Month: November 2018

A Chance for Faramir, Captain of Gondor, to Show his Quality!

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Dear Readers,
Today this post became my first to have 1,000 hits. Have a look at it and see what you think.
Stephen

Wisdom from The Lord of the Rings

Poor Sam! It is so long since he has enjoyed what he would call “proper” food and the wine has gone to his head. Add to that the way in which talk has drifted away from the melancholy decline of Gondor and its people to the abiding beauty of Galadriel, “Hard as di’monds, soft as moonlight. Warm as sunlight, cold as frost in the stars,” and Sam’s guard is gone completely and he has told Faramir about his brother, Boromir’s desire for the Ring.

And so Faramir is put to the test: “In the wild I have you: two halflings, and a host of men at my call, and the Ring of Rings”. He has within his grasp the means to bring victory to Gondor, to vanquish the ancient enemy of his people and perhaps even to restore the dream of Númenor that he has nourished for so long. So…

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An Excerpt From “Chosen” by Anne Marie Gazzolo

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Dear friends, Anne Marie has been a regular reader of and commentator on my blog for some time now. I read her first book on The Lord of the Rings, “Moments of Grace and Spiritual Warfare in The Lord of the Rings” with much pleasure and she has now published her second book, “Chosen”.

Details on how to buy both of these can be found below but before you get there I hope that you will enjoy this short excerpt from “Chosen” that she has sent me and that it will leave you wanting to read more.

Gandalf Rejects the Ring

Frodo desires to bring an end to the Ring. But after he hears only the fires in faraway Mordor can do this, he no longer wishes to be the one to do it. He does not consider himself cut out for such a dangerous undertaking. “Why was I chosen?” (LotR I:2, 60).

Gandalf replies he does not know, but he confirms the decision was deliberately made. “Despite this emphasis on fate, however, free will does play a significant part in Tolkien’s novel. Frodo is perhaps the ideal Ring-bearer, as his strength of character enables him to accept his fated role, yet also to retain a sense of free will in the face of the powerful, corrupting influence of the Ring” (Gardner et al. 82).

The wizard vehemently rejects Frodo’s plea to take the Ring in his stead. Twice he begs the hobbit not to entice him with its power. He knows he is not strong to withstand the test if he actually became a Ring-bearer. He pledges his support to its ordained Bearer. The decision to accept this appointment rests on the hobbit’s shoulders and heart alone, but this assurance of aid makes Gandalf “the messenger of the actual grace bestowed upon the hobbit . . .” (Wagner, “Sacramentum,” 84). The wizard brings up two important, recurring themes: “One is that there is a benevolent force at work that opposes the power of evil, and that everyone has a role to play in its grand design. The other is that individuals should not be forced to do anything – even to follow their roles in the grand scheme of things” (Pienciak 74).

As Frodo ponders his choice, his active imagination presents a fearful picture. The fireplace becomes Mount Doom and envelops his whole world until Gandalf’s voice recalls him. He announces he will remain the Ring’s guardian, whatever the cost to himself.

Here is the first glimmering of his Chosen status . . . a free will accepting, not a challenge, but a Calling. Although he does not yet fully understand the impact of this decision for himself, he understands the importance, the need for it, for others.

It is a moment of supreme faith. And trust. Trust freely given – not coerced – despite what may come of it. (Wagner, “Sacramentum” 82; emphasis in original)

 

Works Cited

 

Gardner, Patrick, et al. SparkNotes: The Lord of the Rings. Spark Publishing, 2002.

Pienciak, Anne M. Barron’s Book Notes: J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Barron’s Educational Series, 1986.

Tolkien, J. R. R. The Lord of the Rings. 2nd ed., Houghton Mifflin, 1965-66.

Wagner, Constance G. J. “Sacramentum Midgard: Frodo as Sacrament to Middle-earth.” Silver Leaves . . . from the White Tree of Hope, issue 4, 2012, 83-87.

 

Anne Marie Gazzolo is the author of Moments of Grace and Spiritual Warfare in The Lord of the Rings, Chosen: The Journeys of Bilbo and Frodo of the Shire, and the forthcoming companion piece: The Long Way Home, a collection of poems centered about a heroic quest and its aftermath. Two fantasy series and another book about lessons from Middle-earth anxiously await their turn to come out. Visit her at annemariegazzolo.com.

Things That Can Only Be Spoken of in Daylight. Gandalf Speaks of the Corrupting Power of the Ring.

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The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991) pp. 45-48

When Frodo and Gandalf begin to speak about the Ring it is as if every word emerges from a profound silence. Not just the silence of the night that has passed but the silence of long years whose shadow now lies over this comfortable hobbit hole in the heart of the Shire. At last Frodo speaks.

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Gandalf and Frodo in Bag End by Alan Lee

“Last night you began to tell me strange things about my ring, Gandalf… And then you stopped, because you said that such matters were best left until daylight.”

