Naked in the dark

“This is An Evil Door”. Some Thoughts on The Dark Journeys of The Lord of the Rings as Aragorn and his Company Enter The Paths of the Dead.

/ stephencwinter / 7 Comments

The Return of the King by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991) pp. 768-773

“This is an evil door,” said Halbarad, “and my death lies beyond it. I will dare to pass it nonetheless; but no horse will enter.”

Aragorn and his company have arrived at the door to the Paths of the Dead and every heart, unless it be the heart of Aragorn himself, and Legolas perhaps, falls under a dread at this haunted place. Such is the strength of Aragorn’s will, something that we might call fey if it were not that he has been called to his destiny by a power that is both deeper and higher than the spirits of the earth, that at the last all the horses of the Dúnedain and even Arod of the Rohirrim are willing to follow their masters into the dark. For a time, Gimli stands rooted to the spot by his fear of the dead, but eventually he too is willing to follow.

The journeys into dark places, into tunnels, form a major theme in The Lord of the Rings. Gandalf is warned by Aragorn not to enter Moria, but when he does so he is confronted by the Balrog and in the deep places of the earth and then in a high place he fights the battle of his life, passing even into the place of the dead. Frodo and Sam go through Shelob’s Lair where the darkness has a tangible presence that can be touched, and there Frodo passes into a death-like state after suffering the sting of Shelob’s bite. Now Aragorn’s company follow their lord into the paths of the dead through a door that Halbarad, close kinsman and companion to Aragorn, knows that heralds his death. He will fall in the Battle of the Pelennor Fields a few days later.

I could go on to speak of other dark journeys that do not necessarily involve physical tunnels but share aspects of those. I could speak of the dark journey of Merry and Pippin across the plains of Rohan as captives of the orcs of Isengard; the dark journey that Faramir goes through in his relationship to his father that leads almost to his death; the journey that Frodo and Sam take across Mordor to the Cracks of Doom; Sam’s horror in seeing the destruction of the Shire by Saruman and his gang of thugs; and I could also speak of the dark journey that Éowyn takes that leads to her encounter with the Lord of the Nazgûl at the Battle of the Pelennor Fields and the darkness that she enters and within she remains after the battle. In fact, we could say that every major character in the story has to take a dark journey.

Of course this is not original to Tolkien, nor did he intend it to be. The theme of the hero’s dark journey is an old one in the European mythology from which Tolkien drew so much of his inspiration, weaving those stories with his own dark journey, his experience of the trenches of the First World War and the Battle of the Somme of 1916, and the death of all but one of his closest friends in that terrible conflict. We could mention the journey of Lemminkäinen into the underworld in the Kalevala of Finland that Tolkien loved and read in its original language. And although Tolkien did not appreciate it so much, I do not think that we can leave out the journey of Odysseus into Hades on his journey home from Troy to his home in Ithaca.

That none of us can find life, can come at last to Paradise, without passing through death, is at the heart of all of these stories, and Tolkien’s story invites us to consider this for ourselves. Indeed, we could say that it is the refusal of characters to embrace loss and diminishment in The Lord of the Rings, characters like Sauron and Saruman and Denethor, that is their greatest tragedy. And at the heart of all this, the story to which all the stories ultimately point, is what Tolkien called the True Myth, the death and resurrection of Christ as recounted in the gospels.

Frodo and Sam Cast Away What They Do Not Need in Mordor

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As I began to think about this part of the story a beautiful line from a French poem came to mind.

Partir, c’est mourir un peu 

To leave, or to say farewell, is to die a little.

As Frodo and Sam draw nearer to the mountain so the Ring, Frodo’s burden, becomes more and more unbearable.

“I can’t manage it, Sam,” he said. “It is such a weight to carry, such a weight.”

Sam offers to help Frodo to carry the Ring and this rouses what energy remains within him but the fact remains that the task of bearing the Ring is increasingly beyond his strength. And so Sam suggests that they lighten their load.

Some of the items are easy to dispose of. Frodo gladly casts away his disguise of orc shield, helmet and sword. “I’ll be an orc no more… and I’ll bear no weapon, fair or foul.” But he casts aside his elven cloak too. He describes himself to Sam as “naked in the dark”. Not a nakedness as a kind of liberation, that sees clothing as a kind of imprisonment but a nakedness that means that there is no protection, even the illusory protection of clothes, that lies between Frodo and destruction and there is no protection that lies between Frodo and shame.

In the fourth century, after the Emperor Constantine had declared Christianity to be the official religion of the Roman Empire, the newly built churches were filled with people who were there in order to further their careers. It was Bishop Cyril of Jerusalem, one of great spiritual geniuses of his age, who addressed this by creating the idea of Lent, a 40 day period of fasting, prayer, instruction and discipline for the many who were preparing for baptism. Baptism had once been a courageous thing to do in a world hostile to the Christian faith but it was now required behaviour for all. At the end of Lent those who were to be baptised presented themselves in a darkened church and they removed all their clothing, becoming naked in the dark, before descending into the water. All this signified a dying to them, a symbol of the ending of one life, and it was a ritual cleansing to. It was followed by an arising from the water after which they were clothed in a white robe, were given a lighted candle and received the bread and wine of the Eucharist that symbolised the new life that had just begun.

Cyril was doing what the great spiritual guides of every culture have done before the culture of the modern west and that is to teach that it is necessary to die before we die. He recognised the spiritual catastrophe of a baptism that simply affirmed the ascent to success that the young people of his day naturally desired. He knew that this could not prepare them for the inevitability of the descent that every life must know before the final and complete descent into death.

The church always recognised that those who were martyred required no baptism for martyrdom, the act of bearing true witness to the cross, is true baptism. Frodo and Sam in their journey through Mordor know the reality of death. Frodo knows what Coleridge named as a death in life. He is almost in the power of the Ring and if the Ring goes to the Fire he expects to be destroyed with it.

And for Sam, the moment when his pots and pans are cast into one of the deep fissures of the Plain of Mordor is “like a death-knell to his heart”. It is as if he is saying that there is no way back from the Mountain.

Partir, c’est mourir un peu. 

To leave, to say farewell, is to die a little.

Frodo and Sam know the truth of this.

But not quite. In a pocket of his tunic, next to his heart, Sam still keeps two things, “the phial of Galadriel and the little box that she gave him for his own”.