George Herbert

“Whatever Betide, You Have Come to the End of The Gondor That You Have Known.” Gandalf Enters the Gates of Minas Tirith and Declares Its Doom.

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The Return of The King by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991) pp. 733-735

There are many who fear the word, doom, believing it to be a word that speaks of destruction. And let us begin by saying that it does speak that way. Indeed it is a word that speaks of judgement and it is words of judgement that Gandalf speaks at the gates of Minas Tirith as he arrives there upon Shadowfax bearing Pippin before him.

The guards at the gate see Gandalf as the herald of war as is their belief about him and in reply to them he has no words of comfort for them.

The storm “is upon you,” he declares to them. “I have ridden upon its wings. Let me pass! I must come to your Lord Denethor, while his stewardship lasts. Whatever betide, you have come to the end of the Gondor you have known.”

This is the end of the Third Age of the world. Its terrible climax as Sauron reaches out his hand seeking to bring all things under his rule and domination, lacking only the ruling Ring to make his victory absolutely complete. If he triumphs, as Galadriel said to Frodo after he had looked into her mirror “then we are laid bare to the Enemy.” But if Frodo succeeds in his mission “then our power is diminished, and Lothlórien will fade, and the tides of Time will sweep it away”.

I speak here of the ending of the time of the Elves in Middle-earth but what of Gondor? In what way will its end have come? Surely if Frodo succeeds in destroying the Ring then Sauron will fall and Gondor will triumph being free from its greatest foe forever?

The clue to understanding what Gandalf says to the guards lies in his reference to the Lord Denethor, the Steward of Gondor. “I must come to your Lord Denethor, while his stewardship lasts.” Gandalf is not prophesying the particular end to which Denethor will come on the day of the Battle of the Pelennor Fields. It is the return of the king to which he alludes here. Aragorn, the Lord Elessar, is making his way to the city even as Gandalf speaks, and either he will fall with Gondor or he will claim its crown as its rightful lord. The Gondor that its people have known for many centuries will come to an end either in defeat or triumph.

The Return of the King, the final volume of The Lord of the Rings, is a story of endings and new beginnings. Of course there is the ending of the great evil, the shadow that has oppressed the peoples of Middle-earth for many long years. As Sam will ask as he wakes at the Field of Cormallen: “Is everything sad going to come untrue? What’s happened to the world?” And one sadness has indeed “come untrue”, but not all that is sad. Lothlórien will fade as the power of the Three Elven Rings will fade with the destruction of the One Ring, and their keepers, Galadriel, Elrond and Gandalf, will depart from Middle-earth, and with them will depart the enchantment, the song that Sam felt himself to be a part of in Lothlórien, with which they enriched the world. The disenchanted world in which we live, the burden that we must bear, is in part the fruit of Frodo’s triumph. How much would the readers of Tolkien’s great tales wish to be able to walk into the enchanted lands of Lothlórien and Rivendell in the clear light of day even as Frodo and his companions were able to do, but all we can do is to catch glimpses of Faerie and to carry them in our hearts in the diminished world that is the one in which we live, learning perhaps the art of re-enchantment as we bring what we have glimpsed to the task of ordinary life, to find “heaven in ordinary”, as George Herbert puts it in his poem, Prayer.

And so too will the Gondor that its people have known pass away, and we will journey with its steward, in his sad attachment to what has long been passing away under his watch. We will see that not all will welcome the possibility of renewal but will reject it. But renewal will come, even though much will be lost, and some will embrace it, even while they bear the loss of much that was beautiful.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See you all again on Saturday.

Gaffer Gamgee is Afraid of the Suddenness of the World but Sam is Learning to Love it.

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Welcome to what is effectively a relaunch of my blog, Wisdom from The Lord of the Rings. I first began to write this in the autumn of 2012 and began to publish it on WordPress in October 2013. If this is your first visit then a very warm welcome. If you have been here before or you are a regular reader, welcome back!

The intention of the blog is to offer a weekly reflection on Tolkien’s great work in search of its wisdom. Tolkien was a central member of a group of writers and scholars, known as The Inklings, that used to meet in order to read and discuss their work with each other in Oxford in the mid 20th century. If you would like to know about them then I would warmly recommend a series of talks that you can find on YouTube given by Malcolm Guite. If you type in Malcolm Guite and Inklings when you visit YouTube you will find them easily. I just tried it and it works! The Inklings were regarded as highly unfashionable in their day by the literary establishment but I believe that they will prove to be one of the most important intellectual and literary influences, not just of their own time but of ours too. Tom Shippey’s fine book, J.R.R Tolkien, Writer of the Century, is a good read on this.

