J. R. R. Tolkien - Author of the Century

CHAPTER II THE LORD OF THE RINGS (1):

MAPPING OUT A PLOT Starting again

One of the most undeniable (and admirable), if least imitated qualities of Tolkien’s eventual sequel, The Lord of the Rings, is the complex neatness of its overall design. It is divided into six ‘Books’ (the three volumes in which it usually appears were a publishing decision based on the cost of paper in post-war Britain). The first Book takes Bilbo’s successor Frodo, with his three hobbit companions and eventually Strider, or Aragorn, to Rivendell. There he is joined by Gandalf and the rest of the ‘fellowship’ of the ring, that is, Boromir, Legolas, and Gimli. Their journey south, during which they lose Gandalf, takes up the second Book. At that point the company of eight splits up. Boromir is killed. Frodo and Sam set off to reach Orodruin and destroy the Ring. Pippin and Merry are captured by the orcs. Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli pursue them. During the third, fourth, fifth and part of the sixth Book these three groups, still further supplemented (by the return of Gandalf) and subdivided (by the separation of Pippin and Merry), weave their paths in and out of each others’ knowledge, the latter often partial or mistaken. (See the diagram on p. 104.)

Symmetry is, however, more than discoverable, it is unmistakable, if you look for it. Thus, it could be an accident that both Books I and II, in The Fellowship of the Ring, contain a second chapter which is largely explanation of the past building up to decisions about the future – and ending with much the same decision, that Frodo has to take the Ring to the Cracks of Doom. It probably is an accident that both Books I and II contain much the same number of scene-shifts and scenes of threat – some three of the latter (Old Forest, Barrow-downs and Weathertop against Caradhras, Moria and the orcs in Lórien), and four or five of the former, with Lórien juxtaposed against the house of Tom Bombadil as an asylum, a place of safety. But thereafter symmetry becomes increasingly detailed. Two groups of the Fellowship meet strangers in the wilderness, and are helped by them: Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli by Éomer the Rider, as they pursue the orcs and their hobbit-captives across the Rohan prairie; Frodo and Sam by Faramir the Ranger, as they struggle towards Mordor through the woods of Ithilien. The decision to free and assist the members of the Fellowship is in both cases disapproved by the helpful strangers’ superiors, Théoden and Denethor. These two last are furthermore strongly parallel to each other: they are both old men who have lost their sons (Théodred, Boromir) and see Éomer and Faramir as doubtful replacements. They die at almost the same time, at or during the Battle of the Pelennor Fields. Each has a hall which is described in close detail, in IV/6 and V/l respectively, and the two descriptions take on special point if compared with each other – as do the scenes of confrontation between Éomer and Aragorn and Faramir and Frodo in III/2 and IV/5. (Page-references are not always helpful in a work as often reprinted and repaginated as The Lord of the Rings. Where reference to the text may be valuable, I use accordingly Book [not volume] and chapter numbers. Here, for instance, IV/6 means chapter 6 of Book IV, ‘The Window on the West’, in The Two Towers, while V/l means chapter 1 of Book V, ‘Minas Tirith’, in The Return of the King.)

Meanwhile Merry and Pippin are clearly set antithetically to each other, with Merry joining the Riders and Pippin the defenders of Gondor, where each rises to much the same rank. All these points tend to set up a detailed cultural contrast between the Riders and the Gondorians, while at the same time there is a running cultural clash between Legolas the elf and Gimli the dwarf, as there is a clash of policies between Gandalf and Saruman (initially similar to and sometimes mistaken for each other). All the way through the later Books there is moreover a deliberate alternation between the sweeping and dramatic movements of the majority of the Fellowship, and the inching, small-scale progress of Frodo, Sam, and Gollum. The irony by which the latter in the end determines the fate of the former is obvious, remarked on by the characters and by the narrator. Tolkien furthermore went to great lengths to build in moments of connection, as when Legolas sees an eagle near the start of III/2, but does not find out that it was ‘Gwaihir the Windlord’ on an errand from Gandalf till three chapters later; or when Sauron is distracted from guarding against Frodo and Sam by the palantír in the hands of Aragorn. Tolkien also very carefully (and laboriously) created an exact day-by-day chronology for all parties, signalled in the text by such things as the changes of the moon. There is no doubt that Tolkien did all this, little doubt that he meant to, and no doubt again that the effects created of variety, contrast, and irony are in major part responsible for the book’s phenomenal and never-equalled success.

Tolkien, however, had no idea of any of this when he began to write, nor indeed for quite unlikely stretches of time once he did get started. He may have felt himself in rather a quandary after the success of The Hobbit. The Hobbit itself had been published almost by accident, with a pupil who knew of its existence recommending it to a publisher’s representative who encouraged him to send it to Stanley Unwin, and Unwin sr. then giving the typescript to his eleven-year-old son Rayner to read and report on (see Bibliography, pp. 7-8). Once it had come out, had been acclaimed, and Unwin had not unreasonably asked for a sequel, Tolkien must have wondered what to do. The texts he had on hand, and on which he had been working for twenty years already, were versions, in poetry and prose, of the complex of tales associated with the Silmarillion (a complex discussed in detail in chapter V below). He duly sent a selection of these in, from which Unwin made a further selection to pass on this time to an adult and professional reader, Edward Crankshaw. Crankshaw, however, faced with a collection of seemingly genuine ancient legends which made no concession whatsoever to novelistic convention, was baffled, and confessed as much. The story is told in detail by Christopher Tolkien in The Lays of Beleriand, pp. 364-7, but one thing that was clear from the start was that no ‘Silmarillion’ could possibly be seen as a sequel to The Hobbit. Told as much, Tolkien, we now know, began work on the sequel which was to turn into The Lord of the Rings some time between 16th and 19th December 1937, in the university’s Christmas vacation.

Yet however neat the final product, at that point in late 1937, and for long afterwards, Tolkien had no clear plan at all, certainly nothing even remotely like the schema outlined at the start of this chapter. It is an interesting, and for any intending writer of fiction rather an encouraging experience, to read through the selections from Tolkien’s many drafts now published in volumes VI-IX of The History of Middle-earth (The Return of the Shadow, The Treason of Isengard, The War of the Ring, and Sauron Defeated), and to note how long it was before the most obvious and seemingly inevitable decisions were made at all. Tolkien knew, for instance, that Bilbo’s ring now had to be explained and would become important in the story, but he still had no idea of it as the Ring, the Ruling Ring, the Ring-with-a-capital-letter, so to speak: indeed he remarked at an early stage that it was ‘Not very dangerous’ (see The Return of the Shadow, p. 42). Another element arrived at early on was the character who would become Strider, the Ranger, but in several opening drafts this role of guard and guide is taken not by a man, still less by one of the Dúnedain, but by a weatherbeaten hobbit called Trotter, distinguished by his wooden shoes. Tolkien remained strongly attached to this character, and even more strongly attached to the name Trotter, though he was quite perplexed as to how to explain him. In The Return of the Shadow we see Tolkien wondering whether Trotter might perhaps be Bilbo in disguise; or maybe a relative, a cousin, one of the ‘quiet lads and lasses’ led off by Gandalf ‘into the Blue for mad adventures’. Reading these drafts one often feels like saying, as Tolkien had done over the idea of fairy-hobbit marriages, ‘This is, of course, absurd’ (for all critics have 20/20 vision, in hindsight). However Christopher Tolkien notes that more than two years after his father started work on the sequel, he was still ‘without any clear conception of what lay before him’ (The Treason of Isengard, p. 18). ‘Giant Treebeard’ was at this stage hostile, and was the character responsible for the imprisonment of Gandalf, rather than Saruman, who had not yet appeared (The Return of the Shadow, p. 363). There was ‘not a hint’ of Lothlórien or of Rohan (The Return of the Shadow, p. 411), even by the time the Fellowship had reached Moria; Tolkien knew no more than his characters what lay the other side of the mountains. Perhaps the most surprising of the many surprises revealed by the early drafts is that in August 1939, with Tolkien about halfway through what would become Book II, of the eventual six Books, he thought that the work was about three-quarters done, see The Return of the Shadow, p. 370. It is as if he anticipated finishing not at the end of The Lord of the Rings, but at the end of The Fellowship of the Ring. The most determined hindsight, reading these drafts, can find no trace at all of the outline given above.

One critical factor in the development of the whole seems to have been the introduction of the Riders of Rohan, like Treebeard seen originally as enemies, allies of Sauron (The Return of the Shadow, p. 422) – Tolkien was indeed to keep this idea vestigially present in the completed work as a rumour, which Boromir indignantly rejects in II/2, but which is still present in the minds of Aragorn and his companions when they meet the Riders for the first time on the prairie at III/2. However, once they did appear, the Riders expanded the story markedly, and also gave Tolkien an easy way of tapping once more into the source-material of ancient literature. At about the same time he formed the idea of creating a set of linguistic correspondences within Middle-earth, and in the process providing a sensible explanation of the names used in The Hobbit. Tolkien knew (none better) that the dwarf-names he had used in The Hobbit came from Old Norse; but if one thought about it, it was clearly impossible that anything like these names could have survived from the far past of the Third Age. Old Norse is indeed an old language, but not so old that we cannot see its descent from something even older. As far back as Tolkien’s Third Age whatever was the ancestor of Old Norse would be quite unrecognizable. The dwarf-names of The Hobbit must accordingly in strict logic be translations, and so must the hobbit-names; but in that case the real original hobbit-names and dwarf-names ought to have been related to each other in at least the same sort of way as modern English and Old Norse (which are in fact related, even quite closely related). The Riders could then be conceived of as being something linguistically in between hobbits and dwarves, as speaking (and in every detail except one, as being) Old English. Théoden realizes early on that there is some sort of connection between the hobbits and his people, a closer one than there is between the hobbits and the Northern men from whom the dwarves have borrowed their names and the language they use in public; his ancestors and theirs must at some time have lived in close association. Tolkien had worked out this set of relationships by about early 1942 (see The Treason of Isengard, p. 424), and could see his way at last to integrating it with the elvish languages and legends on which he had worked for so long already: this gave his story a clearer shape. However one thing which remains certain is that he was still not working from a plan, an overall design. He was writing his way into the story. Other great works have been written the same way, like Dickens’s novels, composed and published in serial instalments – Tolkien’s notes often look rather like Dickens’s, with both writers in the habit of jotting down a string of possible names for a character till they struck one which seemed to fit. But Tolkien, even more than Dickens, had no conscious idea of where he was going. Seven months after starting work on The Lord of the Rings, he complained that he still had no story (The Return of the Shadow, p. 108). The amazing thing is that this did not stop him trying to write one. Back-tracking

Tolkien did in fact have several resources when he began work in December 1937. One was the backlog of material which would in the end become the Silmarillion. As mentioned above, he had already sent some of this to Stanley Unwin, and though it had been rejected for separate publication, he could clearly continue to use it, as he had here and there in The Hobbit, to give a sense of depth and background to his main story. Thus Aragorn, in the chapter ‘A Knife in the Dark’ (I/11), not only sings a song of Beren and Lúthien, but also gives an extensive paraphrase of the legend concerning them, which had formed a major part of the package rejected by Unwin. Later Bilbo in Rivendell, in the chapter ‘Many Meetings’ (II/1), sings a song of Eärendil. Both poems were based on ones which Tolkien had already written and published separately, if only in university magazines of limited circulation. This indeed was a further resource available to Tolkien in 1937. Most of the more than a dozen poems in The Hobbit had been light-hearted or frivolous, like the elf-song in chapter 3 or the songs for taunting spiders in chapter 8, but some, especially the ongoing ballad which the dwarves start in chapter 1 and extend or modify according to their mood in chapters 7 and 15, had shown how poetry could be mixed in to narrative. Between 1923 and 1937 Tolkien had not only written but published a small body of poems which did not arise out of his Silmarillion legendarium, but which were available for re-use. However, his most important and unexpected resource in 1937, though it was not unconnected with the poems just mentioned, was a strong interest in place, and in place-names.

Place-names, like riddles and fairy-tales and nursery-rhymes, form yet another connection with antiquity in which Tolkien took strong personal interest. They were especially valuable to him for two reasons. One is that most people do not think much about names, but accept them as a given. They are accordingly unlikely to meddle with them, or change them except by the slow and natural processes of language change of which they are unconscious; which means that names may well contain unusually authentic testimony to history or to old tradition. Tolkien suggested to me once that the name of the village Hincksey, outside Oxford, might contain within it the name of the old hero Hengest, the founder of England (< ^*Hengestes-ieg, ‘Hengest’s island’). He thought his own aunt Jane Neave’s surname might be derived from the name of Hengest’s dead leader, Hnæf. But another reason for taking an interest in names is that, unlike other words, they exist in a special relationship to what they refer to: obviously, one-to-one. It was said above, on p. 3, that ‘The word is not the thing’, but names are a lot closer to things than are other classes of word. If a name exists it offers a kind of a guarantee that what it labels must also exist. Names, especially names which are not strictly necessary, weight a narrative with the suggestion of reality. This may of course be just a device – a good example is the little elegy on Théoden King’s horse in The Return of the King, which goes:

Faithful servant yet master’s bane,

Lightfoot’s foal, swift Snowmane.

