Month: December 2023

“I Will Not Touch the Creature. For Now That I See Him, I Do Pity Him.” It Is Pity That Will Overthrow The Dark Lord.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 798-803

Think of how many stories that you know in which the hero overcomes the evil against which he stands by means of the way he uses what resources at his disposal, especially the means of violence, to defeat his foes. What matters in all these stories is power and the use of power. That is what makes the Ring so tempting. It is the Ring of Power. The one who possesses it and who has the capacity to use it would gain a power over others that nothing else could give.

And then think of the good that you could do if you had the power to do it. Perhaps you could use your power to protect the innocent and to overcome those who seek to do wrong. This desire, of course, is what lay behind the code of chivalry. Men were trained in the use of arms, the means of power, to the highest degree, but they were also trained spiritually. They were to use their power in the service of the good, the true and the beautiful. They were to defend women and children against harm. They were never to use their power for mere self interest but always for a higher good.

So power in itself is not an evil. If Frodo had not had Sting, the Elven blade that Bilbo had taken from the trolls’ cave on his adventures with the dwarves, then Gollum would have probably killed Sam and then Frodo too. Gollum has survived as long as he has in part because of his cunning but also because he is always prepared to kill and he has killed many times. Neither Frodo or Sam are killers even though they have been in battle. Gollum is.

But there is a fundamental difference between using a sword or any means of violence in desperate need and using them in cold blood. When Isildur took the Ring from Sauron it was in such need. We know little of his history after he took the Ring apart from his unwillingness to destroy it but there is little to suggest that he had become a tyrant. At least not yet. Gollum, on the other hand, gained the Ring by murdering his best friend.

And, crucially, when Bilbo took the Ring from Gollum, he had the opportunity at one point to kill him. Cloaked by the invisibility that the Ring was able to give him he stood behind Gollum who himself was standing between him and freedom. Surely he would have been justified in using Sting to gain his freedom. But he could not kill in cold blood and so he did the riskier thing. He leaped over his crouching enemy and so escaped from the Misty Mountains.

But it was not Bilbo’s need that Frodo was thinking about when he said to Gandalf:”What a pity Bilbo did not stab the vile creature, when he had the chance.” At that moment Frodo was simply afraid of Gollum and disgusted by him. He felt that it would be justifiable, even good, to take Gollum’s life. But Gandalf did not agree.

“Pity? It was Pity that stayed his hand. Pity, and Mercy; not to strike without need.”

And now that Frodo sees Gollum for himself, the half-starved miserable creature in the wild, driven by a hunger over which he has no control, he pities him. Perhaps too, he feels enough of the corrupting power of the Ring himself to understand in a way that no-one else can, apart perhaps from Bilbo, what it means to possess this evil thing. Frodo may be being slowly worn down by the thing that he carries but the goodness with which he has been trained still has power over evil.

And so in Pity Frodo stays his hand. And this makes all the difference. Of course it makes an immediate difference. Frodo and Sam are lost in the wild and without Gollum as a guide they would have starved. And it also makes a crucial difference to the eventual outcome of the story. It is only through Gollum that the Ring eventually goes to the Fire and its destruction; only through Gollum that Sauron is overthrown. And it also makes a crucial difference to Frodo himself. Could he have found healing for all his hurts in the Undying Land if he had murder on his conscience? Perhaps he could but it would have been so much harder.

So it is indeed Pity that indeed “rules the fates of many”, as Gandalf put it. It is a quality in which Gandalf has chosen to be trained and so, crucially, he is different from Saruman. And it is a quality in which he schools three of the vitally important characters in The Lord of the Rings, Aragorn, Faramir and Frodo. Although power plays its part in the final overthrow of Sauron it is Pity and Mercy that make the essential difference. Indeed we could say that it is because Frodo and Sam do not kill Gollum at this moment that Sauron is overthrown.

“I Think The Rope Came by Itself- When I Called.” The Rope From Lórien Makes Us Think of Unexpected Lights in Dark Places.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 789-798

There comes a point in Frodo and Sam’s efforts to descend the steep eastern slopes of the Emyn Muil when they scramble down a gully to a point where Frodo thinks they might be able to escape the hills altogether. He is just making his way down to a ledge some way below when a cry sounds in the sky above them. It is a Nazgûl and so terrible is the sound out in the wild that Frodo puts his hands to his ears and finds himself sliding down the face of the hills to another ledge below the one that he had originally intended to reach.

