Even Smeagol is not that simple.
The ring never has all of him, it has fractured him, and he is at war with himself so to speak, even despises himself.
He was flawed, as most people are, and the ring found a crack to wedge itself in and break him apart, but the ring could never find that one foot hold it needed in Smeagol to bring itself home.
In a way, the crack it found actually works against it, probably wholly unexpected by it.
Fractured as Smeagol is, the ring can not find the one thing in him it needs to bend him to it’s will, and that is probably why he never fades.
Even when he uses the ring, it’s totally utilitarian in use, he simply wont answer it’s call.
The ring said one thing that Smeagol heard and he ignores everything else it has to say, to Gollum Sauron is just some other annoying bastard that wants to take away the Precious.
Think of it like this, you try to temp a kid with candy.
You give him a piece of candy, you figure he will of course eat it and follow you for more candy.
Except he does not, he fixates on that one single piece, he fawns over it, he worships it, but he wont eat the damned thing, and he doesn’t hear anything else you have to say at that point.
It is now his Precious, and you have simply become a threat or nothing.
Smeagol hates the ring, hates what it has done to him, but alone as he is Smeagol is weak, without support. Gollum loves the ring, it is his Precious, and in isolation he has the support of the ring to overpower Smeagol.
Unfortunately for Sauron, Gollum loves the idea of just having the Precious more than any promise of power it could offer, and Smeagol simply hates it.
The Ring is screwed, it’s trapped until it can find another host.
It’s next host is an even worse choice.
I don’t think Sauron would have been any more powerful after regaining the ring than he was before he lost it. Before he lost the ring he was surely a mighty foe, but he was not undefeatable (or he would not have lost the ring in the first place). Never underestimate the power of good against evil, my friend. (Yes, I know, both elves and men were weaker in the 3rd age than they had been in the 2nd, but it was only one man, after all, who cut off the ring in the first place.)
I have always wondered something. Why did the Ring corrupt Smeagol so rapidly? He goes from zero to murderous after only being exposed to it for a few minutes. I can understand this as being its temptation at play except for the fact that Smeagol was a Hobbit. Compare the Ring’s effect on Smeagol to the effect it had on Boromir. Smeagol’s immediate impulse, almost virtually after he saw the Ring, was to murder his cousin. Boromir spent a few days, a week perhaps before it corrupted him, and even then, he did not outright murder Frodo; he went on at length, becoming more and more feverish, talking about grand ideas and fantasies the Ring has shown him for Gondor’s salvation - and only after Frodo denied him did he attempt to take the Ring. In the story, the willpower of Man is supposed to be weaker than that of a Hobbit, more susceptible to temptation - so why did the Ring take longer to effect Boromir than it took to effect Smeagol?
Smeagol wasn’t always as bad as he later became, but he was never a very good person. He probably hadn’t ever murdered before Deagol, but it didn’t take much to put him over the top.
Of course he will be.
A good chunk of his being is IN the ring.
He cant even assume physical form, one might perceive him as strong in LOTR, but he is nothing compared to what he could be.
That Isildur struck him down was a combination of Luck, Balls, and Sauron being too smug and cocky not thinking the boy would strike at him.
You give him that ring, and it is game over.
*“And much of the strength and will of Sauron passed into that One Ring; for the power of the Elven-rings was very great, and that which should govern them must be a thing of surpassing potency; and Sauron forged it in the Mountain of Fire in the Land of Shadow. And while he wore the One Ring he could perceive all the things that were done by means of the lesser rings, and he could see and govern the very thoughts of those that wore them.”
[The Silmarillion] *
“The Ring of Sauron is only one of the various mythical treatments of the placing of one’s life, or power, in some external object, which is thus exposed to capture or destruction with disastrous results to oneself. If I were to ‘philosophise’ this myth, or at least the Ring of Sauron, I should say it was a mythical way of representing the truth that potency (or perhaps rather potentiality) if it is to be exercised, and produce results, has to be externalised and so as it were passes, to a greater or less degree, out of one’s direct control.”
