Sam

“Adventures, as I Used to Call Them.” Sam Gamgee Ponders the True Nature of Adventure Before the Hobbits Try to Enter the Nameless Land.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp.928-935

I doubt whether a tour of Mordor would ever be a commercial success. Imagine it being sold something like this.

The adventure of a lifetime. In fact it will probably end your life. The chances that you will return alive are very small and the guide we will provide will do his best, either to kill you himself or to have you killed by a savage monster of terrible potency. So what’s stopping you from signing up?”

Perhaps a small number of adrenaline junkies might be prepared to take on the odds but most of us want to come back from our holidays, alive and in one piece.

It is in a moment of calm after the long climb up the stairs of Cirith Ungol and before they enter the tunnel that lies between them and Mordor, the Nameless Land as Tolkien calls it here, Sam reflects upon all that he and Frodo have experienced together upon their journey. It has been a long way from Bag End and when we compare the Sam that we first met there as Gandalf hauled him through the window of Frodo’s study by his ear we might say that the inner journey that Sam has taken has been even longer.

As they take a few moments of rest after their long climb Frodo expresses his dislike for their surroundings. “Earth, air and water all seem accursed. But so our path is laid,” he says. And then Sam responds with a speech of great beauty.

“Yes, that’s so… And we shouldn’t be here at all, if we’d known more about it before we started. But I suppose it’s often that way. The brave things in the old tales and songs, Mr. Frodo: adventures, as I used to call them. I used to think that they were things the wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for, because they wanted them, because they were exciting and life was a bit dull, a kind of a sport, as you might say. But that’s not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind.”

The tales that matter

“The tales that really mattered, or the ones that stayed in the mind.” Sam is looking back on the years of his childhood when he would sit at the feet of Bilbo Baggins at Bag End. It is hard to imagine the Gaffer being a repository of stories unless they were ones of family history. He was more a storehouse of pithy sayings, all of which were intended to be the last word on any subject. Sam certainly remembers these, usually when he becomes aware that what he is doing would meet with his father’s disapproval, but the stories that Bilbo told were a different matter altogether. They opened doors into worlds of wonder and enchantment in Sam’s heart and mind. And they awoke desire there. Sam expressed that desire in the words, “I want to see Elves!”, a desire that was quickly satisfied in his journey in the meeting with Gildor Inglorien and his company while still in the Shire. Frodo asked him then whether he wished to continue now that his longing had been fulfilled and Sam responded by speaking of the need to see something through. We can only imagine that he returned to thoughts of resolution many times in his journey because he speaks in a similar way here.

“I expect that they had lots of chances, like us, of turning back, only they didn’t. And if they had, we shouldn’t know, because they’d have been forgotten. We hear about those as just went on.”

Carl Jung, the great map maker of the human psyche, spoke of this in these terms. “To this day God is the name by which I designate all things which cross my wilful path violently and recklessly, all things which upset my subjective views, plans and intentions and change the course of my life for better or worse.”

Sam’s language is very different from Jung’s but they are speaking of the same human experience. Oh, yes, Sam would say, you are speaking of a story that really matters. Oh yes, Carl Jung might reply, I am speaking about God.

“A Waiting Silence Broods Above the Nameless Land.” All is Prepared for Frodo to Enter Mordor.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 908-909

It was at the end of their sojourn in Lothlórien that the Fellowship was addressed by Galadriel on the matter of the journey that they were about to resume.

“Sleep in peace! Do not trouble your hearts overmuch with thought of the road tonight. Maybe the paths that you each shall tread are already laid before your feet, though you do not see them.”

Some of the Fellowship seem to do as Galadriel bids them. We hear little report of anxious thought on the part of Merry and Pippin although they both regard the journey to Mordor as folly and wish to go to Minas Tirith. And apart from declaring their intention to go with Frodo to the end neither Legolas or Gimli say anything of their preference for the road ahead. Sam, of course, will go with Frodo wherever he goes but shrewdly guesses that Frodo will cross the Anduin to fulfil the mission that was given him by the Council in Rivendell. “He knows he’s got to find the Cracks of Doom, if he can. But he’s afraid.” Boromir wants Frodo to come to Minas Tirith, at least that is what he has long said to himself until at last he is confronted by the truth within his heart that he desires to possess the Ring itself. And Aragorn is torn between his desire to go to the city that he believes to be his destiny while knowing that since the fall of Gandalf in Moria he has to guide Frodo the best he can.

