The Ring

“Do You Understand, Mr. Frodo? I’ve Got to Go On.” Sam Gamgee Makes The Hardest Choice of His Life.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 956-959

If Sam could have chosen for himself he would never have woken up after fainting beside Frodo’s body but he could not choose for himself. He woke and the world had not changed even though, as far as he was concerned, the worst thing of all had already happened. “The mountains had not crumbled nor the earth fallen into ruin.”

Anyone who has suffered the loss of someone that they have loved deeply will know what Tolkien speaks of here, except it is not the death of Frodo that they mourn. Each person suffers their own grief alone. As we read in the last piece posted on this blog Tolkien was drawn to words written by Simone de Beauvoir who spoke of the unnaturalness of death. He might equally have quoted St Paul who, in his First Letter to the Corinthians spoke of death as the last enemy of all; not as a thing that is naturally a part of life but as something that has invaded from outside. Nothing is able quite to prepare us for death and so nothing prepared Sam for this moment, for the moment in which Sam has to decide what he is going to do next. Even though the very word, next, must sound like the most dreadful obscenity in his heart.

Tolkien writes the process by which Sam comes to a decision as a debate that takes place within him. Not like the debate that took place within the divided soul of Gollum on the road to the Black Gate, the debate between the utterly fallen Gollum, or Stinker as Sam called him, and the all too easily defeated Sméagol, or Slinker. Sam is torn between his love for Frodo and a greater love for the world that both he and Frodo loved and for which, Sam is sure, Frodo has given his life.

“What shall I do, what shall I do?” he said. “Did I come all this way with him for nothing?” And then he remembered his own voice speaking words that at the time he did not understand himself, at the beginning of their journey. I have something to do before the end. I must see it through, sir, if you understand.

Sam has come a very long way on this journey. Beginning, as he did, with a simple desire to go on an adventure with Frodo, to see Elves, to look upon wonders, now he has reached the point when all he wants to do is to see something through until its end. But now he wrestles with another question. What is that end?

For a moment his imagination conjures up the image of Gollum cowering before him in a dark corner and he will show no mercy. “But that was not what he had set out to do. It would not be worth while to leave his master for that. It would not bring him back.” Sam even contemplates suicide for a moment, but “that was to do nothing not even to grieve. That was not what he had set out to do.”

But at last Sam realises that he has to go on, to try to finish the task, to cast the Ring into the Fire. And then he finds himself asking the same question that Frodo asked of Gandalf in his study at Bag End. Why should it be me? Gandalf was able to answer Frodo’s question by saying that it was not because of any quality that he possessed but that he should take encouragement from the very fact that indeed he seems to have been chosen. It is the very fact of being chosen that should give him strength. Sam has no Gandalf to answer his questions. Why is he the very last of the company? Why is he left all alone?

There is no one to answer his questions. Sam has to make up his own mind. And that mind is quite enough.

“Let me see now: if we’re found here, or Mr. Frodo found, and that Thing’s on him, well, the Enemy will get it. And that’s the end of all of us, of Lórien, and Rivendell, and the Shire and all.” Suddenly the world becomes bigger once again than it was just a moment before when all Sam could see was his own grief and loss.

And so he places the Ring about his neck, feels the terrible weight that Frodo has borne and is given strength to bear it. For a little while.

“Do Not Go to Cirith Ungol!” Some Further Thoughts on an Impossible Decision.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 904-907

I have read this passage from The Lord of the Rings many times over the last fifty years or so and I don’t think I ever quite realised before the pivotal role that it plays in the whole story. Frodo has come to trust Faramir and here this noble figure is offering him safety and the chance to be free completely of the malicious character that is Gollum.

Tolkien reflected on this in a letter that he wrote to Michael Straight early in 1956, replying to a number of questions that Straight had asked him before writing a review for New Republic and he did so in terms of the 6th petition of The Lords Prayer, “Lead us not into temptation”. (The Letters of J.R.R Tolkien Harper Collins 2006 pp. 232-237).

Tolkien compared this petition with the 7th, “But deliver us from evil” and commented that the 6th is both harder and less often considered. Tolkien writes that “the ‘salvation’ of the world and Frodo’s own salvation is achieved by his previous pity and forgiveness of injury. At any point any prudent person would have told Frodo that Gollum would certainly betray him, and could rob him in the end. To ‘pity’ him, to forbear to kill him, was a piece of folly, or a mystical belief in the ultimate value-in-itself of pity and generosity even if disastrous in the world of time”.

