Transcription
Why did Sauron not know when Bilbo put on the ring? He seemed to know when Frodo put on the ring, so why not Bilbo, particularly when he was so close at one point in Mirkwood?
Hi everyone, this is Robert. Welcome to InDeep Geek. On this channel, we cover The Lord of the Rings in depth, as well as other great fantasy worlds like A Song of Ice and Fire and The Witcher. If that sounds good, there's a subscribe button somewhere.
In The Fellowship of the Ring, Gandalf urges Frodo not to put on the One Ring, and for the most part, he manages not to. But when Frodo accidentally puts on the ring in the Prancing Pony, in the movie, we hear Sauron say in his ominous rasp, "I see you." The Eye of Sauron is staring right at Frodo. Meanwhile, the Nazgûl screech and change direction, seemingly drawn by Frodo putting on the ring. The message seems clear: when Frodo puts on the ring, it's like a homing signal; Sauron and the Ringwraiths can see him or sense exactly where he is.
So how come Sauron didn't seem to be able to see Bilbo when he put on the ring so many times? In The Hobbit and afterwards, until he captures Gollum, Sauron seems not to have any idea about Bilbo at all. But Bilbo puts on the ring under the Misty Mountains, as Gollum did many times, then again a couple of times in Mirkwood, which was close to Sauron's home base of Dol Guldur in southern Mirkwood, and so on.
Well, the first thing we need to do here is untangle the films from the books because Sauron saying "I see you" then and the Nazgûl sensing Frodo putting on the ring are film-only things. Personally, I don't mind that as an interpretation of what happened for a big-screen audience. It certainly added to the urgency and drama of what happened in Bree, which worked really well in the film, but it wasn't what happened in the book.
So what happened when Frodo put on the ring in the book? Well, nothing obvious. Sorry, there was no big reveal of the Eye of Sauron or voice threatening Frodo. The Black Riders still tracked Frodo and the other Hobbits down to the Prancing Pony, but they did so through spies like Bill Fernie and a more generalized feeling that we'll get onto in a bit. Basically, Frodo disappeared; people noticed, and the Nazgûl found out.
So why is this important, and what does it have to do with Bilbo using the ring in Mirkwood? It's because Bilbo uses the ring quite a few times in the story of The Hobbit. Under the Misty Mountains, he uses it to evade Gollum and the Orcs, then to sneak up on the dwarves outside in Mirkwood, to get past the giant spiders in their halls, helping the dwarves escape in Erebor, to sneak in to see Smaug, to sneak out with the Arkenstone, then to sneak back in again. Then, in the Battle of the Five Armies, to stay safe-ish.
Later, back in the Shire, he obviously used it again an unknown number of times, including things as mundane as evading the Sackville-Bagginses, culminating in his disappearance at his 111th birthday party. So a dozen times or more, probably a lot more, and Sauron doesn't know. His big breakthrough in tracking down the ring is capturing Gollum, not sensing vaguely that someone is wearing his ring.
And that's because he can't tell if someone is wearing his ring. Yes, we could go into there being extenuating circumstances when Bilbo used the ring in the same forest that Sauron was already in. He was being attacked by the White Council at the time, so probably had other things on his mind, but that's not really the point. The point is that simply putting on the One Ring does not immediately attract the gaze of the Eye of Sauron, with a couple of exceptions.
And perhaps this is where book readers get a bit confused because there is a time when Frodo definitely does attract the attention of the Eye of Sauron while wearing the ring. When Boromir gets tempted by the ring and tries to take it from Frodo, Frodo puts it on and disappears. The place he runs to happens to be Amon Hen, an ancient ruin from the height of the Gondorian age, with a chair on the summit of the hill—the Seat of Seeing.
This is a magic chair that allows the person sitting there to see far away. Frodo takes the seat and casts his eyes about, seeing things happening all across Middle-earth. But then he looks towards Mordor. Remember, he is still wearing the ring at this point. Suddenly, he felt the Eye. There was an Eye in the Dark Tower that did not sleep. He knew that it had become aware of his gaze. A fierce, eager will was there; it leaped towards him almost like a finger. He felt it searching for him. Very soon, it would nail him down, know just exactly where he was.
