Sam Gamgee

“The Gate was Shut. Sam Hurled Himself Against the Bolted Brazen Plates and Fell Senseless to the Ground. He Was Out in the Darkness. Frodo Was Alive but Taken By The Enemy.” Where Can We Find Wisdom in the Ending of The Two Towers?

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 964-971

The Lord of the Rings is a book filled with wisdom. Often this is explicit, for example, the moment when Gandalf says to Frodo in the study in Bag End, in speaking of his decision to show mercy to Gollum, that “even the wise cannot see all ends”; and often it is expressed through the actions of wise figures in the story. But in the final pages of The Two Towers we see Sam’s desperate but ultimately futile efforts to catch up with the orcs who have taken Frodo’s body, and we overhear a conversation between Shagrat and Gorbag, the two commanders of the orc companies of Cirith Ungola and Minas Morgul. We learn much from what they say, especially the fact that Frodo is still alive, but we do not learn much wisdom. That is unless you count it as a kind of wisdom to learn from Shagrat and Gorbag how to survive in a world in which the only thing that matters is power.

Let us determine right here that we do not wish to learn the wisdom of the orcs. That even if the time might come in which they and their masters rule the world we will continue to refuse to live by their example and to continue to choose to speak truth, seek for beauty wherever we can find it, and to do whatever good we can, even if we have to pay for this choice with our lives.

We have made our choice. It is the choice that Sam makes in the Nameless Land, and continues to make, even when Frodo becomes incapable of making any choice beyond taking one step of excruciating pain after another. But what of the choices that Sam makes in the last pages of The Two Towers? Can we find any wisdom here?

I said in my last post on this blog that Sam is probably not capable of constructing an argument from first principles. I think that I may have been unfair to him. Listen to these words that he says to himself he learns that Frodo is still alive.

“I got it all wrong!” he cried. “I knew I would. Now they’ve got him, the devils! the filth! Never leave your master, never, never: that was my right rule. And I knew it in my heart. May I be forgiven! Now I’ve got to get back to him. Somehow, somehow!”

These are brave words, even heroic, but are they wise? What would have happened if brave Sam had been found beside Frodo’s body, or in making a futile effort to carry it to a place of safety? I think that we know the answer. Either the orcs would have carried two prisoners off to Barad-dûr or they would have taken Frodo alive while leaving his faithful servant dead upon the path. Sam would have died bravely, maybe even leaving some orcs dead around his body, but Frodo would still be a prisoner and the Ring would have been found. All would have been for nothing.

As it is, Frodo may have been taken but Sam is still free and the Ring has not been found. And as we will see when we next return to their story in The Return of the King, not only will the orcs have carried Frodo into Mordor but on finding his priceless mithril coat a fight for its possession will break out between the orcs of Cirith Ungol and of Minas Morgul and Sam will be able to rescue Frodo without having to strike a single blow.

So what wisdom can we learn? Do we learn that all thought, all planning, is useless? That everything that happens in the world is merely one random event after another? Of course not. Sam is only there to take advantage of his luck because he is deeply principled. If he was guided merely by self interest he would be back in the Shire offering his support to Lotho Sackville-Baggins as he seizes control through a coup d’etat. He would simply swap one master for another. No, it is essential that Sam is a hobbit who loves Frodo, and who seeks truth, beauty and goodness, even and, perhaps most especially, in the darkest places. Sam maybe unaware of the Power that is at work in the world, the Power that meant Bilbo to find the Ring and Frodo to receive it from Bilbo. His only prayer is that the Lady, that is Galadriel, will look after his master. We might think that this prayer is less than adequate but it is honoured nonetheless. Perhaps at the end what we do learn is that the deepest wisdom is not cleverness but goodness. It is Sam’s goodness that is honoured, so that when the gate of Cirith Ungol is opened to him he can enter and set Frodo free.

“Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow.” Sam’s Grief For Frodo in Shelob’s Lair.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 955-956

Shelob is defeated and she lies in terrible pain in the innermost recesses of her lair. Sam has achieved the impossible, a heroic deed beyond imagining and for the briefest of moments the exhilaration of victory floods his whole being.

But then reality strikes a blow that Shelob never could. Frodo lies beside him and all Sam’s efforts to revive him are utterly useless and in vain.

“Frodo, Mr. Frodo!” he called. “Don’t leave me here alone! It’s your Sam calling. Don’t go where I can’t follow! Wake up, Mr. Frodo! O Wake up, Frodo, me dear, me dear. Wake up!”

