Many Lord of the Rings and Hobbit fans have wondered how the wearer of the ring is always able to avoid detection. Although the ring obviously gives the gift of invisibility, the person would still have to be very careful about other markers that might alert an enemy to their presence, for example moving silently, breathing as quietly as possible, and making sure not to brush up against branches or leave footprints in the grass or snow, depending on the weather.
However, some eagle-eyed Tolkien enthusiasts have noticed another interesting thing in the book that the wearer of the ring must look out for: A shadow! There are a couple of instances in which Bilbo, when wearing the ring, is almost caught because of a faint shadow that he casts.
For example, when he is in the Goblin Tunnels, trying to escape from Gollum who has just threatened to eat him, the ring betrays him and almost gets him killed. He tries to sneak out, but ‘suddenly one of the goblins inside shouted: “There is a shadow by the door, something’s outside!’’’. Luckily, the hobbit manages to squeeze past without being captured, and reunites with his friends the dwarves. He learns a valuable lesson from this encounter, and later, when the elves of Mirkwood capture the company, he keeps well away from them. They don’t see him because the ring makes him invisible, ‘nor did they hear him trotting along well behind their torch-light as they led their prisoners off into the forest.’ Clearly, he has realized to stay away from light that might be blocked out by his physical form, and this remains true for the whole time he is hiding in the elven palace trying to rescue his friends, as he keeps a distance from everyone ‘because of his shadow, altogether thin and wobbly as it was in the torchlight.’
This is a fascinating concept, because of course, shadows only form when there is an opaque object in front of a source of light. And as the wearer of the ring is invisible, surely they would be completely transparent, and therefore the light would be able to pass through them entirely, without being blocked. If the wearer of the ring were only translucent when they had it on their finger, rather than completely see-through, then surely enemies would be able to spot a sort of hazy shape, and differentiate the translucent blur from the surroundings, thus being able to find and capture the person wearing the special object. It therefore calls into question exactly how the magic of the ring works.
There have been various other objects that have this same gift across different franchises, for example the Invisibility Cloak in the Harry Potter series, but that definitely doesn’t cast a shadow (although the wearer of this particular deathly hallow can still be seen on the Marauder’s map). So what is about the Ring that interacts so strangely with light? The answer lies in why the ring turns its wearer invisible in the first place. Lots of people think that the Ring’s powers are only an illusion: so rather than acting on the body of the figure who wears it, and making the literal body invisible, the ring’s powers act on the mind of the person looking at the wearer, blinding them from being able to locate either the ring, or the one who has it.
This theory is based in part upon the elven ring of Galadriel. Nenya, the ring of water, showcases a similar ability, where, to those who have never been a ring bearer (like Samwise Gamgee, at the time, in the Fellowship of the Ring book, before he had need to put on the dark object) it appears as nothing more than starlight twinkling between Galadriel’s fingers. Until she informs Sam that it is in fact a ring of power, he never would have known it was there, because it was hidden from him. Perhaps this is how the One Ring works too, keeping itself, and its bearer hidden from the person seeking it.
However, the more widely accepted answer is that the ring doesn’t actually turn the wearer invisible as such. Rather, it transports them, or part of them, into a sort of other dimension known as the ‘wraith world.’ This is why, in Peter Jackson’s film adaptations, the scene goes sort of blurry, and the colors become dimmer, whenever someone wears the wring. This is the film portrayal of what the world looks like, and it’s where creatures such as the Nazgul and the Witch King of Angmar exist.
Therefore, if part of the person is put into the wraith world, it implies that part of the person is also left behind in the physical world, and it is this part that casts the shadow. The shadow is described by Bilbo as being ‘altogether thin and wobbly’, and it is much thinner and harder to see than a normal shadow, because it exists in the veil between the two realms,because the person wearing it is not quite wholly in the wraith realm, but not quite a solid object in the real world either.