[The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien #121)
He did have physical form by the time of LOTR. The thing is, with the Ring on, he would be even more powerful than his normal power. He’d be about as powerful as he was in the Second Age with it. Tolkien wrote a whole essay on Sauron about this:
"SECOND AGE
Sauron should be thought of as very terrible. The form that he took was that of a man of more than human stature, but not gigantic. In his earlier incarnation he was able to veil his power (as Gandalf did) and could appear as a commanding figure of great strength of body and supremely royal demeanour and countenance. But at the beginning of the Second Age he was still beautiful to look at, or could still assume a beautiful visible shape – and was not indeed wholly evil, not unless all ‘reformers’ who want to hurry up with ‘reconstruction’ and ‘reorganization’ are wholly evil, even before pride and the lust to exert their will eat them up. But many Elves listened to Sauron. He was still fair in that early time, and his motives and those of the Elves seemed to go partly together: the healing of the desolate lands. Sauron found their weak point in suggesting that, helping one another, they could make Western Middle-earth as beautiful as Valinor. It was really a veiled attack on the gods, an incitement to try and make a separate independent paradise. Gil-galad repulsed all such overtures, as also did Elrond. But at Eregion great work began – and the Elves came their nearest to falling to ‘magic’ and machinery. With the aid of Sauron’s lore they made Rings of Power (‘power’ is an ominous and sinister word in all these tales, except as applied to the gods). Sauron dominates all the multiplying hordes of Men that have had no contact with the Elves and so indirectly with the true and Unfallen Valar and gods. Thus, as the Second Age draws on, we have a great Kingdom and evil theocracy (for Sauron is also the god of his slaves) growing up in Middle-earth. He rules a growing empire from the great dark tower of Barad-dûr in Mordor, near to the Mountain of Fire, wielding the One Ring.
THE ONE RING
But to achieve this he had been obliged to let a great part of his own inherent power (a frequent and very significant motive in myth and fairy-story) pass into the One Ring. While he wore it, his power on earth was actually enhanced. But even if he did not wear it, that power existed and was in ‘rapport’ with himself: he was not ‘diminished’. Unless some other seized it and became possessed of it. If that happened, the new possessor could (if sufficiently strong and heroic by nature) challenge Sauron, become master of all that he had learned or done since the making of the One Ring, and so overthrow him and usurp his place. This was the essential weakness he had introduced into his situation in his effort (largely unsuccessful) to enslave the Elves, and in his desire to establish a control over the minds and wills of his servants. There was another weakness: if the One Ring was actually unmade, annihilated, then its power would be dissolved, Sauron’s own being would be diminished to vanishing point, and he would be reduced to a shadow, a mere memory of malicious will. But that he never contemplated nor feared. The Ring was unbreakable by any smithcraft less than his own. It was indissoluble in any fire, save the undying subterranean fire where it was made – and that was unapproachable, in Mordor. Also so great was the Ring’s power of lust, that anyone who used it became mastered by it; it was beyond the strength of any will (even his own) to injure it, cast it away, or neglect it. So he thought. It was in any case on his finger. Sauron would not have feared the Ring! It was his own and under his will. Even from afar he had an effect upon it, to make it work for its return to himself. In his actual presence none but very few of equal stature could have hoped to withhold it from him. Of ‘mortals’ no one, not even Aragorn.
The Ring of Sauron is only one of the various mythical treatments of the placing of one’s life, or power, in some external object, which is thus exposed to capture or destruction with disastrous results to oneself. If I were to ‘philosophize’ this myth, or at least the Ring of Sauron, I should say it was a mythical way of representing the truth that potency (or perhaps rather potentiality) if it is to be exercised, and produce results, has to be externalized and so as it were passes, to a greater or less degree, out of one’s direct control. A man who wishes to exert ‘power’ must have subjects, who are not himself. But he then depends on them.
