Gandalf’s rapport with the little and lesser peoples of Middle Earth is fascinating for its humour and humane interest.  It’s interesting how much his pleasure in dealing with these humble folk shines through the stories he tells in the Council of Elrond, sometimes to the exclusion of the great.  We note that when he describes his flight from Orthanc to Rohan and his reception by King Theoden, Gandalf gives us no detailed characterization of the king nor any recital of an entertaining conversation with him, even though he rides off on the king’s best horse. But Gandalf does take the trouble to relate some animated exchanges with the Gaffer of Bag End and Butterbur of Bree, even though the chat with the Gaffer has almost no plot value at all.

“I came to Hobbiton and Frodo had gone,” Gandalf says, “but I had words with old Gamgee. Many words and few to the point. He had much to say about the shortcomings of the new owners of Bag End.

“‘I can’t abide changes,’ said he, ‘not at my time of life, and least of all changes for the worst.’ ‘Changes for the worst,’ he repeated many times.

“‘Worst is a bad word,’ I said to him, ‘and I hope you do not live to see it.’”

Now this is a scrap of conversation the Council does not need to hear at all. But Gandalf conjures up the Gaffer vividly anyway, with all his little concerns over bad neighbors, in the midst of a tale full of suspense and dread over the fate of Frodo and the Ring. The only thing that justifies the anecdote is the strength and solidity of the Gaffer’s character itself… and the spontaneous, humane interest in such things on the part of Gandalf and his hearers.

The only other substantive noun that Saruman invokes as frequently as “wisdom” is the word “power.”  The two doubtless go together for Saruman.  His wisdom involves mastering the power of the Ring, and he reveals himself at last, conjointly, as both “Saruman the Wise” and “Saruman Ring-maker.”  (What Ring, we wonder, has he made?  How has he earned the title that belongs to the Elven-smiths?  Has he stolen their knowledge, as Sauron did?  Alas, he does not clarify.)

I wonder if there is a deliberate contrast between Saruman and the rest of the Wise on the matter of these two words.  There is an excess of self-consciousness in Saruman, a susceptibility to confuse wisdom with power, and specifically with his own power.  Saruman’s wisdom and power, unlike Gandalf’s, know nothing of humility.  And that is interesting because Gandalf really does have wisdom and power, like Elrond and Galadriel and the other wizards in his order.  The Wise, we are constantly reminded, have been the guides and counselors in a great deal of what has transpired in the Tale of the Ring.  But what we also discover throughout that Tale is that so much of it depends upon what the Wise do not know and cannot control.

Elrond’s words to Frodo at the end of the Council seem to call back to Saruman’s words and reprove them:

This is the hour of the Shire-folk, when they arise from their quiet fields to shake the towers and counsels of the great.  Who of all the Wise could have foreseen it?  Or, if they are wise, why should they expect to know it, until the hour has struck?

Apparently Saruman’s move from white to many-colored does not lack for allusion and symbolic power.  The common metaphor about “revealing one’s true colors” probably goes with the turncoat allusion.  There is also a resonance, peculiarly enough, with Newtonian physics.  Saruman says that the “white light can be broken.”  How exactly he acquired this optical knowledge is perhaps beside the point; maybe wizards in Middle Earth liked to experiment with prisms much more than they did in the actual Middle Ages.  But for an audience raised on basic optical knowledge in high school, the allusion is effective.

I wonder if Gandalf doesn’t somewhat miss the point in his response.  Saruman’s analogy of the white page and the white light presents the idea that they are good starting points, but only as a background for something greater and more interesting.  Saruman wants power and who knows what else, in addition to his initial pure state of being-whatever-he-was.  So it seems that Gandalf’s response should have had something to do with purity, not with the business of breaking things to find their essences.  Saruman had not broken his white light to find out what white light was, but to acquire powers and distinctions that he thought he could not have as long as he was “white.”

The reason I haven’t ventured into Tolkien criticism before is probably related to the reason that the Hobbits didn’t often venture into the great Outside World.  It is so much more comfortable to sit by my own the hearth and do my own irresponsible readings at my own pleasure.  But there comes a point where even a Hobbit has to admit that maybe it would not be a bad thing to find out what people are actually doing in the outside world, especially when they are getting academic about it, and so there may be a few reflections on Tolkien criticism turning up in future posts on this blog.

The occasion of this great upheaval was the fact that I visited a book sale this morning.  The stouthearted gallant who devotedly escorts me to bookstores found it first and put it into my hands; and it was the $5.00 price tag that put the thought into my head that, perhaps, it would not be a bad thing to find out what people in the outside world are up to.

