Woody End

“At Least by Good Chance We Come at The Right Hour to Reward You For Your Patience.” Frodo and Sam Come to Henneth Annûn, the Window of the Sunset.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 878-881

The journey to the place of refuge in which Frodo and Sam will stay that night is not an easy one, especially for Frodo and Sam for they will have to make the journey blindfold. But even Gollum, who we glimpsed briefly through Sam’s eyes at the beginning of this passage seems to be thrown off the trail.

But at the last, after a journey that Tolkien describes by means of the language of sound, the hobbits arrive at their place of rest and find it to be a place of beauty. For Frodo and Sam this will be their last place of refuge upon their long journey before they enter Mordor and there will be no refuge there. The first was at Woody End when they were guests of Gildor Inglorien and his company and there have been many along the way. The house of Tom Bombadil, the Prancing Pony at Bree, the Last Homely House at Rivendell, the secret land of Lothlórien, and now this. Of all the places in which they have rested this provides the least comfort but it is a safe place and it has its reward for those who rest there.

See Alan Lee’s beautiful depiction of the Elves refuge in Woody End.

“They stood on a wet floor of polished stone, the doorstep, as it were, of a rough hewn gate of rock opening dark behind them. But in front a thin veil of water was hung, so near that Frodo could have put an outstretched arm into it. It faced westward. The level shafts of the setting sun behind beat upon it, and the red light was broken into many flickering beams of ever changing colour. It was as if they stood at the window of some elven-tower, curtained with threaded jewels of silver and gold, and ruby, sapphire and amethyst, all kindled with an unconsuming fire.”

If elves had come to this place they would have fashioned a place of wonder just as they did at Woody End in the Shire. They would have learned what the place had to teach them through patient attention and then worked with it to reveal that wonder. As Gimli showed us at the glittering caves of Aglarond that dwarves would pay attention to the gifts of the earth in order to reveal them. And hobbits would discover that which would make it homely just as they had done in the Shire.

But these gifts are gifts of peace and now there is no time to practice them. The men of Gondor have made it a place of temporary shelter just as soldiers did in the trenches of the Western Front in the 1914-18 war in which Tolkien played his part. Whether Faramir returned to Henneth Annûn after the war we are not told but I like to imagine that he did and that some of Legolas’s promised elves from the woodland realm offered their services to create a kingly hall here.

But Frodo and Sam are able to find beauty wherever they go. Perhaps, as Frodo suggests when his eyes are blindfolded, it is a gift that he shares with all hobbits. He spoke at that moment of how, when the Fellowship had entered Lothlórien Gimli had sought to resist the Elves insistence that their eyes should have been blindfolded but that “the hobbits endured it”.

The willingness of hobbits to endure is one of the great gifts that they bring to the story. Of course they are capable of heroic deeds when called upon to undertake them but they do not look for such things. Merry and Pippin are carried across Rohan bound by orcs and Sam follows where Frodo goes without seeking any comfort for himself. And Frodo endures the Ring that he never sought, never desired,but which simply came to him. Later Frodo will be carried into Mordor by orcs and at the end he will be carried up Mount Doom by Sam.

“And do you seek great things for yourself, seek them not,” was a favourite text from the bible of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the great theologian and resister of the Nazi tyranny, and one that he pondered often while in prison. And the text continues, “but I will give your life as a prize of war” (Jeremiah 45.5). Bonhoeffer learnt that life was to lived as something given, not shaped by ourselves, just as prisoners of war are allowed to live. Frodo understands life in this way and one of the rewards of his patience is an ability to find beauty at many unexpected times and places.

“I Name You Elf Friend”. The Hobbits Meet and Stay With a Company of High Elves

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The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991) pp 77-83

The chance encounter, if chance it was as Gildor Inglorion observes, probably saves the hobbits from the Black Rider, the Nazgûl, most deadly of the servants of the Dark Lord. When Gildor and his company realise what it was from which they had inadvertently rescued Frodo and his companions they decide to take them under their protection and so the hobbits spend the night in a place of wonder.

In last week’s post we saw how Frodo begins to learn about the strangeness of a world that he had thought familiar. Gildor corrects Frodo when he speaks of “our own Shire”. “The wide world is all about you;” he says, “you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot forever fence it out.”

And the inability of hobbits and of ourselves too to fence the world out is a reason for thankfulness. It may be that enemies can enter the Shire but so too can friends, and in the case of the High Elves they are such friends as bring blessing beyond conceiving. For the hobbits that night in Woody End this blessing contains protection of course, but also for Sam it is the beginning of the fulfillment of a life long yearning. He has always wanted to see Elves and now they stand before him. The expression on his face, we are told, is one “half of fear and half of astonished joy”. And as for Pippin the whole thing is perhaps too much for him now. He is soon fast asleep but it begins an education that will make him a mighty hero.

And this is so for Frodo too. Gildor names him Elf Friend and this is not a title lightly given. Elrond of Rivendell will later say this of him at the Council that “though all the mighty elf-friends of old, Hador, and Húrin, and Túrin, and Beren himself were assembled together, your seat should be among them.” The elves gave this title for those heroes who made common cause with them in the age long struggle against the dark. Elrond names some of them whose stories are told in The Silmarillion and other places but he could also have named his own father, Eàrendil, and Elendil, high king of Gondor and Arnor and Aragorn too.

And why is Frodo named among them? He is not a mighty warrior, doing great deeds in battle. He will never sweep all his enemies from the field in a glorious charge of knights. It is not for this reason that Elrond names him among the company of heroes. No, the reason why Frodo is so named is because of the deed that he offers to do and the price that he is prepared to pay in order to do it. Gildor rightly judges that Frodo does not yet know the full scale of this but one might say that this was true of Beren before he set out to win a silmaril from the iron crown of Morgoth. But like Beren Frodo has made the great choice. He will accomplish the task that he chooses to do and is in turn chosen for or he will be overthrown or even die in the attempt.

And the task is truly great as well. He will seek to destroy the Ring which, if it were to fall into the hands of the Dark Lord, would lead to the final victory of darkness over Middle-earth. Day by day he will conquer his fear. Day by day he will fight the growing desire of the Ring to return to its maker, a desire that will make the carrying of this burden intolerable. Eventually he will be cast down by the Ring but this will not happen until another undreamt of means will be provided to accomplish the Ring’s destruction.

It is for this reason that Elrond will confirm that he is truly an Elf-friend. Gildor knows far less than Elrond but even without the knowledge that Elrond has he perceives the greatness of the story in which he was been called upon to play a part and the greatness of the person who he has taken under his protection as well.