Ithilien

“Your Land Must Be a Realm of Peace and Content, and There Must Gardeners Be in High Honour.”

/ stephencwinter / Leave a comment

The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 891,892

Faramir knows that Frodo’s secret is the very Ring of Power. He does not yet know Frodo’s mission, that he has been given the task of casting the Ring into the fires of Mount Doom, but he wonders at this little folk who now keep it.

“If you took this thing on yourself, unwilling, at other’s asking, then you have pity and honour from me. And I marvel at you: to keep it hid and not to use it. You are a new people and a new world to me. Are all your kind of like sort? Your land must be a realm of peace and content, and there must gardeners be in high honour.”

Gardeners are held in honour in the Shire.

“Are all your kind of like sort?” Faramir asks. The true answer is that just as Faramir is exceptional within Gondor so too are Frodo and Sam within the Shire. Neither are typical of their kinds although there are many good men in Gondor and good hobbits in the Shire. What is providential is that these great ones have found one another in a hostile land and at this critical moment in the story. Within this providential context even Sam’s mistakes, from his negligent care of a smoking fire to his revealing of the true nature of the burden that Frodo bears, only lead to good. Faramir puts this in a different way. Sam was “fated” to stumble, to make such good mistakes and so to aid his master’s mission the better. Later his interventions will be of the most heroic kind.

For a long time when I have read this passage I assumed that the reference that Faramir makes to the high honour in which gardeners must be held in the Shire must have been a gentle joke on Tolkien’s part. When we remember that the very first scene in The Lord of the Rings is set in the Ivy Bush on the Bywater Road near Hobbiton in which Gaffer Gamgee expresses his hope that “no harm” will come of Bilbo teaching Sam to read and write, to “learn him his letters”, it is hard to believe that greatness can come of this family of gardeners at least.

But woven into the rest of the story are very different references to gardens and to gardeners. Galadriel’s gift to Sam, so carefully put together, comes with her recognition that it is Sam, the gardener, who will have to heal his land after the ravages of Saruman there. “Though you should find all barren and laid waste, there will be few gardens in Middle-earth that will bloom like your garden, if you sprinkle this earth there.” Treebeard tells Merry and Pippin of the Entwives who were tenders of gardens and how they would love the Shire if they were to find it. And perhaps most telling of all, Faramir himself was given the task, by Aragorn, of healing the land of Ithilien after the ending of the war of the Ring and so himself became a prince of gardeners.

Ted Naismith beautifully evokes the wild garden of Ithilien.

There is a gardener within the soul of this Captain of Gondor that recognises a kindred spirit in the soul of Sam Gamgee even as he recognises greatness within Frodo’s soul. Faramir, like Sam, will become a healer of the hurts of Middle-earth after warfare is ended and, like Sam, he will tend a garden. Galadriel’s gift to Sam will keep the memory of Lothlórien alive within Middle-earth and Ithilien too will be a blending of wild woodland and cultivated lands, a marriage of Ents and Entwives just as the land that Galadriel made was such a marriage.

Tolkien was drawing upon the memory of Eden in his following of this theme in The Lord of the Rings. Eden is the garden in which everything is in perfect harmony and humankind is connected with itself, with the land and with the divine presence. There is no abuse or exploitation here. There is much more than mere cultivation here and so the Gaffer cannot be a perfect example of a gardener. It is Sam with his internalisation of all that he has seen upon his journeys, especially in Lothlórien, who will subcreate Eden in Middle-earth, or at the very least, a glimpse of it, and so draw his fellows into a delight in what is good, beautiful and true.

Ted Naismith gives us a land at peace with itself in his beautiful depiction of the young mallorn tree in the Shire

“I Do Not Love The Bright Sword For Its Sharpness, Nor the Arrow For Its Swiftness, Nor The Warrior For His Glory.” Faramir Speaks of War.

/ stephencwinter / Leave a comment

The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 874-878

Faramir is a warrior. When Éowyn first meets him in the Houses of Healing in Minas Tirith after the Battle of the Pelennor Fields she assesses him shrewdly as a warrior herself, “bred among men of war, that here was one that no Rider of the Mark could outmatch in battle”.

