The Red Book of Westmarch

Sometimes I wonder if Tolkien was a reincarnation of Gerard Manley Hopkins.  I ran across one of my favorites the other day in The Poetical Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1990).

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared, with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
 
And, for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
 
 
Then, of course, there is the last stanza of “Inversnaid”:


What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and wildness?  Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

It was 11:00 the other night, and a knock came at my door.  As this was the hour when Elves usually visit me, I was not surprised when I opened the door to find my good friend Hendumaica waiting there.

“Hendumaica!” I cried.  “You are most welcome here!  Come in!”

“A star shines upon the hour of our meeting,” she smiled, covering her heart with one hand.  Then she stepped as lightly as a leaf into my dorm room and sat down in a patch of space not already taken by books or papers or goulashes or kitchen cutlery or laundry or Capelli’s Dizionario di Abbreviature latine ed italiane.  She waited until I had found a seat too, and then she said (with a grave note in her silvery voice),

“Elf-friend, I believe that we have reached a parting of the ways.”

“A what?” I blinked.

“It concerns your weblog,” she said. “I have read your posts on ‘The Shadow of the Past’, and they are as unsound as a hollow elm that loses its leaves in the summer.”

“Uh… you’ve been reading my blog?” I asked.  This was disconcerting.  Elvenhome must have finally gotten the Internet, and the thought of “Common Stories” awash in Elvish comments completely unnerved me.

“You are young and green,” Hendumaica said gently, “and do not remember Frodo of the Nine Fingers.  But even so, you ought to have known from reading ‘The Shadow of the Past’ how much of his character is revealed there!”

“Uh…?” I said.

“Surely Frodo’s speech is not as singular as Elizabeth Bennet’s,” Hendumaica went on, “but John Ronald Reuel Tolkien the Golden-Tongued does not debase the speech of Frodo into a mere goad for a slow tale!”

“What are you talking about?” I asked.  And then I remembered:  I had written a post complaining about Frodo not having his own character, and about Tolkien using his questions simply to move the story along.

“It was not well said,” Hendumaica continued, as if reading my thoughts. “Our ways part on this question.  But I would not leave your stray bark to wander in the seas without guiding it back to its haven! Harken to this,” she added, suddenly pulling out a book nearly half her own size, bound in scarlet leather and inscribed with golden lettering.  On the front cover glittered the title The Lord of the Rings.  As she opened it creakily, I could see that the text of the book was written in black ink, with elaborate notations scribbled in silver all over the margins.

“Hear the words of Mithrandir,” Hendumaica said, and in a dramatically silvery voice she started into a passage near the beginning of ‘The Shadow of the Past’ where Gandalf tells Frodo about the real nature of his Ring.  The passage ends with Frodo uttering some exclamations of surprise:

‘How terrifying!’ said Frodo.  There was another long silence.  The sound of Sam Gamgee cutting the lawn came in from the garden.‘How long have you known this?’ asked Frodo at length.  ‘And how much did Bilbo know?’

“Stop!” I interrupted.  “That is exactly what I meant.  Why in the world does Frodo ask those two questions?  Gandalf has just told him about how dangerous it is to own a Great Ring, and instead of asking sensibly about Sauron or Elves or how to get rid of it, he comes out with those two nonsensical inquiries: how long have you known, and how much did Bilbo know?  Tolkien clearly just needed a way to introduce the story of Gandalf’s research, and Frodo’s question was a rather forced way of moving things along.”

“Ah, you mortals!” Hendumaica sighed, shaking her head.  “Do you not understand?  Imagine you were one of the small folk, living in your quiet Shire and knowing nothing of dark things.  You had a close friend who was a wizard; and this wizard knew for more than 50 years that your uncle had a certain ring, and he knew when your uncle gave the ring to you, and he had known for the last 17 years that you were keeping it.  Then one day he suddenly tells you that it is a Great Ring of Power, and that it corrupts all who own it!  Would you not demand to know how long he had known, and why he had not told you sooner?—and whether your uncle could be healed from its evil?”

