The Boring Lands

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.

 

A Knife in the Dark… but first, a Horn of Buckland!

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.

 

Chapter 10: Strider

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.

 

Back to the Drawing Board

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.

 

Black Riders

As one of those annoying children who read The Lord of the Rings seven or eight times before reaching high school, it is sometimes difficult to remember what stood out at the first reading. It is very easy, for example, to focus on the meeting with Strider at the Prancing Pony as the most important event in the Bree chapters, because of who Strider turns out to be. However, it strikes me that the reader does not know of this importance, or even really begins to trust Strider, until after the Hobbits reach Rivendell, or (at the earliest) until Strider meets Glorfindel near the Ford. I think that what is really going on in the Bree chapters, and the rest of Book I, has two main currents: pursuit by the Black Riders, and the problem of Gandalf.

The Black Riders are the spoken and unspoken material of the Bree chapters. I had forgotten, until I was puzzling recently over a few passages, how firmly Tolkien assumes that the reader has the fear of the Black Riders in the back of his mind while reading about the Hobbits’ entrance into Bree. Everything, even the occasional oblique reference, caters to it. Here are some of the more obvious ones which, in my over-familiarity with the story-line, took some genuine thought before I realized again that they were obvious:

The gatekeeper is, for some reason, interested in the fact that there are four Hobbits from the Shire knocking at his gate. Beginning with him, there are repeated references—by Butterbur, by Strider, by Tolkien’s description of the people in the common room—to “queer folk being about.” It’s Tolkien’s way of saying that something’s rotten in Denmark. The only “queer folk” concerned with the Hobbits so far have been the Black Riders.

Frodo, however, doesn’t take the hint and instead wonders if Gandalf has been to Bree and is looking for the Hobbits. Sam, poor fellow, is the only Hobbit with Black Riders on his mind as they trot through the lanes of Bree. When the “dark figure” scales the gate after the Hobbits and vanishes into the streets, the reader’s mind instantly goes to the Black Riders, though later we find out that this figure was Strider himself.

Strider makes himself untrustworthy from the start, by dropping hints about Frodo’s name: “I am very pleased to meet you, Master—Underhill, if old Butterbur got your name right.” This brings to mind the name of Baggins, and the reader wonders if any fellows on black horses have been asking for Baggins in Bree. Then, while Frodo is up on the table distracting Pippin’s audience, he feels exactly what he has felt previously in the presence of the Black Riders—the temptation, apparently from outside himself, to put on the Ring.

In short, even before the meeting with Strider, the letter from Gandalf, and the actual attack on the Inn, the Black Riders are everywhere in Bree. The unusual thing about the way Tolkien brings this to the reader’s awareness, however, is that he almost never mentions them directly. (The one blunt exception to this is Sam’s thoughts about them.) Just as the Riders are unseen, they are unspoken; and this adds power to the reader’s fears and suspicions about them. It is Tolkien’s subtle playing with the reader’s expectations that makes them invisibly present even at the merriest moment in the inn’s common room.

Once again there will be a progression with the Black Riders: an unspoken presence in Chapter 9, Strider’s revelation of who they are in Chapter 10, and finally a tour de force of their powers in Chapter 11. Gandalf too becomes an increasingly important matter; but that should be reserved for another post.