The Red Book of Westmarch

During the summer and autumn, I’ve slowly been working my way through a gem of a scholarly book in the field of medieval studies. It’s The Book of Memory by Mary Carruthers, and it’s about how people in the Middle Ages memorized things, why they memorized, and memory’s role in story-telling and moral formation.

It so happens that, just after writing my post on Strider’s recitation of the poem on Weathertop, I ran across the following passage in Carruthers’ book. It’s from a chapter called “Memory and the Ethics of Reading,” which I recommend indiscriminately to everyone who likes to read.

“In considering what is the ethical nature of reading, one could do much worse than to start with Gregory the Great’s comment, that what we see in a text is not rules for what we ought to be, but images of what we are, ‘our own beauty, our own ugliness.’ It is this which enables us to make these texts our own. We read rhetorically, memory makes our reading into our own ethical equipment (“stamps our character”), and we express that character in situations that are also rhetorical in nature, in the expressive gestures and performances which we construct from our remembered experience, and which, in turn, are intended to impress and give value to others’ memories of a particular occasion.”

This is a really good description of what is happening on Weathertop. By remembering and reciting the Lay of Beren and Lúthien, Strider is informing his own character, because it is a story that he himself is re-enacting in a certain way. But Strider also uses the story to form the Hobbits’ characters and guide their action, in the hope that it will strengthen them to resist evil and bear suffering.  In short, Strider’s use of poetry is a good example of a medieval use of poetry.  I’m not at all sure that Tolkien consciously premeditated it as such, but it is nevertheless befitting that his quasi-medieval world should incorporate a quasi-medieval poetic ethics.

The Lay of Beren and Lúthien, especially as it is recorded in the Silmarillion, is without doubt one of Tolkien’s masterpieces, if not the Masterpiece. It is the tragedy of Orpheus gone right. Even when Tolkien transcribes the tale in his tripping rhymes (admittedly more suited to the comic vein than the high romance), it is enough to move the passions.

But why, of all places to introduce this ancient ordeal of love and sacrifice, does Tolkien choose the moment when our four Hobbits are shivering in a hillside dell on Weathertop, awaiting the inevitable approach of the Ringwraiths?

One obvious answer is that the tale is supposed to boost their morale. In fact, the Hobbits begin to discuss another Elvish tale to keep their spirits up (the story of Gil-galad), but Strider interrupts because he thinks it too dark for the occasion. As indeed he should: Gil-galad was an Elf who bravely and nobly perished at the hand of the Enemy. What Frodo and the other Hobbits need, as the dreadful minutes tick by on Weathertop, is a story of someone brave and noble whom the Enemy did not destroy.

Up to this point, Strider’s discussion of historical persons has been rather didactic, as Gandalf’s was as well back in the second chapter. It seems, however, that didactic storytelling may not be the most bolstering thing in the hour of real need. So, for the first time in the romance so far, we find history transformed into poetry. Strider chants the Lay of Beren and Lúthien, in a pleasant rhyming meter, and only later does he offer a longer explanation of the history, presumably because the Hobbits do not know the full story behind Lúthien’s sacrifice.

Beyond all this, however, Strider has ascertainable personal reasons for telling the tale. It is significant that the first narrative verse to come from Strider’s mouth not only implicates his own lineage, but serves as a foil to his own romance. For Strider too is the offspring, however many generations removed, of the love between Beren and Lúthien, and he himself is playing the role of Beren as, for the second time in the history of Middle Earth, an Elf will sacrifice her immortality for a man. Tolkien does not portray Strider’s love for Arwen by speaking of it, but by deliberately speaking around it.

Like the rest of the chapter, Strider’s account of Beren and Lúthien sheds further illumination on his character, though (ironically) the reader does not realize this until the second time through, and the Hobbits realize nothing about it until the end of the story.

It has been a week of findings!  One is clear-cut and glittering, like a gem fallen from the crown of Academia.  The other grows among the grasses, as homely and down-to-earth as a hobbit monastery.  They are both very rich sites, the former especially if one desires the keen eyes of a professor to spy out Tom Bombadil’s role in the Tale of the Ring, and every possibility for his identity.  The second is especially useful if one is a Catholic, or not a Catholic, wanting to know what Catholic ideas might be playing through the features of Tolkien’s stories.

