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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 846530" data-attributes="member: 4937">Blood Jester: I've read LotR 18 times.  I don't need policing.I never said summoning demons always and immediately drove you straight to the bottom of the pit.  I said that it was always evil.I don't want to get into textually disecting Bilbo's ring in the Hobbit.  At the time the story was written JRRT did not himself 'know' that the ring was 'the One Ring', so its dangerous to draw extensive conclusions about it.  The conception of the ring as evil was not fully devoloped.  As the story did develop, Bilbo was protected largely by his innocence.  He didn't know the thing was evil, and he always used it for a basically good purpose.  The closest analogy would be summoning up a demon by accident, not knowing what it was after summoning it, and then getting it to do something fairly trivial and harmless and putting it away.  Even that is evil, but the harm it did to him was understandably small and slow to develop.  One thing was clear however, even used just _once_ by Bilbo in direst need to save his life and the thing started effecting his behavior.  Frodo's ring even more so.  Sure Frodo (and Sam) used it several times in great need, but Frodo did not come out of that unscathed and most of the times Frodo was using it he very nearly got himself killed or worse.  At the very least he was taking great risk.  Moreover, the whole class of Halflings seems to have a 'supernatural' (though not total) resistance to evil corruption.  Regular humans probably wouldn't have faired as well.Lastly, I just brought up the One Ring because it is something I thought everyone would recognize.  I'm not saying that there is complete and utter parallel between the two, only that both share the trait of turning even good purposes to evil.</blockquote>

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