“Night Always Had Been, and Always Would Be, And Night Was All.” Frodo and Sam Enter Shelob’s Lair. The Dark Journeys of The Lord of the Rings.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 939-942

Frodo and Sam follow Gollum into Shelob’s Lair and enter a darkness such as they had not known since the passage through Moria. But at least in Moria there had been a sense of space and a movement of air. “Here the air was still, stagnant, heavy and sound fell dead. They walked as it were in a black vapour wrought of veritable darkness itself that, as it was breathed, brought blindness not only to the eyes but to the mind, so that even the memory of colours and of forms and of any light faded out of thought. Night always had been, and always would be, and night was all.”

The theme of the dark journey is one that repeats throughout The Lord of the Rings. The journey through Moria that ends in Gandalf’s fall, Aragorn’s passage of the Paths of the Dead with Legolas and Gimli, and here, Frodo and Sam in Shelob’s Lair.

This is a theme that runs through European mythology. Perhaps the most famous example being the journey of Odysseus into Hades in order to meet the blind prophet, Tiresias, and to learn what would befall him in his journey home to Ithaca from the war at Troy. But perhaps readers of Tolkien should turn to another example because he himself would have done so. Tolkien chose to draw from northern European sources because he wished to place his own theology within that world. He was particularly drawn to stories from Finland known as the Kalevala and in particular the tale of the hero, Leminķäinen. Leminķäinen was sent on a journey into the land of the dead, Tuonela, in order to kill the black swan that guarded it. He was killed himself by a blind cowherd and thrown into the waters of the river that runs through Tuonela before being restored to life by his divine mother.

We might think more about Tolkien’s love affair with the Finnish language and the mythology that flowed from it on another occasion but here we will move on from the tale of Leminķäinen to another telling of a dark journey, perhaps one of the greatest of all European literature, the Divine Comedy by Dante (1265-1321). At the opening of the poem, here translated by Dorothy L. Sayers, herself a member of the Inklings, we read these words.

Midway this way of life we're bound upon, 
I woke to find myself in a dark wood, 
Where the right road was wholly lost and gone. 

Ay me! How hard to speak of it- that rude 
And rough and stubborn forest! the mere breath 
Of memory stirs the old fear in the blood;

It is so bitter, it goes nigh to death;
Yet there I gained such good, that to convey 
The tale, I'll write what else I found therewith.

The poet, lost upon his journey “in a dark wood” is at the very gates of hell, above which are written the words:

Lay down all hope, you that go in by me.

Of course we should not try to draw parallels that are too exact between the dark journeys described here, nor are they an exhaustive list. We might add the winter journeys of Beowulf into the fenland in search of Grendel’s mother or Gawain in a search of the Green Knight, both stories that Tolkien knew and translated into modern English. But what they all have in common is that they cannot be escaped. In every tale the hero must take the dark journey that “goes nigh to death” in order to achieve their goal and even find good for themselves.

Frodo’s hell is the journey through Shelob’s Lair into captivity in the tower of Cirith Ungol and the agony of the passage through Mordor to Mount Doom. His purgatory (and we can use this word because Tolkien does himself) is his healing in the Undying Lands. We are not told of his paradise but I think we can be assured that he found it, not as an achievement but as a gift. Whatever work that any of us do in order to pass through hell and purgatory can only take us so far, If we are to enter paradise we can only do so as a gift of pure grace and love. I think that we can be assured that by the time Frodo had completed his “gentle purgatory” as Tolkien called it he knew that whatever came next was exactly that.

But first must come his dark journey through Shelob’s Lair.

“Is This The Only Way, Sméagol?” Frodo Prepares to Enter Shelob’s Lair.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 938, 939

By the time Frodo arrives at the foul smelling entrance to Shelob’s Lair he is already a dead man. Some might call him a dead man walking. Usually that means that others intend to kill him or have him killed. But in Frodo’s case there is a sense in which he has already given up on his own life.

Readers might remember the moment when he arrived at the Black Gate of Mordor and found it shut and impassable.

“His face was grim and set, but resolute. He was filthy, haggard and pinched with weariness, but he cowed no longer, and his eyes were clear. ‘I said so, because I purpose to enter Mordor, and I know no other way. Therefore I shall go this way. I do not ask anyone to go with me.”