The events that befall them all at Parth Galen throw all their plans into disarray. Boromir’s treachery and the attack by the orcs of Isengard sends Frodo across the river to the Emyn Muil fleeing from Boromir and he is only just caught by Sam before he does so. Merry and Pippin are taken prisoner by the orcs and are carried across the plains of Rohan before escaping into Fangorn Forest just in time to meet Treebeard the Ent. Aragorn realises that he can do little more for Frodo and decides to follow the orcs and their prisoners and Legolas and Gimli go with him. Boromir falls trying to defend Merry and Pippin and seeking to right his own wrong. And, of course, there is one other character who does not so much think but is driven by desire for the Ring and that is Gollum and he follows Frodo. Soon, much against both of their wills they will become companions upon the journey.

I will leave my readers to ponder the paths that each of the characters will take after the chaos of the breaking of the Fellowship but we can assert that none of them quite expected that they were to follow the paths laid before them in quite the manner in which they did. As small stones that begin an avalanche Merry and Pippin awaken the anger of the Ents and bring about the fall of Isengard. Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli meet Gandalf in Fangorn, liberate Théoden, King of Rohan, from bondage, and he leads his people to victory over Saruman and then to the relief of the siege of Gondor at the Pelennor Fields.

And, perhaps most unplanned for and most unexpected, Sauron becomes convinced that one of his enemies possesses the Ring and will try to use it against him. He sees Pippin in the Palantir of Orthanc, something that was no-one’s plan, and assumes that this is the hobbit who bears the Ring and that he is a prisoner within that fortress. And then Aragorn chooses to reveal himself to Sauron in the Palantir as the heir of Isildur and wrests control of the stone that is rightfully his from Sauron.

We must assume that Sauron is deeply shaken by his encounter with Aragorn. Until this point he has used the palahtiri to dominate others, both Saruman, who he wins to his side, and Denethor, who he leads to despair, although never treachery. Now he is defeated in a battle of wills by the heir of the one who cut the Ring from his finger. He needs to move quickly and decisively and so he prepares an attack upon Minas Tirith from the stronghold of Minas Morgul to be commanded by his most deadly of captains, the Witch King of Angmar, the Lord in the Nazgûl. All his forces are withdrawn either into Minas Morgul or directed to the Black Gate (the Morannon) in the north of Mordor. As Faramir says, “My scouts and watchers have all returned, even some that have crept within sight of the Morannon. They all find a strange thing. The land is empty. Nothing is on the road, and no sound of foot, or horn, or bowstring is anywhere to be heard. A waiting silence broods above the Nameless Land.”

It is as if everything has been arranged with the exact purpose of allowing Frodo to walk into that land unhindered. We will think more about this next week. Now we know that Frodo has to take full advantage of the opportunity that has been given to him.

“I Looked For no Such Friendship as You Have Shown. To Have Found it Turns Evil to Great Good.” The Redeeming Friendship of Frodo and Faramir.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 908-909

Friendship is one of the great themes of The Lord of the Rings. Friendship mattered deeply to Tolkien as he had known close friendship in his younger years and then lost those friends in the slaughterhouse of the trenches of the Great War of 1914-18. Early in Frodo’s perilous journey from the Shire came a moment in the cottage of Crickhollow when his friends revealed to him that they knew that he was leaving the Shire and that he was in danger. At first Frodo was dismayed. He had intended to go alone with Sam and in secret. But then Merry replied:

“You can trust us to stick to you through thick and thin- to the bitter end. And you can trust us to keep any secret of yours- closer than you keep it yourself. But you cannot trust us to let you face trouble alone, and go off without a word. We are your friends, Frodo.”

And later in the story, Gandalf defended the right of Merry and Pippin to go with the Fellowship of the Ring from Rivendell.

