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

CHAPTER III THE LORD OF THE RINGS (2):

CONCEPTS OF EVIL The concept of the Ring

Most of what has been said in the last two chapters has stressed Tolkien’s background in ancient literature. From it one could argue that The Lord of the Rings is essentially an ‘antiquarian’ work, a word now usually used rather patronizingly. The patronage is false, if the antiquarianism is true, and the latter quality does explain a great deal about the charm of Middle-earth. Nevertheless it does not explain why so many readers have found The Lord of the Rings so deeply influential, so readily applicable to their own circumstances. Tolkien’s work is not just an antiquarian fantasy. If it is still being read (like Beowulf) a thousand years after its creation, no perceptive person even in the far future could take it for anything other than a work, a highly characteristic work, of the twentieth century.

One can see this by considering what we are told about the Ring. Tolkien had to do a good deal of work here in modifying what he had said about the ring, Bilbo’s ring, the ring not yet imagined as the One Ruling Ring, in the first edition of The Hobbit. It comes as rather a shock to anyone who has gathered the story from The Lord of the Rings and a later edition of The Hobbit, to go back and read the account of Bilbo’s contest with Gollum in the first 1937 edition of The Hobbit. The surprising thing there is that Gollum is not all that attached to his ‘precious’. He wagers it against Bilbo’s life; he loses the riddle-contest; but then he does his best to play fair. When he cannot find the ring (for it is already in Bilbo’s pocket), he apologizes profusely for not being able to pay up, and Bilbo, being in a tight corner, accepts Gollum’s offer to show him the way out instead. They part on something close to good terms, with Gollum’s last words being:

‘Here’ss the passage…It musst squeeze in and sneak down. We dursn’t go with it, my preciouss, no we dursn’t, gollum.’

From the second edition of 1951 onwards, by contrast, his last words are:

‘Thief, thief, thief! Baggins! We hates it, we hates it, we hates it for ever!’

Tolkien retained the original and alternative version as the story which Bilbo had told Gandalf and the others, a story in which his claim to the ring was significantly stronger: the fact that Bilbo lied about this is, in The Lord of the Rings, an ominous sign that the Ring is gaining power over him, becoming (he uses the same word as Gollum and Isildur), his ‘precious’. But this original version of the story contradicts one of the basic facts which we are later told about the Ring, which is that its owners from Isildur on, Gollum included, do not abandon it – it abandons them.

At the heart of The Lord of the Rings are the assertions which Gandalf makes in Book 1/2, his long conversation with Frodo. If they are not accepted, then the whole point of the story collapses. And these assertions are in essence three. First, Gandalf says that the Ring is immensely powerful, in the right or the wrong hands. If Sauron regains it, then he will be invincible at least for the foreseeable future: ‘If he recovers it, then he will command [all the other Rings of Power] again, even the Three [held by the elves], and all that has been wrought with them will be laid bare, and he will be stronger than ever.’ Second, though, Gandalf insists that the Ring is deadly dangerous to all its possessors: it will take them over, ‘devour’ them, ‘possess’ them. The process may be long or short, depending on how ‘strong or well-meaning’ the possessor may be, but ‘neither strength nor good purpose will last – sooner or later the dark power will devour him’. Furthermore this will not be just a physical take-over. The Ring turns everything to evil, including its wearers. There is no one who can be trusted to use it, even in the right hands, for good purposes: there are no right hands, and all good purposes will turn bad if reached through the Ring. Elrond repeats this assertion later on, ‘I will not take the Ring’, as does Galadriel, ‘I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel’. But finally, and this third point is one which Gandalf has to re-emphasize strongly and against opposition in ‘The Council of Elrond’, the Ring cannot simply be left unused, put aside, thrown away: it has to be destroyed, and the only place where it can be destroyed is the place of its fabrication, Orodruin, the Cracks of Doom.

These assertions determine the story. It becomes, as has often been noted, not a quest but an anti-quest, whose goal is not to find or regain something but to reject and destroy something. Nor can there be any half-measures, attractive as these may seem. Gandalf will not take it, Galadriel will not take it, it would be disastrous to take it to Gondor, as Boromir and Denethor would prefer. One might point out that while all this is perfectly logical, granted the initial assumptions, Gandalf’s basic postulates might take a bit of swallowing. Why should we believe them? However, while critics have found fault with almost everything about The Lord of the Rings, on one pretext or another, no one to my knowledge has ever quibbled with what Gandalf says about the Ring. It is far too plausible, and too recognizable. It would not have been so before the many bitter experiences of the twentieth century.

If one fits together the three points which Gandalf makes in this early chapter, it would be a dull mind, nowadays, which did not reflect, ‘All power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely’. This adage was first stated, not in exactly the form just given, in 1887, by Lord Acton. What Lord Acton actually wrote was, ‘Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men…’ I do not think that many people would have agreed with him much before 1887. The medieval world had its saints’ lives, in which the saints used their immense and indeed miraculous power entirely for good purposes; while there is no shortage of evil kings in medieval story, there is rarely any sign that they became evil by becoming kings (though there are some hints to that effect in Beowulf). On the whole people probably thought that evil possessors of power were evil by nature, and from the beginning. The nearest thing to Lord Acton’s statement in Old English is the proverb, Man deÞ swa he byÞ Þonne he mot swa he wile, ‘A man does as he is when he can do what he wants’, and what this means is that power reveals character, not that it alters it. Why have opinions changed?