“Well…” I said.

“Is not Mithrandir’s very honor at stake?  Is not Bilbo’s kindness at stake?  If he had known the evil of the ring and had still given it to Frodo, what great ill Frodo must have thought of him!”

“Y-yes…” I said.  There was silence between us for several minutes.

“You ask,” Hendumaica said, “why Frodo did not immediately press Mithrandir about the Dark Lord.  But why should he?  Frodo knew so little then that it was hardly enough to make him curious.  Do you not see how very slowly Mithrandir brought him to a living awareness of the evil things outside of the Shire?  How slowly Frodo’s questions change from concerns about himself and Bilbo to a real curiosity about the Tale of the Ring, and finally to his great moment of resolve to leave the fields of his people?”

I did not answer.

“Nay, my friend,” Hendumaica said, smiling.  “John Ronald Reuel Tolkien Golden-Tongue was too much a master for such child’s tricks.  Truly, he does not craft the speech to the character as Jane Austen Ivory-Pen does; but he pours enough of Frodo’s spirit into his words for us to mark the changes in him.”

A thought now struck me.

“O Hendumaica,” I said, “thrice-blessed boon of Elbereth, make plain to me now the full meaning of this second chapter in The Lord of the Rings!  You said that Frodo moves on from asking about himself and Bilbo to asking about the greater story.  Now tell me:  Is the point of the whole chapter to show him attaining new knowledge?  To bring him out of his ignorance about himself and the world?”

Hendumaica smiled like the sun breaking through oak leaves on a summer’s day.  “O wise mortal!” she answered.  “The star of Feanor glittered upon you at your birth!  Indeed: Frodo grows in knowledge of himself and of evil.  Mithrandir too grows in knowledge; for he says that You can learn all that there is to know about Hobbits’ ways in a month, and yet after a hundred years they can still surprise you at a pinch.  Even Sam comes to knowledge at the chapter’s close.  Yes, the chapter is about coming to know what levels of knowledge there are.”

“I think I understand,” I said in an awed tone.  We sat talking for some time further, looking at more of the parchments in Hendumaica’s copy of The Lord of the Rings.  At last she rose to go.

“My people and I will read more of your weblog,” she said, “when we can be spared from our work in the trees and the rain.”

“Indeed!” I answered.  “You’ll have to comment sometime, then! … er, in the Common Speech, you know.”

“Comment?  Ah, yes.  I believe a few of our brighter smiths have almost discovered how to do this.  When the secret is made plain, I will surely attempt it.”

I opened the door.

“May a star shine upon your weblog!” Hendumaica smiled, covering her heart with her hand again.

“Come again soon!” I said, giving her a bear hug.  For a second she looked slightly scandalized, but then she smiled again, waved goodbye, and vanished down the hall.

I looked at my digital clock.  It had just struck midnight.

All I can say is, kudos to John Duns Scotus.  He has me thoroughly befuddled.  I don’t remember spending this long trying to figure out a philosopher since reading Husserl as an undergraduate.

The question is:  When Duns Scotus tries to argue that the “nature” of a thing (its species or form) is “less than numerical unity,” what in the world does he mean?  I could understand it if Scotus drew an analogy with the geometric point so beloved by mathematicians.  A point (commonly referred to as a “unity,” since Euclid defined it as “that which has no part”) has no length or breadth or height.  That is to say, it has 0 spatial extension.  So, even though it involves a concept of unity equal to 1 (a single thing), its numerical value would be 0.  This, of course, creates problems for how to talk about points… you can say, for example, “Here’s point A and there’s point B, so that means we have two points total in our diagram.”  But two times zero is still zero; so even if you have two points, you really don’t have anything.  And whatever you do have, numerically speaking, is going to be less than the number one. 

