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.

 

The Ethics of a Poem in the Dark

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.

 

A Poem in the Dark

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.

 

The Guise of a Guide, Part II

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.

 

The Guise of a Guide, Part I

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.