One of the most interesting things about The Lord of the Rings is how often the people we might expect to exercise power are instead asked to refuse it.
Gandalf refuses the Ring. Galadriel refuses it. Aragorn spends much of the story exercising restraint long before he openly exercises authority. Faramir rejects an opportunity to take the Ring even after learning what it might mean for Gondor. Frodo's task is not to wield the great power placed in his hands, but to carry it somewhere it can be destroyed.
Even Sam, during his brief possession of the Ring, encounters the possibility of becoming someone much larger than himself.
This isn't accidental. Tolkien described the Ring in a 1951 letter in terms of the will to power seeking to make itself objective through force and mechanism. That gives us a useful starting point because the danger of the Ring isn't simply that an evil person might possess a powerful weapon. The deeper problem is that the Ring itself embodies a particular relationship to power: the desire to make other wills subordinate to one's own.
That helps explain why good intentions provide so little protection against it.
Gandalf understands this almost immediately. He doesn't refuse the Ring because he lacks the power to use it or because he expects to become Sauron overnight. The frightening possibility is that he could use it for purposes he continued to regard as good.
Tolkien explored exactly that possibility in a later letter. A Gandalf who mastered the Ring could defeat Sauron and remain convinced of his own righteousness, ruling according to considerable wisdom for what he believed was the benefit of others. Tolkien's conclusion was not reassuring: the Ring would still become master in the end.
That is a much more interesting danger than simple corruption.
A person doesn't have to stop wanting good things in order to become dangerous. The problem can begin when wanting the good becomes inseparable from requiring everyone else to submit to our understanding of it.
Galadriel's temptation works in a similar way. She doesn't imagine becoming a petty tyrant. She imagines herself magnificent, beloved and terrible. The temptation works because domination can borrow the language of protection, wisdom and benevolence.
The Ring doesn't need to replace every motive with cruelty. It can work through motives that were already present.
This is where I think Tolkien gives us something more durable than a simple warning that power corrupts. Different characters encounter power differently because they bring different desires to it. Boromir thinks about the defense of Gondor. Galadriel confronts the possibility of becoming a great ruling power herself. Sam's imagination turns toward what he knows and loves.
The Ring gives those desires another direction: outward, larger and increasingly concerned with command.
Sam is especially revealing because the scale of the fantasy eventually becomes ridiculous even to him. He knows gardens. He knows the actual work involved in growing things. The fantasy of ordering an entire world into the shape of one enormous garden runs into the ordinary knowledge of a gardener.
His limitation helps him.
That pattern appears throughout the story. The supposedly small people are not important because smallness is inherently virtuous. Hobbits have their own vanities, prejudices, foolishness and capacity for cruelty. What Tolkien repeatedly gives them, though, is attachment to ordinary things that exist outside the pursuit of power.
Food matters. Gardens matter. Birthdays matter. Inns matter. Songs matter. Going home matters.
The Ring offers greatness, and much of the story keeps asking whether greatness is actually what the situation needs.
Frodo's answer is particularly complicated because his task requires an extraordinary endurance that eventually reaches its limit. He carries the Ring farther than anyone reasonably could have expected, reaches the place where it can be destroy