Sam Gamgee: Warrior and Gardener

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Sam Gamgee never intended to be a warrior. To be the best gardener that he could be, working in the garden of Frodo Baggins at Bag End, was an ambition sufficient for him. And he did not resent his lot because he loved Frodo. If he cherished a secret desire then it was to see the world that he had begun to learn about through the stories of Bilbo; but his secret desire had never turned into a root of bitterness within him.

So it is that when he first encounters a battle “of Men against Men” Tolkien tells us that “he did not like it much”. Faramir, Captain of Gondor, has left him with Frodo in the keeping of Mablung and Damrod, two Rangers of Ithilien, for a battle has to be fought. A force from the south is marching toward the Black Gate in order to join the forces of Mordor and Faramir is determined to stop them from getting there. He leads a guerrilla force whose aim is to make Ithilien as unsafe as possible for the enemies of Gondor. Soon Faramir’s men have the southerners on the run and Sam’s first encounter with one of his enemies is with a young warrior who falls dead at his feet.

It was the victorious Duke of Wellington, writing after his victory over Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo, who said: ” “Believe me, nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.” Sam’s immediate response is to agree. As he gazes at the dead young warrior at his feet his heart goes out towards him. He “was glad that he could not see the dead face. He wondered what the man’s name was and where he came from; and if he was really evil of heart, or what lies or threats had led him on the long march from his home; and if he would not really rather have stayed there in peace- all in a flash of thought.” Tolkien is probably remembering his own experience of war here. As an infantryman on the Western Front during The Great War of 1914-18 he was present on the terrible first day of The Battle of the Somme in 1916 in which some 30,000 British troops died in a fruitless assault upon the German lines. The response that he expresses through Sam’s thoughts is typical of a volunteer soldier. The natural empathy between one human being and another has to be trained out of the soldier in order that killing should become “natural”.

By the end of The Lord of the Rings Sam will be a battle hardened warrior but he will never be a killer. The journey that he makes from the garden in Bag End and back again is not one that he he makes because he loves battle and adventure. He makes it because he loves Frodo and because Gandalf told him to do the job. Even his desire to see the wonders of the world is quickly satisfied though he never becomes cynical about them. He delights in seeing the Oliphaunt of Harad but it is not as important to him as finishing the job he has been given to do. At the end of the story he will be a gardener again, taking up his old task with the old love but with a new wisdom.

And as we get to know Faramir, the mighty Captain of Gondor, a little better, we shall learn that he shares much more in common with Sam Gamgee than we might ever have expected when we first met him.

Sam Shows Us How to Make Good Mistakes

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Perhaps we should not be too harsh on Sam. Ever since the sundering of the Fellowship at Parth Galen above the Falls of Rauros he has been forced by reason of necessity to live on a diet of the Elves’ waybread alone. “This waybread keeps you on your legs in a wonderful way,” he said to Frodo earlier in the journey, “though it doesn’t satisfy the innards proper as you might say: not to my feeling anyhow, meaning no disrespect to them as made it.”

Sam has long desired for something he can put in the pot and with that purpose in mind he has carried his cooking gear on the journey across the Dead Marshes to the Black Gate and then into Ithilien. Now at last in the woodlands of that once fair land he has the chance to use his gear and with the aid of Sméagol he is able to clean, prepare, cook and then eat two rabbits on his campfire. At least Sméagol offered his aid to catch the rabbits. Once he realised that Sam did not intend to eat them raw no more aid was forthcoming and soon he departed to catch and eat his own prey.

It was the campfire that led to the capture of the hobbits. Perhaps Sam is a little too content after doing the first cooking he has been able to do for such a long time for when he goes to wash his gear he forgets to smother his fire and it is the smoke rising from it that draws his captors to him. Four tall men stand before Frodo and Sam, two with spears in their hands and two with great bows; all with swords at their sides. They are men of Gondor and their Captain is Faramir, son of Denethor, the Steward of Gondor.