There is no difficulty in answering this, and the answer proves with particular clarity that Tolkien was not quite as isolated a writer as he is sometimes made out to be. Six years before The Lord of the Rings started to be published, George Orwell had published his fable Animal Farm, which ends, as everyone knows, with the animals’ revolution failing completely, because the pigs had become farmers: ‘The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.’ The exact applicability of this fable has been furiously disputed (no one wants it to apply to them), but in a way that only makes the point stronger, and it is Gandalf’s point: it applies to everybody. All seizures of power, no matter how ‘strong or well-meaning’ the seizers, will go the same way. That’s what power does. Meanwhile, at exactly the same time as the publication of The Lord of the Rings William Golding was bringing out his fables, Lord of the Flies (1954), and The Inheritors (1955), the meaning of which Golding conveniently summarized for commentators in a later essay, ‘Fable’, in his collection The Hot Gates:

I must say that anyone who passed through those years [of World War II] without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, must have been blind or wrong in the head.

(Hot Gates, p. 87)

So the English choirboys, marooned on an idyllic desert island, invent murder and human sacrifice and create the ‘lord of the flies’ himself, Beelzebub; in The Inheritors our ancestors, Cro-Magnon men, exterminate the gentle and friendly Neanderthals and create an entirely false legend of ogres and cannibals to justify their actions. A very similar if more complex argument was put forward, one might add, by the other great fantasy of the 1950s, T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, a work which began like Tolkien’s with a children’s book, The Sword in the Stone (1937), but took even longer than Tolkien’s to reach termination, appearing as a whole (though still unfinished) in 1958. White’s points are too many and too self-doubting to summarize readily, but there is at least no doubt that White saw in humanity a basic urge to destruction, expressed in a work written like The Lord of the Rings, nationibus in diro bello certantibus, ‘while the nations were striving in fearful war’. Orwell, Golding, White (and several other post-war authors of fantasy and fable): the thought that they expressed in their highly different ways was that people could never be trusted, least of all if they expressed a wish for the betterment of humanity. The major disillusionment of the twentieth century has been over political good intentions, which have led only to gulags and killing fields. That is why what Gandalf says has rung true to virtually everyone who reads it – though it is, I repeat, yet one more anachronism in Middle-earth, and the greatest of them, an entirely modern conviction.

But does Tolkien play fair with this, the very basis of his story? Critics have argued that he does not – pre-eminently Colin Manlove, whose determined attack on Tolkien forms chapter 5 of his 1975 book, Modern Fantasy. One should begin by granting that there are indeed several characters who show one stage or another of the creeping corruption which Gandalf fears. We have Bilbo, in the scene in the first chapter when he gets angry with Gandalf as the wizard tries to persuade him to part with (not to hand over) the Ring; and again in ‘Many Meetings’, when he asks Frodo to let him ‘peep at it again’, and is transformed for a moment in Frodo’s eyes to ‘a little wrinkled creature with a hungry face and bony groping hands’. We have Isildur, whose letter discovered in the Gondor archives by Gandalf declares ominously, ‘It is precious to me, though I buy it with great pain’. There is Gollum, of course, and throughout. And there is also Boromir, who is doubtful about the wisdom of destroying the Ring in Orodruin from the start, and who in the end breaks the Fellowship because he is convinced that ‘True-hearted Men, they will not be corrupted’. Boromir’s speech at this point, near the start of the last chapter of The Fellowship of the Ring, sends out all the signals which the twentieth century has learned to distrust, from the fascination with power, even if it is ‘the power of the Enemy’, to the exaltation of ‘The fearless’, and then immediately ‘the ruthless’, as the means to victory; finally the self-dramatization of himself as the Leader with ‘power of Command’, and the naked appeal to force, ‘For I am too strong for you, halfling’. Even Sam has a fleeting vision of the same kind, of himself as ‘Samwise the Strong, Hero of the Age’, when he briefly carries the Ring in VI/1, and as with Bilbo Frodo sees him for a moment, when he is slow to hand over the Ring, as ‘a foul little creature with greedy eyes and slobbering mouth’. The danger of carrying the Ring is repeated and insisted on throughout the story in very consistent terms, all bearing out Gandalf’s initial assertions.

But, one could say, Tolkien allows exceptions to his own rule. Both Sam and Bilbo do after all hand over the Ring with only momentary reluctance. Other characters show no interest at all in having it or taking it, Merry and Pippin, Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli. Galadriel is aware of it in Lothlórien, and admits that ‘my heart has greatly desired’ what Frodo offers to give her. She too declares a fantasy like Boromir’s and Sam’s, ‘In place of the Dark Lord you will set up a Queen…Dreadful as the Storm and the Lightning! Stronger than the foundations of the earth. All shall love me and despair!’ But then she puts aside the temptation with no more than a laugh. In very much the same way Faramir, with Frodo and Sam in his power, and aware of what they are carrying, seems for a moment threatening, but then also laughs and shrugs the temptation off. Finally one has to consider the case of Frodo. Gandalf had told him near the beginning that he could not make him relinquish the Ring, ‘except by force, and that would break your mind’. However, as Manlove forcefully points out, in the end, in the scene in the Sammath Naur, Gollum does make Frodo give up the Ring, by force, indeed by biting off his finger: but this has no effect on Frodo’s mind at all. These apparent contradictions have made critics hostile to the whole fable argue that Tolkien’s entire presentation of the origins of evil is flawed: the Ring has bad effects on some people, but no effect at all on others. The plot is being manipulated, not developing logically.

