Aragornian Doubling

Aragorn, as I’ve already opined, is possibly the best orator at the Council of Elrond.  At any rate, he speaks with his own distinctive voice, the broadest array of rhetorical devices, and with some of the strangest grammatical constructions… constructions in which the grammar is driven along like a beast of burden for the meaning.  He is a skillful task-master of grammar, is Aragorn.  But I’ll get to that in a moment.

The most distinctive thing I’ve seen in Aragorn’s formal speeches at the Council is a curious feature that I’m calling “doubling,” but which goes by the more formal term “parallelism.”  Aragorn likes to state and restate his meanings in pairs.  Take one of the sentences in his speech to Boromir:

I have had a hard life and a long… I have crossed many mountains and many rivers, and trodden many plains, even into the far countries of Rhûn and Harad where the stars are strange.

“Many mountains” and “many rivers” are here parallel to each other, with the addition of “many plains.”  Rhûn and Harad form a convenient pair of foreign-country names.  And the opening phrase “a hard life and a long” emphasizes its own parallelism.  Think of the most usual way of expressing such a sentence:  “I have had a hard, long life.”  With two adjectives in a row, you don’t get a peculiar emphasis on either of them, and one is tempted to ignore the second adjective.  But if you change it to “I have had a hard and long life,” the two qualities are emphasized by the conjunction; and when you so separate them that you say “I have had a hard life and a long,” the unusual structure places an independent emphasis on both.

(I’m not entirely sure, but this structure may be an example of “hendiadys.”  Hendiadys is a device that creates a conjunction where there was only subordination beforehand: as in  “my darling and friend” for “my darling friend,” or “sound and fury” for “furious sound.”  Here, you might be able to say that “a hard life and a long” rescues the adjective “long” from a somewhat subordinate position as a second-seat to “hard” in describing “life”… but I don’t have official rhetorical confirmation of this.)

Now let’s take a look at Aragorn’s speech in defense of the Dúnedain, where he hits his rhetorical stride.  The thing about Aragorn’s rhetorical stride is that he gives it free reign only to draw it up short.  The sort of doubling we saw above occurs again and again, yet Aragorn punctuates it with extremely abbreviated and mostly ironic remarks.  Take the following example, from the description of the Rangers:

When dark things come from the houseless hills, or creep from sunless woods, they fly from us.  What roads would any dare to tread, what safety would there be in quiet lands, or in the homes of simple men at night, if the Dúnedain were asleep, or were all gone into the grave?

Doublings everywhere—houseless hills and sunless woods, being asleep and going into the grave.  It’s a rolling plain of rhetoric.  But then comes the check, in eight words:

And yet less thanks have we than you.

Touché, Boromir of Gondor.  But Aragorn hardly pauses long enough for the effect to sink in, and goes immediately back to the doubling:

Travelers scowl at us, and countrymen give us scornful names.  ‘Strider’ I am to one fat man who lives within a day’s march of foes that would freeze his heart, or lay his little town in ruin, if he were not guarded ceaselessly.

The doublings again are obvious: travelers and countrymen, freezing hearts and ruining towns.  What comes next?  Seven words, this time:

Yet we would not have it otherwise.

Experiencing this kind of rhetoric is like watching a well-trained stallion.  There is an expansiveness in the gallop, and utmost control in the check.  It is Aragorn’s distinctive style of speech, and one which no other member of the Council deploys.  It is, I believe, the self-tempered voice of a King.

These are not the only tools Aragorn carries in his rhetorical knapsack, however.  The climax of his speech to Boromir is a pungent display of the device called “enumeratio.”  Remember that Aragorn had asked Boromir a question that Boromir had not answered.  Should the House of Elendil return to the land of Gondor?  Boromir had doubted and Bilbo had interrupted; and Aragorn had continued with a speech in defense of the Dúnedain.  But now he returns to the crucial point.  Aragorn abandons his expansive sentences and his Aragornian doubling.  His speech becomes staccato.  Using the device of “enumeratio”—a listing of considerations in concise, punctuated form—he crescendos to a climax:

But now the world is changing once again.  A new hour comes.  Isildur’s Bane is found.  Battle is at hand.  The Sword shall be reforged.  I will come to Minas Tirith.

