Death

“Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow.” Sam’s Grief For Frodo in Shelob’s Lair.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 955-956

Shelob is defeated and she lies in terrible pain in the innermost recesses of her lair. Sam has achieved the impossible, a heroic deed beyond imagining and for the briefest of moments the exhilaration of victory floods his whole being.

But then reality strikes a blow that Shelob never could. Frodo lies beside him and all Sam’s efforts to revive him are utterly useless and in vain.

“Frodo, Mr. Frodo!” he called. “Don’t leave me here alone! It’s your Sam calling. Don’t go where I can’t follow! Wake up, Mr. Frodo! O Wake up, Frodo, me dear, me dear. Wake up!”

In an interview that Tolkien’s daughter, Priscilla, once gave for a film about her father she spoke about the lifelessness of the whodunit and about how, once you had worked it out or had it revealed to you you never needed to go back to it. But how, when a passage of writing had once moved you deeply that feeling would return each time you came back to it. This is such a passage. Sam’s grief in this moment is utterly real and it strikes you with devastating effect every time you come to this part of the story.

It is all too much for him. He dashes about, heedless of his own safety, “stabbing the air, and smiting the stones, and shouting challenges.” At this moment he would gladly fight Shelob again and again so overwhelming is his despair.

“He’s dead!” he said. “Not asleep, dead!”

It does not matter that we know the story, have read the book, maybe many times, seen the film, and know that “her ladyship” does not kill her prey outright but stuns them with sufficient venom so that she can eat them alive at her leisure later on knowing that they will be helpless to resist her. It does not matter that we know that Frodo will awaken later, a prisoner of the orcs in the tower of Cirith Ungol. All we know at this moment is what we feel as we wait beside Sam in his grief, his desolation.

Tolkien experienced grief and loss in many ways during his life, losing his mother when just a boy, then most of his closest friends in the trenches during the Great War. When C.S Lewis died in 1963 he described the experience as if it were “an axe blow near the roots”. In the same film in which Priscilla Tolkien gave an interview about her father an old interview with the Professor himself was used. At one point Tolkien pulls a piece of paper from his pocket and reads some words written by the French feminist philosopher, Simone de Beauvoir.

“There is no such thing as a natural death because nothing that happens to a man is ever natural, since his presence calls the world into question. All men must die: but for every man his death is an accident and, even if he knows it and consents to it, an unjustifiable violation.” (From An Easy Death by Simone de Beauvoir).

Apart from being a little taken aback that the so-called fusty old reactionary, as many have regarded Tolkien, was capable of quoting the author of The Second Sex, we also need to consider what he was trying to say through this quotation. In the same interview he declares that the central theme of The Lord of the Rings is death. The inescapable nature of death, of the desire to escape it, and as de Beauvoir says, the unnaturalness of death. Surely it is this unnaturalness, this sense that every death is unjustifiable and a violation, that Sam protests against at this moment, raging against Frodo’s death in helpless fury. Surely it is impossible that Frodo can die? Surely impossible that Frodo can die and Sam have to continue to live? Is it not all some outrageous accident that can be overcome?

But Sam is ridiculously helpless against this violation. All he can do is to decide what to do next, even with the sense beating against the walls of his heart that none of it means anything anymore.

Tolkien beats our hearts many times in his story with this sense, at the fall of Gandalf in Moria, at the death of Boromir, at the moment when Éomer sees his sister’s body by the empty garments of the Lord of the Nazgûl whom she has just slain. He never seeks to flinch from the full horror of death. But neither does he hide from the sense, absurd though it might seem at the time, that we have to go on even if, as Aragorn said after Gandalf’s fall, “We must go on without hope”.

“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

“Where Now The Horse and The Rider?” Aragorn Sings of The Brevity of Human Life.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 660-665

After a hard and weary crossing of the plains of Rohan Gandalf and his three companions arrive at the feet of the White Mountains and to Meduseld, the hall of Théoden amidst the courts of Edoras. Legolas is the first to see them clearly and Gandalf asks him to describe what he can see.

“I see a white stream that comes from the snows,” he said. “Where it issues from the shadow of the vale a great hill rises upon the east. A dike and mighty wall and thorny fence encircle it. Within there rise the roofs of houses; and in the midst, set upon a green terrace, there stands aloft a great hall of Men. And it seems to my eyes that it is thatched with gold.”

As the road draws near to the gates of Edoras it passes under many grassy mounds covered with white flowers. These are the barrows in which the kings of Rohan lie. There are sixteen of them, “seven mounds upon the left, and nine upon the right”, and the first was raised 500 years before this time. To Legolas it is but a little while but to the Riders of the Mark this seems so long ago “that the raising of this house is but a memory in song, and the years before are lost in the mist of time.”