I think the difference comes off to nice effect in Gandalf’s conversation with Saruman.  Saruman presents himself as a rhetorician, attempting to persuade Gandalf to his side by getting up and declaiming “as if he were making a speech long rehearsed.”  (It is extraordinarily strange to me, by the by, that Saruman’s speech possesses almost none of the rhetorical virtues that show up in Elrond’s or Aragorn’s speeches.  Saruman starts off rather vacuously and uninterestingly—“The Elder Days are gone. The Middle Days are passing.  The Younger Days are beginning”—and in what follows, he uses almost no arresting sentence constructions or poignant archaisms or attention-grabbing ecphoneses.  The messenger that rode to Daín from Mordor spoke more sweetly and seductively.  Yet Saruman is the wizard whose spell-binding voice is supposed to possess great powers, such that he may persuade almost anything living to his will!  It is a strange inconsistency.)

In contrast to Saruman, Gandalf makes no speeches in Orthanc.  But his wit punctuates Saruman’s speeches like a needle popping balloons.  When Saruman calls himself “Saruman of the Many Colours,” Gandalf remarks sardonically that he liked white better.  When Saruman repeatedly insists that “we” will command the Ring, Gandalf points out the obvious absurdity.  In reply to Saruman’s insinuation that he must submit either to himself or to Sauron, Gandalf breaks the horns of the dilemma by refusing both options and requesting another.  And so it goes on, until Saruman leaves Gandalf in the tower of Orthanc and retreats, the temporary victor of the situation but loser of the war of wit.

Tolkien gives us further indications that this scroll of Isildur is aged beyond other texts.  For one thing, it seems to be written in a script and tongue “dark to later men.”  He notes that both the script and the tongue are dark: the language and the alphabet, together with the mode of constructing the letters.  Students of paleography will appreciate the compounded level of difficulty.

But the most obvious indication of the scroll’s age is Tolkien’s translation of it.  Unlike his translations of Elvish or other tongues in the Lord of the Rings, Tolkien deliberately puts the content of Isildur’s scroll into Elizabethan English.  Not only do the archaisms run rampant—“hot as a glede,” “lest a time come,” “I deem it to be”—but Tolkien also resurrects the original verb inflections for the third person singular.  “It seemeth to shrink, though it loseth neither its beauty nor its shape.”  The word order and general flow of the sentences is often archaic as well:

“The Ring misseth, maybe, the heat of Sauron’s hand… and maybe were the gold made hot again, the writing would be refreshed.”

(It is a great blot upon modern English usage that, as I type these words, the accusatory red squiggles of the Spell-Checker are proliferating.)

So what, I wondered, was a glede?  Several online dictionaries unhelpfully mentioned European kites and buzzards, and Google tried to change my search from “glede” to “glade.”  My Old English and Old Norse dictionaries only gave the meaning “bright, cheerful” for such terms as glaed and glaeð.  But Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary from 1913 came through.  The entry for “glede” is “a live coal,” though the European kites and buzzards are listed as well.  Presumably Isildur meant the former.

Who now would know?  The maker.  And Saruman?  But great though his lore may be, it must have a source.  What hand save Sauron’s ever held this thing, ere it was lost?  The hand of Isildur alone.

The word source, and the inductive (deductive?) inference that Saruman’s knowledge has one, gives the whole episode at once the feel of a twentieth-century researcher running off to discover an unmined primary text, and a medieval theologian searching through every scrap of parchment he can find for authorities to back him up.  Gandalf goes then to Gondor, to comb through Denethor’s “hoarded scrolls and books” for any record Isildur might have left of the Ring.

Twice, incidentally, Gandalf refers to the store of books and records as a “hoard.”  Only in a world before its Gutenberg can this word be applied books as well as to gold.  And in very few places in any world could the Lord of a City be described as a “lore-master.”  But it is so in Gondor.  “Unless you have more skill even than Saruman,” Denethor tells Gandalf proudly, “you will find naught that is not well known to me, who am master of the lore of this City.”

There is both a moral and a heaping dose of scholarly self-consciousness in the fact that Gandalf discovers the truth about the Ring in a library.  Self-consciousness in that Tolkien himself was a scholar, and was clever enough to work the import of his profession into the narrative of the Ring.  A moral in that a library, with all its lore of the past, turns out to be tied inextricably to the present; and that the work of the scholar is perhaps not always in vain.

It is interesting how many false tales there are about this Ring.  The story that Boromir has heard is a tale about the Ring being destroyed at the Battle of Dagorlad.  Saruman, meanwhile, has been spreading the tale that the Ring rolled into the ocean and will never be recovered.  Gollum spread the tale that it was his birthday present; and Bilbo spread the tale that he had won it in a riddle game.  So it seems that the greater part of the Council of Elrond is taken up with clearing away the false tales of the Ring like so many cobwebs, and finding the single clue of the true tale to lead the way through the labyrinth.

