Meditations on Middle-Earth Page 4

  Similarly, to read Sauron as Hitler and the Ring as the atom bomb is to reduce a significant work to triviality. Yet Tolkien fought in World War I and he wrote much of his masterpiece during the darkest reaches of the second. The England of his youth was thoroughly gone by then. Like most of his generation, he mourned its passing. His portrayal of evil events was informed by things he knew only too well: Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, the bomb, genocide, gas warfare, cultural homogenization, the Corporate State, depersonalization, pollution, mind control, the Big Lie . . . all the ills of his times are implicit in his work.

  From experience, Tolkien knew that there are only two possible responses to the ending of an age. You can try to hold on, or you can let go. Those who try to seize the power to ward off change are corrupted by despair (Saruman, Theoden, and Denethor most notably, but there are others). Those who are willing to pay for all they have, to suffer and make sacrifices, to toil selflessly and honorably, and then to surrender their authority over what remains, ultimately gain the satisfaction of knowing that the world has a future worth passing on to their children. But it has no place for them anymore. Nevertheless—and this is what moved me most—Tolkien’s vision of the combined horrors of the twentieth century ended with hope and forgiveness.

  This is a book sad with wisdom. It moved me in ways my son could not feel.

  You grow older, you grow more wary. As a boy in Vermont, I spent almost every day of one summer fishing in the Winooski River. I didn’t tell my parents that my favorite spot was a backwater just below the hydroelectric dam at the head of a stretch of river bounded by high, steep cliffs to either side, which we all called the Gorge. The river churned wildly as it went through the Gorge, and every few years a teenager died falling from the cliffs. And I certainly didn’t tell my parents that the way to the backwater was through the old power plant, and that it involved scrambling down the jagged, rusted-out remains of iron stairways, and taking a running leap over a gap that would have, at a minimum, broken bones if I’d slipped. For all that, those long summer days spent with my best friend Steve, fishing and talking and playing cards and reading stacks of comic books from each other’s knapsacks, were one of the best times of my life. I wouldn’t trade the memory of them for anything.

  I shudder, though, to imagine my son risking his life the way I did clambering through the power plant. Or racing leapfrog across the wrecked cars in the automobile junkyard at the edge of town. Or breaking into abandoned houses to explore their spooky interiors. Or getting into rock-fights. Or going out onto the reservoir, as I did every year when the ice was beginning to melt and there was open water at its center, and jumping up and down to see how much of the ice could be made to sag under the water without my actually breaking through and drowning. Or . . . well, things look different when you’re a grown-up. I couldn’t understand them then, and I despair of explaining us now.

  THE RAVEN AND THOREN

  The Hobbit

  Chapter XV: “The Gathering of Clouds”

  Nobody suggests that Bilbo go on the Ring-quest, though he stands up and volunteers to do so. On the evidence of The Hobbit, it might even seem that the quest is his by right. But he is, quite simply, too old, not only physically but spiritually as well. He has drunk of the wine of mortality, and for him the age of adventures is over.

  So another hero must be found.

  “You were meant to have it,” Gandalf tells Frodo, unlikeliest of saviors. A string of coincidences brings the One Ring to him. It falls from the finger of a king, and is found by one scavenger and stolen by another. An adventurer, lost and seeking to evade ores, chances upon it in the lightless passages beneath a mountain. A wizard convinces the adventurer to bequeath it to his nephew. The Ring, we are told, is actively seeking its master, Sauron. Yet its journey takes it directly away from Mordor, and straight to the Shire.

  Coincidences multiply during Frodo’s flight from Hobbiton. He leaves at the last possible instant, saved from a Black Rider by the simple chance that the Gaffer thinks he’s already left town. He is saved again by elves, who happen along just in the nick of time. He is saved a third time from Old Man Willow, and a fourth time from the barrow-wraiths by Tom Bombadil, who rather pushes plausibility by happening along just in the nick of time twice. In Bree, he is saved by Strider, who also happens along, again, just in the nick of time. At the Ford of Bruinen, he is saved by Elrond and Gandalf, who . . . well, you know the drill. There is a special providence on Frodo, guiding and protecting him all the way to Rivendell.

