The Ring Goes to the Fire

“Is There Any Hope? For Frodo, I Mean; Or at Least Mostly for Frodo.” Pippin Wonders if There is Any Hope Remaining.

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The Return of the King by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991) pp. 796-797

After the counsel in the chamber of the Lord of the City all go to their rest and Gandalf and Pippin to the chamber that they share together. And there in the privacy of that room Pippin speaks at last, asking the question that is closest to his heart.

“Tell me,” he said, “is there any hope? For Frodo, I mean; or at least mostly for Frodo.”

Of course, when Pippin says “mostly for Frodo”, what he implies is an unspoken question.

Is there any hope for me? For any of us? And we do not blame him for this. We would all ask the same question. Pippin’s love for Frodo is not diminished in any way by his asking it.

And in his reply Gandalf acknowledges what we have been thinking about in the last few posts. He acknowledges that Denethor is right. He acknowledges that any hope that there has ever been that Frodo will succeed in his mission was foolish. But we will not go back to the alternative that Denethor says could and should have been done, that the Ring should have been brought to Minas Tirith by Faramir and that it should have been hidden there until “the uttermost end of need”. We have considered this and recognised that this too would have been foolish, even wicked, that if the Ring had come to Denethor it would have overthrown his considerable mind and almost certainly would not have prevented Sauron’s inevitable victory.

And so all the alternative there is is two forms of foolishness. So is there any hope?

Gandalf ponders Pippin’s question and, as he does so, he begins to find reasons to go on hoping, reasons that may be smaller than the biggest reason of all, that the Divine Power does not will that Frodo should fail, but big enough to give reason not to give in but to resist.

Sauron has launched his assault upon Minas Tirith before he is ready and while Frodo is still free. Now his attention will not be solely upon the borders of his own land, defending them against any attack, but upon Minas Tirith.

And Gandalf wonders why he is doing this now, and so he thinks back to the Stone of Orthanc that Pippin looked into and which he gave to Aragorn to keep.

“Ah! I wonder. Aragorn? His time draws near. And he is strong and stern underneath, Pippin; bold and determined, able to take his own counsel and dare great risks at need. That may be it. He may have used the Stone and shown himself to the Enemy, challenging him, for this very purpose.”

Indeed, we know that this is precisely what Aragorn has done, and why he has taken the Paths of the Dead, bringing with him the host of Oath Breakers to the port of Pelargir to relieve its defenders from the siege of the Corsairs of Umbar and to bring the fleet at anchor there up the Anduin to aid the defenders of Minas Tirith. This would indeed be a reason for hope but even if Aragorn were to succeed it would only bring a little hope, perhaps very little hope as Denethor will later assert.

And Pippin has one more question. Why have Frodo and Sam taken up with Gollum of all the creatures in the world, and why are they trying to enter Mordor by way of Cirith Ungol?

“And I could see that Faramir did not like the place he was taking them to any more than you do. What is wrong?”

And here at last Gandalf comes, in his response, closer to the greatest cause for hope of all. For even though he fears the way that Frodo and Sam have taken with their treacherous guide he must acknowledge that he does not know a better way. There is no better way. All ways into Mordor are defended and unassailable, or if they are less defended it would take so long to achieve as to render any success almost meaningless for there will be nothing to return to.

So, there is no hope except for the greatest hope of all, that a power greater than any upon Arda has willed that through the most unlikely of all means, by means of a treacherous guide, Frodo and Sam should achieve their task. But to desire this end is almost too much for anyone without falling into the most terrible pride or complacency. The best way remains to take one brave small step and then another.

“There are evil days ahead. To sleep while we may.”

“So You Know About Our Little Footpad, Do You?” Gollum Follows The Fellowship Down The Anduin.

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The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991) pp.371-375

“His longing for the Ring proved stronger than his fear of the Orcs, or even of light.” So said Gandalf to Frodo in the study at Bag End when he spoke to Frodo of Gollum, of the way in which, two years after the Ring left him in order to find its way back to its master, the Dark Lord who was calling it back to himself, Gollum had emerged from the darkness beneath the Misty Mountains in order to find the Ring and to revenge himself upon the “thief” who had stolen it, Baggins.

And it is the same desire that has driven his pursuit of the Fellowship since first he came upon them in the Mines of Moria. Somehow he had managed to escape the turmoil that followed the fall of the Balrog with Gandalf at the Bridge of Khazad-dûm and although his fear and loathing of Elves or anything elvish prevented him from entering Lothlórien, he had waited, hiding in the woods by the Silverlode, until the journey of the Fellowship began once more.

Aragorn has been aware of him all the time and has known who it has been that has been following them. On the one hand this is because he is one of the great trackers of the age, but it is also because he caught Gollum once. He had found him by a pool in the Dead Marshes, hunting for food and had driven him all the way to the Woodland Realm of the Elves in Mirkwood where Thranduil was to hold him prisoner. But he was not a prisoner for very long. Sauron had a purpose in mind for Gollum and that was to use his desire in order to help in the search for the Ring and so he was freed during an attack by orcs upon his guards and so had been hunting ever since. Probably it had been his intention to make his way through Moria from east to west and then to walk across Eriador all the way to the Shire and so track his mortal enemy down and to regain the Ring.

