Shelob

“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.

Peter Jackson’s imagining of the debate between Sméagol and Gollum.

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!”

“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”.

Fish three times a day.

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?

“May It Be a Light to You in Dark Places, When All Other Lights Go Out.” Galadriel Gives a Phial of Light to Frodo.

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The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991) pp.365-367

After Galadriel has given a gift of three of her golden hairs to Gimli there remains one last gift to be given, to Frodo, the Ring-bearer who is not last in her thoughts. She gives to him “a small crystal phial” that glitters as she moves it and “rays of white light” spring from her hand.

Anke Eismann imagines the giving of the Phial to Frodo.

“In this phial,” she said, “is caught the light of Eärendil’s star, set amid the waters of my fountain. It will shine still brighter when night is about you. May it be a light to you in dark places, when all other lights go out.”

Tatkatmur depicts Galadriel capturing the light of the star of Eärendil in her phial. I would like to say thank you to finnral for sending me the information about this artwork.

Frodo remembers the verses that Bilbo chanted about Eärendil in the Hall of Fire in Rivendell, the verses that seemed to Frodo “to fit somehow” into something about which he was dreaming, about “an endless river of swelling gold and silver” flowing over him. This is Frodo’s immersion into the history of light of which he is a vital part and of which Galadriel’s phial is now a living symbol. 

A ship then new they built for him 
of mithril and of elven-glass
with shining prow; no shaven oar
nor sail she bore on silver mast:
the Silmaril as lantern light
and banner bright with living flame 
to gleam thereon by Elbereth 
herself was set, who thither came 
and wings immortal made for him,
and laid on him immortal doom,
to sail the shoreless skies and come 
behind the Sun and light of Moon.

Galadriel herself has been intimately involved in this history from the beginning. It is the story of how Fëanor made three exquisite jewels in which was captured the light of the two trees in Valinor, of Telperion and of Laurelin. Eventually the trees are destroyed by Morgoth with the aid of Ungoliant, the terrible spider-like monster and ancestor of Shelob, who Frodo and Sam will encounter in the tunnels of Cirith Ungol and who Sam will vanquish with the aid of Galadriel’s phial after Frodo is poisoned. After the theft of the Silmarils Fëanor will pursue Morgoth, defying the Valar who forbid him to leave Valinor. Along with his people, the Noldor, he steals ships from the Teleri, slaying them when they try to resist him, and so begins the tragic history of Middle-earth that reaches a climax in The Lord of the Rings.

A light when all other lights have gone out.

There is a sense in which the whole of this history is contained in Galadriel’s phial, both in its beauty and its sorrow. The light of the Silmaril that is captured in the phial is a sign of hope to which all the peoples of Middle-earth can look each morning and evening in the star that shines brightly above them. Eärendil brought hope to Middle-earth when it lay prostrate before the power of Morgoth and his star continues to do so today. In the terrible lair of Shelob, in a place where all other lights have gone out, Frodo cries out, “Aiya Eärendil elenion ancalima!” “Hail Eärendil, brightest of stars!” And at this moment when all hope is gone the light of the Silmaril blazes forth and the memory of the fall of Morgoth is rekindled.

But I mentioned sorrow too. For the story of the Silmarils is a story of trust betrayed. I mentioned the kinslaying of Alqulondë when the Noldor stole the ships of the Teleri but I could mention many other sorrows too. In fact one of the great themes of the story of the First Age as recounted in The Silmarillion is the telling of the sorrows of Middle-earth to the Valar. After the death of Beren Lúthien follows him to the underworld and sings to Mandos the most beautiful song in the world, a weaving together of the griefs of the Two Kindreds of Elves and Humankind that reduces the Lord of Death to tears of pity. Indeed we could add to this story that of Eärendil himself whose journey to Valinor is itself a plea to the Valar to take pity upon these kindreds.