For a moment Frodo is blinded and terribly shaken and Sam does not know how he will reach him. He begins to brave the descent that Frodo has just made rather precipitously when Frodo stops him.

“Wait! You can’t do anything without a rope.”

And suddenly Sam remembers the coil of rope that he has carried all the way from Lothlórien; a gift of the Elves of that land.

“Never travel far without a rope!” said the Elf who had given it to Sam. “And one that is long and strong and light. Such as these. They may be a help in many needs”

The rope that Sam has carried in his pack is about 30 ells in length or about 110 feet, quite long enough to get them both down to the ground below. Although the rope seems to be so slender that it could not possibly bear their weight it turns out to be very strong. It also turns out to have other qualities. When Sam lowers it to enable Frodo to scramble back up to the point at which he fell the rope shimmers in the dark in such a way as to dispel his temporary blindness. And the rope has a further quality. When Frodo and Sam finally reach the bottom of their descent and realise that they cannot bring the rope with them Sam mournfully gives it a farewell tug. To his surprise and chagrin it falls into his hands. Frodo breaks into mocking laughter remarking on the quality of Sam’s knot.

“I may not be much good at climbing, Mr. Frodo,” he said in injured tones, “but I do know about rope and about knots. It’s in the family, as you might say.”

They check the rope to see if it had frayed but found it completely whole. Sam has complete faith both in the Elven rope and also in his own skill with knots and at the last he declares, “Have it your own way, Mr. Frodo… but I think the rope came of itself- when I called.”

And Sam is right. That is exactly what happened. And with this Sam is beginning to learn a relationship to things that is a form of wisdom, a wisdom that the Elves of Lothlórien have developed over many years. To the Elves all things that we tend to treat as mere tools, mere objects, have a kind of consciousness. We see this with lembas, the waybread that at this point in the story is the only food that Frodo and Sam have. We remember that when Merry and Pippin escaped from the orcs they noted that lembas “does put heart into you. A more wholesome sort of feeling, too, than the heat of that orc draught.” And later in the story we will see what the Phial of Galadriel can do in the darkest place.

At first Sam is inclined to call this quality a kind of magic, Elven magic. But he is learning that he also has the ability to evoke a kind of aliveness in things just as the Elves do and just as great craftsmen and women do. This evocation is a deep form of attentiveness. The patience to wait until the inner life of a thing reveals itself. Eventually Sam will use this attentiveness through Galadriel’s gift to him, the little box of dust that he will use to heal the Shire after Saruman’s scouring of it. Through that dust and Sam’s particular use of it the babies born in the year after will be especially beautiful and the beer especially good.

All of these things are expressions of the way in which dark places can be transformed. Ordinary things like rope, food and dust are found to have a real presence but we must pay them sufficient attention in order to find that presence and to allow it to transform our lives.

“It is My Doom, I Think, To Go To That Shadow Yonder, So That a Way Will Be Found.” Frodo Thinks About Providence and His Journey.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 787-789

It has been three days since the Fellowship was broken at Parth Galen and Frodo and Sam have been wandering in the Emyn Muil, always looking for a way to bring them down to the marshes below but always finding that the eastern slopes are too steep to do this with any kind of safety. Westwards on this same day Merry and Pippin have just met with Treebeard in Fangorn, Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli follow them and in two days will meet with Gandalf who has made his way directly from Lothlórien to Fangorn.

Sam fears that they are lost, that they have come the wrong way. Should they make their way back and try another? Frodo does not think it possible to retrace their steps. They have hardly taken a straightforward path through the hills that would make this an easy choice and there are orcs patrolling the eastern banks of the Anduin. No, somehow there needs to be a way forward.

Frodo thinks about his doom. We have come to think of this word in dark terms. I remember a much loved sitcom from my youth set in the days of the Second World War in England when a German invasion was expected at any moment. There was a Scottish character who would respond to any difficulty with the words, “We’re all doomed,” in other words, we’re all finished. But this is not what Frodo means. He uses the word in an older sense in which doom meant judgement. People would speak of doomsday as meaning the day of judgement, the day on which their eternal destiny would be decided.

