Sauron

“None Could Rival Her, Shelob The Great, Last Child of Ungoliant to Trouble the Unhappy World.” We learn of the History of Shelob and Her Relationship with Sauron and with Gollum.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 944-948

The contrast is almost absolute. There is Galadriel’s gift. “A light when all other lights go out”. And then there is Shelob: “she served none but herself, drinking the blood of Elves and Men, bloated and grown fat with endless brooding on her feasts, weaving webs of shadow; for all living things were her food, and her vomit darkness”.

Galadriel gives light and life and Shelob consumes everything and leaves only darkness.

“Little did she know of or cared for towers, or rings, or anything devised by mind or hand, who only desired death for all others, mind and body, and for herself a glut of life, alone, swollen till the mountains could no longer hold her up and the darkness could not contain her.”

It is this notion of an existence that is reduced to mere consumption without making, of taking without giving, that disgusts us and, maybe, frightens us. Or it would most certainly frighten us if we were ever to meet it, knowing that one who existed thus would only be interested in us as something to devour and for no other purpose.

Even Morgoth, mightiest of the Valar, who entered into what he thought had been an alliance with Shelob’s sire, Ungoliant, in order to steal the Silmarils from Valinor, an alliance with all the usual boundaries and limits, found his ally’s desire terrifying. For Ungoliant wished to consume the Silmarils too and only a company of Balrogs, armed with whips of fire, were able to drive her off their master.

The word that Tolkien uses to describe the energy that drives both Ungoliant and Shelob her daughter is lust. We tend to use this word to describe an intense sexual desire and in one regard it is clear that Shelob is not driven by this particular desire. Shelob simply wants to eat. But anyone who has ever felt lust for another person will know the temptation is just to reduce all thought of that person to an object to be consumed. This desire that is called lust, at its most potent, contains no wish to give pleasure or delight, no wish to enrich the life of the other. These wishes are irrelevancies to the one who is consumed by lust and by lust alone. Tolkien describes this well in his description of Ungoliant in The Silmarilion. In speaking of her relationship to Morgoth he writes:

“But she had disowned her Master, desiring to be mistress of her own lust, taking all things to herself to feed her emptiness”. (The Silmarilion ,Harper Collins 1999 p76)

It is that phrase, “to feed her emptiness” that describes the lust we are speaking of here most effectively. When we speak of lust in this regard then there is no difference between lust as sexual desire or lust to possess an object as Morgoth desired to possess the Silmarils even though they caused him pain, or lust to devour as Ungoliant wished to devour those jewels and Shelob wishes to devour Frodo and Sam and the Ring. All these are expressions of the same desire, the desire to feed an emptiness within. And ultimately all attempts to feed that emptiness are in vain. Tolkien describes the end of Ungoliant with a devastating finality.

“Of the fate of Ungoliant no tale tells. Yet some have said that she ended long ago, when in her uttermost famine she devoured herself at last.” (Silmarilion p.86)

All people who achieve any self knowledge will come to recognise some form of inner emptiness and the desire to fill it in some way, the desire that we call lust. We may come to fear our own emptiness and that fear may become so unbearable that any object that we can seize upon that will give even a very temporary satisfaction of our hunger will be sought. But the great spiritual teachers tell us that we do not have to fear our emptiness. We can even learn to embrace it. So Meister Eckhart, the great 14th century German mystic and theologian wrote this:

“I never ask God to give himself to me: I beg him to purify, to empty, me. If I am empty, God of his very nature is obliged to give himself to me.”

It seems that it would require a vast leap of the imagination to think of Shelob, or Sauron or Gollum embracing their emptiness as Eckhart encourages us to do but it is actually their refusal to do so that distinguishes them from Galadriel, who “passed the test” when Frodo offered the Ring to her, to take the risk as she saw it of being diminished and to go into the West, to entrust herself to God and not to make herself a private possession. Shelob could have chosen differently, Sauron certainly was offered the opportunity to do so at the end of the First Age and he refused to take it. So both he and Shelob chose their lust and rejected the emptiness that only God can fill.