I said a few moments ago that perhaps we should not be too harsh on Sam. He longed to cook something that he regarded as properly nourishing for Frodo, the master that he loves. Sam’s whole identity is founded upon his determination to serve and to deny this would be to do harm to something essential, even holy in himself. It is this sense of identity that causes him to hate Gollum who he regards as utterly false. So if Sam is going to make a mistake we would expect it to be the result of his identity. That is what makes Sam and Gollum so different. When Gollum murdered Déagol long ago in order to take the Ring from him he had to deny something essential in himself. Sam does not do this when he forgets to smother his fire. He has made a mistake but he has not denied his true self.

Is it because of this that Sam and Frodo fall into the hands of a good man and not one who is false or into the hands of a company of orcs? I wish I could say so but to do that would be to say that in some way those who enjoy good fortune deserve it; or, alternatively, that those whose fortune is bad equally deserve theirs. To say such a thing is not true and does no good either to those who say it or to those about whom it is said. “Somewhere in my youth or childhood I must have done something good,” sings Captain von Trapp as he holds Maria in his arms. I think we can safely say that he is happily mocking himself and giving thanks for a good fortune he does not feel he deserves. I am glad that Tolkien does not make Frodo and Sam suffer for Sam’s gentle mistake. Such suffering still lies before them. But whether we suffer or not we cannot do good with a mistake that flows from a denial of our true self. One that flows from the true self can always lead to good because good was always intended.

Elizabeth Winter (nee Foster) April 29th 1925 to June 6th 2015 Part Two

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I am very grateful to my mother’s cousin’s daughter, Peggy Robinson for sending me some more material about my mother’s early life since I wrote my first post about her last week. I was relieved to learn that what I had written was more or less correct although I learnt for the first time that Peggy’s grandfather, Joseph Grave, also lived in the tiny miner’s cottage that was pictured in last week’s posting. I did not mention him because my mother never did. What I did learn was that the poor man lost his wife to the terrible Spanish ‘flu epidemic in December 1918 and then his baby daughter to the same illness just a month later. I try to picture a household led by my great-grandmother, Elizabeth Young after she had lost her two sons to the Great War of 1914-18 and a daughter to the Spanish ‘flu epidemic that came with the war’s ending.

It is Peggy Robinson’s belief that my grandmother, Jane Foster, went into a deep depression after she lost her first son, John at the age of just one month just after Christmas 1926 and that she rejected her daughter, my mother, during that time. It was when her second son, Thomas (my uncle whom I have never met) was born in 1934 that my mother went to live with her grandmother, uncle and cousins. I cannot help but note that my grandmother gave her two sons the same names of her older brothers killed in the war who died when she was fifteen and then seventeen years of age. Was there some attempt to keep them alive through these names; a hope that was dashed when baby John died in 1926? What is certain was that my mother was born in total innocence into a world trying to come to terms with terrible loss. Anyone who was in Britain in the autumn of 2014, the one hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of the war,  will have seen how that loss still haunts this country.

The more I reflect on my mother’s early life the more grateful I am that she gave so much love to her five children, of whom I am the eldest. I cannot say that she was physically affectionate. I have no memory of hugs in my childhood. Fortitude in adversity was expected of each one of us from a very early stage in life. But she created an atmosphere of profound security in her home which was all the more remarkable considering the fact that by the time I was eight years old in 1963 we had lived in seven different homes as my father took us from one farm to another. If I have an instinctive sense of home and of heaven then it is one shaped by memories of walking home after school through the woods on dark and frosty winter’s evenings to the light in her kitchen and the warmth that came from it as the door opened mixed with the delicious smell of soup kept warm upon the stove.

My mother and father were also people of great honesty and generosity and faith too. The year was shaped by the seasons (how could it not be if you grow up on farms?) and by the church’s calendar. I have much to be grateful for to them in this as well. Faith and duty were closely linked to both my parents. I don’t think they had much sense in those days that God might be gentle and kind.

