The Red Book of Westmarch

As a concluding thought on “Fog on the Barrow Downs,” I think that the end of this chapter introduces two themes that will become important through the rest of the book.  Both themes, interestingly, are integral to the world of Men, on whose brink the Hobbits are now teetering.  The first theme has to do with greed; the second with self-sacrifice.

The chief evil represented by the barrow-wight is, oddly enough, not an abstract one but the very concrete evil of goldlust.  This may not be apparent at first, but consider the way in which Tom Bombadil breaks the spell on the barrow after exorcising the wight from it.  He brings out the mound’s treasures and bids them lie there, “free to all finders, birds, beasts, Elves or Men, and all kindly creatures.”  This particular cure suggests that the curse on the barrow originally had to do with the hoarding of gold.

This theme is unfortunately very common in Middle Earth.  One remembers the end of The Hobbit, where five armies fight over the possession of a dragon’s treasure.  One also thinks of The Silmarillion, where Feanor’s proud refusal to give up his jewels in order to rekindle the light of the Two Trees initiates a series of disasters, the implications of which continue even down into the days of Frodo and Aragorn.  And, repeatedly, Tolkien casts the appeal of the Ring in terms of its beautiful golden hue.  Greed and goldlust are among the cardinal sins in Middle Earth.

Along with the theme of Men’s greediness, however, Tolkien introduces the theme of their nobility.  That is, he introduces the first hint of a line of Men who will become increasingly important to the tale:  the Numenoreans, who have dwindled to become the Rangers.

The barrow that trapped the Hobbits is a Numenorean barrow; the knives that Bombadil retrieves from the treasure to give to the Hobbits are the very blades that were forged by the sons of Isildur to wreck ruin on the Nazgul.  When Bombadil gives the knives to the Hobbits, he tells them that their makers “go wandering, sons of forgotten kings walking in loneliness, guarding from evil things folk that are heedless.”  Though the Hobbits do not understand him, they will meet one of these unseen guardians that very night, under the unlikely guise of Strider the Ranger.  The point is that the world of men is full not only of greed but of generous self-sacrifice.  The old kings no longer rule; but they still guard those who cannot defend themselves.

And with this introduction to the world of Men—its greed and its sacrifice—the Hobbits set off for Bree.

The claim may (and probably will) admit of some controversy, but with the Barrow-Wight I will begin to seriously press the notion that Tolkien incorporates an Augustinian view of evil in his depiction of evil beings.  The claim will likely grow stronger as the hobbits travel nearer to Mordor, but I want to start pointing out the scraps of evidence early.

What I should do first, by all rights, is offer a concise account of what exactly an Augustinian view of evil involves.  This is rather a tall order for me at present, since I need time to think about several passages in Augustine and Aquinas; so for this post I’ll only mention a few things about the Barrow-Wight that may prove interesting in light of future posts on evil.

Our first and only description of the Wight himself is that he is a “tall dark figure like a shadow against the stars” with “two eyes, very cold though lit with a pale light that seemed to come from some remote distance.”  The likeness to a shadow seems to be a stock simile with Tolkien when it comes to his especially evil creatures.  The light-like eyes contrast with this, of course; as does the seemingly very corporeal grip that is “stronger and colder than iron.”  I’ll point out that this is an apparently contradictory set of characteristics:  an insubstantial visible form, but a (seemingly) very substantial grip.  There are other ways of pointing out the dichotomy:  darkness and coldness, for example, are privations of light and warmth; but a strong grip isn’t a privation of anything, since it is rather a sort of power.

Still on the subject of the grip, one of the most effective things about the encounter with the wight is that fact that, when Frodo is inside the barrow, he gets a close-up view of a hand and arm, but nothing else.  The spectre of the hand—the part that tries to behave like the whole, or the part that is severed from the body to which it belongs, first by description and then by Frodo’s actual knifestroke—horrified me more than anything else as a child (with the exception of the well in Moria).  I emphasize the fact that Tolkien gives us only the hand and arm for two reasons.  First, it is part of the art of ghastly story-telling to recognize that, though corpses are bad, parts of corpses are worse. And second, it is another way of depriving us of any clear and distinct picture of what form this being actually has.

Frodo’s experience of the Wight’s dwelling seconds all this.  The barrow is dark and cold; and the strange light, when it comes, seems (inexplicably) to be coming not from the barrow but from Frodo himself.  The wight’s song is a dreary and “formless stream of sad but horrible sounds,” full of words that are “grim, hard, cold… heartless and miserable.”  At least half of these terms (including that most important term “formless”), again, are privative.  Moreover, even when the wight’s words do “shape themselves” and become intelligible, their shape still concerns privations:  coldness, the sun failing, the moon and stars dying, the land withering.

Finally, lest there be any more doubt about the matter, Tolkien’s own authorial commentary on the song makes the point about privation explicit:  The night was railing against the morning of which it was bereaved, and the cold was cursing the warmth for which it hungered.

All of this, of course, combines to create an impression on the reader that will raise problems here and in many descriptions to come.  Evil is associated with the cold, the dark, with night and shadows, with mutilated forms and parts of forms and deformed forms.  And yet, for something that that is deformed, shadowy, and generally deprived of good things, evil in Tolkien’s world is remarkably stern, strong, and—well, substantial.