It is also interesting how self-consciously the characters refer to themselves as if they were in a tale.  When Gandalf finally comes to the point of relating his captivity in Orthanc, he begins with the remark that “It is the last chapter in the Tale of the Ring, so far as it has yet gone”; and he concludes with the remark that “the Tale is now told, from first to last.”  That it is a chapter in the Tale of the Ring is quite astonishing; Gandalf is thinking of himself in terms of the written and not the spoken word.  Bilbo is likeminded. When he offers to take the burden of the Ring back upon himself, he refers specifically to the text he has already written:

I was very comfortable here, and getting on with my book.  If you want to know, I am just writing an ending for it.  I had thought of putting: and he lived happily ever afterwards to the end of his days.  It is a good ending, and none the worse for having been used before.  Now I shall have to alter that: it does not look like coming true; and anyway there will evidently have to be several more chapters, if I live to write them.

Gandalf’s reply continues the theme of text,

Finish your book, and leave the ending unaltered!  There is still hope for it.  But get ready to write a sequel, when they come back.

Perhaps it is Tolkien’s sense of irony that prompted him to make his characters self-conscious of the fact that they lived and moved and had their being in a written text.  But perhaps he meant to gesture beyond that too.  Those who think of themselves as characters in a tale acknowledge that the text is not wholly of their own writing.  But they also acknowledge that there is a logic to their setting and their plots; that they are being moved along in an orderly fashion, chapter by chapter, to some culmination or eucatastrophe, however dimly foreshadowed.

We were eating burgers and French fries, and talking about the problem of the Eagles in the Lord of the Rings. You may recall that, in the past, Hendumaïca has shown surpassing keenness in seeing through to the truth of things, and the current problem was this. When the Council of Elrond decided to destroy the Ring, why didn’t Gandalf summon Gwaihir and his Eagles to fly Frodo over to Mount Doom? Presumably, Frodo of the Ten Fingers could simply drop the Ring into the Fire like a WWII bombardier, avoiding all the risks of a year-long journey, an overweight spider, and a slippery schizophrenic.

The simplistic explanation, of course, is that Tolkien just overlooked the possible course of action, and sent his heroes packing to Mordor without thinking of more cost-efficient routes.

Hendumaïca and I, however (but mostly Hendumaïca), cooked up an alternative explanation. Here it is.

It’s really all about chance and secrecy. Peculiar constraints seem to be in play regarding who in Middle Earth is allowed or not allowed to know about the Ring. So we see that Elrond opens the Council in Rivendell with the curious announcement that he has not called it, and that the Elves and travelers who are sitting in the council have arrived by “chance.” But it is not just any chance, as Elrond makes clear in his following remarks. It is a chance that has determined who is to decide the Fate of the Ring; and though Elrond does not use the term “providence,” the reader increasingly suspects that this form of “chance” is what is in play — chance from the perspective of Elves and men, but not chance from a higher perspective. At any rate, everyone takes this “chance” as a “sign” that they are the exclusive company to know about and decide the fate of the Ring, to the exclusion of most other beings in the world.

As the Council members debate their course of action, the only outsider they consider calling up is Tom Bombadil. Bombadil, of course, has already seen the Ring and knows about Frodo’s burden. In contrast to Bombadil, it never occurs to anyone in the Council to call up the Eagles. Presumably, this is because the Eagles don’t already know anything about the Ring and are not concerned with it in any way. Gandalf has not taken them into his counsel, nor have any of Gwaihir’s folk arrived “by chance” in Rivendell in time for the deliberations. These two facts seem to rule out their involvement from the beginning.

Of course, to say that “chance” disqualifies the Eagles from involvement in the Quest of the Ring may be the same as stating that Tolkien simply forgot to include them, or chose not to, so that we all might have the pleasure of reading about a year-long journey and spiders and a schizophrenic Gollum. In this case, the interest of the narrative is a sufficient reason for excluding the Eagles. However, even if Tolkien had decided to include a debate about the Eagles in the Council — if an Eagle had flown in and offered safe transportation to the Ringbearer — there still might have been practical reasons to reject the airborne course. Gandalf and Elrond may not have thought it wise to risk a long, obvious airborne journey straight through the skies towards Mordor. The problematic thing about Eagles is that they are not the only birds in Middle Earth. Sauron has winged spies and servants, including dragons, and the rumor of the Ring’s coming could spread as quickly as wings could beat the air. And, as the reader and the Ringbearer learn only much later, the unhorsed Nazgul also find wings to bear them aloft. A confrontation between Frodo and the King of Angmar, mounted on Eagle and Reptile respectively, would not be likely to go well.

But, as I said, they are not included, probably because the narratives are already known to the readers, and Tolkien really could not take the extra space in a chapter already so epically long.

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The Halflings’ speeches give rise to one very good archaism:  trove.  Both Galdor and Gandalf refer to the Ring by this name afterwards, “the halfling’s trove.”  “Trove” from the Old French trover, “to find,” but with connotations of “treasure trove.”  The Ring is just that: something found, something precious, something requiring a short vernacular word to match the vernacularity of Hobbits, but also something old and requiring a word that is beginning to be unfamiliar to us:  trove.