“The Eye: That Horrible Growing Sense of a Hostile Will That Strove With Great Power to Pierce All Shadows of Cloud, and Earth and Flesh and to See You.” The Wisdom and Power of Sauron and The Frailty of Frodo.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 822-826

When I chose to give my blog the title, Wisdom From The Lord of the Rings, it was not immediately clear to me that I would need to reflect on different and even competing kinds of wisdom and that not all of these would be life giving. St Paul understood this sense of competing wisdoms that I was slower to grasp when he wrote to the Corinthian church, “For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength”. In such a world of competing wisdoms one form might indeed appear to be foolishness to the other.

As Frodo begins to draw nearer to Mordor, having crossed the Dead Marshes with the aid of Gollum, he becomes increasingly aware of a malignant power that he understands as an Eye.

“With every step towards the gates of Mordor Frodo felt the Ring on its chain about his neck grow more burdensome. He was now beginning to feel it as an actual weight dragging him earthwards. But far more he was troubled by the Eye: so he called it to himself. It was more than the drag of the Ring that made him cower and stoop as he walked.”

Frodo called this sense of malignant power, “the Eye”, and with this we are given a sense of his inner life at this stage of his story. Of course, he first heard that name for the power from Galadriel when he offered the Ring to her in Lothlórien. And both of them shared the same experience; that of striving against a power that wanted to break into their minds and to see them.

This desire to “see” is far more than a mere exercise in surveillance. It is not Frodo and Galadriel’s shopping habits that Sauron wishes to see, or their political opinions. Sauron wants to have their innermost essence, their very reality, laid bare before him. “He gropes ever to see me and my thought. But still the door is closed!”

That word, gropes, denotes the lust that lies at the heart of Sauron’s wisdom and a pornographic stripping away of every barrier that lies between his gaze and the object of his desire. Frodo feels this too. “The Eye: that horrible growing sense of a horrible will that strove with great power to pierce all shadows of cloud, and earth and flesh, and to see you: to pin you under its deadly gaze, naked, immovable. So thin, so frail and thin, the walls were become that still warded it off.”

Sauron wants to “see” and to control. It is this desire that drove his ambition to create the Ring during the Second Age. The Ring is a technology of control. The ability to control not only the actions of others but their very wills and first of all it seeks to know that will. Even from an acquaintance with the Ring that has been very brief Frodo begins to understand this. He shows this understanding to Galadriel when he says to her: “I am permitted to wear the One Ring: why cannot I see all the others and know the thoughts of those that wear them?” The very asking of the question displays within Frodo a desire to see as Sauron desires it.

Galadriel understands this too and understands that with this desire must come the power to dominate others and it is this power that Sauron has trained through many ages and it is this that makes him different from his fellow Maia, Gandalf. Sauron and Gandalf belong to the same order of heavenly being created by Ilúvatar and with the same essential powers but Sauron has dedicated his power towards one purpose and that is domination.

And this brings us back to that quotation from St Paul with which I began this reflection. Paul distinguishes human and divine wisdom and power. For us wisdom tends to be related to power, to our desire to achieve mastery over all things, to eliminate risk and uncertainty as far as is possible, essentially to make of the cosmos a machine that is entirely predictable and entirely under our control. I say our but as Gandalf pointed out to Saruman who shares this desire, ultimately only one will can achieve this power and until that moment comes we all live in a reality which is an endless struggle to be that totally knowing,dominating and controlling will. Gandalf, and I would add, St Paul as well, understand a very different kind of wisdom that does not want to dominate in this sense but wishes to see in order to delight in the one that is seen. And in order to achieve this kind of seeing there has first to be a casting away of the desire and the means to achieve domination and this is what Frodo is doing. He is trying to cast away the Ring in such a way that no-one will ever be able to use it again.

The Divine Foolishness that is wiser than human wisdom.

“There Are Dead Things, Dead Faces in The Water.” Frodo and Sam Cross The Dead Marshes.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 817-822

I once crossed a bog a little like the one that Tolkien describes here. It is not one of my favourite memories of walks that I have taken although I have a certain satisfaction about the way in which I was able to navigate it. I had a long staff with me, a gift from my wife and one that we used to call my Gandalf staff. I used it to reach out to the next tussock ahead of me, to check its firmness, and then sometimes if necessary to use it to swing myself across the pools to firm ground.