But I would not want to give the impression that life was a stern affair in our home. My mother never lost the sense of fun and mischief that I described last week. Many who knew her have spoken of the sound of her laughter and I remember it too. For me the memory that stays strong within is the sound of laughter coming up from the living room in which the television was. She used to make sure that we were all packed off to bed after seven o’clock in the evening and after that the day belonged to her. Her laugh was big and free and she loved to laugh. My mother always seemed to have friends. I wonder if that is at least in part because of her laughter. I certainly remember when we worked on the fruit harvests together in my late teens that she would laugh a lot in the fields among the other workers. I also remember that she enjoyed bawdy jokes which was a little embarrassing for her son!

I am now deeply grateful for both the solidity that my mother  sought to create and for the laughter too. I don’t pretend that life was always easy. There were many struggles and great sorrows along the way. I now realise that in early childhood you believe that your parents have somehow lived for ever and that parenthood is some kind of eternal quality that they seem to possess in some innate manner. If you become a parent yourself then you realise that you always seem to feel a complete beginner no matter how long you have been one and I have been a parent for twenty-one years now. Your children are always presenting you with challenges (and joys too!) that you did not anticipate. Perhaps we all need both to forgive our parents for not being god-like enough and to forgive ourselves too if we are parents. If our parents did their best then we have much to be grateful for.

My mother’s last years, especially after my father died, were a great struggle for her. Those who loved her and visited her would sit with her while she wept or sat in silence. Who knows how she was dealing with her long life? She never told us. We are all grateful that her passing, when it came, was so peaceful and pray that she may now Rest in Peace and that Light Perpetual may shine upon her. She gave little indication what she would like from us which was typical of her except that she would like her ashes to be scattered upon the top of Dent Fell in West Cumbria. Dent is the first climb for those who undertake the Coast to Coast walk across England devised by the great Alfred Wainwright and although only about a thousand feet high it dominates the sky line for all who live on the West Cumbrian plain which lies just above sea level. It will be a special day when her family gather there to give her remains to the land where she grew up and to the love and mercy of God.

Elizabeth Winter (nee Foster) April 29th 1925 to June 6th 2015

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James Street, Cleator Moor

On the West Cumbrian coastal plain in the North-West of England lie a string of villages near the once important sea port of Whitehaven the most important of which are Egremont, Frizington, Cleator and Cleator Moor. Due to deposits of coal and iron-ore they enjoyed a brief flourishing at the end of the 19th century and early in the 20th and in that time attracted considerable immigration from Ireland both Catholic and Protestant, Nationalist and Unionist. As has been the nature of the flourishings of the Industrial Revolution once the earth has been stripped of its treasures the people who worked on them, who built communities and shared histories are more or less left to fend for themselves and it was into such a community that my mother, Elizabeth Foster (known as Betty as a girl) was born. There was still a mine in Cleator Moor until the 1960s and I remember playing on the steep sided heap of slag there with local boys and watched the steam locomotives as they pulled trucks of material away from the mine. I spent my summers with my mother’s family and loved it although I did not understand the question, “Are you a Cat (a Catholic) or a Proddy-Dog (Protestant) ?” having been raised in the gentle South of England. In the second summer I spent in Cleator Moor the slag heap was gone and we played on the disused tracks of the mine railway. And my mother’s family were Protestant and very strictly so.

It was into this world that my mother was born. I wish I could tell you about her parents, my grandparents, but I know almost nothing about them for at some point in her early life she was taken in by her grandmother and lived the rest of her early years at 2 James Street, Cleator Moor, a tiny miners’ cottage with a toilet in the shed in the yard and no indoor bathroom. It was a household of women for the First World War had robbed them of men and my mother’s uncles, Tommy and John are both buried in military cemeteries in France and Belgium. It is said that their father died of a broken heart soon after. Their mother did not however, taking in her  grand-daughters, Annie and Winnie as well as my mother. It was a household full of images, the photographs of young soldiers on the mantlepiece. My mother did not know who they were and she did not ask. She did not know why Christmas Day was so sad either. It was years later that she learned that it was on Christmas Day 1918 that her Uncle John died from his wounds, sustained just before the war, in a military hospital in Belgium. I have seen his photograph. He was hardly more than a boy.