Indeed we might go even further back to the moment when the Fellowship was broken and Frodo resolved to make the journey alone. This was not a choice he made out of hubris although he might have developed a feeling that only he could accomplish the task. But after the fall of Gandalf in Moria Frodo lost what hope he might have had. Now he knew that his mission was impossible, that it was beyond him. That it was beyond any of the company. That the Ring was too much for any of them. Of that last certainty he was even more sure after the treachery of Boromir.

So Frodo is hopeless. What I mean by this is that he does not expect to succeed. All he knows is that he is not allowed to give in. He has to keep on going. A few weeks ago we thought about a moment outside the haunted fortress of Minas Morgul when he was tempted to despair having just witnessed the hosts of the Lord of the Nazgûl march past him on their way to besiege Minas Tirith. On that occasion it was the Shire that called to him from a deep unconquered place within his soul, a place that lay deeper even than his despair. And Tolkien told us that “he even smiled grimly, feeling now as clearly as a moment before he had felt the opposite, that what he had to do, he had to do”.

So when Frodo asked Gollum whether the foul smelling tunnel that lay ahead of them was the only way it was not because he wished to discuss options. And if Gollum had replied that it was the only way, but that what lay before him was a monster, so terrible, that he had little or no chance of getting past it, it would have made little difference to him. We began this piece by describing him as a dead man walking. He has got past the stage of wondering whether he is going to get through this whole thing alive. He simply has to do his duty.

And he has little interest in whether Gollum is trustworthy or not. He has not put his trust in Gollum because he believes Gollum to be worthy of it. He has got past that as well. Sam is angered by Gollum, believing that he is going to betray them. Frodo knows deep within himself that his destiny is bound up with Gollum’s, perhaps in that same secret place within that took him past the despair he felt outside Minas Morgul, that same unconquered place that the darkness still cannot reach. And so he says to Sam:

It’s no good worrying about him now,.. We couldn’t have got so far, not even within sight of the pass, without him, and so we’ll have to put up with his ways. If he’s false, he’s false.”

As we have seen, and will see on other occasions, this grim determination, remarkable though it is, cannot be not enough. He would not have got far without Sam, whose cheerful optimism keeps him going through every hardship; and he would not have got far without Gollum whose knowledge of the way into Mordor is essential to the mission. But without his grim determination that goes deeper than any hope he would not be standing here. He would not be about to walk into Shelob’s Lair. The only way into Mordor.

“The Gleam Faded From His Eyes, and They Went Dim and Grey, Old and Tired.” Did Gollum Come Close to Repenting of The Evil He Planned to Do to Frodo and Sam?

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 935-937

Something happens when all the protective layers that surround us are pealed away. As our true self comes into view, vulnerable and undefended, it calls out to everything about it to respond. So when Frodo and Sam rested after the hard climb up the stairs of the Pass of Cirith Ungol before attempting to enter the land of Mordor they began to open their hearts to one another, and as they did so things began to change about them. The very rocks that Frodo had described as accursed seemed to reach out towards them at the sound of their merriment.

“To Sam suddenly it seemed as if all the stones were listening and the tall rocks leaning over them.”

And when Gollum returned later, finding Frodo at rest in Sam’s arms, a strange change seemed to take place within him.

“Gollum looked at them. A strange expression passed over his lean hungry face. The gleam faded from his eyes, and they went dim and grey, old and tired. A spasm of pain seemed to twist him, and he turned away, peering back up the pass, shaking his head, as if engaged in some interior debate. Then he came back, and slowly putting out a trembling hand, very cautiously he touched Frodo’s knee- but almost the touch was a caress.”

It is a deeply moving moment but a tragic one too. Tolkien later spoke of how he had tears in his eyes as he wrote this passage. As Gollum hesitantly reached out to Frodo so too did he reach back to the hobbit that he once was before the finding of the Ring, before the murder of Déagol, before his separation from his people and his journey into the hidden darkness at the roots of the Misty Mountains.

“For a fleeting moment, could one of the sleepers have seen him, they would have thought that they beheld an old weary hobbit, shrunken by the years that had carried him far beyond his time, beyond friends and kin, and the fields and streams of youth, an old starved pitiable thing.”

But neither Frodo nor Sam ever saw this old and weary hobbit, one of their own, because when Sam saw Gollum reaching out towards Frodo he assumed the worst.

“What are you up to?”

And the moment was lost forever.

