The Red Book of Westmarch

Time 

Every time less than the pulsation of the artery

Is equal in its period and value to six thousand years.

For in this period the poet’s work is done, and all the great

Events of time start forth and are conceived in such a period,

Within a moment: a pulsation of the artery.

Space

Every space larger than a red globule of man’s blood

Is visionary, and is created by the hammer of Los.

And every space smaller than a globule of man’s blood opens

Into eternity, of which the vegetable earth is but a shadow.

Quoth the Sage: “Never can the soul have vision of the First Beauty unless itself be beautiful.”

But if a soul is not beautiful, how can it see the First Beauty?  It must make itself beautiful.  But how can it make itself beautiful?  It must have an exemplar to follow.  But surely the only true exemplar of Beauty is Beauty itself.

So how can the soul make itself beautiful in order to see Beauty, unless it has first seen Beauty?

What Plato’s language of rebirth and memory captures, well before Plotinus’s language about the ascent of the soul toward Beauty captures the same thing, is a real necessity of prior knowledge of some things, some things that Aquinas would call “known in a general and confused way” but not known clearly and perhaps not even consciously.  The soul begins by knowing something about beauty.  Based on that, it can make itself a little beautiful.  Being more beautiful, it can see and recall beauty more clearly.  And hence it makes itself a little more beautiful.

But this account of the journey of the soul, by steps, to some great but dimly foreshadowed End, is nothing other than a literary construction known as a Quest.  When Perceval (or any other knight, for that matter) sets out to find the Holy Grail, he knows what he seeks, but not how impure he is or how unworthy to find it.  As he realizes his defects, he undergoes purification.  The purification is what enables him to see what he could not see before.

And it all comes down to the seeing.  Is there a medieval Grail legend anywhere in which the knight takes the Grail home, quaffs mead from it at feasts, gives it to his lady, or donates it to the local museum?  The desire for the Holy Grail is not the desire for acquisition but for Sight.

But the distinction between the pleasure of acquisition and the pleasure of seeing is exactly the distinction that Aquinas draws between the Good and the Beautiful.

Now at last all is clear.  The knight questing for the Holy Grail is the divine spark of the Soul seeking to return to its first sight of Beauty.  The Primal Beauty is the Holy Grail.

For all my quibbles with Tolkien’s character sketches, I cannot complain about his plot development.  Tolkien is the Artist of the Set Stage.  He is also the Master of Unwinding Events.  Consider, for example, how many allusions to future events are packed into the opening paragraphs of Chapter 1.  We learn right off the bat about Mr. Bilbo Baggins being “well preserved.”  The Gaffer in the Inn characterizes the Old Forest as “a dark bad place.”  The first words out of Sandyman’s mouth (the churlish fellow who will prove the instrument of vile Industrialization later) are slanderous accusations against the dead Mr. and Mrs. Drogo Baggins.  A stranger in the Inn asks about the treasure up in Bag End.  We find out that Sam loves tales and the Gaffer distrusts book-learning and other forms of meddling in affairs that are too high for folk.  (Is this oddly reminisicent of Saruman’s later accusation that the Hobbits are mixed up in matters too great for them?)  And so it goes on.

An excellent plot-development-in-miniature is the building up of excitement for the Long-Expected Party.  It spans 6 paragraphs (all of page 34 in my edition).  Tolkien uses an action initiated at Bag End to cause a material effect in the neighborhood to heighten the anticipation of his characters.  Each paragraph is a separate event.  For example: invitations pour out – the post office is snowed under – people say they will certainly come.  Or: the field is covered with poles for tents – the Hobbits wake up the next morning to discover this – the Gaffer stops pretending to work in his garden.  The whole thing reaches its height at the end of paragraph 5, when (appropriately) the preparations are crowned by the creation of an outdoor kitchen and arrival of food services.  Tolkien even says “Excitement rose to its height.”

And then—then Tolkien shows how easily he can twitch the reins and alter everything.  The weather clouds over.  The remarkable thing about this paragraph is that it is only 5 sentences long, and Tolkien is still able to take the reader through sudden apprehension, building suspense, the critical moment of anxiety (the middle sentence and the shortest), the twinkle of hope, and the final glorious resolution.  “The sun got up, the clouds vanished, flags were unfurled and the fun began.”

