Power and Control

“You May Know, or Guess, What Kind of a Tale it is… But The People in It Don’t Know. And You Don’t Want Them To.” Frodo Speaks About The Best Kind of Stories.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 930-935

“I wonder what sort of a tale we’ve fallen into?” asks Sam as he and Frodo rest after their climb up the stairs of Cirith Ungol. We thought about this last time and compared the story of Frodo and Sam to that of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, about how Cervantes’ famous characters found themselves in a story that largely came about because Don Quixote had immersed himself for years in tales of medieval chivalry until what he found there became preferable, more real, than what he saw around him in 17th century Spain.

Sam recognises that he and Frodo are in a story. The story is different from the life that he had lived while tending the gardens of Bag End, a story that Sam had come to regard as just a little dull and mundane; a little too predictable. The stories that Sam had learned from Bilbo of Elves and of great heroes were so much more exciting than the every day reality in which he lived. Frodo too was caught up by a longing to go after Bilbo in his discussion with Gandalf in his study in Bag End, a longing that for a moment was greater than the fear that had gripped him when Gandalf told him of the true nature of Bilbo’s ring and of how Sauron was looking for it.

It all felt very different when the question was asked at the Council of Elrond in Rivendell as to who should carry the Ring to Mount Doom and destroy it there. By that point Frodo had suffered the terrible wound inflicted upon him by the Lord of the Nazgûl. Most of his journey to Rivendell had been as a battle field casualty carried on the back of Bill the Pony. If Frodo had ever been caught up with the romance of adventure by the time he had accepted the task of bearing the Ring to Mordor this was long gone by this point.

But Frodo still has the capacity to have his imagination awakened by Sam. When Sam asks what of tale they have landed in Frodo wants to respond, to follow Sam’s train of thought.

“I wonder,” said Frodo. “But I don’t know. And that’s the way of a real tale. Take any one that you’re fond of. You may know, or guess, what kind of a tale it is, happy-ending or sad-ending, but the people in it don’t know. And you don’t want them to.”

I keep on going back to this image. By this point in the story Sam no longer cares about what kind of story he is in. He is guided by his love for Frodo and the need to finish the job.

We don’t want the characters in a story to know how it is going to end because if they did it would spoil the story. It is the very fact that the heroes in our favourite stories don’t know how the story is going to end, and that they keep on going, that makes them the heroes that they are. And in this regard they are completely different in spirit to Sauron. Sauron, by the time we reach this point in the story, has spent three ages in the history of Arda trying to achieve absolute control and to eliminate any unpredictability from all reality. At first he is a servant of Morgoth and then after his master falls at the end of the First Age, he becomes the Dark Lord. But in all this time what he seeks to achieve is power, both over others and over reality itself. Sauron wants to know how the story ends and he exercises all his power to achieve that end. He makes Mordor impregnable against attack and assembles an army so great that even after the defeat at the Pelennor Fields his power is not greatly diminished.

Every reader of The Lord of the Rings is aware of the great irony here. Sauron is convinced that he is in a story that is about power. As a consequence he spends two ages of history trying to amass as much power as possible. That is why he forged the Rings of Power. That is why he is convinced that the one thing he needs is to regain the greatest of those rings. And that is why all his schemes are fatally flawed. In trying to eliminate all uncertainty from the story, in trying to make everything his story, he falls, because stories do not work that way. Frodo and Sam don’t want the characters in the best stories to know how the story is going to end because that will spoil the story. They know that what makes a good story is that very element of uncertainty. And the wonder is that this very element is what makes reality. Frodo and Sam don’t know how their story is going to end. They don’t know if it will have a happy ending. They have “fallen into” this story. They haven’t written it themselves. But in giving themselves up to the uncertainty of their story they allow a deeper reality, one that Sauron has long ago rejected, to do its work.

“I Would Not Take This Thing ,If It Lay By The Highway.” Faramir and Isildur’s Bane.

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

Frodo and Sam are taken towards the secret refuge of Henneth Annûn and Faramir takes the opportunity, having sent his men ahead of him, to speak further with them and to ask them about the matter of “Isildur’s Bane”.

Was it because of this matter that Frodo and Sam had not parted on good terms with Boromir?

Frodo continues to answer cautiously. He will not speak openly of the Ring even though he is beginning to trust this man. The memory of Boromir and his attempt to take the Ring by force is still too fresh.

Faramir remembers how Gandalf, who he remembers as Mithrandir, used to ask of Isildur, and the great battle fought upon Dagorlad at the beginning of Gondor and the ancient legend that Isildur “took somewhat from the hand of the Unnamed, ere he went away from Gondor, never to be seen among mortal men again”.

We know that Gandalf went to Minas Tirith among many other journeys after Bilbo’s Farewell Party in the Shire when, with some necessary persuasion, he left the Ring behind him in Bag End in Frodo’s care. At this point in the story Gandalf had an ever growing conviction of the true nature of Bilbo’s ring but that he still required proof. So it was that he searched in the archives of Gondor for all that he could find of the story of Isildur. We know that he found an ancient document in which Isildur wrote of the taking of the Ring from Sauron’s hand and of how it glowed hot and was adorned with writing that Isildur could not understand though it was written in Elvish script. Isildur was already beginning to fall under the spell of the Ring speaking of it as “of all the works of Sauron the only fair”. Already he spoke of it as “precious to me, though I buy it with great pain”.