Had Gollum contemplated the possibility of repentance? We saw him looking back up the pass, shaking his head, engaged in some interior debate. Gollum had been to visit Shelob, the monstrous spirit in spider form with whom he had formed a relationship long before when Sauron had released him from captivity assuming that he would do some mischief in the world, even to bring the Ring to him. Gollum would bring Shelob, always ravenous, prey to consume. The purpose of Gollum’s visit was to inform her that he intended to bring her the hobbits, hoping that he might regain the Ring thereby; but when he saw Frodo and Sam so peacefully sleeping his heart went out to them just for a moment. Would he change his mind about the planned betrayal?

In a letter to Michael Straight, editor of New Republic, (The Letters of J.R.R Tolkien, Harper Collins 2006, pp. 232-237) Tolkien spoke about this moment. He spoke of how Gollum had repeatedly, consistently, given in to temptation, was already a thief when the Ring crossed his path, did not defeat the Stinker side of his character in the debate in the slag hole near to the Black Gate, and so “weakened himself for the final chance when dawning love for Frodo was too easily withered by the jealousy of Sam before Shelob’s Lair.”

That phrase, “too easily withered”, tells us Tolkien’s own thoughts about this. Frodo’s kindness had awoken feelings within Gollum that he had not known for many hundreds of years. Tolkien speaks of them as a “dawning love”. But Gollum had murdered a friend before, desiring the Ring above any love, and that desire, combined with his long held resentment against all who he felt had rejected and excluded him, proved to be greater than any affection that might have awoken within him. We too might shed tears for Gollum, for the Sméagol that he once was, but our tears will be for all who choose, often by sheer force of habit, to put themselves beyond the power of love to reach into their hearts.

“Sleep Then, Master. Lay Your Head in My Lap.” Some Thoughts on Sam’s Love For Frodo.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 930-935

In the last post on my blog we watched Frodo shyly, uncertainly, begin to express his feelings regarding Sam. Frodo imagines a father reading the story of his and Sam’s adventures to his child and that child saying to his father:

“And Frodo wouldn’t have got far without Sam, would he, dad?”

It’s the closest that either Frodo or Sam have come to expressing how they feel about each other. Frodo is telling Sam that he needs him and that Sam has come to mean a lot to him. As we saw last time this isn’t a democratic relationship, a partnership of equals. Sam has no problem in calling Frodo, Master. Neither does he feel demeaned in any way in doing so. We have looked at other master-servant relationships in recent weeks, in particular that of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, but in the 20th century two such relationships come immediately to my mind. Dorothy Sayers creation of Lord Peter Wimsey and his servant, Bunter, and P.G Wodehouse’s creation of Bertie Wooster and his servant, Jeeves. In the former case the relationship began in the First World War in which Bunter served as Lord Peter’s batman. The relationship between them remains formal but it is laced with deep mutual respect, trust and considerable affection. Sayers and Tolkien knew one another, Sayers joining the Inklings from time to time and both shared a similar view of society although Sayers was more critical of it as she showed in her story, Gaudy Night, for example. Wodehouse’s wonderful joke in his Jeeves and Wooster stories is that everyone (apart from Bertie himself) is aware that Jeeves possesses a competence that Wooster entirely lacks but Jeeves is more than content to play the game that Wooster is the master and he the servant.

As we have already discussed, the relationship between Frodo and Sam is based upon Tolkien’s memory of his batman in the trenches. In this respect it is closer to the relationship between Peter Wimsey and his servant, Bunter. But I cannot quite imagine a scene in one of Dorothy Sayers stories ending with Lord Peter lying in Bunter’s lap as it does here with Frodo and Sam.

Many of my readers will be aware that some people in the LBGTQ world have claimed the relationship between Frodo and Sam as queer. I confess that I do not understand the various nuances in queer relationships enough to be able to dismiss this assertion completely out of hand. I am also aware, based upon my life as a straight man, that however straightforward any of my friendships have been with women over the years, I have come to practice a certain reserve, a caution, to prevent the crossing of boundaries. I say this because I do not know all the feelings that Sam, in particular, has for Frodo. But of one thing I am sure, and that is that Sam is deeply respectful of boundaries. They have been ingrained in him by his culture since birth. I only say this because I do not want to simply dismiss the deep love that Sam has for Frodo as if it doesn’t matter or even exist. I am only certain that it exists within carefully, even painfully formed boundaries.