“It is true that if these hobbits understood the danger, they would not dare to go. But they would still wish to go, or wish that they had dared, and be shamed and unhappy. I think, Elrond, that in this matter it would be well to trust rather to their friendship than to great wisdom.”

Of course, Gandalf might have reminded Elrond of his own words at the conclusion of the Council when Elrond recognised that Frodo, the hobbit, had been chosen by a Power greater than his own to carry the Ring to Mordor. It was Elrond who saw that this was “the hour of the Shire-folk” but maybe he did not grasp the true extent of what he had recognised. Maybe he did not see that it was the strength that lies within and above such things as pity, mercy and friendship that would, in words that he himself spoke, “shake the towers and counsels of the great”.

But it is in the very nature of such things as friendship that they have a fragility, a vulnerability, that do not belong to such things as power and control. In his famous treatise on leadership, The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli wrote, “It may be more pleasant to be loved than feared, but it is safer to be feared than loved.” Every lord in Tolkien’s story would understand the truth of those words, even Elrond, and it was in the breaking of trust by Boromir when he tried to take the Ring from Frodo that Frodo’s heart was broken. It was a brokenhearted Frodo who met with Faramir in Ithilien and who learned that this man was not only a mighty captain of Gondor but also Boromir’s brother. Frodo was quickly drawn to this man and longed to put his trust in him but the memory of Boromir’s face transfigured by desire for the Ring was too fresh a memory. It was only Sam’s mistake in revealing that Frodo carries the Ring of Power that both made Frodo terribly vulnerable once more but also allowed Faramir to show his nobility and utter trustworthiness.

So it is that when Frodo bids Faramir farewell as he begins his journey to Mordor once more that he says to his new friend: “It was said to me by Elrond Halfelven that I should find friendship upon the way, secret and unlooked for. Certainly I looked for no such friendship as you have shown, To have found it turns evil to great good.”

After Boromir’s betrayal of friendship at the breaking of the Fellowship Frodo attempted to make his journey to Mordor alone and, unwillingly, he had to make three bonds of trust of varying kinds along the way. First he found that he could not go without Sam and it is this friendship that will carry him all the way to Mount Doom. Secondly, he found that he has to trust a guide who would eventually betray him and he knows this to be his fate. But third he would form a deep bond with the brother of the man who betrayed his trust. This is the great evil to which Frodo referred in the words he spoke to Faramir and this is the great good to which that evil is turned. That Frodo will begin the last stage of his journey with the friendship of Faramir in his heart and not the betrayal of Boromir will give him a strength that he will need throughout the terrible ordeal that awaits him.

“There Are Dead Things, Dead Faces in The Water.” Frodo and Sam Cross The Dead Marshes.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 817-822

I once crossed a bog a little like the one that Tolkien describes here. It is not one of my favourite memories of walks that I have taken although I have a certain satisfaction about the way in which I was able to navigate it. I had a long staff with me, a gift from my wife and one that we used to call my Gandalf staff. I used it to reach out to the next tussock ahead of me, to check its firmness, and then sometimes if necessary to use it to swing myself across the pools to firm ground.

My bog was nothing like the size of the Dead Marshes that Frodo and Sam, guided by Gollum, had to cross, but I was very glad when I stood on firm ground once more and could walk freely and easily. The bog that Tolkien describes was based upon his memory of the Battle of the Somme in which water filled the shell holes created by incessant artillery barrages and, in which, fallen soldiers often lay some time before their bodies were recovered.

Soldiers fish in pools at the Western Front in the 1914-18 war that are crossed by bridges made of wooden duckboards.

In his vision of the Dead Marshes Tolkien mythologises this memory. Here it is the Battle of Dagorlad that is recalled, that was fought in the last Great Alliance at the end of the Second Age between the Elves of Gil-galad and the Men of Elendil against the forces of Mordor. Gollum describes it as “a great battle”, fought “before the Precious came”. “Tall Men with long swords, and terrible Elves, and Orcses shrieking. They fought on the plain for days and months at the Black Gates. But the marshes have grown since then, swallowed up the graves; always creeping, creeping.”