My mother revered her grandmother and stories about her were a part of my own childhood. I hope to meet this brave woman some day and to do her honour. She used to make my mother walk to Frizington each Sunday afternoon to visit her parents. After her grandmother died she never went again. I never met my grandparents or their son, my uncle and know nothing about their lives. I am not sure that I want to find out.

I must not give the impression that life was only cold and hard although growing up in the Depression with very little money must have been hard. My mother tells stories of winning a race at Sports Day at Montreal Primary in Cleator Moor. I have seen the certificate! She also loved to go dancing and for her, the outbreak of the Second World War meant interesting new dancing partners. She spoke of the slightly dangerous (and exciting?) French Canadians stationed nearby and Polish officers with their formal manners. They bowed stiffly to her when asking for a dance. She also spoke of having to climb in through the coal hole when she came home as the door to the house was locked against her.

I realise that this posting could become very long indeed so I must continue more quickly but I loved the stories of the mischievous side to my mother’s character and her sense of adventure too. She left Cleator Moor at the end of the war, heading down to Preston in Lancashire and from there she would go dancing in the Blackpool Tower ballroom getting the last bus back to Preston and walking alone through the darkened streets of the town. She also spoke of an insurance policy in her name maturing and how she spent it all on one holiday in Blackpool. But my own particular favourite story of her mischievous sense of fun was how, after she began to train as a nurse in London, she had been on a visit home and when returning by train fell in with some American soldiers. They must have been delighted to meet this very pretty nurse (I have seen photos from those days and she was very pretty indeed!)  and by the time they reached London she was rather drunk. It was my father who met her at the station and who, on greeting his very tipsy girlfriend bidding farewell to her new American friends, took her gently by the arm and steered her away, acting as if nothing had happened. My mother told me that it was at that moment that she decided that he was the man for her.

I have got slightly ahead of myself and must go back a little. My mother’s travels had by this point taking her to London where she trained as a nurse at the isolation hospital at Joyce Green in South East London. The hospital was by the banks of the River Thames situated there so that in a time of an epidemic in the city the sick could be loaded up on boats to be transported down the river to the hospital. The hospital required a farm to supply it, especially in times of emergency, and it was run by a young man called John Winter, my father.

My father had been raised in London, the son of Bert and Lucy Winter. Bert, my grandfather, was a London black cab taxi driver and my father’s first job before the outbreak of war was at Covent Garden Fruit and Vegetable Market in the heart of London. As with many men of his generation the war opened up doors that had until then been closed. My Father served in the Royal Artillery during the war, taking part in the Normandy landings of June 1944, and the battles through western Europe and into Germany, and when he was finally demobilised from the army in 1947 as a Sergeant Major he took the opportunity to go to Agricultural College and and spent his working life running farms. My mother and my father married in August 1952 and I was born, their first son, in February 1955.

I will write more of their life together in another posting soon but will end here by saying that my mother loved her new family. Her mother in law was good, strong and very kind and my mother wrote to her every week sharing news of her growing family. My grandmother told me years later that she too had been very drawn to her own mother in law who was good and kind, and as I was later to learn, Italian! I love the fact that I am descended from so many immigrants on both sides of my family! But what I mainly want to say here was that both women, my mother and my grandmother were drawn to strong, kind women. I have much to be grateful for to all the women in this story I have told so far.

END OF PART ONE

A Dishevelled Dryad Loveliness

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Frodo and Sam have journeyed through many landscapes since they left Bag End together stepping out onto the Road that Bilbo once sang about, that “Goes ever on and on”. From the gentle woodlands and fields of the Shire to the tangling branches of the Old Forest to the wilds of Eriador; from the magical lands of Rivendell and Lothlorien to the dreadful desolation before the Gate of Mordor, they have seen so much that will change them for ever.

Now they have arrived in the land of Ithilien, once the garden of Gondor upon its northern borders but now fallen into the hands of the Enemy who has already begun his work of destruction. But the foul work of his servants has only recently begun and although Frodo and Sam see many signs of that work they still see for the first time upon their journey Spring “busy about them” with small flowers “opening in the turf” and birds singing. And Tolkien tells us that “Ithilien, the garden of Gondor now desolate kept still a desolate dryad loveliness”.