So, when Faramir, the “prudent person” says to Frodo that if he chooses to abandon Gollum he will have Gollum escorted to any point on the borders of Gondor that Gollum might name, Frodo replies “I have promised many times to take him under my protection and to go where he led.” Frodo cannot break faith even though it is folly to keep it. Utter folly.

See how Kryztov Marczak imagines the chaos in Shelob’s Lair below the Tower of Cirith Ungol. The path that Frodo must take.

As we saw last week Frodo goes through with Faramir the options that are available to him. To return to the Black Gate is simply impossible and there is no-one apart from Gollum who could guide him into Mordor. And what of returning with Faramir to Minas Tirith?

“Would you have me come to Gondor with this Thing, the Thing that drove your brother mad with desire? What spell would it work in Minas Tirith? Shall there be two cities of Minas Morgul, grinning at each other across a dead land filled with rottenness?”

At the last Faramir respondes with the only words upon which both he and Frodo can agree completely.

“It is a hard doom and a hopeless errand.”

But Faramir hopes, beyond hope, that one day he and Frodo might sit “by a wall in the sun, laughing at old grief”. The thought is a tender one and one can only hope that both Frodo and Faramir were comforted from time to time by it on the hard roads that each of them were to take in the weeks ahead, roads that were to take both of them to the verge of death and then to new life beyond them. The Lord of the Rings does not recount these happy conversations but in other writings Tolkien speaks of times like this and we can only hope that the two heroes were able to enjoy one another’s company in this way.

Both Frodo and Faramir have to make choices that are folly. Faramir allows Frodo to go free, bearing the Ring of Power, in the company of a treacherous guide, into Mordor itself. His father cannot forgive him for this and we must think that he dies unreconciled with his son. Frodo goes on with Gollum and is betrayed by him in Shelob’s Lair in Cirith Ungol and attacked and wounded by him in the Cracks of Doom; and Frodo has to live in the knowledge that at the end he did not have the strength to cast away the Ring and was only saved by Gollum’s attack. But both make their choice in freedom in Henneth Annûn. As Tolkien reflected in his letter to Michael Straight, Frodo’s choice (and we must add, Faramir’s also) is a “piece of folly”. But Tolkien also opens the possibility that Frodo’s decision not to kill, or even abandon, Gollum has a mystical quality to it. This quality comes from the belief that any act of goodness has meaning in eternity “even if disastrous in the world of time”. In The Lord of the Rings this eternal quality breaks into the story at the moment when Gollum takes the Ring into the Fire to unmake it. In the stories in which we live we cannot tell what consequences our own choices for goodness will have. Perhaps we will only see disaster in the world of time but we are called to choose the good anyway and to trust.

“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.

” 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!”

“I Must Find The Mountain of Fire and Cast The Thing Into The Gulf of Doom. Gandalf Said So. I Do Not Think I Shall Ever Get There.” Frodo Speaks of His Task to Faramir and of Its Impossibility.

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

The shock and fear that followed the revelation of the true identity of Frodo’s burden is at an end but what follows is sheer exhaustion. With the last of his strength Frodo tells Faramir of his mission.

“I was going to find a way into Mordor… I was going to Gorgoroth. I must find the Mountain of Fire and cast the thing into the gulf of Doom. Gandalf said so. I do not think I shall ever get there.”

Faramir stares at Frodo with “grave astonishment”, and rightly so. Alongside Frodo’s declaration at the Council of Elrond that he would take the Ring though he did not know the way this is the only time that Frodo actually speaks of his task in plain speech. There is no attempt at heroic language. No boasting. Merely a quiet statement of what has to be done.

“Gandalf said so.”

Frodo claims nothing for himself. He has been given his orders and now he must carry them out. There is nothing more to be said and Frodo says nothing more. Except, as Faramir knows, that Frodo is attempting something that no-one has ever before tried to do. Later in the story Ioreth of the Houses of Healing will tell her friend that Frodo “went with only his esquire into the Black Country and fought with the Dark Lord all by himself, and set fire to his Tower, if you can believe it.” Of course we know that this is not quite what happened but what Frodo achieved is almost as impossible and Faramir recognises this. His grave astonishment is entirely justified. He knows that he stands in the presence of greatness even as Elrond recognised at Frodo’s first quiet declaration, comparing him to Beren and the great heroes of the First Age.

Only Frodo, as we have seen, does not recognise this, nor ever does. He only thinks in terms of what must be done and of its impossibility.

