Month: June 2024

“Your Land Must Be a Realm of Peace and Content, and There Must Gardeners Be in High Honour.”

/ stephencwinter / 8 Comments

The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 891,892

Faramir knows that Frodo’s secret is the very Ring of Power. He does not yet know Frodo’s mission, that he has been given the task of casting the Ring into the fires of Mount Doom, but he wonders at this little folk who now keep it.

“If you took this thing on yourself, unwilling, at other’s asking, then you have pity and honour from me. And I marvel at you: to keep it hid and not to use it. You are a new people and a new world to me. Are all your kind of like sort? Your land must be a realm of peace and content, and there must gardeners be in high honour.”

“Are all your kind of like sort?” Faramir asks. The true answer is that just as Faramir is exceptional within Gondor so too are Frodo and Sam within the Shire. Neither are typical of their kinds although there are many good men in Gondor and good hobbits in the Shire. What is providential is that these great ones have found one another in a hostile land and at this critical moment in the story. Within this providential context even Sam’s mistakes, from his negligent care of a smoking fire to his revealing of the true nature of the burden that Frodo bears, only lead to good. Faramir puts this in a different way. Sam was “fated” to stumble, to make such good mistakes and so to aid his master’s mission the better. Later his interventions will be of the most heroic kind.

For a long time when I have read this passage I assumed that the reference that Faramir makes to the high honour in which gardeners must be held in the Shire must have been a gentle joke on Tolkien’s part. When we remember that the very first scene in The Lord of the Rings is set in the Ivy Bush on the Bywater Road near Hobbiton in which Gaffer Gamgee expresses his hope that “no harm” will come of Bilbo teaching Sam to read and write, to “learn him his letters”, it is hard to believe that greatness can come of this family of gardeners at least.

But woven into the rest of the story are very different references to gardens and to gardeners. Galadriel’s gift to Sam, so carefully put together, comes with her recognition that it is Sam, the gardener, who will have to heal his land after the ravages of Saruman there. “Though you should find all barren and laid waste, there will be few gardens in Middle-earth that will bloom like your garden, if you sprinkle this earth there.” Treebeard tells Merry and Pippin of the Entwives who were tenders of gardens and how they would love the Shire if they were to find it. And perhaps most telling of all, Faramir himself was given the task, by Aragorn, of healing the land of Ithilien after the ending of the war of the Ring and so himself became a prince of gardeners.

There is a gardener within the soul of this Captain of Gondor that recognises a kindred spirit in the soul of Sam Gamgee even as he recognises greatness within Frodo’s soul. Faramir, like Sam, will become a healer of the hurts of Middle-earth after warfare is ended and, like Sam, he will tend a garden. Galadriel’s gift to Sam will keep the memory of Lothlórien alive within Middle-earth and Ithilien too will be a blending of wild woodland and cultivated lands, a marriage of Ents and Entwives just as the land that Galadriel made was such a marriage.

Tolkien was drawing upon the memory of Eden in his following of this theme in The Lord of the Rings. Eden is the garden in which everything is in perfect harmony and humankind is connected with itself, with the land and with the divine presence. There is no abuse or exploitation here. There is much more than mere cultivation here and so the Gaffer cannot be a perfect example of a gardener. It is Sam with his internalisation of all that he has seen upon his journeys, especially in Lothlórien, who will subcreate Eden in Middle-earth, or at the very least, a glimpse of it, and so draw his fellows into a delight in what is good, beautiful and true.

Ted Naismith gives us a land at peace with itself in his beautiful depiction of the young mallorn tree in the Shire

“Your Heart is Shrewd As Well As Faithful, and Saw Clearer Than Your Eyes.” Sam Gamgee Shows Us How To Make a Mess of Things and Yet To Get The Biggest Things Right.

/ stephencwinter / 4 Comments

The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp.888-890

It is a catastrophic moment. Frodo has taken such care to keep the conversation with Faramir away from the matter of the Ring. Faramir is aware that there is something that Frodo does not wish to speak about but once he has made his mind up that Frodo is a man of honour he chooses not to press him on this. But Frodo is tired and lapses into silence and Sam takes over the conversation.

Anke Eissman depicts the moment when Frodo begins to drift into sleep and Sam takes up the conversation with Faramir. Note the intensity of the gaze between Sam and Faramir. Great things are about to be revealed.

Sam begins to speak about Galadriel and he falls into a reverie as he does so and within that dreamlike mood suddenly says of Boromir:

“It’s my opinion that in Lórien he first saw clearly what I guessed sooner: what he wanted. From the moment he first saw it he wanted the Enemy’s Ring.”

Suddenly everything changes. The Ring takes centre stage after it has lain hidden and defended and the brother of the man who tried to take it by force from Frodo stands before it surrounded by a troup of warriors. Faramir knows what it is and he knows that his brother tried to take it. It is as he puts it himself “a chance for Faramir, Captain of Gondor, to show his quality”.

And he does show his quality. At this critical moment he chooses not to try to take the Ring. And as when Gandalf and then Galadriel both chose not to take it when Frodo offered it to them and as Bilbo freely let it go when Gandalf told him to do so it is upon these moments of free renunciation that the whole story turns. A number of readers of The Lord of the Rings have noted that Tolkien does something quite unique in his story. That whereas every story of quest is about the finding and getting of something Tolkien tells us a story of letting something go, of casting it away, a story of renunciation. The Ring is a thing that can give great power to the one who possesses it and each one of the characters that we have mentioned chose to renounce the possibility of this power.

Bilbo chooses freely to renounce the Ring after a little persuasion from a good friend.

And what of Sam’s terrible mistake? At this moment Frodo simply sees it as a disaster. What had lain hidden now lies bare before all. The brother of the man who tried to take it knows what it is and where it is. But Faramir sees it very differently.

“Be comforted, Samwise. If you seem to have stumbled, think that it was fated to be so, Your heart is shrewd as well as faithful, and saw clearer than your eyes.”

Clearly Sam was not meant to reveal that Frodo had the Ring of Power in his possession. We thought a few weeks ago about Frodo’s decision not to let Faramir know about the true purpose of his mission. But Sam has come to trust the man who has offered them shelter and has chosen, albeit without reflection, to entrust him with the secret of Frodo’s mission. Frodo himself longs to do the same. It is only the memory of Boromir that prevents him from doing so.

And so it is Sam’s heart, and not his head, that has lead both him and Frodo to this moment. It is Sam’s heart that breaks through all the mistrust that has divided the foes of Sauron from one another for so very long. Gondor’s long separation from peoples who once stood with them as allies is set aside in a moment of heartfelt indiscretion. Not that the heart of Minas Tirith is changed in this moment. Denethor, when he learns of the trusting action of his son, will bitterly declare that if Boromir, and not his brother, had lived he would have brought to his father “a mighty gift”. But all through The Lord of the Rings it is these moments of trust that prove essential to the successful outcome of the great quest and this is one of the most important of all of them. If Faramir had chosen at this moment to take the Ring then all would have ended in darkness and the triumph of Sauron. That he does not do this, but chooses to trust in the mission that Frodo has been given, is crucial to the whole story.

And all becomes possible because of Sam’s heart and not his head.