Touché again, Boromir; and that is a promise.

 

The Sons of Elendil

Following his solemn call to order at the beginning of the council, Elrond tells the tale of the Ring from its forging to its loss at the death of Isildur.  He also briefly tells of the decline of the kings in Gondor – a royal line which eventually fails and is succeeded by a line of stewards, who are also of Númenorian blood but not of royal descent.  When Elrond has finished speaking, Boromir interrupts.

Our first glimpse of Boromir’s character, other than his clothing, is his choice of topic.  He does not begin with his own tale and quest, but with a defense of Gondor.  “Believe not,” he says, “that in the land of Gondor the blood of Númenor is spent, nor all its pride and dignity forgotten.”  Two of Boromir’s comments on Gondor’s situation are intriguing.  First is his assumption that “few… know of our deeds” and therefore do not understand the danger that Middle Earth would be in if Gondor failed to restrain the forces of Mordor.  Second is his explicit assertion that “by our valour… alone are peace and freedom maintained in the lands behind us.”   Both assertions are ones which Aragorn will challenge in his response to Boromir.

There is irony, great irony, when the son of the steward of Gondor says that few know the deeds done in Gondor, while Aragorn, son of the rightful heir to Gondor, sits by with all his deeds and the deeds of his kin, the Rangers, unknown.  There is irony when Boromir boasts of the praise men give to Gondor as the sole bulwark between Mordor and the West, while the Rangers toil unpraised at their task of hunting the evil things that Gondor cannot restrain.  These ironies are the substance of Aragorn’s reply to Boromir.  But not before Aragorn himself has been revealed to all the council as the heir of Elendil, and not before he has asked a pivotal question that goes unanswered.

They are described carefully, Aragorn and Boromir:  both dark-haired and grey-eyed, both clad in their weatherstained habits, though Boromir’s is lined with fur and Aragorn’s is not.  Boromir wears a white stone set in his collar.  Aragorn, the evening before, had worn a stone like a star upon his breast.  Yet the similarities are hardly sufficient for even the reader to immediately recognize Aragorn as Boromir’s double and distant relation—a failure of recognition which Aragorn, for his part, excuses.  “Little do I resemble the figures of Elendil and Isildur as they stand carven in their majesty in the halls of Denethor,” he concedes. 

But what of the pivotal question?  Boromir makes his speech in praise of Gondor and tells of his own quest to find the Sword that was Broken.  In response to Boromir’s quest, Aragorn casts the two pieces of his sword upon Elrond’s table, whereupon Elrond (like a herald) dramatically reveals Aragorn’s identity as the Heir of Isildur.  And then Aragorn asks Boromir the crucial question:  “Now you have seen the sword that you have sought, what would you ask?  Do you wish for the House of Elendil to return to the Land of Gondor?”

It is a question Boromir does not answer.  His response, I think, is the instinctive response of pride and perhaps not of careful consideration — I mean the kind of consideration that would have made him realize what was at stake in having the Heir of Isildur return to Gondor.  In the absence of a King in Gondor, the stewards of Gondor essentially held the powers of kings, and Boromir was next in line for the highest office in the West.  The return of the King to Gondor would mean not only the possible salvation of Gondor but also the practical demotion of the stewards.  Would Boromir be the sort of man to willingly bow before a Ranger not bred in Gondor?

Perhaps that question, given the plot to come, cannot be answered.  Boromir’s only answer in the present situation is his proud assertion that “I was not sent to beg any boon.”  He follows this with an admittedly skeptical glance at Aragorn and the half-spoken question of whether the Sword of Elendil really had returned out of the past.

Boromir’s skepticism sets off two replies:  one by Bilbo, and the other by Aragorn.  Bilbo’s response is to recite, in annoyance on behalf of his friend, the full two-stanza rhyme All that is gold does not glitter.  Aragorn’s response, considerably longer, musters the full force of his rhetoric and includes a magnificent speech in defense of the Dúnedain.  Since Aragorn is quite possibly the best orator at the Council of Elrond, his response deserves a further post all to itself.

 

Anastrophe, Archaism, Ecphonesis, Alliteration, Apostrophe, and Repetition: Or, Wherefore this Jargon of Greek and Latin Derivatives?