In an interview that Tolkien’s daughter, Priscilla, once gave for a film about her father she spoke about the lifelessness of the whodunit and about how, once you had worked it out or had it revealed to you you never needed to go back to it. But how, when a passage of writing had once moved you deeply that feeling would return each time you came back to it. This is such a passage. Sam’s grief in this moment is utterly real and it strikes you with devastating effect every time you come to this part of the story.

It is all too much for him. He dashes about, heedless of his own safety, “stabbing the air, and smiting the stones, and shouting challenges.” At this moment he would gladly fight Shelob again and again so overwhelming is his despair.

“He’s dead!” he said. “Not asleep, dead!”

It does not matter that we know the story, have read the book, maybe many times, seen the film, and know that “her ladyship” does not kill her prey outright but stuns them with sufficient venom so that she can eat them alive at her leisure later on knowing that they will be helpless to resist her. It does not matter that we know that Frodo will awaken later, a prisoner of the orcs in the tower of Cirith Ungol. All we know at this moment is what we feel as we wait beside Sam in his grief, his desolation.

Tolkien experienced grief and loss in many ways during his life, losing his mother when just a boy, then most of his closest friends in the trenches during the Great War. When C.S Lewis died in 1963 he described the experience as if it were “an axe blow near the roots”. In the same film in which Priscilla Tolkien gave an interview about her father an old interview with the Professor himself was used. At one point Tolkien pulls a piece of paper from his pocket and reads some words written by the French feminist philosopher, Simone de Beauvoir.

“There is no such thing as a natural death because nothing that happens to a man is ever natural, since his presence calls the world into question. All men must die: but for every man his death is an accident and, even if he knows it and consents to it, an unjustifiable violation.” (From An Easy Death by Simone de Beauvoir).

Apart from being a little taken aback that the so-called fusty old reactionary, as many have regarded Tolkien, was capable of quoting the author of The Second Sex, we also need to consider what he was trying to say through this quotation. In the same interview he declares that the central theme of The Lord of the Rings is death. The inescapable nature of death, of the desire to escape it, and as de Beauvoir says, the unnaturalness of death. Surely it is this unnaturalness, this sense that every death is unjustifiable and a violation, that Sam protests against at this moment, raging against Frodo’s death in helpless fury. Surely it is impossible that Frodo can die? Surely impossible that Frodo can die and Sam have to continue to live? Is it not all some outrageous accident that can be overcome?

But Sam is ridiculously helpless against this violation. All he can do is to decide what to do next, even with the sense beating against the walls of his heart that none of it means anything anymore.

Tolkien beats our hearts many times in his story with this sense, at the fall of Gandalf in Moria, at the death of Boromir, at the moment when Éomer sees his sister’s body by the empty garments of the Lord of the Nazgûl whom she has just slain. He never seeks to flinch from the full horror of death. But neither does he hide from the sense, absurd though it might seem at the time, that we have to go on even if, as Aragorn said after Gandalf’s fall, “We must go on without hope”.

“Night Always Had Been, and Always Would Be, And Night Was All.” Frodo and Sam Enter Shelob’s Lair. The Dark Journeys of The Lord of the Rings.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 939-942

Frodo and Sam follow Gollum into Shelob’s Lair and enter a darkness such as they had not known since the passage through Moria. But at least in Moria there had been a sense of space and a movement of air. “Here the air was still, stagnant, heavy and sound fell dead. They walked as it were in a black vapour wrought of veritable darkness itself that, as it was breathed, brought blindness not only to the eyes but to the mind, so that even the memory of colours and of forms and of any light faded out of thought. Night always had been, and always would be, and night was all.”

The theme of the dark journey is one that repeats throughout The Lord of the Rings. The journey through Moria that ends in Gandalf’s fall, Aragorn’s passage of the Paths of the Dead with Legolas and Gimli, and here, Frodo and Sam in Shelob’s Lair.

This is a theme that runs through European mythology. Perhaps the most famous example being the journey of Odysseus into Hades in order to meet the blind prophet, Tiresias, and to learn what would befall him in his journey home to Ithaca from the war at Troy. But perhaps readers of Tolkien should turn to another example because he himself would have done so. Tolkien chose to draw from northern European sources because he wished to place his own theology within that world. He was particularly drawn to stories from Finland known as the Kalevala and in particular the tale of the hero, Leminķäinen. Leminķäinen was sent on a journey into the land of the dead, Tuonela, in order to kill the black swan that guarded it. He was killed himself by a blind cowherd and thrown into the waters of the river that runs through Tuonela before being restored to life by his divine mother.