Clearly we do not need to know the name of the father, or mother, of Snowmane, or indeed of Snowmane, a very incidental character. But giving both names, one completely extraneous to the story, is a sort of re-assurance. As said on p. 15 above, there are not many real names in The Hobbit, apart from those of the dwarves, and some of those listed there were added in later editions, but The Lord of the Rings is completely different. It is loaded down with names, personal names and place-names, the latter often transferred on to a map. They say a good deal about the way in which Tolkien began to work.

A sidelight on his methods and interests at this stage is cast by Tolkien’s short story Farmer Giles of Ham. This was not published till 1949, but we know (see Bibliography) that it was heavily rewritten at about this time, and read to an Oxford college literary society in January 1938, a month after Tolkien began The Lord of the Rings. In it one can see Tolkien brooding, not only over nursery-rhyme, but also over the place-names of Oxfordshire and the neighbouring counties. The fictional ‘Ham’ of the title is the real village of Thame. Why should it be called Thame? Why is there an -h- in Thame, as in Thames, which no one ever pronounces? Should it not be Tame, and if so, what does Tame mean? Not far away from Thame is the equally real village of Worminghall, which seems on the face of it to mean ‘the hall of the Wormings’. But what are Wormings? If ‘worm’ means dragon (as it often does in Old English), then might Wormings have something to do with a dragon – conceivably a tame dragon, since Tame is so close by? From thoughts like this Tolkien constructed his story of the wicked dragon Chrysophylax, who is bested by Farmer Giles with his sword Tailbiter, or Caudimordax, and who enables Farmer Giles to escape from the tyranny of the king of the Middle Kingdom, Augustus Bonifacius Ambrosius Aurelianus Antoninus. The whole story is set in an imaginary past, the past of the ‘Brutus books’ referred to by the author of Sir Gawain (which Tolkien had co-edited thirteen years before), but its geography is perfectly realistic. The villages of Thame and Worminghall, and Oakley, which had its parson eaten, can all still be found close together on the map of Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire – Thame is in Oxfordshire, the other two in Buckinghamshire; and the same map will show the small town of Brill in Buckinghamshire, once ^*Bree-hill – it was to be reshaped in The Lord of the Rings as Bree. The capital of the Middle Kingdom is not named, but is said to be ‘twenty leagues’ away, or sixty miles; it must be Tamworth, the ancient capital of Mercia, sixty-eight miles from Thame as the crow flies. The village of Farthingho, where we are told Farmer Giles’s Little Kingdom maintained ‘an outpost against the Middle Kingdom’, is almost exactly on a line between them, one-third of the way measured from Thame. When Farmer Giles grumbles about the strange people who live far away, ‘beyond the Standing Stones and all’, he must mean the inhabitants of Warwickshire as opposed to his own Oxfordshire: the boundary between the two counties runs by the famous Rollright Stones. In Farmer Giles Tolkien was using place-names in a way which he had avoided in The Hobbit, but which he was to rely on in The Lord of the Rings (names like Brill, or Bree, or T(h)ame, or Farthingho, are on the face of it very different from The Hill or The Water, if not always so different historically). He was moreover taking a close interest in locality.

Tolkien used his new involvement with names in creating ‘the Shire’, with its elaborate map, relatively elaborate social structure, and elaborated history, all explained in the ‘Prologue’ to The Lord of the Rings. The Shire is indeed a brilliant invention, rubbing home the point that hobbits are just English people by its names, often strange-sounding (Nobottle, the Farthings) but usually real (there is a Nobottle in Northamptonshire, and a Farthingstone); and by the very careful, point-for-point resemblance of its history to the traditional history of England, which extends even to both communities being founded by two brothers called ‘Horse’ – Hengest and Horsa for England, Marcho and Blanco for the Shire, but all four names are Old English words for the same animal. It also rationalizes some of Tolkien’s anachronisms in The Hobbit, explaining that ‘pipeweed’ is the hobbits’ only contribution to civilization, but no one knows where they got it from, and that a postal service is one of the few public functions exercised by the hobbits’ minimal government, along with Shirriffs (sheriffs, or as Tolkien knew, ‘shire-reeves’), the Mayor (another ancient office surviving into modern England, and as with sheriffs into America), and the Thain (Old English thegn, king’s servant, now known to most people only from the Thane of Cawdor in Macbeth). But none of this solved Tolkien’s underlying problem with story, with getting the story moving. What did was a poem he had published a few years before The Hobbit, which also springs from close engagement with locality, names and maps.

The poem was ‘The Adventures of Tom Bombadil’, which Tolkien published in The Oxford Magazine in 1934. Many years later it was to be reworked and to become the lead-title in the collection of poems published under that name as a sort of Christmas present for Tolkien’s favourite aunt from ‘Bag End’, Jane Neave, but its 1934 version is somewhat different, provoking a narrative rather than (as in 1962) conforming to one already written. Both versions introduce Tom Bombadil without further explanation:

Old Tom Bombadil was a merry fellow; bright blue his jacket was, and his boots were yellow.

Both also give Tom four adventures, or encounters with malignant powers. In the first he is pulled into the river by ‘Goldberry, the Riverwoman’s daughter’; in the second trapped by ‘Willowman’; in the third pulled down their hole by ‘Badger-brock’ and his family; in the last, as he gets home, he finds ‘Barrow-wight’ waiting for him behind the door:

‘You’ve forgotten Barrow-wight dwelling in the old mound up there a-top the hill with the ring of stones round. He’s got loose tonight: under the earth he’ll take you! Poor Tom Bombadil, pale and cold he’ll make you!’

Tom reacts to all these adventures with complete confidence and simple imperatives, always obeyed: ‘Go down!…let me out again…show me out at once…Go back to grassy mound…go back to buried gold and forgotten sorrow’. And then, the next morning, he goes back again, this time to capture Goldberry in his turn and take her off to be married. The beasts and bogies still cluster round his house in the night, tapping on the window-pane, sighing in the reeds, crying from the mound, but Tom ignores them all. Both versions end with him singing at sunrise:

sitting on the doorstep chopping sticks of willow, while fair Goldberry combed her tresses yellow.

To readers of The Oxford Magazine in 1934 the poem must have seemed almost a nonsense-poem. What it does is to take the English landscape, perhaps the safest in the world, and to try to make it haunted. Tolkien did have a little to work on. Barrow-wights are familiar in Norse saga as ghosts, or more accurately walking corpses, coming out of their grave-mounds for vengeance on the living. There is little trace of this belief in English folklore, but against that, barrows are utterly familiar. Barely fifteen miles from Tolkien’s study the Berkshire Downs rise from the Oxfordshire plain, thickly studded with Stone Age mounds, among them the famous Wayland’s Smithy, from which a track leads to Nine Barrows Down. As he did elsewhere, Tolkien has taken one of the traces of old belief surviving in Norse, and anglicized it, transferring it to a locality he knew well. Meanwhile Goldberry is ‘the Riverwoman’s daughter’, beautiful and charming herself, but connected with the hag who lurks like Grendel’s mother ‘in her deep weedy pool’. The folklore of hags has not been much studied, but Beowulfian scholars had at least heard of the malignant female river-deities whom some saw as a model for the Beowulf-poet. R.W. Chambers, a patron and supporter of Tolkien in his early years, had pointed to beliefs about Peg Powler, in the River Tees, and Jenny Greenteeth in the Ribble, as classic malignant water-hags.

What was missing in the 1934 version of the poem was the name of the river to which the Riverwoman belonged. In 1962 Tolkien was able to write it in as the Withywindle. This gives further clues as to how Tolkien was working, both with names and with locality. The description of the Withywindle itself, when the hobbits come upon it, is one of many brilliant passages of natural description in The Lord of the Rings. The hobbits find themselves coming down a ‘deep dim-lit gully’ which opens into a sunny valley:

A golden afternoon of late sunshine lay warm and drowsy upon the hidden land between. In the midst of it there wound lazily a dark river of brown water, bordered with ancient willows, arched over with willows, blocked with fallen willows, and flecked with thousands of willow-leaves. The air was thick with them, fluttering yellow from the branches; for there was a warm and gentle breeze blowing softly in the valley, and the reeds were rustling, and the willow-boughs were creaking.

If Tolkien had left his study in Northmoor Road, walked back to the University Parks, crossed the Rainbow Bridge, and then walked along the other side of the river away from the town of Oxford in the direction of the villages of Wood Eaton and Water Eaton – as no doubt he did – he would have seen virtually the same sight: the slow, muddy, lazy river fringed with willows. The real river, the one that flows into the Thames at Oxford, is the Cherwell. The Oxford Dictionary of English Place-Names gives a different derivation, but Tolkien was always capable of rejecting the advice of Oxford dictionaries. I think he derived the name from Old English ^*cier-welle, the first element coming from cierran, ‘to turn’: so, ‘the turning stream, the winding stream’, which is what the Cherwell is (unlike the Evenlode not far away, the ‘even-course’, or the Skirfare in Yorkshire, the ‘bright-runner’, in which Tolkien’s Leeds predecessor Professor Moorman had been drowned in 1919). Further down the Thames, furthermore, is Windsor, which may take its name from ^*windels-ora, ‘the place on the winding stream’. Finally, ‘withy’ is simply the old word for ‘willow’, frequent in English place-names, like the Warwickshire Withybrook. The Withywindle is a combination of the Cherwell itself, and words for its two main features, its willows and its slowly twisting course. We have no name for its resident hag, but it would only be sensible to see her as more passive, and perhaps more likely to have a human-friendly daughter, than child-eating Peg Powler, the spirit of the rapid River Tees, running down from the highest waterfall in England, High Foss. Willow-man, meanwhile, though a ‘grey thirsty spirit’, ‘filled with a hatred of things that go free upon the earth’, works mostly by the power of sleep – he sends an overpowering drowsiness so he can trap or drown the hobbits. Such a power is notoriously at its height in long quiet summer afternoons, especially (some say) in river-bottom country like Oxford.

Finally Tom Bombadil himself was from his first conception a genius loci, a ‘spirit of the place’, the place being, as Tolkien remarked to Unwin (see Letters, p. 26), ‘the (vanishing) Oxfordshire and Berkshire countryside’. The elves in The Lord of the Rings call him ‘oldest and fatherless’; he is the one creature over whom the Ring has no power at all, not even to make invisible; but he could not defy Sauron permanently, for his power ‘is in the earth itself, and Sauron ‘can torture and destroy the very hills’. He is a kind of exhalation of the earth, a nature-spirit and once again a highly English one: cheerful, noisy, unpretentious to the point of shabbiness, extremely direct, apparently rather simple, not as simple as he looks. The fact that everything he says is in a sort of verse, whether printed as verse or not, and that the hobbits too find themselves ‘singing merrily, as if it was easier and more natural than talking’, make him seem, not an artist, but someone from an age before art and nature were distinguished, when magic needed no wizard’s staff but came from words alone. Tolkien may have got the idea from the singing wizards of the Finnish epic the Kalevala, which he so much admired, and which he perhaps wished might also have an English counterpart.

The point one may take from these comments is that for the first nine chapters at least the action of The Lord of the Rings does not move very far. The hobbits get out of the Shire, true. But in the Old Forest, along the Withywindle, and on the Barrow-downs, they are still moving in a very familiar landscape, all of it within a day’s walk of Tolkien’s own study. Bree itself is modelled on the Buckinghamshire town of Brill. One thing Tolkien certainly knew about the latter is that its name is odd and philologically interesting, being composed of two elements, ‘bree’ and ‘hill’. But ‘bree’ is only the Welsh word for ‘hill’. The name suggests that the incoming English heard the word, used as a description, but thought it was a name and added their own description to it, creating ‘Bree-hill’: not very far removed, in origin, from ‘The Hill’ in The Hobbit, but of course felt quite differently now that it has become a name, and so in one-to-one relationship with what it represents as ordinary nouns are not. The name Bree bears witness also to Tolkien’s other theory about place-names, mentioned in the Foreword: that people could still detect ‘linguistic style’ in them. Tolkien backed his hunch by giving the villages round Bree names of the same kind – Archet, from Welsh ar chet, ‘the wood’, Combe, from Welsh cŵm, ‘valley’. He wanted the Bree area to feel slightly different from the Shire, and trusted to his readers’ intuitions for the result. In the process, of course, he created a further sense of the variety and verisimilitude of Middle-earth. Much of his seemingly redundant activity in finding names and drawing maps paid off in this way.