Why, I ask myself, are there no people in the blogosphere (a word I am sure Tolkien would have grimaced at) attempting to blog in the erudite style of Prof. Eugene C. Hargrove?  The answer must be that it would take too much time.  Reflecting on Tom Bombadil is one thing; doing research on him is another.  And the scholarly world fits one to do nothing if not research.

I’m not opposed to Catholic interpretations of Tolkien.  I do not perpetrate them myself, because I am not Catholic and would not know how to go about it.  But it strikes me as eminently probable that Tolkien, being Catholic, had access to a world of Catholic symbols and images that he might easily allude to or impart to the offspring of his imaginings.  (I believe there is currently some contemporary lingo for this kind of thing:  “intertextuality” they liked to dub it in my English classes.)  It also seems eminently probable to me that these allusions and impartations would be easily recognized by other Catholics, and not so easily recognized by those who weren’t initiated into the same symbolry and imagery.

And so, as I said, I’m inclined to think a Catholic interpretation here and there rather a good thing, at least in regard to a good Catholic like Tolkien.

It is not the problem of the active vs. contemplative life alone that makes Strider so difficult to grapple with as a guide or guardian figure. The fact is that he talks more like Gandalf the Wizard than like a mere Man, yet he does not present himself with Gandalf’s qualifications for trustworthiness. And what respectable guide in classical or medieval literature simply shows up without qualifications? When Virgil appears to Dante, Dante recognizes him and learns at once that he is sent from Beatrice herself in Paradise. When saints appear in medieval tales as helpers of the lost, they show up in shining gold and white, with crowns or crucifixes or other indications that they are generally on the Right Side.

Strider, however, looks more like a rascal from the beginning. In fact, if I had to give him a counterpart from medieval or Renaissance literature, the closest would probably be the figure of the Devil, and especially of Mephistopheles. Strider appears suddenly, as Mephistopheles appears to Faust; he promises guidance and understanding, for a certain price (the price of trust… which is rather like selling one’s soul); he has powers that seem supernatural at times; he knows dark secrets. Intriguingly, the puzzle of his character brings to Frodo’s lips two adjectives that themselves have overtones of devilry and witchcraft in English literature.

“I think,” (Frodo says of the Enemy), “one of his spies would—well, seem fairer and feel fouler, if you understand.”
“I see,” laughed Strider. “I look foul and feel fair. Is that it? All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost.”

At another time and in another place, another man who was destined to become King was accosted with similar language:

Fair is foul, and foul is fair,
Hover through the fog and filthy air.

Fair being foul and foul being fair is an apt way of summarizing the problem of Strider. Tolkien makes much of the fact that Strider is not what he seems to be. All that is gold does not glitter. There is, in fact, a traditional English saying that “All that glitters is not gold”, which phrase also shows up in another one of Shakespeare’s plays (The Merchant of Venice), though not in a context that sheds much light on the situation of Strider. (The phrase seems to have been common enough without Shakespeare’s help.) But Tolkien inverts this phrase to fit it to Strider. Common lore is ripe with warnings about evil disguising itself as good, fool’s gold passing itself off for real gold, the Devil appearing as an angel of light. But what if good disguises itself as evil, and gold disguises itself as lead, and the angel of light dresses up as the Devil? Don’t we need a useful maxim for those situations? Is Strider, in fact, the Devil inverted?

Perhaps this is why Strider escapes classification as a guide-figure. Tolkien may have been the first storyteller, on a grand scale, to attempt the inversion.

Strider is the strangest guide I have ever encountered in literature. I wish I could compare him to Virgil in Dante’s Inferno. Like the character of Virgil, Strider does not navigate the Hobbits merely through a certain geography, but through the complexities of a reality that encompasses many different orders of beings — not demons, sinners and saints, in this case, but wraiths and Men and Elves. In this sense, a slender comparison between the two guides might hold good. But Virgil is an epic poet and Strider is not; Virgil is dead and Strider is not; Virgil is sent by the saints, and Strider is not. Strider simply has no classical or medieval analog that I can think of.

To be sure, Strider’s skills on the geographical level are nothing to be sneezed at. He is a great tracker and woodsman; he follows the signs of footprints and can tell if a stone has been handled recently. He remarks (tongue-in-cheek, I am convinced) to Frodo that he has “some skill as a hunter at need”. (In Chapter 2, Gandalf calls Aragorn “the greatest traveler and huntsman of this age of the world.”) So on the one hand, Strider has something of the accidents of a Robin Hood, using his woodcraft to protect the innocent Bree-landers. On the other hand, Strider is fighting no Sheriff of Nottingham but a Sheriff of Mordor who happens to be a Dark Lord, and everybody in Bree-land who should be on his side instead thinks that he’s a rascal.

