Month: April 2024

“Better Fear Undeserved Than Rash Words”. Can Frodo Trust Faramir?

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 874-878

The question of trust is one of life’s greatest challenges. When we are able to trust someone it creates a liberty that enlivens and energises like nothing else. When trust is betrayed the very foundations of the soul are undermined. In Dante’s Inferno it is traitors who are placed in the deepest circle of hell. Faramir himself has had to struggle with the question, “Can he trust Frodo?”. When he was interrogating Frodo after the battle against the Haradrim it was the one thing that he was striving to establish. Boromir was dead and here was someone who clearly had known him. Had Frodo played some part in his brother’s death?

“Treachery not the least.” Can Faramir trust Frodo? Anke Eissman depicts Faramir’s interrogation of Frodo.

One of the central themes of The Lord of the Rings is the creation of the bonds of fellowship. Fellowship is in the very title of the first volume of Tolkien’s great work, the one title in which he had full confidence, having wished himself that the book should have been published in a single volume and not three as his publisher decided to do. When Elrond formed the Fellowship following the Council in Rivendell and Frodo’s courageous offer to carry the Ring to the Fire of Orodruin in Mordor he had two purposes. One was the decision to choose nine walkers to stand in opposition to the Nazgûl, Sauron’s nine riders. This was a symbolic choice and not a practical one. Perhaps only Gandalf of the nine could match any of the Nazgûl in combat. That one of the hobbits should play a part in the death of their chief was due, not to his prowess in battle, but to the part played by deeper and providential forces at work, another of the central themes of Tolkien’s great work.

The Nine Walkers of the Free Peoples against Sauron’s Nine Riders. The team photo from Peter Jackson’s films.

The other purpose in Elrond’s choice, and the purpose that we are considering in this reflection, was to create a fellowship of the free peoples of Middle-earth; elves, men, dwarves and hobbits. That these had been sundered from one another over long years had been one of the greatest sorrows of its long history. There had been no alliance of men and elves since the end of the Second Age and the war against Sauron in which Elendil the only High King of both Gondor and Arnor, and Gil-galad, the last High King of the Elves in Middle-earth, were able, just, to stand against Sauron in battle and to overthrow him. Indeed it had been one of Sauron’s main purposes throughout the Third Age once he began to take shape again following his defeat and the loss of the Ring, was to weaken those essential bonds of fellowship among his enemies. Elves and Dwarves had long mistrust in one another as we learned when Gimli came to Lothlorian. Indeed it was one of the greatest fruits of the stay of the Fellowship in that land that Gimli gave his heart to Galadriel and formed a deep friendship with Legolas, the son of an elven king who had once held Gimli’s own father prisoner. Elves and Men had become sundered as the elves had slowly withdrawn into secret lands and a secret way of living, the outcome of which was that elves had become a thing of legend in the minds of men, even an uncanny thing, a thing to be feared little less than Mordor itself. And hobbits, if they were known at all, were largely disregarded as a people of small consequence.

Throughout the Third Age it was examples of friendship between its free peoples that was always remarkable. Elrond’s own “Last Homely House” in Rivendell was a place of hospitality to all free peoples, and its way, The Prancing Pony in Bree played a similar role but on a lesser scale. That Elves never made use of its welcome played its part in the growing belief amongst other peoples that they were fey and to be feared. The west door of Moria through which the Fellowship entered with such difficulty had a password of beguiling simplicity. All a traveller needed to do in order to gain access to the greatest kingdom of the Dwarves was to say the word, friend, and the door would open. And the friendship between Dale and the kingdom under the mountain, near neighbours in the north of Middle-earth, was a rare example of friendship between Dwarves and Men.