We might think more about Tolkien’s love affair with the Finnish language and the mythology that flowed from it on another occasion but here we will move on from the tale of Leminķäinen to another telling of a dark journey, perhaps one of the greatest of all European literature, the Divine Comedy by Dante (1265-1321). At the opening of the poem, here translated by Dorothy L. Sayers, herself a member of the Inklings, we read these words.

Midway this way of life we're bound upon, 
I woke to find myself in a dark wood, 
Where the right road was wholly lost and gone. 

Ay me! How hard to speak of it- that rude 
And rough and stubborn forest! the mere breath 
Of memory stirs the old fear in the blood;

It is so bitter, it goes nigh to death;
Yet there I gained such good, that to convey 
The tale, I'll write what else I found therewith.

The poet, lost upon his journey “in a dark wood” is at the very gates of hell, above which are written the words:

Lay down all hope, you that go in by me.

Of course we should not try to draw parallels that are too exact between the dark journeys described here, nor are they an exhaustive list. We might add the winter journeys of Beowulf into the fenland in search of Grendel’s mother or Gawain in a search of the Green Knight, both stories that Tolkien knew and translated into modern English. But what they all have in common is that they cannot be escaped. In every tale the hero must take the dark journey that “goes nigh to death” in order to achieve their goal and even find good for themselves.

Frodo’s hell is the journey through Shelob’s Lair into captivity in the tower of Cirith Ungol and the agony of the passage through Mordor to Mount Doom. His purgatory (and we can use this word because Tolkien does himself) is his healing in the Undying Lands. We are not told of his paradise but I think we can be assured that he found it, not as an achievement but as a gift. Whatever work that any of us do in order to pass through hell and purgatory can only take us so far, If we are to enter paradise we can only do so as a gift of pure grace and love. I think that we can be assured that by the time Frodo had completed his “gentle purgatory” as Tolkien called it he knew that whatever came next was exactly that.

But first must come his dark journey through Shelob’s Lair.

“Sleep Then, Master. Lay Your Head in My Lap.” Some Thoughts on Sam’s Love For Frodo.

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

In the last post on my blog we watched Frodo shyly, uncertainly, begin to express his feelings regarding Sam. Frodo imagines a father reading the story of his and Sam’s adventures to his child and that child saying to his father:

“And Frodo wouldn’t have got far without Sam, would he, dad?”

It’s the closest that either Frodo or Sam have come to expressing how they feel about each other. Frodo is telling Sam that he needs him and that Sam has come to mean a lot to him. As we saw last time this isn’t a democratic relationship, a partnership of equals. Sam has no problem in calling Frodo, Master. Neither does he feel demeaned in any way in doing so. We have looked at other master-servant relationships in recent weeks, in particular that of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, but in the 20th century two such relationships come immediately to my mind. Dorothy Sayers creation of Lord Peter Wimsey and his servant, Bunter, and P.G Wodehouse’s creation of Bertie Wooster and his servant, Jeeves. In the former case the relationship began in the First World War in which Bunter served as Lord Peter’s batman. The relationship between them remains formal but it is laced with deep mutual respect, trust and considerable affection. Sayers and Tolkien knew one another, Sayers joining the Inklings from time to time and both shared a similar view of society although Sayers was more critical of it as she showed in her story, Gaudy Night, for example. Wodehouse’s wonderful joke in his Jeeves and Wooster stories is that everyone (apart from Bertie himself) is aware that Jeeves possesses a competence that Wooster entirely lacks but Jeeves is more than content to play the game that Wooster is the master and he the servant.

As we have already discussed, the relationship between Frodo and Sam is based upon Tolkien’s memory of his batman in the trenches. In this respect it is closer to the relationship between Peter Wimsey and his servant, Bunter. But I cannot quite imagine a scene in one of Dorothy Sayers stories ending with Lord Peter lying in Bunter’s lap as it does here with Frodo and Sam.

