Gildor Inglorien

“Whatever Befell on the North March, You, Frodo, I Doubt No Longer.” Faramir Hears Frodo’s Story and Tells of The Death of Boromir.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 866-874

Boromir “was alive and strong when we parted. And he lives still for all that I know”, says Frodo to Faramir. “Though surely there are many perils in the world.”

Anke Eissman depicts the moment when Faramir encounters the funeral craft of his brother, Boromir.

“Many indeed,” says Faramir, “and treachery not the least.”

Frodo stands before Faramir and his men as Faramir judges the truth of the story that Frodo tells and also the teller of the tale. How did Boromir die? And what part did Frodo play in his death? Was Frodo a traitor who betrayed his companion to his death at the hands of orcs?

Sam reacts to the implied accusation of treachery with fury and he tells Faramir to mind his own business much to the amusement of Faramir’s men, but Faramir is determined to find out the truth, in part because he wants to know what happened to his brother, in part because he wants to judge Frodo fairly.

What persuades him that Frodo is a truth teller is the story of Lothlórien. As soon as we learn that Faramir knows the most name of the hidden land we know, as we began to think about last week, that he is a man of wisdom. Laurelindórenan, he names it, the valley of singing gold. Treebeard also used the ancient name of that land when he spoke with Merry and Pippin, sadly remarking that just as the name was diminishing to Lothlórien or even Lórien so too the enchantment of the elder days was fading away.

Fading it may be but Faramir still understands its potency. In part this power lies in its beauty. Faramir thinks of the beauty of the belt in which his brother was arrayed in the boat from Lórien that Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli had sent him down the Anduin on the day of the breaking of the Fellowship. He also recognises the beauty of the broach of green and silver leaf that fastens Frodo’s elven cloak about his neck.

But Faramir also recognises the potency of Lothlórien in two other ways. One is in the mystery of Frodo himself. Right at the beginning of his journey Gildor Inglorien names Frodo Elf-friend and Goldberry recognises him as such in the house of Tom Bombadil. Gandalf sees a light shining within him and a certain transparency to his body when Frodo lies in Rivendell recovering from the wound that the Lord of the Nazgûl gave him at Weathertop. Sam saw this light too as Frodo slept in Ithilien, seeing that his face was “old, old and beautiful, as if the chiselling of the shaping years was now revealed in many fine lines that had before been hidden, though the identity of the face was not changed.”

Frodo and Galadriel in Lothlórien.

Frodo shares in the enchantment that comes from the elder days but is also marked by the wound he received at Weathertop and by the power of the Ring. Gandalf wondered which of these would prevail within him but concluded that he did not think that he would come to evil but might become “a glass filled with a clear light for eyes to see that can.”

Faramir is one who has such eyes and can perceive this light. “There is something strange about you, Frodo, an Elvish air maybe”, he says. But here we recognise the third element of the potency of Lothlórien that Faramir perceives. Its peril. “It is perilous for mortal man to walk out of the world of this Sun, and few of old come thence unchanged.”

There are tales in so many cultures of mortals straying into Faerie and emerging changed. Later Faramir will speak of what change came over his brother to Frodo and Sam. Now he merely asks the question and perceives something of the beauty and the peril in Frodo.

There is much talk now of re-enchantment and who would deny the need for this in a dying world. But might there be a naive optimism about such speech? We want the beauty without the peril. In C.S Lewis’s Prince Caspian Susan says of the Maenads who surround her and Lucy and who unleash glorious chaos in a Narnia that is dying of rationalism that if Aslan were not with them she would be very afraid. The Christian wisdom of the Cross recognises both the healing that flows from it but also its horror. We cannot separate the two but would love to reduce our desire for re-enchantment to little more than a pleasant walk in the country or a neatly tendered border of pretty flowers in a garden. There is beauty in both of these but this is not the perilous beauty of re-enchantment. It is not what Faramir perceives in Frodo. He perceives it yet he has the wisdom to trust it.

Pauline Baynes wonderful illustration of Susan, Lucy, Aslan and the Maenads from Prince Caspian by C.S Lewis. One of my favourite scenes from the entire Chronicles of Narnia.