As I hope to point out later, these are the same classic problems raised by the Augustinian view of evil.  I wish I could say that Tolkien’s narrative and poetic answer to the problem persuasively complements Augustine’s philosophical answer; but as I don’t recall the core passages from Augustine or Tolkien himself clearly enough, that is a series of posts that will have to wait.

Having now written three posts on Tom Bombadil, I suppose it would only be fair to include at least one on Goldberry.  I do not know if it is significant that Bombadil and Goldberry are the first married couple we meet with any degree of thoroughness in the Lord of the Rings.  Now that I think of it, they are the only married couple, except for Celeborn and Galadriel.

This in itself may be odd.  What strikes about the long tale of the Ring is the general and perhaps intentional lack of women, and especially of wives.  Elrond’s consort Celebrian (Galadriel’s daughter) was mortally wounded some centuries before our story starts, and passed into the West.  Theodon’s wife, the Queen of Rohan, we never hear of.  The same goes for Denethor’s lady.  Dwarf women never show up at all, except in Gimli’s scant remarks about them; and Treebeard laments the disappearance of the Entwives.

In general, I think this lack of wives—the lack, if you will, of the sources of life and renewal—contributes to an atmosphere of exhaustion and decay in Middle Earth.  Of course, the end of the tale (as for all comedies) brings revitalization and a number of auspicious marriages.  But in the midst of the decay, Tolkien does give us these two glimpses of Goldberry and Bombadil on one hand, and Celeborn and Galadriel on the other.  I am still puzzling over why he does this—it may, in fact, not turn out to be very important to the story—but perhaps it constitutes some reason for dwelling a little on Goldberry herself.

Goldberry is a strange combination of a housewife and a great lady.  I call her a housewife because she has no servants and therefore presumably does all the housework herself.  (She prepares the meals and holds washing day and autumn cleaning.)  However, in the House of Goldberry, the work of the house hardly sounds like drudgery.  Even when she and Tom Bombadil lay the table, they do so as if it were a dance.

Outside the house, incidentally, Goldberry appears to do little or nothing; she is not one of the doers of great deeds in Middle Earth.  Even in the matter of gathering water lilies, it is Bombadil who undertakes the mission.  Perhaps this is why Bombadil, besides calling her pretty River-daughter and clearer than clear water, refers to her frequently as waiting:

Tom has his house to mind, and Goldberry is waiting!

In short, Goldberry seems to embody the old ideal of feminine domesticity.

Of course, Goldberry is also a great lady.  Her voice is clear, her speech is half-poetic (like Bombadil’s), and she inspires an Elvish wonder in the Hobbits.  When they first see her, she is sitting in her house in the midst of bowls of water-lilies, as if in state.

This Elf-like queenliness, when rolled together with the huswifery above, results in the initially paradoxical impression that she is a domestic queen, a princess of the hearth.  In a sense, I wonder if Tolkien is awakening us to something here:  the realization that domesticity and queenhood need not be opposed in Middle Earth.  Goldberry (unlike Eowyn, for example, and perhaps in deliberate contrast to her) lives her life by the home hearth, in elegance and merriment.

I bring this up as a counterpoint (though I don’t know if Tolkien intended it so) to those scholars who construct a philosophy of women in which housework and domesticity always function as a sort of oppression.  There is no doubt that many women do love the work of the house; and I think that Tolkien’s portrayal of Goldberry is true to such women.  He has struck, in fact, a role that seems quite natural to many women, while giving it a quasi-enchanted air; and that, no doubt, explains part of why Goldberry is (in Frodo’s words) “deeper and nearer to mortal heart; marvelous and yet not strange.”

As a concluding caveat to all this, I do not wish to extrapolate anything about Tolkien’s “view of women,” or views on feminine domesticity, from such a small vignette of Goldberry.  There are too many other things to take into account:  Arwen as the bella donna of courtly romance, Galadriel as fairy godmother, Eowyn as the reincarnation of a Nordic demigoddess.  I would guess that it would be as tricky to discuss Tolkien’s view of women as it would be to discuss his view of literary genres.  I only wish to point out that, in Goldberry, we find Tolkien seamlessly knitting up two qualities that our current age tells us are unreconcilable.  Goldberry is, indeed, both a housewife and a queen.

It does not bode well for my career as a blogger that other people are apparently paying more attention to my blog than I am.

As one of my friends pointed out once, it seems a little absurd to apologize for not writing what nobody is obligated to read, or perhaps even desires to read; and especially absurd to assume the arrogance of thinking that anyone would desire to read it greatly enough to merit an apology for its not being written.

However, when someone clearly states a time at which something will begin to be written again, and then fails to follow through on it, perhaps it constitutes a moral ground for a categorical apology, whether anyone reads it or not.  I would therefore like to offer a categorical apology, especially to Monica and Maxim, who apparently read this blog more than I; and to make thin and watery excuses about being tied up by schoolwork, and grubbing around in classical economics, and suffering the mundane but curiously distracting affairs of life.

There’s a post on Goldberry forthcoming, and after that, hopefully some stuff on evil.