From the Wikipedia article about 'Gollum', in 'The Hobbit' and 'The Lord of the Rings':
Gollum is a fictional monstrous character from J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth legendarium. He was introduced in the 1937 fantasy novel The Hobbit, and became important in its sequel, The Lord of the Rings. ... In The Lord of the Rings it is stated that he was originally known as Sméagol, he was corrupted by the One Ring and later named Gollum after his habit of making "a horrible swallowing noise in his throat". ... Sméagol obtained the Ring by murdering his relative Déagol, who found it in the River Anduin. Gollum referred to the Ring as "my precious" or "precious", and it extended his life far beyond natural limits. Centuries of the Ring's influence twisted Gollum's body and mind, and, by the time of the novels, he "loved and hated [the Ring], as he loved and hated himself." Throughout the story, Gollum was torn between his lust for the Ring and his desire to be free of it. Bilbo Baggins found the Ring and took it for his own, and Gollum afterwards pursued it for the rest of his life. Gollum finally seized the Ring from Frodo Baggins at the Cracks of Doom in Mount Doom in Mordor, but he fell into the fires of the volcano, where both he and the Ring were destroyed.
First of all, the ring was obtained through murder.
The ego is established through the (illusory) separation from God, which, by removing God from awareness, appears to constitute a form of murder.
It is the ego that twists and distorts body and mind. And yet it presents itself as the saviour from the perdition that it, itself, is wreaking. A maladaptive solution to a non-existent problem.
When I am offered liberation from the ego, through relinquishment of my beliefs, ideas, attitudes, values, methods of gathering, analysing, and assessing information, thinking, and behaviour—these being the source of my problem—I leap to their protection and fight back.