There are boundaries in the relationship between Frodo and Sam but there is also deep tenderness, especially on Sam’s part. And Tolkien is not afraid to show this even though he is describing a relationship between two men. Sam will draw upon this tenderness again and again as the two hobbits draw ever closer to Mount Doom and Frodo withdraws ever further from him as the Ring tightens its grip upon Frodo’s heart. Indeed it is probably only this tenderness that will see them through to their goal together.

As I conclude this reflection I need to make a decision. Is the relationship between Frodo and Sam queer or not? I am going to come down on the side of saying that it is not. And the reason why I am going to make this choice is because I believe it is possible to separate tenderness from sexual attraction. From my experience women are much more capable of taking the risk of expressing tenderness without confusing it with romantic attraction than are men. I regard this as a unhappy shortcoming in many men who struggle with both giving and receiving tenderness. I would argue that one of the characters in The Lord of the Rings who will benefit most from Sam’s considerable ability to show tenderness will be Rosie Cotton who will marry him and bear his children. So will those children as well.

Sam brings his tender heart to his marriage to Rosie Cotton.

“Frodo Wouldn’t Have Got Far Without Sam, Would He Dad?” Frodo Thinks About the Place of Sam Gamgee in His Story and About Both of Them in The Great Tale.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 931-935

Frodo and Sam have come a long way since Gandalf unceremoniously pulled Sam by the ear through the study window at Bag End. And they have travelled far since Frodo’s attempt to escape from all his friends across the Anduin to the Emyn Muil after Boromir’s betrayal and his attempt to take the Ring from Frodo by force. At that point in the story Frodo greeted Sam’s heroic effort to catch up with him, risking his life in the waters of the mighty river, with the words:

“Of all the confounded nuisances you are the worst, Sam!”

The road from the breaking of the Fellowship to the place just below the tunnel into Mordor in the pass of Cirith Ungol has only been a few days but during that time the bonds of friendship between Frodo and Sam have begun to grow deep. Frodo takes the opportunity using the gentle game that he and Sam are playing as Sam imagines Frodo as a character in the kind of story that he loved to hear when he was a child to express something of how he has come to feel about him.

“Why, Sam,” he said, “to hear you somehow makes me as merry as if the story was already written. But you’ve left out one of the chief characters: Samwise the stouthearted. ‘I want to hear more about Sam, dad. Why don’t they put in more of his talk, dad? That’s what I like. it makes me laugh. And Frodo wouldn’t have got far without Sam, would he, dad?'”

This short speech displays much of the struggle that men have to say what they really feel. It is the last sentence that gets closest to this for Frodo. “I wouldn’t have got very far without you, Sam.” But this shy expression of feeling is wrapped up in teasing and in all the careful formality of relationships between classes that typified the early twentieth century world that Frodo and Sam live in and which they carry into the pre-modern heroic world of the central narrative of The Lord of the Rings. And in passing we might note here how seemingly effortless this travel between worlds is. We hardly notice that that all this conversation about heroic literature takes place in a lighthearted conversation between an officer and his batman (a servant to an officer in the British military) on the front line during the Great War of 1914-18. Are we in the trenches of that terrible conflict or are we in the story of Beren and Lúthien from the First Age of Arda? In fact we are in both stories but most importantly of all, the heroic tale recounted in The Silmarilion is legitimately brought into the twentieth century conversation and re-enchants it.

Sam is the first to point this out, speaking of the tale of Beren and Lúthien.

“But that’s a long tale, of course, and goes on past the happiness and into grief and beyond it- and the Silmaril went on and came to Eärendil. And why sir, I never thought of it before! We’ve got some of the light of it in that star-glass that the Lady gave you! Why, to think of it, we’re in the same tale still! Its going on. Don’t the great tales never end?”

Some may recall that Bilbo used words very much like this in his despairing cry of, “Don’t adventures ever have an end?” in the hall of fire in Rivendell when he met Frodo there. Both the tragedy and comedy of life come down to each of us from the ancient stories and we must inherit them both. The point is, and Tolkien vividly brings this to life here, is that our lives in modernity are not hermetically sealed against the heroic tales of the past. They still live in us and we in them.