Faramir knows nothing of this because Gandalf did not speak of it. Gandalf did not finally know for sure of the true nature of Bilbo’s ring until he threw it into the fire in Bag End and read the letters for himself and he was unwilling to speculate upon it with others knowing that it could be a cause of conflict.

Even though Faramir does not know the true nature of Isildur’s Bane he guesses that it was indeed a cause of conflict between members of the Fellowship, that it might be some kind of weapon.

“I can well believe that Boromir, the proud and fearless, often rash, ever anxious for the victory of Minas Tirith (and his own glory therein), might desire such a thing and be allured by it.”

Now we can see why many early readers of The Lord of the Rings thought that it was an allegory about nuclear weapons, about how the decision was made in the Second World War to develop the bomb and to use it in order to end the war against Japan. Faramir himself seems to think that Isildur’s Bane was such a thing. Tolkien made it clear in writing about this that he was developing his idea of the Ring some time before the events of 1945 and indeed the Ring was more than just a weapon. It was made by Sauron to be the means to achieve power and control over all things. It was not, in and of itself, a perfect means to such an end. Even after he made the Ring Sauron was defeated first by Ar-Pharazôn of Númenor and then by the last alliance of Men and Elves when Isildur took the Ring from him. But it was Sauron’s belief that as he grew in power so too the Ring would be the means to make that power absolute. And, of course, he feared the possibility of the Ring falling into the hands of another person of power and being used against him.

Faramir does not regard himself as such a person. Nor does he desire victory at all costs. In this Tolkien gives us a character who, I believe, shows his own belief about the nature of power itself.

“But fear no more! I would not take this thing, if it lay by the highway! Not were Minas Tirith falling in ruin and I alone could save her, using the weapon of the Dark Lord for her good and my glory. No, I do not wish for such triumphs, Frodo son of Drogo.”

Why Did Sauron Make the Ring? Gandalf in Frodo’s Study at Bag End.

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The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991) pp 50,51

In 1949 Herbert Butterfield, Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge, published a series of lectures that he had given under the title of Christianity and History. I do not know if he had any contact with The Inklings. He was a Cambridge Professor and they were based in Oxford. But I rather think that Tolkien would have approved of Butterfield’s thoughts contained in this quotation from those lectures.

 

“The hardest strokes of heaven fall in history upon those who imagine that they can control things in a sovereign manner, as though they were kings of the earth, playing Providence not only for themselves but for the far future- reaching out into the future with the wrong kind of far-sightedness and gambling on a lot of risky calculations in which there must never be a single mistake.”

When I asked whether Butterfield and the Inklings could have known each other it was because it seemed to me that Butterfield could have been describing the action of Sauron in the forging of the Ring. That Sauron imagined himself, not only as a king of the earth, but as the king. Sauron forged the Ring in order to achieve kingship, declaring his intent in the words that he inscribed upon it.

One Ring to rule them all.

Sauron is one who fears disorder; one for whom order is only certain when he is in absolute control. This means that all other powers, even and perhaps most especially Providence itself, must first be found and then bound in the darkness. And why the darkness? Because the light is not under his control and the light is able to penetrate even the most carefully constructed of his defences. The same goes for the unruly weather. The wind blows where it chooses and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.

And Sauron fears those who are born of the Spirit, those who are truly free, who will not bow the knee to him; and so he labours endlessly to corrupt the free and to bind them to him for ever. It is the Ringwraiths, the Nazgûl, who are the most tragic of these people. They are those who traded their freedom in exchange for power and so as Gandalf expresses it heartbreakingly, they became “shadows under his great Shadow”. It is hard to imagine any image that could convey the sense of something or someone who has less substance than a shadow within a shadow. This is the end of all who seek power and control and who grow to fear freedom above everything else. Butterfield describes Sauron so well when he speaks of one who is farsighted in the wrong way, someone who seeks to eliminate all unpredictability and risk from the future. As Butterfield puts it, someone for whom “there must never be a single mistake”.

Compare such a spirit to the astonishing risk of putting your trust in hobbits! Perhaps this is a moment to consider how great a risk this is. Later in the story Denethor, the Lord of Gondor, will declare Gandalf’s trust in hobbits as madness and the hobbits themselves as witless. Gandalf does not argue with him or try to justify his trust. His choice is the worst that could possibly have been made. Except, that is, for every other choice.

 

But the same quotation from Butterfield that opened this short reflection goes on to describe the choice that Gandalf does make and the one that Frodo accepts and makes his own.

“Each of us should rather do the good that is under our noses. Those people work more wisely who seek to achieve good in their own small corner of the world and then leave the leaven to leaven the whole lump.”

This is what Gandalf and Frodo speak of on that Spring morning in the Shire. Not some vast plan to solve all the problems of Middle-earth but the decision to take one course of action. And at this point the action is only to take the Ring out of the Shire because the Dark Lord now knows that the Ring is there. The first choice to do good is very limited in its scope because at this point Frodo and, even, Gandalf himself does not know what to do next. But it is enough. The lump of dough will be leavened beyond all imagining.