“I Must See It Through, Sir”. Thoughts, With The Help of Sam Gamgee, on the Yeomen of Worcestershire on Remembrance Sunday 2022

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The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991) p.85

Back in May 2020, early on in our experience of the Coronavirus, as I began once more to write reflections on The Lord of the Rings after a pause of over a year as I got used to my duties as a parish priest in Worcestershire, I wrote about the moment when Frodo, Sam and Pippin prepare to leave the place above Woodhall in the Shire where they have enjoyed the hospitality of Gildor Inglorien and his wandering company of High Elves. If you would like to read that piece please click on the link below.

https://stephencwinter.com/2020/05/15/

Alan Lee’s beautiful depiction of the hobbits’ stay with the Elves above Woodhall.

I want to go back to that moment in the story today in order to think, once more, about the conversation between Frodo and Sam that takes place there; and I want to think about it on Remembrance Sunday here in Great Britain, and here in the County of Worcestershire, Tolkien’s Shire. For the little village of Hall Green in which he spent his early years lies within the ancient county boundaries of Worcestershire, and his grandfather and aunt on his mother’s side of the family farmed in Dormston which is just 6 miles from where I am writing these thoughts. Tolkien’s hobbits are very much based upon the country folk that he got to know as he grew up and he said of himself that his personal tastes and habits were very much those of a hobbit. Worcestershire gave up Hall Green to the growing city of Birmingham some years ago, a development that Tolkien watched and very much regretted. Dormston is still a country village but folk who live hereabouts watch, with some anxiety, the gradual spread of the kind of housing development that Saruman was starting to create during the brief time in which he ran the Shire.

The farm known as Bag End in Dormston where Tolkien’s Suffield relatives lived.

Remembrance Sunday takes place every year on the Sunday nearest to Armistice Day, November 11th, recalling the moment at 11 am on that day in 1918 on which the guns fell silent on the Western Front in France and Belgium and the terrible slaughter of the previous four years finally came to an end. In London, at the Cenotaph in Whitehall, the King will lead a national act of Remembrance that is centred around a silence of two minutes and in villages and towns up and down the land there will be local acts of Remembrance taking place. I will lead one in the village of Ombersley and it will take about 5 minutes to read all the names of the fallen just from that village. It is about the nearest thing that this country has to a national day. There is no independence to celebrate as no conquest has taken place in nearly a thousand years and there is no overthrow of tyranny to celebrate, as in France, because we have largely been content (with all the usual grumbling) with our form of government for over 350 years now. I wonder sometimes what will be left of our national identity when the memory that this day seeks to keep alive finally begins to fade. But that would require another essay in order to ponder it.

It has been effectively shown that The Lord of the Rings is very much a personal response to Tolkien’s experience of the trenches of the Western Front. John Garth’s excellent study on the subject, Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth, very much established that as fact, as did the biopic, Tolkien, of 2019. Scholars, at least on this side of the Atlantic, still seem very reluctant to add Tolkien to the canon of war writers. I read an excellent study this year on another Worcestershire writer of the early 20th century, A.E Houseman, who never went to war himself but whose poetry was carried by thousands of British servicemen who did, that does not even mention Tolkien in its survey of war literature from this part of England. That Houseman played a vital part in the creation of English culture in the 20th century is undeniable. That Tolkien continues to do so today is surely equally so. In Blackwell’s bookshop, the largest and most important in Oxford, a whole section is devoted to Tolkien. No other writer comes even close to the the number of books on display either by or about him. The readers of Oxford do not need to be persuaded of his importance even if the university’s literary establishment may still regret it.

But let me come back in conclusion to Sam Gamgee. If one of the tasks of The Lord of the Rings is to re-enchant a world that has effectively lost touch with that which most truly nourishes its soul, then can we also say that the book also re-enchants warfare? Surely we must say that in one sense the slaughter that took place in the battlefields of Europe between 1914 and 1918 cannot be enchanted. And yet the deepest instinct of the British people is that the dead who will be remembered on this Remembrance Sunday cannot be so as if what they did was utterly useless and wasteful. Yes, the industrial nature of that conflict was simply appalling but each person whose name will be read out today was essentially beautiful. And Sam Gamgee speaks for them. He speaks for the country folk of England, of Worcestershire, who went cheerfully to war simply because they had been asked to do so.

“I have something to do before the end”.

“I seem to see ahead, in a kind of way. I know that we are going to take a very long road, into darkness; but I know I can’t turn back. It isn’t go see Elves now, nor dragons, nor mountains that I want- I don’t rightly know what I want: but I have something to do before the end, and it lies ahead, not in the Shire. I must see it through, sir, if you understand me.”

