The Red Book of Westmarch

This poem from The Adventures of Tom Bombadil seems the right stuff for Hallowe’en.  May you all be kept from the Mewlips tonight.

The Shadows where the Mewlips dwell
Are dark and wet as ink,
And slow and softly rings their bell,
As in the slime you sink.

You sink into the slime, who dare
To knock upon their door,
While down the grinning gargoyles stare
And noisome waters pour.

Beside the rotting river-strand
The drooping willows weep,
And gloomily the gorcrows stand
Croaking in their sleep.

Over the Merlock Mountains a long and weary way,
In a mouldy valley where the trees are grey,
By a dark pool´s borders without wind or tide,
Moonless and sunless, the Mewlips hide.

The cellars where the Mewlips sit
Are deep and dank and cold
With single sickly candle lit;
And there they count their gold.

Their walls are wet, their ceilings drip;
Their feet upon the floor
Go softly with a squish-flap-flip,
As they sidle to the door.

They peep out slyly; through a crack
Their feeling fingers creep,
And when they´ve finished, in a sack
Your bones they take to keep.

Beyond the Merlock Mountains, a long and lonely road,
Through the spider-shadows and the marsh of Tode,
And through the wood of hanging trees and gallows-weed,
You go to find the Mewlips – and the Mewlips feed.

Suddenly Bilbo looked up. “Ah, there you are at last, Dúnadan!” he cried.
“Strider!” said Frodo. “You seem to have a lot of names.”
“Well, Strider is one that I haven’t heard before, anyway,” said Bilbo. “What do you call him that for?”

Why is it that things in Middle Earth have so many names? It’s as if Tolkien’s narrative landscape was tunneled through with linguistic rabbit holes, teeming with broods of playful and proliferating names. Black Riders, Ringwraiths, and Nazgul; Rivendell, the Last Homely House, Imladris; Strider, Aragorn, the Dúnadan—it seems as if being a person or place of importance in Middle Earth requires at least three different names, one of which must be in a foreign language if at all possible.

The meetings at Rivendell, and the tales told at the Council of Elrond in the chapter following, must have worked on Tolkien like so many excuses for enriching the treasure-trove of Middle-Earthling names. The character who was Tom Bombadil several chapters ago becomes Iarwain Ben-adar, Forn, and Orald during the Council of Elrond; and the sneaking culprit who bears so much of the blame for the Ring is revealed not only as Gollum but as Sméagol, who is to become Slinker and Stinker before his tale is done.

And this is not even counting the epithets. Frodo is dubbed both the Halfling and the Ring-Bearer, just as Elrond is the Half-Elven and Gandalf is the Grey. The Ring itself is variously the One Ring and Isildur’s Bane. Even Sauron, who does not seem to have another proper name—certainly not one as decorous and awe-inspiring as “Tom Riddle”—has an entourage of epithets that include “the Dark Lord,” “the Necromancer,” and “the Enemy.”

And so it seems that any being of any importance or lineage in Middle Earth bears many names, and indeed cannot avoid bearing them. Interestingly, the lone class of beings to largely escape these multiple namings is the Hobbits. They are named in our common modern way of First Name, Last Name, and that is very likely because they are neither important enough to have epithets (except in the case of a prodigy like the Old Took), nor adventurous enough to win other names. (Think of how many multiple namings arise from the same thing being named in multiple languages. That is a phenomenon that no respectable Hobbit would wander far enough to suffer.)

This fanciful proliferation of names, I believe, is ultimately not merely fanciful. If it does nothing else, it contributes its tuppence to the three-dimensional texture of Middle Earth as a world of intelligent beings. Things are named diversely because diverse languages name them, or because diverse qualities inhere in them. A name picks out what is most salient from someone’s particular angle of vision. Thus, Isildur’s Bane means nothing to Frodo until he hears the story of Isildur; but to the Heirs of Isildur, the epithet strikes closer to home than the mere noun “the Ring.” So it is with the Last Homely House and Imladris. The first conveys to us all the comfort of a chair by a fire; the last conveys all the magic and mystery of an unexplored fairy kingdom.

All this seems to be roughly what lies in the background of Bilbo and Frodo’s exchange on the names of Aragorn. It is tempting to think that Tolkien included the brief conversation just to make his linguistic point. For Aragorn explains to Bilbo that he is called Strider by a particular folk (the Bree-landers), much as he will explain to Boromir in the following chapter that travelers give the Rangers scornful names. The striding and wandering quality—“Longshanks” as Bill Ferny puts it—is what stands out about the Rangers to such a folk. But as Bilbo goes on to demonstrate in Elvish, the name of “the Dúnadan” when applied to Aragorn is fraught with import. It means “Man of the West, Numenorean,” and is not only what stands out to the Elves when they look at the weather-beaten Ranger, but is closer to the reality of who he is.