My bog was nothing like the size of the Dead Marshes that Frodo and Sam, guided by Gollum, had to cross, but I was very glad when I stood on firm ground once more and could walk freely and easily. The bog that Tolkien describes was based upon his memory of the Battle of the Somme in which water filled the shell holes created by incessant artillery barrages and, in which, fallen soldiers often lay some time before their bodies were recovered.

Soldiers fish in pools at the Western Front in the 1914-18 war that are crossed by bridges made of wooden duckboards.

In his vision of the Dead Marshes Tolkien mythologises this memory. Here it is the Battle of Dagorlad that is recalled, that was fought in the last Great Alliance at the end of the Second Age between the Elves of Gil-galad and the Men of Elendil against the forces of Mordor. Gollum describes it as “a great battle”, fought “before the Precious came”. “Tall Men with long swords, and terrible Elves, and Orcses shrieking. They fought on the plain for days and months at the Black Gates. But the marshes have grown since then, swallowed up the graves; always creeping, creeping.”

When Frodo and Sam look down into the pools Sam reacts with horror, looking down at rotting faces illuminated by ghostly candles. Frodo, on the other hand, looks down with a melancholy fascination. Death is beginning to take hold of his imagination as he carries the Ring ever closer to the place of its making. Sam has to move him gently away, both from the deep pools in which he might drown and also from the vision of the dead that holds such a strange fascination for him.

The ghostly candles must surely have come out of Tolkien’s Catholic imagination and therefore originally must have been signs of hope. Candles are lit in memory of the dead at the feast of All Souls at the beginning of November and here they represent light that continues both in the hearts of those who mourn the lost and also in the presence of God. The darkness of death does not have the last word. Light continues to shine. But here in the Dead Marshes everything is corrupted, even light itself. The sun barely breaks through the vapours that rise from the fen. Everything seems to exist in a kind of half-light.

And yet it is this ghostly passage that is Frodo and Sam’s safest way. The firm roads that lie to the east of the marshes are continually patrolled by the forces of Mordor and to the west lies the Anduin that would take them away from their goal to Minas Tirith. Ever, for the members of the Fellowship, it is the dark road that is the best. Gandalf’s fall in Moria takes him through death itself before leading him to return as Gandalf the White. Merry and Pippin’s dark journey as captives of the orcs leads them to Fangorn and to Treebeard. And the whole of the journey of Frodo and Sam from the Emyn Muil onwards is one long dark journey with a brief interlude in Ithilien that leads eventually to the destruction of the Ring and the fall of Sauron. In none of these cases can we say that those who pass through them embrace the experience but they all have to give themselves up to them and each one of them find their journey to be a passage from darkness into light. Perhaps the ghostly candles remain a sign of hope after all.

Candles lit at All Souls

“I Ask You, Sam, Are We Ever Likely to Need Bread Again?” As They Begin The Passage of The Marshes Frodo Thinks of What Lies Ahead.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 809-816

On the day that Frodo and Sam begin the passage of the Dead Marshes guided by a creature that neither of them ever hoped to meet Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli meet Gandalf in the Forest of Fangorn while Merry and Pippin wait for Entmoot to end. Events have overtaken each member of the Fellowship that none of them ever planned for or anticipated and yet plans still have to be made. The three hunters will go with Gandalf to Edoras and then onto war with Saruman while Merry and Pippin will go with the Ents to the destruction of Isengard and Frodo and Sam ponder the journey to Mordor and Mount Doom that still lies ahead of them.

Sam, as always, is the one to think about practical issues. The most pressing one in his mind is the problem of food. All that is left to them is lembas and there is nothing for Gollum. Sam assumes that Frodo has not thought about this but Frodo offers to share a piece of lembas with Gollum, an offer that is greeted with disgust. Gollum will have nothing to do with Elves or anything associated with them.

Eventually Gollum solves his own problem. He is a forager, even a scavenger, and he is used to surviving on almost nothing. He will do as he has done for a very long time. He will live off the land even though there will be times when the land will have little to offer him, while longing, all the time, for fish. Apart from his all consuming desire for the Ring Gollum wants for almost nothing. When, at a later point, Sam overhears an inner debate between Gollum and Sméagol, Stinker and Slinker as he calls these two parts of this divided creature, he hears Gollum declare that if he could regain the Ring he would use it to “eat fish every day, three times a day, fresh from the sea”. That seems to be the limit of his ambition.