Actually, the doubt expressed in this way can be cleared up by one word, though it is not one that Tolkien uses, and was not recorded by the OED till its 1989 edition (the first citation found for it comes only from 1939). The word is ‘addictive’. Gandalf’s whole argument could be summed up as saying that use of the Ring is addictive. One use need not be disastrous on its own, but each use tends to strengthen the urge for another. The addiction can be shaken off in early stages (which explains Bilbo and Sam), but once it has taken hold, it cannot be broken by will-power alone. On the other hand, if the addiction has not been contracted in the first place (and this explains Galadriel and Faramir, as well as all the other members of the Fellowship), then it has no more power than any other temptation. Moreover, addicts can of course be restrained from their addiction by simple outside force, whether this consists of Gollum’s teeth or a locked cell and ‘cold turkey’ treatment. What Gandalf meant by saying he could not ‘make’ Frodo hand over the Ring ‘except by force, and that would break your mind’, was that he could not make him want to hand over the Ring except by some unknown mental force, perhaps a kind of hypnosis. But none of this contradicts or detracts from the basic point about the Ring, which is that the very urge to use it is what is destructive: Elrond, or Gandalf, or Galadriel, or Denethor, if they owned it, would begin with the best of intentions, but would come to enjoy having their intentions achieved, the use of power itself, and would end as dictators over others, enslaved to themselves, unable to give up or go back. Wraiths and shadows: Tolkien’s images of evil

There is something extremely convincing, for very many people, in Tolkien’s presentation of evil; but it is worth re-stressing that his concern with the topic is highly contemporary, and by no means unique. Many authors of the mid-twentieth century were obsessed with the subject of evil, and produced unique and original images of it. I have mentioned already Orwell’s torturer O’Brien, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, declaring, ‘If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever’; and Ursula Le Guin’s parable of ‘The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas’, with its shining city whose power and beauty depend entirely on the continuous and conscious tormenting of an idiot child; to which one can add Kurt Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim, working in the ‘corpse mines’ of Dresden, with their stink ‘like roses and mustard gas’; or T.H. White’s Merlyn denouncing humanity as:

‘Homo ferox, the Inventor of Cruelty to Animals, who will…burn living rats, as I have seen done in Eriu, in order that their shrieks may intimidate the local rodents; who will forcibly degenerate the livers of domestic geese, in order to make himself a tasty food; who will saw the growing horns of cattle, for convenience in transport; who will blind goldfinches with a needle, to make them sing; who will boil lobsters and shrimps alive, although he hears their piping screams; who will turn on his own species in war, and kill nineteen million every hundred years’ (etc.)

(The Book of Merlyn, section 5)

All these images are based, sometimes obviously as with Vonnegut, sometimes less obviously as with Le Guin, on personal or recent experience. The authors are trying to explain something at once deeply felt and rationally inexplicable, something furthermore felt to be entirely novel and not adequately answered by the moralities of earlier ages (keen medievalists though several of these authors were). The end of the quotation above from White suggests that this ‘something’ is connected with the distinctively twentieth-century experience of industrial war and impersonal, industrialized massacre; and it is probably no coincidence that most of the authors concerned (Tolkien, Orwell, Vonnegut, but also Golding, and Tolkien’s close colleague C.S. Lewis) were combat veterans of one war or another. The life experiences of many men and women in the twentieth century have left them with an unshakable conviction of something wrong, something irreducibly evil in the nature of humanity, but without any very satisfactory explanation for it. Nor can they find such an explanation in the literature of previous eras: Billy Pilgrim’s friend Rosewater in Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five agrees that, ‘everything there was to know about life was in The Brothers Karamazov, by Feodor Dostoyevsky. ‘But that isn’t enough any more’. Twentieth-century fantasy can be seen as above all a response to this gap, this inadequacy. One has to ask in what ways Tolkien’s images are original, individual, and in what ways typical, recognizable.

The orcs, whom we meet or overhear several times in The Lord of the Rings, form one image, and there is a conclusion to be drawn from them (see the next section). However, they are relatively low-ranking evil-doers, what Tolkien called in his Beowulf lecture ‘the infantry of the old war’; and in some ways they resemble fairly conventional fairy-tale images, like the ‘goblins’, which was Tolkien’s original word for them. More individual and more original is Tolkien’s concept of the ‘Ringwraith’. This is, one has to say, a word of exactly the same type as ‘wood-wose’ or ^*hol-bytla: a compound, the first element completely familiar, the second more mysterious. What is a ‘wraith’? If one looks the word up in the OED one finds a puzzle of just the kind which always attracted Tolkien’s attention. The dictionary has no suggestion about the word’s etymology, but comments ‘Of obscure origin’. As for its meaning, the OED gives two senses, which appear to contradict each other, and cites the same text, Gavin Douglas’s 1513 translation of Virgil’s Aeneid into Scots, as the source for both. I have no doubt that Tolkien and the other Inklings—for Lewis has a very clear image of a fictional wraith as well – discussed the matter, and in the end found a solution which makes sense both of Douglas’s old text, and of the modern reality to which ‘wraiths’ refer. (For a comment on Lewis, see my article in the Clark and Timmons collection in the ‘List of References’ below).

