Trusting in “Witless Halflings”

“Your Heart is Shrewd As Well As Faithful, and Saw Clearer Than Your Eyes.” Sam Gamgee Shows Us How To Make a Mess of Things and Yet To Get The Biggest Things Right.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp.888-890

It is a catastrophic moment. Frodo has taken such care to keep the conversation with Faramir away from the matter of the Ring. Faramir is aware that there is something that Frodo does not wish to speak about but once he has made his mind up that Frodo is a man of honour he chooses not to press him on this. But Frodo is tired and lapses into silence and Sam takes over the conversation.

Anke Eissman depicts the moment when Frodo begins to drift into sleep and Sam takes up the conversation with Faramir. Note the intensity of the gaze between Sam and Faramir. Great things are about to be revealed.

Sam begins to speak about Galadriel and he falls into a reverie as he does so and within that dreamlike mood suddenly says of Boromir:

“It’s my opinion that in Lórien he first saw clearly what I guessed sooner: what he wanted. From the moment he first saw it he wanted the Enemy’s Ring.”

Suddenly everything changes. The Ring takes centre stage after it has lain hidden and defended and the brother of the man who tried to take it by force from Frodo stands before it surrounded by a troup of warriors. Faramir knows what it is and he knows that his brother tried to take it. It is as he puts it himself “a chance for Faramir, Captain of Gondor, to show his quality”.

And he does show his quality. At this critical moment he chooses not to try to take the Ring. And as when Gandalf and then Galadriel both chose not to take it when Frodo offered it to them and as Bilbo freely let it go when Gandalf told him to do so it is upon these moments of free renunciation that the whole story turns. A number of readers of The Lord of the Rings have noted that Tolkien does something quite unique in his story. That whereas every story of quest is about the finding and getting of something Tolkien tells us a story of letting something go, of casting it away, a story of renunciation. The Ring is a thing that can give great power to the one who possesses it and each one of the characters that we have mentioned chose to renounce the possibility of this power.

Bilbo chooses freely to renounce the Ring after a little persuasion from a good friend.

And what of Sam’s terrible mistake? At this moment Frodo simply sees it as a disaster. What had lain hidden now lies bare before all. The brother of the man who tried to take it knows what it is and where it is. But Faramir sees it very differently.

“Be comforted, Samwise. If you seem to have stumbled, think that it was fated to be so, Your heart is shrewd as well as faithful, and saw clearer than your eyes.”

Clearly Sam was not meant to reveal that Frodo had the Ring of Power in his possession. We thought a few weeks ago about Frodo’s decision not to let Faramir know about the true purpose of his mission. But Sam has come to trust the man who has offered them shelter and has chosen, albeit without reflection, to entrust him with the secret of Frodo’s mission. Frodo himself longs to do the same. It is only the memory of Boromir that prevents him from doing so.

And so it is Sam’s heart, and not his head, that has lead both him and Frodo to this moment. It is Sam’s heart that breaks through all the mistrust that has divided the foes of Sauron from one another for so very long. Gondor’s long separation from peoples who once stood with them as allies is set aside in a moment of heartfelt indiscretion. Not that the heart of Minas Tirith is changed in this moment. Denethor, when he learns of the trusting action of his son, will bitterly declare that if Boromir, and not his brother, had lived he would have brought to his father “a mighty gift”. But all through The Lord of the Rings it is these moments of trust that prove essential to the successful outcome of the great quest and this is one of the most important of all of them. If Faramir had chosen at this moment to take the Ring then all would have ended in darkness and the triumph of Sauron. That he does not do this, but chooses to trust in the mission that Frodo has been given, is crucial to the whole story.

And all becomes possible because of Sam’s heart and not his head.

Why Did Sauron Make the Ring? Gandalf in Frodo’s Study at Bag End.

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The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991) pp 50,51

In 1949 Herbert Butterfield, Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge, published a series of lectures that he had given under the title of Christianity and History. I do not know if he had any contact with The Inklings. He was a Cambridge Professor and they were based in Oxford. But I rather think that Tolkien would have approved of Butterfield’s thoughts contained in this quotation from those lectures.

 

“The hardest strokes of heaven fall in history upon those who imagine that they can control things in a sovereign manner, as though they were kings of the earth, playing Providence not only for themselves but for the far future- reaching out into the future with the wrong kind of far-sightedness and gambling on a lot of risky calculations in which there must never be a single mistake.”

When I asked whether Butterfield and the Inklings could have known each other it was because it seemed to me that Butterfield could have been describing the action of Sauron in the forging of the Ring. That Sauron imagined himself, not only as a king of the earth, but as the king. Sauron forged the Ring in order to achieve kingship, declaring his intent in the words that he inscribed upon it.

One Ring to rule them all.

Sauron is one who fears disorder; one for whom order is only certain when he is in absolute control. This means that all other powers, even and perhaps most especially Providence itself, must first be found and then bound in the darkness. And why the darkness? Because the light is not under his control and the light is able to penetrate even the most carefully constructed of his defences. The same goes for the unruly weather. The wind blows where it chooses and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.

And Sauron fears those who are born of the Spirit, those who are truly free, who will not bow the knee to him; and so he labours endlessly to corrupt the free and to bind them to him for ever. It is the Ringwraiths, the Nazgûl, who are the most tragic of these people. They are those who traded their freedom in exchange for power and so as Gandalf expresses it heartbreakingly, they became “shadows under his great Shadow”. It is hard to imagine any image that could convey the sense of something or someone who has less substance than a shadow within a shadow. This is the end of all who seek power and control and who grow to fear freedom above everything else. Butterfield describes Sauron so well when he speaks of one who is farsighted in the wrong way, someone who seeks to eliminate all unpredictability and risk from the future. As Butterfield puts it, someone for whom “there must never be a single mistake”.

Compare such a spirit to the astonishing risk of putting your trust in hobbits! Perhaps this is a moment to consider how great a risk this is. Later in the story Denethor, the Lord of Gondor, will declare Gandalf’s trust in hobbits as madness and the hobbits themselves as witless. Gandalf does not argue with him or try to justify his trust. His choice is the worst that could possibly have been made. Except, that is, for every other choice.

 

But the same quotation from Butterfield that opened this short reflection goes on to describe the choice that Gandalf does make and the one that Frodo accepts and makes his own.

“Each of us should rather do the good that is under our noses. Those people work more wisely who seek to achieve good in their own small corner of the world and then leave the leaven to leaven the whole lump.”

This is what Gandalf and Frodo speak of on that Spring morning in the Shire. Not some vast plan to solve all the problems of Middle-earth but the decision to take one course of action. And at this point the action is only to take the Ring out of the Shire because the Dark Lord now knows that the Ring is there. The first choice to do good is very limited in its scope because at this point Frodo and, even, Gandalf himself does not know what to do next. But it is enough. The lump of dough will be leavened beyond all imagining.