I cannot think of another occasion in The Lord of the Rings where Tolkien strays from his own mythology, so carefully formed, to bring in an image from another. Perhaps it was a mistake. But it is a phrase of such beauty that maybe we can imagine that if on re-reading his work Tolkien noticed it there, a stray from a classical land, he allowed it to remain and to work its own particular magic upon the land that he described by means of it.

For Ithilien is a land that for centuries has been tended by men and women. It bears testimony to the possibility that human beings of the highest civilisation are capable of living in such harmony with nature they can make a garden that can yet give space to wildness. After many pages of dreariness Tolkien gives space himself to rich language as he writes of the many things that still grow there, of groves and thickets “of tamarisk and pungent terebinth, of olive and of bay…and many herbs of forms and scents beyond the garden-lore of Sam”. Simply to write the names of the plants that grow in this land is to write a poetry that delights the senses as well as mind and spirit.

In his recently published book, Landmarks, that wonderful writer about wildness, Robert Macfarlane notes that a recent edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary had culled many words related to nature from its pages so that “acorn, adder, ash, beech, bluebell, buttercup, catkin, conker, cowslip, cygnet, dandelion, fern, hazel, heather, heron…” had all been removed to be replaced for the first time with “attachment, block-graph, blog, broadband, bullet point, celebrity, chatroom, committee, cut-and-paste, MP3 player and voicemail”.

The cull did not go unnoticed and when the head of children’s dictionaries at the OUP was asked about them she replied that the dictionary needed to reflect the consensus experience of modern-day childhood. “When you look back at older versions of dictionaries, there were lots of examples of flowers, for instance,” she said; “that was because many children lived in semi-rural environments and saw the seasons. Nowadays, the environment has changed.”

Nowadays the environment has changed and if we are to accept what she says, children no longer see the seasons. It is hard not to think that if Frodo and Sam were to find themselves in our own world they might think that the servants of the Enemy had been at work among us and that the diminishment of our language was a part of that work even as they saw “wounds made by the Orcs and other foul servants of the Dark Lord” all of whom were just trying to make a living.

I passed by proud swans this morning watching carefully over their newly born brood of five cygnets and a heron rising ponderously from the ground a little further on and rejoiced in them. I have hopes that one day I will see otters near by as others have seen them in the past year. And I write these words in a blog, using a broadband connection and complain when the connection lets me down as it sometimes does in my semi-rural home and I am grateful to them for what they enable me to do.

How do I live this tension well?

Frodo Shows What the Gift of Laughter can Teach Us

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Frodo has come at last to the Morannon, the Black Gate of Mordor, with its mighty watch-towers. “Stony-faced they were, with dark window-holes staring north and east and west, and each window was full of sleepless eyes.”. He has come with no idea of how he is to go any further and only his sense of duty can impel him to to try to go on. All he can foresee is his own death and the failure of his mission but he stands with his face “grim and set, but resolute,” and his eyes are clear. Sam never had much hope in the affair but, as Tolkien tells us, “being a cheerful hobbit he had not needed hope, as long as despair could be postponed,” and even as he reaches the end he can still die beside his master and so know that his life has not been without meaning.

It is at this moment that Gollum offers them an alternative: “a little path leading up into the mountains; and then a stair, a narrow stair…And then… a tunnel, a dark tunnel; and at last a little cleft, and a path high above the main pass.”

So this then is the choice that lies before them. On the one hand there is a brave, even noble, death at the hands of the Enemy, but with the knowledge that with their capture and death so too will die all the hopes of their friends and all that they hold dear. On the other hand there is a possibility offered to them by one they know to be false and murderous. How should they choose at such a moment?

For Sam there is only one choice and that is to stay true to his master. He sees no need to choose between options. All he needs to do is to follow. Sam is sure that Gollum will betray them if he can but that will not sway his own choice in any way. Frodo, on the other hand, must make a choice that gives at least some possibility that his mission his can be fulfilled.