“You May Know, or Guess, What Kind of a Tale it is… But The People in It Don’t Know. And You Don’t Want Them To.” Frodo Speaks About The Best Kind of Stories.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 930-935

“I wonder what sort of a tale we’ve fallen into?” asks Sam as he and Frodo rest after their climb up the stairs of Cirith Ungol. We thought about this last time and compared the story of Frodo and Sam to that of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, about how Cervantes’ famous characters found themselves in a story that largely came about because Don Quixote had immersed himself for years in tales of medieval chivalry until what he found there became preferable, more real, than what he saw around him in 17th century Spain.

Sam recognises that he and Frodo are in a story. The story is different from the life that he had lived while tending the gardens of Bag End, a story that Sam had come to regard as just a little dull and mundane; a little too predictable. The stories that Sam had learned from Bilbo of Elves and of great heroes were so much more exciting than the every day reality in which he lived. Frodo too was caught up by a longing to go after Bilbo in his discussion with Gandalf in his study in Bag End, a longing that for a moment was greater than the fear that had gripped him when Gandalf told him of the true nature of Bilbo’s ring and of how Sauron was looking for it.

It all felt very different when the question was asked at the Council of Elrond in Rivendell as to who should carry the Ring to Mount Doom and destroy it there. By that point Frodo had suffered the terrible wound inflicted upon him by the Lord of the Nazgûl. Most of his journey to Rivendell had been as a battle field casualty carried on the back of Bill the Pony. If Frodo had ever been caught up with the romance of adventure by the time he had accepted the task of bearing the Ring to Mordor this was long gone by this point.

But Frodo still has the capacity to have his imagination awakened by Sam. When Sam asks what of tale they have landed in Frodo wants to respond, to follow Sam’s train of thought.

“I wonder,” said Frodo. “But I don’t know. And that’s the way of a real tale. Take any one that you’re fond of. You may know, or guess, what kind of a tale it is, happy-ending or sad-ending, but the people in it don’t know. And you don’t want them to.”

I keep on going back to this image. By this point in the story Sam no longer cares about what kind of story he is in. He is guided by his love for Frodo and the need to finish the job.

We don’t want the characters in a story to know how it is going to end because if they did it would spoil the story. It is the very fact that the heroes in our favourite stories don’t know how the story is going to end, and that they keep on going, that makes them the heroes that they are. And in this regard they are completely different in spirit to Sauron. Sauron, by the time we reach this point in the story, has spent three ages in the history of Arda trying to achieve absolute control and to eliminate any unpredictability from all reality. At first he is a servant of Morgoth and then after his master falls at the end of the First Age, he becomes the Dark Lord. But in all this time what he seeks to achieve is power, both over others and over reality itself. Sauron wants to know how the story ends and he exercises all his power to achieve that end. He makes Mordor impregnable against attack and assembles an army so great that even after the defeat at the Pelennor Fields his power is not greatly diminished.

Every reader of The Lord of the Rings is aware of the great irony here. Sauron is convinced that he is in a story that is about power. As a consequence he spends two ages of history trying to amass as much power as possible. That is why he forged the Rings of Power. That is why he is convinced that the one thing he needs is to regain the greatest of those rings. And that is why all his schemes are fatally flawed. In trying to eliminate all uncertainty from the story, in trying to make everything his story, he falls, because stories do not work that way. Frodo and Sam don’t want the characters in the best stories to know how the story is going to end because that will spoil the story. They know that what makes a good story is that very element of uncertainty. And the wonder is that this very element is what makes reality. Frodo and Sam don’t know how their story is going to end. They don’t know if it will have a happy ending. They have “fallen into” this story. They haven’t written it themselves. But in giving themselves up to the uncertainty of their story they allow a deeper reality, one that Sauron has long ago rejected, to do its work.

“I Wonder What Sort of a Tale We’ve Fallen Into?” Sam Gamgee Continues to Think About His and Frodo’s Experience.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 930-935

When I first read Sam’s thoughts about the ancient tales that were to be recorded in The Silmarilion, tales such as that of Beren and Lúthien and their journey to Thangorodrim to wrest a Silmaril from Morgoth’s iron crown they meant nothing to me beyond the lines that I had read of The Lay of Beren and Lúthien in the first book of The Lord of the Rings when Aragorn recounted the story to the hobbits in the camp below Weathertop. I had no idea that these words related to a work upon which Tolkien had spent most of his adult life, the creation of a legendarium within which The Lord of the Rings played just a part.