At this moment in their lives Frodo and Sam seem to want for little more. Life has been stripped down to its barest necessities. It is to keep on going from one day to the next, somehow to get to Mount Doom and, then?

Sam is pondering the question of finding enough food to finish the job. He also hopes that somehow there will be a future that lies beyond that. Sam’s heart lies in the Shire and he wants a “there and back again” story. Frodo does not share his hopes.

“If the One goes into the Fire, and we are at hand? I ask you, Sam, are we ever likely to need bread again? If we can nurse our limbs to bring us to Mount Doom, that is all we can do. More than I can, I begin to feel.”

This will always be a dividing point between Frodo and Sam. Sam will always hope and he will always worry. Rosie Cotton lies behind in the Shire and Sam means to marry her if she will have him. And he will worry about what he saw in Galadriel’s Mirror, about his father’s welfare and the digging up of Bagshot Row. Frodo, on the other hand has become a little more like Gollum but wants even less than he. He does not desire the Ring or anything that the Ring could give him. He only feels its burden and longs to be free of it, while the Ring slowly but inexorably takes possession of his mind until the time will come when the Ring will be all that he can see or perceive. If he can find food then it will be to get him to Orodruin. He will take little pleasure in it.

Sam is deeply moved by what he sees as Frodo’s nobility of character, his self-sacrifice for the great cause but I am glad that Sam has smaller ambitions. As he lay dying after the Battle of the Five Armies Thorin Oakenshield said to Bilbo, “If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold it would be a merrier world”. Sam has the same heart as Bilbo. He too values food and cheer and song and a happy domestic life and he wants this for all his fellows and especially for Frodo. He will keep on trying to find a way home after doing the job.

“All You Wish is to See It and Touch It, If You Can, Though You Know It Would Drive You Mad.” Gollum Swears To Serve The Master of The Ring.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 803-809

What are Frodo and Sam to do with Gollum? They know that he will not stop following them and that he means to do them harm. Frodo, in particular, knows that it is the Ring that draws him, knows it in a way that Sam cannot possibly know, because he knows that the Ring has the same power over him and that this power grows each and every day.

“One Ring to rule them all and in the Darkness bind them.”

Sam suspects that Gollum is in league with the Enemy in some way, that he has been given a job to do, to find the Ring and to bring it to Barad-dûr. Sam believes that at some point he will betray them so should they kill him? Frodo knows that they might kill Gollum in self-defence, if Gollum attacked them, but not in cold blood, in an execution, and reluctantly Sam agrees.

Eventually, after Gollum attempts to escape, they tie the elven rope around his ankle, but this causes Gollum to scream in pain. It is the connection with Elves that Gollum cannot bear, the connection with light. At last Frodo says that he will not take the rope from Gollum’s ankle unless Gollum makes a promise that can be trusted.

It is the word, on, that Frodo immediately understands.

“No! not on it,”said Frodo, looking down on him with stern pity. “All you wish is to see if and touch it, if you can, though you know it would drive you mad. Not om it. Swear by it, if you will. For you know where it is. Yes, you know, Sméagol. It is before you.”

At this moment Sam begins to see something in Frodo that he has not seen before. Until this time Sam has served Frodo because he loves him. He loves Frodo’s gentleness but he does not think that Frodo is especially strong or tough. Now, to his surprise, he sees Frodo speak with an authority that he did not know that Frodo possesses, the kind of authority that requires obedience. And he sees Frodo almost grow in stature before him while Gollum shrinks. Gollum senses this too.

“We promises, yes I promise!” said Gollum. “I will serve the master of the Precious.”

This is a critical moment in the story. Until now Gollum has been the hunter and Frodo and Sam have been fugitives in the wild always trying to throw their pursuer off their scent, always trying to evade his grasp, but now Frodo, in particular, has become the master. Gollum is the prisoner and even, it would appear, a willing one. Frodo even tells him that they are going to Mordor and although Gollum is horrified he still promises to help them get there.

And it is a critical moment in another way. Until now Frodo and Sam have been lost. They know where they are trying to get to but they have had no idea how to get there. Now they have a guide. This alone is providential; an unexpected, even unwelcome, but a very necessary gift. Gollum will guide them across the Dead Marshes, a way that orcs fear to tread, a way that will bring them close to the borders of Mordor.