Just the same, these factors together – Tolkien’s expansion of the earlier Bombadil poem, his consequent confinement within a familiar imaginative space, the concern for locality signalled by the new interest in names inside and outside the Shire – explain why, for all Tolkien’s efforts, The Lord of the Rings takes such a time to develop its major theme. The hobbits in particular have to be dug out, or winkled out, of no fewer than five Homely Houses before the voyage of the Ring starts in earnest. First there is Bag End; then the (really rather unnecessary) halt at Fredegar Bolger’s house at Crickhollow; then the house of Tom Bombadil, then the Prancing Pony, and finally the house of Elrond. Furthermore much of the activity of the hobbits in these sections comes not from their adventures but from their recuperations: feasting with the elves in the Shire, hot baths in Crickhollow, singing with Tom Bombadil, singing again in the common room of the Prancing Pony, working their way through ‘yellow cream, honeycomb, and white bread and butter’, ‘hot soup, cold meats, a blackberry tart, new loaves, slabs of butter, and half a ripe cheese’, not to mention the elves’ ‘fruits sweet as wildberries and richer than the tended fruits of gardens’ and Farmer Maggot’s ‘mighty dish of mushrooms and bacon’. It was a criticism of Tolkien’s early drafts of Book I made by both Rayner Unwin and C.S. Lewis that Tolkien found it too easy, and too amusing, just to let the hobbits chatter on. Tolkien did his best to amend this (one can see him responding to the criticisms in a letter to Stanley Unwin in 1938), and the Old Forest and Barrow-wight sections have their own charm and their own power; but there is still a faint sense, after much reworking, that Tolkien was initially groping for a story, and keeping himself going with a sort of travelogue.

The clearest sign of this comes, perhaps, from the early use made of the Black Riders, the Nazgûl. The concept of the ‘Ring-wraith’, and indeed of the ‘wraith’ more generally, is an original and compelling one, with surprising modern resonance (as will be argued in the next chapter, on Tolkien’s presentation of evil). But though the Riders appear frequently in the ‘travelogue’ section, from Bag End to Rivendell, they show relatively little of the force and meaning which they acquire later on. In their first appearance (in 1/3) a Rider is seen ‘sniffing’ for Frodo, and Frodo feels an urge to put on the Ring. But nothing happens – it is an odd thing that when this description was first written the mysterious rider turned out in fact to be Gandalf (The Return of the Shadow, p. 47)! After that there is a second ‘snuffling’ scene, from which the hobbits are saved by the elves. The third time a Rider appears (1/4), he is deterred by no more than the difficulty of taking his horse down a steep bank. The ‘long-drawn wail’ which follows, ‘the cry of some evil and lonely creature’, is a feature which will be developed, but this time it has none of the effects of despair and demoralization which occur in later Books. On three occasions, we are told, the Riders try to get information from one person or another, from Gaffer Gamgee, Farmer Maggot, Barliman Butterbur, but though they are ominous, with their hissings and their ability to make hair stand on end, they seem to have no special powers. The two armed attacks they make, on the house at Crickhollow and on the Prancing Pony, do not amount to much – ‘good bolsters ruined and all’, says Butterbur. Nob drives off the Riders bending over Merry with a shout. There are only two scenes in the early sections where the Riders develop any of the supernatural power later ascribed to them, and one of those is again told rather than shown – Gandalf’s description of the splinter from the Morgul-knife working closer to Frodo’s heart, which would have turned him into ‘a wraith under the dominion of the Dark Lord’. The attack on Weathertop at the end of I/11 does give a glimpse of what the Riders are in the other world, with the sight given by the Ring: white faces, grey hairs, haggard hands, something not skeletal but undying, the bitter and dangerous obverse of the long life enjoyed by Bilbo and endured by Gollum. But this is only a glimpse, and may have been written in at a late stage. Speaking purely tactically, one has to say that the Riders could have saved themselves a great deal of trouble later on by pressing their attacks home at this early point. The reason for their lack of development remains, once again, that to begin with Tolkien had no story. As he had done in The Hobbit, he was writing himself into the experience of Middle-earth, and using such material as he had already available.

One does not need to conclude that this was a failure, or a mistake. In later years Tolkien was to toy with the idea that these early chapters were in fact integrated to the main plot, that (for instance) Willow-man, the Barrow-wight, and the elementals who send the storm on Caradhras, were all operating under the command of the chief Ringwraith (Unfinished Tales, p. 348). This is not the impression they make at the time. Aragorn says of Caradhras that ‘There are many evil and unfriendly things in the world that have little love for those that go on two legs, and yet are not in league with Sauron, but have purposes of their own’, and Gimli agrees with him: ‘Caradhras was called the Cruel, and had an ill name…when rumour of Sauron had not been heard in these lands’. Aragorn says earlier on, of Butterbur, that he lives ‘within a day’s march of foes that would freeze his heart, or lay his little town in ruin, if he were not guarded ceaselessly’, but he never says what those foes are – trolls? ettins from the ettinmoors? orc-tribes? killer-Huorns? The scene with the wight is especially mysterious in that we never learn what it is that the wight intends to do, why it has dressed its captives in the gold of the buried dead, or why it has seemed in a way to reanimate its old victims (or itself?) in the bodies of the hobbits – for when Merry wakes up he thinks for a moment that he is a warrior killed long ago in battle against the Witch-king, who would eventually become the chief of the Nazgûl. Nevertheless the wight is not a wraith, the creatures of Caradhras seem perhaps to be mad Bombadils, the genii of a cruel and inhuman landscape, Butterbur’s foes remain unglimpsed. And as with the mention of ‘other things’ in the Wild besides goblins, in The Hobbit, that is entirely to the good. When Tolkien drew his maps and covered them with names, he felt no need to bring all the names into the story. They do their work by suggesting that there is a world outside the story, that the story is only a selection; and the same goes for the hints of other creatures unaffected by and uninterested in the main plot. Middle-earth is different from its many imitators in its density, its redundancy, and consequently its depth, and Book I of The Lord of the Rings does a great deal to create that depth. What was needed next, though, was a greater degree of narrative urgency. The Council of Elrond: character revealed

Urgency is supplied in large part by chapter 2 of Book II, ‘The Council of Elrond’. The chapter is a largely unappreciated tour de force, whose success may be gauged by the fact that few pause to recognize its complexity. It breaks, furthermore, most of the rules which might be given to an apprentice writer. For one thing, though it is fifteen thousand words long, in it nothing happens: it consists entirely of people talking. For another, it has an unusual number of speakers present (twelve), the majority of them (seven) unknown to the reader and appearing for the first time. Just to make things more difficult, the longest speech, by Gandalf, which takes up close on half the total, contains direct quotation from seven more speakers, or writers, all of them apart from Butterbur and Gaffer Gamgee new to the story, and some of them (Saruman, Denethor) to be extremely important to it later on. Other speakers, like Glóin, give direct quotation from yet more speakers, Dáin and Sauron’s messenger. Like so many committee meetings, this chapter could very easily have disintegrated, lost its way, or simply become too boring to follow. The fact that it does not is brought about by two things, Tolkien’s extremely firm grasp of the history (as earlier of the geography) of Middle-earth; and his unusual ability to suggest cultural variation by differences in mode of speech.

With more than twenty voices to deal with, demonstrating this latter point fully would be a long business, and I pick out accordingly only some of the most marked variations. Elrond is an immortal, and by far the oldest speaker present – Frodo is taken aback to realize he has been an eye-witness of events now legendary. It is only suitable, then, that his speech is strongly (though never incomprehensibly) marked by archaism, in particular by unusual use of word-order. Modern English, it may be said – Tolkien, as a Professor of English language, could at any time have expanded this brief account into a full lecture – has grown increasingly inflexible in its rules about word-order. It is rare for subjects not to precede verbs, or for objects and complements not to follow them; the old rule that the verb comes second, and so must change places with the subject if something else has taken first place, has almost vanished. But not quite, as one can see from sentences like ‘Down came the rain’ or ‘Up went the umbrellas’, both archaic, in a way, but at the same time completely colloquial. Elrond’s speech is a kind of treasury of subrules of this nature. See for instance:

‘This I will have as weregild for my father, and my brother’ (Elrond is quoting Isildur, from the far past: he uses the archaic word ‘weregild’, and puts the grammatical object in first place with ‘This I will have…’)

‘Only to the North did these tidings come’ (Elrond is speaking in his own person: he uses the archaic word ‘tidings’, which is still familiar however from the Christmas formula ‘tidings of great joy’; he puts the adverbial phrase first, ‘Only to the North…’, which he follows by inverting subject and verb, as in ‘Down came the rain’ constructions)

‘From the ruin of the Gladden Fields…three men only came ever back’ (Elrond is speaking in his own person again, but his word-order is odd, cp. more normal ‘only three men ever came back’)

‘Fruitless did I call the victory of the Last Alliance?’ (Elrond once more, but this time he has placed a grammatical complement first, ‘Fruitless’, and once again inverted subject and verb).

Elrond’s archaism is consistent, achieved not just by vocabulary (the first resort of the amateur medievalist), but also by grammar. Though marked, it is never so obtrusive as to obscure meaning or make the speaker appear quaint. It serves to distinguish his speech from that of the others; to act as a continual reminder of his age; and to make a link with the similarly archaic speech of Isildur, when Gandalf also comes to quote this later on. Many critics have complained of Tolkien’s archaic style in one section or another; they have failed to realize that he understood archaism far more technically than they ever could, and could switch it on and off at will, as he could modern colloquialism.

Another distinctive speaker is Glóin the dwarf, or perhaps one might say dwarves in general (though Glóin’s son Gimli is the only named person present at the Council who does not speak, perhaps out of dwarvish deference to his father). Dwarves, it seems, like the Norsemen whose language Tolkien assigned to them, are characteristically taciturn. Glóin’s sentences tend to be short, and to break where one might expect them to continue. He has a trick of using ‘apposition’, two constructions with much the same meaning, the second expanding the first: so, ‘For a while we had news…messages reported that Moria had been entered’. He combines it sometimes with another trick found in both ancient and modern colloquial speech, which is to give several sentences which are formally parallel, but contain unspoken causal connections. See for instance the following, in which Glóin’s connecting words are italicized, and the implied ones, which he leaves out, inserted in brackets:

‘Also we crave the advice of Elrond. For the Shadow grows and draws nearer. [As we can tell, because] We discover that messengers have come also to King Brand in Dale, and that he is afraid. [So] We fear that he may yield. [Because] Already war is gathering on his eastern borders.’

At all times, furthermore, Glóin has a tendency toward oblique statements: when, interrupting Legolas’s account of their merciful treatment of Gollum, he says ‘You were less tender to me’, he means of course not the opposite but the obverse, ‘You were more cruel to me’.

Most striking – and suggesting that these are not characteristics of the idiolect of Glóin, but of the dwarves as a whole – is his account of the exchange with the messenger of Sauron. The messenger does not speak like a dwarf. For one thing he has an un-dwarvish tendency to say things three times: ‘As a small token of your friendship Sauron asks this…that you should find this thief…and get from him, willing or no, a little ring, the least of rings, that once he stole.’ Glóin stresses that he is quoting directly by adding to the word ‘thief, ‘such was his word’, and later on parodies the messenger’s speech-pattern by repeating mockingly the phrase ‘this ring, this least of rings’. However, the messenger seems aware of the difference too, and at one moment tries to answer Dáin after his own manner, in the little interchange when he demands an answer:

‘Dáin said: ‘I say neither yea nor nay. I must consider this message and what it means under its fair cloak.’

‘Consider well, but not too long,’ [said the messenger].

‘The time of my thought is my own to spend,’ answered Dáin.

‘For the present,’ said he, and rode into the darkness.’

No one here means exactly what they say. Dáin’s first statement is a veiled accusation (‘fair cloak’ implies foulness underneath). The reply looks like an agreement, but is a threat. Dáin’s second statement seems to be so general, and metaphorical, as to be unanswerable. But the second reply, while again an agreement, qualifies that agreement so sharply as to be a threat again – ‘there will be a time when your thoughts will not be free’. The exchange is menacing, it adds a touch of urgency to the question for which the Council has been called – ‘what are we to do with the Ring?’ – but it also creates strong characterization for the whole dwarvish race: stubborn, secretive, concealing their intentions, in a word (a word Tolkien uses, see Richard Blackwelder’s Tolkien Thesaurus), ‘thrawn’. It is appropriate that the Northern dialect word should be apparently the same as the name of Thorin’s father, Thráin.