A POST SCRIPT

I almost never offer an explicit spiritual reflection on The Lord of the Rings because I want to honour Tolkien’s own decision not to do so in his greatest work. He allowed his story to speak for itself which is probably why it has been the best selling work of fiction now for many years. But he comes closest to such a reflection here in Shelob’s Lair at this moment of uttermost peril both in speaking of Shelob’s and Sauron’s lust and in contrasting them to Galadriel and her gift that Frodo uses as he speaks the words from Crist, the Old English poem by Cynewulf that captured his imagination before he began to write his legendarium and which was its wellspring. And it is because of this that I have chosen to depart from my usual practice.

It is also a good moment to write differently as I will be taking a short break from these reflections. Regular readers will know that with my wife, Laura, I have been walking one of the ancient pilgrim ways to the shrine of St James in Santiago da Compostela in northern Spain for the last couple of years, making the way in two stages. We began in Biarritz in south west France in September 2023 and reached the town of Llanes last year having covered about 270 miles. This year our intention is to cover the remaining 270 miles and to complete our pilgrimage. We will be walking the Camino Primitivo across the Picos Europa mountains from Oviedo. This is so named because it is the oldest pilgrim route of all but now less often travelled. I hope to post my next reflection in Wisdom From The Lord of the Rings on Saturday 13th September and maybe to write something about the experience of completing our pilgrimage. For those of you who pray please remember us as we walk this ancient way.

“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.

“There are Locked Doors and Closed Windows in Your Mind, and Dark Rooms Behind Them… But in This I Judge That You Speak The Truth.” Faramir and Gollum in Henneth Annûn.

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

When Sauron interrogated Gollum in Barad-dûr he found to his surprise that there was an inner strength within this pathetic creature that he was unable to break. By means of his tortures he was able, at last, to learn of Baggins and the Shire but he was never able to open the “locked doors and closed windows” in Gollum’s mind or to enter “the dark rooms behind them”.

In the end Sauron deemed that he had learned all that he needed to know and that there was not enough of significance that might dwell within those dark rooms for him to continue his interrogation and so he released him. He even thought that Gollum’s malice might even be of some small use to him in the future. Little did he know that Gollum would eventually bring about his downfall.

Sauron would never acknowledge or accept that Faramir had an advantage that he, in his wisdom, had abandoned long ago. When Faramir, with Frodo’s unhappy assistance, was able to capture Gollum alive in the forbidden pool beneath Henneth Annûn he needed to find out what Gollum knew.

“Do you know the name of this place? Have you been here before?”

If Gollum was unable or unwilling to answer these questions in a satisfactory fashion Faramir would have either to kill him or to bring him captive back to Minas Tirith. No one unless they were judged to be trustworthy could know of the existence of this refuge within Ithilien. The very survival of Faramir and his men depended upon its location remaining a complete secret.

“Slowly Gollum raised his eyes and looked unwillingly into Faramir’s. All light went out of them, and they stared bleak and pale for a moment into the clear unwavering eyes of the man of Gondor. There was a still silence. Then Gollum dropped his head and shrank down, until he was squatting on the floor shivering. ‘We doesn’t know and we doesn’t want to know,’ he whimpered. ‘Never came here; never come again,'”

It is enough. Faramir has learned all that he needs to know. And he has learned this because,wholly unlike Sauron, he is a man of truth.

“I would not snare even an orc with a falsehood,” Faramir had declared to Frodo the previous day when he questioned the hobbit before his men. Faramir speaks the truth and he has an unwavering commitment to the truth and so he recognises truth and he recognises falsehood when he hears them.

We might think that Sauron was seeking for truth when he questioned Gollum in Barad-dûr. He wanted to know what the connection was between Gollum and the Ring and he wanted to know where the Ring might be found. Surely these are both expressions of truth? But Sauron has come to believe that no-one can be trusted unless they fear him and unless they fear the consequences of betrayal more than the consequences of loyalty. The servants of Sauron may have little love, if any, for their master, but they believe that his triumph is inevitable and they want to be on the winning side.

Faramir’s servants also fear his power but they love him too, knowing that he would lay down his life for them. They know that he has not separated truth from goodness and beauty. When he says that he would not even snare an orc with a falsehood they know that he speaks the truth and that he would never be false to them either. And he will not be false to Gollum. Does Gollum recognise this? Does he see anything different in Faramir that he did not see in Sauron? Probably not. For Gollum, his heart twisted by five hundred years possession of the Ring, there is only power, but at this moment the power that Faramir possesses is tempered by a love of truth, beauty and goodness and that makes all the difference.