  Yet from Rivendell onward, the quest is thwarted and delayed with maddening regularity. The Fellowship cannot take the pass through the Misty Mountains, and must therefore make the more perilous passage through Moria. Gandalf falls doing battle with a Balrog, depriving them of his strength and council. There are ores on the eastern bank of the Anduin, forcing Frodo and Sam to travel downriver, away from their desired route. Gollum leads them up a road they cannot possibly survive.

  But the contradiction is only apparent. There is a power at work here, both in the abetting and in the hindrance, “beyond any design of the Ring-maker,” as Gandalf says. And there is on Middle-earth only one such power, though (significantly), it is never named.

  Tolkien was religious, not in the loud, proselytizing manner of his friend C. S. Lewis (whom, to his frustration, he converted from atheism to Anglicanism, one crucial step short of Catholicism and salvation), but with the bone-deep sincerity of a man born into the faith he still holds. Which is to say, he was not trying to argue anyone to his beliefs, but only to portray the workings of the world as he understood them.

  If we ask why an omnipotent and benevolent deity would put our hero through so much suffering in order to destroy the One Ring, we are asking the wrong question. For the mere destruction of evil was never on the agenda at all. Little children, in their frightening innocence, believe the world would be a better place if only we would kill all the bad people. Those adults who love them understand that the moral realm is more difficult than that, and that the evil we must fear the most resides within ourselves.

  There’s a subtler purpose at work here.

  Ignore the geopolitics and the movements of armies, and follow instead the Ring as it travels toward its ultimate destiny. Time after time, Frodo unwittingly uses it to test those he encounters. First he offers the Ring to Gandalf, who, horrified, cries “No!” and “Do not tempt me!” Then he must rebuff the unwise desire of his beloved uncle and mentor Bilbo to hold it again. When Aragorn of the many names reveals his lineage, Frodo cries, “Then it belongs to you!” He offers it outright to Galadriel, who says to him, “Gently are you revenged for my testing of your heart at our first meeting;” and then, in one of the most memorable scenes in the book, proceeds to scare the snot out of him, before concluding, “I pass the test. I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.” Boromir tries to seize it by force, but afterward redeems himself, according to his rough warrior’s code, by dying in defense of the Fellowship. Boromir’s brother Faramir, brashly declares that he would not pick it up if he found it lying in the road, and then, more nobly, proceeds to demonstrate the truth of his words. Denethor, who never gets within snatching distance of the thing, rhapsodizes on what he would do with it. In Mordor, the temptation is put first to Gollum, then to Sam, and ultimately to Frodo himself.

  Frodo travels through Middle-earth like some kind of God-sent integrity test. The Wise, if they were truly so, upon seeing that he had come to visit, would shriek, “Oh, no! It’s that fucking hobbit! I’m not in!” and slam the door in his face.

  Here is the true purpose of the Ring-quest: not to destroy the source of power, but to test all of creation and decide whether it is worthy of continuance. Frodo’s quest, though he doesn’t know it, is a scouring of Middle-earth.

  What’s most interesting about the testing is that Frodo fails it.

  What an odd protagonist Frodo turns out to be! He starts out well enough. The Lord of the
Rings begins as a children’s book and the sequel to a children’s book, and through the first half of The Fellowship of the Ring struggles to emerge from its own failings, ranging from the unconvincing comic relief of the bumptious rustics to the twee insistence that hobbits are still among us, too quick and shy to be seen. Still, there are cunning bits of craft worked in there. Cleverly slipped into the creaking machinery surrounding Bilbo’s “eleventeenth” birthday is the information that it is also Frodo’s first day as an adult.