I did not know these stories but Sam did; and so did Frodo. These characters that Tolkien created came to the early readers of The Lord of the Rings with inner lives that had been formed in a way that no others ever had been in an imaginary work. So as Sam spoke of the story of Beren and Lúthien to Frodo both of them could picture the characters in their mind’s eye and both of them knew what had led those characters to make the journey to Thangorodrim and to achieve the impossible task that lay before them.

See Alan Lee’s wonderful evocation of the journey of Beren and Lúthien to Thangorodrim that is on the front cover of Christopher Tolkien’s edited version of his father’s writings of that story.

It is not possible within this limited space to recount the whole of this story. You will need to read it either within The Silmarilion or in Beren and Lúthien, both of which were lovingly and masterfully prepared for publication from his father’s writings by Christopher Tolkien. There you will read the story that holds such an important place within the imagination that Frodo and Sam both share.

If you do decide to do this then you might come to the conclusion that Sam has become a little too full of himself. Who does he think that he is to compare himself to such an heroic figure such as Beren? Of course the point is that he is not comparing himself with the great hero of old. It is Frodo of whom he is speaking.

“I wonder if we shall ever be put into songs or tales. We’re in one, of course; but I mean: put into words, you know, told by the fireside, or read out of a great big book with red and black letters, years and years afterwards. And people will say: ‘Let’s hear about Frodo and the Ring!”

As far as Sam is concerned, his part in the story is not particularly important. He is a kind of Sancho Panza to Don Quixote as his master travels about Spain engaged in adventures of medieval chivalry. His task is simply to look after his master and not to do anything that is particularly heroic himself.

Now the adventures of Don Quixote, and his faithful servant, Sancho Panza, in Miguel de Cervantes’ tale, bare some similarity to Frodo and Sam’s. If Sam knew Cervantes’ story he would almost certainly think of himself as a figure like Sancho Panza. But Frodo is no Don Quixote. His adventures are not illusory. He does not tilt at windmills imagining them to be knights at a medieval joust. His task is deadly serious. He has been given an impossible journey to undertake. One upon which the whole world depends. The likelihood is that neither he nor Sam will survive, either to tell the tale or to hear it told.

And there is one thing more. Sancho Panza’s role in his story was to keep his master from getting into too much trouble and to patch things up after they got a little too out of hand. Sam is a hero in his own right and Frodo recognises this, even if he speaks of it here in humorous tones.

“To hear you somehow makes me as merry as if the story was already written. But you’ve left out one of the chief characters: Samwise the stouthearted.”

Frodo speaks in this way because he wants to deflect attention from himself. In fact from both of them. As far as he is concerned he is no hero. Just as Sam puts it he has fallen into a story in which he has no right to be and he wishes that it could simply be done with. But his heart has been cheered by Sam and by the story to which Sam has referred. He is ready to go on and to walk into the darkness with some sense that his journey has meaning.

“Adventures, as I Used to Call Them.” Sam Gamgee Ponders the True Nature of Adventure Before the Hobbits Try to Enter the Nameless Land.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp.928-935

I doubt whether a tour of Mordor would ever be a commercial success. Imagine it being sold something like this.

The adventure of a lifetime. In fact it will probably end your life. The chances that you will return alive are very small and the guide we will provide will do his best, either to kill you himself or to have you killed by a savage monster of terrible potency. So what’s stopping you from signing up?”

Perhaps a small number of adrenaline junkies might be prepared to take on the odds but most of us want to come back from our holidays, alive and in one piece.

It is in a moment of calm after the long climb up the stairs of Cirith Ungol and before they enter the tunnel that lies between them and Mordor, the Nameless Land as Tolkien calls it here, Sam reflects upon all that he and Frodo have experienced together upon their journey. It has been a long way from Bag End and when we compare the Sam that we first met there as Gandalf hauled him through the window of Frodo’s study by his ear we might say that the inner journey that Sam has taken has been even longer.

As they take a few moments of rest after their long climb Frodo expresses his dislike for their surroundings. “Earth, air and water all seem accursed. But so our path is laid,” he says. And then Sam responds with a speech of great beauty.

“Yes, that’s so… And we shouldn’t be here at all, if we’d known more about it before we started. But I suppose it’s often that way. The brave things in the old tales and songs, Mr. Frodo: adventures, as I used to call them. I used to think that they were things the wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for, because they wanted them, because they were exciting and life was a bit dull, a kind of a sport, as you might say. But that’s not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind.”

