Month: February 2024

“Suddenly Sam Laughed, For Heart’s Ease Not for Jest.” Frodo and Sam Find Refreshment in Ithilien.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 847-851

You can almost feel the relief in Tolkien’s writing as Frodo and Sam leave the dreadful ash pits of the desolate lands before the Black Gate of Mordor and arrive in the fair land of Ithilien, which, although now under the control of the enemy, has not yet been spoiled.

Frodo and Sam, guided by Gollum, are making their way from the Black Gate down towards the crossing place in the road that runs south towards the sea and east-west from Minas Morgul to Osgiliath, the ancient but ruined capital of Gondor. And as they get further away from the horror of lands that have been utterly ruined by Mordor so their mood begins to change.

Tolkien gives us a rich feast of language so that he can do justice to Ithilien, once the garden of Gondor, far enough from the shadow of the Ephel Death, the mountains of Mordor, to be free of them and yet sheltered by those same mountains from the east wind.

Tolkien was not a meteorologist and so he never discourses in detail about the weather in Middle-earth. His geography, and his meteorology too, is first and foremost mythological and so reflects the way in which the peoples of western Europe saw the world about them in the pre-modern world. The West and the great Atlantic ocean always made that direction one of mystery. In Tolkien’s Middle-earth it is the way to Valinor, the way that the Elves take on their journey to Valinor. It is the way to the Grey Havens, that are themselves a crossroads between worlds. In Europe the wind that comes from the West is warmed by the warm current coming out of the Gulf of Mexico and so it moderates the weather right up into the Arctic Circle in the far north of Norway and brings warm rain to the green lands of western Europe and especially, for Tolkien, to the British Isles that were his native lands.

The East, on the other hand, was always the direction from which danger and threat came. Invading armies always came from the East, whether Saxon, Viking or Norman in the British Isles, or the hordes coming out of the steppes of Central Asia, or the Ottoman Turks coming out of the East up the valley of the River Danube. And the weather that comes out of the East comes out of Siberia and there are no mountain ranges in Europe north of the Alps to provide shelter from the cold east wind or to provide defence from invading armies.

Ithilien is thus a land sheltered from the east and open to the south and west, a land of plenty, and Tolkien’s rich feast of language reflects this.

“Many great trees grew there, planted long ago, falling into untended age amid a riot of careless descendents; and groves and thickets there were of tamarisk and pungent terebinth, of olive and bay; and there were junipers and myrtles; and thymes that grew in bushes, or with their woody creeping stems mantled in deep tapestries the hidden stones; sages of many kinds putting forth blue flowers, or red, or pale green; and marjorams and new-sprouting parsleys, and many herbs and scents beyond the garden-lore of Sam.”

Readers will note the sheer length of that sentence with its profusion of semicolons and Tolkien’s pleasure in writing a list. Each shrub and herb is named until we arrive at the limit of Sam, the gardener’s, knowledge, and we are invited into the unknown, not as a place of danger, but a place to be explored so that new pleasures can be experienced and enjoyed. Tolkien sums it all up through a phrase in which, just for a moment, he leaves the language of the north and strays for a moment into the classical Mediterranean world.

“A dishevelled dryad loveliness.”

And Sam laughs, “for heart’s ease not for jest”. Frodo indeed laughed for jest in the ash pit before the Morranon when Sam recited his verse about the oliphaunt, and it lifted his spirit, breaking the spell of despair in which he was held in the long hours of that day. That laughter broke into his darkness but the dark still lay about him. Sam’s laughter is of a different kind. It is an expression of delight, the laughter of heaven. It is as if as Sam breathes in the rich scents of the garden, this is his outbreath.

So we come into the last place of refreshment for the hobbits before they enter the darkness of Mordor, a moment of grace before they are abandoned to the horror that they alone, unaided, must face. They do not know what lies before them but they are able to draw strength from this place because, unlike Gollum, this is how they have trained their hearts.

“Well, Sméagol, The Third Turn May Turn the Best. I Will Come With You.” Frodo Decides to Put His Faith in Gollum.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 833-846

The journey to Mordor and to Mount Doom was always an impossible task. While there were other things to think about and problems to solve it was possible to avoid confronting that reality. There was the descent of the Emyn Muil, the passage of the Marshes and the question of what to do about Gollum. All this gave Frodo and Sam something to think about other than the really big thing. But now, as they see the impossibility of entering Mordor through the Black Gate without death or capture the reality hits home.

What would Gandalf have done if he had been with them? Which way would he have gone? Frodo wonders if Gandalf had ever been this way. He knew that Gandalf had once entered the fortress of Dol Guldur in Mirkwood, Sauron’s lesser stronghold, but he doubted if Gandalf had ever been to Mordor. Indeed no-one had ever entered Mordor and lived to tell the tale. No-one except Gollum, and he had been freed in order to search for the Ring.