“We Look towards Númenor That Was, and Beyond to Elvenhome That Is, and To That Which is Beyond Elvenhome and Will Ever Be”. Faramir Prepares to Eat in The Divine Presence.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 882-884

While on the journey to Henneth Annûn, Faramir had spoken to Frodo and Sam about his love for the memory, the ancientry, the beauty and the present wisdom of the city of the Men of Númenor, Minas Tirith, and his desire, therefore, to defend that city against Sauron, the Lord of Darkness. Faramir lives in a big world and before he sits to eat with his guests and his men he leads them all in a simple ceremony in which all stand and face west “in a moment of silence”.

This is the only ceremony that takes place throughout the entirety of The Lord of the Rings until the crowning of the High King of Gondor and of Arnor. There might be an argument to be made that the peoples of Middle-earth are ritually malnourished, an argument that could be made about the West in our own time, but Tolkien had good reason not to give his secondary creation a ritual structure. His creation was a mythical history of our own world but in a world before the incarnation of Christ, the True Myth as he famously explained to C.S Lewis, the moment in which myth and history became one in first century Palestine.

Faramir remembers “Elvenhome that is” as depicted by Alan Lee.

His anxiety was that any attempt to create a ritual life for his sub-creation would at best be inadequate and at worst idolatrous. There is only one place of worship built in the whole of Tolkien’s legendarium and that was built by Ar-Pharazôn, the last king of Númenor, for the worship of Morgoth because Ar-Pharazôn had been seduced by Sauron who had convinced him that Morgoth was the ultimate power of the universe. So the only place of worship was idolatrous and rejected by Elendil, the Elf-friend, and his followers, of whom Faramir was a descendant.

So when Faramir leads his men in a moment of ritual before they sit to eat it is done in silence so that there can be no danger of idolatry, the worship of that which is false. But this does not mean that there is no content to the ceremony and when Faramir explains it to Frodo he shows him the world in which he lives.

“We look towards Númenor that was, and beyond to Elvenhome that is, and to that which is beyond Elvenhome and will ever be.”

Númenor is the memory and the ancientry of which Faramir spoke upon the way. While the Númenor of Ar-Pharazôn was destroyed by a great wave by Eru Ilúvatar at the end of the Second Age Elendil escaped with his followers to Middle-earth and created there the kingdoms of Gondor and Arnor. Elendil honoured the ancient friendship that the Númenorians had enjoyed with the Elves, a friendship that meant that he fought alongside Gil-galad in the last great alliance between Elves and Men that overthrew Sauron taking the Ring from his hand. Faramir recognises this as he speaks of Elvenhome that is, Valinor that lies beyond the wreck of Númenor.

And he also recognises “that which is beyond Elvenhome and will ever be”. He recognises God, Eru Ilúvatar, the source of all being and life. Later when he takes Éowyn into his arms for the very first time he tells her of the wave that destroyed Númenor. In doing this he shows that he understands that Eru had intervened once directly in the affairs of Arda and also feels that something similar has just happened at the moment in which the Ring has gone to the Fire.

Frodo feels “strangely rustic and untutored” when Faramir explains all this to him. He recognises that Faramir lives in a bigger world than he does. Faramir probably lives in a bigger world than any of his men but because they honour him as their leader so too they honour his inner life and that which he believes. He is the greatest holder of the memory, the ancientry, the beauty and the present wisdom of his people. One man holds all of this, a fragile link with it all, but the world in which Faramir lives is not held by him. He is held by it as are his men and his people whether they do so consciously or not. Soon Faramir’s world will be assaulted by the darkness and tested to its very limits. It will stand, not because of its own might, but because of that which stands beneath, around and within it, and will hold it even and especially in its darkest moments.

“Lord Sméagol? Gollum The Great? The Gollum!” Sméagol and Gollum Debate What They Should Do About The Ring.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 826-830

An essential difference between Peter Jackson’s version of The Lord of the Rings and the story that Tolkien originally told lies in the character of Gollum and the telling of the inner debate between Gollum and Sméagol that Sam overhears.

Sam hears it because Gollum’s inner life is almost laid bare for all to see. I say almost because Gollum is still capable of deception. Sam hears Gollum speak of She and wonders who that might be but does not find out until he encounters Shelob in her lair.

