On The Subject Of A Ring..

"..One Ring to rule them all..
One Ring to find them..
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them 
In the land of Mordor where the shadows lie."
                                                                 -- Excerpt from "The Lord of the Rings" by JRR Tolkein


There have been many books-- and movies --about a great evil threatening to kill all of mankind/take over the world or the galaxy/destroy life as we know it/steal your lunch, whichever idea you like. And in all of them the evil has been great.. powerful.. fairly large in size..

Not so for The Lord of the Rings.

Sure, Sauron the Dark Lord is big and bad (you REALLY don't want to get on that guy's bad side! whew!) and dark and scary and rather large in size. Anybody would be intimidated by him (well, anybody except Aragorn.. if you don't know who Aragorn is, read the book or watch the movies over again because Aragorn is really important.. I'm straying off the subject, aren't I?), but the real evil at the heart of the story is not Sauron in all his badness, believe it or not.

The fate of Middle-Earth hangs in the balance because of one tiny object made of gold, something you could put in your pocket and forget it was even there.

A ring.

Millions of lives at risk, their freedom hanging precariously close to the edge of the dark abyss.. because of a ring.

A ring so powerful and so full of evil and malice that even Sauron adores it and will do anything to get it back.

Even the smallest thing may change the course of the future.

                                                                                        Meow,
                                                                                                  The Artful Cat