Galadriel has been a part of both the sorrow and the beauty. She was a part of the rebellion of Fëanor and the Noldor, albeit reluctantly, but in her rejection of the Ring when it was offered to her by Frodo she displays her adamantine character and so wins a victory over evil that is vital for the success of the task of the Ring-bearer. Her gift to him is a symbol of that victory.

“I am Wounded; it will Never Really Heal”. Frodo Begins to Fade Away From the Shire.

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After Sam and Rosie Cotton are married they move into together with Frodo in Bag End. It is a good arrangement for all. Sam and Rosie have a fine home in which to raise a family together. Frodo has kind and loving friends to watch over him. Sam is close enough to the Gaffer to keep an eye on him. But not too close.

It is the beginning of a golden age in the history of the Shire. Restoration work is underway everywhere and everything returns to how it was but perhaps it is even more beautiful than it was before the troubles. Tolkien gives us a vision, perhaps, of how England might have been restored after the destruction of the Second World War. One thinks of the beautiful medieval city of Coventry that was badly bombed during the war and its ancient cathedral almost completely destroyed. It is a grim joke told by the people of that city that the Luftwaffe only began the destruction of the city. It was completed by the city authorities. It is as if Lotho Pimple and Ted Sandyman had seized control of the country after the war for long enough until they had changed it for ever.

Not so the Shire. The Shire is seized, not by brutalist architects, but by a spirit of merriment. And the spirit is manifested above all in Merry and Pippin. “The two young Travellers cut a great dash in the Shire with their songs and their tales and their finery, and their wonderful parties. ‘Lordly’ folk called them, meaning nothing but good; for it warmed all hearts to see them go riding by with their mail-shirts so bright and their shields so splendid, laughing and singing songs of far away.”

Merry and Pippin bring something new to the Shire in a way that even hobbits, that most conservative of peoples, could receive. They give the Shire back to itself but more itself than ever it was before. And there is one other who does this work also and that is Sam the Gardener who will eventually take the name of Gardener for his family.

Sadly there is one who cannot share this joy, delight and glory and that is Frodo. It is not that Frodo becomes angry or embittered, withdrawing into a windowless inner darkness. It is just that Frodo has been hurt and cannot wholly be healed in Middle-earth.

Sam is away in March in the Year of Plenty on his duties as forester to the Shire. All his attention and his energy is given to looking forward. So he misses March 13th, the day one year before when Frodo lay helpless, poisoned by Shelob, a prisoner of the orcs in Cirith Ungol, and the Ring was gone. On that day Frodo had not known that Sam had taken the Ring in order to prevent it from falling into the hands of the orcs but what Frodo relives a year later is not a sense of misery at the failure of the mission but an utter emptiness because the Ring has gone. It is the same emptiness that Gollum felt when Bilbo took the Ring and which was to fuel his obsessive search thereafter. The Ring has a hold over Frodo from which he can never wholly escape.

This is an experience that the Shire cannot share. The story of the Ring and its utterly malevolent maker is something that it has never shared. Even when the Ring was in the Shire it remained hidden and it was only revealed for the briefest of moments in the uncanny goings on at Bilbo’s farewell party. And when the War of the Ring came to the Shire it was through Saruman and his brigand ban, already defeated though able to do some small mischief before being caught. The Shire never shared Frodo’s heroic sacrifice of himself and so it cannot understand it. As Frodo himself says: “I tried to save the Shire, and it has been saved, but not for me.”

Frodo is the wounded healer, the prophet without honour in his own country. Merry, Pippin and Sam are all closer to the Shire and are able to bring the great story of deliverence to their people in such a way that they can receive it and learn to be grateful for it. For Frodo healing must come somewhere else.

 

“Where Shall I Find Rest?” Frodo Longs For Home. His True Home.

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The hobbits are eager for home and set out for the Shire with Gandalf. It is the sixth of October when they reach the Ford of Bruinen, a place redolent with memory for Frodo as he almost fell into the grasp of the Nazgûl there. The date too is filled with ominous significance. It was on this date a year before that the Nazgûl attacked the camp below Weathertop and Frodo received a wound that almost made him a wraith like them but under their power.