As we saw in the last post…

Anastrophe inverts normal word order: “Rings he would give for it”…
Alliteration repeats a vowel sound (assonance) or a consonant sound (consonance): “Heavy have the hearts of our chieftains been”…

And Archaism uses an old word or old way of saying things: “on a time,” “deem.”

Gloin and Elrond both make use of these devices in their speeches at the Council (and anastrophe and archaism run rampant throughout the council in general… I’ll point out more examples when we come to the other speakers). However, there are at least two other rhetorical devices that Gloin and Elrond seem to appropriate in particular, and in a way that others do not echo: ecphonesis and repetition.

As far as I can tell, there are the only two instances of ecphonesis in the Council. The first is Gloin’s passionate outcry, “Moria! Moria! Wonder of the Northern world!” and the second is Elrond’s cry, “The Ring!” As you can tell, ecphonesis is a passionate interjection that breaks into the flow of things, and Gloin’s particular ecphonesis could just as well be apostrophe, I suppose. The difference is that an apostrophe is supposed to address the inanimate thing or abstract idea directly, whereas an ecphonesis just exclaims about said thing or idea. In the case of Moria, I think Gloin is not so much addressing Moria directly as exclaiming about it. And Elrond clearly is not addressing the Ring.

The Ring is the subject, not only of Elrond’s ecphonesis, but also of recurrent and significant repetition in the first two speeches. “The Ring, the least of rings,” a phrase containing an echo of itself, appears no fewer than three times. Gloin, relating a speech within a speech, says that the messenger who came from Mordor to King Dain spoke of “a little ring, the least of rings, that once [a Halfling] stole.” Later, Gloin repeats the phrase by saying that he has come to Rivendell to learn “why [Sauron] desires this ring, this least of rings.” Finally, Elrond himself echoes the mantra. In Elrond’s mouth, however, the repetition is transformed. The messenger from Mordor meant the description “least of rings” as a lie; Gimli repeated it honestly and inquiringly; but Elrond utters it with irony. At the climactic moment of his solemn call to the council, a sort of official opening to the proceedings, Elrond summarizes the dilemma in few words:

The Ring! What shall we do with the Ring, the least of rings, the trifle that Sauron fancies? That is the doom that we must deem.

This pivotal call, one of the highest moments of eloquence in the entire Council, packs at least four rhetorical devices into two lines. It opens with ecphonesis, ends with the alliteration of doom and deem, both archaic words, and at the very heart re-echoes the ironic chant, “the Ring, the least of rings.” Perhaps one ought to count the irony as a fifth rhetorical device. “The least of rings,” “the trifle that Sauron fancies,” could not magnify the import of the Ring in the listener’s ears more than they do.

The eloquence of Elrond is unquestionable, and one cannot help thinking that it is so intentionally. The lord of Elves and master of the council should be well-versed in words, and Tolkien consistently gives him an archaic and anastrophic manner of speaking, interspersed with gems of polished oratory as above. The gems, moreover, come at pivotal moments, and one gradually gets the impression that the unfolding of the council is the unfolding of a rhetorically intricate and elaborate structure, which Tolkien has designed to take on a life of its own in the revealing of character, in addition to its revealing of content.

Elrond’s and Gloin’s narrative speeches are not alone for their oratorical skill. Our next specimens of rhetoric will come not from a narrative speech, but from an altercation between two Men who foil one another: Aragorn and Boromir.

 

Dwarf and Elf: Anastrophic Archaism

The first two speeches in the Council of Elrond are given by a Dwarf and an Elf, Gloin and Elrond, and the rhetorical devices they employ are more similar than you would think. In some sense this goes for the whole council—Tolkien makes use of few rhetorical devices as often as he does anastrophe and archaism, both in the council and elsewhere. But I find it curious that, of all the very different speakers that might have started the council, an Elf and a Dwarf should sound so similar. Maybe there is nothing more to this than coincidence, and the fact that both Gloin and Elrond have narratives to relate (a recent narrative in Gloin’s case, and an ancient one in Elrond’s). But the rhetoric of each is very pleasing, and I thought that it would be pleasing to lift out a few of the rhetorical elements for each.