How then does he decide?

The moment of decision comes when something entirely unexpected breaks into hours of agonised thought. Even as the day of choice has been passing companies of soldiers have been arriving at the gate in order to swell the armies of Mordor and as one arrives from the far south Sam’s curiosity causes him to forget his fear and to ask Gollum if he has seen oliphaunts among them, “Grey as a mouse, big as a house”. Sam chants a verse about them and tells Gollum what he knows of them and Frodo laughs. He laughs “in the midst of all his cares” and the laugh releases him from all hesitation. He will entrust himself to Gollum once more.

Frodo’s laughter is not the grim laughter of one staring the inevitability of death in the face and so making one last gesture of defiance before the night falls. And it is most certainly not the ravenous and mocking laughter most usually heard in that land, a laughter taking pleasure in the misfortune of another. Frodo’s laughter is the inbreaking of a reality that runs entirely counter to the reality of death that seems to govern our lives declaring endlessly and monotonously as it does so that there is no alternative; that the best we can make of this cruel joke is to try to make some deal with it just as those who belong to the peoples who have made Sauron their overlord have done, just as the many minor functionaries of the Third Reich did. Theologian, James Alison speaks of the alternative reality that breaks in upon Frodo’s unhappy thoughts in these terms when he speaks of Jesus going to his own death:

“I am going to my own death,” he imagines Jesus saying in his reflection on John 15.12-14 ” to make possible for you a model of creative practice which is not governed by death. From now on this is the only commandment that counts: that you should live your lives as a creative overcoming of death.”

Sam’s rhyme about oliphaunts and Frodo’s cheerful laughter makes the life that is not governed by death real once more and in the light of that reality they can continue their journey.

Frodo Teaches Us about Strength in Times of Darkness

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If hope means to have some expectation that things will turn out well for the one who hopes then Frodo has little of it. He does not expect that he will survive his mission. When he awakens at dusk in the foul pit in which he, Sam and Gollum have been sheltering he prepares to go to the Black Gate of Mordor with no plan of how to get past it but only a clear sense of where his duty lies. He must do what the Council has asked of him. He must do all in his power to take the Ring to the fires of Mount Doom and there unmake it. If he has hope then it must mean that he believes that what he seeks to do has meaning even if he fails and perishes in the attempt and the Ring returns to the hand of its master and maker, the Dark Lord.

During his journey across the Dead Marshes the Ring has become a terrible burden to Frodo in his body, mind and spirit, and he has often lagged behind his companions, but when he awakens in the pit Tolkien tells us:

“Strangely enough, Frodo felt refreshed. He had been dreaming. The dark shadow had passed, and a fair vision had visited him in this land of disease. Nothing remained of it in his memory, yet because of it he felt glad and lighter of heart. His burden was less heavy on him.”

Others have spoken of such an experience; that when they have no strength left to endure a great burden they receive strength to carry on from a source they may not be aware of. In his reflection on his experience in the Nazi death camps, Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl writes of the power that hope gave him to survive. “Those who have a ‘why’ to live, can bear with almost any ‘how’”, he says. The German pastor and theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, spent the last two years of his life as a prisoner of the Nazis as they sought to uncover his part in the Resistance. After time in the Tegel military prison in relatively tolerable conditions he was eventually sent to Gestapo headquarters in Prinz Albrecht Strasse where he was tortured. He was given permission to write a letter to his parents at Christmas 1944 and enclosed a poem that he wrote and which is still sung as a hymn in German churches.

“With every power for good to stay and guide me,/ comforted and inspired beyond all fear” the poem begins and it ends with the words, “While all the powers of good aid and attend us,/ boldly we’ll face the future come what may./ At even and at morn God will befriend us,/and oh most surely on each newborn day!”

Bonhoeffer describes his own experience of receiving strength to endure the unendurable here and reports from reliable witnesses tell us that he continued in that way right until his execution in Flossenburg concentration camp just a few days before the ending of the war. So we learn that if we too live in hope that our actions for good have meaning, even in the face of death, then we will receive strength to endure, perhaps most especially at the darkest times.