And so I say: let the names be fruitful and multiply, and replenish all of Middle Earth.

Well, there are many of them, aren’t there?  First the missing Gandalf turns up abruptly by Frodo’s sick bed; then we meet Elrond and Arwen; then Gloin; then Bilbo; then Strider under a new name.  It is a chapter of discovering old friends and discovering new things about old friends.  It is a chapter that gives one the impression that something is afoot, and that the impending council is going to be an explosion of discoveries and strange tales.

All this takes place against the backdrop of my favourite place in all literature:  the Last Homely House east of the Sea.  I noticed during this re-reading how little Tolkien actually tells us about the appearance of this house.  Sometimes it seems more like a country manor with a garden, and sometimes more like a Gothic abbey or even an intricate medieval city.  Perhaps this ambiguity is intentional.  Tolkien indulges in very little description of Rivendell, but what he tells us is significant.  Rivendell retains the memory of good things from all the places of Middle Earth, and it reminds each person of what he loves best.  It is “a perfect house, whether you like food or sleep or story-telling or singing, or just sitting and thinking.”  It has nooks and crannies and Elves of every stripe.  As Pseudo-Dionysius might have put it, Rivendell is variety in unity and unity in variety.

Along with the peaceful harmony of variety, Rivendell is a place of the peaceful harmony of different orders of beings.  By this I mean Elves (themselves possessing varying degrees of greatness), Men, Hobbits, and even Dwarves.  (Surprisingly, except for occasional references, the old feud between Dwarves and Elves seems to be dropped in the Last Homely House).  There is what might be called a “cordial consent of being to being”* throughout the house of Elrond.  For it is a House and not a Court; and Elrond is a host, and not a king.  The great of the world pass through such a place and rub shoulders with the comparatively insignificant, all with the greatest amiability and enjoyment.  The Elves themselves are sometimes “like kings, terrible and splendid,” while others are “merry as children”—and they coexist with perfect amicability.

There are few incidents in the Lord of the Rings that I love as much as Bilbo, the old Hobbit, requisitioning the appearance of Aragorn, the Heir of Isildur and rightful King of most of Middle Earth, to help him work out a rhyme in a little ditty he is composing for the amusement of the Elves.  And Aragorn comes, not because Bilbo is his equal, but because the two are friends, and greatness and smallness do not matter in a such place.  In much the same way, when Frodo is seated (to his dismay!) at the table of the great during Elrond’s feast, his feelings of smallness vanish as he enters into conversation and enjoyment with his neighbors.

What I am trying to gesture at with these ramblings is something I find foreign to our world and way of thinking.  For there is a hierarchy among the intelligent beings in Middle Earth—not merely a hierarchy of position and personal qualities, such as we find in our own world, but a radical hierarchy of essences and species and internal powers.  Our own modern-day quibbles over the equality of the sexes and the races vanishes like a star in the sun in the world of Middle Earth.  For in Middle Earth, the inequalities between Hobbits and Men and Elves are greater, involving the exercise of immaterial powers over persons of lesser degree—involving even the ability to inhabit a suprasensible world in addition to the sensible one.  Yet in houses like Rivendell, this radical hierarchy does not create envy or oppression among the ranks of beings, but rather concord and mutual respect.  There is dominion without domineering, giving-of-place without fawning, and above all, merriment and good humour in putting up with both one’s betters and inferiors.

After all, at the end of the day, the setting of Rivendell gives us the chance to enjoy what some never enjoy in our own world.  In how many places could such a diversity of ranks and privileges co-exist without perversion and abuse?  Rivendell satisfies our desire that Hobbits should be Hobbits and not Elves; that Elves should be immortal and not Men; that Men too should be what they are—some Kings, some innkeepers, and some children—and that all should enjoy the best that their order offers.

*A phrase of Jonathan Edwards’.  Sometimes a Protestant can sound just like a Thomist.

Directly following Gandalf’s explanation of the Seen and the Unseen worlds to Frodo, Tolkien records for us a prophetic and mystifying rumination on the part of Gandalf.  To Gandalf’s eyes, which see in both worlds as the Elves do, Frodo appears slightly transparent.  Importantly, the word is transparent and not faded.  Gandalf does not think that Frodo will come to evil.  But, he reasons, “He may become like a glass filled with a clear light for eyes to see that can.”