The tales that matter

“The tales that really mattered, or the ones that stayed in the mind.” Sam is looking back on the years of his childhood when he would sit at the feet of Bilbo Baggins at Bag End. It is hard to imagine the Gaffer being a repository of stories unless they were ones of family history. He was more a storehouse of pithy sayings, all of which were intended to be the last word on any subject. Sam certainly remembers these, usually when he becomes aware that what he is doing would meet with his father’s disapproval, but the stories that Bilbo told were a different matter altogether. They opened doors into worlds of wonder and enchantment in Sam’s heart and mind. And they awoke desire there. Sam expressed that desire in the words, “I want to see Elves!”, a desire that was quickly satisfied in his journey in the meeting with Gildor Inglorien and his company while still in the Shire. Frodo asked him then whether he wished to continue now that his longing had been fulfilled and Sam responded by speaking of the need to see something through. We can only imagine that he returned to thoughts of resolution many times in his journey because he speaks in a similar way here.

“I expect that they had lots of chances, like us, of turning back, only they didn’t. And if they had, we shouldn’t know, because they’d have been forgotten. We hear about those as just went on.”

Carl Jung, the great map maker of the human psyche, spoke of this in these terms. “To this day God is the name by which I designate all things which cross my wilful path violently and recklessly, all things which upset my subjective views, plans and intentions and change the course of my life for better or worse.”

Sam’s language is very different from Jung’s but they are speaking of the same human experience. Oh, yes, Sam would say, you are speaking of a story that really matters. Oh yes, Carl Jung might reply, I am speaking about God.

“I Am Too Late. All is Lost”. Frodo’s Struggle With Despair Outside Minas Morgul.

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

The overwhelming force that is the army of Minas Morgul has passed down the valley on its way to assault th6e city of Minas Tirith and Frodo is left alone in the shadows at the beginning of the long climb to Cirith Ungol with Sam and Gollum.

Suddenly, despite his escape from the Lord of the Nazgûl, Frodo is overcome by despair.

“Frodo stirred. And suddenly his heart went out to Faramir. ‘The storm has burst at last,’ he thought. ‘This great array of spears and swords is going to Osgiliath. Will Faramir get across in time? He guessed it, but did he know the hour? And who can now hold the fords when the King of the Nine Riders is come? And other armies will come. I am too late. All is lost. I tarried on the way. All is lost. Even if my errand is performed, no one will ever know. There will be no one I can tell. It will be in vain.’ Overcome with weakness he wept. And still the host of Morgul crossed the bridge.”

“And still the host of Mordor crossed the bridge”. Alan Lee depicts the scene that Frodo saw as the Witch King leads his army to war.

Perhaps the choreography that I spoke of in my last post on The Two Towers has had its effect, albeit one that was unintended. The shock and awe was all intended to drain morale from the defenders of Minas Tirith but it is Frodo who is lying on the ground, all hope gone and no strength left to continue his journey. We can imagine that repeated phrase, “all is lost”, resounding over and over again within him, gaining an ever tightening grasp upon his heart. And there is still the terrible climb up the stairs of Cirith Ungol yet to be attempted; a task that will require all the strength that he possesses.

At a moment like this when all seems lost something has to pierce the darkness and for Frodo this something is one of exquisite simplicity. We must assume that Frodo must have fallen into a swoon, overwhelmed by the horror of what he has witnessed, or at least to have appeared to have done so, because it is Sam’s voice that breaks through to him.

“Wake up, Mr. Frodo! Wake up!”

And in those simple words, just for the briefest of moments, Frodo is transported back to the Shire and breakfast is about to be served. Of course the moment cannot last and the awful reality must return but when it does Frodo has strength to resist it. He knows that it is likely that all is in vain, that Gondor will fall before the power that has come against it but it is almost as if this no longer matters. “That what he had to do, he had to do, if he could, and that whether Faramir or Aragorn or Elrond or Galadriel or Gandalf or anyone else ever knew about it was beside the purpose.”

The early fathers of the Christian Church taught that an essential foundation of the spiritual life was a renunciation of despair and this is true. For Frodo this renunciation is expressed in the words “what he had to do, he had to do”. And it is worth emphasising here also, that for Frodo, and for many others also, the spiritual life is not some state of endless bliss but a bloody minded refusal to give in, a determination to go on putting one foot in front of the other. Tolkien puts this wonderfully as he concludes this passage by saying of Frodo that “he prepared to take the upward road”.

