One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.

These lines are the Black Speech inscription forged by Sauron for the One Ring in the Second Age of Middle-earth. In The Lord of the Rings, the verse is introduced early in The Fellowship of the Ring as part of the lore explaining how the One Ring was made to dominate the other Rings of Power and ensnare their bearers. The words are famously spoken aloud at the Council of Elrond in Rivendell, where their utterance is treated as perilous and defiling, underscoring the Ring’s corrupting power and Sauron’s lingering presence. Tolkien presents the couplet as a fragment of a longer rhyme about the Rings.

The verse compresses Sauron’s program of domination into a ritualistic chant: rule, find, bring, bind. Each verb escalates control from sovereignty to surveillance, then coercive gathering, and finally total imprisonment “in the darkness,” suggesting both literal shadow and moral/spiritual negation. The anaphora (“One Ring… One Ring…”) mimics incantation, emphasizing singularity and the erasure of plurality—many wills reduced to one. In Tolkien’s moral universe, the Ring embodies power sought for its own sake; the line’s grim cadence and finality dramatize how absolute power aims not merely to govern but to possess and immobilize others.

Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,
Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,
Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die,
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
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.

1) “Ash nazg durbatulûk, ash nazg gimbatul, ash nazg thrakatulûk agh burzum-ishi krimpatul.” (Black Speech original)
2) “...and in the darkness bind them.” (often quoted without the final line “In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.”)
3) “One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.” (single-line formatting in many editions/quotations)