Cheerfulness

“Well, Sméagol, The Third Turn May Turn the Best. I Will Come With You.” Frodo Decides to Put His Faith in Gollum.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 833-846

The journey to Mordor and to Mount Doom was always an impossible task. While there were other things to think about and problems to solve it was possible to avoid confronting that reality. There was the descent of the Emyn Muil, the passage of the Marshes and the question of what to do about Gollum. All this gave Frodo and Sam something to think about other than the really big thing. But now, as they see the impossibility of entering Mordor through the Black Gate without death or capture the reality hits home.

What would Gandalf have done if he had been with them? Which way would he have gone? Frodo wonders if Gandalf had ever been this way. He knew that Gandalf had once entered the fortress of Dol Guldur in Mirkwood, Sauron’s lesser stronghold, but he doubted if Gandalf had ever been to Mordor. Indeed no-one had ever entered Mordor and lived to tell the tale. No-one except Gollum, and he had been freed in order to search for the Ring.

So it is at this terrible moment just some few yards from the Morranon that the impossibility of the task and his utter inadequacy to undertake it becomes clear to Frodo. Gollum has spoken of another way but for some time they all sit in the hollow where they are hiding in silence.

Elrond had said to Frodo that the task was appointed for him and that Frodo could not find a way then no-one could. As Frodo heard these words that “no-one” probably held little meaning for him and when Elrond had gone on to speak of Hador and Húrin and Túrin and even Beren himself, it probably meant very little to him, except as a cause of some embarrassment, but now Frodo understands what Elrond meant. The task really is for him alone, not for Gandalf or Aragorn or any other of the great, and the task is impossible.

Something has to break into the sheer immensity of this realisation or the story might have ended here. In silence. But something does. It always does. Life goes on around even the most significant events and does not even notice them. First they become aware that, far off, Nazgûl are in the air, and this terrifies them; then they hear more forces arrive from Harad to swell the growing army within Mordor.

Gollum describes what he can see to Frodo and Sam and this leads Sam to think of oliphaunts and he recites a verse that he remembers from his childhood, standing with his hands behind his back just as he would have done as a small child. And just as happened when Sam had recited the tale of the trolls on the journey to Rivendell as the Morgul-blade drew Frodo deeper and deeper into darkness so too now Sam’s simple cheerfulness breaks the spell and Frodo laughs.

It is laughter that enables Frodo to make a choice. Impossibility becomes possibility once again. I do not mean that suddenly Frodo believes that he can achieve his mission, that, as we might now say, he believes in himself again. Frodo never entertained that particular illusion that has become so important in our own time. We may have seen Boromir believing in himself but Frodo just gets on with the job that has been given to him.

But faith does play a vital part in what Frodo decides to do. He decides to trust Gollum. This is not mere naivety on his part. He is well aware of Gollum’s malice and untrustworthiness. But in the face of impossibility, at the moment when this has moved from some abstract form of which he has always been aware to a reality that almost crushed him when he realised it, Gollum offers a way forward.

Gollum’s way is a terrible one and full of treachery. Gandalf would have warned Frodo against it. But Frodo is now aware that there may not be any way into Mordor and that, as Sam grimly puts it, they might as well walk up to the Black Gate and save themselves “a long tramp”. And it is in the light of this realisation that he becomes free to choose. He chooses to go with Gollum and he laughs. The whole thing is ridiculous, impossible, anyway. The whole thing is a joke. And this realisation reawakens hope in Frodo’s heart. At least hope to take the next step.

And then the step after that.

“He’s as Wise as Any, But He’s Soft Hearted, That’s What He Is.” Sam Thinks About Frodo Before The Black Gate of Mordor.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 830-842

The opening of the chapter that Tolkien entitled, The Black Gate is Closed, opens with the words “Before the next day dawned their journey to Mordor was over”. Readers will know as they read these words that much of the book lies still before them but to Frodo, and even to Sam, as they gaze upon the Black Gate in all its impregnable strength the journey has come to an end.

And it is a bad end. It is clear to them both that there is no way into Mordor here and that what lies ahead of them is death or capture. Surely here Tolkien is thinking about the dull quiet that would fall in the hearts of men just before they went “over the top” of their own trenches into the “no man’s land” that lay between them and the enemy trenches. Even the distance between them and the Gate, Tolkien describes it as being “but a furlong from their hiding place”, or 220 yards, or two hundred metres, just the kind of distance that it often was between the two sets of trenches on the Western Front. Such a distance would take only a couple of minutes to walk briskly and yet the possibility of even reaching the enemy trenches without being either killed or wounded was small. To each man at such a moment there would be the sense of journey’s end. This at least is how Sam feels and it is through Sam’s eyes that we now see the story as it unfolds.