Just a note on this week’s blog and a personal connection. I refer to Louis MacNiece’s wonderful poem, Snow, in the post. When I first began to get to know my wife, Laura, back in the early 1990s, I noticed a framed copy of the poem in the hallway of her parents’ home in Edgbaston, Birmingham, England. The reason for this, so I learned, was because MacNiece had written this poem while a guest in the house some years before. It was in the time of a previous owner of the house but the summer house in which he wrote it remained very largely as it was at the time. We knew it mainly because at one time 21 of us used to sit down in it to eat on Christmas Day each year. A big fire used to roar in the fireplace. It was necessary on cold winter days. My mother in law, Bridget Pugh, used to teach English Literature at Birmingham University, and even in her later years also regularly taught a semester in Duluth, Minnesota. I am glad to say that she would teach a class on Tolkien.

Regular readers of the blog will notice two new things. One is that I include a page reference to my Harper Collins edition of The Lord of the Rings. That is to make it easier for readers who are reading the book to see what part of the story I am referring to. The other new thing is that I include an audio file of my reading of the post. This is at the encouragement of my wife who thinks people will like it. I would also like to thank my daughter, Bethan, who has helped me with the technical side of things. Please do let me know what you think of this in the comments section.

So,  introduction at an end, I invite you to read or listen or both and most importantly to enjoy another reading of The Lord of the Rings.

The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991) pp. 21-24

To know and to love a plot of land is no shame and does not diminish or shrink the soul in or of itself. It was the great Irish poet of the mid-twentieth century, Patrick Kavanagh, who wrote of such knowledge and such love:

“To know fully even one field or one land is a lifetime’s experience. In the world of poetic experience it is depth that counts, not width. A gap in a hedge, a smooth rock surfacing a narrow lane, a view of a woody meadow, the stream at the junction of four small fields- these are as much as a man can fully experience.”

The Gaffer, Master Hamfast Gamgee, of Number 3 Bagshot Row below Bag End in Hobbiton, the Shire, knows the gardens that he tends for Mr Bilbo Baggins. He knows every furrow and every corner, the right times to plant and the right times to harvest, but perhaps we might say that he has never fully experienced the gardens that he has spent a lifetime looking after.

To fully experience something is to look, not at, but through it. It is to have the vision that George Herbert speaks of when he writes:

“A man who looks on glass, on it may stay his eye; or if he pleaseth through it pass, and then the heaven espy.”

Or William Blake who speaks of seeing “A World in a Grain of Sand. And a Heaven in a Wild Flower”.

This is the poetic experience that Kavanagh speaks of and that the Gaffer has never known or valued and which he fears in watching his son, Sam, grow up. He knows that the world is “suddener than we fancy it” as Louis MacNiece speaks of in his poem, Snow. He speaks of “mountains of gold” in foreign parts, the places to which Bilbo mythologically travelled long ago, but he seeks to protect himself from such experience by reserving it for the gentry, the business of his betters, as he puts it. This allows him to remain within the safety of cabbages and potatoes and to keep his distance from Elves and Dragons.

Poor Master Hamfast! What glory he will never see, even the glory right underneath his very nose. The very cabbages and potatoes that he regards as symbols of safety and security would, in the hands of an elven cook, become a heavenly banquet.

For the Gaffer’s son, Samwise, everything is laden with possibility although at this point in his life the possibility lies elsewhere. One day he will be gardener to the Shire and bring this possibility within the very boundaries that his father thinks to be safe and known. Sam is learning his poetic experience through the “stories of the old days” as the Gaffer puts it and he has learned to read and write. Already he begins to know that the mythic, the world of Elves and Dragons, lies within his grasp, but not here, not in Hobbiton or the Shire. He still believes that he must go elsewhere to experience it. The Gaffer believes this too. Perhaps because he too believes that the mythical cannot lie within his own garden he is afraid. He is afraid of foreign parts and he is afraid of losing Sam to such an experience.

I grew up in the English countryside on farms that my father ran for wealthy people. It was a world of cabbages and potatoes, or pigs and fields of wheat in our case, but beauty and joy kept breaking into my life. A walk with my father through a wood filled with bluebells and sensing the strangeness of the church to which we had gone together. Walking across a room and suddenly standing transfixed in joy as a piece of orchestral string music began to play on our television set. And listening to the wonderful Miss Maher reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to us in my village school as the dusk of an autumn afternoon began to descend and I walked with Lucy Pevensie for the first time through the wardrobe into Narnia. Like Sam my ability to see, to listen, to go beyond the surface of things to the heaven that lies beyond was being formed.

“I hope no harm will come of it,” says the Gaffer. But harm does come. Sam will be be taken into a world that is far too big for him, to dangers that no other hobbit has ever faced, but he will see wonders that no other hobbit has ever seen.

The two go together.