And the thing that binds them all together, at least for a brief time, is the very worst object in the world, the Ring of Power. The Ring gives Frodo an authority that he would not otherwise possess, an authority that he is beginning to understand and to use, and the Ring has a power over Gollum that he cannot ignore. For a time, at least, until he works out a way to break his promise, Gollum will obey that power and he will serve Frodo. And both Frodo and Gollum will resist Sauron with all the strength that they possess.

“We won’t!” Gollum cries into the darkness at one point. “Not for you.” Not for Sauron. Through all the years of torture and intimidation Sauron was never able to break Gollum’s will. It is the Ring, and not Sauron, that has power over Gollum and it is this tiny space of freedom that will make all the difference. Gollum will be a faithful guide and a capable one and Frodo knows this. Of course, all the time, Gollum will be thinking of ways in which he will be able to break Frodo’s trust but there is one way that Gollum will never think of, and that is to betray Frodo, and the Ring, to Sauron. In this way Gollum and Frodo have forged the strongest alliance possible. And so the words that Gandalf spoke to Frodo in Bag End are already beginning to prove true.

“My heart tells me that he has some part to play yet, for good or ill, before the end; and when that time comes, the pity of Bilbo may rule the fate of many- yours not least.”

“I Will Not Touch the Creature. For Now That I See Him, I Do Pity Him.” It Is Pity That Will Overthrow The Dark Lord.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 798-803

Think of how many stories that you know in which the hero overcomes the evil against which he stands by means of the way he uses what resources at his disposal, especially the means of violence, to defeat his foes. What matters in all these stories is power and the use of power. That is what makes the Ring so tempting. It is the Ring of Power. The one who possesses it and who has the capacity to use it would gain a power over others that nothing else could give.

And then think of the good that you could do if you had the power to do it. Perhaps you could use your power to protect the innocent and to overcome those who seek to do wrong. This desire, of course, is what lay behind the code of chivalry. Men were trained in the use of arms, the means of power, to the highest degree, but they were also trained spiritually. They were to use their power in the service of the good, the true and the beautiful. They were to defend women and children against harm. They were never to use their power for mere self interest but always for a higher good.

So power in itself is not an evil. If Frodo had not had Sting, the Elven blade that Bilbo had taken from the trolls’ cave on his adventures with the dwarves, then Gollum would have probably killed Sam and then Frodo too. Gollum has survived as long as he has in part because of his cunning but also because he is always prepared to kill and he has killed many times. Neither Frodo or Sam are killers even though they have been in battle. Gollum is.

But there is a fundamental difference between using a sword or any means of violence in desperate need and using them in cold blood. When Isildur took the Ring from Sauron it was in such need. We know little of his history after he took the Ring apart from his unwillingness to destroy it but there is little to suggest that he had become a tyrant. At least not yet. Gollum, on the other hand, gained the Ring by murdering his best friend.

And, crucially, when Bilbo took the Ring from Gollum, he had the opportunity at one point to kill him. Cloaked by the invisibility that the Ring was able to give him he stood behind Gollum who himself was standing between him and freedom. Surely he would have been justified in using Sting to gain his freedom. But he could not kill in cold blood and so he did the riskier thing. He leaped over his crouching enemy and so escaped from the Misty Mountains.

But it was not Bilbo’s need that Frodo was thinking about when he said to Gandalf:”What a pity Bilbo did not stab the vile creature, when he had the chance.” At that moment Frodo was simply afraid of Gollum and disgusted by him. He felt that it would be justifiable, even good, to take Gollum’s life. But Gandalf did not agree.

“Pity? It was Pity that stayed his hand. Pity, and Mercy; not to strike without need.”

And now that Frodo sees Gollum for himself, the half-starved miserable creature in the wild, driven by a hunger over which he has no control, he pities him. Perhaps too, he feels enough of the corrupting power of the Ring himself to understand in a way that no-one else can, apart perhaps from Bilbo, what it means to possess this evil thing. Frodo may be being slowly worn down by the thing that he carries but the goodness with which he has been trained still has power over evil.

And so in Pity Frodo stays his hand. And this makes all the difference. Of course it makes an immediate difference. Frodo and Sam are lost in the wild and without Gollum as a guide they would have starved. And it also makes a crucial difference to the eventual outcome of the story. It is only through Gollum that the Ring eventually goes to the Fire and its destruction; only through Gollum that Sauron is overthrown. And it also makes a crucial difference to Frodo himself. Could he have found healing for all his hurts in the Undying Land if he had murder on his conscience? Perhaps he could but it would have been so much harder.