Anke Eissman shows us Faramir the man of war who longs for peace on his first meeting with Éowyn who is a warrior who does not yet know that there is contentment to be found in peace.

But Faramir does not love war or the way of the warrior. After the War of the Ring and after he marries Éowyn of Rohan he will devote his life to the arts of peace. Together with his bride he will restore the land of Ithilien to its former beauty. Later in his encounter with Frodo and Sam Faramir will say of the Shire, “Your land must be a place of peace and content, and there must gardeners be in high honour”.

Faramir would be a gardener himself, not an industrial scale food producer, one who reduces the land to compliant submission with pesticides and chemical fertilisers, but one who would allow the land to find its true wildness in which the growing of food would take its natural place. In essence he would be one who would re-unite the Ents and the Entwives, if that were possible, working as a sub-creator to make a land where both could live at peace with one another. When Treebeard met Merry and Pippin and learnt of the Shire he commented that it was a land that the Entwives would love. The Ents would love the Old Forest, a land in which the hobbits felt themselves to be alien. Is there a land where both could live together in harmony?

“Come back to me and say my land is best.” The Ents and the Entwives as depicted by Luca Bonatti.

But here we must return to the reality of war. Faramir is now a warrior by necessity. Mordor has already seized control of Ithilien and Faramir and his men are operating behind enemy lines. And they would take the rest of Gondor too and then land by land the rest of Middle-earth also. Mordor is an empire that would make the whole earth its slave, that would make it like Mordor itself. So, as Faramir puts it himself, “War must be, while we defend our lives against a destroyer who would devour all”.

So Tolkien was not a pacifist in an absolute sense, one who regards war as unjustified in all cases, even that in which an enslaving enemy seeks to devour a peaceful land. But neither Tolkien, nor Faramir, love war for its own sake.

“I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend: the city of the Men of Númenor; and I would have her loved for her memory, her ancientry, her beauty, and her present wisdom. Not feared, save as men may fear the dignity of a man, old and wise.”

This is a theme that runs throughout all Tolkien’s works. That the arts of peace are superior to the arts of war. We remember the last words that Thorin Oakenshield said to Bilbo as he lay dying after the Battle of the Five Armies. “If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold it would be a merrier world.” And yet, as Aragorn says at the Council of Elrond, the northern lands of which the Shire is one would have known little of peace unless they had been defended. “What roads would any dare to tread, what safety would there be in quiet lands, or in the homes of simple men at night, if the Dúnedain were asleep, or were all gone into the grave?”

The death of Thorin Oakenshield by Abe Papakien.

So Tolkien never quite resolves the question of how much must a land and its people be prepared to defend themselves against potential threat, and perhaps it can never be fully resolved. So Faramir must be a warrior by necessity even though he longs to practice the arts of peace. And perhaps this is where we must leave the debate for now. Perhaps Faramir gives us a sense of how to live with this tension. He is trained for war and yet longs for peace, He is unyielding in war as he showed in the battle against the Haradrim in which we first met him and yet he is gentle in all his dealings with the hobbits who are now his prisoners. Such a tension requires a hard practice and discipline. The fruit of that discipline is the man who now speaks his heart to Frodo, one of the greatest of all Tolkien’s creations.

“Now if I’ve Gone and Brought Trouble, I’ll Never Forgive Myself.” What Kind of Trouble Does Sam Gamgee’s Fire Bring to The Hobbits in Ithilien?

/ stephencwinter / Leave a comment

The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 851-861

I am glad that Frodo and Sam were able to eat the rabbits that Gollum caught before they were caught by the men of Gondor in the woodlands of Ithilien and I am glad that they were able to rest upon a bed of fern that must have felt like the greatest luxury. To be well fed and well rested is of great help when you need to keep your wits about you. I am only sorry that they were not able to smoke a pipe as well but then perhaps they did not have their pipes or pipeweed with them.