This is really the only case I can get my brain around for a sort of “unity” that has a numerical value less than one.  Too bad Scotus does not use this illustration.  Too bad that I have a dark suspicion that he is not talking about geometry when referring to natures and forms.  Too bad that it’s been more than 500 years since anyone last used his philosophical lingo, and that I might have to resort to using mediums to bring him up for extended questioning.  (That is an advantage to knowing Latin… with a universal language, Scotus’s ghost and I could probably keep up a decent conversation.)  It is all too, too bad.

“Merry got down and unlocked the gate, and when they had all passed through he pushed it to again.  It shut with a clang, and the lock clicked.  The sound was ominous.‘There!’ said Merry.  ‘You have left the Shire, and are now outside, and on the edge of the Old Forest.’”

I wonder what it says about Tolkien’s understanding of Nature that the Shire, that quiet bourgeois homeland of unadventure, is bordered by a place as unruly and queer as the Old Forest.  And what, indeed, does he intend by having the Hobbits slip out the back door of this comfortable Shire only to find themselves lost in such a place?  I think that the Old Forest is more than a way of simply transitioning the Hobbits into the world of Men, and in any event it is more than a hiccup in Tolkien’s plan for getting the Hobbits to Rivendell and the real quest.  The Old Forest and the House of Tom Bombadil are what must be learned about Middle Earth before anything else:  namely, that the natural foundation of Middle Earth is old, untame, and living.

I bring this up here because evidently this point was important enough to Tolkien to bear repeating.  All of Middle Earth is alive.  Elves once taught trees to talk.  Legolas hears stones speaking.  The mountain Caradhras bears ill-will towards creatures that go on two legs.  Tree-herders go to war.  The reality of Nature being alive seems so important to Tolkien that he wants his readers to grasp it at once, and he contrives it by losing his readers with the Hobbits in the shifting paths of the Old Forest.  What they learn there is that, in the terminology of Martin Buber, it will not do to confront anything in Middle Earth with an I-It distinction.  Leaf, stock, and stone must be hailed with an I-Thou.

I think that Tolkien confronts us with this view of Nature so early in the Fellowship because it is fundamental to our understanding of the Ring.  The evil of the Ring is possible only if men and trees and grass are not the only things that live in Middle Earth.  Stone and gold also live.  The Ring lives.  If it did not live, and if Sauron did not live through it, it could neither rule nor find nor bring nor bind.  Magic in Middle Earth depends upon what we normally call “objects” actually becoming living “subjects” with their own wills, desires, and ends.  Not insignificant is the moment when Tom Bombadil, the first of the living men and the master of living things, puts on the Ring and does not vanish.

In short, the Old Forest, Old Man Willow, the Withywindle, and Tom Bombadil form the web and weft of the rest of The Lord of the Rings.  They are the only kind of Nature in which the tale of the Ring is possible.

It is odd that the fifth chapter of the Fellowship begins with Frodo leaving the Shire proper, and it ends with him leaving Middle Earth.

The chapter begins with the Hobbits floating across the Brandywine into Buckland.  Tolkien takes the occasion to pursue a rabbit trail on the history of the Brandybuck family.  The digression, practically speaking, serves to slow down the reader’s experience of the trip across the river, and after the scare of the Black Riders, it hushes the action for a bit.  But the digression also signals an important change of place.

Tolkien is shifting his story-telling from the faerie- and folk-style to the mythic.  He does this, interestingly, in stages that correspond to the stages of the Hobbits leaving the Shire.  First the Hobbits leave Hobbiton and encounter Elves for the first time.  Then they leave the Four Farthings and enter Buckland, the queerest and otherest place connected with the Shire.  Soon after, they will leave the Shire altogether in favor of the Old Forest, thence to finally emerge into the world of Men.  (And an odd emergence it is, since their first encounter with this world involves the first man, Tom Bombadil, and a dead man, the barrow-wight).