Jackson gives us the same debate that Sam overhears but with a major difference. In his version the debate is between good and evil. He gives us a sense that within the miserable creature that has guided Frodo and Sam through the Dead Marshes almost as far as the Black Gate the possibility remains that good might still triumph. Indeed at this point of the story the good Sméagol does seem to triumph over the evil Gollum and the debate ends with Sméagol crying out “I’m free! I’m free!”

But Tolkien gives us a very different version of this debate. Here we see the same Gollum whose mind has been utterly overthrown by his desire for the Ring. When Gollum thinks about the promise that he made to Frodo to “serve the master of the Precious” all that he thinks about is that if he were to regain the Ring then he would be its master and so would have kept the promise. Sméagol, on the other hand, could never be described in any sense as good. In Tolkien’s version of the debate we see a pathetic cringing figure driven mainly by fear. Fear that there might be terrible consequences if he were to break the promise because the promise is held by the Ring and he fears the Ring above all things, and fear that in trying to take the Ring he might be killed because there are two hobbits and only one of him. Sméagol does have some sense of gratitude to Frodo who took the elven rope off his leg but his goodness goes little further than that. And the debate ends, not with Sméagol’s cry of joy that he is free of the control of the Ring and of his Gollum alter ego but with his hand slowly reaching out to seize the Ring, an action that is only prevented by Sam appearing to wake up.

The Ring and its corruption have a complete hold over all that Gollum or Sméagol are. The distinction that Sam makes between them as Slinker and Stinker is pretty accurate. But there is one sense in which Gollum has grown as a character during the long years of his existence. The Gollum who took the Ring by the murder of his friend was a creature with almost minimal ambition. Apart from a desire to hide and to survive all that drove him was a desire to find the roots of things and this desire sent him deep under the Misty Mountains where all he found was darkness.

This all changed when Bilbo took the Ring from him and he began his long search for it. As he searched he began to understand more and more about the thing that he had possessed for so many years and with which he had done practically nothing. And he learnt this most when he fell into the hands of Sauron, the Lord of the Ring. It was from Sauron that he learned about mastery, the ability to rule over others. That is why Gollum refers to Sauron as He. This leads Gollum to develop a fantasy life, one in which he is “Lord Sméagol? Gollum the Great? The Gollum!”. Gollum imagines himself as lord and ruler of all. A life in which he is able to exchange his pathetic cringing existence for one in which all will bow down to him, even the Nazgûl. But even then his ambition is very limited. All he desires with all his mastery is fish “three times a day, fresh from the Sea”.

Last week we thought about Sauron’s desire to see everything and to control it. Gollum’s desire is not very different and like Sauron he does not so much possess his desire but is possessed by it. He would not be the Lord of the Ring so much as to be ruled by it. And is Sauron so very different?

“The Eye: That Horrible Growing Sense of a Hostile Will That Strove With Great Power to Pierce All Shadows of Cloud, and Earth and Flesh and to See You.” The Wisdom and Power of Sauron and The Frailty of Frodo.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 822-826

When I chose to give my blog the title, Wisdom From The Lord of the Rings, it was not immediately clear to me that I would need to reflect on different and even competing kinds of wisdom and that not all of these would be life giving. St Paul understood this sense of competing wisdoms that I was slower to grasp when he wrote to the Corinthian church, “For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength”. In such a world of competing wisdoms one form might indeed appear to be foolishness to the other.

As Frodo begins to draw nearer to Mordor, having crossed the Dead Marshes with the aid of Gollum, he becomes increasingly aware of a malignant power that he understands as an Eye.

“With every step towards the gates of Mordor Frodo felt the Ring on its chain about his neck grow more burdensome. He was now beginning to feel it as an actual weight dragging him earthwards. But far more he was troubled by the Eye: so he called it to himself. It was more than the drag of the Ring that made him cower and stoop as he walked.”

Frodo called this sense of malignant power, “the Eye”, and with this we are given a sense of his inner life at this stage of his story. Of course, he first heard that name for the power from Galadriel when he offered the Ring to her in Lothlórien. And both of them shared the same experience; that of striving against a power that wanted to break into their minds and to see them.

