[Kalimac]

Good question - at least, it's one I've wondered about sometimes myself [img]smilies/smile.gif[/img]. Sorry if I'm repeating what other people have said here, but here's how I see it:

Sauron - I second the opinion that he wouldn't want any competition, and when you think about it, whom could he marry exactly? Demons who exist only as lidless eyes don't seem like they would really get anything out of the institution. ("Till destruction of the Tower of Barad-dur do you part" eh, maybe not).

Isildur - hard to tell since, as was pointed out, he was married before he got the Ring. The theory that the Ring might affect one's "personal life" like that might be true here though; consider the description of Isildur in "The Disaster of the Gladden Fields" - he seems so consumed by the thing that his family was a far-distant priority. He may barely have seen his wife after that battle; they certainly didn't have any more children.

Deagol - Technically there's no evidence that he *wasn't* married, but as Rosa points out, it's not likely. No idea what would have happened to him if he'd lived, but the examples of Isildur (and Gollum) aren't too promising.

Gollum/Smeagol - Tricksy this one is. Gollum sounds like a fairly nasty guy even before he got the Ring - always going exploring alone into "roots and beginnings", greedy, trying to take advantage of his friend, and the first thing he thinks of after discovering he's invisible is of all the pranks he can pull. It's a safe bet he wasn't too sociable before the whole thing happened, and that the Ring didn't find it terribly difficult to corrupt him. To be honest, Gollum sounds like far too much of a natural loner to be the marrying kind, even if he hadn't gotten the Ring.

Bilbo - Again, not the marrying kind, but in a far different way. In "The Quest of Erebor" Gandalf describes Bilbo as a naturally adventure-minded young hobbit who had stifled his dreams of exploration so he wouldn't be seen in Hobbiton as being unnaturally Took-like. But he never married (which Gandalf points out is unusual among hobbits) which was probably a way of keeping a sort of escape-hatch; if by chance an adventure ever *did* come along, he wouldn't be tied down. All this predated the Ring and must be ascribed to Bilbo's character.

Frodo - He grew up knowing about the Ring and got official possession of it while he was young, rather like Gollum, actually. Very hard to tell if the Ring affected the fact that he didn't marry, especially since Frodo seems more of an innate homebody than Bilbo does (you can see that in ROTK when Frodo is grieving over leaving the Shire for good; Bilbo lived there a lot longer and was sorry to leave, but not that way). I think the fact that the Ring was always occupying a corner of Frodo's mind, eating up his attention, so to speak, probably did affect his not marrying (and of course there's the whole "you were *meant* to have it" factor; maybe it was Fate holding him back). Afterwards, of course, he was in far too bad a shape to marry anyone, even if he'd had the energy left to be so inclined.

Sam - He was the only one of all the Ring-bearers who did not take possession of it willingly; he took it against his own inclination and while he was bearing it never thought of it as his - it was Frodo's, and he was just helping Frodo out. And of course he only had it a very short time, and was the only one who could let himself give up the Ring without a struggle (which can't just be ascribed to his having borne it for a very short while; imagine trying to get Boromir to give up the Ring after he'd had it for five minutes). Sam seems to have been saved by the fact that the Ring was never the dominating thought in his mind; instead the dominating thought was always Frodo. These factors were probably what saved Sam; if he'd let the Ring take over his thoughts and had quarrelled over it with Frodo his character would have been terribly changed, even if they did manage to destroy it. Rosie Cotton probably wouldn't have recognized the Sam who came back after that.

Oh - sorry, I seem to have written a book! Thanks for reading the end [img]smilies/smile.gif[/img].