Private Fraser expresses his personal philosophy of life, shaped by Scottish Calvinism.

But there was another meaning that takes us back in the story to Lothlórien and the words that Galadriel spoke to the company as they prepared to continue their journey onward and wondered which way they should take.

“Do not trouble your hearts overmuch with thought of the road tonight. Maybe the paths that each of you shall tread are already laid before your feet, though you do not see them.”

And none of the Fellowship could see, at that moment, the paths that they were to follow in the days that followed their departure from Lothlórien. Only Boromir among them was absolutely certain which way he should go. He would go to Minas Tirith and he thought that the Fellowship should go with him. But Boromir’s journey ends when the Fellowship is broken. Aragorn is torn between his desire to go with Boromir to Minas Tirith, to the land over which he will become king, but feels that he cannot abandon Frodo. On the day of the breaking of the Fellowship he will make another choice completely and one that he never anticipated; he will follow Merry and Pippin across the plains of Rohan with Legolas and Gimli and while failing to find them will find Gandalf once more.

And Frodo and Sam are stuck in the barren Emyn Muil with seemingly no way forward.

It is a feature of our lives that we are aware for the most part only of the circumstances in which we find ourselves. Frodo and Sam have no awareness of the great events that are unfolding westwards that will lead to the fall of Isengard. They only know that at this moment they cannot find a path. But Frodo has a sense that he is a part of a bigger story, one that is carrying him along, even against his own will. This sense is called a belief in Providence. Gandalf told him that he was meant to have the Ring. Galadriel told him that his path was already laid before his feet. And even though at this point he has no idea how he will find that path he believes that it will be found. And in that faith he will keep on going. He will find a way to Mordor and his doom.

“Well, Master, We’re in a Fix and No Mistake.” Some Thoughts on Hobbits and Heroes.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) p. 787

I spent a pleasant evening with a friend in a pub recently (Thanks, Ben!) talking about The Lord of the Rings and we got to thinking about heroes and, more specifically, the kind of heroes that Tolkien’s hobbits are. We compared them to superheroes in, say, a Marvel comic or film. Now I was an avid reader of those comics as a boy and I am happy to say this with pride now with C.S Lewis’s thought in mind that he would rather see a boy reading a comic with pleasure than a classic novel because he thought he had to. I also fell in love with Narnia so I hope that would have pleased him too. I was fascinated by the characters of the heroes and their inner struggles just as much as their triumphs over evil. I was just starting to become aware of my own struggles and they gave me some comfort and the thought that I might be a hero too.

But we agreed that Tolkien created a different kind of hero in Frodo and Sam. In fact, as Tom Shippey has shown, he created the kind of hero that could only have been created in a 20th century story, the kind that would have experienced industrial warfare, as Tolkien and Lewis did on the Western Front of the First World War of 1914-18. And while in a Marvel story the hero comes to save the day while the rest of us run for cover or stand helplessly with our hands raised over our heads as the forces of evil destroy our city around us, Tolkien’s hobbits are more like us.

Yesterday I listened, deeply moved, to a news report that the French military attaché to the United Kingdom unexpectedly arrived at the hundredth birthday celebration of a veteran of the Normandy landings of June 1944 and presented him with France’s highest honour, the Legion d’honneur. I was moved by this because my father took part in those landings and, had he lived, would recently have celebrated his own hundredth birthday. I felt that my Dad was being honoured too. The old gentleman was interviewed on the radio and, speaking with admirable clarity, said that he did not feel that he deserved the award because, as he put it, “I was just there”. I think my father would have said the same thing. In fact the only story that he ever told us of the experience was that as he was going ashore on the Normandy beaches in his American built landing craft he noted that it had an ice-cream maker fitted and wondered what it was doing there. If any of my American readers know the answer please let me know in the comments below.

But that “I was just there” remark typifies Tom Shippey’s argument about the “heroes” of 20th century warfare. Whereas Lancelot, riding to rescue Guinevere from her captors, is a hero of romance, the veterans of the Normandy landings of 1944 were “just there”, doing their duty and trying to stay alive.

