The Ring and the Fall
In the letter to his friend, J.R.R. Tolkien discussed much of the processes he used and the thoughts he put into creating The Silmarillion. Within this discussion, he mentioned the fall of man and how allegory, especially concerning that fall, was necessary in a creation story. While he regarded the fall to be that of the elves and did not feel that the fall of man came into the story at all, the rings which became central in the chronologically later books can be a physical representation of the Fall as well as of sins. The ring, as we have discussed in class, can be representative of various things including power, colonialism, and greed. When looking more generally at the rings, they come to represent what is bad. This is in large part due to the fact that Sauron was the one who tempted everyone into making and wearing the too powerful rings. Nine of these rings went to man, seven to the dwarves, three to the ...