When Frodo and Sam look down into the pools Sam reacts with horror, looking down at rotting faces illuminated by ghostly candles. Frodo, on the other hand, looks down with a melancholy fascination. Death is beginning to take hold of his imagination as he carries the Ring ever closer to the place of its making. Sam has to move him gently away, both from the deep pools in which he might drown and also from the vision of the dead that holds such a strange fascination for him.

The ghostly candles must surely have come out of Tolkien’s Catholic imagination and therefore originally must have been signs of hope. Candles are lit in memory of the dead at the feast of All Souls at the beginning of November and here they represent light that continues both in the hearts of those who mourn the lost and also in the presence of God. The darkness of death does not have the last word. Light continues to shine. But here in the Dead Marshes everything is corrupted, even light itself. The sun barely breaks through the vapours that rise from the fen. Everything seems to exist in a kind of half-light.

And yet it is this ghostly passage that is Frodo and Sam’s safest way. The firm roads that lie to the east of the marshes are continually patrolled by the forces of Mordor and to the west lies the Anduin that would take them away from their goal to Minas Tirith. Ever, for the members of the Fellowship, it is the dark road that is the best. Gandalf’s fall in Moria takes him through death itself before leading him to return as Gandalf the White. Merry and Pippin’s dark journey as captives of the orcs leads them to Fangorn and to Treebeard. And the whole of the journey of Frodo and Sam from the Emyn Muil onwards is one long dark journey with a brief interlude in Ithilien that leads eventually to the destruction of the Ring and the fall of Sauron. In none of these cases can we say that those who pass through them embrace the experience but they all have to give themselves up to them and each one of them find their journey to be a passage from darkness into light. Perhaps the ghostly candles remain a sign of hope after all.

Candles lit at All Souls

“Down Into The Land of Shadow.” Tolkien’s Ending of The Fellowship of the Ring.

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The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991) pp.397-398

Those who came to know The Lord of the Rings through the films that were made some twenty years ago by Peter Jackson will have been surprised when they first read Tolkien’s own ending to the first volume of his trilogy, The Fellowship of the Ring. Tolkien gives us no battles, no brave self-sacrifice from Merry and Pippin offering themselves to the orcs so that Frodo can escape, no farewell by Aragorn to Frodo, and no heroic death of Boromir. That last will take place off stage at the beginning of The Two Towers. Instead he gives us this…

“So Frodo and Sam set off on the last stage of the Quest together. Frodo paddled away from the shore and the River bore them swiftly away, down the western arm, and past the frowning cliffs of Tol Brandir”

Frodo and Sam struggle to get past the current of the river that seeks to drag them over the mighty falls and so at last make their way to the east bank, and then…

“At length they came to land again upon the southern slopes of Amon Lhaw. There they found a shelving shore, and they drew the boat out high above the water, and hid it as well as they could behind a great boulder. Then shouldering their burdens, they set off, seeking a path that would bring them over the grey hills of the Emyn Muil, and down into the Land of Shadow.”

We can understand why Peter Jackson decided to end his first film differently and I, alongside the packed theatre audience who witnessed the film, was glad to stand and applaud it. It was a masterpiece in its own right and I could not wait for the release of The Two Towers which is what Jackson had intended.

But Tolkien had his reasons for ending this first part of his great story in this way and if I were to try to create the scene as I think Tolkien intended us to see it I would slowly draw the camera back from Frodo and Sam as they set off on their journey until all we could see was two small figures set against a vast and empty wasteland.

There is an old and deeply poignant prayer of the Breton people of France whose ancient language is related to Welsh, a tongue that Tolkien loved. It simply states that “O God, thy sea is so great and my boat is so small.” I have known it for some time through a collection of prayers from the Celtic tradition of which the Breton tongue is a part but discovered while preparing this blog post that an American admiral gave a small plaque to President John Kennedy, a fellow sailor, with this prayer inscribed upon it. The point of the prayer, as President Kennedy received it, was to remind us of our smallness against the vastness of the universe in which we are set. Kennedy kept the plaque on his desk in the Oval Office throughout his term of office to teach him humility. Presidents need such reminders in a way that Breton fisher folk do not. For them, and for all the “little” people of the earth, it is enough that they must set out each day into a world that is so much bigger than they are, and Tolkien intends us to see Frodo and Sam among such people. Their journey is not heroic in the sense that it is a conquest of the world although Elrond was right to compare Frodo to the great heroic figures of the First Age like Hurin and Beren, it is heroic in the sense that ordinary life is heroic. Ordinary folk shoulder their burdens and set out, seeking a path through a life that is so much bigger than they are. Frodo and Sam know that what they seek to do is far too big a task for people like them but they do it anyway because it is a task that they have been given to do.