The image of a glass filled with light instantly recalls the Phial of Galadriel, which will come to Frodo’s aid so often through his later adventures.  The implication of Gandalf’s rumination is clear.  Frodo too has begun to live in the world of both the Seen and the Unseen, and to those like Gandalf who can see the Unseen, he is already being transformed into a vessel or medium of invisible virtues.  As the Phial of Galadriel brings light to dark places, Frodo himself will presumably come to exude (for lack of a better word) a “spiritual” light in the darkness.

Perhaps it would not be too much of a stretch to take a cue from the Catholics on this point.  If Frodo’s sufferings transform him into a phial of light to his world—a vehicle of divine grace, as it were—then this lowly Hobbit of the Shire is destined to become a Saint of Middle Earth.

At last!  The hour has come for the answering of many questions, the probing of many mysteries left veiled and inscrutable.  For as Book II of The Fellowship of the Ring opens, Frodo is awakening in Rivendell to a new measure of life and health, as if he were coming to life again and being reborn to a higher order of knowledge and duty.  His convalescence takes place under the watchful eyes of Gandalf and Elrond, who are shortly to hold a council.  Many things hitherto unexplained are to be made plain, and the thoughts of many hearts are to be laid bare.

Within his first hour of waking in Rivendell, Frodo and the reader learn several things from Gandalf about the part Frodo has been playing in the cosmopolitan game against Mordor.  Foremost among the revelations is something that the reader already knew:  that the Ringwraiths inhabit a world different from the every-day mortal one, and that Frodo was teetering on the brink of this world until Elrond came to his rescue.  The surprising piece of news, however, is that Ringwraiths are not the only beings to inhabit this “otherworldly” parallel universe.

“Here in Rivendell,” Gandalf tells Frodo, “there live still some of [the Enemy’s] chief foes:  the Elven-wise, lords of the Eldar from beyond the furthest seas.  They do not fear the Ringwraiths, for those who have dwelt in the Blessed Realm live at once in both worlds, and against both the Seen and the Unseen they have great power.”

The Seen and the Unseen.  Are these, then, the proper names by which to call the Two Worlds?  It’s as if the first world were primarily material, subjected to the five senses, while the second was somehow beyond the material and subject to other modes of perception.  We are reminded of what Strider said before the attack on Weathertop:  “Senses, too, there are other than sight and smell.  We can feel their presence… they feel ours more keenly.”

Yet Gandalf and the Elves perceive the Ringwraiths very differently than Frodo does, even though at the last even Frodo entered the world of the Unseen.  Frodo, on the brink of the Ringwraiths’ world, experiences the wraiths as powerful substances.  Gandalf, however, continues to speak of the wraiths as if they were literally nothing.  “The black robes,” he says, “are real robes that they wear to give shape to their nothingness when they have dealings with the living.”  How can Frodo and Gandalf, both seeing the Unseen, see it so differently?

Here, I believe, is another clue to that tangle called “the Problem of Evil” in Middle Earth.  The clue is that we must cast this problem in terms of two different worlds and two different orders of being.  For the Unseen world comprises a higher order than the Seen, and beings who can operate in the Unseen world have, de facto, a sort of power over the Seen world as well.

Let us imagine that certain beings in the Unseen World have become corrupt and evil.  Relative to the uncorrupted beings—good Elves like Glorfindel, Half-Elves like Elrond, wizards like Gandalf—these evil beings seem to have lost something, to have degenerated to the level of shadows and nothingness.  That is why Gandalf can speak of the Wraiths as nothing, and why Glorfindel has no fear of them.  However, relative to the Seen world, these corrupted beings retain their powers.  In fact, their power over the Seen world may still be great, even though they themselves have degenerated as beings within the Unseen world.

That is why Frodo, encountering the Ringwraiths from the vantage point of the Seen, is so easily subject to their mastery; while Glorfindel, revealing himself to them in his otherworldly wrath by the Ford of Bruinen, wreaks fear and havoc on them.  We cannot compare a pea and an apple.  Glorfindel is by all rights the peer of the Ringwraiths in their own world.  Frodo is not.  By the wraiths’ degeneracy into evil, they have made themselves lesser than Glorfindel.  By their nature as great beings, they are still greater than Frodo.

“The Flight to the Ford” is an extension of the problem of perception, as I hypothesized about in my previous post.  The chapter, in broad outline, is the account of Frodo’s world beginning to fade as the Morgul wound in his shoulder takes possession of him.  Yet the language in which I have just described Frodo’s experience is somewhat deceptive.  For, while Frodo perceives that his world is fading, his companions know that it is not the world but Frodo himself who is fading.