To begin with the etymology of ‘wraith’, an obvious suggestion which the OED compilers should have thought of is that it is a form derived from the Old English verb wríðan, ‘writhe’. This is a class 1 strong verb, exactly parallel to rídan, ‘ride’, and if it had been common enough to survive in full form, we would still say ‘writhe – wrothe – writhen’, as we do ‘ride – rode – ridden’ or ‘write – wrote – written’ (Tolkien does in fact use the form ‘writhen’, see Blackwelder’s Tolkien Thesaurus). It is characteristic of verbs like ‘ride’ or ‘write’ to form other words by vowel-change, like ‘road’ from ‘ride’ or ‘writ’ from ‘write’. ‘Writhe’ has given rise to several: ‘wreath’ (something that is twisted), but less obviously and more suggestively, ‘wroth’ (the old adjective meaning ‘angry’), and ‘wrath’ (the corresponding noun which still survives). What has anger got to do with writhing, with being twisted? Clearly – and there are other parallels to this – the word is an old dead metaphor which suggests that wrath is a state of being twisted up inside (an Inkling thesis expressed by Owen Barfield and mentioned by Tolkien, see Letters p. 22. The word wraithas, ‘bent’, was also of special importance to Tolkien’s personal myth of ‘the Lost Road’, see pp. 287-8 below.)

That Tolkien was aware of this sort of variation between the physical and the abstract is suggested by a word Legolas uses in ‘The Ring Goes South’. There, when the Fellowship’s attempted crossing of Caradhras is foiled by the snow, Legolas goes ahead to scout out their retreat. He returns to say that the snow does not reach far, though he has not brought the sun back with him: ‘She is walking in the blue fields of the South, and a little wreath of snow on this Redhorn hillock troubles her not at all’. By ‘wreath’ here Legolas clearly means something like ‘wisp’, something barely substantial, and though the OED does not record it, that is also part of the meaning of ‘wraith’ – one could say, ‘a wraith of mist’, ‘a wraith of smoke’, just as Legolas says ‘a wreath of snow’. It seems likely, then, that ‘wraith’ is a Scottish form derived from wríðan in exactly the same way as ‘raid’ is derived from rídan.

Meanwhile the two Gavin Douglas quotations from which the OED derives its two senses are these. To illustrate sense 1, ‘An apparition or spectre of a dead person: a phantom or ghost’, the OED offers Douglas, ‘In diuers placis The wraithis walkis of goistis that are deyd’. For sense lb, though, ‘An immaterial or spectral appearance of a living being’, it offers Douglas again, ‘Thidder went this wrath or schaddo of Ene’ (i.e. Virgil’s hero Aeneas). The obvious question is, are wraiths, then, alive or dead, for Douglas uses the word both ways? And, one might add, are they material or immaterial? The latter is suggested by the equation with ‘shadow’ (another important word for Tolkien), and by the idea that wraiths and wreaths are defined by their shape more than by their substance, a twist, a coil, a ring; the former, however, by the fact that wraiths can be wraiths of something, even if that something is as fluid (but not insubstantial) as snow or mist or smoke. Tolkien’s Ringwraiths, of course, answer all the questions posed, and also demonstrate once more that apparent mistakes or contradictions in old poems may simply indicate an understanding that the self-confident nineteenth- and twentieth-century dictionary compilers had not reached. Are the Ringwraiths alive or dead? Gandalf says early on that they were once men who were given rings by Sauron, and so ‘ensnared…Long ago they fell under the dominion of the one [Ring], and they became Ringwraiths, shadows under his great Shadow, his most terrible servants’. Much later, in ‘The Battle of the Pelennor Fields’, we learn that the Lord of the Nazgûl, the chief Ringwraith, was once the sorcerer-king of Angmar, a realm overthrown more than a thousand years in the past. He ought, then, to be dead, but is clearly alive in some way or other, and so positioned neatly between the two meanings given by the OED. As for being material or immaterial, he is in a way insubstantial, for when he throws back his hood, there is nothing there. Yet there must be something there, for ‘he had a kingly crown; and yet upon no head visible was it set’. He and his fellows can furthermore act physically, carrying steel swords, riding horses or winged reptiles, the Lord of the Nazgûl wielding a mace. But they cannot be harmed physically, by flood or weapon – except by the blade of Westernesse taken from the barrow-wight’s mound, wound round with spells for the defeat of Angmar. It is the spells that cleave ‘the undead flesh’, not the blade itself. So the Ringwraiths are just like mist or smoke, both physical, even dangerous and choking, but at the same time effectively intangible.

All this is highly original. But the important question is, how far is it recognizable, even psychologically plausible? And here the answer returns us very firmly to the twentieth century. Tolkien did not perhaps develop his image of the Ringwraiths very quickly, for as has been said above, the Black Riders to begin with make relatively little impact. In ‘The Council of Elrond’, though, Boromir gives them what is to be one of their leading characteristics, the ability to create panic: wherever the ‘great black horseman’ came, ‘a madness filled our foes, but fear fell on our bravest’. This is increasingly what the wraiths do from the time the Fellowship emerges from Lothlórien. When they pass overhead, over Sam and Frodo, over the Riders, over Gondor, we have some combination of the same elements: shadow, cry, freezing of the blood, fear. The moment when Pippin and Beregond hear the Black Riders and see them swoop on Faramir in ‘The Siege of Gondor’, V/4, is typical:

Suddenly as they talked they were stricken dumb, frozen as it were to listening stones. Pippin cowered down with his hands pressed to his ears; but Beregond…remained there, stiffened, staring out with starting eyes. Pippin knew the shuddering cry that he had heard: it was the same that he had heard long ago in the Marish of the Shire, but now it was grown in power and hatred, piercing the heart with a poisonous despair.