This desire to “see” is far more than a mere exercise in surveillance. It is not Frodo and Galadriel’s shopping habits that Sauron wishes to see, or their political opinions. Sauron wants to have their innermost essence, their very reality, laid bare before him. “He gropes ever to see me and my thought. But still the door is closed!”

That word, gropes, denotes the lust that lies at the heart of Sauron’s wisdom and a pornographic stripping away of every barrier that lies between his gaze and the object of his desire. Frodo feels this too. “The Eye: that horrible growing sense of a horrible will that strove with great power to pierce all shadows of cloud, and earth and flesh, and to see you: to pin you under its deadly gaze, naked, immovable. So thin, so frail and thin, the walls were become that still warded it off.”

Sauron wants to “see” and to control. It is this desire that drove his ambition to create the Ring during the Second Age. The Ring is a technology of control. The ability to control not only the actions of others but their very wills and first of all it seeks to know that will. Even from an acquaintance with the Ring that has been very brief Frodo begins to understand this. He shows this understanding to Galadriel when he says to her: “I am permitted to wear the One Ring: why cannot I see all the others and know the thoughts of those that wear them?” The very asking of the question displays within Frodo a desire to see as Sauron desires it.

Galadriel understands this too and understands that with this desire must come the power to dominate others and it is this power that Sauron has trained through many ages and it is this that makes him different from his fellow Maia, Gandalf. Sauron and Gandalf belong to the same order of heavenly being created by Ilúvatar and with the same essential powers but Sauron has dedicated his power towards one purpose and that is domination.

And this brings us back to that quotation from St Paul with which I began this reflection. Paul distinguishes human and divine wisdom and power. For us wisdom tends to be related to power, to our desire to achieve mastery over all things, to eliminate risk and uncertainty as far as is possible, essentially to make of the cosmos a machine that is entirely predictable and entirely under our control. I say our but as Gandalf pointed out to Saruman who shares this desire, ultimately only one will can achieve this power and until that moment comes we all live in a reality which is an endless struggle to be that totally knowing,dominating and controlling will. Gandalf, and I would add, St Paul as well, understand a very different kind of wisdom that does not want to dominate in this sense but wishes to see in order to delight in the one that is seen. And in order to achieve this kind of seeing there has first to be a casting away of the desire and the means to achieve domination and this is what Frodo is doing. He is trying to cast away the Ring in such a way that no-one will ever be able to use it again.

The Divine Foolishness that is wiser than human wisdom.

“To…Perceive The Unimaginable Hand and Mind of Fëanor at Their Work.” What Would Gandalf Want to See in The Palantír of Orthanc?

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 778-784

Gandalf and Pippin are sitting upon Shadowfax, flying across the plains of Rohan towards Edoras and then onwards to Minas Tirith and to war. A Nazgûl has just flown over them, a messenger from Barad-dûr to Isengard. Sauron wants to know why Saruman has not come to the Orthanc-stone. Soon a second messenger will be sent to bring Pippin back for further questioning but there will be no captive to send because Pippin is not in Orthanc. Sauron will want to know why he has seen a hobbit in the palantír and yet nothing is given to the Nazgûl. He will suspect treachery.

As they ride Gandalf thinks about the palantír and whether he might have wrested control of the stone from Sauron. He has already told Aragorn and Théoden that he is relieved that it was Pippin and not himself who first looked into it, that he has not been revealed to the Dark Lord, that there is still a brief window of doubt in Sauron’s mind that they might yet exploit, but he still wonders what he might have seen had he still had the palantír.

“Even now my heart desires to test my will upon it, to see if I could not wrench it from him and turn it where I would- to look across the wide seas of water and of time to Tirion the Fair, and perceive the unimaginable hand and mind of Fëanor at their work, while both the White Tree and Golden were in flower.”

When The Lord of the Rings was first published in 1954 only a handful of people knew anything about Fëanor or the two trees. In his famous review of The Hobbit C.S Lewis revealed that every character that readers meet in Wilderland spring from “deep sources in our blood and tradition” but he was one of the few who knew what they were. It was not until after Tolkien died in 1973 that The Silmarillion was published thanks to the work of his son, Christopher. That changed the way that everyone read The Lord of the Rings. At last we knew the back story.

