One Ring mind, turning him into the creature known as Gollum. The Ring, which Sauron had endowed with a will of its own, manipulated Gollum into hiding in a cave under the Misty Mountains near Mirkwood, where Sauron was beginning to resurface. There Gollum remained for nearly 500 years, until the Ring tired of him and fell off his finger as he was hunting an orc. As is told in "The Hobbit", Bilbo found the Ring shortly afterward while lost in the tunnels near Gollum's lair. When "The Hobbit" was written, Tolkien had not yet conceived of the Ring's sinister history. Thus,
The Fellowship of the Ring the decision to publish "The Lord of the Rings" in three volumes was made, Tolkien had hoped to publish the novel in one volume, possibly also combined with "The Silmarillion". However, he had proposed titles for the individual six sections. Of the two books that comprise what became "The Fellowship of the Ring" the first was to be called "The First Journey" or "The Ring Sets Out". The name of the second was "The Journey of the Nine Companions" or "The Ring Goes South". The titles "The Ring Sets Out" and "The Ring Goes South" were used in the "Millennium