It’s the entire Lord of the Rings tale in a nutshell.

It was Chapter One, and it was not wholly disappointing.

Sam’s character is the strongest in the first chapter, thanks perhaps to the tavern scene with Sandyman.  A good-souled, down-to-earth, thick-pated clod is Samwise Gamgee… and we know it as soon as he parts his rough lips.  Gandalf, on the other hand, appears in all the abruptness of disappointing the Hobbit children of early fireworks (an instructive comparison with the recent film, no doubt), and just as abruptly does he spare no syllables in any conversation.

 Bilbo is… his old self, as I remember him from The Hobbit, and he seems the picture of the middle-aged gentleman who can take 111 years with humor.  He is the vehicle of most of the chapter’s jokes.  But Frodo?  Perhaps he has too little action to himself in the first chapter.  Perhaps Tolkien wishes him to be the character with whom everyone identifies.  But he is washed out.   He has no distinctive tone of voice, as Sam and Gandalf clearly do, and as even Bilbo has to a lesser degree.

 Why does Tolkien start by creating a weak character for the one that is supposed to be strongest?  Perhaps the Quest is what we learned in college to call a “Bildungsroman.”  Frodo will grow with the story.  Perhaps it is significant that the tale begins when he is 33, the “coming of age” for Hobbits.  Perhaps it is significant that this is the age at which Christ died.

Perhaps we shall see.

by Robert Graves

There is one story and one story only

That will prove worth your telling,

Whether as learned bard or gifted child;

To it all lines or lesser gauds belong

That startle with their shining

Such common stories as they stray into.

I have been musing a bit more on some questions that the Prologue seems to raise.

Are Hobbits supposed to be “foils” to Men?  “Their faces were as a rule good-natured rather than beautiful, broad, bright-eyed, red-cheeked, with mouths apt to laughter, and to eating and drinking…. It is plain indeed that in spite of later estrangement Hobbits are relatives of ours: far nearer to us than Elves, or even than Dwarves.  Of old they spoke the languages of Men…. But what exactly our relationship is can no longer be discovered” (11).

Why are the Hobbits interested in genealogy?  If their size is a diminution of the stature of Men, perhaps their genealogical interests is a diminution of the study of History.  In fact, Hobbits don’t go in much for real history—and this, curiously, is the characteristic to come up most strongly when they first fall in with a Man.

Granted Meriadoc’s subsequent treatises on herblore, linguistics, and calendars, as well as Pippin’s compilation of a library of Gondor texts, why does the War of the Ring turn the hobbits into scholars?

For the first time since junior high I am re-reading The Lord of the Rings (Tolkien: Houghton Mifflin, 1978, 2nd ed).  In preparation for this momentous undertaking I purchased a cheap boxed set at the local Half-Price Books, suitable for making copious notes in the margins without troubling my conscious over the unspoilt whiteness of page borders.  This was well, for I have made notes as copiously as I feared.

When I was in junior high, of course, I was not struck by the oddity of Tolkien’s Prologue at the beginning of the Fellowship.  It is a great joke now to go back and re-read this benignly straight-faced, scholarly summary of the customs and history of Hobbits.  From the first reference to the Red Book to the last hypothesis regarding the chronology and provenance of the last Red Book copy, Tolkien spares no pains to make his academic prologue as respectable as possible.

I do not find the account to be quite dull, although I already know most of the information about Hobbits… I think the narrator’s charming, naïve, persistent assumption that his reader is interested in Hobbits as a piece of obscure but creditable history, is humorous enough to hold the attention of anyone with a stomach for a bit of academic spoofery.  But I wonder whether Tolkien might have a very dry side of academic scholarship in mind when he writes of the Hobbits’ passion for genealogies, and the fact that “all but Hobbits would find them exceedingly dull.  Hobbits delighted in such things, if they were accurate:  they liked to have books filled with things that they already knew, set out fair and square with no contradictions” (17).