Further revealing speech differences can be seen, for instance, in the contrast between Aragorn and Boromir: the only two Men at the Council, similarly imposing, with similar names, and indeed sharing common descent. They ought to talk the same way, but they do not, quite. Boromir’s speech is from the beginning relatively Elrondian, one might say – he uses words like ‘verily’ and ‘deem’, and some inverted constructions, ‘Loth was my father to give me leave’. Aragorn is capable of replying the same way, but tends to do it most when he is speaking directly to Boromir, as if to impress him. He is also capable of speaking quite colloquially, as in his reference to Butterbur – Boromir does not say things like ‘one fat man’, and shows no sign of knowing anyone of Butterbur’s social status. There is of course a certain competition between the two, for if Aragorn were to be what he said, then he would displace Boromir from his position as Steward-to-be: Boromir never directly answers Aragorn’s question, ‘Do you wish for the House of Elendil to return to the Land of Gondor?’ The clash of styles shows up when Boromir (for the second time) expresses doubt about what he has been told:

‘Mayhap the Sword-that-was-Broken may still stem the tide – if the hand that wields it has inherited not an heirloom only, but the sinews of the Kings of Men.’

The doubt is potentially insulting, but Aragorn responds to it easily, almost chattily:

‘Who can tell?…But we will put it to the test one day.’

However, though this is said easily, it contains within it a heroic formula often found in Old English (‘now is the time’, the heroes cry to each other, ‘to put our boasts to the test’). Thorin Oakenshield says it too, in The Hobbit, though there Bilbo immediately and crossly mocks it, see pp. 42-3 above. Boromir replies to Aragorn ambiguously:

‘May the day not be too long delayed.’

The way they talk reminds us, in miniature, that Aragorn is also Strider, and does not need to be on his dignity all the time; but at the same time that Strider is also Aragorn, and can claim just as much, indeed even more authority than Boromir. There is a hint of future trouble in the veiled challenges from both sides.

It is Gandalf’s long monologue, however, which shows most variety in its use of ‘impacted speakers’, the direct speech of others quoted by Gandalf. Without that variety the immense amount of necessary plot-detail conveyed by the monologue would run flat. Several of Gandalf’s (seven) ‘impacted speakers’ create, like Boromir or Sauron’s messenger, a sense of the ominous, more or less concealed. Perhaps the least significant, in terms of plot, is Gaffer Gamgee, whose job is only to tell Gandalf that Frodo and the others have left. He makes too much of this, as Gandalf says, ‘Many words and few to the point’, and Gandalf stresses what it is he actually says:

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

This is of course stupid, when all he has to complain about is the Sackville-Bagginses. Sharkey/Saruman will be much worse than this ‘worst’, and there could be yet worse than Sharkey. In any case the Gaffer simply does not know the meaning of his own words. When he says ‘abide’ it has the meaning, in context, of ‘bear, put up with’, and in fact the Gaffer can abide these – he just has, having no choice. In older use, though, the word means ‘await the issue of, wait (stoically) for, live to see’, and this would be a better use of it. The Gaffer does not learn, though, and at the end is still moralizing inaccurately. ‘“It’s an ill wind as blows nobody any good”, as I always say’ (but he didn’t), ‘And All’s well as ends Better’ (at least he has stopped using superlatives). The Gaffer is not very important, but he is a reminder of psychological unpreparedness; it may be remembered that Tolkien was writing ‘The Council of Elrond’ in the early years of World War II.

Isildur’s scroll, meanwhile, which Gandalf has discovered in the archives of Gondor, and which tells how Isildur cut the Ring from Sauron’s hand after the Battle of Dagorlad long ago, is even more archaic than Elrond’s speech, using the old -eth verb-endings – ‘seemeth’, ‘fadeth’ – and subjunctive forms like ‘were the gold made hot again’. Its most ominous feature, though, is timeless: Isildur says of the Ring, ‘It is precious to me, though I buy it with great pain’, and any reader of The Hobbit will remember that Gollum too called the Ring ‘my precious’. Isildur in Gondor is already on the road to becoming a wraith – a fate from which Gollum has only just been saved. But the most ominous speaker in the whole chapter is also the most modernistic, and in a way the most familiar. It is Saruman, the wizard who has changed sides. Or has he? He wants to ‘join with’ the ‘new Power’, which is Sauron, for no other reason than that it is going to win. But when Gandalf shows no leaning towards that course, Saruman shows that he is prepared to betray the ‘new Power’ too. ‘If we could command [the Ring], then the Power would pass to us. That is in truth why I brought you here.’ If that is the ‘truth’, then why did Saruman make the other suggestion first? Because he doubted Gandalf’s ambition, maybe? Or was there some truth in the argument he also put forward, that ‘the Wise, such as you and I’, might be able to persuade, direct, control Sauron – though he does not say Sauron, he says ‘the Power’. The idea of anyone, however wise, persuading Sauron, would sound simply silly if it were said in so many words. No sillier, though, than the repeated conviction of many British intellectuals before and after this time that they could somehow get along with Stalin, or with Hitler.

Saruman, indeed, talks exactly like too many politicians. It is impossible to work out exactly what he means because of the abstract nature of his speech; in the end it is doubtful whether he understands himself. His message is in any case one of compromise and calculation:

‘We can bide our time, we can keep our thoughts in our hearts, deploring maybe evils done by the way, but approving the high and ultimate purpose: Knowledge, Rule, Order; all things that we have so far striven in vain to accomplish, hindered rather than helped by our weak or idle friends. There need not be, there would not be, any real change in our designs, only in our means.’

The end justifies the means, in other words, a sentiment the twentieth century has learned to be wary of. One might note also the echo of Gaffer Gamgee at the start; and the unusual rhetorical polish of the balanced phrases, ‘can bide / can keep, deploring…but approving, hindered rather than helped, need not be / would not be’. But it is all nonsense, summed up by the word ‘real’ at the end. What does ‘real’ mean when Saruman says ‘real change’? The intention is clear enough, and one often hears people say things like that, but I do not think there is any logical answer to the question. When people say things like ‘no real change’, they mean there is going to be a major change, but they would like you to pretend it is minor; and too often we do. Saruman is the most contemporary figure in Middle-earth, both politically and linguistically. He is on the road to ‘doublethink’ (which Orwell was to invent, or describe, at almost exactly the same time).

The gist of the paragraphs above is only this. People draw information not only from what is said, but from how it is said. The continuous variations of language within this complex chapter tell us almost subliminally how reliable characters are, how old they are, how self-assured they are, how mistaken they are, what kind of person they are. All this is as vital as the direct information conveyed, not least, as has been said, to prevent the whole chapter from degenerating into the minutes of a committee meeting, which in a sense is what it is. Tolkien’s linguistic control (a professional skill for him) is one of his least-appreciated abilities; there is a sour irony in observing critics with no linguistic knowledge presuming to tell him how to do it, or assuming it is some sort of accident. Nevertheless it should also be noted that ‘The Council of Elrond’ does one other thing, which is pass on information, and do it from an almost bewildering complex of directions. The Council of Elrond: organizing the plot

If the Council were a well-organized committee meeting of modern times, it would have on its agenda only three items:

(1) to determine whether Frodo’s ring is indeed the One Ring, the Ruling Ring

(2) if it is, to decide what action should be taken

(3) and further, who should take it.

All these issues are indeed stated explicitly during the Council. Elrond asks near the start, ‘What shall we do with the Ring?’ But more than twenty pages later Gandalf has to ask the question again, saying perfectly correctly, ‘But we have not yet come any nearer to our purpose. What shall we do with it?’ One reason the Council has not made any progress is that its members have been pre-occupied with issue (1) above. It is once again framed explicitly by Boromir, though only after the Council has been in session for some time, ‘How do the Wise know that this ring is [Isildur’s]?’, and repeated by Galdor, ‘The Wise may have good reason to believe that the halfling’s trove is indeed the Great Ring…But may we not hear the proofs?’ The only conclusive proof is in fact this. The One Ring is known to have passed to Isildur, who cut it from Sauron’s hand (and the Council has an eye-witness to this present in Elrond). Gandalf has seen a document written by Isildur himself which gives the inscription on the Ring he took; and Gandalf knows that that inscription is on Frodo’s ring, because he tested it himself by throwing the ring in the fire and then reading the inscription on it, at Bag End in the Shire on April 13th 3018 – the Council itself takes place on October 25th of the same year. If Gandalf had said this at the start, the Council might have proceeded a good deal quicker. Why does this not happen? Is Elrond simply a poor committee chairman?

The way ‘The Council of Elrond’ is in fact presented can be summarized like this. The bulk of it – up to the point where Gandalf says, ‘Well, the Tale is now told, from first to last’, and then repeats the question, ‘What shall we do with it?’ – consists of some seven major accounts by different speakers, which I number to keep track of them. (1) is the dwarf Glóin’s. This makes it clear that Sauron thinks that a ring connected with hobbits is of vital importance. Elrond’s account (2), takes us much further back, to say what the Ring was in the beginning, and to trace it as far as Isildur and the ruin of the Gladden Fields. Logically, we should now hear about Gollum, who as Gandalf knows, and as he explained to Frodo six months before in the study at Bag End, took the ring from his friend Déagol, who found it in the Great River by the Gladden Fields – a vital point of connection. However, what happens instead is that concentration on the Ring is broken by Elrond’s account of Gondor, and Boromir’s response to it. The rhyme Boromir and his brother heard in their dream does contain the line ‘For Isildur’s Bane shall waken’ (the Bane is the Ring), but it starts with ‘Seek for the Sword that was broken’, and the Council is distracted by having that explained, by being told about Aragorn’s lineage, and by the slightly competitive by-play between Aragorn and Boromir. It is Boromir who brings them back to the point by his question quoted above, ‘How do the Wise know that this ring is [Isildur’s]?’.

He is answered first by Bilbo’s résumé of events in The Hobbit (3) (which a wise chairman might well have cut short), and then by Frodo’s account (4) of ‘his dealings with the Ring from the day that it passed into his keeping’, i.e. from September 22nd, 3001, to the date of the Council seventeen years later. While Frodo’s narrative (4) is continuous from Bilbo’s (3), though, Bilbo’s is nothing like continuous from Elrond’s (2). In fact there is a gap of almost three thousand years between them, from the death of Isildur in year 2 of the Third Age to the events of The Hobbit in year 2941. The gap can only be filled by the story of Gollum, and after Frodo has finished Galdor does indeed tenaciously repeat that no one has yet proved the identity of the rings in question. However he also raises the issue, where is Saruman? And Elrond calls on Gandalf to answer because ‘the questions that you ask, Galdor, are bound together’.

This is not strictly true, and Elrond as chairman once again seems to be letting the meeting get out of hand. Gandalf’s tale (5) begins slightly combatively by suggesting that Galdor cannot have been listening to the proceedings so far (something which often happens in committee meetings): do accounts (1) and (4) not show that Sauron at any rate thinks the ring is the Ring? Galdor might have replied, ‘yes, but that’s not proof, and Gandalf indeed concedes that there is ‘a wide waste of time between the River and the Mountain’, i.e. between Isildur losing the Ring in the River Anduin and Bilbo finding it under the Misty Mountains. But he still does not fill the gap decisively with what he knows about Gollum, or about the inscription on the Ring, going back instead to the year of The Hobbit, 2941 (when he failed to recognize Bilbo’s ring for what it was), then to the year of Bilbo’s departure from the Shire, 3001, and only then telling the story of his discovery of Isildur’s scroll, with the vital identifying inscription on it. The sensible thing might then have been to go straight to the Shire and investigate Frodo’s ring itself, but Gandalf makes a detour to talk to Aragorn, and Aragorn now gives his account (6) of the capture of Gollum. Only after that does Gandalf finally clinch the point about identity: he knows Frodo’s ring is the Ring because he has seen the inscription on it, in the Black Speech, which he repeats. He also adds the fact, which now explains Glóin’s account (1), that Sauron heard about the rediscovery of the Ring from Gollum; that is what started his enquiries about dwarves and hobbits. The Council is then side-tracked by Boromir’s question about Gollum and Legolas’s account (7) of his escape; and further by Gandalf returning to ‘Galdor’s other questions’ (really only one question), ‘What of Saruman?’ Once Gandalf has told of his imprisonment in and escape from Orthanc, all he has left to do is to bring the story up to date by retracing his steps to the Shire, and following Frodo and party belatedly to Rivendell, the point at which he says, ‘Well, the Tale is now told, from first to last’.

But to say that is to disguise a good deal of art. The tale has not in fact been told ‘from first to last’ at all, but through a series of interjections, as one character or another manages to turn the conversation to their immediate concerns. Nor has it been told in strictly logical order, with concentration on the central point, is the ring the Ring? Instead there have been distractions over Gondor, over Aragorn and the Sword that was broken, over Gollum, and over Saruman – all elements that will be vital to the plot, but are not directly vital to the Ring. And there is also a giant gap in the whole narrative, as said above nearly three thousand years, from year 2 to year 2941, a gap which Gandalf has filled for Frodo many chapters before with the tale of Sméagol and Déagol and the revelation that Gollum was once a hobbit, but which is left blank to the Council. It is a mark of Tolkien’s skill in handling conversation that these gaps, loops, and meanders do not seem tedious, and indeed are usually not noticed. But then, as often happens in committee meetings, the real issue appears after much talk: what to do next?