What follows immediately after the Hobbits land in Buckland, of course, is more firming up of their individual characters.  Pippin sings and plays around, while Frodo hesitates.  Merry (whom we meet properly for the first time) prudently and practically sets all in readiness.  And most importantly, Sam turns out to have more about him than meets the eye, having functioned as an unexpected informant for the other two younger Hobbits.  Together they form a conspiracy, with the result that Frodo takes Gildor’s advice, offered the night before:  “Do not go alone.  Take such friends as are trusty and willing” (94).  Through the eyes of these four trusty friends, we encounter the rest of the wide world of Middle Earth.

If I am right about this progression, and the stages that Tolkien develops in his story-telling as the Hobbits travel Eastward, I wonder very much about the timing of Frodo’s dream at the end of Chapter 5.  The dream at Crickhollow is the first of several dreams to haunt Frodo on his flight to Rivendell.  And the odd thing is that it concerns the West instead of the East:  it is a dream of longing, not for the world of Men or even for the Shire, but for the Sea.

They are short, humble, mostly unremarkable chapters, but I think “Three Is Company” and “A Shortcut to Mushrooms” function brilliantly as a build-up to “A Conspiracy Unmasked.”  The point is that Tolkien needs to get two things across to his readers: a growing unease about the Black Riders, and a growing trust and liking for dependable Hobbits (most notably Sam and Pippin, although in Farmer Maggot and Fatty Bolger we get a glimpse of the Shire’s real earthy strength).  These two things, in fact, go together; and they culminate at the moment when Frodo and company, hiding in Farmer Maggot’s wagon and cowering at the sound of hooves ahead on the dark road, discover that the culprit in the darkness is their old friend Merry come to look for them.

The Black Riders in the Shire, of course, pose a test of imagination for Tolkien.  The problem is how to describe the coming of the Witch-King and his wraiths (those lords of dreadful mythological note) to the very unmythological Shire.  What effects do they have on the nature of things?  Do rivers freeze over?  Do Hobbits drop dead in blinding flashes of green light?  Tolkien opts for none of these effects.  No doubt reasons intrinsic to the story prevent such spectacles (like the fact that the wraiths are far from the Dark Lord and their power is limited).  However, Tolkien the Artist has at least one extrinsic reason as well.  This reason seems to be that he is aiming for a certain quality of fear for the Black Riders, and it must be produced gradually.

Consider the way he goes about it.The first appearance of a Black Rider is not even known to be a Black Rider until much later.  The evening he leaves Bag End, Frodo overhears someone talking with the Gaffer.  He experiences the voice as being “strange, and somehow unpleasant” (78).  The next afternoon, a Black Rider makes what has become its classic appearance on the road to the Woody End:  Frodo has a “sudden desire to hide from the view of the rider”; the rider is described as “crouching” in the saddle, with a shadowed face; Frodo hears sniffing noises, and an “unreasoning fear of discovery” almost drives him to put on the Ring.  Unaccountably, at the last moment the Rider simply rides off.  Then Sam is prompted to relate what his Gaffer told him about the mysterious inquirer the previous night:  we learn that the Rider “hissed” and that it gave the Gaffer “quite a shudder.”

All this builds curiosity and unease in the reader.  But consider how thoroughly unusual it is for the introduction of a powerful villain.  Tolkien does not make us fear the Black Rider for what we know of its strength and deadliness.  He makes us fear it for what is quietly wrong about it, quietly (and yet increasingly) unnatural.

The first moment of true horror at the Black Rider occurs at the Hobbits’ second encounter on the road: when the Rider stops near their hiding place, bends to the ground, and begins to crawl towards them.  The unnatural crawling is the absolute signal that something is dreadfully wrong, and this is intensified by Frodo’s compulsion to wear the Ring again.  The moment, of course, is interrupted by a deus ex machina: the arrival of Gildor’s Elves.  What we lose in the believability of the story line at this point, however, is made up for by what Gildor is able to tell Frodo about the Black Riders.  Or rather, by what he doesn’t tell Frodo.  After observing the silencing effect that news of the Black Riders has on the Elves, we hear from Gildor only the ominous words “Has Gandalf told you nothing?… Then I think it is not for me to say more—lest terror should keep you from your journey” (93).