So it is indeed Pity that indeed “rules the fates of many”, as Gandalf put it. It is a quality in which Gandalf has chosen to be trained and so, crucially, he is different from Saruman. And it is a quality in which he schools three of the vitally important characters in The Lord of the Rings, Aragorn, Faramir and Frodo. Although power plays its part in the final overthrow of Sauron it is Pity and Mercy that make the essential difference. Indeed we could say that it is because Frodo and Sam do not kill Gollum at this moment that Sauron is overthrown.

“I Think The Rope Came by Itself- When I Called.” The Rope From Lórien Makes Us Think of Unexpected Lights in Dark Places.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 789-798

There comes a point in Frodo and Sam’s efforts to descend the steep eastern slopes of the Emyn Muil when they scramble down a gully to a point where Frodo thinks they might be able to escape the hills altogether. He is just making his way down to a ledge some way below when a cry sounds in the sky above them. It is a Nazgûl and so terrible is the sound out in the wild that Frodo puts his hands to his ears and finds himself sliding down the face of the hills to another ledge below the one that he had originally intended to reach.

For a moment Frodo is blinded and terribly shaken and Sam does not know how he will reach him. He begins to brave the descent that Frodo has just made rather precipitously when Frodo stops him.

“Wait! You can’t do anything without a rope.”

And suddenly Sam remembers the coil of rope that he has carried all the way from Lothlórien; a gift of the Elves of that land.

“Never travel far without a rope!” said the Elf who had given it to Sam. “And one that is long and strong and light. Such as these. They may be a help in many needs”

The rope that Sam has carried in his pack is about 30 ells in length or about 110 feet, quite long enough to get them both down to the ground below. Although the rope seems to be so slender that it could not possibly bear their weight it turns out to be very strong. It also turns out to have other qualities. When Sam lowers it to enable Frodo to scramble back up to the point at which he fell the rope shimmers in the dark in such a way as to dispel his temporary blindness. And the rope has a further quality. When Frodo and Sam finally reach the bottom of their descent and realise that they cannot bring the rope with them Sam mournfully gives it a farewell tug. To his surprise and chagrin it falls into his hands. Frodo breaks into mocking laughter remarking on the quality of Sam’s knot.

“I may not be much good at climbing, Mr. Frodo,” he said in injured tones, “but I do know about rope and about knots. It’s in the family, as you might say.”

They check the rope to see if it had frayed but found it completely whole. Sam has complete faith both in the Elven rope and also in his own skill with knots and at the last he declares, “Have it your own way, Mr. Frodo… but I think the rope came of itself- when I called.”

And Sam is right. That is exactly what happened. And with this Sam is beginning to learn a relationship to things that is a form of wisdom, a wisdom that the Elves of Lothlórien have developed over many years. To the Elves all things that we tend to treat as mere tools, mere objects, have a kind of consciousness. We see this with lembas, the waybread that at this point in the story is the only food that Frodo and Sam have. We remember that when Merry and Pippin escaped from the orcs they noted that lembas “does put heart into you. A more wholesome sort of feeling, too, than the heat of that orc draught.” And later in the story we will see what the Phial of Galadriel can do in the darkest place.

At first Sam is inclined to call this quality a kind of magic, Elven magic. But he is learning that he also has the ability to evoke a kind of aliveness in things just as the Elves do and just as great craftsmen and women do. This evocation is a deep form of attentiveness. The patience to wait until the inner life of a thing reveals itself. Eventually Sam will use this attentiveness through Galadriel’s gift to him, the little box of dust that he will use to heal the Shire after Saruman’s scouring of it. Through that dust and Sam’s particular use of it the babies born in the year after will be especially beautiful and the beer especially good.

All of these things are expressions of the way in which dark places can be transformed. Ordinary things like rope, food and dust are found to have a real presence but we must pay them sufficient attention in order to find that presence and to allow it to transform our lives.