But now Gollum speaks, pleading with the hobbits not to go this way, not to take the Ring to Him, but to go back home, perhaps even “to give it back to little Sméagol”.

Frodo is absolutely firm that he must do as he has promised and so must go to Mordor and as Sam looks at the man that he both loves and calls, master, all hope dies in his cheerful heart. Long ago, or so it now feels, Tom Bombadil told the hobbits to keep up their “merry hearts”, and Sam has done so, both for him and for Frodo, but now the journey is ended.

But not for Gollum. He speaks of “another way” and pleads with Frodo to listen to him. We might think that in the face of the impossibility that this way, the short walk to the Black Gate, is going to lead to anything but death or capture, that Frodo and Sam would grasp any other possibility with greedy hands but they are so firm in their resolve, and for Sam at least, so untrusting of their guide, that they cannot believe that “another way” can possibly exist.

Sam, at least, does not trust anything that comes from Gollum’s mouth, for Gollum is Sam’s shadow in the starkest sense. Where Sam is loyal and trustworthy Gollum is treacherous. Where Sam is straightforward Gollum is sly. Sam detests him, even nursing the thought in his heart that death might be preferable to any more time in Gollum’s company.

Sam also fears what he calls Frodo’s softheartedness. “He’s as wise as any, but he’s softhearted, that’s what he is.” Sam holds two entirely contradictory beliefs about Frodo in his heart at exactly the same time without any sense that they do contradict. On the one hand Frodo is “as wise as any”, with the possible exception of Gandalf or Bilbo, and there is a sense in which this is true. Both Elrond, Galadriel and Gandalf, too, recognise that Frodo is worthy to undertake his task, that it is more than sheer accident that he is the Ringbearer. But while Sam believes this too, he also believes that Frodo is softhearted, a quality that he loves, and confuses this with softheadedness. It is a mistake that many make and so he is shocked when Frodo displays a very hard head indeed.

Frodo makes it quite clear to Gollum that he heard him when he spoke of giving the Ring back to “little Sméagol”. And he tells him that he will never possess the Ring, ever again, that at the last, he would put on the Ring and if he, “wearing it, were to command you, you would obey, even if it were to leap from a precipice or to cast yourself into the fire”. Is this a prophecy on Frodo’s part? Is this what happens at the Cracks of Doom? As Ringbearer Frodo’s heart, and most certainly his head, is capable of a flinty resolve that shocks even Sam, and terrifies Gollum.

Frodo is Cheered by Old Trolls. With a Little Help from a Song by Sam Gamgee.

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The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991) pp. 197-203

In attempting to keep away from the great East-West Road that runs from Rivendell to the Grey Havens, fearing that it will be upon the road that the Nazgûl will be lying in wait, Strider has taken the hobbits a little too far to the north. It is at this point that Tolkien’s maps of Middle-earth that he drew for The Lord of the Rings give us little guidance about the exact route of their journey. Although it is clear from Tolkien’s wonderfully evocative description that the travellers have to negotiate some difficult terrain with steep climbs and descents the map shows us none of this and we are left to our imaginations to trace their path. Indeed for a long time there is no path. They have to find their way through what is literally a trackless waste until Pippin stumbles upon one.

We remember the paths created by Tom Bombadil in the Old Forest, respectfully even tenderly weaving in and out among the trees following the line of the Withywindle. This path in the wild is a brutal affair “made by strong arms and heavy feet. Here and there old trees had been cut or broken down, and large rocks cloven or heaved aside to make a way. “

Eventually we learn that the heavy lifting machinery is, in fact, three trolls, the very three who years before had captured the thirteen dwarves of the expedition to the Lonely Mountain that had been Bilbo’s great adventure; and the reason why they are now effigies seated on the ground in a clearing in the Trollshaws is that Gandalf had tricked them into continuing an argument about how to cook their prey until the rising sun had turned them into stone.

Throughout this stage of the journey Frodo has been drifting in and out of a shadowy world. We will not find out until later in Rivendell that a tiny sliver of the Morgul blade that had pierced his shoulder has been working its way inwards towards his heart, slowly but inexorably drawing him into the world of shadows in which his attackers dwell, but the progress of this deadly invader does not seem to be an even one and moments like this seem to stay its malevolent influence, for a time at least.