Our Shadow is our Hope for Wholeness

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In last week’s blog posting we thought about the debate between Sméagol and Gollum that takes place in the foul pit just before the travellers reach the Black Gate of Mordor. We saw Sméagol feebly resisting the ravenous Gollum who wishes to take the Ring and so be free of all who might harm him and who might become great and even eat fish from the sea “three times a day”! And we see Gollum overcome Sméagol and begin to crawl menacingly toward Frodo “with long fingers flexed and twitching”.

Sméagol is Gollum’s shadow that he has sought to silence over many centuries. Sméagol is the self who on first encountering Bilbo in the dark tunnels of the Misty Mountains welcomes the sound of a friendly voice and in playing the riddle game enjoys the memories of the world that he knew before he crawled into the darkness, the world of sunlight and fresh air. But this self is fearful and cringing and Gollum hates him, though, try as he might, he cannot get rid of him.

For that is the nature of our shadow. Like Gollum, we may despise the weakness that it represents or we may be one who carries a shadow self that clings to us despite our longing for goodness or light. What is certain is that we all have a shadow. That is why I chose Hieronymous Bosch’s anguished triptych, The Temptation of St Anthony a theme that the artist often returned to, as the picture that is at the head of last week’s reflection. The saint is unable to get free of the images of his temptation but learns a serenity in their company. Those aware of Buddhist art will call to mind images of the Buddha smiling, poised in perfect balance upon the turtle that represents the world, while surrounded by demons.

Of course there is no serenity for Gollum/Sméagol only endless and unresolved torment and there is little hope that he will ever find it. But there is that within him that has never submitted entirely to the Ring. That is why he is not entirely under the sway of the Dark Lord as are the Ringwraiths. It is why he has some freedom of action in his dealings with Frodo and Sam and is not bound to bring the Ring straight to Sauron when he has it within his grasp and it is in this lingering freedom that some hope for him lies.

Like Sam who longs to be rid of Gollum, the false and treacherous servant, we might long to return to some state of uncomplicated simplicity but we cannot. But we might come to see that our liberation can only come at the end with the aid of the very shadow that we hate, fear and despise. We might learn to ask what it is that the shadow has to teach us that we could not learn without its aid, what pathways we must travel by the shadow’s guidance in order to reach our goal. And as we yearn for our liberation we are thankful for the torment that is the expression of our freedom

Sméagol, Gollum and the Great Spiritual Battle

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The great spiritual battle inside us is a universal human experience. In his letter to the Romans Paul wrote that he did not understand his own actions: “For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate… I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.”

This is the experience of every person who wishes to do what is right but Gollum or Sméagol has not wanted to do what is right ever since the day he murdered Déagol in order to take the Ring from him. What possible struggle could still continue in the heart of someone who has not willed the good for over five hundred years? That Tolkien could even imagine the possibility of such a struggle in the heart that is so corrupted tells us what he believed about the capacity of the heart to go on fighting, about the greatness of the person. For our greatness lies in our capacity for freedom; either freedom for the good or for the wrong. Does Sméagol still have such capacity?

There is a scene in The Lord of the Rings that suggests that he has at least a remnant of the capacity for such a struggle even as Gandalf once hinted that he might. It takes place as the hobbits draw close to the Morannon the Black Gate that forms the only way into Mordor upon its northern border. They camp in a pit that is “cold and dead” even as the land about them is also. As Frodo sleeps Sam overhears a strange conversation in which Sméagol talks to himself, or rather to Gollum. It would appear that they know each other for there is a kind of familiarity in their speech with each other that suggests that they have been doing this for a very long time indeed. Gollum is angry and cruel, seeking to regain the Ring, seeking to make those who have hurt him pay for what they have done. Sméagol, on the other hand, is a cringing, whining creature. Do we have here something of a hint of the creature that lived before he took the Ring? Was Sméagol a weak creature who immediately desired the Ring seeing it as something that might help him overcome his own weakness? Was Gollum the persona that he developed in his own spiritual battle? For the one who wishes to do right the battle is always against that within themselves that does what is wrong. It is a battle that they lose again and again but they keep on fighting. For Gollum it is the weak and miserable Sméagol that must be overcome if he is to survive. For Gollum the Ring must be regained if he is to defeat his own weakness as well as those who are his enemies. For such a person the shadow is goodness understood as weakness.