Gollum is expressing his extreme displeasure at the building of a fire and the cooking of meat.

Frodo and Sam are in Ithilien, the garden of Gondor, Although it bears the unmistakable signs of Mordor upon it after a few years of occupation it remains a place of beauty and of plenty too. They are surrounded by herbs that grow in profusion and perfume the air, and there are game creatures about that Sam can cook.

The hobbits have eaten nothing more than lembas for about a week now and although it is wonderfully sustaining and even more so when it isn’t mingled with any other kind of food lembas cannot satisfy them in the particular way that a well cooked meal could and Sam, in particular, desires that particular satisfaction.

Perhaps it was always unwise to light a fire in a place where enemies might be lurking, certainly Gollum thinks so, but a fire is necessary if you are going to cook, and maybe if Sam hadn’t relaxed a little too much after eating a good meal then he would not have committed the cardinal error that all children are warned against when learning to make a campfire. Never leave it unattended.

But Sam did make this mistake and a small brand from the fire did start a blaze in a pile of fern lying nearby and the smoke from the fire was spotted by the Rangers of Ithilien, and the hobbits were caught.

These Rangers are a company of men from Gondor who are operating behind enemy lines in the woodlands of Ithilien. Their mission is to make sure that the forces of Gondor can never feel completely at ease in this land. They harry and harass their foes and on this day it is their intention to ambush a force that is travelling northwards from Harad to enter Mordor through the Black Gate, just the kind of force that the hobbits saw on the day when Frodo decided to trust Gollum as his guide into the dark land.

The Rangers are commanded by Faramir, son of Denethor, Steward of Gondor, and the brother of Boromir, who had travelled as part of the Fellowship from Rivendell until he fell at Parth Galen as he sought to defend Merry and Pippin from capture by the Uruk-hai of Isengard. And it was this same Boromir that tried to take the Ring from Frodo and so made him take the decision to go on alone to Mordor. As far as Frodo and Sam are concerned Boromir is still alive and Frodo’s last memory of him is of the madness that overcame him and led him to try to seize the Ring by force.

I have long appreciated the depictions of Faramir by the artist, Anke Eissman. Note how he sits on the ground before his captive and does not seek to dominate him by standing, but his authority is still unmistakable.

So at the moment of their capture Frodo and Sam do not know what kind of trouble they are in and Sam does not know whether he will ever be able to forgive himself or whether he will ever get the opportunity to do so. He cannot know that he has fallen into the hands of one of the noblest of all Tolkien’s creations and that much good will come of this encounter.

We might say that the “chance” meeting between the hobbits and Faramir is mere coincidence, if any circumstance in our lives can ever be described with the word, mere. It was the great Swiss psychologist, Carl Jung, who first coined the word, synchronicity, to describe a series of unrelated events that are connected through their meaning and the meeting of the hobbits and Faramir is a profound expression of this. Later, before they parted, Frodo says to Faramir that Elrond had told him that he would find unexpected friendship upon his journey and we will think more of this on another occasion but it is sufficient to say on this occasion that Sam can forgive himself for his “mistake”, if mistake it truly is.

“Suddenly Sam Laughed, For Heart’s Ease Not for Jest.” Frodo and Sam Find Refreshment in Ithilien.

/ stephencwinter / 2 Comments

The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 847-851

You can almost feel the relief in Tolkien’s writing as Frodo and Sam leave the dreadful ash pits of the desolate lands before the Black Gate of Mordor and arrive in the fair land of Ithilien, which, although now under the control of the enemy, has not yet been spoiled.

Frodo and Sam, guided by Gollum, are making their way from the Black Gate down towards the crossing place in the road that runs south towards the sea and east-west from Minas Morgul to Osgiliath, the ancient but ruined capital of Gondor. And as they get further away from the horror of lands that have been utterly ruined by Mordor so their mood begins to change.

Ted Nasmith’s evocation of Ithilien.

Tolkien gives us a rich feast of language so that he can do justice to Ithilien, once the garden of Gondor, far enough from the shadow of the Ephel Death, the mountains of Mordor, to be free of them and yet sheltered by those same mountains from the east wind.