Frodo’s reaction to this is beautifully to the point:  “I cannot imagine what information could be more terrifying than your hints and warnings” (93)!  Tolkien knew his art.

In the next chapter, of course, the Hobbits hear the unearthly piercing cries of the Black Riders for the first time.  Then Farmer Maggot has his own story to tell of a Black Rider, with the repeated detail of “hissing” and the additional detail about his war-worthy dog taking one sniff of the rider and bolting off howling (103).  The Rider is revealed to be increasingly unnatural at every turn.  But the question of who the Black rider is remains unanswered.  I think Tolkien intends this.  His art is to create terror by silence.  Not only here, but consistently throughout the trilogy, we do not fear the Shadow because we know what’s in it.  We fear because we do not know.

Dante envisioned Hell as an inferno.  He should have envisioned it as an airport.  An airport with waiting rooms where one can look out over miles of frozen asphalt and cubic sheds covered with unfathomable steel tubes and railings and gas pumps and hatches.  An airport where one waits and waits for one’s flight only to learn that it has been cancelled, and that one must wait and wait for a later flight, also to be cancelled… where one wanders in an endless circle over moving walkways, from terminal to terminal, lugging a heavy carry-on bag and looking for a ticket agent, who refers one to a customer service agent, who then refers one to a ticket agent.  An airport where there is no help for the Russian woman who is crying and wandering from one official-looking person to another, pleading in broken English, “Need plane Toronto.  Mother have surgery… why plane cancel?  Please, please, Toronto tonight.”

Hell is the airport from which there is no flight out. 

As part of our holiday festivities this year, our family has been watching the Lord of the Rings trilogy again.  As we are not used to much movie-watching, we have been going rather slowly—about an hour and a half each night.  The slow pace, however, is a bit more conducive for thinking about all those vivid, lurid, fascinating visions that hover so magically in the otherwise dark glass of the television screen.  It would be interesting sometime to write a sketch comparing the Television with the Mirror of Galadriel.

This time the Mirror, in addition to showing me Middle Earth, has also show me a few things about myself.  I dislike Aragorn.  The reasons for the dislike are three.  He is aimless, he is soft, and he is rude.  (“Aimlessness” and “softness” do not appear in any of the lists of Vices I have consulted lately, but I am using them here as vices and intend them to sting accordingly.)

The charge of aimlessness is fairly apparent.  Elrond says in the “Fellowship” film that Aragorn has “turned from the path of kingship.”  Why is not clear; what Aragorn is doing is also not clear; and the point at which he begins to seek kingship again is not clear.  This hero clearly does not have a grasp of his own destiny.

Although mere aimlessness might be pardonable, being “soft” in Middle Earth is one of the worst vices a Ranger can have.  (There is a worse vice, but I will not get around to that for another few paragraphs.)  Tolkien frequently refers to the Men of the North being “hardy,” “tougher than other men,” and Gandalf once refers to Aragorn as being “the hardiest man living.”  No doubt this “hardiness” includes a muscular component, perhaps even stringy hair and a few days without shaving.  But hardiness means much more than that.  Surely the better half of hardiness is psychological: the will to endure, the will to lead a band of men through the paths of the dead when any other mortals would be overcome by terror, the will to bear all manner of hardship without complaint.  Tolkien’s Aragorn is something of a Stoic.  He is never so overcome by frustration, for example, that he kicks a helmet in a fit and then flings himself, roaring, to the ground.