But whoever wins out it is clear that both Gollum and Sméagol are small, unhappy creatures. The limit of Gollum’s ambition is to become strong, to become “Gollum the Great”. And his greatness will be expressed by eating fish “every day, three times a day, fresh from the sea.” Perhaps before we smile at this we might want to examine what we wish for when we are tempted to be great. In what manner would we express our greatness? In what does true greatness lie if it does not lie in our fantasies?

We have already spoken of greatness not as the desire for power over others as Gollum, Sauron or Saruman would have us believe but as the desire for goodness. We have seen that those who desire goodness will have to fight throughout their lives against that within themselves that will do wrong. It is the battle that expresses greatness. It is the battle that declares that we are free people. As Paul puts it later in his letter: “For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death.”

Let Him Come and Open His Grief

/ stephencwinter / 9 Comments

On the journey to Mordor food is more to Frodo, Sam and Gollum than taking in sufficient energy to accomplish another day’s march. It is a sign that connects them to or separates them from the ground of their being and which unites or divides them from one another. Lembas, the waybread of the Elves given to them when they left Lothlorien, is all that Frodo and Sam have to eat as they pass through the barren lands to the north of the border of Mordor, through the Dead Marshes and then the desolation that is the land before the Morannon, the Black Gate of Mordor. They may wish for some variety in their diet but they are profoundly nourished by this food of the Elves. Not only does it sustain them upon each weary day but it also has a virtue that gives them courage and hope.

But not so, Gollum. When Frodo offers him some of the scant supply that he has of Lembas we are told that “Gollum sniffed at the leaf and his face changed: a spasm of disgust came over it, and a hint of his old malice.” Gollum can smell the leaves of the Elven lands and the smell is to him a foul stench that speaks of enmity, judgement and of imprisonment. The very food that has such virtue to the hobbits is vicious to him. “He spat, and a fit of coughing took him.”

Lembas reminds us of ancient symbols, of the manna in the wilderness that sustained the children of Israel through their forty year sojourn in the wilderness before they entered the Promised Land, and of the bread of the Eucharist in the Christian tradition that is a waybread to those who look to it for sustenance. In the Book of Common Prayer of the Church of England the Minister seeks to remind his hearers of the nature of the food that is offered to them at the holy table.

“It is our duty to render most humble and hearty thanks to Almighty God, our heavenly Father, for that he hath given his Son our Saviour Jesus Christ, not only to die for us, but also to be our spiritual food and sustenance in that holy Sacrament.”

So it is that the one who comes to receive the Sacrament is not only nourished but also profoundly connected to the deepest ground of their being. The one who eats it is linked to not only to that ground but also to all others that share the bread and the wine. It is a waybread for the journey and unites those who are sustained by it more profoundly than do ties of gender, family, sexuality, class, nationality or race. The Minister’s warning to those who are about to receive this food tells us that we cannot allow anything to divide us from each other or else we take it unworthily and so do ourselves harm.

Frodo longs to heal the great divide that lies between himself and Gollum but he cannot. For this to happen Gollum would have to come and “Open his Grief” as the Prayer Book puts it. He would have to weep for the murder of Déagol, his closest friend from whom he took the Ring. He would have to give up the fiction of the birthday present withheld by Déagol that he has long cherished to justify his crime. He would have to acknowledge his utter wretchedness. He would have to long for healing, maybe even for death. He would have to give up the Ring and join Frodo and Sam in their wish to destroy it and all the evil that it has the power to do.

“I think this food would do you good, if you would try,” says Frodo. “But perhaps you can’t even try, not yet anyway.”