1 Ring Was Even More Important Than Sauron’s in The Lord of the Rings
The One Ring has become a pop-cultural icon, especially in its depiction in Peter Jackson’s film adaptations of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. But deep within Tolkien’s lore was another, more powerful “ring.” It belonged not to Sauron but to his master: Morgoth, the original Dark Lord. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Tolkien’s son, Christopher, collected much of his father’s unpublished Middle-earth lore in a series of twelve volumes called The History of Middle-earth, and the tenth volume was titled Morgoth’s Ring. This book covered several topics, but the one for which it was named was a dark truth about The Lord of the Rings‘ setting. Morgoth did not literally possess a magical ring; the Rings of Power were strictly Sauron’s inventions, and he did not create them until long after his master’s defeat in the War of Wrath. Rather, Christopher drew the title from a metaphor that his father had used in one of his essays, “Notes on Motives in The Silmarillion.” In this essay, Tolkien wrote that “the whole of Middle-earth was Morgoth’s Ring.”