“It is My Doom, I Think, To Go To That Shadow Yonder, So That a Way Will Be Found.” Frodo Thinks About Providence and His Journey.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 787-789

It has been three days since the Fellowship was broken at Parth Galen and Frodo and Sam have been wandering in the Emyn Muil, always looking for a way to bring them down to the marshes below but always finding that the eastern slopes are too steep to do this with any kind of safety. Westwards on this same day Merry and Pippin have just met with Treebeard in Fangorn, Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli follow them and in two days will meet with Gandalf who has made his way directly from Lothlórien to Fangorn.

Sam fears that they are lost, that they have come the wrong way. Should they make their way back and try another? Frodo does not think it possible to retrace their steps. They have hardly taken a straightforward path through the hills that would make this an easy choice and there are orcs patrolling the eastern banks of the Anduin. No, somehow there needs to be a way forward.

Frodo thinks about his doom. We have come to think of this word in dark terms. I remember a much loved sitcom from my youth set in the days of the Second World War in England when a German invasion was expected at any moment. There was a Scottish character who would respond to any difficulty with the words, “We’re all doomed,” in other words, we’re all finished. But this is not what Frodo means. He uses the word in an older sense in which doom meant judgement. People would speak of doomsday as meaning the day of judgement, the day on which their eternal destiny would be decided.

Private Fraser expresses his personal philosophy of life, shaped by Scottish Calvinism.

But there was another meaning that takes us back in the story to Lothlórien and the words that Galadriel spoke to the company as they prepared to continue their journey onward and wondered which way they should take.

“Do not trouble your hearts overmuch with thought of the road tonight. Maybe the paths that each of you shall tread are already laid before your feet, though you do not see them.”

And none of the Fellowship could see, at that moment, the paths that they were to follow in the days that followed their departure from Lothlórien. Only Boromir among them was absolutely certain which way he should go. He would go to Minas Tirith and he thought that the Fellowship should go with him. But Boromir’s journey ends when the Fellowship is broken. Aragorn is torn between his desire to go with Boromir to Minas Tirith, to the land over which he will become king, but feels that he cannot abandon Frodo. On the day of the breaking of the Fellowship he will make another choice completely and one that he never anticipated; he will follow Merry and Pippin across the plains of Rohan with Legolas and Gimli and while failing to find them will find Gandalf once more.

And Frodo and Sam are stuck in the barren Emyn Muil with seemingly no way forward.

It is a feature of our lives that we are aware for the most part only of the circumstances in which we find ourselves. Frodo and Sam have no awareness of the great events that are unfolding westwards that will lead to the fall of Isengard. They only know that at this moment they cannot find a path. But Frodo has a sense that he is a part of a bigger story, one that is carrying him along, even against his own will. This sense is called a belief in Providence. Gandalf told him that he was meant to have the Ring. Galadriel told him that his path was already laid before his feet. And even though at this point he has no idea how he will find that path he believes that it will be found. And in that faith he will keep on going. He will find a way to Mordor and his doom.

“Well, Master, We’re in a Fix and No Mistake.” Some Thoughts on Hobbits and Heroes.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) p. 787

I spent a pleasant evening with a friend in a pub recently (Thanks, Ben!) talking about The Lord of the Rings and we got to thinking about heroes and, more specifically, the kind of heroes that Tolkien’s hobbits are. We compared them to superheroes in, say, a Marvel comic or film. Now I was an avid reader of those comics as a boy and I am happy to say this with pride now with C.S Lewis’s thought in mind that he would rather see a boy reading a comic with pleasure than a classic novel because he thought he had to. I also fell in love with Narnia so I hope that would have pleased him too. I was fascinated by the characters of the heroes and their inner struggles just as much as their triumphs over evil. I was just starting to become aware of my own struggles and they gave me some comfort and the thought that I might be a hero too.

But we agreed that Tolkien created a different kind of hero in Frodo and Sam. In fact, as Tom Shippey has shown, he created the kind of hero that could only have been created in a 20th century story, the kind that would have experienced industrial warfare, as Tolkien and Lewis did on the Western Front of the First World War of 1914-18. And while in a Marvel story the hero comes to save the day while the rest of us run for cover or stand helplessly with our hands raised over our heads as the forces of evil destroy our city around us, Tolkien’s hobbits are more like us.