In The Silmarillion Fëanor is a figure who is both incredibly gifted and yet deeply flawed. When Morgoth and Ungoliant, the monstrous spider creature and mother of Shelob, destroy the two trees, the source of light in Aman, the Valar turn to Fëanor who has caught the light within the Silmarils that he made. They ask for his help asking him to give up the Silmarils so that they might become the source of light in the uttermost west. Fëanor refuses to give them up but Morgoth steals them. Against the will of the Valar Fëanor leads the Noldor to Middle-earth to regain the Silmarils but he is slain in battle against Morgoth.

Gandalf’s desires to see Fëanor at work, to see the greatest maker in the whole history of Arda. Compared to Fëanor Sauron is a craftsman of little skill. Gandalf tells Pippin that Sauron could never have made the palantíri. He could only use them. Fëanor’s hand and mind are “unimaginable”. In him we see the ability of the Elves, the first born of the earth, to co-create with God, and we see Fëanor as the greatest of them. The early Fathers of the Church used to speak of a proper pride in our work. They spoke of parrhesia, of being able to speak freely to God, to look God in the eye and to say, “I have done this”. This, the Fathers taught, was lost in the Fall, as Humankind became competitors with God and not co-creators, but it is restored through the Incarnation. Fëanor’s pride, his desire to keep his own work as a private possession, brought him into competition with the Valar and with Ilúvatar himself. He was corrupted by Morgoth, coming to view the Valar with suspicion, believing that they wanted to use the things he had made for their own narrow self interest. Perhaps his death was a mercy. Had he defeated Morgoth might he have become a Dark Lord in his place?

“I Do Not Wish For Mastery.” If Not Mastery, What Does Gandalf Wish For?

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 762-766

The accusation came first from Saruman when Gandalf told him that he could only have his freedom if he surrendered the Key of Orthanc and his staff, to be returned later if he merited them.

“Later! Yes, when you also have the Keys of Barad-dûr itself, I suppose; and the crowns of seven kings, and the rods of the Five Wizards, and have purchased yourself a pair of boots many sizes larger than those that you wear now”

Last week we thought about how in these words Saruman reveals his own desire, It is he that desires mastery over all things. As Gandalf puts it, “he will not serve, only command.”

Pippin asks Gandalf what he will do to Saruman and receives this reply.

“I? I will do nothing to him. I do not wish for mastery.”

The idea of mastery is often reflected upon in The Lord of the Rings. The title itself, the only title that Tolkien really liked, is about mastery. It is about Sauron’s desire to rule over all things. So is Gandalf saying that mastery is of its very nature wrong? And if Gandalf does not seek for mastery then what does he wish for?

There is a moment in the story when we are given a very different picture of mastery than the one that Saruman and Sauron give us. It comes in the house of Tom Bombadil when Frodo asks Goldberry who Tom Bombadil is.

Goldberry replies” “He is the Master of wood, water and hill.”

Observant readers of Tolkien will immediately recognise one of his characteristic capital letters here in the word, Master. Tolkien uses them in the middle of a sentence when he wants to draw our attention to the importance of something. In this case it is Tom Bombadil’s authority over everything. It is because of this authority that Old Man Willow has to free Merry and Pippin. But when Frodo asks if this means that the land belongs to him Goldberry replies in distress:

“No indeed!.. That would indeed be a burden… The trees and the grasses and all things growing or living in the land belong each to themselves.”

In the case of Tom Bombadil Tolkien gives us a glimpse into Eden before the Fall. I wonder if the reason why the chapters in which the hobbits stay with Tom and Goldberry are so beloved of the readers of The Lord of the Rings is because, just for a moment, just after we have been introduced to the Nazgûl for the first time, and just before the hobbits captivity in the barrow, we rest briefly in a place of pure and childlike innocence. Tom is Master in the sense, as Goldberry puts it, “No-one has ever caught old Tom walking in the forest… He has no fear.”

In Tom we see a picture of authority without ownership. It is the authority of a great musician in relation to their instrument and the music they play upon it. The musician gives us no anxiety that the music will be too much for them and while we may admire their mastery it is the music to which we give our ultimate attention. The music belongs to itself and a truly great musician allows us to enter a space that we ourselves do not control but within which we experience delight, wonder, exhilaration, peace and sometimes terror.