A Elbereth Gilthoniel. Pray for the Wanderer. Pray for Me. The Hymn to Elbereth in the Hall of Fire in Rivendell.

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The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991) pp.231,32

As Frodo and Bilbo depart the Hall of Fire in order to enjoy some quiet talk together they hear “a single clear voice” rise in song. It is a hymn to Elbereth, the Lady Varda of the Valar, Queen of the Blessed Realm of Valinor, Elentári, Queen of Stars, and it is a song of praise and an expression of longing. 

O Elbereth Starkindler
White glittering, slanting down sparkling like a jewel, 
The glory of the starry host!
Having gazed far away 
From the tree-woven lands of Middle-earth, 
To thee, everwhite, I will sing,
On this side of the Sea,
Here on this side of the Ocean. 

O Elbereth Starkindler, 
From heaven gazing afar, 
To thee I cry now beneath the shadow of death! 
O look towards me, Everwhite!

And so the mood in the hall moves from merriment to longing. And if merriment is an expression of contentment, of being happy just where we are then this hymn tells us that those who sing it long to be somewhere else entirely. The gaze of the elven singer looks out from this place of peace to the stars above, the same stars to which the Elves first looked as they awoke in Middle-earth. The name that the Valar gave them was, Eldar, the people of the stars, for at their beginning, Elbereth/Varda “began a great labour, greatest of all the works of the Valar since their coming into Arda. She took the silver dews from the vats of Telperion, and therewith she made new stars and brighter against the coming of the Firstborn; wherefore she whose name out of the deeps was time and the labours of Eà was Tintalle, the Kindler… Queen of the Stars”.

It was for fear of Melkor/Morgoth, dweller in the dark of Middle-earth, that Elbereth kindled the stars in the sky, fear that awakening in darkness the Elves would meet first its lord and worship him, bowing down before his great might, part in fear and part in admiration. And her labour was not in vain for as they awoke from sleep they gazed first upon those stars “and have revered Varda Elentári above all the Valar”.

An Imagining of The Evening Star

Throughout their long history the Elves have looked upwards towards the starlight and westward to the Queen of Heaven. As in all the stories of the children of Ilúvatar, of both Elves and Humankind, immortal and mortal, the simplicity of this gaze is soon lost. The Valar, led by Oromë, the hunter, set out to find the firstborn and to lead them to safety in the Blessed Realm, but some never complete the journey, lingering among the beauty of what they know while others, the Noldor, followers of Fëanor, tire of a life of absolute safety and obedience in the realm their angelic lords and return to Middle-earth to freedom, glory and ultimately, for most of them, destruction. But the feeling expressed in this hymn to Elbereth is of a longing, a cry “beneath the shadow of death” that has been woven in the very fabric of their being from the moment of that first gaze upwards, a gaze both from eye and heart.

The Awakening of the Elves by Ted Nasmith

The language of this hymn is Sindarin, the language of the Grey-elves, the Elves who never came to Valinor and yet the longing is as deep as it is among those of the Noldor who survive the terrible wars in Beleriand in the First Age, the exiles from the Blessed Realm like Galadriel and at the very end of The Lord of the Rings all these stories will be brought together when Frodo sings the old walking song, the song of the road one last time, and almost in response the hymn to Elbereth will be taken up once more by Gildor Inglorien, by Elrond and by Galadriel as they make their last journey into the West across the Sea.

Gildor Inglorien and the High Elves at the beginning of the story and its end

This is my last of a series of meditations meditation upon Frodo’s words, “It seemed to me to fit somehow”. On the next day, which we will take up from next week, Elrond will gather together a great council whose task it will be to decide what to do with the Ring of Power that Bilbo found beneath the Misty Mountains and which Frodo has brought into Rivendell. As we have seen in these last weeks none of the events that have led to this moment are in any way random and disconnected but all are a part of the great story that flows onward to the “one chord, deeper than the Abyss, higher than the Firmament, piercing as the light of the eye of Ilúvatar” at the end of all things. This is how everything fits somehow. Frodo has caught a glimpse of this story to which he belongs but which he can never explain.

And a final note upon my title. Some of you will have recognised the words there as from the great hymn, “Ave Maris Stella”, Hail Queen of Heaven, the Ocean Star, a hymn that Tolkien knew very well indeed. In the echo of this hymn in the song of the Elves we pray for Frodo the wanderer and ourselves also.