The comparison with Robin Hood is superseded because what stands out most about Strider is not his woodcraft but what I will call his liberal arts education. Like Gandalf, he is one of the few people Frodo encounters in his journey who can explain the present danger in terms of past episodes in the doings of Elves and Men. As he will prove later in Rivendell, he knows more history than Boromir, he has decades of experience in international politics (he served both Theoden’s father and Denethor’s), and in Minas Tirith he displays more knowledge of herblore than the lore master himself. Strider knows the languages of Elves and Men, both ancient and modern, and can recite long passages of poetry and elaborate on them at leisure, as if he were a professor in an overstuffed chair. In short, Strider seems to have had the Harvard University education of his day.

Who exactly in ancient or medieval literature combines both the active and the contemplative life like this? Perhaps Plato’s “guardian class” in the Republic is a possibility. Granted, the philosopher-kings never reckoned on losing their thrones… but if a philosopher-king had been dethroned, and that by an evil power who was attempting to enslave the world, what would he have done? Perhaps Strider is Tolkien’s answer.

There is something wonderfully apt about the word “middle” in both Middlemarch and Middle-Earth. In the case of Middle-Earth, of course, the Earth is midway between Heaven and Hell, caught in the opposing struggles of darkness and light. To be from Middle-Earth is to be one who is torn between death and immortality.

“Middlemarch” looks like it should be cognitively similar: the swath of land in the midst of a wider land, or maybe, the provincial place that is neither a backwater nor a great city. “Middle” also has resonances of the Middle Class, the bourgeoisie. And the Middle Class is exactly where we have found ourselves in Middle-Earth thus far. The Hobbits of the Shire and the Men of Bree are alike in this: they are not savages, not the laboring poor, not serfs or dependents; but neither are they kings and lords. They desire to be quiet and live in comfort. The life of high ideals and sacrifice is not for them.

Butterbur is loveable precisely because he is bourgeois, flourishing in his place and not recking either the glories or the dangers of a higher code or calling. When Strider begins to show him Frodo’s danger and the possibilities of a darker world intruding on Bree, his answer is classic.

“Me? Leave Bree! I wouldn’t do that for any money,” he says. And then, naively, “Why can’t you stay here quiet for a bit, Mr. Underhill?”

In all of this, the inhabitants of Bree and the Shire are very like the inhabitants of Middlemarch. They distrust living by extremes, and the littleness of their provincial lives is the same. In Middlemarch, in Bree, and in the Shire, “sane people did what their neighbors did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them.”*

One could say that Tolkien and George Eliot look at the same coin from two sides. Eliot shows mundane provincial life being redeemed from the inside; Tolkien shows it redeemed from the outside, by those willing to venture out into the world of romance, and back again.

*George Eliot, Middlemarch, chapter 1.

Chapter 11 opens with a jolt.  The reader has just settled down in the Prancing Pony to see how Strider will handle the imminent threat of Black Riders in Bree.  And Black Riders do in fact arrive… but not at Bree!  Without warning, the plot has whisked us back to Crickhollow, where Fatty Bolger (in a surreal imitation of what could have happened at the Inn of Bree) flees from the Black Riders and abandons the little cottage to the invasion of supernatural forces.  Given that this is the only time the plot reverts to the Shire in the absence of the four Hobbits, the curious incident calls for a double glance.

First, though, we need to imagine what is actually happening in Bree that night, even though Tolkien does not give us an account.  Someone (quite probably Bill Ferny) breaks into the Hobbits’ sleeping room at the inn and demolishes it, slashing to pieces a decoy of Frodo that had been left in his bed.  Instead of describing this demolition, however, Tolkien gives us instead a picture of what is happening to another “decoy” of Frodo (Fatty Bolger himself, left to tend Crickhollow) dozens of miles away in the Shire.

Why this doubling?  Why make a decoy of the plot, the same way that Nob makes a decoy of Frodo?  Such narrative tricks are not in common trade in the age of the novel, and this particular trick is especially eye-catching because Fatty Bolger himself is so minor a character.  I have three hunches.