There are many barrows in England, none of which are made beautiful by Evermind. They are thousands of years old and “lost in the mist of time” and yet to Legolas this would still be but a little while.

This contrast between the immensity of time itself and the brevity of each human life within it is one of the major themes within Tolkien’s works. Elves and Men feel this contrast in different ways but both feel its sadness. Elves are immortal unless they suffer violent death and yet they live amidst change and decay. The three Rings that Celebrimbor forged in the Second Age and hid from Sauron were an effort to mitigate the effects of Time. They have done much good and Gandalf himself bears one of them, using it secretly to warm human hearts wherever he goes, but they are ultimately a futile effort to prevent what is inevitable. And for humankind, while they feel deeply the immensity of time they feel also how short each life within time is doomed to be.

Aragorn has been here before. In the days of his lonely wanderings in Middle-earth after learning from Elrond his true identity as the heir of Isildur and Elendil he served both the Steward of Gondor and the King of Rohan, preparing in hope for the day on which he would claim the throne. Thanks to the way in which he has inherited the longevity of the Númenorians he has already lived a long life by the time he returns to Edoras. He is older than Théoden and none of the people who now live in Rohan have any memory of him from the days of Thengel, Théoden’s father. In his time among the Rohirrim he mastered their language and now he begins to sing from the Lay of Eorl, words “laden with the sadness of Mortal Men”.

Where now the horse and the rider? Where  is the horn that was blowing?
Where is the helm and the hauberk, and the bright hair flowing?
Where is the hand on the harpstring, and the red fire glowing?
Where is the spring and the harvest and the tall corn growing?
They have passed like rain on the mountain, like a wind in the meadow;
The days have gone down in the West behind the hills into shadow. 
Who shall gather the smoke of the dead wood burning, 
Or behold the flowing years from the Sea returning?

Tolkien draws here from the poetry of the people who created kingdoms in England after the departure of the Romans in 410 A.D. Like the Rohirrim they felt the brevity of life deeply, the tragedy of what it is to be human, to be aware of the immensity of time and space, of the possibility of the eternal, and to know that life is too short to explore the potential of all this. He knew the story that St Bede recounted in his history of the English people, of Bishop Paulinus standing before the King of Northumbria and telling him of the Christian faith. And of how, after Paulinus had finished speaking that Coifi, the high priest replied and spoke of how to be human is to be like a bird in winter flying from the dark and storm outside the hall of the King and enjoying, for a brief moment, the light and warmth within before returning again to the cold and dark outside. “So man appears on earth for a little while,” Coifi concludes, “but of what went before this life, or what follows, we know nothing.”

And so the scene is set for the encounter between the travellers and Théoden in Meduseld, upon whom, with the malicious aid of Wormtongue, this tragic sense of life lies so heavily.

“Naked I Was Sent Back- For a Brief Time, Until My Task is Done.” Gandalf Speaks of The Battle With The Balrog of Moria.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp.653-657

There is much to think about in all that Gandalf speaks of after his reunion with Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli, but this is Eastertide and so we will think about the terrible struggle between Gandalf and the Balrog of Moria, a struggle that ends in Gandalf’s death.

But this story does not end with his death.

“I threw down my enemy, and he fell from the high place and broke the mountain-side where he smote it in his ruin. Then darkness took me, and I strayed out of thought and time, and I wandered far on roads that I will not tell.”

The Lord of the Rings is a story that weaves together both myth and history in a way that would have been familiar to Homer, to Snorri Sturluson or to the poet who wrote the story of Beowulf, but is quite alien to the modern mind. I have read many a commentator on Tolkien’s legendarium who has struggled to present his work as mere history, if such a thing can exist; and so they speak of the inadequacy of Tolkien’s economics for example. And from time to time I come across efforts to discover a historical King Arthur or Robin Hood. Tolkien does something far more interesting and far more exciting. He also does something that is more true than mere history. He is a writer of myth.

And so Gandalf tells of his struggle with the Balrog in a way that the hearers of Beowulf would have grasped immediately. As he tells us of the headlong fall from the Bridge of Khazad-dûm into the icy waters far below the deepest delvings of the Dwarves and then of the ascent to the highest peak of the Misty Mountains we are not invited to ponder the cardiovascular systems of the two combatants even when Gandalf says that the icy waters almost froze his heart. What we are invited into is the great stories that transcend such things, of which our stories are a rich part if we will only understand them as such.