There are actually not only two, but five rhetorical devices that Gloin and Elrond use in common. For this post, I think I’ll confine myself (mostly) to the first two, the bread-and-butter devices which I mentioned above, which Tolkien loves so well: anastrophe and archaism. (There are three others—alliteration, repetition, and ecphonesis—which I’ll get into next time, since they’re all packed together rather densely in one of Elrond’s speeches.) Anastrophe is the glorified term for inverted word order. Tolkien employs this most frequently by switching the positions of subjects and objects. So you have Gloin relating what the messenger from Sauron said about the Halfling’s ring: “Rings he would give for it, such as he gave of old,” switching object and subject for emphasis. Or, “Heavy have the hearts of our chieftains been since that night,” making use not only of anastrophe but of alliteration as well.

Archaisms, meanwhile, come in everywhere: old words and old ways of saying things, like “nigh on thirty years ago” and “on a time” (thus, “one of these was known to you on a time”) and “yea nor nay.” Elrond’s archaic vocabulary is very colorful: “deem” and “weregild” appear in his lengthy address to the council—although the latter term originally rises from the mouth of Isildur, who says he will take the Ring “as weregild for my father, and my brother.”

Elrond’s anastrophe is similar to Gloin’s, though with not so great an emphasis upon concrete objects. “Only to the North did these tidings come,” he relates of Isildur’s death, inverting the verb and its modifiers, “and only to a few. Small wonder it is that you have not heard them, Boromir.” You can see that he packs in two anastrophes in a row. Elrond uses alliteration in a peculiarly forceful manner once when he announces, “That is the doom that we must deem”—but that is a passage I will return to in the next post. That is also the post where I’ll come back to the other devices that both Elrond and Gloin use: ecphonesis and repetition. But in the meantime, talking about anastrophe and ecphonesis in the same post could lead to unwarranted obfustication, both being obscure Greek terms that I myself was not on friendly terms with until this very afternoon.

 

The Speeches of Heroes, Part II

Elves may thrive on speech alone, and Dwarves endure great weariness; but I am only an old hobbit, and I miss my meal at noon.   ~ Bilbo at the Council of Elrond (LotR Book II, ch. 2)

Getting adults to sit still and pay attention through a long speeches is hard enough.  Getting children and hobbits to do so is still harder.  Yet this is what Tolkien sets himself to throughout the magnanimously long Council of Elrond, wryly and wittily acknowledging the difficulty of the task by having Bilbo remark twice about his eagerness for dinner.  But the fact is that Bilbo’s dinner must wait.  The material that Tolkien has to get across to the Hobbits and the readers is largely epic in content, and crucial to orienting the rest of the Tale.  And yet its setting is a romance, and the style of telling that Tolkien has already adopted—with its verisimilitude and prosaic portrayal of the common and mundane—is that of a novel.  How is epic content to be poured into novelesque prose, and how is the reader to be coaxed along?

Tolkien comes to grips with his difficulty by carefully distributing the epic material he wants to relate to a kaleidoscope of speakers.  Gimli is the first to relate a recent adventure occurring among his own people, and this is followed by a historical narrative through the mouth of Elrond.  This narrative is interrupted by an exchange between Boromir and Aragorn; continued by Bilbo and Frodo; continued again by Gandalf (not without more interruptions), and concluded with the pressing question of what to do. By presenting the Tale of the Ring in this fashion, Tolkien both limits the knowledge of each speaker (with the notable exception of Gandalf and Elrond), and ensures that the history and condition of Middle Earth are delivered to the reader piecemeal.  Since no single speaker tells the full story, both Frodo and the reader must construct their situation like a jumbo jigsaw puzzle, with each piece falling duly into place.

While this peculiar process of discovery in itself is sufficient to keep the mind of the first-time reader from wandering to his dinner, it also plays another and equally important role.  It novelizes the epic material to be related.  We learn of cosmic doings in Middle Earth not through the eyes of the Omniscient Narrator, but through the eyes of very particular persons with very particular limitations and—if I may go so far—very particular quirks in narration.  Elrond, Aragorn, and Gandalf do not favor identical styles of speech-giving.  Though each attains moments of high eloquence, the character of each reveals itself in divergent modes of expression:  Aragorn’s with a stride like a stallion under the reign, Gandalf’s with that peppering of humor so peculiar to the wizard.  The characterization in the prose speeches trains the epic material to the genre of the novel; and the strangeness of the unfolding tale, heard through the non-omniscient ears of Frodo, preserves the otherworldly feel of the romance.