So it is at this terrible moment just some few yards from the Morranon that the impossibility of the task and his utter inadequacy to undertake it becomes clear to Frodo. Gollum has spoken of another way but for some time they all sit in the hollow where they are hiding in silence.

Elrond had said to Frodo that the task was appointed for him and that Frodo could not find a way then no-one could. As Frodo heard these words that “no-one” probably held little meaning for him and when Elrond had gone on to speak of Hador and Húrin and Túrin and even Beren himself, it probably meant very little to him, except as a cause of some embarrassment, but now Frodo understands what Elrond meant. The task really is for him alone, not for Gandalf or Aragorn or any other of the great, and the task is impossible.

Something has to break into the sheer immensity of this realisation or the story might have ended here. In silence. But something does. It always does. Life goes on around even the most significant events and does not even notice them. First they become aware that, far off, Nazgûl are in the air, and this terrifies them; then they hear more forces arrive from Harad to swell the growing army within Mordor.

Gollum describes what he can see to Frodo and Sam and this leads Sam to think of oliphaunts and he recites a verse that he remembers from his childhood, standing with his hands behind his back just as he would have done as a small child. And just as happened when Sam had recited the tale of the trolls on the journey to Rivendell as the Morgul-blade drew Frodo deeper and deeper into darkness so too now Sam’s simple cheerfulness breaks the spell and Frodo laughs.

It is laughter that enables Frodo to make a choice. Impossibility becomes possibility once again. I do not mean that suddenly Frodo believes that he can achieve his mission, that, as we might now say, he believes in himself again. Frodo never entertained that particular illusion that has become so important in our own time. We may have seen Boromir believing in himself but Frodo just gets on with the job that has been given to him.

But faith does play a vital part in what Frodo decides to do. He decides to trust Gollum. This is not mere naivety on his part. He is well aware of Gollum’s malice and untrustworthiness. But in the face of impossibility, at the moment when this has moved from some abstract form of which he has always been aware to a reality that almost crushed him when he realised it, Gollum offers a way forward.

Gollum’s way is a terrible one and full of treachery. Gandalf would have warned Frodo against it. But Frodo is now aware that there may not be any way into Mordor and that, as Sam grimly puts it, they might as well walk up to the Black Gate and save themselves “a long tramp”. And it is in the light of this realisation that he becomes free to choose. He chooses to go with Gollum and he laughs. The whole thing is ridiculous, impossible, anyway. The whole thing is a joke. And this realisation reawakens hope in Frodo’s heart. At least hope to take the next step.

And then the step after that.

“He’s as Wise as Any, But He’s Soft Hearted, That’s What He Is.” Sam Thinks About Frodo Before The Black Gate of Mordor.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 830-842

The opening of the chapter that Tolkien entitled, The Black Gate is Closed, opens with the words “Before the next day dawned their journey to Mordor was over”. Readers will know as they read these words that much of the book lies still before them but to Frodo, and even to Sam, as they gaze upon the Black Gate in all its impregnable strength the journey has come to an end.

And it is a bad end. It is clear to them both that there is no way into Mordor here and that what lies ahead of them is death or capture. Surely here Tolkien is thinking about the dull quiet that would fall in the hearts of men just before they went “over the top” of their own trenches into the “no man’s land” that lay between them and the enemy trenches. Even the distance between them and the Gate, Tolkien describes it as being “but a furlong from their hiding place”, or 220 yards, or two hundred metres, just the kind of distance that it often was between the two sets of trenches on the Western Front. Such a distance would take only a couple of minutes to walk briskly and yet the possibility of even reaching the enemy trenches without being either killed or wounded was small. To each man at such a moment there would be the sense of journey’s end. This at least is how Sam feels and it is through Sam’s eyes that we now see the story as it unfolds.

But now Gollum speaks, pleading with the hobbits not to go this way, not to take the Ring to Him, but to go back home, perhaps even “to give it back to little Sméagol”.

Frodo is absolutely firm that he must do as he has promised and so must go to Mordor and as Sam looks at the man that he both loves and calls, master, all hope dies in his cheerful heart. Long ago, or so it now feels, Tom Bombadil told the hobbits to keep up their “merry hearts”, and Sam has done so, both for him and for Frodo, but now the journey is ended.

But not for Gollum. He speaks of “another way” and pleads with Frodo to listen to him. We might think that in the face of the impossibility that this way, the short walk to the Black Gate, is going to lead to anything but death or capture, that Frodo and Sam would grasp any other possibility with greedy hands but they are so firm in their resolve, and for Sam at least, so untrusting of their guide, that they cannot believe that “another way” can possibly exist.