Tolkien gives us both kind of heroes in his story though he hardly ever used the word. In Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli, following the orcs of Isengard across the plains of Rohan in the hope of freeing Merry and Pippin from their captivity we have the kind of hero that Sir Thomas Malory would have recognised in his Morte D’Arthur. In Frodo and Sam trying to find a way down from the Emyn Muil to the livid marshes below we have something quite different. They are more like the men going ashore on the Normandy beaches in 1944. They just keep going. Or, at least, they try to.

But Frodo and Sam give a dignity to every person who has ever just kept on going, trying their best to do whatever good they can in their lives. I have had conversations with my daughters about this recently as they have looked in horror at evils in the world and have wondered what can be done. I have thought about it in reference to my own life as I have asked myself the question, “What use have I been?” And like Frodo and Sam, I won’t pretend that my story has been like Aragorn’s or Lancelot’s although there was a time when I wanted to be like that, but, whether I ever write it down or not, I will try to create my own Red Book in my head of what I have tried to do, of how I have tried to answer Gandalf’s principle that all any of us can do is “to decide what to do with the time that is given us”.

And not to give up.

“To…Perceive The Unimaginable Hand and Mind of Fëanor at Their Work.” What Would Gandalf Want to See in The Palantír of Orthanc?

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 778-784

Gandalf and Pippin are sitting upon Shadowfax, flying across the plains of Rohan towards Edoras and then onwards to Minas Tirith and to war. A Nazgûl has just flown over them, a messenger from Barad-dûr to Isengard. Sauron wants to know why Saruman has not come to the Orthanc-stone. Soon a second messenger will be sent to bring Pippin back for further questioning but there will be no captive to send because Pippin is not in Orthanc. Sauron will want to know why he has seen a hobbit in the palantír and yet nothing is given to the Nazgûl. He will suspect treachery.

As they ride Gandalf thinks about the palantír and whether he might have wrested control of the stone from Sauron. He has already told Aragorn and Théoden that he is relieved that it was Pippin and not himself who first looked into it, that he has not been revealed to the Dark Lord, that there is still a brief window of doubt in Sauron’s mind that they might yet exploit, but he still wonders what he might have seen had he still had the palantír.

“Even now my heart desires to test my will upon it, to see if I could not wrench it from him and turn it where I would- to look across the wide seas of water and of time to Tirion the Fair, and perceive the unimaginable hand and mind of Fëanor at their work, while both the White Tree and Golden were in flower.”

When The Lord of the Rings was first published in 1954 only a handful of people knew anything about Fëanor or the two trees. In his famous review of The Hobbit C.S Lewis revealed that every character that readers meet in Wilderland spring from “deep sources in our blood and tradition” but he was one of the few who knew what they were. It was not until after Tolkien died in 1973 that The Silmarillion was published thanks to the work of his son, Christopher. That changed the way that everyone read The Lord of the Rings. At last we knew the back story.

In The Silmarillion Fëanor is a figure who is both incredibly gifted and yet deeply flawed. When Morgoth and Ungoliant, the monstrous spider creature and mother of Shelob, destroy the two trees, the source of light in Aman, the Valar turn to Fëanor who has caught the light within the Silmarils that he made. They ask for his help asking him to give up the Silmarils so that they might become the source of light in the uttermost west. Fëanor refuses to give them up but Morgoth steals them. Against the will of the Valar Fëanor leads the Noldor to Middle-earth to regain the Silmarils but he is slain in battle against Morgoth.

Gandalf’s desires to see Fëanor at work, to see the greatest maker in the whole history of Arda. Compared to Fëanor Sauron is a craftsman of little skill. Gandalf tells Pippin that Sauron could never have made the palantíri. He could only use them. Fëanor’s hand and mind are “unimaginable”. In him we see the ability of the Elves, the first born of the earth, to co-create with God, and we see Fëanor as the greatest of them. The early Fathers of the Church used to speak of a proper pride in our work. They spoke of parrhesia, of being able to speak freely to God, to look God in the eye and to say, “I have done this”. This, the Fathers taught, was lost in the Fall, as Humankind became competitors with God and not co-creators, but it is restored through the Incarnation. Fëanor’s pride, his desire to keep his own work as a private possession, brought him into competition with the Valar and with Ilúvatar himself. He was corrupted by Morgoth, coming to view the Valar with suspicion, believing that they wanted to use the things he had made for their own narrow self interest. Perhaps his death was a mercy. Had he defeated Morgoth might he have become a Dark Lord in his place?