That’s right, the Tolkien one.

No, I haven’t found it. The damn thing’s last reported location is still “plummeting,” and that was an age and a half ago. I’m willing to bet it hit lava since then, especially considering what happened elsewhere around that time. I’m just theorizing a little about what it did.

Now, everyone knows it could turn the wielder invisible, and prolong their lives, and drive them insane, and drain out their soul. Now, it’s obvious these features are interconnected in some way, but they don’t really convey the unity and suggestion of absolute power it had. I mean, for Sauron, it’s the only thing he needs to rule the world, and it doesn’t seem to need HIM; it would have happily enough settled for Gandalf or Galadriel or Boromir. But when some little hobbit gets his hairy paws on it, it’s just a cheap invisibility charm, and when it’s stranded on the bottom of a river, it’s helpless.

Then I realized: it’s not an instrument of world-shattering power at all; it’s a toroidal reflector. Like the Krell machine (y’know, from Forbidden Planet?), it exists only to reflect the desires of it’s weilder. That’s why Tom Bombadil was unaffected by it; he HAD no desires. He was completely content. It takes the stuff you have, but don’t want (or don’t seem to care about; everyone has something they take for granted) and turns them into things you want, but don’t have. In the hobbit’s case, it took their astronomical potential for heroism. In Isildur’s case, it took his compassion, and his resourcefulness. Remember, this is the guy who beat up a world-beating giant with powers best measured on a seismic scale using only a busted sword. Later, he got killed by one lousy (in the most literal sense of the word) orc-arrow, just because he lost his precious little trophy in the river.

What, then, did it grant?

Whatever he wanted. It gave Sauron the power to crush the world, in exchange for all his physical might and humanity (admittedly, he didn’t have much left to lose in that category, but he didn’t need much of an edge to crush the world, either). It gave Isildur the power to be an effective ruler. Again, he had the power already, it just amplified the existing potential. To Gollum, it gave the power to sneak away and avoid the consequences of the crime it inspired him to commit, and the tenacious grip to bring down a few tasty goblins, and it let him live forever. Or at least as long as the ring itself did. The hobbits (Bilbo and Frodo) also got an amplification of their natural talents; to paraphrase Strider, it’s no big deal to keep yourself from being seen, but vanishing outright is a rare ability indeed.

Here’s another thing: dropping the ring into the magma of Mount Doom suposedly destroyed it, but how can you destroy something so fundamental? Seems to me they just “purified” it, and restored it to the ground it came from. The little CGI bit in the movie seems to support this. Working by that same logic, it seems like someone could easliy enough (and by “easily” I mean “with a whole crapload of major charges”) reforge the Living Mirror of Earth and acheive the pinnacle of their obsession at the cost of everything else they didn’t realize the value of. Sounds like some kinda Avatar struggle to me.

Anyone remember the original, non-Disney Alladin? He didn’t just have a lamp-genie, he had a ring too; and it’s power, while more limited, was still great. But when he lost the lamp, he couldn’t just wish for the answer to his problems; the ring could only put him in a situation in which his existing abilities would be most effective.