Many of my readers will be aware that some people in the LBGTQ world have claimed the relationship between Frodo and Sam as queer. I confess that I do not understand the various nuances in queer relationships enough to be able to dismiss this assertion completely out of hand. I am also aware, based upon my life as a straight man, that however straightforward any of my friendships have been with women over the years, I have come to practice a certain reserve, a caution, to prevent the crossing of boundaries. I say this because I do not know all the feelings that Sam, in particular, has for Frodo. But of one thing I am sure, and that is that Sam is deeply respectful of boundaries. They have been ingrained in him by his culture since birth. I only say this because I do not want to simply dismiss the deep love that Sam has for Frodo as if it doesn’t matter or even exist. I am only certain that it exists within carefully, even painfully formed boundaries.

There are boundaries in the relationship between Frodo and Sam but there is also deep tenderness, especially on Sam’s part. And Tolkien is not afraid to show this even though he is describing a relationship between two men. Sam will draw upon this tenderness again and again as the two hobbits draw ever closer to Mount Doom and Frodo withdraws ever further from him as the Ring tightens its grip upon Frodo’s heart. Indeed it is probably only this tenderness that will see them through to their goal together.

As I conclude this reflection I need to make a decision. Is the relationship between Frodo and Sam queer or not? I am going to come down on the side of saying that it is not. And the reason why I am going to make this choice is because I believe it is possible to separate tenderness from sexual attraction. From my experience women are much more capable of taking the risk of expressing tenderness without confusing it with romantic attraction than are men. I regard this as a unhappy shortcoming in many men who struggle with both giving and receiving tenderness. I would argue that one of the characters in The Lord of the Rings who will benefit most from Sam’s considerable ability to show tenderness will be Rosie Cotton who will marry him and bear his children. So will those children as well.

Sam brings his tender heart to his marriage to Rosie Cotton.

“Frodo Wouldn’t Have Got Far Without Sam, Would He Dad?” Frodo Thinks About the Place of Sam Gamgee in His Story and About Both of Them in The Great Tale.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 931-935

Frodo and Sam have come a long way since Gandalf unceremoniously pulled Sam by the ear through the study window at Bag End. And they have travelled far since Frodo’s attempt to escape from all his friends across the Anduin to the Emyn Muil after Boromir’s betrayal and his attempt to take the Ring from Frodo by force. At that point in the story Frodo greeted Sam’s heroic effort to catch up with him, risking his life in the waters of the mighty river, with the words:

“Of all the confounded nuisances you are the worst, Sam!”

The road from the breaking of the Fellowship to the place just below the tunnel into Mordor in the pass of Cirith Ungol has only been a few days but during that time the bonds of friendship between Frodo and Sam have begun to grow deep. Frodo takes the opportunity using the gentle game that he and Sam are playing as Sam imagines Frodo as a character in the kind of story that he loved to hear when he was a child to express something of how he has come to feel about him.

“Why, Sam,” he said, “to hear you somehow makes me as merry as if the story was already written. But you’ve left out one of the chief characters: Samwise the stouthearted. ‘I want to hear more about Sam, dad. Why don’t they put in more of his talk, dad? That’s what I like. it makes me laugh. And Frodo wouldn’t have got far without Sam, would he, dad?'”

This short speech displays much of the struggle that men have to say what they really feel. It is the last sentence that gets closest to this for Frodo. “I wouldn’t have got very far without you, Sam.” But this shy expression of feeling is wrapped up in teasing and in all the careful formality of relationships between classes that typified the early twentieth century world that Frodo and Sam live in and which they carry into the pre-modern heroic world of the central narrative of The Lord of the Rings. And in passing we might note here how seemingly effortless this travel between worlds is. We hardly notice that that all this conversation about heroic literature takes place in a lighthearted conversation between an officer and his batman (a servant to an officer in the British military) on the front line during the Great War of 1914-18. Are we in the trenches of that terrible conflict or are we in the story of Beren and Lúthien from the First Age of Arda? In fact we are in both stories but most importantly of all, the heroic tale recounted in The Silmarilion is legitimately brought into the twentieth century conversation and re-enchants it.

Sam is the first to point this out, speaking of the tale of Beren and Lúthien.

“But that’s a long tale, of course, and goes on past the happiness and into grief and beyond it- and the Silmaril went on and came to Eärendil. And why sir, I never thought of it before! We’ve got some of the light of it in that star-glass that the Lady gave you! Why, to think of it, we’re in the same tale still! Its going on. Don’t the great tales never end?”