So mastery is not, of itself, an evil. In fact, in the world of Tom Bombadil, it allows all things to be truly themselves although even Tom has a house and garden although it is a place in which, as in Treebeard’s Wellinghall, the boundaries between what lies inside and outside the house are somewhat porous. So what does Gandalf reject? For Gandalf also has the kind of mastery that Tom enjoys. Few are likely to catch Gandalf out. As Sam put it when the wargs attacked near the gates of Moria, “Whatever may be in store for old Gandalf, I’ll wager it isn’t a wolf’s belly,”

What Gandalf rejects is Saruman’s idea of mastery with ownership. He rejects Saruman’s desire to make all things serve him. As Gandalf would later say to Denethor, he is a steward. He looks after all things in order that they may be truly free in themselves. That is why he came to Middle-earth to free it from a particular tyranny and to allow it, if it would take the opportunity, freedom to be fully alive.

Ten Years of Wisdom From The Lord of the Rings on WordPress.

/ stephencwinter / 14 Comments

It was on October 30th 2013 that I first posted on WordPress seeking Wisdom From The Lord of the Rings. On those first two days I was so excited that nine people around the world had read the introduction to my work. By the end of that year those nine had been added to by a further 390 and so my project had begun.

My daughter, Bethan took this photo of me outside the rooms where she taught Modern European History at Magdalen College, Oxford last year. Fans of the Inklings will know that it was on Addison’s Walk in the gardens of the College that Tolkien and Lewis went for the famous walk that ended with Lewis’s conversion to Christianity.

My first encounter with The Lord of the Rings came in the autumn of 1968. I was 13 years old and a pupil at the Royal Grammar School in High Wycombe, one of those schools originally founded in the middle of the 16th century in England. And while Tolkien attended a school originally founded in Birmingham by Edward VI, the only son of Henry VIII, mine was founded a few years later by his half-sister, Elizabeth I.

It is worth noting that in 1968 comparatively little of Tolkien’s work had been published and The Silmarillion was yet to come. So apart from The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit little was known of the history of Middle-earth except what could be found in the appendices to The Return of the King. But I was a lover and not a scholar and so, in the years to come I returned to what I knew again and again, always with a sense of melancholy as Frodo’s ship went into the West but with the knowledge that I could return to the beginning on another occasion.

It was in the first decade of this century that I began to wonder if I might write about the book that I loved and as I read it once again I began to fill notebooks with my thoughts on the text and to find references to the ideas that I was gleaning from it. I thought that forty years of reading Tolkien might give me some kind of authority to write about his work. But nothing seemed to flow until one evening at home I watched a movie on TV with my wife and younger daughter, Rebecca, and a new idea came to mind.

The movie was called Julie and Julia and in it I was introduced to a thing called a blog. The movie told the story of a young New Yorker, Julie Powell, who decided to cook all 520 recipes in the book written by the legendary cook, Julia Childs in a single year and to tell the story in a blog. As well as enjoying the story itself I began to realise that while I could not construct whole chapters on my favourite book I could construct a short piece of 700 to 800 words. My mind seemed to think in arguments of that kind of length quite naturally. After all I was a church minister, a priest of the Church of England, and I constructed sermons that felt like that.

The first year was a bit of a struggle and in 2014 I published irregularly and my work was read by just a handful of people each day. In 2015 I began to write more regularly and my readership grew to a dozen a day. I would publish a piece once a week and that felt all right within my other commitments. In November 2016 my readership grew to over a thousand in that month for the first time and thereafter kept on steadily growing and by the time I was was appointed to my current post in December 2018 I was being read by about 2000 people each month.

At that point I felt that I could not write regularly and minister to seven busy parishes in rural Worcestershire close to where Tolkien grew up and where his mother’s family used to farm on a farm known locally as Bag End. There was a gap in my publishing of over a year but to my surprise my readership held up pretty well. People were still finding and reading my work.

Then came Covid in March 2020 and we were all locked away inside our homes. Suddenly I had time to write and people had time to read. During that spring and summer I got two mentions in Google News and suddenly my readership grew from a little over 2,000 a month to around 5,000. Even after I was able to return to more normal working practices I kept on writing, getting up at around 5 a.m on a Saturday morning and writing my 700 to 800 words. A further leap in my readership came in the autumn of 2022 with Amazon’s Rings of Power and in September and October of that year I got over 11,000 readers. The number fell back a little bit after the series ended but during this year I have had regularly had between 8,000 and 9,000 readers a month and by the end of 2023 I will have had over 100,000 readers during the year for the very first time. It is a long way from the handful that I was getting each day ten years ago. Over 50 pieces that I have written have been read over 1,000 times and my two most popular posts have been read over 20,000 times.