Tolkien was not a meteorologist and so he never discourses in detail about the weather in Middle-earth. His geography, and his meteorology too, is first and foremost mythological and so reflects the way in which the peoples of western Europe saw the world about them in the pre-modern world. The West and the great Atlantic ocean always made that direction one of mystery. In Tolkien’s Middle-earth it is the way to Valinor, the way that the Elves take on their journey to Valinor. It is the way to the Grey Havens, that are themselves a crossroads between worlds. In Europe the wind that comes from the West is warmed by the warm current coming out of the Gulf of Mexico and so it moderates the weather right up into the Arctic Circle in the far north of Norway and brings warm rain to the green lands of western Europe and especially, for Tolkien, to the British Isles that were his native lands.

The East, on the other hand, was always the direction from which danger and threat came. Invading armies always came from the East, whether Saxon, Viking or Norman in the British Isles, or the hordes coming out of the steppes of Central Asia, or the Ottoman Turks coming out of the East up the valley of the River Danube. And the weather that comes out of the East comes out of Siberia and there are no mountain ranges in Europe north of the Alps to provide shelter from the cold east wind or to provide defence from invading armies.

Ithilien is thus a land sheltered from the east and open to the south and west, a land of plenty, and Tolkien’s rich feast of language reflects this.

“Many great trees grew there, planted long ago, falling into untended age amid a riot of careless descendents; and groves and thickets there were of tamarisk and pungent terebinth, of olive and bay; and there were junipers and myrtles; and thymes that grew in bushes, or with their woody creeping stems mantled in deep tapestries the hidden stones; sages of many kinds putting forth blue flowers, or red, or pale green; and marjorams and new-sprouting parsleys, and many herbs and scents beyond the garden-lore of Sam.”

Ted Nasmith imagines seeing Ithilien for the first time coming from the north.

Readers will note the sheer length of that sentence with its profusion of semicolons and Tolkien’s pleasure in writing a list. Each shrub and herb is named until we arrive at the limit of Sam, the gardener’s, knowledge, and we are invited into the unknown, not as a place of danger, but a place to be explored so that new pleasures can be experienced and enjoyed. Tolkien sums it all up through a phrase in which, just for a moment, he leaves the language of the north and strays for a moment into the classical Mediterranean world.

“A dishevelled dryad loveliness.”

And Sam laughs, “for heart’s ease not for jest”. Frodo indeed laughed for jest in the ash pit before the Morranon when Sam recited his verse about the oliphaunt, and it lifted his spirit, breaking the spell of despair in which he was held in the long hours of that day. That laughter broke into his darkness but the dark still lay about him. Sam’s laughter is of a different kind. It is an expression of delight, the laughter of heaven. It is as if as Sam breathes in the rich scents of the garden, this is his outbreath.

So we come into the last place of refreshment for the hobbits before they enter the darkness of Mordor, a moment of grace before they are abandoned to the horror that they alone, unaided, must face. They do not know what lies before them but they are able to draw strength from this place because, unlike Gollum, this is how they have trained their hearts.

Frodo and Sam Rest For a While in The Woods of Ithilien

/ stephencwinter / 2 Comments

Frodo and Sam have been here before because the Field of Cormallen lies close to the refuge of Henneth Annûn. These are the woods that they came to on their journey, guided by Gollum, from the desolation that lay before the Black Gate of Mordor to the Crossroads, the Morgul Vale and then the great climb up to the Pass of Cirith Ungol. These are the woods in Ithilien, the desolate garden of Gondor that “kept still a dishevelled dryad loveliness” even as they were ravaged by orcs and other foes of Gondor.