Tolkien deals with this briskly, using three minor characters to put forward unsatisfactory answers before the true issue can be faced. Erestor suggests, give it to Bombadil: this is rejected. Galdor asks if it could simply be kept safe: this too is rejected. Glorfindel suggests, throw it in the sea: too dangerous, and not final enough. It is Elrond who says in the end, ‘We must send the Ring to the Fire’. Over Boromir’s objections he refuses to take it himself, and is backed up by Gandalf. The impasse, and the growing tension (and weariness) are relieved by a sudden drop in stylistic level, as the hobbits speak up, one after another, for almost the first time in this chapter in direct speech. Bilbo volunteers, commenting with near-bathos, ‘It is a frightful nuisance’, but putting his finger on the point – for (again as often happens in committees), it may be decided what is to be done without deciding who is to do it. And yet, as Bilbo says, ‘That seems to me what this Council has to decide, and all it has to decide’. We have at last reached agenda item (3). At this moment Frodo speaks, with extreme plainness: ‘I will take the Ring…though I do not know the way’; and Sam breaks in for the first time, his presence till then not even mentioned: ‘A nice pickle we have landed ourselves in, Mr Frodo!’

Of course, this decision is absolutely vital for the plot, the theme, and everything else. It is a testimony to Tolkien’s art that he makes it seem a surprise, and also that the low level of hobbit style as the decision is made, with its chronic understatements (‘frightful nuisance…nice pickle’), remains dignified, even challenging in its plainness. However the final point to be made about ‘The Council of Elrond’ is this. It took Tolkien a very long time to reach this level of complexity – early drafts are given in The Return of the Shadow; and the first of them skips over almost all the matter discussed here in seven lines on p. 395. But once he had reached it, rather as with the arrival of the ring and of Gollum in The Hobbit, Tolkien had solved his problem with story. After this chapter there is a driving narrative requirement: take the Ring to Orodruin and destroy it. There is a series of loose ends: Gollum escaped, Saruman changing sides, Gondor under threat, Aragorn’s status revealed but not acknowledged, the Three Rings of the elves, even the Mines of Moria and the indeterminate loyalties of Rohan. As the anonymous poet said of King Arthur and his knights, in the Sir Gawain poem Tolkien had edited nearly twenty years before, and in the words of Tolkien’s own translation:

Though such words were wanting when they went to table, now of fell work to full grasp filled were their hands. More re-creations

Sir Gawain further provides a good example of the way Tolkien tended to work from this point on. He was now committed to taking up the challenge which The Hobbit had set: its careful creation of the sense that there was far more of Middle-earth than one story could ever bring into focus had naturally generated the desire for a sequel, and for more novelties in that sequel, and Tolkien now had to find them. He found them very largely where he had found the surprises of The Hobbit, in ancient literature – and in particular (and here very few of his imitators have been able to follow him) in the gaps and even the errors of ancient literature.

To pursue the example from Sir Gawain, in that poem the hero, rather like Frodo and company setting out from Rivendell, finds himself beset by all manner of dangers and hardships before ever he gets to the real goal of his quest. As the poet says (doing exactly what Tolkien had done in his account of Bilbo’s return):

Somwhyle wyth wormeƷ he werreƷ, and with wolues als,

Sumqhyle wyth wodwos, Þat woned in Þe knarreƷ,

BoÞe wyth bulleƷ and bereƷ, and boreƷ oÞerquyle,

And etayneƷ, Þat hym aneled of Þe heƷe felle.

It is essential to see the original here, but Tolkien’s translation of the lines runs:

At whiles with worms he wars, and with wolves also, at whiles with wood-trolls that wandered in the crags, and with bulls and with bears and boars too, at times; and with ogres that hounded him from the heights of the fells.

The third word in the second line of the original presented a problem to editors like Tolkien and his colleague Gordon. It looks like a plural, indeed it must be a plural, to match all the other creatures mentioned in the four lines. But in that case, what is the singular of it? Presumably, ^*wodwo (another guess, or reconstruction). Tolkien and Gordon, however, did not like ^*wodwo. It did not have a sensible etymology. They concluded, instead, that the origin of the poem’s plural form wodwos was in fact Old English ^*wudu-wása, a singular form, the plural of which would have been ^*wudu-wásan. This compound word, one might note, would then have been absolutely identical in form to Tolkien’s later invention ^*hol-bytla, plural form (several of Tolkien’s critics have got this wrong, including C.S. Lewis) ^*hol-bytlan. In both cases the first element of the compound is common and familiar, being no more than the ordinary words for ‘wood’ and ‘hole’, but the second element is rare or unknown: and the compound designates a non-human creature to be guessed at only from the word. Tolkien thought, in brief, that the Gawain-poet should have written wod-wosen, not wodwos; but he or the copyist had assumed, wrongly, that the -s at the end of the rare word wodwos was a plural already.

Having gone so far, though, the next question (a natural one, but one not to be answered by philology) was, ‘what, then, are these wood-woses?’ Tolkien answered the question in Book V/5, of The Lord of the Rings, where we meet, for a moment, ‘the Woses, the Wild Men of the Woods’. One other element in his thinking at that stage, though, may well have been this. His office at the University of Leeds was just off a road called Woodhouse Lane, down which he had to come every day from his house in Darnley Road. Woodhouse Lane leads over Woodhouse Ridge and Woodhouse Moor, the latter areas still wooded and largely undeveloped even now because of the steep fall down to the stream at the bottom. Of course, ‘woodhouse’ in these names could just have the dull meaning, ‘house in the wood’. On the other hand, Tolkien thought that the modern surname Wood-house derived from ^*wudu-wása, and he knew also that in several Northern dialects, ‘wood-house’ and ‘wood-wose’ would be pronounced exactly the same, i.e. ‘wood-’ose’. So the modern spelling of Woodhouse Lane could be a mistake, just like the Gawainpoet’s. The road he went up and down every working day might preserve, in a completely prosaic context, a memory of uncanny creatures, the ‘wild men of the woods’ who once haunted the tangles above the River Aire. And if ^*wudu-wásan could survive misunderstood and worn down as ‘woodhouses’, one might add, then why should ^*hol-bytlan not survive as ‘hobbits’?

Tolkien’s creation of the Woses shows at once his dependence on ancient texts, his conviction that at times he knew better than the authors (or anyway than the copiers) even of those texts, and his ability to set academic puzzles in entirely contemporary contexts. His inventions often sprang from words, or from names. But in investigating the words, and the names, he worked on the principle that they must at one time have had known referents, which with patience and imagination could be recovered. Middle-earth was always to him, as suggested in the ‘Foreword’, an ‘asterisk-reality’: it had not been recorded, like the ^*-forms of early words, but again like the ^*-forms it could be inferred, or reconstructed, with high plausibility if not complete certainty. The guarantee of Middle-earth, as of the verbal reconstructions of philologists, was inner consistency. The Woses are not demanded by the plot of The Lord of the Rings, but they feel as if they should be there. They help to create the fullness which is the major charm of Tolkien’s Middle-earth.

Tolkien used what one might call the ‘wood-wose’ model of invention increasingly from the end of ‘The Council of Elrond’ and the departure of the Fellowship. The scenes on Caradhras and in Moria, one might say, tend to recapitulate early chapters of The Hobbit – in both cases a company setting out from Rivendell. The storm on Caradhras is rather like the storm in the Misty Mountains, with both times a feeling that the storm is not just a natural phenomenon; the ‘wild howls of laughter’ and the ‘fell voices on the air’ which Boromir recognizes echo the ‘stone-giants…hurling rocks at one another for a game’ and ‘guffawing and shouting all over the mountainside’ in chapter 3 of The Hobbit. In the same way, the entrance into Moria is rather like the entrance into the goblin-tunnels in The Hobbit, with much the same outcome – adventures in the dark leading to a passage to the other side of the mountains. A new element in Moria, though, is the Balrog, introduced in exactly the same way as so many of Tolkien’s inventions, as if we ought to have known about it already: ‘A Balrog’, muttered Gandalf. ‘Now I understand.’ But we do not.

Just like Woses, Balrogs owe a part of their existence, at least, to an editorial problem. There is an Old English poem called Exodus, like several Old English poems a paraphrase of a part of the Bible. Tolkien’s edition of it did not appear during his lifetime, but it came out posthumously, appropriately enough ‘reconstructed’ from his lecture notes. Since it is both a paraphrase and a fragment, the poem has never managed to gain a central position in literary courses, but Tolkien was interested in it: for one thing, he thought on linguistic grounds that it was older than Beowulf, and he thought that like the Beowulf-poet, the Exodus-poet had known a good deal about the native pre-Christian mythology, which could with care be retrieved from his copyists’ ignorant errors. In particular, the poet at several points mentions the Sigelwara land, the ‘land of the Sigelware’. In modern dictionaries and editions, these ‘Sigelware’ are invariably translated as ‘Ethiopians’. Tolkien thought, as often, that that was a mistake. He thought that the name was another compound, exactly like ^*wudu-wása and ^*hol-bytla, and that it should have been written ^*sigel-hearwa. Furthermore, he suggested (in two long articles written early on in his career, and now ignored by scholarship) that a ^*sigel-hearwa was a kind of fire-giant. The first element in the compound meant both ‘sun’ and ‘jewel’; the second was related to Latin carbo, ‘soot’. When an Anglo-Saxon of the preliterate Dark Age said sigelhearwa, before any Englishman had ever heard of Ethiopia or of the Book of Exodus, Tolkien believed that what he meant was ‘rather the sons of Múspell [the Old Norse fire-giant who will bring on Ragnarök] than of Ham, the ancestors of the Silhearwan with red-hot eyes that emitted sparks, with faces black as soot’.

The fusion of ‘sun’ and ‘jewel’ perhaps had something to do with Tolkien’s concept of the silmaril. The idea of a fire-spirit re-emerges in the brief glimpse of the orc-chieftain who stabs Frodo, with his ‘swart’ face, red tongue and ‘eyes like coals’, but it also gave Tolkien Durin’s Bane, the Balrog. Tracing such an ancestry of course says nothing about the way the Balrog is deployed, or the increasing tension of the Moria chapters, ‘A Journey in the Dark’ and ‘The Bridge of Khazad-dûm’. One apparent aspect of these, however, is their strong antiquarianism – the interest in elvish runes in the inscription on the West-Door, the dwarvish runes on the tomb of Balin (both of them reproduced in full), the image of Gandalf poring over a tattered manuscript in the Chamber of Mazarbul. Another is their relative understatement. Unlike many of his imitators, Tolkien had realized that tension was dissipated by constant thrill-creation. Accordingly the dangers of Moria build up slowly: from the first reluctance of Aragorn, ‘the memory is very evil’ (never enlarged on), to the ominous knocking from the deep that answers Pippin’s stone (was it a hammer, as Gimli says? – we never learn), to Gandalf’s mention of Durin’s Bane. The Balrog is also hinted at several times before it appears: the orcs hang back as if they are afraid of something on their own side, Gandalf contests with it and concedes ‘I have met my match’ before it is ever seen, and again the orcs and trolls fall back as it comes up to cross the bridge of Khazad-dûm. Even when it does come into focus, the focus is blurred:

Something was coming up behind them. What it was could not be seen: it was like a great shadow, in the middle of which was a dark form, of man-shape maybe, yet greater; and a power and a terror seemed to be in it and to go before it.

The clash of Gandalf and the Balrog produces yet further feelings of mystery: we hear of, but do not understand, the opposition between ‘the Secret Fire…the flame of Anor’, and ‘the dark fire…flame of Udûn’. What Tolkien does in such passages is to satisfy the urge to know more (the urge he himself felt as an editor of texts so often infuriatingly incomplete), while retaining and even intensifying the counterbalancing pleasure of seeming always on the edge of further discovery, looking into a world that seems far fuller than the little at present known. If gold and greed and mastery are ‘the desire of the hearts of dwarves’, then words and links and inferences are the lust of philologists. Tolkien had that lust as strongly as anyone ever has, but he felt it was one which could be strongly shared.

As with ‘The Council of Elrond’, a full survey of all Tolkien’s philological roots would be too exhaustive to follow readily, but three final examples of his methods may be briefly given. First, orcs. Tolkien had used the word in The Hobbit, but his regular word at that point was ‘goblin’. As he built up the linguistic correspondences of Middle-earth, mentioned above, this came to seem out of place: it is a relatively late word in English (the OED cannot find a clear citation before the sixteenth century), and according to the OED it derives probably from medieval Latin cobalus – the dictionary oddly makes no attempt to link it with the German-derived ‘kobold’. Tolkien preferred an Old English word, and found it in two compounds, the plural form orc-neas found in Beowulf, where it seems to mean ‘demon-corpses’, and the singular orc-Þyrs, where the second half is found also in Old Norse and means something like ‘giant’. Demons, giants, zombies – it seems that literate Anglo-Saxons really had very little idea what orcs were at all; but then they or their descendants had the same problem with woses and sigelhearwan. The word was floating freely, with ominous suggestions but no clear referent. Tolkien took the word, brought the concept into clear focus in detailed scenes (to be discussed in the next chapter), and, as with hobbits, has in a way made both word and thing now canonical.