Indeed each of these examples brought prosperity and strength and it was to deepen, even create, friendship to which Gandalf devoted his long sojourn in Middle-earth, using Narya, the even ring of fire to “rekindle hearts in a world that grows chill. In our own human history it was the creation of Christian monasteries, first formed in the deserts of Egypt and Syria in the 4th century, and then in the West of Europe following the fall of the Roman Empire, places of hospitality, learning and healing, that played a central role in the renewing of Europe, giving a part to friendship in the history of that continent that stood in sharp distinction to the role of power in the Roman Empire and in the many attempts to recreate empire in the centuries since that time.

So can Frodo trust Faramir? Or is fear, even if undeserved, a wiser cause of action? Perhaps the whole future of Middle-earth rests upon the choice that Frodo will make. Fortunately for all it is Sam’s simplicity that will make the choice for all and that is wonderfully providential.

Can Frodo trust Faramir? He remembers the effect of the Ring upon Boromir. Anke Eissman depicts Boromir’s treachery when he tried to take the Ring from Frodo.

“I Do Not Love The Bright Sword For Its Sharpness, Nor the Arrow For Its Swiftness, Nor The Warrior For His Glory.” Faramir Speaks of War.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 874-878

Faramir is a warrior. When Éowyn first meets him in the Houses of Healing in Minas Tirith after the Battle of the Pelennor Fields she assesses him shrewdly as a warrior herself, “bred among men of war, that here was one that no Rider of the Mark could outmatch in battle”.

Anke Eissman shows us Faramir the man of war who longs for peace on his first meeting with Éowyn who is a warrior who does not yet know that there is contentment to be found in peace.

But Faramir does not love war or the way of the warrior. After the War of the Ring and after he marries Éowyn of Rohan he will devote his life to the arts of peace. Together with his bride he will restore the land of Ithilien to its former beauty. Later in his encounter with Frodo and Sam Faramir will say of the Shire, “Your land must be a place of peace and content, and there must gardeners be in high honour”.

Faramir would be a gardener himself, not an industrial scale food producer, one who reduces the land to compliant submission with pesticides and chemical fertilisers, but one who would allow the land to find its true wildness in which the growing of food would take its natural place. In essence he would be one who would re-unite the Ents and the Entwives, if that were possible, working as a sub-creator to make a land where both could live at peace with one another. When Treebeard met Merry and Pippin and learnt of the Shire he commented that it was a land that the Entwives would love. The Ents would love the Old Forest, a land in which the hobbits felt themselves to be alien. Is there a land where both could live together in harmony?

“Come back to me and say my land is best.” The Ents and the Entwives as depicted by Luca Bonatti.

But here we must return to the reality of war. Faramir is now a warrior by necessity. Mordor has already seized control of Ithilien and Faramir and his men are operating behind enemy lines. And they would take the rest of Gondor too and then land by land the rest of Middle-earth also. Mordor is an empire that would make the whole earth its slave, that would make it like Mordor itself. So, as Faramir puts it himself, “War must be, while we defend our lives against a destroyer who would devour all”.

So Tolkien was not a pacifist in an absolute sense, one who regards war as unjustified in all cases, even that in which an enslaving enemy seeks to devour a peaceful land. But neither Tolkien, nor Faramir, love war for its own sake.

“I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend: the city of the Men of Númenor; and I would have her loved for her memory, her ancientry, her beauty, and her present wisdom. Not feared, save as men may fear the dignity of a man, old and wise.”

This is a theme that runs throughout all Tolkien’s works. That the arts of peace are superior to the arts of war. We remember the last words that Thorin Oakenshield said to Bilbo as he lay dying after the Battle of the Five Armies. “If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold it would be a merrier world.” And yet, as Aragorn says at the Council of Elrond, the northern lands of which the Shire is one would have known little of peace unless they had been defended. “What roads would any dare to tread, what safety would there be in quiet lands, or in the homes of simple men at night, if the Dúnedain were asleep, or were all gone into the grave?”

The death of Thorin Oakenshield by Abe Papakien.