The last phrase is a critical one. The Ringwraiths work for the most part not physically but psychologically, paralysing the will, disarming all resistance. This may have something to do with the process of becoming a wraith yourself. That can happen as a result of a force from outside. As Gandalf points out, explaining the Morgul-knife, if the splinter had not been cut out, ‘you would have become a wraith under the dominion of the Dark Lord’. But more usually the suspicion is that people make themselves into wraiths. They accept the gifts of Sauron, quite likely with the intention of using them for some purpose which they identify as good. But then they start to cut corners, to eliminate opponents, to believe in some ‘cause’ which justifies everything they do. In the end the ‘cause’, or the habits they have acquired while working for the ‘cause’, destroys any moral sense and even any remaining humanity. The spectacle of the person ‘eaten up inside’ by devotion to some abstraction has been so familiar throughout the twentieth century as to make the idea of the wraith, and the wraithing-process, horribly recognizable, in a way non-fantastic.

The realism of this image of evil is increased by the examples we have of people on their way to becoming wraiths themselves. We have just the start of this, enough to be ominous, in the cases of Bilbo and Frodo, and the others mentioned above. Gollum is much further along the road, though in The Lord of the Rings Gollum, detached from the Ring many years before, is possibly beginning to recover, as is shown by the fact that he has started to call himself by his old name, Sméagol, the name he had when he used to be a hobbit, and is also occasionally and significantly able to say ‘I’. There is a striking dialogue between what one might call his hobbit-personality (Sméagol) and his Ring-personality (Gollum, ‘my precious’) in ‘The Passage of the Marshes’, which makes the point that the two are at least connected: one can imagine the one developing out of the other, pure evil growing out of mere ordinary human weakness and selfishness.

However, the best example of ‘wraithing’ in The Lord of the Rings must be Saruman. As was pointed out earlier, his language and behaviour are the most contemporary of any in ‘The Council of Elrond’, or indeed in the whole work. Saruman’s goals are knowledge (no one can object to that); organization in the service of knowledge (there are certainly many researchers, and far more administrators, who see this as desirable); but finally control. In the pursuit of control Saruman is prepared to co-operate with forces he knows perfectly well are evil, but which he thinks he can use for his own much more admirable purposes, and later suppress or discard. The failure of beliefs like this is all too familiar from war after war, and alliance after alliance, during the past century. Moreover Saruman’s main advantage, we learn in ‘The Voice of Saruman’ (III/10) is indeed his voice:

Those who listened unwarily to that voice could seldom report the words that they heard; and if they did, they wondered, for little power remained in them. Mostly they remembered only that it was a delight to hear the voice speaking, all that it said seemed wise and reasonable, and desire awoke in them by swift agreement to seem wise themselves. When others spoke they seemed harsh and uncouth by contrast…

Different people will have different real-life experiences to match this too, but it is again a common experience in the world of the twentieth century to find oneself enmeshed in some professional jargon, whether it is that of Vietnam generals with their body-counts or of literary theorists with their différances and ratures, and to be unable to break free of it, or to shake off the assumptions it tacitly embodies; the experience goes further back than either of the examples just cited, as one can tell from Orwell’s repeated criticisms of early twentieth-century military and political language. Saruman is becoming a wraith, then, partly by merging himself with his own cause, discarding any sense of means in pursuit of some increasingly impossible end, and partly by the self-deceptions of language. He too becomes physically a wraith in the end, for when Wormtongue cuts his throat, the wraith rises from him:

about the body of Saruman a grey mist gathered, and rising slowly to a great height like smoke from a fire, as a pale shrouded figure it loomed over the Hill. For a moment it wavered, looking to the West; but out of the West came a cold wind, and it bent away, and with a sigh dissolved into nothing.

The body that is left once the ‘mist’ and the ‘smoke’ have departed seems in fact to have died many years before, becoming only ‘rags of skin upon a hideous skull’. There was still some humanity in Saruman – the figure which wavers, looking towards the West, is perhaps hoping for some forgiveness from the Valar, as the dissolving sigh perhaps indicates some sort of grief or repentance – but it had been steadily eaten up.

By what? C.S. Lewis might have replied, by nothing. One of the striking and convincing assertions made by his imagined devil, Screwtape, is that nowadays the strongest temptations are not to the old human vices of lust and gluttony and wrath, but to new ones of tedium and solitude. At the end of number XII of The Screwtape Letters Screwtape remarks that Christians describe God as the One ‘without whom Nothing is strong’, and they speak truer than they know, he goes on, for:

Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man’s best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them…or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish.

Sinners of this kind, of course, hate all those who appear to have ‘got a life’, in the revealing modern idiom; it is essential that they persuade others to join them in their dreariness and despair. And so we have the many modern literary images of evildoers as above all ‘hollow’ (T.S. Eliot wrote a poem called ‘The Hollow Men’); of evil as essentially pointless or bureaucratic (see Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, or Heller’s Catch-22); of the power of language to conceal unmistakable evil (the inhabitants of Le Guin’s Omelas, most of them, talking themselves out of what they have seen with their own eyes); of something dreadful underneath the routines of daily life, as in Conrad’s prosaic Marlow coming upon the ‘heart of darkness’ and Kurtz’s never-explained ‘The horror, the horror’. No one ever wrote anything like that in the Middle Ages. Tolkien may have taken his word ‘wraith’ from the sixteenth century and Gavin Douglas, but the concept of the Ring-wraiths themselves, and the hints as to how you get to be one, are responses to something found in his own, and our, life-experience. That is what has given them, not their literary originality, but their dreadful conviction. Two views of evil

The word which goes with ‘wraith’ from Gavin Douglas’s time is ‘shadow’, and it is a word which Tolkien uses repeatedly and pointedly. In the verse of the rings which Gandalf quotes to Frodo in ‘The Shadow of the Past’, the concluding lines are:

One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,

One Ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them,

In the land of Mordor where the shadows lie.