A parallel case is that of the Ents. ‘Ent’ is another Old English word, found relatively frequently in that language but even more puzzling than ‘orc’ or ‘wose’. Its first association seems to be one of gigantic size: dictionaries usually translate ent as ‘giant’, and the huge sword which Beowulf snatches up in Grendel’s mother’s lair is the work of ents, enta ærgeweorc. But ents also seem to have had a reputation as builders in stone. Anglo-Saxons faced with Roman roads and Roman ruins were liable to describe them as orÞanc enta geweorc, ‘the cunning work of giants’. Tolkien perhaps read the first word not as an adjective but as a name, so that the phrase now means ‘Orthanc, the ents’ fortress’ – which is what Tolkien’s Orthanc in the end becomes and might seem to later human generations always to have been. However the main point about Anglo-Saxon ents is that whatever they were, they are felt, unlike ettins or thurses or elves or dwarves, to be no longer present, no longer a threat: they are present only in their surviving artefacts. Tolkien picked up the gigantism, the connection with the word or name Orthanc, and most of all the sense of extinction, for that is the fate of the ents even more than of the other non-human peoples of Middle-earth. What came entirely from his own mind was the connection with trees, the idea of ents as tree-herders, creatures which rise from and turn back into wood, as trolls do with stone: a part of what in later years would come to be seen as Tolkien’s ‘Green’ ideology.

A final example may be Lothlórien. The ‘magic’ of Lothlórien has many roots (some of them to be discussed later on), but there is one thing about it which is again highly traditional, but also in a way a strong re-interpretation and rationalization of tradition. There are many references to elves in Old English and Old Norse and Middle English, and indeed in modern English – belief in them seems to have lasted longer than is the case with any of the other non-human races of early native mythology – but one story which remains strongly consistent is the story about the mortal going into Elfland, best known, perhaps, from the ballads of ‘Thomas the Rhymer’. The mortal enters, spends what seems to be a night, or three nights, in music and dancing. But when he comes out and returns home he is a stranger, everyone he once knew is dead, there is only a dim memory of the man once lost in Elf-hill. Elvish time, it seems, flows far slower than human time. Or is it far quicker? For there is another motif connected with elves, which is that when their music plays, everything outside stands still. In the Danish ballad of ‘Elf-hill’ (Elverhøj), when the elf-maiden sings: ‘The swift stream then stood still, that before had been running; the little fish that swam in it played their fins in time’. Tolkien did not at all mind deciding that ancient scribes had got a word wrong, and correcting it for them, but he was at the same time reluctant ever to think that they had got the whole story wrong, just because it did not seem to make sense: it was his job to make it make sense. Lothlórien in a way reconciles the two motifs of the ‘The Night that Lasts a Century’ and ‘The Stream that Stood Still’. The Fellowship ‘remained some days in Lothlórien, as far as they could tell or remember’. But when they come out Sam looks up at the moon, and is puzzled:

‘The Moon’s the same in the Shire and in Wilderland, or it ought to be. But either it’s out of its running, or I’m all wrong in my reckoning.’

He concludes, it is ‘as if we had never stayed no time in the Elvish country…Anyone would think that time did not count in there!’ Frodo agrees with him, and suggests that in Lothlórien they had entered a world beyond time. But Legolas the elf offers a deeper explanation, not from the human point of view but from the elvish (which no ancient text had ever tried to penetrate). For the elves, he says:

‘the world moves, and it moves both very swift and very slow. Swift, because they themselves change little, and all else fleets by: it is a grief to them. Slow, because they do not count the running years, not for themselves. The passing seasons are but ripples ever repeated in the long long stream.’

What Legolas says makes perfect sense, from the viewpoint of an immortal. It also explains how mortals are deceived when they enter into elvish time, and can interpret it as either fast or slow. All the stories about elves were correct. Their contradictions can be put together to create a deeper and more unpredictable image of Elfland, at once completely original and solidly traditional. Cultural parallels: the Riders of the Mark

At the end of The Fellowship of the Ring the story seems to open out, and also to start gathering pace. First Celeborn gives the Fellowship a verbal map of what lies before them – ‘There the Entwash flows in by many mouths from the Forest of Fangorn in the west’ – and then Aragorn follows suit, ‘You are now looking south-west across the north plains of the Riddermark, Rohan of the Horse-lords’. In quick succession then, in the first Book of The Two Towers, we are introduced to the Riders, the Uruk-hai, the Ents, and Saruman; one might note also that in Tolkien’s own careful chronology of events in Appendix B, the action of Book I (Bilbo’s farewell party to Frodo’s arrival in Rivendell) occupies seventeen years, the action of Book II three months (November 20th 3018 to February 26th 3019), but that of Book III only ten days, Book IV only fifteen. The sense of increasing speed, however, may also have something to do with the arrival on the scene of the Riders of Rohan. Even at a late stage of composition Tolkien had no idea that they were going to come in, but when they did, one imagines that matters immediately became easier for him: when Tolkien wrote about the Riders he had plenty of material ready to hand.

The fact is that the Riders, like the hobbits, are another image of Englishness – Old English, of course, not modern English, but English just the same. Tolkien later on denied this, insisting in a footnote to Appendix F (II) that the fact that he had ‘translated’ all Rider-names into Old English did not mean that Riders and Anglo-Saxons were any more than generally similar. But the ‘translation’ process runs very deep. One might begin with the Riders’ word for their own country (as translated), ‘the Mark’. This is, or ought to be, almost as familiar as ‘the Shire’, but it has been obscured by just the kind of learned Latinizing (and Frenchifying) which Tolkien so much disliked and defied in names like ‘Bag End’. Among historians the central kingdom of Anglo-Saxon England is invariably known as ‘Mercia’, its inhabitants as ‘Mercians’. These must however be Latinizations of native terms, and indeed the West Saxons (in whose dialect most Old English texts survive) called their neighbours the Myrce. If their name for their neighbours’ kingdom had survived it would certainly have been, the ^*Mearc. Tolkien, however, a native of Mercia, as he often proclaimed, would have had no trouble in translating this back into Mercian, removing the West Saxon diphthongization and coming up with the ^*Marc, pronounced ‘Mark’. In Anglo-Saxon times the natives of Worcestershire and Warwickshire and Oxfordshire, and many other counties, would have told anyone who asked that they lived in the Mark, and also in their own particular Shire: names at once both ancient and modern, indeed unchanging. As for the white horse that is the emblem of the Mark, like Bree and the Barrow-downs it lies less than a day’s walk from Tolkien’s study, the White Horse of Uffington, cut into the chalk a short stroll from the great Stone Age barrow of Wayland’s Smithy. All the names given to the Riders and their horses and their weapons are pure Anglo-Saxon, and (a point less often noted) pure Mercian, not West Saxon. The names of their kings, Théoden, Thengel, Fengel, Folcwine, etc., are all simply Anglo-Saxon words or epithets for ‘king’, except, significantly, the first: Eorl, the name of the ancestor of the royal line, just means ‘earl’, or in very Old English, ‘warrior’. It dates back to a time before kings were invented.

There is, one has to admit, one thing about the Riders which does not resemble the historical ancestors of the English, which is that they are riders. In texts of the later Anglo-Saxon period like the poem The Battle of Maldon or the prose Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the reluctance of the Anglo-Saxon military to have anything to do with horses approaches the doomed, or the comical. The Maldon poem begins with the English leader telling his men to leave their horses and advance on foot; an attempt by an English army to fight on horseback in the year 1055 ended in total catastrophe, according to the Chronicle (which blames the whole fiasco on Norman leadership). It could be argued that Hastings was lost because of this insular insistence on fighting on foot. Nevertheless, Tolkien might have thought, the evidence, deeply considered, might not all point the one way. It is striking, for instance, that in modern English there is no native word for cavalry country, a flat sea of grass: we make do with foreign words like ‘steppe’, ‘prairie’, ‘savannah’. The reason is obvious: there are no steppes or prairies in England. If there were, though – and the likeliest place to look is on the flatlands of East Anglia – we might have had a word for them, and the word (Tolkien worked out) would be ‘emnet’. This is in fact the first place name in the Riddermark that we are given, with the Eastemnet being mentioned early on in III/2, as Aragorn and the others pursue the Uruk-hai, the Westemnet by Éomer a few pages later. Emneth, though, is also a real place in Norfolk. It probably derives from Old English ^*emn-mœÞ, or in modern English ‘even meadow’, quite clearly the same idea as ‘steppe’ or ‘prairie’. If the Old English had encountered a sea of grass, then, they would have called it an emnet, and it is possible to imagine what would have happened to them if they did. In any case, before they emigrated to the island of Britain, perhaps they had. Tolkien may well have known that the peculiar and rather unsatisfactory set of Old English words for colour – grey, dun, fallow etc. – could well be interpreted as words for the colour of horsehide. He uses one of them in the name of the horse lent to Aragorn, Hasufel, in modern English ‘dark-skin’. The word Éomer uses early on in his order to Éothain, ‘Tell the éored to assemble on the path’, is another clue. It is a word of exactly the same class as sigel-hearwa, one never used in any text we have, but surmised by editors to explain a mistake in a line of poetry. Line 62 of the Old English poem Maxims I reads, Eorl sceal on éos boge, worod sceal getrume rídan, ‘earl shall [go] on horse’s back, warband (worod) ride in a troop’. The alliteration fails on worod, the word is spelled wrong, and in any case Anglo-Saxon warbands (see above) normally marched on foot. Editors solve the problem by crossing out worod and writing in the asterisk-word ^*éored, ‘mounted troop’ – to be carefully inserted in exactly the right context by Tolkien as he started to create the image of the Riddermark. Maybe the ancestors of the English, therefore, were not as hippophobe as later records suggest; their descendants have after all been passionately hippophile ever since.

The Riders of the Mark are then a reconstruction from many sources, like so much in Tolkien, a blend of ancient and modern, the strange and the familiar, the learned (like ^*éored) and the absolutely matter-of-fact (like the place-name Emneth). The underlying model for much of what they do and how they behave is furthermore perfectly obviously the Old English epic of Beowulf, which Tolkien knew so well. Théoden’s hall is called Meduseld; so is Beowulf’s. The courts round it are called Edoras; see again Beowulf, line 1037. In the chapter ‘The King of the Golden Hall’, the etiquette of arrival and reception corresponds to that of Beowulf point for point. In the epic Beowulf and his men are challenged by a Danish coastguard, who hears what they have to say, makes his own decision to let them pass, and escorts them to the hall of King Hrothgar itself. Here he leaves them, to be met again by a doorwarden, who keeps the visitors outside till he has gone in and reported their arrival to the king; he then comes back, invites them in, but tells them firmly to leave their weapons outside: ‘Let the battle-shields wait here…’ Beowulf then goes in, to be greeted by the king, but then, shortly after, to be challenged and indeed insulted by the king’s counsellor, who ‘sat at the feet of the lord of the Scyldings’.

All this is exactly what happens in The Two Towers. Gandalf, Aragorn and company are met by an outer guard, who passes them on to the door-guards, saying as he does so almost exactly what the Danish coastguard says in the poem – the one, ‘I return to the sea, to hold guard against any fierce warband’, the other, somewhat redundantly, ‘I must return now to my duty at the gate’. The clash between Háma and Aragorn over relinquishing weapons then has no counterpart in Beowulf (Beowulf of course prefers like Beorn to fight bare-handed, and so has little concern for weapons). However, Tolkien has here revealingly transposed a scene of tension from early on in the sequence of events to rather later. In the epic, the critical moment was at the coastline, when the coastguard had to make up his mind about letting them pass on Beowulf’s word alone. He thinks it over, and then decides, in words which have been disputed by editors and translators, but which are clearly a gnomic maxim of some kind:

ÆghwæÞres sceal

scearp scyldwiga gescad witan,

worda ond worca.

My translation of them would be, ‘A sharp shield-warrior must be able to decide, from words as well as from deeds’ (for, unstated, any fool can decide from deeds – it is deciding before anything has happened which is the test of intelligence). Tolkien clearly pondered the saying, and decided to rephrase it without changing its point. After Háma has forced Aragorn, Legolas, Gimli and Gandalf to hand over their undeniable weapons, the question arises of Gandalf’s staff. Is it a weapon or not? ‘The staff in the hand of a wizard may be more than a prop for age’, says Háma – and indeed we soon learn both that it is, and that Gríma Wormtongue had foreseen the point. But Háma decides to let it pass:

‘in doubt a man of worth will trust in his own wisdom. I believe you are friends and folk of honour, who have no evil purpose. You may go in.’