Hardiness is just as important for the contests of Love as for War.  Hardiness in Love means that the love perseveres when there is no hope.  Tolkien’s Aragorn falls in love at 20, and he never falls in love again, regardless of whether he may ever wed Arwen.  Curiously, a hardiness in love means an unwillingness to play with the feelings of anyone else.  When Eowyn falls for Aragorn, Tolkien’s Aragorn gives her no encouragement.  To be sure, he is not rude.  But there are no exchanged glances, no embraces at the moment of victory (well, Tolkien’s Eowyn wasn’t at Helm’s Deep to be embraced, anyway)—in short, no flirting.  For Tolkien’s Aragorn, incidentally, there are also no luxurious and rather suggestive flashbacks about Arwen.  Tolkien’s sense for love’s delicacy of feeling forbade such things.

Delicacy of feeling, apparently, does not rate high in the list of things that Jackson is capable of capturing on film.  This is most apparent in the monstrous Rudeness of Aragorn—his barbaric insensitivity to good breeding and good manners.  Consider his first meeting with Frodo in the Prancing Pony.  Tolkien’s Strider first asks Frodo for a talk later in the evening, then quietly follows him to his room, then spends several paragraphs making sure that Frodo is not a spy and trying to show Frodo that he is not, and finally draws his sword only to show that it is broken below the hilt.  Strider never does violence to Frodo during this meeting—he does not, for example, physically drag Frodo into his room and then thrown him forcefully onto the floor.  (In most cultures this is not considered a polite form of greeting.)

“But,” someone may object, “Jackson had to convey a sense of urgency in the movie, and of Aragorn’s strength and intensity of character, and of his knowledge of how great an evil Frodo risked by putting on the Ring.”  Surely this is true.  Strength, intensity, and knowledge are all virtues that Aragorn possesses as a descendant of the line of Kings.  But surely this is also the point about good manners!  To be well-mannered is to carry your strengths in such a way that you hurt no one by them.  Tolkien emphasizes nothing so much as he emphasizes this in connection with the Rangers.  “They say little,” one of the Rohirrim observes about the Dunedain in the Return of the King, “but they are courteous.”

The Rudeness of Aragorn is not confined to his manner of introducing himself.  In general, he lacks of a sense of decorum, of timing, of appropriate gestures and tone of voice.  He rouses the grieving Hobbits too soon and too roughly after Gandalf’s fall.  At Boromir’s death he tries to show some sign of respect—he touches his forehead, then his chest, and then having thus half-crossed himself, he awkwardly touches his mouth.  (What, we wonder, is the meaning of this bizarre action?)  At Helm’s Deep he greets Haldor with an apparently appropriate sign of laying his hand over his heart, but then he ruins all with a rough-and-ready bear hug (which, incidentally, Jackson intends to be a breach of decorum, as we can tell by Haldor’s stiff surprise).

But the worst of all occurs in the third movie before the Black Gate.  Sauron has sent out his messenger—his Mouth—to parley with the Lords of the West.  In the book, Tolkien’s Aragorn takes the gaze of the Mouth of Sauron and they stare each other down, with the result that the Mouth quails and cries, “I am a herald and ambassador, and may not be assailed!”  The interesting thing is that Gandalf and Aragorn acknowledge this.  They theaten the herald with death if he does not return to Mordor swiftly, but they do not actually harm him.  The point is important.  So ancient is the role of the herald, and so important is it to preserve this sort of mediation in times of war, that not even Sauron’s herald should be mistreated.

In the film, of course, Aragorn simply slices off the fellow’s toothy head.  Great stroke, Mr. Bravado.  And bad news for the role of “ambassador” in Middle Earth.

My conclusion is this.  Jackson and company, seeing that Aragorn is supposed to be the epitome of heroism in Tolkien’s story, recognize that the image of the “destined, single-minded King,” the non-flirtatious lover, and the self-restraining Stoic simply are not the material of heroism for the Screen.  They are therefore forced to make Aragorn over into something that the average teenage skate-boarder, or the average middle-aged car mechanic, or the average wanna-be Clint Eastwood, or the average blonde with male pinups all over her room, would recognize as being admirable.  So they give us a new Aragorn:  unkempt, weak-willed, unable to rule himself, but (in the words of several of my friends) hot. In my terminology, Jackson’s Aragorn is a real Hunk.