The language of fading is, of course, automatically privative.  Frodo is losing his being, not gaining it.  Yet as Frodo progressively fades, the Black Riders progressively gather reality.  Frodo dreams one night that he is walking in his own garden in the Shire, “but it seemed faint and dim, less clear than the tall black shadows that stood looking over the hedge.”  The very next day Frodo is exhausted by a hard climb through the hills, and as he throws himself to the ground, the trees and rocks about him (normally prime examples of substances) seem mere shadows.  That night he has another dream of winged shadows, this time not alleviated by any image of the real world.  By the last day of his flight, Frodo feels, while still awake, that a shadow has come between himself and his friends.  In short, the world of substances is vanishing for Frodo, and (as Gandalf will explain later), he is becoming like a wraith.

By the time Frodo encounters the Nine Ringwraiths by the Ford, his perception of them has altered entirely.  He no longer needs to wear the Ring in order to see them clearly.  To his waking (fading) eyes, they “appeared to have cast aside their hoods and black cloaks.”  Frodo sees kings wearing white and gray, clearly delineated warriors with helmets and Morgul weapons.  And even those weapons, one of which, in the form of a knife-blade, melted in the sun when Strider held it in his hands, now withstand the daylight to appear cold and hard.

What is most striking at this climax is not only the alteration in the Ringwraiths’ appearance, but in their hold on Frodo’s will.  In the attack on Weathertop, Frodo was able to resist the Ringwraiths to the point of striking at a Wraith’s feet and then freely pulling the Ring off his own finger.  Immediately following the fatal attack, however, Strider tells Sam bluntly that “they [the Riders] believe your master has a deadly wound that will subdue him to their will.”  And by the end of the chapter, the plot has proved Strider right.

Consider Frodo’s reaction to the final appearance of the Ringwraiths, while he is straddling one of the swiftest steeds in the world and Glorfindel is urging him to flee.  In the past, Frodo never had such powers of escape; but now, as the Ringwraiths are thundering up behind and he is realizing the full of his danger, we are astonished to learn that “a strange reluctance seized him,” and that “he knew in his heart that they were silently commanding him to wait.”  More astonishingly, Frodo obeys them.  Rather than flee, he draws his sword.  It is an action that can only be described as half-willful deception of himself, as if he could excuse his obedience to the Ringwraiths on the grounds of trying to resist them.  At the last moment, it is only the intervention of Glorfindel that sends his horse galloping off in the right direction.

After crossing the Ford, Frodo again feels himself “commanded urgently to halt.”  This time he cannot refuse.  Feebly he attempts to brandish his sword, but the upraised hand of a Wraith strikes him dumb and breaks his blade.  Frodo is reduced to the plaything of the evil powers, and once again, only the intervention of something external to himself—the flood at the command of Elrond—spares him from being wholly seized.

And it is at this nadir of Frodo’s weakness, when he is internally defeated even if externally saved, that Book I ends.

There is no denying that the moment on Weathertop is a sort of climax in Book I, to be outdone only by the confrontation at the Ford at the very end.  But between these two terrible clashes, we find an interminably long passage of barren lands and bleak hillsides, and a journey that lasts no less than 14 days.  Though Tolkien manages to give us an account of 2 weeks in less than one chapter, the length of time and the dullness of the journey wear off on the reading.  Why must this part of the tale be so lacklustre?

The simple answer might be merely geographical.  Weathertop is 14 days out from Rivendell, and Nazgul or no Nazgul, the ground simply has to be traversed.  Having previously drawn up his map, Tolkien could not miraculously move hills to make the Hobbits’ journey shorter for either them or the reader.  Nor, I suppose, was it unfitting that he should make the plodding as grueling on the reader as it was on the Hobbits.

But stepping outside the map of Middle Earth and into the art of the plot-maker, couldn’t Tolkien have done something to make these 14 days more… well, adventurous?

No and yes.  No, in that the point of the boring lands specifically seems to be not to provide us with new adventures, but to chronicle the effects of the old adventure on Frodo.  The chapter presents us with a series of days in which Frodo must bear the Morgul knife and gradually succumb to its powers.  Perhaps Tolkien thought we needed a relatively quiet time period in order to mark how Frodo’s dreams become darker as his arm grows colder.

Yes, however, in that Tolkien does provide us with some adventure through these boring lands, though not the terrifying and mystical adventure of a battle with Ringwraiths.  He takes the occasion, instead, to give us a reminder of a comic adventure that once transpired in the very same lands—an adventure involving Frodo’s own forebear, Bilbo, and a handful of Trolls.