Frodo does renounce despair at this point in the story and there is a sense in which he will have to repeat that renunciation over and over again before the end of his journey and when his mind can no longer do so his body will have to do it and when his body can no longer do so Sam will have to carry him and renounce despair for him. But just before the renunciation that we have described here there is that moment of pure grace when another reality than the one he must return to breaks in from outside through Sam’s voice and simple words. This moment of grace will not always be repeated but it comes here, just Frodo has to take the upward road, and it is enough, though barely. Frodo will make the journey to Orodruin.

“Or If He Pleaseth, Through it Pass, and Then The Heaven Espy.” Reflections on a Visit to The Islands of Mull and Iona.

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It is not necessary to die in order to go to heaven. St Catherine of Sienna, a 14th century Italian mystic teaches that for those who are going to heaven every step is heaven. I wish that I could practice this all the time but sadly I don’t. Most of the time I just see the ordinary and not, as the 17th century poet and Anglican parish priest, George Herbert put it in his poem on prayer, the “heaven in ordinary”.

Thankfully there are occasions when I really see the heaven in the ordinary and they encourage me to keep on going. Last week, in a visit that Laura and I made to the Scottish islands of Mull and Iona I enjoyed such an occasion. I will return to my regular blog on Wisdom From The Lord of the Rings again on Saturday but I would like to think about this experience today. Do let me know your thoughts in the comments below.

My photograph of St Columba’s Bay on Iona where the saint first landed 1400 years ago.

Those of you who have followed this blog for some time will know that I love the work of William Blake and that I have often gone back to lines from his Auguries of Innocence, 

To see a world in a grain of sand
And heaven in a wild flower, 
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand 
And eternity in an hour.

The point about what Blake is saying here is not that the sand needs to be arranged perfectly as it would be in a Zen garden or that the wild flower needs to be especially beautiful and in a beautiful setting as it was for Sam Gamgee in Lothlórien when he felt that he was “inside a song” amidst the elanor and niphredil upon Cerin Amroth. It is possible to see heaven in any wild flower, in any sand or in any hour. But we are people whose inner eyes are weak through lack of use and so most of the time we miss the glory. I needed to see the light on the holy island of Iona and the quiet beauty of the Abbey there that was first built by St Columba there 1400 years ago. I needed to struggle up Ben More to look across to the mountains of the Scottish Highlands eastward and out to the Hebridean islands westward.

Haldir shows Cerin Amroth to Frodo. Beautifully reimagined by Anke Eissmann.

And perhaps the fruit of a week in which I began to look again at heaven in the many wild flowers I saw last week was two entirely unexpected glimpses of heaven on our last morning on Mull before returning to the mainland and beginning our journey southward to our home once more. We visited a café and farm shop at Scriob-ruadh just outside Tobermory just to enjoy an early morning coffee. We decided to share a cheese scone together and as I bit into my half I had that experience that the food critic has with a plate of ratatouille in the film of that name. An ordinary thing became heavenly. You can be certain that I went into the shop in order to purchase the cheese that had been an ingredient in the scone. I hope that I can prepare my senses, both bodily and spiritual, in order to enjoy the cheese when I eat it with friends who are visiting later this week.

And then, surpassing even this moment if such a thing could be possible, was a meal in the Gallery Restaurant in Tobermory at lunch time. Wonderful Italian food was served at unbelievable prices and I ordered a langoustine risotto that was delicious. But the moment that surpassed everything was when I tasted a simple rocket salad. I put some of the rocket into my mouth and entered heaven directly. I have never tasted a dressing like it before and maybe I never will again. I spoke with the young Italian chef before leaving who told me that he was going to be leaving in the next couple of weeks. I told him that if that if this was true then I had been truly blessed to eat his food before he left.

I am aware that these last two paragraphs read a little like a TripAdvisor review and I intend to leave them for others to read there. But the point I wanted to make was that Blake’s point about wild flowers is that an experience of heaven is not limited to wild flowers alone but can be extended to cheese scones and a rocket salad, exquisitely dressed. In fact it can be extended to any human experience. I want to return to George Herbert before I close today. He teaches us the secret to seeing heaven through these experiences. The secret is that we need to choose to look through something and not merely at it. What we have to do is to make it our daily practice to do this.

A man that looks on glass
On it may stay his eye;
Or if he pleaseth, through it pass,
And then the heaven espy.

See you all again on Saturday.