Some may recall that Bilbo used words very much like this in his despairing cry of, “Don’t adventures ever have an end?” in the hall of fire in Rivendell when he met Frodo there. Both the tragedy and comedy of life come down to each of us from the ancient stories and we must inherit them both. The point is, and Tolkien vividly brings this to life here, is that our lives in modernity are not hermetically sealed against the heroic tales of the past. They still live in us and we in them.

“I Wonder What Sort of a Tale We’ve Fallen Into?” Sam Gamgee Continues to Think About His and Frodo’s Experience.

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

When I first read Sam’s thoughts about the ancient tales that were to be recorded in The Silmarilion, tales such as that of Beren and Lúthien and their journey to Thangorodrim to wrest a Silmaril from Morgoth’s iron crown they meant nothing to me beyond the lines that I had read of The Lay of Beren and Lúthien in the first book of The Lord of the Rings when Aragorn recounted the story to the hobbits in the camp below Weathertop. I had no idea that these words related to a work upon which Tolkien had spent most of his adult life, the creation of a legendarium within which The Lord of the Rings played just a part.

I did not know these stories but Sam did; and so did Frodo. These characters that Tolkien created came to the early readers of The Lord of the Rings with inner lives that had been formed in a way that no others ever had been in an imaginary work. So as Sam spoke of the story of Beren and Lúthien to Frodo both of them could picture the characters in their mind’s eye and both of them knew what had led those characters to make the journey to Thangorodrim and to achieve the impossible task that lay before them.

See Alan Lee’s wonderful evocation of the journey of Beren and Lúthien to Thangorodrim that is on the front cover of Christopher Tolkien’s edited version of his father’s writings of that story.

It is not possible within this limited space to recount the whole of this story. You will need to read it either within The Silmarilion or in Beren and Lúthien, both of which were lovingly and masterfully prepared for publication from his father’s writings by Christopher Tolkien. There you will read the story that holds such an important place within the imagination that Frodo and Sam both share.

If you do decide to do this then you might come to the conclusion that Sam has become a little too full of himself. Who does he think that he is to compare himself to such an heroic figure such as Beren? Of course the point is that he is not comparing himself with the great hero of old. It is Frodo of whom he is speaking.

“I wonder if we shall ever be put into songs or tales. We’re in one, of course; but I mean: put into words, you know, told by the fireside, or read out of a great big book with red and black letters, years and years afterwards. And people will say: ‘Let’s hear about Frodo and the Ring!”

As far as Sam is concerned, his part in the story is not particularly important. He is a kind of Sancho Panza to Don Quixote as his master travels about Spain engaged in adventures of medieval chivalry. His task is simply to look after his master and not to do anything that is particularly heroic himself.

Now the adventures of Don Quixote, and his faithful servant, Sancho Panza, in Miguel de Cervantes’ tale, bare some similarity to Frodo and Sam’s. If Sam knew Cervantes’ story he would almost certainly think of himself as a figure like Sancho Panza. But Frodo is no Don Quixote. His adventures are not illusory. He does not tilt at windmills imagining them to be knights at a medieval joust. His task is deadly serious. He has been given an impossible journey to undertake. One upon which the whole world depends. The likelihood is that neither he nor Sam will survive, either to tell the tale or to hear it told.

And there is one thing more. Sancho Panza’s role in his story was to keep his master from getting into too much trouble and to patch things up after they got a little too out of hand. Sam is a hero in his own right and Frodo recognises this, even if he speaks of it here in humorous tones.

“To hear you somehow makes me as merry as if the story was already written. But you’ve left out one of the chief characters: Samwise the stouthearted.”

Frodo speaks in this way because he wants to deflect attention from himself. In fact from both of them. As far as he is concerned he is no hero. Just as Sam puts it he has fallen into a story in which he has no right to be and he wishes that it could simply be done with. But his heart has been cheered by Sam and by the story to which Sam has referred. He is ready to go on and to walk into the darkness with some sense that his journey has meaning.

“I Am Too Late. All is Lost”. Frodo’s Struggle With Despair Outside Minas Morgul.

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

The overwhelming force that is the army of Minas Morgul has passed down the valley on its way to assault th6e city of Minas Tirith and Frodo is left alone in the shadows at the beginning of the long climb to Cirith Ungol with Sam and Gollum.

Suddenly, despite his escape from the Lord of the Nazgûl, Frodo is overcome by despair.