It has been a rich experience and I would like to say a special thank you to the people who have accompanied me along the way. Brenton Dickieson who writes the blog, A Pilgrim in Narnia, has been an important regular encourager and I will always remember the weekend that he stayed with us as he made his way from Prince Edward Island in Canada to Oxford to give a lecture to the C.S Lewis Society there. We went walking in the Malvern Hills above the town where Lewis went to school and found places to which Lewis made reference in his imaginative works. And I am still incredibly excited every time I see a comment and know that a new conversation might be about to begin with someone new. Just leave a comment and we can start to talk.

So thank you everyone for travelling with me along the way. And thank you to WordPress for being such enabling hosts. I wonder where the blog is going to take me next.

“The Enemy Has Failed- so Far. Thanks to Saruman.” What Does Gandalf Mean?

/ stephencwinter / 4 Comments

The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp.646-650

The treason of Isengard is one of the saddest stories within all that makes up The Lord of the Rings. One who was chosen by the Valar to rouse the peoples of Middle-earth against Sauron chooses to turn against them and to side with the very power against whom he was sent to fight.

Gandalf has been giving Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli a briefing on the state of affairs in the War of the Ring at this point in the story when he has been reunited with them in Fangorn Forest. He has spoken of how Sauron has no conception of the possibility that his enemies might want to destroy the Ring, being convinced that one of them will seize control of it and use it against him. With this conviction he is concentrating upon attack rather than defence. “If he had used all his power to guard Mordor, so that none could enter, and bent all his guile to the hunting of the Ring, then indeed hope would have faded: neither Ring nor bearer could long have eluded him.”

But what Sauron believes is that it will take time even for the most able of his enemies to learn how to wield the power of the Ring in a way that could ensure victory over him. Gollum, and then Bilbo later, possessed and used the Ring, but neither were able to do much more with it than to make themselves invisible. As Frodo draws nearer to Mordor he begins to become more aware of the Ring’s power threatening to use that power against Gollum in order to frighten him into co-operation, but compared to what Sauron could achieve if he were to regain possession of the Ring this is very small.

Because of this Sauron believes that he has a window of opportunity to strike a blow against his foes that will be strong enough to defeat them. His main goal is to capture Minas Tirith, the capital of Gondor and that is where the main part of his attention is focussed. Surely this is the reason why he sent only a small company of orcs to waylay the Fellowship and not a more significant force. His concern would have been that any larger company would have attracted the attention of his enemies and he did not yet have enough control over the territory between Mordor and the Anduin to fight a battle far from home.

So Grishnákh’s force that took part in the attack upon the Fellowship was not particularly large, and disastrously for Sauron, not large enough to force Uglúk’s Uruk-hai to go to Barad-dûr instead of Isengard.

“Already he knows that the messengers that he sent to waylay the Company have failed again. They have not found the Ring. Neither have they brought away any hobbits as hostages. Had they done even so much as that, it would have been a heavy blow to us, and it might have been fatal. But let us not darken our hearts by imagining the trial of their gentle loyalty in the Dark Tower. For the Enemy has failed- so far. Thanks to Saruman.”

Gimli is confused by Gandalf’s words, wondering if what he means by them is that Saruman is not a traitor, but what Gandalf means is that Saruman is not only a traitor to the Valar and the free peoples of Middle-earth but also to Sauron. Saruman wants the Ring for his own purposes. He wishes to become lord of Middle-earth. But he too has failed to seize the Ring. He too has not even been able to capture hobbits. All that he has managed to achieve is, as Gandalf puts it, “to bring Merry and Pippin with marvellous speed, and in the nick of time, to Fangorn, where otherwise they would never come at all.”

What Saruman has achieved by attempting to seize the Ring for himself is to make Sauron aware of his treachery. At this point of the story Sauron fears that it might be Saruman who has seized the Ring. Time and again irony has a big part to play within The Lord of the Rings. An action that is meant to do harm turns out to achieve the opposite of its intention. It might even be that irony is not merely a kind of chance event but is woven into the very fabric of reality.