And so Gandalf begins to tell the story of what Frodo has always called, Bilbo’s Ring. And it is a story of power and of possession.

“A mortal, Frodo, who keeps one of the Great Rings, does not die or obtain more life, he merely continues, until at last every minute is a weariness. And if he often uses the Ring to make himself invisible, he fades: he becomes in the end invisible permanently, and walks in the twilight under the eye of the dark power that rules the Rings. Yes, sooner or later- later, if he is strong or well-meaning to begin with, but neither strength nor good purpose will last- sooner or later the dark power will devour him.”

ring2_by_badriel-d68re7u

The One Ring by Badriel

What Gandalf has done here is to describe to Frodo both what it will mean to possess a Ring of Power and what it means to desire power over others. It was the 19th British historian, Lord Acton, who famously said, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” What Tolkien describes here is what happens when absolute power is achieved by means of a particular item and linked to a particular desire. The One Ring appears to convey two things. One is power over others. The other is power over death itself. Thus the one who possesses it will believe themselves to be entirely invulnerable both to the power of others and even to death. But what Tolkien shows is that the corruption that Acton spoke of in relation to power is not just the loss of a moral sense. Sauron had already made this bargain long before the forging of the Ring and did so without a backward glance. All that he desired was absolute power and his assumption was that everyone else desired this too. What he did not know was that in the forging of the Ring in order to achieve power he was giving his Self to the thing that he had made. He was able to appear, first to Celebrimbor and then later to Ar-Pharazôn of Númenor, in a fair guise. But he lost this capacity and throughout the Third Age he could only appear as a thing of terror. And when the Ring eventually goes into the Fire there is nothing left of him but a mist in the wind, malicious but utterly powerless.

Lord-of-the-Rings-the-Nazgul-kings

This is what it means to be corrupted. This is what all who desire power over others believe themselves to be exempt from. They believe that they have achieved a level of self-possession through the exercise of that power that will mean that they are the masters of their own destiny. But what we learn here is that the wielders of power, those who achieve it by means of a Ring of Power, fade. And what we also learn is that those who spend too much time with a Ring of Power are eventually corrupted by it. Even Bilbo was beginning to fall under its influence saying that it was “growing on his mind”, that “he was always worrying about it”, that he felt “thin and stretched”. Eventually even Bilbo would have fallen under the power of the Ring and surely with the Nazgûl hunting for it high and low and drawn to it because it has power over them they would have found Bilbo and found the Ring too. But might we say that a swift end at the point of a Nazgûl blade or even torture at the hands of the Dark Lord would be preferable to the terrible fate that would have befallen him through possession of the Ring? Perhaps when we pray that we might be delivered from evil it is more a prayer that we might not become evil ourselves than that we might suffer from the evil of another.

Philosophy in the Pub. The World According to Ted Sandyman and to Sam Gamgee.

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The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991) pp 42-44

Please click Play in order to listen to my reading of this post.

It is not necessary to have travelled far in order to have an imagination that extends beyond the boundaries of one’s own lived experience but it is necessary to wish to have done so. On an April evening after a rainy day Sam Gamgee and Ted Sandyman sit opposite one another by the fire of The Green Dragon in Bywater and the regulars of the pub gather about them. They expect a debate between the two hobbits and they are not disappointed.

Ted and Sam

By the rules of bar room debate Ted Sandyman is more skilled at the art and if a quicker wit were to guarantee success in life then he would have been the happier of the two. There is little doubt that the assembled company consider that Ted is the winner and certainly Ted, himself, thinks so, but Sam will end his days honoured by all and Ted…?

We never find out what happened to Ted after Saruman’s gang is driven out of the Shire. The last time that we hear of him is when the victorious hobbits, fresh from the Battle of Bywater, are marching upon Saruman’s headquarters in Bagshot Row. Ted still regards himself as Sam’s superior even then. “You was always soft,” he sneers at Sam and even when he sees the hobbit host he still believes that his horn will summon a force of men sufficient to put down the uprising.

scouring_of_the_shire_by_discogangsta

Of course the men would never come so what happened to Ted after that? There are two possibilities. The first and the most hopeful is that after a lifetime of small-minded mean spiritedness Ted comes to realise what a fool he has been and that he realises too that to think of oneself as a fool is not the worst fate that can befall a person. Indeed it can open the door to happiness. Ted could lay down the burden of what he considers to be his dignity, something that he has always regarded as more important than happiness, seek to make amends for the harm that he has done to others, and to put his mill to use in the service of the Shire at a difficult time. If he were to do that he would almost certainly find that his fellow hobbits would be quick to forgive and he would live out his days as a useful and contented member of his community.