Hope and hopelessness are themes that Tolkien returns to again and again throughout The Lord of the Rings. Aragorn is given the name, Estel, secretly by his mother as she gives herself up to her own death and he spends his life struggling with this destiny, hoping against hope, not with Sam’s cheerful optimism, but a grim determination just to carry on. Frodo is of a similar spirit. There is a job to be done and that is all needs to be said.

What Frodo, and Aragorn, both do, is to give themselves up to something that is greater than themselves. Although Tolkien was himself man of deep Christian faith he never allows the characters in his story the comfort or strength that such faith would bring. Julian of Norwich’s famous declaration that “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well” is something about which they know nothing. They must simply do their jobs because they are both necessary and right. Whether they will be rewarded with success is not something that they can know. So Elrond told Gimli’s father, Glòin, on learning of Sauron’s threats against the dwarves of Erebor that there is naught that the dwarves can do “other than to resist, with hope or without it”.

The heroic figures of The Lord of the Rings are denied faith in God in an explicit sense but the goodness, truth and beauty that they both love and fight for sustain them throughout their struggles. Galadriel may speak of “the long defeat” but this does not weaken her resolve. Tolkien did not believe in an arc of history that tends towards justice but in his belief in the resurrection of Christ, “the greatest ‘eucatastrophe’ possible in the greatest fairy story”, as he put it in a letter, he placed his hope in a final victory that would be one achieved by God alone.

In this sense Tolkien felt closer to the spiritual world of his heroes who had to resist “with hope or without it” than to some general kind of Christian optimism. And so he gives us Frodo, walking step by step towards Mordor even though he does not think that he will ever get there, as a model for our own lives and even as we stare with Faramir’s grave astonishment at him so too do we do the good that we have been called to do both this and every day.

“Not a Mistress of Many Slaves, Not Even a Kind Mistress of Willing Slaves.” Faramir Speaks of Patriotism to Frodo and Sam.

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

As Faramir guides Frodo and Sam towards Henneth Annûn he speaks thoughts aloud that, perhaps, he has not shared with anyone else. We have already met his brother, Boromir and know that he was a man of a very different spirit. Later we will meet his father, Denethor, and we will learn that Faramir could not have shared his heart with him. Denethor, as we will learn, discerned much of what lay in his younger son’s heart and laid the blame for this at Gandalf’s door. There is little doubt that Gandalf was a great influence upon Faramir. As with Frodo in the Shire and Aragorn in Rivendell he found out young men and taught them, but they needed to be young men of the right spirit. That Frodo, Aragorn and Faramir all emerged at exactly the same time must have been the cause of great delight for one who came to teach, as Gandalf had done. For it was through teaching, not through the exercise of power, that Gandalf came to change the world.

Last week we learned that Faramir too had no desire for power if it came from an evil source. He has some sense of the nature of Isildur’s Bane even though he does not yet know that it is the Ring of Power that Sauron made to enable him to rule all things. Now we learn what Faramir believes about power itself and the power of his own country.

“For myself,” said Faramir, “I would see the White Tree in flower again in the courts of the kings, and the Silver Crown return, and Minas Tirith in peace: Minas Arnor again as of old, full of light, high and fair, beautiful as a queen among other queens: not a mistress of many slaves, nay, not even a kind mistress of willing slaves.”

Tolkien wrote these words towards the end of an age in which his own country, Great Britain, had ruled over an empire, greater in area and in population, than any that had existed before it. By the time he died, in 1973, most of this empire had gone. One particular empire no longer existed but the idea of empire was as strong as ever. The British Empire had been one of many that had existed throughout world history and after its decline and fall it has not been the idea of empire that has disappeared, merely a particular expression of that idea.

As you can see, I have used the word, decline, in speaking of this history and that is how it is usually understood. For about a century after the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo, Britain was the greatest world power but the story since then has been one of decline. The assumption made here is that the exercise of power, if you have it, is how things are. And when power is spoken of it is military power that we are speaking about. We remember that when Boromir spoke at the Council of Elrond he made reference to the counsel that his host might offer in a somewhat dismissive manner. This “counsel” was all that he expected. It was only when discussion turned to the Ring that he became really interested because he understood this kind of power.

Faramir understood power in a very different way. For him power was meant to be exercised for the good of all; “a queen among other queens”. And the power of Gondor was to be first and foremost power in wisdom, of goodness, beauty and truth. To achieve power in which wisdom was absent was of no value at all. It was a thing to be left by the side of the highway, a piece of rubbish that we notice, if at all, and then pass by.

