irrelevance feels like death.
Boromir and the Justification
If Gandalf is the temptation refused and Galadriel is the temptation resisted by a margin, Boromir is the temptation consummated. And what makes Boromir such a good character is that his arguments are impeccable.
Boromir does not want the Ring for himself. He wants it for Gondor. He wants it to defend his people, to win the war, to save lives. Every argument Boromir makes in favour of using the Ring is an argument any reasonable person would accept in a situation room. 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?
Boromir’s realism is the realism of necessity, which is the most powerful argument in politics. There is no luxury more expensive than principles when the enemy is at the gate. Kissinger would have understood perfectly. Boromir is, in many respects, a Kissingerian: a practical man who looks at the world as it is and not as it should be, and who is willing to use whatever tools are available to solve the immediate problem.
The trouble is that the immediate problem is not the real problem. The real problem is not Sauron. The real problem is the Ring. And using the Ring to defeat Sauron is like borrowing the enemy’s logic to defeat him: it works in the short term and destroys you in the long. Boromir cannot see this, not because he is foolish but because he is brave, and courage sometimes blinds more than cowardice does. The coward at least distrusts easy solutions.
Boromir’s death, defending Merry and Pippin after having tried to take the Ring from Frodo, is the cleanest redemption in the novel. Boromir does not die corrupted. He dies repentant. He dies being what he always was, a good man who committed a terrible mistake for the most understandable reasons in the world. And that is sadder than if he had died a villain, because it confirms Tolkien’s thesis: the Ring does not seek the wicked. It seeks the good who have good reasons to use it.
Frodo’s Failure
And we arrive at the centre. At the fact a great many people prefer not to look at squarely.
Frodo fails. At the decisive moment, at the Crack of Doom, after having carried the Ring across half the world, after the suffering, after everything, Frodo 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. The hero loses.
What saves the world is not Frodo’s heroism. It is an accident. Gollum, crazed, bites the Ring from his finger, and in his ecstasy falls into the fire. The mission is fulfilled not by virtue but by what 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. Bilbo’s mercy towards Gollum in the caves of the Misty Mountains, Frodo and Gandalf’s insistence on not killing Gollum when they could have, all of it converges in a moment none of them planned or could have planned.
This is theology before it is narrative. It is the specifically Catholic idea that grace works through history in ways the individual actors cannot comprehend or control. That mercy is not weakness but a long-term investment, an investment whose return cannot be calculated because it depends on an order that exceeds human reckoning.
For a realist, this is unacceptable. Political realism does not admit providence. It does not admit that mercy is a viable strategy, because in the short term it almost never is. Sparing Gollum was, in realpolitik terms, foolish. An unnecessary risk. And yet without that foolishness, the world would have been lost. Tolkien does not say realism is wrong. He says something subtler: that realism is incomplete. That there are forces at play which strategic analysis cannot capture, and that wisdom consists in acting as though those forces exist even when you cannot prove them.
What Tolkien Understood
Tolkien’s political genius, and I use the word “genius” carefully, was to have diagnosed a problem that political theory does not solve and that political practice confirms in every generation: absolute power cannot be managed. Not by the wicked and not by the good. Not with institutions and not without them. Not with checks and not without checks. The only fate of absolute power is destruction, preferably its own.
This is not naïveté. It is the opposite of naïveté. The naïve response to absolute power is to believe it 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, which is Gandalf’s and Galadriel’s and ultimately the Council of Elrond’s, is that there are no right people. That the instrument deforms the user, always, inevitably. That the only answer to absolute power is to destroy it.
Machiavelli would have found this position absurd. If you have a weapon that gives you advantage, you use it, and the moral consequences are dealt with later. Kissinger would have agreed: politics is the art of the possible, and the possible includes using whatever tools the world provides. And they are not wrong, within their framework. But Tolkien operates in a wider framework, one that includes the dimension realism excludes by definition: the possibility that there exists a moral order operating on a timescale strategists cannot measure.
Tolkien was not an idealist. He fought at the Somme. He saw what power does when unleashed without restraint. He did not believe the world was good or that people were good. He believed the world was a fallen place where goodness was possible but costly, where mercy was risky but necessary, and where power was the most dangerous temptation precisely because it always presented itself as solution and never as problem.
That is what the Ring teaches. Not a lesson about the politics of power, which is Machiavelli’s and Kissinger’s terrain. A lesson about the metaphysics of power, which is a terrain only saints and novelists dare enter. And of the two, the novelists tend to be more honest.