The person whose wholesome influence has this effect upon Frodo is Sam. I wonder if in this scene Tolkien was recalling the way in which soldiers in the trenches of the First World War would try to cheer each other up with songs like the one that Sam sings here in the shadow of the frozen trolls. Probably some of them were pretty bawdy but some would, as with Sam’s simple ditty, have simply made their hearers smile. And Frodo does smile. In the trenches such songs would have kept at bay a slow freezing of the heart for men, lice infested and surrounded by death. Here Sam’s song slows the progress of the splinter towards Frodo’s heart. Frodo jokingly declares that Sam might “end up by becoming a wizard-or a warrior” and wizards and warriors will both play a vital part in this story.

But so too will jesters. That is the word that Frodo uses, somewhat dismissively we have to acknowledge, to describe Sam at this point of the story. Frodo does not yet know that the part that this jester is going to play in getting him and the Ring to the Cracks of Doom is going to be absolutely vital. Sam will prove to be a warrior, although never one by choice, especially in his heroic battle with Shelob in her lair and in his storming of the Tower of Cirith Ungol but it is his simple refusal to abandon his cheerful spirit that will play the kind of role that only someone who is learning to see through the eyes of a child will ever come to value. Those who study to achieve a cultured sophistication will never have that vision. Frodo might have been tempted to be such a sophisticate but his terrible suffering in the course of his Ringbearing journey will teach him that it is not cleverness that sustains us in our darkest days but pure and simple goodness.

Peregrin Took Teaches Us the Value of Cheerfulness in Dark Times

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It is Pippin’s cheerfulness that gives courage to Beregond, the soldier of Gondor. It was the kind of cheerfulness that Tolkien met among the soldiers from the villages of England in the trenches of the First World War. On July 1st of this year we will remember the first day of the Battle of the Somme on which 20,000 British soldiers were killed and about 40,000 wounded. Tolkien was present at the battle and survived. My great uncle, Tommy Young, was also present and did not survive. I shall think of him especially on that day.

Tolkien received what was known, amongst the soldiers, as a blighty wound during the battle. This was a wound not serious enough to cause lasting damage but serious enough to mean that the soldier who received it would be withdrawn from the front line for a lengthy period of recuperation. To receive such a wound was generally regarded as good luck among the soldiers. Tolkien though had to live with the fact that among his closest friends he was the only survivor of the war.

It is with this memory that Tolkien begins to describe the preparations for the great battle of The Lord of the Rings at the Pelennor Fields. It may not have been this battle that was to be the decisive action of the story. That was the journey of Frodo and Sam to Mount Doom and the events in the Sammath Naur. But if Minas Tirith had fallen to the armies of Minas Morgul there would have been nowhere to return to for Frodo and Sam.

Pippin’s cheerfulness before the overwhelming might of Mordor reminds us of Sam Gamgee’s reflection at the Black Gate when  it appeared that the journey was at an end. Tolkien tells us that Sam “never had any real hope in the affair from the beginning; but being a cheerful hobbit he had not needed hope, as long as despair could be postponed.”

It is this spirit that enables Sam to bring Frodo and the Ring to Mount Doom; that brings Merry and Eowyn to the place in the Battle of the Pelennor Fields where they are able to slay the Lord of the Nazgûl; and which enables Pippin to save the life of Faramir in the face of Denethor’s despair and the passivity of his guard. It is not quite the same thing as the great joy that Pippin sees in Gandalf after the encounter with Denethor. Gandalf’s joy is a heavenly thing that Pippin, as yet, can only catch glimpses of; it is the inbreaking of another world into the world that Pippin knows and one that declares that even in the darkest of times the last word belongs to love and to joy and not to darkness. The cheerfulness of the hobbits is of a different order and belongs to the earth. It is a peasant quality that determines to make the best of whatever life brings, enjoying the good without too much expectation that it will last for long and bearing up under times of difficulty. It takes a quiet pride in maintaining the right kind of face. This is not a kind of dissembling, a deliberate attempt to deceive, unless it is to deceive an enemy, but it is a kind of virtue, most closely akin to fortitude. Perhaps the last time it was seen in British life to a great degree was during the heavy bombing of British cities during the Second World War by the German Luftwaffe, an action that was intended to demoralise the civilian population but which failed to do so. Perhaps it should be noted here that the bombing of German cities proved to be just as ineffective in this regard.

Pippin’s cheerfulness will be needed much in the days that lie ahead for the “darkness has begun”. But it will be no mere whistling in the wind. It will be a source of strength that will enable him to do brave deeds and will prevent the doing of great harm. We will do well to honour this quality and to develop it ourselves.