Sam, at least, does not trust anything that comes from Gollum’s mouth, for Gollum is Sam’s shadow in the starkest sense. Where Sam is loyal and trustworthy Gollum is treacherous. Where Sam is straightforward Gollum is sly. Sam detests him, even nursing the thought in his heart that death might be preferable to any more time in Gollum’s company.

Sam also fears what he calls Frodo’s softheartedness. “He’s as wise as any, but he’s softhearted, that’s what he is.” Sam holds two entirely contradictory beliefs about Frodo in his heart at exactly the same time without any sense that they do contradict. On the one hand Frodo is “as wise as any”, with the possible exception of Gandalf or Bilbo, and there is a sense in which this is true. Both Elrond, Galadriel and Gandalf, too, recognise that Frodo is worthy to undertake his task, that it is more than sheer accident that he is the Ringbearer. But while Sam believes this too, he also believes that Frodo is softhearted, a quality that he loves, and confuses this with softheadedness. It is a mistake that many make and so he is shocked when Frodo displays a very hard head indeed.

Frodo makes it quite clear to Gollum that he heard him when he spoke of giving the Ring back to “little Sméagol”. And he tells him that he will never possess the Ring, ever again, that at the last, he would put on the Ring and if he, “wearing it, were to command you, you would obey, even if it were to leap from a precipice or to cast yourself into the fire”. Is this a prophecy on Frodo’s part? Is this what happens at the Cracks of Doom? As Ringbearer Frodo’s heart, and most certainly his head, is capable of a flinty resolve that shocks even Sam, and terrifies Gollum.

“Lord Sméagol? Gollum The Great? The Gollum!” Sméagol and Gollum Debate What They Should Do About The Ring.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 826-830

An essential difference between Peter Jackson’s version of The Lord of the Rings and the story that Tolkien originally told lies in the character of Gollum and the telling of the inner debate between Gollum and Sméagol that Sam overhears.

Sam hears it because Gollum’s inner life is almost laid bare for all to see. I say almost because Gollum is still capable of deception. Sam hears Gollum speak of She and wonders who that might be but does not find out until he encounters Shelob in her lair.

Jackson gives us the same debate that Sam overhears but with a major difference. In his version the debate is between good and evil. He gives us a sense that within the miserable creature that has guided Frodo and Sam through the Dead Marshes almost as far as the Black Gate the possibility remains that good might still triumph. Indeed at this point of the story the good Sméagol does seem to triumph over the evil Gollum and the debate ends with Sméagol crying out “I’m free! I’m free!”

But Tolkien gives us a very different version of this debate. Here we see the same Gollum whose mind has been utterly overthrown by his desire for the Ring. When Gollum thinks about the promise that he made to Frodo to “serve the master of the Precious” all that he thinks about is that if he were to regain the Ring then he would be its master and so would have kept the promise. Sméagol, on the other hand, could never be described in any sense as good. In Tolkien’s version of the debate we see a pathetic cringing figure driven mainly by fear. Fear that there might be terrible consequences if he were to break the promise because the promise is held by the Ring and he fears the Ring above all things, and fear that in trying to take the Ring he might be killed because there are two hobbits and only one of him. Sméagol does have some sense of gratitude to Frodo who took the elven rope off his leg but his goodness goes little further than that. And the debate ends, not with Sméagol’s cry of joy that he is free of the control of the Ring and of his Gollum alter ego but with his hand slowly reaching out to seize the Ring, an action that is only prevented by Sam appearing to wake up.

The Ring and its corruption have a complete hold over all that Gollum or Sméagol are. The distinction that Sam makes between them as Slinker and Stinker is pretty accurate. But there is one sense in which Gollum has grown as a character during the long years of his existence. The Gollum who took the Ring by the murder of his friend was a creature with almost minimal ambition. Apart from a desire to hide and to survive all that drove him was a desire to find the roots of things and this desire sent him deep under the Misty Mountains where all he found was darkness.

This all changed when Bilbo took the Ring from him and he began his long search for it. As he searched he began to understand more and more about the thing that he had possessed for so many years and with which he had done practically nothing. And he learnt this most when he fell into the hands of Sauron, the Lord of the Ring. It was from Sauron that he learned about mastery, the ability to rule over others. That is why Gollum refers to Sauron as He. This leads Gollum to develop a fantasy life, one in which he is “Lord Sméagol? Gollum the Great? The Gollum!”. Gollum imagines himself as lord and ruler of all. A life in which he is able to exchange his pathetic cringing existence for one in which all will bow down to him, even the Nazgûl. But even then his ambition is very limited. All he desires with all his mastery is fish “three times a day, fresh from the Sea”.

Last week we thought about Sauron’s desire to see everything and to control it. Gollum’s desire is not very different and like Sauron he does not so much possess his desire but is possessed by it. He would not be the Lord of the Ring so much as to be ruled by it. And is Sauron so very different?