When Gandalf falls into the abyss, Aragorn says that he ‘fell into shadow’; Gandalf says that if they lose, ‘many lands will pass under the shadow’; sometimes ‘the Shadow’ becomes a personification of Sauron, as when Frodo tells Sam that ‘the Shadow can only mock, it cannot make…not real new things of its own’. The last statement goes far towards explaining why Tolkien used the word so often and with such emphasis. One might think that the main associations of ‘shadow’ are darkness, or menace, or perhaps oblivion, but the real point may be a more metaphysical one. Do shadows exist? In the Old English Solomon and Saturn poem from which Tolkien drew Gollum’s riddles, Solomon indeed asks Saturn, ‘What is that is not?’ And though the answer is expressed riddlingly, it contains the word besceadeð, ‘shadows’ (here a verb). Saturn seems to be saying that shadows both are and aren’t. Aren’t, in that a shadow is not a thing, but an absence caused by a thing. Are, in that they have shapes, and physical effects, like cold and dark. In folklore at least they can be detached, even stolen. Particularly ominous, therefore, is the slight variation on the line from the rings-verse given by Sam, when he recites the elvish poem about Gil-galad in I/11. This ends (my emphasis):

For into darkness fell his star,

In Mordor where the shadows are.

Just as the wraiths are both substantial and insubstantial, in Mordor (though Sam does not realize the ominousness of what he says), absence can take on a kind of life, can become presence – as it does for instance in Milton’s presentation of Death in Paradise Lost II, 666-73, also a ‘shape’ poised between ‘substance’ and ‘shadow’, and like the chief Ringwraith, bearing ‘the likeness of a kingly crown’ on ‘what seemed its head’.

By saying things like this, however, Tolkien sets up a running ambivalence throughout the whole of The Lord of the Rings, which acts as an answer at once orthodox and questioning to the whole problem of the existence and source of evil in a universe created (as both Tolkien and Milton were sure it was) by a benevolent God. One can sum Tolkien’s characteristically twentieth-century position up by saying that there are two opinions about the nature of evil, both old, both deep-rooted, both still relevant, neither easy to deny, but apparently irreconcilably in contradiction. One is that of orthodox Christianity, repeated and put into modern language by, for instance, Tolkien’s close friend and associate C.S. Lewis, whose exposition of it in Mere Christianity was composed at the same time as Tolkien was writing the first chapters of The Lord of the Rings, and eventually published in 1952. One of Lewis’s avowed motives in writing the book (in which ‘mere’ means ‘common’ or ‘central’) was to state doctrines which both he, an Ulster Protestant, and Tolkien, a Catholic, could agree on. Furthermore, as both Tolkien and Lewis would certainly have known, the most famous statement of this view of evil was made in a work written by a Christian, which however never at any point mentions Christ or any specifically Christian doctrine, trying at all times to reach its conclusions through logic alone: the De Consolatione Philosophiae written in the sixth century by Boethius, a Roman senator at the time of writing under sentence of death on charges of plotting to restore Imperial rule (a sentence in the end carried out: Boethius was tortured to death in AD 524 or 525).

The Boethian view is this: there is no such thing as evil. What people identify as evil is only the absence of good. Furthermore people in their ignorance often identify as evil things (like being under sentence of death) which are in fact and in the long run, or in the divine plan, to their advantage. Philosophy tells Boethius that ‘all fortune is certainly good’, omnem bonam prorsus esse fortunam. Corollaries of this belief are, as Frodo says to Sam in ‘The Tower of Cirith Ungol’, that evil cannot create, ‘not real new things of its own’, and furthermore it was not created; it arose (and here we switch over to ‘Mere Christianity’) when human beings exercised their own free will in withdrawing their service and their intentions from God; in the end, and when the divine plan has been fulfilled, all evils may be annulled, cancelled, brought to good, as the Fall of Man was by the Incarnation and Death of Christ. As all readers of Boethius have observed – and his translators into English have included King Alfred, Chaucer, and Queen Elizabeth the First – whatever one may think of the truth of Boethius’s opinions, no one can deny his fortitude in writing them on Death Row while waiting for execution. His view of the non-existence of evil has great authority, both in its own right and through its ratification by orthodox Christianity.

There is also a certain amount of evidence for it, put into colloquial language by Lewis and fictionalized by Tolkien through the rather unlikely medium of the orcs. To put Lewis’s argument first, a point he made with characteristic simplicity at the start of Mere Christianity is that even evil-doers are liable to excuse themselves in terms of what is good: breakers of promises insist that they do so because circumstances have changed, murderers claim that they were provoked, atrocities are excused as retaliation for earlier atrocities, and so on. Lewis claims that ‘in reality we have no experience of anyone liking badness just because it is bad’; and since bad and good are not symmetrical in this way, evil is an absence, as Boethius said, and also ‘a parasite, not an original thing’, rather as Frodo had said. The argument remains, however, rather abstract. One can see Tolkien here and there doing his best not only to make it more realistic, but even, for those with a robust sense of humour, even funny.