His three sentences match those of the Danish coastguard point for point. The first one paraphrases the maxim given above. The second one is the same as the coastguard’s ‘I hear that this warband is friendly’, the third parallels his statement of permission, ‘Go forward’. Háma’s first sentence falls into the four-stress, alliterative beat of the Anglo-Saxon gnome (doubt / trust, worth / wisdom), for the Riders, like the Anglo-Saxons, prize sententious sayings: Aragorn uses one tactically on the court-guard, ‘seldom does thief ride home to the stable’.

The interchanges with the guards however do more than merely show that Tolkien was copying Beowulf. They make a point about the Riders’ sense of honour, and of proper behaviour, in a sense wider than mere formulas of greeting. At several places one can see that the Riders, while disciplined in a way, do not have the rigid codes of obedience of a modern army, or a modern bureaucracy. Éomer is not sure whether or not he should lend Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli horses. He knows that Théoden is already angry about the loss of Shadowfax; and he has received an order to take strangers to the king. Nevertheless, faced with Aragorn’s direct refusal, and explanation of his quest, he decides to disobey: ‘You may go; and what is more, I will lend you horses.’ He knows this may lead to his own punishment, even execution – ‘I place myself, and maybe my very life, in the keeping of your good faith’ – but he does it just the same. One notes that his second-in-command Éothain immediately queries the order, though he gives in in the end. The unnamed guard of the courtyard decides to disobey an order as well, that ‘no stranger should pass these gates’, because he declines to take it from Wormtongue; and Háma then, as we have seen, uses his own judgement on the issue of the staff. He also gives Éomer his sword back before being told to do so, and Théoden notices the fact. In modern times such an anticipation of the findings of the court-martial, so to speak, would be a serious offence and would not be passed over. But Théoden lets it go. All these scenes make a point about freedom. The Riders are indeed ‘a stern people, loyal to their lord’, but they are not governed, as we are, by written codes. They are freer to make their own minds up, and regard this as a duty. They surrender less of their independence to their superiors than we do ; and Tolkien makes us realize that even if they are relatively ‘uncivilized’, indeed still at a ‘barbarian’ stage of development, this is not all bad. They can be at once more ceremonious and more relaxed than modern people.

The oral nature of the Riders’ culture is further stressed in several ways. Almost the first thing Aragorn says about them is that they are ‘wise but unlearned, writing no books but singing many songs’. Later on he gives an example of their poetry, ‘Where now the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing?’, based on the Old English poem of The Wanderer; Théoden’s ‘call to arms’ in III/6, ‘Arise now, arise, Riders of Théoden’, is based on the poem The Finnsburg Fragment, Tolkien’s commentary on which was published posthumously in 1982; in The Return of the King we have more extended Rider poetry, written in strict Old English metre, in the song of the ride to Gondor (V/3), the song of ‘the Mounds of Mundburg’ (V/6), and Gléowine’s song in memory of his master Théoden (VI/6). Nearly all the poetry that is quoted is strongly elegiac, one might note: in a culture with no written records that is a major function of poetry, at once to express and to resist the sadness of oblivion. It has the same function as the spears that the Riders plant in memory of the fallen, as the mounds that they raise over them, as the flowers that grow on the mounds. Éomer says as he passes one burial-place, ‘when their spears have rotted and rusted, long still may their mounds stand and guard the Fords of Isen!’ As they ride up to Meduseld between the royal barrows (paralleled in reality by the burial-sites of Sutton Hoo in England and Gamle Lejre in Denmark), Gandalf looks at the white flowers that cover them and says, ‘Evermind they are called, simbelmynë in this land of men, for they blossom in all the seasons of the year, and grow where dead men rest.’ Tolkien makes a point here uncommon in the many attempts to present the barbarian past: that the very fragility of record in such societies makes memory all the more precious, its expressions both sadder and more triumphant. As often, his imaginative re-creation of the past adds to it an unusual emotional depth. Cultural contrasts: Rohan and Gondor

There is one final point that may be made both about the Riders’ behaviour patterns, and the images which correlate with them, but it is a point which has to be made comparatively. As has been remarked before, Tolkien clearly meant to set up a contrast between the Riddermark and Gondor, and he did it on several levels, tacitly contrasting Théoden with Denethor, for instance (a comparison to be discussed in the next chapter), and setting up Boromir (in Éomer’s opinion) as a sort of middle term: ‘More like to the swift sons of Eorl than to the grave Men of Gondor he seemed to me, and likely to prove a great captain of his people when his time came.’ Éomer clearly thinks the Riders superior in action to the Gondorians; but the Gondorians think that the Riders are just ‘Middle People’, intermediate between the truly civilized (themselves) and the ‘Men of the Wild’ like the Dunlendings or the Haradrim. Who is right, what is the difference, is it is possible that both are right? Tolkien answers these questions silently in his narrative, deepening his presentation of the two different cultures as he does so.

Two obviously contrasted scenes are the two in which first Pippin and then Merry offer their service to Denethor and Théoden respectively, in V/l and V/2. The central action in each case is the same: the hobbit offers his sword to the man, who accepts it and returns it. The central similarity however only points up the surrounding differences. Merry’s action is spontaneous, prompted only by ‘love for this old man’, and is received in the same spirit. The ceremony, in so far as there is one, consists only of Merry saying ‘Receive my service, if you will’, and Théoden replying ‘Gladly will I take it…Rise now, Meriadoc, esquire of Rohan of the household of Meduseld’. There is no doubt about the binding quality of what has happened, but it takes few words. By contrast Pippin’s offer has more complex motives: pride, and anger at the ‘scorn and suspicion’ in Denethor’s questioning. His offer is not immediately accepted: Denethor looks at his sword first, the one taken from the Barrow-wight, and seems to be affected by that before he says ‘I accept your service’ (not quite the same words as Théoden’s, for the one uses the colloquial ‘take’, the other the formal ‘accept’). Both parties in the Minas Tirith scene then make a formal statement, naming themselves in full and giving both patronymics and titles: Denethor’s is not without an element of threat, a promise to reward ‘oath-breaking with vengeance’, far removed from Théoden’s ‘Take your sword and bear it unto good fortune’. It is probably fair to say that the scene between Merry and Théoden makes much the better impression, kindlier, more casual, and with more concern for the feelings of the junior party.

One might say the same of the equally contrastive descriptions of the two men’s halls. Théoden’s is shadowy, but pierced by bright sunbeams. It has a mosaic floor and painted pillars. Its most obvious feature, though, is the ‘Many woven cloths’ on the walls, with the picture of Eorl the Young, done in green and white, red and yellow, picked out by the sun. All these features echo the hall of King Hrothgar in Beowulf, Heorot (like Théoden’s Meduseld and Beowulf’s own Meduseld, doomed to be devoured by fire); Heorot too has a ‘painted floor’, gilded gables, and ‘webs’ or tapestries to adorn it on ceremonial occasions. Tolkien has added only one foreign word to the description of Meduseld, ‘louver’, the device which allows smoke to escape from the wood-burning but chimneyless building. The hall of Minas Tirith is markedly different – also ‘lit by deep windows’ and held up by many pillars, but quite without colour, or one might say without life. ‘No hangings nor storied webs, nor any things of woven stuff or of wood, were to be seen in that long solemn hall’, only ‘a silent company of tall images graven in cold stone’: this time the native word, ‘web’, i.e. tapestry, stands out as alien to Gondor in the same way that ‘louver’ stood out as alien to the Mark. A further difference is that where Théoden sat in ‘a great gilded chair’ on a dais with Wormtongue at his feet on the steps leading up to it, Denethor’s hall has a dais and a throne, but the throne is empty, and Denethor is sitting, with a kind of humility, on a plain chair on the bottom step, in the same ceremonial space as Wormtongue: he is a steward, not a king. It is clear, though, that Denethor’s humility masks an evident pride, as he shows in his rebuke of Gandalf, ‘the rule of Gondor, my lord, is mine and no other man’s, unless the king should come again’. His exchange with Gandalf in a way repeats in its tone the near-clash between Aragorn and Boromir in ‘The Council of Elrond’, the Gondorian striving for superior dignity, the other party asserting superior status, but feeling no need to mark this formally.

What right have the Gondorians, then, in their claim to be ‘High’ rather than ‘Middle’, as Faramir explains? One may see something of it in a third pair of contrasted scenes, the two encounter-scenes between, on the one hand, Éomer and Aragorn in the Eastemnet (HI/2), and on the other, between Faramir and Frodo in Ithilien (IV/5). The similarities are close and frequent. In both cases an armed company comes upon strangers in a disputed borderland. In both cases the leader of the company is under orders to arrest strangers and take them back, but decides not to obey the order, at the risk of his own life. Both scenes begin with a hostile demonstration, indeed a surrounding, and in both a subordinate member of the weaker party (Gimli, Sam) comes close to losing his temper in support of his own leader. In both scenes, finally, there is an initial sequence which is public, heard by all the Riders or the Rangers, and then a second one in which the leader of the group speaks more privately and in more conciliatory fashion. However, the scenes make a quite different impression, and in this case, unlike the two just mentioned, the balance is on the whole in favour of Faramir and Gondor.

The first thing one might say about the Riders in the Eastemnet scene is that they contain an element more familiar from America than from England. Their sudden wheel and narrowing circle round the strangers, weapons poised, is more like the old movies’ image of the Comanche or the Cheyenne than anything from English history. Aragorn’s impassive response to it also suggests that he understands the stoicism ascribed by tradition to native Americans. Éomer’s behaviour is then markedly aggressive, and the two sides all but come to blows – though he has some cause, for Aragorn and his fellows are in fact slow to give their true names, insisting on hearing his first, and insisting on answers to their questions before they answer his. It is possible to sympathize with Éomer’s remark that ‘wanderers in the Riddermark would be wise to be less haughty in these days of doubt’. Tension recedes once Éomer calls off his men, and begins to talk with less sense of his own dignity; he accepts doubt, even correction, is prepared to explain himself, comes close to apologizing. Nevertheless the general sense one has of him is that while he may indeed be at bottom able and good-natured, he is out of his depth in dealing with Aragorn, and moreover more ‘swift’ or impetuous than is quite safe. As usual there is an object which gives a visual focus for this feeling, and it is Éomer’s main distinguishing feature: the white horsetail on the crest of his helmet. He is repeatedly picked out by this decoration. It is a nomad image, derived from the steppe-dwellers, the Turks or the Scythians (though one may well remember that the English have adopted it cheerfully, using horsetail plumes to decorate the helmets of Her Majesty’s Life Guards to this day). There is even a word in English for both the plume and the quality it represents, though of course the word is foreign-derived: it is panache, which means at once the decoration in a knight’s helmet, and the cavalryman’s swagger, the sudden onset that sweeps away resistance.

If Éomer has panache, though, Faramir has something more valuable, a kind of prudence or restraint. He too is capable of a certain grimness or asperity when he is grilling Frodo, but when he is interrupted by an irate Sam he puts the interruption aside ‘without anger’. He also keeps his cards much closer to his chest than does Éomer, concealing the fact that he has seen the body of his brother Boromir until Frodo has mentioned him several times. In addition, he notes Frodo’s hesitation over his relations with Boromir, but jumps to the right rather than the wrong conclusion. Two striking things about the conversation, though, are first that Faramir (in direct contrast to Éomer) knows more about Lothlórien even than Frodo does, and corrects him about its effects rather than having to be corrected; and, most important, that he holds off his interrogation and deliberately chooses not to press an advantage once he realizes that Frodo is concealing something about ‘Isildur’s Bane’. By doing so, he leads Sam to blurt out the truth, which says something about the efficiency of Faramir’s tactic; but he also sees further into the future than did Boromir, or Éomer. If Éomer is a pleasant young man, as said above, Faramir is a ‘grave young man’. His rejection of mere militarism, his recognition that there are other qualities than those of a warrior or a general, backs up his claim that Gondor is a more reflective society, and one with a longer history, than the Riddermark. The claim is also tacitly demonstrated by Faramir’s capacity for subtlety, understatement, a reverence for truth which nevertheless includes a relatively oblique approach to it, well beyond Éomer’s blunt aggressions and withdrawals. The ironies of interlace

The first three Books of The Lord of the Rings can be seen in particular as a kind of complex map, a map of cultures, races, languages, and histories, which gives the world through which the characters move its special depth and being. The map would remain powerful, and have a kind of charm, even if the characters were just strolling through it (as sometimes they are, early on). However the contrastive element which comes in as the material for contrasts accumulates has a further analogue in the way the story is told. The Two Towers especially, and the first part of The Return of the King, have a structure reminiscent on a large scale of ‘The Council of Elrond’ on a small one. The word that describes the structure is ‘interlace’.

Tolkien certainly knew the word, for it has become a commonplace of Beowulf-criticism, but he may not have liked it much: it is associated also with the structure of French prose romance, in which he took little interest. However, Tolkien certainly also knew that the Icelandic word for a short story is a Þáttr, literally a thread. One could say that several Þættir, or threads, twisted round each other, make up a saga; and Gandalf comes close to saying something like that when he says to Théoden, ‘There are children in your land who, out of the twisted threads of story, could pick the answer to your question’ (my emphasis). Tolkien may have felt that there had been all along a native version of the French technique of entrelacement, even if we no longer know the native word for it. But word, or no word, he was going to do it.