That is one possibility. The other would be that he would retreat into his last remaining possession, his resentment, and nourish it as if it had the ability to feed him. He would hate Merry and Pippin as entitled members of the old gentry of the Shire, a class from which he has always felt himself to be excluded, and he would hate Sam even more because he would see Sam as having achieved the thing that he had always desired himself but now could not have. If he chose the latter pathway would he be able to remain in his mill, serving a community who knew what he had done as an enthusiastic collaborator and whose contentment he would always hate? Or would he, like Bill Ferny, have withdrawn to the edges of things to eke out a miserable existence through small, mean and nasty acts.

I will allow my readers to decide this for themselves. For myself, just as Frodo did with Lotho Pimple even after he saw the destruction of his own home, I will hope for Ted Sandyman. Frodo continued to hope for Lotho, not because he had scaled some moral height, but because of his own sense of failure in not being able to cast the Ring into the Fire. Frodo does not feel alien from his cousin. They have both fallen. Perhaps Sam will not feel alien from his old sparring partner from The Green Dragon. 

But on this April evening after the rain all of this lies in a future beyond events that will change all of their lives. Sam, the hobbit with a ‘soft’ head, will follow his longing to see wonders and he will go with Frodo through terrible hardship unto great glory. While Ted will never see beyond the next successful deal and the next one and the next one until he falls with Lotho Pimple, the hobbit he has most admired, the one who could have written a book about making successful deals.

Ted_sandyman

Divine Restlessness. Frodo Begins to Dream About the Wild Lands and the Mountains.

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The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991) pp 40,41

Please Press Play to Listen to my Reading of this Post

 

None of us can control the stories that others tell about us although Bilbo may have tried to do so. If he had ever heard that he had become a part of Shire folklore as “Mad Baggins, who used to vanish with a bang and a flash and reappear with bags of jewels and gold” we might be able to assume that he would have received the news with a certain amusement, and satisfaction too.

Frodo, on the other hand, never sought to be a part of the Bilbo Baggins “legend” but he finds himself a part of it anyway especially as his habit of giving a party in honour of Bilbo each year on the anniversary of his birth becomes widely known. All societies have a way of policing themselves by means of the informal court of public opinion. Most people do not wish to be thought strange and so will adjust their behaviour, for good or for ill, towards the norms and standards of their community. Until this point in their history hobbits have neither had, nor encouraged, a heroic culture in which certain individuals are permitted, for the sake of the greater good, to step beyond these norms. Smaug the dragon never threatened the welfare of the Shire and so Bilbo’s adventure was never thought worthy of much attention. Later Merry, Pippin and Sam will be granted a certain heroic status because of their leading part in driving out Saruman’s gang but the story of “Frodo of the Nine Fingers and the Ring of Doom” which will be sung for generations in Gondor will never be given much regard in the Shire except among those to whom Sam will tell the story.

Frodo of the 9 Fingers

To the extent that Frodo desires the affection and esteem of others the lack of regard that he enjoys from his fellows will be a cause of unhappiness to him. Certainly Tolkien felt Frodo was tempted to “have returned as a ‘hero’, not content with being a mere instrument of good”.

But the desire to be a hero is not the only thing that can be said about Frodo. If it were so then he would almost certainly have fallen prey to the same temptation that would eventually beset Boromir. And it is during the seventeen years that lay between Bilbo’s departure and Gandalf’s return that a much more important aspect to his character was developed.

“Frodo himself… found that being his own master and the Mr Baggins of Bag End was rather pleasant. For some years he was quite happy and did not worry much about the future. But half unknown to himself the regret that he had not gone with Bilbo was steadily growing. He found himself wondering at times, especially in the autumn, about the wild lands, and strange visions of mountains that he had never seen came into his dreams.”

misty_mountains_by_tavenerscholar-d5opl3e

Frodo himself resists this growing desire to leave the Shire at first but it will not leave him alone. And such is the way with the kind of dreams that Frodo has and the kind of restlessness that begins to grow within him. Gradually all that we have considered to be home begins to feel too confined and the spaces that open up beyond our home become increasingly attractive.

Eventually Frodo will follow this yearning and will leave the Shire. He will wander the world, see mountains and experience Elven lands and their, almost, timeless beauty. Beauty will take hold of him on more than one occasion and yet even the wonder of Cerin Amroth will not be for him the end of his journey and neither can his return to the Shire. Frodo’s restlessness or, might we say, his homesickness, can only grow with each step that he takes. Eventually it will take him out of Middle-earth altogether and into an experience of “pure Elvishness” as Tolkien put it in a letter to a Mrs Eileen Elgar.

Cerin Amroth

But even there, as Tolkien put it in the same letter, Frodo went through what he terms “a purgatory and a reward… a period of reflection and peace and a gaining of a truer understanding of his position in littleness and in greatness”. All purgatory, certainly as Tolkien understood it, is a means to an end and not an end in itself. The classic spiritual journey has three stages. Illumination, Purgation and Union. The journey that Frodo began in restlessness will end in the homecoming at last of pure union with Love beyond “the circles of the world”.