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One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find themOne Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.
With these lines J.R.R. Tolkien depicted the One Ring of Power, the central symbol of evil in The Lord of the Rings (Tolkien, 2004, p. v). The lines describe the Dark Lord Sauron's intent when he created the Ring: to use it to establish total domination over the world. In ancient times, the Ring was cut from his hand and lost, but if Sauron regains the Ring he will be able to enact his desire for complete power. At the beginning of the book, the Ring has come into the possession of the hobbit Frodo Baggins, and the central quest of the book is the effort of Frodo and his companions to destroy the Ring.
In my paper, “J.R.R. Tolkien and Creativity I,” I traced two biographical episodes that show Tolkien struggling to experience the transitional space necessary for his creativity, rather than being stuck in more concrete, constricted experience. In this paper, I will argue that The Lord of the Rings, as well as other aspects of Tolkien's fictional universe, can be read as an exploration of the dynamic contrast between transitionality (represented by the character Tom Bombadil) and concrete, constricted experience as represented by perverse thinking (the One Ring as fetish symbol).
Viewed from one angle, transitional objects and fetishes are opposites, but viewed from another angle they are very similar to each other. Both are things that are imbued with tremendous importance by their creator/possessors, and both create illusions to soothe anxieties—the transitional object soothes anxiety resulting from increasing recognition of the external, Not-me world (Winnicott, 1953, 1971); the classic fetish soothes