We might ponder how the history of the Americas, or of Africa, might have been different if Europeans had come, not to conquer but the mutual exchange of teaching and learning. We might wonder in what way the history of the world might have been different. Next week we will think about what part the ability to wage war has to play in such a world. Faramir recognises that this ability will always be necessary in a world in which some will seek dominance over others. After all, he is a soldier himself, and a very good one. But his dream is not the one that Boromir spoke of to Frodo when he tried to take the Ring. He does not wish others to flock to his banner because of his martial prowess. Faramir wishes to be a great teacher. Gandalf, not Saruman or Sauron, is his model.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“He’s as Wise as Any, But He’s Soft Hearted, That’s What He Is.” Sam Thinks About Frodo Before The Black Gate of Mordor.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 830-842

The opening of the chapter that Tolkien entitled, The Black Gate is Closed, opens with the words “Before the next day dawned their journey to Mordor was over”. Readers will know as they read these words that much of the book lies still before them but to Frodo, and even to Sam, as they gaze upon the Black Gate in all its impregnable strength the journey has come to an end.

And it is a bad end. It is clear to them both that there is no way into Mordor here and that what lies ahead of them is death or capture. Surely here Tolkien is thinking about the dull quiet that would fall in the hearts of men just before they went “over the top” of their own trenches into the “no man’s land” that lay between them and the enemy trenches. Even the distance between them and the Gate, Tolkien describes it as being “but a furlong from their hiding place”, or 220 yards, or two hundred metres, just the kind of distance that it often was between the two sets of trenches on the Western Front. Such a distance would take only a couple of minutes to walk briskly and yet the possibility of even reaching the enemy trenches without being either killed or wounded was small. To each man at such a moment there would be the sense of journey’s end. This at least is how Sam feels and it is through Sam’s eyes that we now see the story as it unfolds.

But now Gollum speaks, pleading with the hobbits not to go this way, not to take the Ring to Him, but to go back home, perhaps even “to give it back to little Sméagol”.

Frodo is absolutely firm that he must do as he has promised and so must go to Mordor and as Sam looks at the man that he both loves and calls, master, all hope dies in his cheerful heart. Long ago, or so it now feels, Tom Bombadil told the hobbits to keep up their “merry hearts”, and Sam has done so, both for him and for Frodo, but now the journey is ended.

But not for Gollum. He speaks of “another way” and pleads with Frodo to listen to him. We might think that in the face of the impossibility that this way, the short walk to the Black Gate, is going to lead to anything but death or capture, that Frodo and Sam would grasp any other possibility with greedy hands but they are so firm in their resolve, and for Sam at least, so untrusting of their guide, that they cannot believe that “another way” can possibly exist.

Sam, at least, does not trust anything that comes from Gollum’s mouth, for Gollum is Sam’s shadow in the starkest sense. Where Sam is loyal and trustworthy Gollum is treacherous. Where Sam is straightforward Gollum is sly. Sam detests him, even nursing the thought in his heart that death might be preferable to any more time in Gollum’s company.

Sam also fears what he calls Frodo’s softheartedness. “He’s as wise as any, but he’s softhearted, that’s what he is.” Sam holds two entirely contradictory beliefs about Frodo in his heart at exactly the same time without any sense that they do contradict. On the one hand Frodo is “as wise as any”, with the possible exception of Gandalf or Bilbo, and there is a sense in which this is true. Both Elrond, Galadriel and Gandalf, too, recognise that Frodo is worthy to undertake his task, that it is more than sheer accident that he is the Ringbearer. But while Sam believes this too, he also believes that Frodo is softhearted, a quality that he loves, and confuses this with softheadedness. It is a mistake that many make and so he is shocked when Frodo displays a very hard head indeed.

Frodo makes it quite clear to Gollum that he heard him when he spoke of giving the Ring back to “little Sméagol”. And he tells him that he will never possess the Ring, ever again, that at the last, he would put on the Ring and if he, “wearing it, were to command you, you would obey, even if it were to leap from a precipice or to cast yourself into the fire”. Is this a prophecy on Frodo’s part? Is this what happens at the Cracks of Doom? As Ringbearer Frodo’s heart, and most certainly his head, is capable of a flinty resolve that shocks even Sam, and terrifies Gollum.

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

/ stephencwinter / 4 Comments

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.

/ stephencwinter / 8 Comments

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.