It is only a few short weeks since Frodo and Sam were last in these woods in the first days of March. Even then Spring was beginning and the life of the Earth was already breaking through the destructive grip of Mordor after the cold of Winter. “Fronds pierced moss and mould, larches were green fingered, small flowers were opening in the turf, birds were singing.” Now the Spring is advanced and in its full riotous glory of smells, sights and sounds. Even amidst the fearfulness of their last visit to Ithilien Frodo and Sam were refreshed by the gentle beauty of this place, now they linger there without fear “visiting again the places that they had passed before.” This time they know that there are no dangers hiding in a shadow or behind a rock or tree. The song of a bird can be heard clearly without the possibility of an iron clad footfall of an orc being listened for amidst its beauty. The “groves and thickets… of tamarisk and pungent terebinth, of olive and of bay” can be gazed upon and their aromas drank in without fear that they may conceal an enemy who might do them hurt.

The last time that they were here Frodo and Sam were pressing forward, always aware that every moment’s delay in their journey to the mountain might lead to disaster for their friends and all that they loved. The curtain of water cascading down the rocks that concealed the refuge of Faramir and his Rangers might be gazed upon for a moment as the setting sun lit it with light and colour but always there was the sense as they paused in their journey that there was another step to be taken, another danger to be faced.

Tolkien’s story is filled with pauses in which the characters encounter beauty in a manner that takes hold of them, making them stop to take it in. The hidden valley of Rivendell, the woods of Lothlórien, the glittering caves of Aglarond and the refuge of Henneth Annûn in the woods of Ithilien are all such places. Each one calls them to turn aside for a moment from their task but they are not thereby distractions. A distraction is a pulling or dragging away of the mind from the needful thing. In The Lord of the Rings the encounter with beauty is not a distraction but a recollection. The essential is that which is good, true and beautiful and it is the essential that is threatened by the Dark Lord and yet so woven into the very fabric of reality that the Dark Lord cannot touch and destroy it. We recall Frodo’s cry of “They cannot conquer for ever!” at the flower-crowned head of the statue of the King of Gondor cast down by orcs and Sam’s vision of the star beyond the mirks of Mordor that is inaccessible to the reach of Sauron.

Already Frodo and Sam have known that there is “the dearest freshness deep down things” and so they can wander through Ithilien without fear and contemplate it in a way far beyond that which those who have not known the dark as they have done can do. This is the dawn that awaits those who watch through the dark of the night, the Springtime prepared for those who have endured through Winter.

Sam Gamgee: Warrior and Gardener

/ stephencwinter / 27 Comments

Sam Gamgee never intended to be a warrior. To be the best gardener that he could be, working in the garden of Frodo Baggins at Bag End, was an ambition sufficient for him. And he did not resent his lot because he loved Frodo. If he cherished a secret desire then it was to see the world that he had begun to learn about through the stories of Bilbo; but his secret desire had never turned into a root of bitterness within him.

So it is that when he first encounters a battle “of Men against Men” Tolkien tells us that “he did not like it much”. Faramir, Captain of Gondor, has left him with Frodo in the keeping of Mablung and Damrod, two Rangers of Ithilien, for a battle has to be fought. A force from the south is marching toward the Black Gate in order to join the forces of Mordor and Faramir is determined to stop them from getting there. He leads a guerrilla force whose aim is to make Ithilien as unsafe as possible for the enemies of Gondor. Soon Faramir’s men have the southerners on the run and Sam’s first encounter with one of his enemies is with a young warrior who falls dead at his feet.

It was the victorious Duke of Wellington, writing after his victory over Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo, who said: ” “Believe me, nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.” Sam’s immediate response is to agree. As he gazes at the dead young warrior at his feet his heart goes out towards him. He “was glad that he could not see the dead face. He wondered what the man’s name was and where he came from; and if he was really evil of heart, or what lies or threats had led him on the long march from his home; and if he would not really rather have stayed there in peace- all in a flash of thought.” Tolkien is probably remembering his own experience of war here. As an infantryman on the Western Front during The Great War of 1914-18 he was present on the terrible first day of The Battle of the Somme in 1916 in which some 30,000 British troops died in a fruitless assault upon the German lines. The response that he expresses through Sam’s thoughts is typical of a volunteer soldier. The natural empathy between one human being and another has to be trained out of the soldier in order that killing should become “natural”.