Surely Tolkien drew here upon his memories of the ordinary soldiers on the Western Front in the First World War who did their job against overwhelming odds and did not see their lives as wasted because doing their job was what life was all about. It reminds me of a conversation I once had with a woman whose husband had worked all his life in a job that he hated in order to feed his family and did it with pride so that the high point of his week was to cook breakfast on a Sunday morning and to share it with them all. That is the kind of heroism that Frodo and Sam represent.

At Weathertop With a Long Journey Ahead. Frodo Longs to Go Home.

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The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991) pp 180-84

There are moments in any great venture in which its sheer scale becomes all too much. There is no shame in such moments. Who, upon setting out on a great journey, can possibly know all that lies ahead? Modern life seems to require the elimination of as much risk and unpredictability as possible. Those who try to sell us a holiday will brand the experience as an adventure but a true adventure is something in life in which the end is uncertain. A holiday, by comparison, is a distraction from our regular routine.

Later in the story, after he has had much more experience of adventure, Sam will reflect on this with Frodo.

“The brave things in the old tales and songs, Mr. Frodo: adventures, as I used to call them. I used to think that they were things the wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for, because they wanted them, because they were exciting and life was a bit dull, a kind of sport, as you might say. But that’s not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind. Folk seem to have been landed in them, usually- their paths were laid that way, as you put it. But I expect that they had lots of chances, like us, of turning back, only they didn’t.”

And it is upon Weathertop, with the first view of snowcapped mountains ahead of him and long leagues of open country between him and the horizon, that Frodo longs to be safe at home, longs to be able to turn back, wishes “bitterly that his fortune had left him in the quiet and beloved Shire.”

Frodo and his companions have been landed in a story that is quite simply much too big for them. As Gandalf said to Frodo in the sitting room at Bag End it would appear that, first, Bilbo, and then Frodo, were meant to have the Ring. Why this should be is unknown to either them or anyone else. It is not because of their wisdom or might. Later the story will be told about them that will draw attention to both of these qualities but the hobbits will never draw attention to themselves in this regard.

But what of the other heroes that are mentioned in the pages about which we are thinking here? What of Gil-galad and Elendil? They were kings of Elves and of Humankind who were confronted by the might of Sauron at the end of the Second Age. Gil-galad was the last great elven king in Middle-earth, capable of raising an army to fight the Dark Lord in all his power in open battle. Elendil, whose very name means elf-friend, had remained faithful to that friendship when Sauron had seduced Númenor to the worship of Morgoth. He, his family and followers, were literally carried by a great wave to the shores of Middle-earth. It was friendship that brought the last alliance together just as it was friendship that caused the hobbits to leave the Shire with Frodo.

And so it always seems to be. Something compels us to make a choice, to take an action that we never anticipated. There comes a moment in which the thought that we might have to deny something essential about ourselves becomes intolerable. Merry, Pippin and Sam could not have denied their friendship with Frodo to allow him to journey into the wild alone. Elendil could not have denied the friendship that was the meaning of his very name.

And Aragorn, or Strider as we know him in this part of the story, cannot deny the destiny that he must seek to fulfil, spending the years of his manhood as a homeless wanderer in the lands of Middle-earth, sneered at by people like Bill Ferny in Bree. Despite all of his doubts about the hobbits he has promised to save them by life or death if he can.

And so it is on Weathertop, with the signs of Gandalf’s battle about them and the Black Riders assembling on the road beneath them that the companions must try to go on together, hoping against hope.