Amon Hen touched him, glanced upon him. He threw himself from the seat, crouching, covering his head with his gray hood. He heard himself crying out, "Never, never!" It was verily, "I come, I come to you." He could not tell then, as a flash from some other point of power, there came to his mind another thought: "Take it off! Take it off, fool! Take it off! Take off the ring!"
Frodo here stumbles into the gaze of the Eye of Sauron, who eagerly seeks for him. Then someone, almost certainly the newly revitalized Gandalf the White, intervenes to tell Frodo to take off the ring, which he does, and that is that. As a result, Frodo decides that enough is enough; the ring must be destroyed and sets off back to the boats that could take him over the Anduin and eastwards.
That was actually the fourth time that Frodo put on the ring. So why did Sauron sense him then but not before? That's because Amon Hen is magical. Frodo looking at the Black Tower from there sort of astrally projected him there or opened up a link. Well, Tolkien's magic system is famously soft, so we don't know the exact details, but it's clear that it was the combination of wearing the ring and gazing at Barad-dûr that made the contact. Just wearing the ring on its own did not.
There's one other time that Sauron notices Frodo put on the ring, and that's at the Cracks of Doom. We read this: "Far away, as Frodo put on the ring and claimed it for his own, even in Sauron's realm, the very heart of his realm, the power in Barad-dûr was shaken, and the tower trembled from its foundations to its proud and bitter crown. The Dark Lord was suddenly aware of him, and his eye, piercing all shadows, looked across the plain to the door that he had made. The magnitude of his own folly was revealed to him in a blinding flash, and all the devices of his enemies were at last laid bare. Then his wrath blazed in consuming flame, but his fear rose like a vast black smoke to choke him, for he knew his deadly peril and the thread upon which his doom now hung."
So why then, and why not before? Well, it's because it's in his realm. We actually get a hint of this when Sam has the ring and he's debating whether to go on or not. He thinks this: "He'd spot me and cow me before I could so much as shout out. He'd spot me pretty quick if I put on the ring now." In Mordor, Sam seems to instinctively know that putting on the ring in Sauron's own realm would be different from putting it on elsewhere.
So putting on the One Ring is not like a homing beacon unless you're in Sauron's backyard or on a magical seeing seat. Gollum could put on the ring probably hundreds of times under the Misty Mountains without Sauron knowing, and Bilbo could too, both while he was on his adventure and when he gets back home. The ring affects them 100%, but it doesn't set up a flare for the baddies to see or anything like that.
All of that said, there is a counterpoint here. If you read through the history of Middle-earth, you'll find several references in Tolkien's wider scribblings to the Nazgûl being drawn to the ring. That's how Khamûl the Easterling managed to get as close as Bagshot Row in Hobbiton before being sent away by Gaffer Gamgee and retreating to some tree cover because he didn't really operate well in the light. He clearly somehow knew roughly where the ring was, but not exactly. Frodo was standing within earshot at the time, and yet the Nazgûl turned back.
Added to which, Gollum seems drawn to the ring. It wasn't just chance or his tracking skills that kept him on Frodo's tail. And although this might just be coincidence, we have to ask: why did Sauron set himself up in Dol Guldur to recuperate early in the Third Age? There were plenty of safer places and more out-of-the-way places for him to hide than the former capital of the Woodland Realm. Did he also feel the tug of the ring, which at the time was nestled at the bottom of the Anduin River just west of Mirkwood?
So to return to the original question: why didn't Sauron sense Bilbo when he wore the ring? Because that's not how the ring works. Yes, those tied to it get a generalized tug towards it, and yes, if it were used in Sauron's own lands or in combination with magical means tying you to there, he would see it straight away. But in general, no.
This is important because one of the main plot drivers in the later part of The Lord of the Rings is that Sauron doesn't know that Frodo and Sam are making their way into Mordor. He thinks that Aragorn has the ring, and that miscalculation would prove fatal for him.
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