Month: February 2025

” Good Night, Captain, my Lord,” Sam Said to Faramir. “You Took the Chance, Sir.” Praise From the Praiseworthy in Henneth Annûn.

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

The effort that Frodo used to speak of his mission openly at last to Faramir was the last that he was able to give that night. As he tried to stand he fell into a swoon, was caught by Faramir and laid upon a bed. Sam was about to lie in another bed beside his master’s but then he paused, bowed low before Faramir and spoke.

“Good night, Captain, my lord,” he said. “You took the chance, sir.”

“Did I so?” said Faramir.

“Yes sir, and showed your quality: the very highest.”

You can feel Faramir wince slightly as he hears these words. He comes from a strictly hierarchical society in which only those of equal or higher rank are permitted to speak so freely to one another. In Gondor only the Prince of Dol Amroth and, of course, Boromir and Denethor, would be permitted to speak to Faramir in this way. Faramir describes Sam as a “pert servant” as he responds to his words, as one who is speaking more freely than he has a right to do, but then he continues:

“But nay the praise of the praiseworthy is above all rewards.”

Faramir recognises that in Sam’s courageous service to Frodo, a service that will almost certainly cost him his life, that Sam has won the right to speak freely. The early Greek fathers of the Christian Church had a word for this freedom of speech that is close to the way Sam speaks here. They called it parrhesia, likening it to the way in which Adam was able to speak freely, openly, confidently, face to face with God in the garden, a freedom that had been restored through the obedience of Christ. In recent years some philosophers, such as Michel Foucault, have argued that this freedom of speech is a quality that belongs inherently to all humans although it always comes with a risk. If I speak frankly I may put myself in danger. But Sam is able to make himself equal to Faramir at this moment, not because of some innate quality that he possesses but because he, as Faramir recognises, is himself “praiseworthy”.

And as Faramir speaks here, perhaps he carries within himself his deep sadness that the one person whose praise he desires above all others is the one who will never give that praise to him. Faramir will never hear that praise from his father, Denethor. Eventually Denethor will learn that for a brief moment his son had the Ring of Power, the One Ring, within his grasp, but that he let it go. He will declare bitterly that Boromir would have brought him “a mighty gift” because Boromir would have done his father’s bidding. And in his anger towards Faramir Denethor will go further in his bitter criticism. He will take the love that his son’s men so clearly have for him and he will say that this is only given because his son likes to appear lordly. Faramir has nothing praiseworthy within himself. He is merely an actor; one who is playing a part.

The part that Denethor accuses his son of playing is that of a lord of Númenor. It is merely a game that Faramir indulges himself in while Gondor is in imminent danger of destruction. Faramir, the “wizard’s pupil”, as Denethor bitterly names him, has chosen to play his lordly games, to imagine himself as one of the heroes of an age long ago, to let Frodo and Sam go free, carrying the Ring with them, when what was needed was a weapon, a weapon so great that even Sauron would quail in fear before it.

Sam sees Faramir quite differently from Denethor. Faramir had the opportunity to take the Ring for himself just as Boromir had tried to do so, but he had chosen not to do so. This is a deed, as Sam sees it, worthy of the highest praise. But in one sense Sam sees things just as Denethor does. For Denethor Faramir is who who is an adopter of a pose in order to win popularity. Sam sees something else.

“You have an air too, sir, that reminds me of, of – well, Gandalf, of wizards.”

“Maybe,” said Faramir. “Maybe you discern from far away the air of Númenor. Good night!”

“I Must Find The Mountain of Fire and Cast The Thing Into The Gulf of Doom. Gandalf Said So. I Do Not Think I Shall Ever Get There.” Frodo Speaks of His Task to Faramir and of Its Impossibility.

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

The shock and fear that followed the revelation of the true identity of Frodo’s burden is at an end but what follows is sheer exhaustion. With the last of his strength Frodo tells Faramir of his mission.

“I was going to find a way into Mordor… I was going to Gorgoroth. I must find the Mountain of Fire and cast the thing into the gulf of Doom. Gandalf said so. I do not think I shall ever get there.”

Faramir stares at Frodo with “grave astonishment”, and rightly so. Alongside Frodo’s declaration at the Council of Elrond that he would take the Ring though he did not know the way this is the only time that Frodo actually speaks of his task in plain speech. There is no attempt at heroic language. No boasting. Merely a quiet statement of what has to be done.

“Gandalf said so.”

Frodo claims nothing for himself. He has been given his orders and now he must carry them out. There is nothing more to be said and Frodo says nothing more. Except, as Faramir knows, that Frodo is attempting something that no-one has ever before tried to do. Later in the story Ioreth of the Houses of Healing will tell her friend that Frodo “went with only his esquire into the Black Country and fought with the Dark Lord all by himself, and set fire to his Tower, if you can believe it.” Of course we know that this is not quite what happened but what Frodo achieved is almost as impossible and Faramir recognises this. His grave astonishment is entirely justified. He knows that he stands in the presence of greatness even as Elrond recognised at Frodo’s first quiet declaration, comparing him to Beren and the great heroes of the First Age.

Only Frodo, as we have seen, does not recognise this, nor ever does. He only thinks in terms of what must be done and of its impossibility.

Hope and hopelessness are themes that Tolkien returns to again and again throughout The Lord of the Rings. Aragorn is given the name, Estel, secretly by his mother as she gives herself up to her own death and he spends his life struggling with this destiny, hoping against hope, not with Sam’s cheerful optimism, but a grim determination just to carry on. Frodo is of a similar spirit. There is a job to be done and that is all needs to be said.