First is that the doubling is meant to underscore the danger to Frodo by showing what happens even to those who pretend to be Frodo.  Fatty Bolger, we recall, had been left behind in the Shire specifically “to keep up as long as possible the pretence that Mr. Baggins was still living at Crickhollow,” and that he had even “brought along some old clothes of Frodo’s to help him in playing the part” (chapter 5).  Meanwhile, Nob fashions a decoy of Frodo in the Prancing Pony by means of a good bolster and a brown woolen mat, to leave the impression that Frodo is sleeping soundly in his bed.  In the same night, both Crickhollow and the room in the Prancing Pony are attacked.  Fatty Bolger is nearly destroyed in the same way that the humble bolster is destroyed; but fortunately, the live decoy of Frodo escapes in time.

My second hunch is that this splitting of the narrative gives a prismatic effect to the danger.  We sense Frodo’s danger in Bree because we see its mirror image at Crickhollow.  And if the peril is so great at Crickhollow, where Frodo is not, how much greater must it be where he is?

Third, this kind of doubling of the plot and the person of Frodo multiplies our suspicions about the omnipresence of the Enemy.  The Black Riders are in many places at once.  They are on the scent, and converging.  The noose is tightening. The absence of Frodo from one place means his presence in another.

And, as an extra dollop of whipped cream on the special effects of this narrative trick, we get to hear the Horn of Buckland for the first time!  Gandalf said something once about Hobbits proving remarkably resistant in the face of evil.  The horn that can sound against the Ringwraiths in the Shire is the same that can sound against Saruman’s thugs—the Urban Planners, if you will—who arrive later.  A little foreshadowing of the stubbornness of Hobbits is not a bad preparation for what Frodo will find when he makes his return journey, and what will happen when his companions are forced to reckon with evil inside the Shire itself.

Having determined henceforth to spy mostly upon plots, and not characters, I find it ironic that my very next post should be about a particular character.  This could not be helped, however.  Tolkien clearly signifies the importance of this character by naming an entire chapter after him, and by devoting that entire chapter to the problem of justifying him.

The problem is simple.  Out of the clear blue, or rather, out of the crowded mustiness of a common room at an inn, a character appears who seems to know all about Frodo’s doings and who wishes Frodo to take him as a guide.  Granted the setting—the disappearance of Gandalf, the threat of Black Riders, the suspicious behavior of everyone in the inn—why in the world should this character be trusted?

What is interesting about this problem of character, however, is that Tolkien does not (properly speaking) handle it as a problem of character as such.  He handles it (1) as a problem of argumentation, of rhetoric, and (2) as a problem of plot.  At the end of the chapter, the ultimate justification for any trust that we as readers may have in Strider, springs not from a direct manifestation of his character, but from a technically argumentative and deliberate plot structure throughout chapter 10.  In short, we end up believing Strider not because of what we see him do, but because of what he says and what other people do.

Tolkien’s justification of Strider progresses mostly with argumentation.  First, there is an initial dialectical exchange with Frodo and Sam, which ends in an impasse.  Second, Butterbur interrupts and precipitates a short rhetorical skirmish.  Third, Gandalf’s letter alters everything.  Fourth, a series of factual verifications and a strong argument from psychology clinch the point.  Finally, Merry’s brush with the Black Rider lends a sort of confirmation to the reader’s provisional trust.

First, then, for Strider’s arguments regarding himself.  The reason he must argue instead of act is that there is no time for anything else.  Strider cannot, in the present instant while sitting comfortably in a chair, prove his character by deeds, as characters in a novel would be required to do.  Instead, he has only words at his disposal, and his first apparent skills are those of a rhetorician trying to create assent in his audience.  His basic argument runs as follows: “If you want to get to Rivendell, you must take me as a guide.  You do want to get to Rivendell—I know that because I know all about your secret Ring and the Black Riders.  Therefore, you must take me as a guide, because I’m the only one who knows a way to Rivendell that the Black Riders are least likely to intercept.”

Sam’s counter-argument is a classic instance of prejudice in the Burkean sense:  “He comes out of the Wild, and I never heard no good of such folk”!

This brings things to an impasse.  Sam demands further explanations and proofs from Strider.  Strider points out the fundamental (epistemological) problem with such a request:  “Why,” he asks, “should you believe my story, if you do not trust me already?”  Any explanation can be doubted, and further explanation is useless without an initial element of trust.