By the end of The Lord of the Rings Sam will be a battle hardened warrior but he will never be a killer. The journey that he makes from the garden in Bag End and back again is not one that he he makes because he loves battle and adventure. He makes it because he loves Frodo and because Gandalf told him to do the job. Even his desire to see the wonders of the world is quickly satisfied though he never becomes cynical about them. He delights in seeing the Oliphaunt of Harad but it is not as important to him as finishing the job he has been given to do. At the end of the story he will be a gardener again, taking up his old task with the old love but with a new wisdom.

And as we get to know Faramir, the mighty Captain of Gondor, a little better, we shall learn that he shares much more in common with Sam Gamgee than we might ever have expected when we first met him.

A Dishevelled Dryad Loveliness

/ stephencwinter / 9 Comments

Frodo and Sam have journeyed through many landscapes since they left Bag End together stepping out onto the Road that Bilbo once sang about, that “Goes ever on and on”. From the gentle woodlands and fields of the Shire to the tangling branches of the Old Forest to the wilds of Eriador; from the magical lands of Rivendell and Lothlorien to the dreadful desolation before the Gate of Mordor, they have seen so much that will change them for ever.

Now they have arrived in the land of Ithilien, once the garden of Gondor upon its northern borders but now fallen into the hands of the Enemy who has already begun his work of destruction. But the foul work of his servants has only recently begun and although Frodo and Sam see many signs of that work they still see for the first time upon their journey Spring “busy about them” with small flowers “opening in the turf” and birds singing. And Tolkien tells us that “Ithilien, the garden of Gondor now desolate kept still a desolate dryad loveliness”.

I cannot think of another occasion in The Lord of the Rings where Tolkien strays from his own mythology, so carefully formed, to bring in an image from another. Perhaps it was a mistake. But it is a phrase of such beauty that maybe we can imagine that if on re-reading his work Tolkien noticed it there, a stray from a classical land, he allowed it to remain and to work its own particular magic upon the land that he described by means of it.

For Ithilien is a land that for centuries has been tended by men and women. It bears testimony to the possibility that human beings of the highest civilisation are capable of living in such harmony with nature they can make a garden that can yet give space to wildness. After many pages of dreariness Tolkien gives space himself to rich language as he writes of the many things that still grow there, of groves and thickets “of tamarisk and pungent terebinth, of olive and of bay…and many herbs of forms and scents beyond the garden-lore of Sam”. Simply to write the names of the plants that grow in this land is to write a poetry that delights the senses as well as mind and spirit.

In his recently published book, Landmarks, that wonderful writer about wildness, Robert Macfarlane notes that a recent edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary had culled many words related to nature from its pages so that “acorn, adder, ash, beech, bluebell, buttercup, catkin, conker, cowslip, cygnet, dandelion, fern, hazel, heather, heron…” had all been removed to be replaced for the first time with “attachment, block-graph, blog, broadband, bullet point, celebrity, chatroom, committee, cut-and-paste, MP3 player and voicemail”.

The cull did not go unnoticed and when the head of children’s dictionaries at the OUP was asked about them she replied that the dictionary needed to reflect the consensus experience of modern-day childhood. “When you look back at older versions of dictionaries, there were lots of examples of flowers, for instance,” she said; “that was because many children lived in semi-rural environments and saw the seasons. Nowadays, the environment has changed.”

Nowadays the environment has changed and if we are to accept what she says, children no longer see the seasons. It is hard not to think that if Frodo and Sam were to find themselves in our own world they might think that the servants of the Enemy had been at work among us and that the diminishment of our language was a part of that work even as they saw “wounds made by the Orcs and other foul servants of the Dark Lord” all of whom were just trying to make a living.

I passed by proud swans this morning watching carefully over their newly born brood of five cygnets and a heron rising ponderously from the ground a little further on and rejoiced in them. I have hopes that one day I will see otters near by as others have seen them in the past year. And I write these words in a blog, using a broadband connection and complain when the connection lets me down as it sometimes does in my semi-rural home and I am grateful to them for what they enable me to do.

How do I live this tension well?