It would be an injustice to pass over the Council of Elrond without a token of attention to the particular speeches.  The glory of the Council is its rhetoric.  This week I will be dusting off the books, well marked and dog-eared, that I still have from the course on medieval rhetoric and poetics last year.  There are names for the sorts of things Tolkien is up to in the speeches, but I have to go back to the old rhetoric manuals to remember what they are.

 

The Speeches of Heroes, Part I

Long deliberative chapters in which the concerned characters tell stories, stories within stories, and ancient histories, all for the sake of determining current action, are hardly popular among novels.  I can’t think of a similar case in English prose fiction prior to Tolkien.  Where such chapters do show up is in the midst of epic poetry.  In fact, the long deliberative speeches of heroes are one of the hallmarks of the epic genre:  confer Agamemnon and the Greek lords in the Iliad, or Satan and his devils in Paradise Lost.  The Council of Elrond, I think, is a moment of genre-bending in The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien is stretching the boundary of his chosen form to appropriate a device from another form, and the question is whether the appropriation works in a way that makes it justifiable.

Before getting to the nuts and bolts of how this appropriation works within the confines of a romance, I want to glance for a moment at the theoretic justification for it.  Romance and epic are different genres with different ends.  As my Old French teacher insisted repeatedly in class, there is no such thing (or at least there was not, among the medievals) as an epic romance or romance epic.  Epics are about national identity, territory struggles, the place of man in the cosmic order, the hard reality of human life and the meaning of death.  They come with conventions like the invocation of a muse, a beginning in media res, a journey to the underworld, long deliberative speeches, and iambic pentameter.  Romances, on the other hand, are about adventures occurring in places that even the medievals envisioned as long ago and far away, tinged with the strange and the magical.  The pertinent difference can be boiled down to this:  epics are about the forces that made the world to be as it is, and man’s place in that world; romances are about other worlds, or the world as it might have been.

Now perhaps you see the loophole in this distinction.  Suppose that someone set himself the task of writing a romance that took place in far-away place that was nevertheless as completely imagined as possible.  This writer wished to imagine this place so thoroughly that he plotted maps of its geography—not just one map but many, as the geography changed over time.  Moreover, he tried to imagine the history of this world from its creation onward, so he wrote volumes full of the doings of its peoples.  Then he began to tell a story about what happened in this far-away place at a fairly late stage in its history.  At the time of the story’s telling, this imaginary world was already peppered with peoples that had their own histories and territories.  Moreover, the story was concerned with a matter of cosmic proportions:  the victory or defeat of an evil being who wished to enslave the whole imagined world.  Such a story involved a meeting of wise men and heroes to deliberate upon their course of action, and it included at least two journeys to the underworld.  Now, was this writer writing an epic or a romance?

Perhaps you might be tempted to say, both epic and romance.  Or perhaps more of romance than epic.  Or perhaps and epic-like romance or vice versa.  But however that may be, you can see why this writer might justifiably (perhaps unavoidably) seek to include the elements of both genres.  But here he runs afoul of another problem, a practical one:  how thoroughly can he expect the elements of disparate genres to meld with each other in an actual written text? 

This question is the subject matter for my next post.

 

The Council of Elrond

As far as the Hobbits’ journey has gone so far, Rivendell is the hub of the tale and of the world.  They have passed from the Shire to Bree with its Men and Rivendell with its Elves; and at Rivendell they become acquainted not only with Elves and Men but Dwarves—in short, with most of the other persons from most of the geographies with which they will now have to do.  To tie Frodo’s tale together with what preceded it and what will follow, Bilbo is there from the Shire, Legolas from Mirkwood, Gloin and Gimli from the Lonely Mountain, and Boromir from Gondor.  The persons and places that the Hobbits do not meet in person, they hear of in story:  Saruman, Rohan, Shadowfax, Gwaihir.  The Council of Elrond sums up the plight of Middle Earth and charts the future course like a living map and compass for the tale.