“Frodo stirred. And suddenly his heart went out to Faramir. ‘The storm has burst at last,’ he thought. ‘This great array of spears and swords is going to Osgiliath. Will Faramir get across in time? He guessed it, but did he know the hour? And who can now hold the fords when the King of the Nine Riders is come? And other armies will come. I am too late. All is lost. I tarried on the way. All is lost. Even if my errand is performed, no one will ever know. There will be no one I can tell. It will be in vain.’ Overcome with weakness he wept. And still the host of Morgul crossed the bridge.”

“And still the host of Mordor crossed the bridge”. Alan Lee depicts the scene that Frodo saw as the Witch King leads his army to war.

Perhaps the choreography that I spoke of in my last post on The Two Towers has had its effect, albeit one that was unintended. The shock and awe was all intended to drain morale from the defenders of Minas Tirith but it is Frodo who is lying on the ground, all hope gone and no strength left to continue his journey. We can imagine that repeated phrase, “all is lost”, resounding over and over again within him, gaining an ever tightening grasp upon his heart. And there is still the terrible climb up the stairs of Cirith Ungol yet to be attempted; a task that will require all the strength that he possesses.

At a moment like this when all seems lost something has to pierce the darkness and for Frodo this something is one of exquisite simplicity. We must assume that Frodo must have fallen into a swoon, overwhelmed by the horror of what he has witnessed, or at least to have appeared to have done so, because it is Sam’s voice that breaks through to him.

“Wake up, Mr. Frodo! Wake up!”

And in those simple words, just for the briefest of moments, Frodo is transported back to the Shire and breakfast is about to be served. Of course the moment cannot last and the awful reality must return but when it does Frodo has strength to resist it. He knows that it is likely that all is in vain, that Gondor will fall before the power that has come against it but it is almost as if this no longer matters. “That what he had to do, he had to do, if he could, and that whether Faramir or Aragorn or Elrond or Galadriel or Gandalf or anyone else ever knew about it was beside the purpose.”

The early fathers of the Christian Church taught that an essential foundation of the spiritual life was a renunciation of despair and this is true. For Frodo this renunciation is expressed in the words “what he had to do, he had to do”. And it is worth emphasising here also, that for Frodo, and for many others also, the spiritual life is not some state of endless bliss but a bloody minded refusal to give in, a determination to go on putting one foot in front of the other. Tolkien puts this wonderfully as he concludes this passage by saying of Frodo that “he prepared to take the upward road”.

Frodo does renounce despair at this point in the story and there is a sense in which he will have to repeat that renunciation over and over again before the end of his journey and when his mind can no longer do so his body will have to do it and when his body can no longer do so Sam will have to carry him and renounce despair for him. But just before the renunciation that we have described here there is that moment of pure grace when another reality than the one he must return to breaks in from outside through Sam’s voice and simple words. This moment of grace will not always be repeated but it comes here, just Frodo has to take the upward road, and it is enough, though barely. Frodo will make the journey to Orodruin.

“They Cannot Conquer For Ever!” Frodo Finds the Consolation of Nature and The Desolation of Darkness at The Cross-roads.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 915-919

The journey from the fragrant woodlands of Ithilien to the Cross-roads is marked by a growing sense of threat as, although it is only afternoon, a deepening darkness takes hold of the land, as if, as Sam puts it, the worst storm that ever was is about to break over their heads. The very ground beneath their feet begins to quiver as “a rolling and rumbling noise” is heard all about them.

Frodo descends into deep gloom.

“I’m afraid our journey is drawing to an end.”

The Cross-roads themselves are surrounded by ancient trees “of vast size, very ancient it seemed, and still towering high, though their tops were gaunt and broken, as if tempest and lightening-blast had swept across them, but had failed to kill them or shake their fathomless roots.”

On this occasion nature fails to give comfort to the hobbits. The trees seem to glower over them and as they stand at the Cross-roads and looks eastward towards the Morgul Vale Frodo is “filled with dread”.

But, at that moment, he turns westward as he becomes aware within the deepening gloom that a light is shining.

“Turning towards it, he saw, beyond an arch of boughs, the road to Osgiliath running almost as straight as a stretched ribbon down, down, into the West. There, far away, beyond sad Gondor now overwhelmed in shade, the Sun was sinking, finding at last the hem of the great slow-rolling pall of cloud, and falling in an ominous fire towards the yet unsullied Sea.”