The battle between Gandalf and the Balrog ends with the deaths of them both. But Gandalf is sent back in order that he should complete his task. Tolkien never speaks of God explicitly in The Lord of the Rings, of Eru Ilúvatar as God is named in The Silmarillion. Even now Gandalf does not name the one who sent him back, the one who restored him to life but it is of Ilúvatar he speaks here just as he spoke of him when he told Frodo that both Frodo and Bilbo were meant to have the Ring.

For a time Gandalf lies upon the mountain top, this high place of the earth acting as a kind of threshold between earth and heaven, between the seen world of flesh and blood and the unseen world into which we only catch glimpses from time to time.

“I was alone, forgotten, without escape upon the hard horn of the world. There I lay staring upward, while the stars wheeled over, and each day was as long as a life-age of the earth. Faint to my ears came the gathered rumour of all lands: the springing and the dying, the song and the weeping, and the slow everlasting groan of over-burdened stone.”

Once again there might be some who recognise in Gandalf’s telling of his story a certain similarity to the effects of hallucinogenics. They might be tempted to reduce Gandalf’s tale to just such an experience. But mystics know that it is not necessary to use such substances in order to see something of what Gandalf sees upon the mountain top. Gandalf lives in both myth and history and as he returns to the history of his time and the mighty struggle against Sauron that lies ahead, the task that he has been sent back to complete, he brings with him the mythic world in which he has dwelt entirely for a brief moment and for “a life-age of the earth”. He returns as Gandalf the White, more perilous than any upon earth except, perhaps, the Dark Lord Sauron, with whom he must now do battle.

Frodo and Sam Lead Us into the Dark

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Should I say that Frodo and Sam lead us into the dark? It is the last place that either of them wish to go and this is no ordinary dark.  This is the  dark of Shelob’s Lair, a deeper and a denser dark even than the tunnels of Moria, “a black vapour wrought of veritable darkness itself that, as it was breathed, brought blindness not only to the eyes but to the mind, so that even the memory of colours and of forms and of any light faded out of thought.  Night had always been,  and always would be, and night was all.”

Neither Frodo nor Sam ever wished to be here. Gollum wished otherwise for this is his act of betrayal.  He has led them into this trap into to have them killed and so, he hopes, to recover the Ring. Perhaps I should have entitled this piece, “Gollum leads us into the dark.” But my choice of title was deliberate.  Readers of The Lord of the Rings are here because they have come to love Frodo and Sam.

And I have another meaning. I  cannot read this part of the story without thinking of my own experience of darkness.  I have never been in a darkness in which I have been afraid. Once in Africa  I remember being guided through a darkness so deep that I could only just make out my guide in front of me but I was not afraid because I trusted him, even though he was a stranger, and my trust proved justifiable. I reached a safe place from which I could continue my journey the next day. No, for me the darkness that is fearful is an inner darkness. This is the darkness in which “even the memory of colours and of forms and of any light” fades out of thought. In his “East Coker” T.S Eliot puts it this way :

“O dark, dark, dark. They all go into the dark…/ And we all go with them into the silent funeral. No one’s funeral for there is no one to bury.”

And in the lines between those that I have quoted he makes it clear that being of good reputation is of no protection from the journey into the dark. It is one that we all must take. And the darknesses through which we pass during our lives are most fearful because they speak to us of the dark at the end of life.  The dark from which we fear there will be no end. Frodo and Sam feel this: “One hour, two hours, three hours : how many had they passed in this lightless hole? Hours- days, weeks rather.”

The dark that we are certain will end does not have the power of the dark that we fear to be endless. Yet so many of the great myths seem to require of their heroes such a journey. Tolkien knew this very well and the True Myth that he spoke of in a conversation with C.S Lewis,  a conversation that changed Lewis’s life for ever, speaks of a journey through the total darkness of death itself, a journey into an a aliveness so complete that death can have nothing to do with it at all. Eliot speaks of it in “East Coker”, “I said to my soul, be still,  and let the dark come upon you which shall be the darkness of God.”

So there is a darkness of God.  And it is a real darkness,  not the gentle turning down of the lights for an intimate evening together but the terrible darkness of death itself, the dark through which Jesus passed of which the creeds speak saying that he descended into hell. Eliot speaks of it in our experience in these words:

“I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope for hope would be hope of the wrong thing; wait without love for love would be love of the wrong thing;  there is yet faith but the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting. ”

So we have to learn how to die before we die so that we can truly live without fear of death or of the darknesses that come upon us in our lifetime.  We learn how to die in order to be fully alive.