Although Gollum had dreams of becoming “Gollum the Great” once he had regained the Ring and of paying everyone back for all their mistreatment of him, as he saw it, Sauron had no fear of him. He knew that if ever Gollum were to find the Ring again he would be certain to use it, and as often as possible, and so it would not be long before his servants would track him down and to bring the Ring back at last to its Lord.

And so it is that Gollum has been floating upon a log down the Anduin in pursuit of the Fellowship and why he tries to climb onto the small island in the river where the the boats are moored where Frodo is sleeping even though Aragorn is there also. But Frodo is alert and draws Sting and Gollum quickly makes his escape.

“We shall have to trying going faster tomorrow,” says Aragorn to Frodo. “I wish I could lay my hands on the wretch. We might make him useful. But if I cannot, we shall have to try and lose him.”

By driving their boats forward on the river the next day the Company are able to lose Gollum for a while but all such efforts are ultimately useless. Gollum’s desire for the Ring is so great that again and again he manages to find his way back to it until all comes to a head at the Cracks of Doom upon Orodruin. As Gandalf put it to Frodo Gollum has “no will left in the matter. If ever there was a time when Gollum had possession of the Ring it was very brief. He has never possessed the Ring. The Ring has always possessed him. He may think that he desires the Ring but it would be more true to say that desire has taken possession of him and will never let him go. There will be moments when the “little corner of his mind” that is still his own will emerge but that corner is very small and desperately weak. It will be his desire that will drive him on.

Gollum Takes The Ring to The Fire

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Frodo cannot cast the Ring into the Fire. It has mastered him and will not be destroyed in that way. In the last two weeks, firstly in my own post, Frodo Claims The Ring For Himself and in Anne Marie Gazzolo’s wonderful meditation, The Ring Claims Frodo we saw that Frodo spent all that he could of himself just to bring the Ring to the Mountain. He had nothing more to give. As Tom Hillman put it, with typical wisdom in a comment on Frodo Claims The Ring For Himself, “no-one could have achieved the Quest by throwing the Ring into the Fire”

I think it is necessary to pause here a moment to say that when Tom says no-one he means that not Elrond, nor Galadriel nor Gandalf nor Aragorn could have thrown the Ring into the Fire. There is an amusing meme that does the rounds of the World Wide Web in which the entire plot of The Lord of the Rings is simplified by Gandalf and the Eagles flying to the Mount Doom and dropping the Ring into the Fire. All that the witty purveyors of this meme achieve is to reveal their spiritual shallowness. For one thing, as a comment from Gwen showed on the same post the mountain would not have been undefended except through the remarkable coalescing of circumstances that Tolkien gives us. Secondly, there is no such thing as a simple throwing of the Ring into the Fire.

And so a grace is given in a form that could not have been anticipated and that form is the last desperate attack by Gollum. It is a form that Sauron ignores entirely regarding it as being completely insignificant. When Shagrat took his report to Barad-dûr of the events in Cirith Ungol did he leave out the detail of “her ladyship’s sneak” turning up again after a long absence? I doubt it. I think that, compared to the news of the dangerous spy who has somehow got past Shelob, Sauron thought that there was nothing more for him to learn about Gollum than he already knew.

That is Sauron’s fatal weakness. He is only capable of seeing things in terms of power and once he had extracted from Gollum all that he had done and all that he knew Sauron had no more interest in him allowing him to play the role in relation to Shelob that Shagrat and Gorbag referred to.

Only Gandalf had a sense that Gollum might have a role to play in the story. “My heart tells me that he has some part to play yet, for good or ill, before the end.” Gandalf learned respect for small things in his long pilgrimage and for deeds that no-one else notices. “The pity of Bilbo may rule the fate of many- yours not least.”

Gandalf has learned a deep wisdom through a conscious attentiveness to small people and small deeds, a wisdom that began with his long tutelage in the school of the Lady Nienna, a school in which I suspect he may have been the only pupil. It was Nienna, one of the Valar, who taught him pity, both its necessity as a moral quality and its significance in the history of the world. It is Gandalf who realised that in the long, violent and malicious history of the Ring only Bilbo took it without violence and only Bilbo gave it up freely. Grace takes Bilbo’s kindly disposition, a very small thing in the great scheme of things and puts it to world-transforming use. Grace perfects Nature and so opens the door to Frodo’s pity for Gollum and Sam’s realisation that he too cannot kill Gollum, much as he wished to do so. And it opens the door to Gollum’s last attack upon Frodo and his fall into the Fire with the Ring on his grasp. Without all these small things the Ring could not have been destroyed. Grace would have had no door by which to enter the story. Grace cannot achieve perfection without Nature.

“But for him, Sam,” says Frodo after the Ring has gone, “I could not have destroyed the Ring. The Quest would have been in vain, even at the bitter end. So let us forgive him!”

And let us all forgive Gollum too and trust that he finds his way at the last to peace and to healing just as we long for peace and healing for ourselves too.