The light of the setting sun falls upon the statue of a king at the centre of the Cross-roads and at first all the hobbits are aware of is the way in which orcs have desecrated it. The body of the king has been decapitated and its once proud head replaced by “a round rough-hewn stone, rudely painted by savage hands in the likeness of a grinning face with one large red eye in the midst of its forehead”.

But then in the last gleams of light cast by the setting sun Frodo sees the old head of the king lying by the side of the road and sees that it has been crowned again. Not this time with gold but a “trailing plant with flowers like small white stars had bound itself across the brows as if in reverence for the fallen king, and in the crevices of his stony hair yellow stonecrop gleamed”.

This is a moment in which both dread and hope are held together in utter poignancy. Briefly it is hope that rises in Frodo’s heart and he declares that “they cannot conquer for ever!” before the light is extinguished and it seems that they have been cast into everlasting night.

Which is more real? Are the last gleams of light that fall upon the crown of flowers more real than the darkness that follow them? We are reminded here of the words that St John writes as Judas goes out from the upper room to betray his lord and friend into the hands of his enemies. “And it was night”. Here too we see the struggle between light and dark playing out within a single moment and Tolkien surely alludes to the words of St John as he ends the chapter by saying that “the Sun dipped and vanished, and as if at the shuttering of a lamp, black night fell”.

It is hard not to feel the absolute triumph of darkness at this moment and yet too, the glimpse of hope in the refusal of life to allow the memory of the dignity of the king to be lost forever cannot be forgotten. This moment at the Cross-roads is one of the great moments in The Lord of the Rings. We think too of the crowing of the cockerell at the broken gates of Minas Tirith as day dawns and the sound of the horns of the Riders of Rohan is heard amidst the wreckage. The struggle between light and dark has to be fought within every human heart and the temptation to despair to be fought against, sometimes with every fibre of our being. It may not be his shout of defiance that carries Frodo onwards into his own struggle against the dark but neither is it forgotten as he shoulders his burden once more and marches into the very heart of the darkness. Frodo is not carried by lofty thoughts as he trudges eastward but neither does he give up. His own renunciation of despair is seen in every hard fought step that he takes.

“Luck Served You There; but You Seized Your Chance With Both Hands One Might Say.” Some more thoughts on the empty Morgul Vale that Frodo and Sam will walk through.

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

In my last post we thought about the chain of events that lead to the strange fact that the road from Ithilien into Mordor is empty at just the very moment in which Frodo and Sam need to walk down it. Instead of companies of orcs and other allies of Mordor constantly travelling up and down it, the road in the Morgul Vale is left free for two hobbits and their guide to walk along it unhindered.

The quotation that I have chosen for this piece does not come from the passage that I am thinking about here but from the chapter entitled Flotsam and Jetsam when Merry and Pippin tell the story of their adventures to Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli amidst the wreck of Isengard after it has been destroyed by the Ents. Pippin tells his companions how, by ,means of a fallen orc blade, he was able to cut the rope that his wrists had been bound by . Gimli responds to this approvingly.

“The cutting of the bands on your wrists, that was smart work!” said Gimli. “Luck served you there; but you seized your luck with both hands, one might say.”

In his study on the thought of J.R.R Tolkien, Tom Shippey considers the role of luck within The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R Tolkien, Author of The Century, Harper Collins 2001, pp. 143-147). Shippey tackles the assertion of some of Tolkien’s critics that his story is full of “biased fortune” and so cannot be taken seriously. In speaking of Gollum’s fall into the fires of Mount Doom that destroys the Ring, Shippey argues that “it is clearly not just an accident” but the direct, if unintended consequence, of many conscious choices. The word that Shippey chooses for this is the Old English word, wyrd, a word that both Shippey and Tolkien knew because both of them held the same chair at Oxford University in Philology, the study of language. Modern readers of English will, of course, immediately recognise the similarity between this Old English word and the modern word, weird. They might also note, with some sadness, the way in which a language that once had the capacity to express human experience with great subtlety has turned the words that were able to do this into banalities.

The Old English word that Gimli might have used when he spoke of Pippin’s luck might well have been wyrd. It would have meant something that had happened, something over which Pippin had no control, such as the sudden and unexpected availability of a sharp blade that Pippin was able to use and to change his fortunes. The same thing might be said about Bilbo’s finding of the Ring. The same thing could be certainly be said of the sudden emptying of the roads into Mordor. In every one of these cases luck, or wyrd, serves those who are able to take advantage of these happenings. But Pippin, Bilbo and then Frodo and Sam, each have to take seize their luck, to take advantage of it.