  Okay, I was an English major. I know what a bildungsroman is. The coming-of-age novel has a venerable and well-known structure, and initially Frodo looks to be fulfilling it. He starts out cheerful, brave, resolute, and more than a little naive. When his duty is made clear to him, he stands up and, though with shrinking heart, unflinchingly accepts it.

  But then, as he travels deeper into the heart of the matter, headed for Mordor, that perpetual dark night of the soul, he grows more and more passive, falls more and more silent. The business, for good and ill, of being the protagonist is perforce shouldered by his two talkative (they are needed to distract from his silence) companions, Sam and Gollum.

  Sam and Gollum are interesting characters. But they are not completely comprehensible unless you realize that they are both aspects of Frodo. Taken in isolation, Sam is simply too good to be believed. He never shirks, never sulks, never gives a single thought to himself, unless it’s of reproach for not having done well enough. His every action is motivated by love. He is (or becomes) the externalization of all that is best in Frodo. He fulfills the arc of growth a bildungsroman requires. Samwise Gamgee, the child who ran away from home hoping to see an oliphaunt, returns to the Shire as a man with the strength and decency needed to take his place in the community, and raise a family.

  Where Sam is the Good Boy, Gollum is the Bad. It is not mere coincidence that Gollum is himself a fallen hobbit, nor that he and Sam unfalteringly hate each other. He has the Ring-bearer’s determination, resourcefulness, and perseverence, though in a misguided cause. He is what Frodo would become, were he to surrender to the lure of the Ring. But since he is really a part of Frodo, he is not entirely evil, but only as evil as such a hero can be.

  My son’s young heart mourned Gollum’s fall into the fires of Mount Doom. So do the hearts of all who truly love this book.

  With his two companions acting out the twin plots of growth and failure, Frodo is freed to follow a third path, one that is, though Tolkien labored hard to disguise the fact, essentially mystic. It begins with Frodo’s wounding by the Nazgûl in the wood below Weathertop (this is the Fisher King’s wound, and the reason he leaves no offspring behind), ennobles him through adversity, and reaches its climax in Mount Doom, when he dons the One Ring and claims its power for his own.

  Of Frodo’s inner journey, we know very little. Tolkien provided hints and mutters, and very little else, for the good and sufficient reason that he lacked the literary powers their explication would require. “That of which we cannot speak,” as Wittgenstein put it, “we must pass over in silence.” We know only that he suffers; and that his journey ultimately leads him to the Cracks of Doom.

  The time of judgment is come at last. Frodo has failed the test. But no fair-minded person can believe he ever had a chance of passing it. Rather, he has been, as an engineer would put it, “tested to destruction.” And, because he is judged for all his life rather than the weakness of an instant, he is spared from the damnation he has seemingly brought upon himself. Gollum, marked by all as a tool of Fate from the very beginning, steps in to save him.

  Frodo is given mercy, rather than victory. This, too, marks the insight of age.

  Mystics, however, cannot live in the real world. When the adventure is done, Frodo knows too much to ever find peace. He has leapfrogged over all his middle years, and carries the burden of age. There is no place left for him in all of Middle-earth save the Grey Havens . . . the Grey Havens and death. Sam follows Frodo partway on that journey, and then turns back. He sits down in a great chair before a roaring fire, his wife places his infant daughter on his knee, and he speaks the most heartbreaking line in all of modern fantasy:

  “Well, I’m back,” he said.

  “No!” Sean cried, when I read those last words. I will bear the guilt of that forever. Reading, I was swept away by the words, by the momentum of the plot, and completely forgot about where they were heading, toward that terrible, beautiful eucatastrophic ending. I should have warned him it was coming. I should have prepared him for it. Possibly, I should even have lied and made up a different ending altogether, one in which “they all lived happily ever after.”

  But maybe not. What makes that moment hurt so much is how absolutely, undeniably true it is. It would be a mistake to tack a moral onto The Lord of the Rings as if it were merely a Brobdingnagian version of one of Aesop’s fables. But Tolkien was writing about the world as he understood it, and in that world he had learned certain lessons: That pity is sometimes better than justice. That the best leaders are often filled with doubt. Most importantly, that life has consequences.