Yesterday I listened, deeply moved, to a news report that the French military attaché to the United Kingdom unexpectedly arrived at the hundredth birthday celebration of a veteran of the Normandy landings of June 1944 and presented him with France’s highest honour, the Legion d’honneur. I was moved by this because my father took part in those landings and, had he lived, would recently have celebrated his own hundredth birthday. I felt that my Dad was being honoured too. The old gentleman was interviewed on the radio and, speaking with admirable clarity, said that he did not feel that he deserved the award because, as he put it, “I was just there”. I think my father would have said the same thing. In fact the only story that he ever told us of the experience was that as he was going ashore on the Normandy beaches in his American built landing craft he noted that it had an ice-cream maker fitted and wondered what it was doing there. If any of my American readers know the answer please let me know in the comments below.

But that “I was just there” remark typifies Tom Shippey’s argument about the “heroes” of 20th century warfare. Whereas Lancelot, riding to rescue Guinevere from her captors, is a hero of romance, the veterans of the Normandy landings of 1944 were “just there”, doing their duty and trying to stay alive.

Tolkien gives us both kind of heroes in his story though he hardly ever used the word. In Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli, following the orcs of Isengard across the plains of Rohan in the hope of freeing Merry and Pippin from their captivity we have the kind of hero that Sir Thomas Malory would have recognised in his Morte D’Arthur. In Frodo and Sam trying to find a way down from the Emyn Muil to the livid marshes below we have something quite different. They are more like the men going ashore on the Normandy beaches in 1944. They just keep going. Or, at least, they try to.

But Frodo and Sam give a dignity to every person who has ever just kept on going, trying their best to do whatever good they can in their lives. I have had conversations with my daughters about this recently as they have looked in horror at evils in the world and have wondered what can be done. I have thought about it in reference to my own life as I have asked myself the question, “What use have I been?” And like Frodo and Sam, I won’t pretend that my story has been like Aragorn’s or Lancelot’s although there was a time when I wanted to be like that, but, whether I ever write it down or not, I will try to create my own Red Book in my head of what I have tried to do, of how I have tried to answer Gandalf’s principle that all any of us can do is “to decide what to do with the time that is given us”.

And not to give up.

“To…Perceive The Unimaginable Hand and Mind of Fëanor at Their Work.” What Would Gandalf Want to See in The Palantír of Orthanc?

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 778-784

Gandalf and Pippin are sitting upon Shadowfax, flying across the plains of Rohan towards Edoras and then onwards to Minas Tirith and to war. A Nazgûl has just flown over them, a messenger from Barad-dûr to Isengard. Sauron wants to know why Saruman has not come to the Orthanc-stone. Soon a second messenger will be sent to bring Pippin back for further questioning but there will be no captive to send because Pippin is not in Orthanc. Sauron will want to know why he has seen a hobbit in the palantír and yet nothing is given to the Nazgûl. He will suspect treachery.

As they ride Gandalf thinks about the palantír and whether he might have wrested control of the stone from Sauron. He has already told Aragorn and Théoden that he is relieved that it was Pippin and not himself who first looked into it, that he has not been revealed to the Dark Lord, that there is still a brief window of doubt in Sauron’s mind that they might yet exploit, but he still wonders what he might have seen had he still had the palantír.

“Even now my heart desires to test my will upon it, to see if I could not wrench it from him and turn it where I would- to look across the wide seas of water and of time to Tirion the Fair, and perceive the unimaginable hand and mind of Fëanor at their work, while both the White Tree and Golden were in flower.”

When The Lord of the Rings was first published in 1954 only a handful of people knew anything about Fëanor or the two trees. In his famous review of The Hobbit C.S Lewis revealed that every character that readers meet in Wilderland spring from “deep sources in our blood and tradition” but he was one of the few who knew what they were. It was not until after Tolkien died in 1973 that The Silmarillion was published thanks to the work of his son, Christopher. That changed the way that everyone read The Lord of the Rings. At last we knew the back story.

In The Silmarillion Fëanor is a figure who is both incredibly gifted and yet deeply flawed. When Morgoth and Ungoliant, the monstrous spider creature and mother of Shelob, destroy the two trees, the source of light in Aman, the Valar turn to Fëanor who has caught the light within the Silmarils that he made. They ask for his help asking him to give up the Silmarils so that they might become the source of light in the uttermost west. Fëanor refuses to give them up but Morgoth steals them. Against the will of the Valar Fëanor leads the Noldor to Middle-earth to regain the Silmarils but he is slain in battle against Morgoth.