Conveniently, however, the plot structure of the chapter defeats this impasse by catapulting Butterbur into the Hobbits’ room, with a yet more conveniently forgotten letter from Gandalf.  Butterbur’s own opinion of Strider, by the by, is even less argumentatively coherent than Sam’s.  At least Sam’s deduction about men from the Wild had two premises and an implied conclusion.  Poor Butterbur never makes it so far.  “If I was in your plight,” he puffs to Frodo, with a mere personal assertion, “I wouldn’t take up with a Ranger.”

Fortunately, however, the plot is twisting underneath Butterbur’s feet, and the letter from Gandalf forces Strider into a new light.  (It is most amusing, by-the-by, that the best method of justification that occurs to Tolkien the Oxford don, at this moment, is to provide Strider with a letter of reference!)  When Strider begins to independently verify certain facts about himself that are also contained in the letter—for example, quoting the verses that go with his name, or drawing the broken blade—we get something in the way of empirical justification.  But, in my opinion, the clinching argument is not empirical but logical and psychological.  In response to Sam’s accusation that he is only pretending to be the real Strider (a genuine empirical possibility), Strider rebuts with the syllogism:

“If I had killed the real Strider, I could kill you.  And I should have killed you already without so much talk.  If I was after the Ring, I could have it—NOW!”

What this argument sets up is a classic modus tollens:  If P then Q, but not Q, therefore not P.  In other words, Strider has not killed the Hobbits; therefore, he did not kill the real Strider.  He is not currently taking the Ring from Frodo; therefore, he is not after the Ring.  Psychologically, the argument seems sound because we know that the desire for the Ring does involve the ability, and even the overpowering compulsion, to steal the Ring; and the physical ability to kill the real Strider would imply the physical ability to kill little Hobbits as well.  Strider could have been a logic professor.

What remains after this argument is only further confirmation.  Strider dramatically draws his sword, only to show that it is broken.  He affirms that he is prepared to defend the Hobbits and especially Frodo at all cost.  After Merry comes running back from his near escape with a Black Rider, Strider capably takes charge of the situation in his first real instance of action.  The Hobbits bunker down for the night, and the reader anxiously awaits a final proof of Strider’s trustworthiness—by deeds.

Drumroll, please!  After a full year off from the Lord of the Rings, I’ve decided to celebrate by blogging again.

But first, an account of my doings in the meanwhile.  What books were magnetic enough to pull me away from the greatest literary achievement of the 20^th century?

Well, Dante’s Inferno, to be sure.  It can be read as an instructive Traveler’s Guide to Mordor, with supplementary material on the Habitat and Behavior of Orcs.

Then there was Jane Austen’s Emma.  A thousand pages from the complete works of Adam Smith.  George Eliot’s Middlemarch.  And lastly, Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose.

In his Postscript to “The Name of the Rose”, Eco makes some remarks about the importance of plot in a narrative:

“Unquestionably, the modern novel has sought to diminish amusement resulting from the plot in order to enhance other kinds of amusement.  As a great admirer of Aristotle’s Poetics, I have always thought that, no matter what, a novel must also—especially—amuse through its plot” (60).

Tolkien himself had made similar remarks in his Essay on Fairy Stories, noting that the rise of both Drama and the Novel had tended to exalt character at the expense of plot.  Continuing his discussion of plot in the Postscript, Eco mentions Tolkien himself.

“I believe there are three ways of narrating the past.  One is romance, and the examples range from the Breton cycle to Tolkien, also including the Gothic novel, which is not a novel but a romance.  The past as scenery, pretext, fairy-tale construction, to allow the imagination to rove freely.  In this sense, a romance does not necessarily have to take place in the past; it must only not take place here and now, and the here and now must not be mentioned, not even as allegory.  Much science fiction is pure romance.  Romance is the story of an elsewhere” (74).

I believe part of my dissatisfaction last year with The Lord of the Rings, and my ability to do the unthinkable—that is, not touch it for a year—stemmed from the fact that I had recently imbibed a great deal of Shakespeare and Jane Austen.  The plays and novels of the latter undoubtedly pack their punch more with the force of character than with sheer plot and scenery.  But in the romance, the situation seems to be reversed.  So in my new attempt at picking up the threads of The Fellowship of the Ring, my perspective glass will be set primarily on plot.  I will try not to view Tolkien’s trilogy as a novel blemished by plot, but as a romance touched up with a bit of character.  For surely, despite some criticism to the contrary, Tolkien’s characters are more than stock characters; and the beings with which he peoples his plot come alive as fully as the confines of the genre allow them to do.