A clear but unnoticed example comes from the orcs. We hear orcs talking six times in The Lord of the Rings; I consider their conversations in more detail in the article in the Clark and Timmons collection mentioned already, but the point can be made from one conversation alone. In the last chapter of The Two Towers Frodo has fallen paralysed by the venom of Shelob the spider, and although Sam takes the Ring from him, Frodo falls into the hands of the orcs. Sam, wearing the Ring, can hear the dialogue of the two orc-leaders, Gorbag from Minas Morgul and Shagrat from Cirith Ungol. Gorbag warns Shagrat that while they have captured the one ‘spy’, Frodo, it is clear that someone else, presumably ‘a large warrior…with an elf-sword’, wounded Shelob and is still loose. The ‘little fellow’ they have caught:

‘may have had nothing to do with the real mischief. The big fellow with the sharp sword doesn’t seem to have thought him worth much anyhow – just left him lying: regular elvish trick.’

There is no mistaking the disapproval in Gorbag’s voice. He is convinced that it is wrong, and contemptible, to abandon your companions. Furthermore it is characteristic of the other side, a ‘regular elvish trick’, they do it all the time. Nearly everything Gorbag says is factually wrong, and it is less than a page before this orcish view of morality is also exposed. For Shagrat knows something which Gorbag doesn’t, which is that Shelob has ‘more than one poison’. She usually paralyses her prey rather than killing it outright. Shagrat asks:

‘D’you remember old Ufthak? We lost him for days. Then we found him in a corner; hanging up he was, but he was wide awake and glaring. How we laughed! she’d forgotten him, maybe, but we didn’t touch him – no good interfering with Her.’

What can one say but ‘regular orcish trick’? It is true that it is Gorbag who expresses disapproval of abandoning one’s companions, when other people do it, and Shagrat who laughs at doing exactly that, when he does it, but on this matter there seems to be no disagreement between them. Orcs here, and on other occasions, have a clear idea of what is admirable and what is contemptible behaviour, which is exactly the same as ours. They cannot revoke what Lewis calls ‘the Moral Law’ and create a counter-morality based on evil, any more than they can revoke biology and live on poison. They are moral beings, who talk freely and repeatedly of what is ‘good’, meaning by that more or less what we do. The puzzle is that this has no effect at all on their actual behaviour, and they seem (as in the conversation quoted) to have no self-awareness or capacity for self-criticism. But these are human qualities too. The orcs, though low down on the scale of evil, the mere ‘infantry of the old war’, quite clearly and deliberately dramatize what I have called the Boethian view: evil is just an absence, the shadow of the good.

The trouble with this view is that it is both highly counterintuitive, and in many circumstances extremely dangerous. One might, for instance, conclude that the proper response to it, if you accepted it, would be to become a conscientious objector, and to refuse to resist what appears to be evil on the ground that this is just a misapprehension. Evil after all is, according to Boethius, more harmful to the malefactor than to the victim and those who do it (or appear to do it) are more to be pitied than feared or fought. King Alfred, dictating his Old English translation of Boethius in the intervals of fighting a desperate war against heathen Vikings, in which he hanged both pirates taken prisoner and also on one occasion his own rebellious monks, certainly found it impossible to go along with Boethius all the way; while at the time that Tolkien was writing The Lord of the Rings, surrender to his country’s enemies would have meant handing over not only himself but many others to the whole apparatus of concentration camps, gas-chambers, and mass murder. A brave man might be prepared to be Boethian himself. But did he have the right to impose the results of that stance on others more defenceless? Neither Tolkien nor King Alfred would have thought so.

In any case there is an alternative tradition in Western thought, which has never risen to the status of being official, but which generates itself spontaneously from common experience. This says that while it may be all very well to make philosophical statements about evil, nevertheless evil does exist, and is not merely an absence; and what is more, it has to be resisted and fought, not by all means available, but by all means virtuous; and what is even more, not doing so, in the belief that one day Omnipotence will cure all ills, is a dereliction of duty. The danger of this opinion is that it swerves towards being a heresy, Manichaeanism, or Dualism: the belief that the world is a battlefield, between the powers of Good and Evil, equal and opposite – so that, one might say, there is no real difference between them, and it is a matter of chance which side one happens to choose.

The Inklings, as it happens, may have had a certain tolerance for Manichaeanism – in Mere Christianity II/2 Lewis awards Dualism second place, so to speak, after Christianity, before going on to make the case against it – but Tolkien certainly less than Lewis. It annoyed him very much when the reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement asserted that in The Lord of the Rings all that the good and the bad sides did was try to kill each other, so that they could not be told apart: ‘Morally there seems nothing to choose between them’ (this comes from a letter in the TLS for 9th December 1955, in which the reviewer, Alfred Duggan, defended himself against challenge; Tolkien later corresponded with David Masson, who had made the challenge precisely over the issue of the (dis)similarity of the good and evil sides). Tolkien was a more orthodox Christian than Lewis, and less tolerant of anything like heresy. Nevertheless, his education, his faith, and the circumstances of his time, all set up what seemed to be a deep-seated contradiction between Boethian and Manichaean opinions, between authority and experience, between evil as an absence (‘the Shadow’) and evil as a force (‘the Dark Power’). In The Lord of the Rings this contradiction drives much of the plot. It is expressed not only through the paradoxes of wraiths and shadows, but also through the Ring. Evil and the Ring

The Ring’s ambiguity is present almost the first time we see it, in ‘The Shadow of the Past’, when Gandalf tells Frodo, ‘Give me the ring for a moment’. Frodo unfastens it from its chain and, ‘handed it slowly to the wizard. It felt suddenly very heavy, as if either it or Frodo himself was in some way reluctant for Gandalf to touch it.’