Gandalf’s desires to see Fëanor at work, to see the greatest maker in the whole history of Arda. Compared to Fëanor Sauron is a craftsman of little skill. Gandalf tells Pippin that Sauron could never have made the palantíri. He could only use them. Fëanor’s hand and mind are “unimaginable”. In him we see the ability of the Elves, the first born of the earth, to co-create with God, and we see Fëanor as the greatest of them. The early Fathers of the Church used to speak of a proper pride in our work. They spoke of parrhesia, of being able to speak freely to God, to look God in the eye and to say, “I have done this”. This, the Fathers taught, was lost in the Fall, as Humankind became competitors with God and not co-creators, but it is restored through the Incarnation. Fëanor’s pride, his desire to keep his own work as a private possession, brought him into competition with the Valar and with Ilúvatar himself. He was corrupted by Morgoth, coming to view the Valar with suspicion, believing that they wanted to use the things he had made for their own narrow self interest. Perhaps his death was a mercy. Had he defeated Morgoth might he have become a Dark Lord in his place?

“This Assuredly is The Stone of Orthanc From The Treasury of Elendil.” Some Thoughts About Palantíri and Other Communication Devices.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 775-784

We live in a world now in which there are so many communication devices that the palantír into which Pippin looked and in which he saw the Dark Lord himself might not seem so remarkable. And yet it is not so long ago when much of the world was not connected as it is now and the speed at which the world has changed has been so rapid that we have hardly had the time to think about all that has happened to us.

As a young man I taught in a school in Zambia, Central Africa, for six years in which there was only one phone and that was located in the headmaster’s house. I used that phone on only one occasion throughout the entire time that I was there. I now look back on that time as being a time of peace in which in order to communicate with someone I either had to go to see them or to write a letter.

But I also remember a conversation with a young Somali woman some years later who was in the UK for development studies. She spoke of her dream for her people and as I listened I became aware that this was an occasion for treading softly. She spoke of how she imagined every group of wandering herdsmen among her people possessing a communication device and how, as they sat around their campfires at night they could speak to each other, telling of where there was good pasture for their animals or of dangers to avoid. As she spoke my heart was carried out to the beauty of the African night and the soft beauty of African languages that I had heard there. Words spoken quietly in the still of the night under glittering starlight and the air feels like silk upon your face.

We can see why Elendil would have wanted the capacity to communicate in this way across his kingdoms in Middle-earth although how these seeing stones, created by Fëanor himself in the depths of time, came to be in his possession and not in the hands of the kings of Númenor I cannot tell. There were three stones in Gondor and three in Arnor and one in Orthanc, a fortress that in the early years of the two kingdoms linked them both. In an age in which a message sent from Osgiliath in Gondor to Annúminas in Arnor would have taken weeks even upon upon the swiftest horses such devices would have been of great value.

But in the years of the decline of Arnor all its stones were lost. One remained in Minas Tirith in Gondor although at this point in the story as Gandalf rides there with Pippin upon Shadowfax we do not know about its existence. Gandalf tells Pippin that the stone that Sauron possesses came from Minas Ithil, the tower of the moon, that is now the city of the Lord of the Nazgûl, Minas Morgul, and an evil place. And there was still the stone of Orthanc that is now in the possession of Aragon, Elendil’s heir, and to whom it rightfully belongs.

There is a mystery about the stones that Fëanor made so long ago that is conveyed in the stars that shone when Pippin first looked into it and the swirling images that cleared when at the last the Dark Lord came himself. And we are left with two questions. Is a palantír simply a communication device such as the ones that we all carry as a matter of course, or are our devices more mysterious than we usually think? Perhaps the answer is yes to both questions. Yes, perhaps the Stone of Orthanc is nothing more than the devices that we carry about with us all the time, and yes, our devices have something more of a palantír about them than we usually recognise.

It is easy for us to see in the palantíri of The Lord of the Rings a spiritual power at work, a battle between the wills of those who look into them, a battle in which it is wise not to regard one’s own power too highly, as Saruman did. Gandalf is relieved that he was saved from a battle of wills with Sauron by Pippin’s foolish act. But we have become so used to the devices that we carry that we are not aware of their spiritual nature and so, like Saruman, we look into them, confident in our own ability to deal with all that we see there, unaware that other wills are at work as well as our own. Unaware, perhaps, until we are trapped by them and we are enslaved to the will of others, whose power is so much greater than ours.