So Tolkien never quite resolves the question of how much must a land and its people be prepared to defend themselves against potential threat, and perhaps it can never be fully resolved. So Faramir must be a warrior by necessity even though he longs to practice the arts of peace. And perhaps this is where we must leave the debate for now. Perhaps Faramir gives us a sense of how to live with this tension. He is trained for war and yet longs for peace, He is unyielding in war as he showed in the battle against the Haradrim in which we first met him and yet he is gentle in all his dealings with the hobbits who are now his prisoners. Such a tension requires a hard practice and discipline. The fruit of that discipline is the man who now speaks his heart to Frodo, one of the greatest of all Tolkien’s creations.

“Not a Mistress of Many Slaves, Not Even a Kind Mistress of Willing Slaves.” Faramir Speaks of Patriotism to Frodo and Sam.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 874-878

As Faramir guides Frodo and Sam towards Henneth Annûn he speaks thoughts aloud that, perhaps, he has not shared with anyone else. We have already met his brother, Boromir and know that he was a man of a very different spirit. Later we will meet his father, Denethor, and we will learn that Faramir could not have shared his heart with him. Denethor, as we will learn, discerned much of what lay in his younger son’s heart and laid the blame for this at Gandalf’s door. There is little doubt that Gandalf was a great influence upon Faramir. As with Frodo in the Shire and Aragorn in Rivendell he found out young men and taught them, but they needed to be young men of the right spirit. That Frodo, Aragorn and Faramir all emerged at exactly the same time must have been the cause of great delight for one who came to teach, as Gandalf had done. For it was through teaching, not through the exercise of power, that Gandalf came to change the world.

John Howe imagines Gandalf, alone and vulnerable, a pilgrim going from one place to another in order to teach or to give counsel.

Last week we learned that Faramir too had no desire for power if it came from an evil source. He has some sense of the nature of Isildur’s Bane even though he does not yet know that it is the Ring of Power that Sauron made to enable him to rule all things. Now we learn what Faramir believes about power itself and the power of his own country.

“For myself,” said Faramir, “I would see the White Tree in flower again in the courts of the kings, and the Silver Crown return, and Minas Tirith in peace: Minas Arnor again as of old, full of light, high and fair, beautiful as a queen among other queens: not a mistress of many slaves, nay, not even a kind mistress of willing slaves.”

The White Tree of Gondor in the Court of the Kings in Minas Tirith. A symbol of Gondor’s fallen state but also its rootedness in the most ancient wisdom.

Tolkien wrote these words towards the end of an age in which his own country, Great Britain, had ruled over an empire, greater in area and in population, than any that had existed before it. By the time he died, in 1973, most of this empire had gone. One particular empire no longer existed but the idea of empire was as strong as ever. The British Empire had been one of many that had existed throughout world history and after its decline and fall it has not been the idea of empire that has disappeared, merely a particular expression of that idea.

As you can see, I have used the word, decline, in speaking of this history and that is how it is usually understood. For about a century after the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo, Britain was the greatest world power but the story since then has been one of decline. The assumption made here is that the exercise of power, if you have it, is how things are. And when power is spoken of it is military power that we are speaking about. We remember that when Boromir spoke at the Council of Elrond he made reference to the counsel that his host might offer in a somewhat dismissive manner. This “counsel” was all that he expected. It was only when discussion turned to the Ring that he became really interested because he understood this kind of power.

Faramir understood power in a very different way. For him power was meant to be exercised for the good of all; “a queen among other queens”. And the power of Gondor was to be first and foremost power in wisdom, of goodness, beauty and truth. To achieve power in which wisdom was absent was of no value at all. It was a thing to be left by the side of the highway, a piece of rubbish that we notice, if at all, and then pass by.

We might ponder how the history of the Americas, or of Africa, might have been different if Europeans had come, not to conquer but the mutual exchange of teaching and learning. We might wonder in what way the history of the world might have been different. Next week we will think about what part the ability to wage war has to play in such a world. Faramir recognises that this ability will always be necessary in a world in which some will seek dominance over others. After all, he is a soldier himself, and a very good one. But his dream is not the one that Boromir spoke of to Frodo when he tried to take the Ring. He does not wish others to flock to his banner because of his martial prowess. Faramir wishes to be a great teacher. Gandalf, not Saruman or Sauron, is his model.