The combination of the two is almost too much for Frodo and he says to Gandalf: “I am wounded with knife, sting and tooth, and a long burden. Where shall I find rest?”

Right from the very beginning of the quest it has been clear that Frodo and his companions have taken on a task that is too big for them. For the briefest of moments Frodo is excited by the thought of the adventure that lies ahead but soon that excitement is replaced by the unhappy realisation that he must leave the Shire, leave his friends, leave home. And soon it is clear that there are powers in the world that are far greater than he is. Old Man Willow in the Old Forest; the Wight in the Barrow Downs; and most deadly of all, the Nazgûl haunting their every step along the way. Aragorn doubts the hobbits’ capacity for the task. Butterbur fears they behave like gentlemen engaged in nothing more dangerous than a walking holiday.

But that is exactly the point. That is the mysterious wisdom of The Lord of the Rings. This is a task that can only be achieved by those for whom it is too great. Those who might have the capacity to undertake the task, who might be strong enough to carry the Ring to Mordor in order to destroy it are those who are in the greatest danger. Gandalf and Galadriel are both offered the Ring and both reject it despite being profoundly tempted to take it. They have come to realise that it is stronger than they are and that in taking it they would begin the road to becoming the Dark Lord or Lady. Boromir does not understand this believing that his noble spirit is sufficient defence against the Ring and he is almost overthrown entirely.

The task and the Ring itself is most certainly too great for Frodo and he knows that it is. Even he begins to ponder what it might mean to seek to possess and to use the Ring as he shows in his questioning of Galadriel at her mirror. Eventually it will overcome him and only through the strange mercy of Gollum’s attack will he and all Middle-earth be saved.

Frodo is saved but he is broken too. The knife that the Witch King of Angmar drove into his shoulder at Weathertop, the sting of Shelob in her lair, Gollum’s tooth biting the Ring from his finger at the Cracks of Doom and worst of all, the slow, inexorable overpowering that the Ring achieves over him, all these have done their terrible work.

“Where shall I find rest?”

Frodo knows that the return to the Shire will be no true home-coming for him. It may be the same but he will not be. This is a powerful insight and one that Tolkien must have gained on his return from the trenches of the First World War as did so many of his generation. It was not just the journey from the familiarity of home to the horror of the battlefield that lead to a profound sense of displacement but the journey back again to what should have been familiar but was no longer. Frodo puts it this way. “It shall not be the same; for I shall not be the same”.

Frodo knows that if there is to be a place of rest for him then it will be somewhere else than the Shire but he does not know where such a place can be. We might know that this sense of displacement, of homelessness, of exile is that which will lead us in search of our true home but when we are gripped by this it is nothing less than terrible.

 

Gollum Worships His God

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Their relationship must have begun because they were so similar in spirit. For Shelob is consumed with a lust for all life, true daughter as she is of Ungoliant the ancient monster in spider form. This lust is insatiable but it is limited by a need for secrecy and so prey must fall unawares into her lair. Gollum in time past has brought such prey to her. He is her “sneak” as the orcs call him.

Similar in spirit they are but she is so much mightier than he. And so Tolkien tells us, “in past days he had bowed and worshipped her, and the darkness of her evil will walked through all the ways of his weariness beside him, cutting him off from light and from regret.”

So it is that Gollum worships his god. She represents to him the embodiment of the principle that shapes and drives him, the desire to eat. Readers may remember the debate between the Gollum and the Sméagol principle that Sam overheard and could not be sure who had won at the end of it. In it the Gollum principle declares: “Perhaps we grows very strong, stronger than Wraiths. Lord Sméagol? Gollum the Great? The Gollum?  Eat fish every day, three times a day, fresh from the sea.” We might allow ourselves a smile at Gollum’s expense but the only difference between him and Shelob or even between him and Sauron is one of degree. Their lust is greater and more all encompassing and their power is greater too but there the difference ends. Sauron is simply a more powerful version of Gollum. Gollum is simply a weaker version of Sauron. Sauron can hurt Gollum but Gollum cannot hurt him.