NÚMENOR
Ar-Pharazôn, as is told in the ‘Downfall’ or Akallabêth, conquered a terrified Sauron’s subjects, not Sauron. Sauron’s personal ‘surrender’ was voluntary and cunning: he got free transport to Numenor! He naturally had the One Ring, and so very soon dominated the minds and wills of most of the Númenóreans. (I do not think Ar-Pharazôn knew anything about the One Ring. The Elves kept the matter of the Rings very secret, as long as they could. In any case Ar-Pharazôn was not in communication with them). Sauron had recourse to guile. He submitted, and was carried off to Númenor as a prisoner-hostage. But he was of course a ‘divine’ person (in the terms of this mythology; a lesser member of the race of Valar) and thus far too powerful to be controlled in this way. He steadily got Arpharazôn’s mind under his own control, and in the event corrupted many of the Númenóreans, destroyed the conception of Eru, now represented as a mere figment of the Valar or Lords of the West (a fictitious sanction to which they appealed if anyone questioned their rulings), and substituted a Satanist religion with a large temple, the worship of the dispossessed eldest of the Valar (the rebellious Dark Lord of the First Age).
Then, Sauron was defeated by a ‘miracle’: a direct action of God the Creator, changing the fashion of the world, when appealed to by Manwë. Though reduced to ‘a spirit of hatred borne on a dark wind’, I do not think one need boggle at this spirit carrying off the One Ring, upon which his power of dominating minds now largely depended. That Sauron was not himself destroyed in the anger of the One is not my fault: the problem of evil, and its apparent toleration, is a permanent one for all who concern themselves with our world. The indestructibility of spirits with free wills, even by the Creator of them, is also an inevitable feature, if one either believes in their existence, or feigns it in a story. Sauron was, of course, ‘confounded’ by the disaster, and diminished (having expended enormous energy in the corruption of Númenor).
THIRD AGE
Sauron was always de-bodied when vanquished. He needed time for his own bodily rehabilitation, and for gaining control over his former subjects. He was attacked by Gil-galad and Elendil before his new domination was fully established. After the battle with Gil-galad and Elendil, Sauron took a long while to re-build, longer than he had done after the Downfall of Númenor (I suppose because each building-up used up some of the inherent energy of the spirit, which might be called the ‘will’ or the effective link between the indestructible mind and being and the realization of its imagination). The impossibility of re-building after the destruction of the Ring, is sufficiently clear ‘mythologically’ in the present book."
To me the last part implies he had “re-bodied” by the time of LOTR, but after the destruction of the Ring was never again able to take physical shape and remained just an angry ghost basically.
It affects Deagol as well, but Smeagol overcomes him.
They are Stoor Hobbits, which i guess we don’t know much about.
Obviously they have not much connection with the Shire folk, as there are no tales of the murderous Smeagol to scare the children into being good etc.
So we know nothing of their ways or constitutions, perhaps they are not quite so simple and honest as the Shirelings but then again, what might take place should Lobelia Sackville-Baggins had taken it?
She is a very envious person, the ring may find foothold in her?
Anyways, we know little of Smeagols character though i think we can be certain, with no ring, he would never have murdered Deagol. Wrestled him for the ring perhaps but never have murdered him.
His character is flawed, and that is the rings foothold, the ring just does not understand that the lure of the ring does not go beyond it being a pretty gold thing.
The short and honest answer is Tolkien wrote him that way as simply a tool to progress the story.
Only enough information is given to make him plausible and make him belong in the story.
Angry ghosty is not my personal interpretation of physical form, ethereal form i would call it. Which is what he seems like during LOTR, not quite here and not quite there.
My perception of physical form is stomping, walk up and smack you with a mace.
He is something at this point, but i am not sure exactly what you might call it?
A shade?
Then again Sauron, form wise, is semi confusing, he isn’t really a physical being to start with.
Nor is Gandalf, Radagast, Saruman, or the Blue.
But Gandalf, now he dies, and he is sent back to his original physical, now enhanced form.