What Frodo, and Aragorn, both do, is to give themselves up to something that is greater than themselves. Although Tolkien was himself man of deep Christian faith he never allows the characters in his story the comfort or strength that such faith would bring. Julian of Norwich’s famous declaration that “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well” is something about which they know nothing. They must simply do their jobs because they are both necessary and right. Whether they will be rewarded with success is not something that they can know. So Elrond told Gimli’s father, Glòin, on learning of Sauron’s threats against the dwarves of Erebor that there is naught that the dwarves can do “other than to resist, with hope or without it”.

The heroic figures of The Lord of the Rings are denied faith in God in an explicit sense but the goodness, truth and beauty that they both love and fight for sustain them throughout their struggles. Galadriel may speak of “the long defeat” but this does not weaken her resolve. Tolkien did not believe in an arc of history that tends towards justice but in his belief in the resurrection of Christ, “the greatest ‘eucatastrophe’ possible in the greatest fairy story”, as he put it in a letter, he placed his hope in a final victory that would be one achieved by God alone.

In this sense Tolkien felt closer to the spiritual world of his heroes who had to resist “with hope or without it” than to some general kind of Christian optimism. And so he gives us Frodo, walking step by step towards Mordor even though he does not think that he will ever get there, as a model for our own lives and even as we stare with Faramir’s grave astonishment at him so too do we do the good that we have been called to do both this and every day.

Time to Start Writing Again.

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It is early morning here in the English county of Worcestershire just a few miles down the road from the farm that once belonged to the Suffield family and was the childhood home of Mabel Tolkien, the mother of John Ronald Ruel Tolkien, author of The Lord of the Rings and creator of a legendarium that has caught the imagination of the world ever since the publication of that book in 1954 and 1955. The locals who were the neighbours of the Suffields named their farm house, Bag End, and this and the surrounding countryside and small towns and villages was to form, through the medium of Tolkien’s rich imagination, his Shire, the home of the hobbits.

A photo taken of me a couple of years ago at Magdalen College, Oxford, by my daughter, Dr Bethan Winter, who has been teaching there.

Tolkien’s hobbits were very much a reimagining of the Worcestershire country folk among whom Tolkien grew up in the early years of the 20th century both when he visited his Suffield relatives and in the village of Hall Green just a few miles north of Bag End. You can still recognise the slow speech and the rich accent of Worcestershire folk but Hall Green is now a suburb of the English city of Birmingham and many of the farm houses of north Worcestershire are now inhabited by wealthy incomers who have made their money elsewhere and now enjoy the fruits of their labour in this beautiful countryside. At least I hope that they do.

I guess that you could include me among the incomers, perhaps not so wealthy but comfortably off, who have moved into this area. My father was London born but he took the opportunity offered to his generation who had served in the armed forces in the Second World War of a college education to go to agricultural college and spend his working life on farms in the English countryside. We never had much money. My father left enough money to pay for his funeral and nothing more but thanks to the generosity of the English state back in the 1960s and 70s I was educated at the Royal Grammar School in High Wycombe among boys from the families of senior military officers and leading political families. My school also educated luminaries such as Roger Scruton and Paul Kingsnorth but Scruton came before me and Kingsnorth after.

Following a brief career as a school teacher I was ordained a minister in the Church of England in 1988 and came to serve in the city of Birmingham where I met my wife, Laura, who was a young hospital doctor there, and so we have spent the rest of our lives together since then in the English Midlands where Tolkien grew up.

In these last years I have served seven country parishes here in Worcestershire as their Rector but I will be 70 years old this month and feel that the time has come to pass that responsibility to someone else. It is time to move on to other things.

I first read The Lord of the Rings back in the late 1960s thanks to the encouragement of my school friend, John Flint, whose father was a senior officer in the Royal Air Force. There were copies of the three volumes in our school library and I took them out and read them voraciously. Eventually I bought John’s paperback copy of the entire book in a single volume from him. It cost me six weeks work at weekends on the farm to do this but I never resented a single minute. I still don’t. I have read and re-read this and other works by Tolkien ever since and enjoyed both a BBC radio dramatisation of the work and Peter Jackson’s films.

Back in 2013 I began to write a blog here on WordPress on the wisdom that I have learned from the The Lord of the Rings. I figured that after reading Tolkien for so many years I might have something to say about him. I think that I have written over 300,000 words since then and had over half a million readers. Thank you to each and every one of you.

Last year I somehow lost access to the blog site and as I was winding up my work in the parishes and then taking a complete break after taking my final service at the end of August I haven’t got round to sorting this out until now. Laura and I walked 150 miles of the Camino del Norte, the pilgrim route to Santiago da Composite in northern Spain during the autumn and we will return to walk the last 250 miles later this year. We have been catching up with friends and family and working on our cottage together. And it’s been a lot of fun just catching up with each other after years of busy work as a priest and as a doctor.

Now the energy is coming back and it is time to write again. I both want to return to the blog and I am beginning a book. I will tell you more of that another time. My daughters are teaching me how to use new technologies to publicise my work. There’s a lot going on. To my delight I found that I had a record number of readers last September, three months after my last post and while Laura and I were in Spain. It seems that people are finding their way to my work. I am so grateful.

Thank you to all who have taken the time to send messages of good will while I have been away from the blog. I will write in response to all of you.

I left Frodo and Sam with Faramir in Henneth Annûn last June. They are in safe hands there but they don’t really know that yet. When you next rejoin me I will take up that part of the story again. It has so much to teach us.

Anke Eissman ‘s wonderful depiction of the scene in which Frodo and Sam talk with Faramir in Henneth Annûn. I really love her work!

I hope you will join me.