There is no denying that the entire adventure is comic, both in its original form in The Hobbit, when the Trolls argue themselves to death over the manner of cooking and eating the Dwarves, and in its rediscovery by the four Hobbits.  Pippin is properly scared by the sight of a Troll in midday, forgetting that the sun turns Trolls to stone; Strider gets a chance to shine as he pokes gentle fun at the Hobbits for forgetting this fact and not seeing the bird’s nest behind the Troll’s ear.  Even Sam has his brief hour of genius when he spins a nonsense rhyme out of his head in honor of the occasion.  The whole adventure serves as comic relief.

Beyond comic relief, however, the adventure has a heuristic point.  In the midst of the boring lands, the Hobbits cannot help stirring up the dust of their own history.  They are journeying on a road that at least one Hobbit journeyed before them.  The lands of Middle Earth remember what has walked through them before; and, just as Tolkien refuses to move mountains on the map of Middle Earth, he refuses to forget the history that he himself already wrote to cover that map.

I am becoming more and more intrigued by Tolkien’s evil creatures, especially the more powerful ones like Balrogs, Ringwraiths, and fallen Valar (or Maiar or whatever Sauron is).  Tolkien was an intelligent Catholic, and it would therefore be expected of him to assume an Augustinian/Thomistic view of evil across all worlds—a view in which evil is not a substance but a privation, not something that exists but something negated from existence.

This view, of course, leaves an elephant in the room when it comes to explaining why evil beings cause so much harm in the world.  (How, we ask, could the atrocities at Auschwitz be said to derive from a “nonexistence”?)  It also complicates a fictional world where evil beings can wield incredible powers that cause supernatural harm.  So the question is, Does Tolkien really assume any such Augustinian account of evil while imagining the actual operations of Barrow-wights and Wraiths?

The encounter with Ringwraiths on Weathertop clears up none of these problems, but it does give us a glimpse into what might be called the “psychology of Ringwraithery.”  I want to highlight two things about the operation of evil in this chapter.  The first is about perception, and the second is about the will.

About perception, the easiest way of putting things is that the Ringwraiths don’t quite inhabit or perceive the waking world that we do.  As Aragorn discourses at length: 

They themselves do not see the world of light as we do, but our shapes cast shadows in their minds, which only the noon sun destroys; and in the dark they perceive many signs and forms that are hidden from us…. And at all times they smell the blood of living things, desiring and hating it.  Senses, too, there are other than sight or smell.  We can feel their presence—it troubled our hearts, as soon as we came here, and before we saw them; they feel ours more keenly.

In short, the Ringwraiths do not live in the world of substance, but of shadow.  So far so good… it is a very Augustinian way of structuring their psychology.

But whence, then, come their powers?  Or, rather, first of all, what exactly are their powers?  I find that this question is not so easy to work out.  The Wraiths live in a world of shadows, but apparently they are solid enough to wear cloaks, ride horses, and wield knives.  They are also responsible for causing certain privations (as all respectable evil beings do), such as darkness and cold.  But I find their most interesting power to be Temptation.  Frodo knows he is in the presence of a wraith when he has an overwhelming desire to put on the Ring.  And this is important, at least as far as Augustine is concerned.  For Augustine thought that evil did not exist anywhere except in the Will; and even in the Will, evil was not a reality in itself.  Evil consisted in the perversion of the Will when it turned away from the highest Good to seek something else.

The brilliance of the attack on Weathertop is that these themes of perception and will come together.  By putting on the Ring, Frodo succumbs to an evil will.  Simultaneously, the wearing of the Ring causes him to enter the world of the Ringwraiths and see as they see.  The altering of his will alters his perception:  evil beings appear to become more substantial, and what the other Hobbits perceive to be merely black shadows, Frodo now perceives as clearly-delineated kings with robes and helms and hands.

All this leads to the question:  Does the “substantiality” of evil in Middle Earth in fact have to do more with the perspective that it is seen from?  Do evil beings seem more powerful precisely in proportion as they have control over the perceiver’s will?  And if a perceiver’s will is not corrupted—as in the example of Tom Bombadil—does evil in fact not seem to be substantial at all?

I have a suspicion here that I am equivocating the terms “substance” and “power”, and “evil” and “evil thing.”  I shall have to turn to culling out a few more definitions from Augustine.  But in the meantime I find the idea highly suggestive that, in the case of the unfallen Valar and certain uncorrupted characters like Bombadil, evil beings really appear to be nothing.