  How could I deprive my son of the very point of the book?

  Here is something that may sound terribly sentimental, but which nevertheless is absolutely true: I was present when my son was born. The midwife handed him first to his mother, and then, after a time, to me. He was placed in my arms. I looked down at that sweet little goblin face (he was born purple, for lack of oxygen, and only slowly turned pink). Someday, I thought, this child will grow up and become a man, and by so doing, turn me into an old man, and then I’ll die. But that’s all right. I don’t mind. It’s a small price to pay for him.

  We live in a reflexively cynical age, and yet cynicism, though it encompasses a great deal of the truth, does not cover everything. That moment, looked at from the outside, comes perilously close to the saccharine. Yet, looked at as something experienced yourself, it is a glad and terrible thing to embrace the necessity of one’s own death. It touches the soul like the first breath of autumn. It sounds a bell whose ultimate message is goodbye.

  Such a moment requires books that can help us comprehend it.

  As of this writing, my son is seventeen. In less than a year—about the time this essay reaches print—he will leave for college.

  A young man is like a falcon. When you remove the hood and untie the jesses, he leaps from your arm and launches himself into the sky. You look at him dwindling, so proud and so free, and you wonder if he’ll ever return to you.

  IF YOU GIVE

  A GIRL A

  HOBBIT

  ESTHER M. FRIESNER

  I am a writer. I have received money for doing this on several occasions, so the odds are that I will continue on this unfortunate course until someone catches wise. (If you don’t want a writer to come back, don’t feed him. This is a good, practical rule, and applies to cats as well. Writers are a lot like cats in this and many other respects, except for the part about being able to wash ourselves all over with our tongues. Dang.)

  Having admitted to the crime of Authoring in the First Degree, with Premeditation and Malice Aforethought, I have no qualms about adding to my scroll of malfeasance by saying that what I write is generally fantasy and science fiction. This would be viewed as bad enough, in most respectable venues (i.e., periodicals such as the Pays-in-Copies Review or the Deconstructionist Quarterly), but I have piled iniquity upon iniquity (which is easier than it sounds, as long as you remember to lift with the legs, not with the back): I have written funny fantasy and science fiction. On purpose.

  Up until now, I simply accepted this deep personal failing as something over which I had as little control as the color of my eyes, the girth of my waistline, or the periodic urge to shout “Macaroni!” in a crowded movie theater. Now some well-meaning prats out there may argue that I do so have the power to change any or all of the above. I can get tinted contact lenses, I can chew less and eschew more; and as for the whole “Macaroni!” thing, wel
l, there is always Pasta-avoidance Therapy (or a gig on Jerry Springer). They claim that it is all a matter of giving it the Old School Try, of getting off my duff and making a valiant effort, of striving ever onward and upward for the night is coming. They may be right. They may also be British.

  But is that the answer I’m seeking? Do I want to learn that I can control the unattractive, unhealthy, or socially unacceptable portions of my life? Do I want to have the golden door of Opportunity for Personal Improvement flung wide by the same kindly hands that are equally ready to frog-march me through same? Do I want to accept responsibility for my actions and the results thereof?

  Of course I don’t want that! It’s too much like work. I’m an American. What I want is to keep on doing exactly what I’ve been doing all along, bad as it may be, only first I want to be told that it’s okay because it is not my fault. Yes, what I need to find is someone else to blame for it.

  I blame Tolkien.

  (No, not for the “Macaroni!” schtick; for my having become a writer. Try to keep up with me here, okay?)

  It all began back in the good old days, when a woman knew her place and the twin pillars upon which civilization rested were: Everything will be all right as long as you have a matching set of china/silverware/crystal/linens/luggage and Real women don’t read fantasy and/or science fiction; boys will think you’re ooky. (Of course, nowadays, the only person upholding the first of these principles is Martha Stewart, but since she is science fiction, I don’t know where that leaves us as far as the second principle goes.)