One can see this by considering the way the narrative is arranged from the start of The Two Towers to chapter 4 of Book VI of The Return of the King, ‘The Field of Cormallen’. I have attempted to represent this by the accompanying diagram. It should be noted that the diagram is in several ways a simplified one. It does not show the brief separation of Legolas and Gimli during IV/7; full representation of the movement of characters on 15th March would require a separate diagram; and there are of course many characters involved in the story besides the members of the Fellowship. Nevertheless the diagram may illustrate the nature of the narrative threads and their ‘interlacing’.

The diagram covers the period from the start of The Two Towers (February 26th) to Book VI, chapter 4, of The Return of the King (March 25th). During this period, exactly one Shire-month, the eight surviving members of the Fellowship (Boromir dies at the very start of The Two Towers) are separated. Their adventures are never told for long in strict chronological order, and continually ‘leapfrog’ each other.

Thus, in the first two chapters of The Two Towers we follow Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli from February 26th to February 30th. In chapters 3 and 4 we follow Pippin and Merry from their capture by the Uruk-hai to their meeting with Treebeard; but though these chapters start at (almost) the same time as the first two, the story here goes on further, to March 2nd. Chapters 5 through 8 return us to Aragorn and his companions, soon including Gandalf, picking up at March 1st and continuing this time on to March 5th. Chapter 5 includes Gandalf’s necessary ‘flashback’, explaining his return from the dead, which runs from January 15th. The two groups meet eventually at Isengard, when Gandalf, Aragorn, Théoden and the others find ‘two small figures’ lying by the shattered gates, one of them asleep and the other peacefully blowing smoke-rings. They are Merry and Pippin, but their appearance is a complete surprise to all including the reader – all, that is, apart from Gandalf, who had met Pippin during his brief detour to Treebeard in chapter 7. The hobbits’ explanation of how they got there (like so much of the narration in ‘The Council of Elrond’) is given in their own narrative, which starts where chapter 4 left off on March 2nd and takes them up to the moment, March 5th. The six members of the Fellowship stay together for two chapters, 10 and 11, but then separate again. The story as far as they are concerned does not resume till the start of The Return of the King more than a hundred pages later, when we begin with Gandalf and Pippin (chapters 1 and 4, March 9th to 15th); cut back in between to Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli, who separate from Merry in chapter 2, on March 8th; after which we follow Merry alone, with the Riders, in chapters 3 and 5. All three groups are reassembled at or after ‘The Battle of the Pelennor Fields’ on March 15th, but once again no one, the reader included, has any idea how Aragorn in particular arrives there. This too has to be told in flashback, the narrative of Legolas and Gimli to Merry and Pippin in V/9 corresponding exactly to the hobbits’ narrative to them in III/9. Towards the end of Book V, as towards the end of Book III, the Fellowship is reassembled and moves on together, leaving only Merry behind, to the end of the Book on March 25th.

Meanwhile, of course, and interlaced with all these other threads, there is the narrative of Frodo and Sam in Books IV and VI. This is relatively straightforward, but a point one should note is that Book IV does not end, with the capture of Frodo, at the same time as the corresponding Book III. The first half of The Two Towers closes on March 5th, with Pippin and Gandalf riding for Gondor. The second half closes on March 13th, a date which is not reached in the ‘alternate’ narrative till V/4, by which time Pippin has been in Gondor for some days. As a general rule one may say that none of the five or six major strands of narrative in the central section of The Lord of the Rings ever matches neatly with any of the others in chronology: some are always being advanced, some retarded.

Two major effects of this, naturally, are surprise and suspense. It is a surprise to find Pippin and Merry sleeping and smoking in the ruins when they were last seen marching with the Ents on Isengard; it is another to have the Ents determine the Battle of Helm’s Deep (something explained only by the hobbits’ later flashback); it is a third when the black sails of the Corsairs of Umbar display the White Tree, Seven Stars and crown of Aragorn (to be explained only by Legolas and Gimli’s later flashback); obviously it is a major surprise, first to Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli, then to Pippin (and presumably Merry), then to Sam (and presumably Frodo) to have Gandalf return to them from the dead. Perhaps the greatest of the surprises in The Lord of the Rings, though, comes at the end of ‘The Siege of Gondor’ (V/4), when the chief Ringwraith’s boast is answered first by the cock-crow and then by ‘Great horns of the North wildly blowing. Rohan had come at last.’ When last seen the Rohirrim were just leaving the Mark (end of chapter 3), and at the end of chapter 4 we have to go back and follow the Riders through chapter 5 to explain how they arrived. Typically, the end of chapter 5 does not quite match that of chapter 3; it goes on from the hornblast heard by Gandalf and the Ringwraith to Théoden’s charge, followed by Éomer, ‘the white horsetail on his helm floating in his speed’; and the story does not turn back to Gandalf till chapter 7. And meanwhile, though less easy to pick out, there is a continuous sense of suspense as the reader is left in the dark, for long periods, about the more vital but less conspicuous quest of Frodo and Sam. Not much has been said by critics about the structure of The Lord of the Rings, but it is considerably more complex and at least as carefully-integrated as the multiple narrative of Joseph Conrad, for instance, in Nostromo. One might feel that a more experienced writer, one who wrote novels or fantasies professionally rather than passionately, would have known not to risk such finesses or trust so much to the ingenuity of his readers: but Tolkien knew no better than to try it.

The main effect of his interlacing technique, however, does not lie in surprise and suspense. What it does is to create a profound sense of reality, of that being the way things are. There is a pattern in Tolkien’s story, but his characters can never see it (naturally, because they are in it). To them the whole story seems chaotic, haunted by bad luck; they are lost in a wilderness metaphorically as well as cartographically, indeed in a ‘bewilderment’, sometimes in the dark, sometimes in an enchanted wood, frequently guessing wrong as to the meaning of what happens even to them. Aragorn is the first to express this feeling, with his repeated remarks that ‘my choices have gone amiss’. As he pursues the Uruk-hai he comes on several puzzles – the dead orcs, Pippin’s brooch, Éomer’s assurance that there were no hobbits among the dead – which remain unexplained and inexplicable. Even a careful reader may not realize who is ‘the old bent man, leaning on a staff’ whom Aragorn and his companions see on the edge of Fangorn. It looks very like Gandalf, but when they finally meet Gandalf he tells them it must have been Saruman (though it may have been a ‘wraith’ of Saruman, possibly projected by Gandalf, see The Treason of Isengard p. 428). The fact that Shadowfax returned at the same time to lure away their horses was just a coincidence – if there is such a thing as a coincidence, which Gandalf takes leave to doubt: he remarks at this point how strange it is that their enemies have managed only to ‘bring Merry and Pippin with marvellous speed, and in the nick of time, to Fangorn’ (and so to stir up the Ents), ‘where otherwise they would never have come at all’, a remark which bears on Gandalf’s theories about ‘chance’, to be discussed in the next chapter. There were other meetings in Fangorn, however, for Gandalf and Treebeard saw each other, though they did not speak. It was this which made Treebeard reply evasively to the hobbits’ tale of Gandalf’s death; but the hobbits do not understand this, and in fact Legolas and Gimli (who do know about it) do not enlighten them. The reader has to put three widely-separated conversations together (which perhaps few ever do) to grasp this fact.

On other occasions characters do notice and seize on a connection. In III/5 Legolas remembers that he saw an eagle at the start of III/2, and Gandalf’s narrative explains what the eagle was doing. On the other hand, at the end of IV/2 Gollum is convinced that he knows why the Nazgûl have passed over them three times, ‘They feel us here, they feel the Precious.’ But he is wrong, actually. The third Nazgûl, ‘rushing with terrible speed into the West,’ is heading for Orthanc to get news of Saruman, alerted perhaps by the burning of the orcs which ‘rose high to heaven and was seen by many watchful eyes’. It is the same Nazgûl which passes over the camp at Dol Baran and makes Pippin ask (also wrongly), ‘it was not coming for me, was it?’, only to be corrected on time and distance by Gandalf. A further cross-connection, which has misled one critic at least, is the scene at the very end of The Fellowship of the Ring where Frodo, sitting on the summit of Amon Hen and wearing the Ring, finds himself being shouted at mentally, Take it off! Take it off! Fool, take it off! Take off the Ring! Many readers perhaps take this unexplained voice to be some sort of projection from Frodo’s own mind, as the last two voices have presumably been (the question is discussed further on pp. 137-8 below); but in fact the third voice is Gandalf’s, as one might guess from its asperity: though of course, as far as Frodo and the reader know, Gandalf at that time is dead. It is only later, in III/5 that he says, and then obscurely, ‘I sat in a high place, and I strove with the Dark Tower; and the Shadow passed’; nor do the people to whom he is talking understand him.

Other cross-threads in the story include Boromir’s horn, split at the end of The Fellowship of the Ring, found drifting by Faramir many chapters later, and used by him as a check on Frodo’s narrative; Hirgon the errand-rider, who appears fleetingly in three chapters (V/1, V/3, V,5); Faramir’s own narrative to his father, ‘this is not the first halfling I have seen walking out of northern legends into the Southlands’; and Frodo’s mithril coat, displayed by the Mouth of Sauron in V/10 before we have any explanation of how it got there. Perhaps the most significant and the most repeated cross-bearing, however, is provided by the palantír of Orthanc. In V/2 Aragorn tells his friends, ‘I have looked in the Stone of Orthanc’. They are horrified, and he accepts that it may be that ‘I have done ill’ in revealing his existence. But in fact he has done well, in the first place prompting Sauron to strike before he is fully ready, as Gandalf realizes some thirty pages later – though his guess is not confirmed till he and Aragorn meet and talk a further sixty pages later, in ‘The Last Debate’ (V/9). However the major result of Aragorn’s decision is never noticed by anyone at all. At a critical moment in Sam and Frodo’s travel:

The Dark Power was deep in thought, and the Eye turned inward, pondering tidings of doubt and danger: a bright sword, and a stern and kingly face it saw, and for a while it gave little thought to other things; and all its great stronghold, gate on gate, and tower on tower, was wrapped in a brooding gloom.

The dates of all these events are carefully cross-checked. Frodo and Sam are ignored, or overlooked, on March 16th, after Sauron has had news of the failure at Pelennor Fields and the death of the chief Ringwraith; Aragorn looked in the palantír, as he says ‘ten days since the Ring-bearer went east from Rauros’, i.e. on March 6th; Gandalf guesses that he had done so from Sauron’s reaction, ‘some five days ago now he would discover that we had thrown down Saruman, and had taken the Stone’, i.e. on March 10th. But while the reader can work this out by fitting together the many narratives offered – and also by cross-checking with Tolkien’s own detailed chronology in Appendix B – it has to be repeated that the characters do not know, have to guess, sometimes cannot explain, sometimes guess wrong. It is a surprise, for instance, to realize that even at the end of the Ring-quest, when the Ring has been destroyed, Sam and Frodo still do not know that Gandalf has returned from the dead, but think that ‘Things all went wrong when he went down in Moria’.

In all this there is a constant irony, created by the frequent gaps between what the characters realize and what the reader realizes – though the reader is of course almost as often in the dark as the characters. But there is also as it were an anti-irony, as one slowly realizes that the characters’ frustration, gloom, even approach to despair is at once natural and justified, and also needless and falsified. Things do go wrong, but they could go worse. Even at the worst, there is a vein of proverbial sense which says that one can never be sure: ‘Oft evil will shall evil mar’, says Gandalf, ‘The hasty stroke goes oft astray’, says Aragorn, ‘a traitor may betray himself, and do good that he does not intend’, Gandalf again. Gandalf in particular sometimes draws threads together, commenting for instance (V/8) that it was an important decision by Elrond to allow the junior hobbits to come – they have between them saved Faramir and Éowyn. On the other hand Denethor’s despair costs the life of Théoden, but Merry only half-notices (“Where is Gandalf?…Could he not have saved the king?’, V/ 6), and though Gandalf is sure that ‘if I do [save Faramir], others will die’ (V/7), he does not know who they will be. As Gandalf often says in various ways, and he is perhaps thinking of threads and patterns as he does so, ‘even the very wise cannot see all ends’.

It may not be possible to draw any certain correct conclusion from the confusions and bewilderments of Middle-earth, but it is possible to see one always marked as unequivocally and permanently wrong: which is, that there is no point in trying any further. Tolkien makes this declaration through his interlacements, at the same time as he dramatizes the temptation to abandon hope by his separation of narrative threads. But having said that, it is time to leave the map of Middle-earth, and the structure of The Lord of the Rings, and consider instead the work’s argument, and even (though it is a word Tolkien would not have liked) its ideology.