Several years ago when the first volume of The Lord of the Rings was made into a movie, one of my acquaintances tried to convince me that the Council of Elrond was handled much more adroitly in the movie than the book.  The speeches on the screen were kept to a minimum, or else their content was rendered visually.  I agreed with him about the director’s prudence in cutting out the verbiage:  long speech, story-telling, and especially long deliberation are not well suited to the widescreen or most of its viewers.  However, I viewed the long speeches in the book as one of the glories of Tolkien’s rhetoric, and their omission in the film as a reflection on the problematic limitations of film-making in general.  But my friend insisted that he could not endure reading through the Council of Elrond in the book:  it was boring and wanted action.

The memory of this conversation has prompted my next several posts.  The overarching question is what the Council of Elrond does for the plot of The Lord of the Rings, and whether there is any way it could have been done better.  I’ve broken this question down into theory and practice:  the theory of wedding an epic convention to a romance narrative, and the practicality of making it work.  In the latter especially, I’ll take up the topic of Tolkien’s rhetoric again, and ask whether the Council of Elrond is indeed one of the glories of his work.

 

Felicem diem natalis

Today, or what is left of it, is Tolkien’s 118th birthday.  We had no food in the dormitory today, but tomorrow I plan to celebrate with a second breakfast.  As for tonight, there is still time to read a chapter of The Lord of the Rings and some incidental poetry before going to bed.

 

Ephemera

Of course everyone can order a personal replica of Arwen’s pendant or Aragorn’s sword these days.  But some Lord of the Rings fans have generated quainter ephemera.

Paper dolls looking for lovely elf and hobbit dresses are now in luck.

Those who live in dollhouses might wish for something to read by the miniature fireplace.

Baked goods and other eatibles presumably taste better with Hobbit names.

Gondor never looked more appetizing.

And nothing would be better than a Tolkien quilt to curl up in while reading his works and eating the aforesaid goodies.

 

Boethian Meditation the Fourth

There is a side of things Boethius does not talk about in the passages we have already seen.  He does not ask whether the good man who is destroyed or harmed by the wicked suffers real harm or destruction.  He talks about this elsewhere, however, and the answer is No.

It seems to me that Boethius must say this in order for the world to be set right.  If one is seriously to believe that the wicked have no power, while one nevertheless experiences the mundane fact that the wicked kill people every day, or forge malevolent rings, or construct unassailable fortresses from which to deploy vast armies of orcs, then one must save face somehow.  One must revert to saying that those who seem to have power over the body have no power over the soul.  And perhaps one will emphasize the fact that the wicked have only a transitory power even over the body, and that in the resurrection, the wicked will have power over nothing.

The resurrection is a controversial subject to broach in Middle Earth.  Elves have no need of it, and Men do not philosophize about it.  Death is a gift, a boon from Iluvatar, and appears not to need revoking.  I will let that sleeping dog lie.  But even without a resurrection in Middle Earth, it is fairly clear that death is not an evil.  In the unknown realm into which the dying go, the goodness of Iluvatar must still order all things.  And one suspects that in that realm, whether in or out of the world, wrongs will be set right.

Thus Boethius appeals to the afterlife:  no matter what goods may be destroyed in this world, our happiness consists in another, in becoming divine (as he puts it): in becoming “gods.”  This, too, is what the wicked lose.  Moreover, whatever wrongs we suffer in this life at the hands of wicked men or fickle Fortune, are actually goods sent by divine mercy to prepare us for the long-awaited happiness.

These are threads Tolkien does not weave into the trilogy.  The reward of good deeds in Middle Earth is the song that is sung of them afterwards, by whoever is left to sing.  The righting of wrongs in the afterlife is a hope which, if yearned for, is still unspoken.  And yet there is the hint eveywhere that death is not really to be feared, that (like Gandalf, perhaps) the righteous man is ultimately unslayable.  He may go to the halls of his fathers, he may go down into the earth or pass over the falls to the sea–but in the end he is accounted for, and preserved from the reach of those who can kill the soul.  In whatever place the dead wait, he too awaits the unbending of the world and the fate of the children of Iluvatar.