Where does the power of Elrond lie?

“I Would Not Take This Thing ,If It Lay By The Highway.” Faramir and Isildur’s Bane.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 874-878

Frodo and Sam are taken towards the secret refuge of Henneth Annûn and Faramir takes the opportunity, having sent his men ahead of him, to speak further with them and to ask them about the matter of “Isildur’s Bane”.

Was it because of this matter that Frodo and Sam had not parted on good terms with Boromir?

Frodo continues to answer cautiously. He will not speak openly of the Ring even though he is beginning to trust this man. The memory of Boromir and his attempt to take the Ring by force is still too fresh.

Frodo remembers how Boromir tried to take the Ring. Anke Eissman depicts the scene.

Faramir remembers how Gandalf, who he remembers as Mithrandir, used to ask of Isildur, and the great battle fought upon Dagorlad at the beginning of Gondor and the ancient legend that Isildur “took somewhat from the hand of the Unnamed, ere he went away from Gondor, never to be seen among mortal men again”.

We know that Gandalf went to Minas Tirith among many other journeys after Bilbo’s Farewell Party in the Shire when, with some necessary persuasion, he left the Ring behind him in Bag End in Frodo’s care. At this point in the story Gandalf had an ever growing conviction of the true nature of Bilbo’s ring but that he still required proof. So it was that he searched in the archives of Gondor for all that he could find of the story of Isildur. We know that he found an ancient document in which Isildur wrote of the taking of the Ring from Sauron’s hand and of how it glowed hot and was adorned with writing that Isildur could not understand though it was written in Elvish script. Isildur was already beginning to fall under the spell of the Ring speaking of it as “of all the works of Sauron the only fair”. Already he spoke of it as “precious to me, though I buy it with great pain”.

Alan Lee depicts the moment when Isildur takes the Ring from Sauron’s hand.

Faramir knows nothing of this because Gandalf did not speak of it. Gandalf did not finally know for sure of the true nature of Bilbo’s ring until he threw it into the fire in Bag End and read the letters for himself and he was unwilling to speculate upon it with others knowing that it could be a cause of conflict.

Even though Faramir does not know the true nature of Isildur’s Bane he guesses that it was indeed a cause of conflict between members of the Fellowship, that it might be some kind of weapon.

“I can well believe that Boromir, the proud and fearless, often rash, ever anxious for the victory of Minas Tirith (and his own glory therein), might desire such a thing and be allured by it.”

Now we can see why many early readers of The Lord of the Rings thought that it was an allegory about nuclear weapons, about how the decision was made in the Second World War to develop the bomb and to use it in order to end the war against Japan. Faramir himself seems to think that Isildur’s Bane was such a thing. Tolkien made it clear in writing about this that he was developing his idea of the Ring some time before the events of 1945 and indeed the Ring was more than just a weapon. It was made by Sauron to be the means to achieve power and control over all things. It was not, in and of itself, a perfect means to such an end. Even after he made the Ring Sauron was defeated first by Ar-Pharazôn of Númenor and then by the last alliance of Men and Elves when Isildur took the Ring from him. But it was Sauron’s belief that as he grew in power so too the Ring would be the means to make that power absolute. And, of course, he feared the possibility of the Ring falling into the hands of another person of power and being used against him.

Faramir does not regard himself as such a person. Nor does he desire victory at all costs. In this Tolkien gives us a character who, I believe, shows his own belief about the nature of power itself.

“But fear no more! I would not take this thing, if it lay by the highway! Not were Minas Tirith falling in ruin and I alone could save her, using the weapon of the Dark Lord for her good and my glory. No, I do not wish for such triumphs, Frodo son of Drogo.”