Frodo had to leave the relative security of the refuge of Henneth Annûn and put his trust in a treacherous guide who would eventually betray him. In walking down the Morgul Vale and then climbing the stair to Cirith Ungol he made his way directly into Shelob’s Lair and was poisoned by her. He only entered Mordor on the backs of orcs and his journey thereafter to Orodruin was one of unrelenting agony as the Ring that he bore slowly but inevitably wore down his resistance to its malignant power. By the time he reached the Cracks of Doom he had no strength left to resist it. At the end he needed an enemy to enable him to fulfil his mission and this enemy did so by biting off his finger. If after all this Gimli were to say to him that he seized his luck with both hands then Frodo might well reply that Gimli had a poor idea of luck. Frodo would be right but then so too would be Gimli. This luck truly opened the way to the mountain and it took the Ring into the Fire. But in seizing it Frodo had to pay a terrible price. He could never find peace again in Middle-earth.

” Good Night, Captain, my Lord,” Sam Said to Faramir. “You Took the Chance, Sir.” Praise From the Praiseworthy in Henneth Annûn.

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

The effort that Frodo used to speak of his mission openly at last to Faramir was the last that he was able to give that night. As he tried to stand he fell into a swoon, was caught by Faramir and laid upon a bed. Sam was about to lie in another bed beside his master’s but then he paused, bowed low before Faramir and spoke.

“Good night, Captain, my lord,” he said. “You took the chance, sir.”

“Did I so?” said Faramir.

“Yes sir, and showed your quality: the very highest.”

You can feel Faramir wince slightly as he hears these words. He comes from a strictly hierarchical society in which only those of equal or higher rank are permitted to speak so freely to one another. In Gondor only the Prince of Dol Amroth and, of course, Boromir and Denethor, would be permitted to speak to Faramir in this way. Faramir describes Sam as a “pert servant” as he responds to his words, as one who is speaking more freely than he has a right to do, but then he continues:

“But nay the praise of the praiseworthy is above all rewards.”

Faramir recognises that in Sam’s courageous service to Frodo, a service that will almost certainly cost him his life, that Sam has won the right to speak freely. The early Greek fathers of the Christian Church had a word for this freedom of speech that is close to the way Sam speaks here. They called it parrhesia, likening it to the way in which Adam was able to speak freely, openly, confidently, face to face with God in the garden, a freedom that had been restored through the obedience of Christ. In recent years some philosophers, such as Michel Foucault, have argued that this freedom of speech is a quality that belongs inherently to all humans although it always comes with a risk. If I speak frankly I may put myself in danger. But Sam is able to make himself equal to Faramir at this moment, not because of some innate quality that he possesses but because he, as Faramir recognises, is himself “praiseworthy”.

And as Faramir speaks here, perhaps he carries within himself his deep sadness that the one person whose praise he desires above all others is the one who will never give that praise to him. Faramir will never hear that praise from his father, Denethor. Eventually Denethor will learn that for a brief moment his son had the Ring of Power, the One Ring, within his grasp, but that he let it go. He will declare bitterly that Boromir would have brought him “a mighty gift” because Boromir would have done his father’s bidding. And in his anger towards Faramir Denethor will go further in his bitter criticism. He will take the love that his son’s men so clearly have for him and he will say that this is only given because his son likes to appear lordly. Faramir has nothing praiseworthy within himself. He is merely an actor; one who is playing a part.

The part that Denethor accuses his son of playing is that of a lord of Númenor. It is merely a game that Faramir indulges himself in while Gondor is in imminent danger of destruction. Faramir, the “wizard’s pupil”, as Denethor bitterly names him, has chosen to play his lordly games, to imagine himself as one of the heroes of an age long ago, to let Frodo and Sam go free, carrying the Ring with them, when what was needed was a weapon, a weapon so great that even Sauron would quail in fear before it.

Sam sees Faramir quite differently from Denethor. Faramir had the opportunity to take the Ring for himself just as Boromir had tried to do so, but he had chosen not to do so. This is a deed, as Sam sees it, worthy of the highest praise. But in one sense Sam sees things just as Denethor does. For Denethor Faramir is who who is an adopter of a pose in order to win popularity. Sam sees something else.

“You have an air too, sir, that reminds me of, of – well, Gandalf, of wizards.”

“Maybe,” said Faramir. “Maybe you discern from far away the air of Númenor. Good night!”