At least, not yet, for Gollum dreams of the day when he will “pay everyone back!” And when he says, “everyone” he means all those for whom he carries a sense of resentment; and this is so great that all creatures must be punished for the wrong that he believes they have done to him.

And what does worship mean in this respect? It is simply this. That some creatures are more powerful than others and we must bow down to those who are more powerful than we are. As Sweeney Todd declares in Stephen Sondheim’s musical of the same name, “Because in all of the whole human race… there are two kinds of men and only two. There’s the one staying put in his proper place and the one with his foot in the other one’s face.” And so those, like Gollum, in the “proper place”, worship those above them who have their feet in their faces. It is a miserable and servile kind of worship and it is offered in endless resentment. And those who seek such worship must take care never to take the foot away from the worshipper’s face for fear that revenge might be taken.

This is the spiritual universe in which Gollum exists, a universe that he entered on the day he murdered his best friend in order to take the Ring for himself. It is a universe made up of endless lust and endless resentment and from which both regret and light must be expelled for ever. And there lies it’s vulnerability for from the moment that Bilbo first entered it deep below the Misty Mountains and chose, for the sake of pity, not to kill Gollum it has been at risk. Gandalf said that the pity of Bilbo “may rule the fate of many” and it does. This is what it means that Hell is harrowed by the crucified Christ whose words spoken to his executioners are “Father forgive them for they know not what they do”. Hell simply absorbs into itself an attack mounted in its own terms of lust and resentment. It falls when the attack is mounted in pity and in mercy and by those who have no desire to rule in Hell.

The Hero’s Journey of Sam Gamgee

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After Frodo invokes Eärendil, the Morning Star, the bearer of the sorrows of Middle-earth to the Valar at the end of the First Age, he and Sam are able to break free of Shelob’s webs and for a moment it seems they are free. Frodo is drunk with the wonder of his escape, while Sam, for his part, is almost too cautious; so it is that Sam hides the Star Glass and in the darkness Shelob attacks Frodo while Gollum attacks Sam. All seems lost and yet a few minutes later Gollum is fleeing for his life while Shelob is “cowed at last, shrunken in defeat” and she hides herself away in a hole to nurse her malice and to heal herself from within.

During those few minutes Sam fights two mighty battles, both of which are far beyond him, and he emerges as a mighty and a victorious hero.

And he does not have any sense that this is what he is!

In his great work, The Hero with a Thousand Faces , Joseph Campbell describes the elements common to what he calls, the Hero’s Journey. And this is what Sam’s story has been. The story begins with Sam caring for Frodo’s garden and his longing to see the wonders of the wider world and, most of all, to “see Elves!” This dissatisfaction is the classic beginning of Campbell’s monomyth and it takes him on the journey that has now led him to Shelob’s Lair and the battles in defence of the master that he loves more even than his own life. Readers of my blog who know Campbell’s work will know of the resistance to the call to adventure that in Sam’s case is his sense of insignificance and also of the importance of a mentor. For Sam, my own belief is that the mentor takes various guises including Gandalf, Aragon and Galadriel but perhaps, most important of all, Frodo himself, who Sam regards as “the wisest person in the world.” Last year I wrote in this blog a posting that I entitled Frodo Carries Sam to Mordor https://stephencwinter.com/2015/03/24/frodo-carries-sam-to-mordor/ and it was Campbell’s sense of the vital role of the mentor that I had in mind there. At the beginning of the story Sam could only connect to the wondrous world through Frodo as mediator. That changes, and the change begins now, as Sam becomes a mighty warrior, part of the great ordeal of which Campbell also speaks. Later Sam will be revered as one of the great figures of his age and still he will hardly notice it!

This is what is unusual in Sam’s heroic journey. Sam has little or no awareness that he is on such a thing. To him if there is a hero then it must be Frodo. Even in the battle with Shelob Sam cries out in admiration when Shelob retreats before Frodo as he holds the Star Glass aloft. What songs will be sung about this great deed! I wonder if even Tolkien was taken by surprise by Sam? In The Fellowship of the Ring the story is told through Frodo but from the sundering of the Fellowship and through the journey to Mordor it is through Sam that the story is told. I will have much more to say about their different roles but here I want to show the way in which Sam grows through the journey.

This is where we will leave Sam today, covered in glory after his mighty battles but thinking only of Frodo. And I will end too on a personal note. Unlike Sam I have always lived with a consciousness of playing a part in a story. Often I have longed for Sam’s self forgetfulness but if I am to achieve it then the work must be a conscious forgetting. I must become the nothing (the no thing) of which the mystics speak. Not to be a zero but to become free of being a thing and to become a person. Once I wanted to be the hero of my own story albeit a religious one. Now I wish simply to be a man.

 

 

 

The Dayspring From On High Comes to the Aid of the Hobbits

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Frodo and Sam are trapped in the darkness visible of Shelob’s Lair as the foul monster advances upon them. As he grips the sword that he took from the barrow Sam suddenly thinks of Tom Bombadil. “I wish old Tom was near us now.” And as he does so it is not Bombadil who comes, but Galadriel, in an insight of such clarity that it has the force of a vision. Sam sees her as the giver of gifts upon the lawn in Lothlórien when she gave to Frodo the Star Glass, “a light when all other lights go out.”

Frodo raises the glass and the light of a Silmaril blazes forth in the darkness. Frodo is wonderfully empowered by this and he advances upon Shelob crying, “Aiya Eärendil Elenion Ancalima!” Frodo does not know what words he speaks for it as if another voice has spoken them in this place of utter darkness but they and the light of a star drive Shelob  back and Frodo and Sam are able to escape.

The words that Frodo cries are “Hail, Eärendil, O Brightest of Stars! ” and readers of The Lord of the Rings will remember the verses that Bilbo chanted in the halls of Elrond in Rivendell of the great hero who brought aid to the defeated peoples of Middle-earth at the end of the First Age. They will remember too that Sam spoke of how he and Frodo were still a part of the story of Eärendil and how the great stories never seem to end.

For Tolkien these words were of the greatest significance. At the very outset of the creation of his mythology when he was a young student of old languages he read some words in an Anglo-Saxon poem that had a profound effect upon him.

Eálá Earendel engla beorhtast ofer middangeard monnum sended 

Or, “Hail Earendel, Brightest of Angels, over Middle-earth sent to men!”

Some who knew Tolkien say that for him words did not merely describe something but could convey to him the very reality they sought to signify.  It was as if he were an initiate in a mystery cult.  Thus on reading the words in the old poem he actually encountered the Brightest of Angels. It was a visionary, a revelatory experience, just as it was for Frodo in the darkness and from it was born the whole mythology from which The Lord of the Rings came.

It is this experience that Tolkien brings to one of the darkest moments in his story. It is the Brightest of Angels who drives Shelob back! And there is something more. The poem that Tolkien was reading at the moment of revelation was one that was related to Advent, the time of year when Christians focus most keenly upon the longing for the coming of Christ. In the poem are found the O Antiphons that form an introduction to the singing of the Magnificat,  the great song of Mary, at evening prayer in Advent. They are most often used today when the popular carol for Advent, O Come, O Come, Emmanuel, is sung. Unlike CS Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia,  Christ is not born within the story. That was deliberate upon Tolkien’s part. But what happens at this moment is a cry of longing for an end to all darkness and even an end to death itself. Eärendil, the Morning Star, bears witness to the Sun that will rise, scattering the gloom from before our paths for ever.

And it all begins in the darkness with a moment of near despair and the thought that comes to Sam, “I wish old Tom was near us now.” For us to know light in the darkness it is not necessary that we should be scholars of old languages. Neither Sam nor even Frodo know what Frodo cries. But they have said, Yes, to their great pilgrimage and they have not turned back and so they receive “a light when all other lights go out” simply because they need that light.

And so can we when we need light in our darkness.