Either it or Frodo. It may not seem very important to know which of these alternative explanations is true, but the difference is the difference between the world-views I have labelled above as ‘Boethian’ and ‘Manichaean’. If Boethius is right, then evil is internal, caused by human sin and weakness and alienation from God; in this case the Ring feels heavy because Frodo (already in the very first stages of addiction, we may say) is unconsciously reluctant to part with it. If there is some truth in the Manichaean view, though, then evil is a force from outside which has in some way been able to make the non-sentient Ring itself evil; so it is indeed the Ring, obeying the will of its master, which does not want to be identified. Both views are furthermore perfectly convincing. In the earlier scene of Bilbo’s inability to part with the Ring – not realizing it’s in his pocket, getting angry when pressed, unable to make up his mind, dropping the envelope with the Ring on the floor – all readers realize that these are not accidents, but manifestations of Bilbo’s own unconscious wishes: Freudianism has taught us all at least that much. However the whole plot of The Lord of the Rings is permeated with the idea of the will of Sauron operating at a distance, stirring up evil forces, literally animating the Ringwraiths and even the orcs; Gandalf talks repeatedly of the Ring as animate, betraying Isildur, abandoning Gollum, and says in explanation that according to Bilbo the Ring ‘needed looking after…it shrank or expanded in an odd way, and might suddenly slip off a finger where it had been tight’. The ideas that on the one hand the Ring is a sort of psychic amplifier, magnifying the unconscious fears or selfishnesses of its owners, and on the other that it is a sentient creature with urges and powers of its own, are both present from the beginning, and correspond to the internal/Boethian and external/ Manichaean theories of evil.

The ambiguity is more prominent and more important in later scenes. Frodo puts on the Ring six times in The Lord of the Rings. The first time is in the house of Tom Bombadil. This does not seem to count, for Tom, characteristically, is quite unaffected: he neither becomes invisible himself when he puts it on nor fails to see Frodo when he puts it on. The next time is in the Prancing Pony, when Frodo feels a ‘desire…to slip it on and vanish out of the whole silly situation’. This, of course, could be entirely his own doing; but ‘It seemed to him, somehow, as if the suggestion came to him from outside’. In any case ‘He resisted the temptation firmly’. He makes a speech, sings a song, and then, falling off the table on which he has been capering, finds he has put on the Ring. By accident? Frodo at least works out an explanation of how this could have happened. But at the same time ‘he wondered if the Ring itself had not played him a trick; perhaps it had tried to reveal itself in response to some wish or command that was felt in the room’. We never learn the truth about this, and the second explanation does not seem especially plausible. Who in the room could have given such a command? The likes of Bill Ferny seem too low-rank and too ignorant to be capable of projecting such orders. But this is not the case on Weathertop, when the Ring-wraiths attack.

Here the Manichaean view is much more evident. Frodo remembers all his warnings, but ‘something seemed to be compelling him’ to disregard them. The situation is different, again, from the moment in the Barrow-wight’s mound, when Frodo thought for a moment of using the Ring to escape, but put the thought aside without difficulty. On Weathertop he has ‘no hope of escape…he simply felt that he must take the Ring and put it on his finger’. He struggles against the urge for a while, but in the end ‘resistance became unbearable’. The feeling here is that Frodo’s will has just been overpowered by superior force, no doubt that of the wraiths, using some mental power of the sort Gandalf hinted at. And yet, and on the other hand, the word used at the start of the attack (just as in the Prancing Pony) is ‘temptation’: Frodo is tempted. Furthermore, we are told that it would have made a difference if he had yielded to the temptation. Gandalf says later on that his heart was not pierced by the Morgul-knife ‘because you resisted to the last’. He might mean just that Frodo dodged, shouted, struck out, in an entirely physical sense putting the Ringwraith off his aim. But more likely there is a psychological sense. The knife works by subduing the will, and if the will does not co-operate it works less well – though it does not lose its power entirely and altogether, as it would if evil were entirely a matter of inner temptations. Gandalf keeps up the ambiguity of the scene by remarking that ‘fortune or fate have helped you…not to mention courage’. But here he clearly means not either/or but both, fate and courage: the same may be true of the nature of the Ring.

Frodo uses the Ring twice on Amon Hen (II/10), and both times he has to, first to escape Boromir, then to get away from the Fellowship without being noticed. On the first occasion, though, he sees the Eye of Sauron, and becomes aware that it is looking for him. And as he does so:

He heard himself crying out Never, never! Or was it: Verily, I come, I come to you? He could not tell. Then as a flash from some other point of power there came to his mind another thought: Take it off! Take it off! Fool, take it off! Take off the Ring.

The two powers strove in him. For a moment, perfectly balanced between their piercing points, he writhed, tormented. Suddenly he was aware of himself again. Frodo, neither the Voice nor the Eye: free to choose and with one remaining instant in which to do so. He took the Ring off his finger.

This is an especially mysterious scene on first reading, though it is cleared up slightly when we learn (as has been said above) that the third voice is Gandalf’s, in a ‘high place’ somewhere striving against the mental force of the ‘the Dark Power’. But whose are the other two voices? The first one seems to be ‘himself, i.e. Frodo. The second one could be, perhaps, the voice of the Ring: the sentient creature obeying the call of its maker, Sauron, as it has been all along. Or could it be, so to speak, Frodo’s subconscious, obeying a kind of death-wish, entirely internal but psychically amplified by the Ring? For that, after all, is how we are told the Ring works. It gets a hold on people through their own impulses, towards pity or justice or knowledge or saving Gondor, and gives them the absolute power that corrupts absolutely. There has to be something there for it to work on; but, like the worms in Bilbo’s father’s proverb, everyone has some weak spot. They may ‘writhe’ between the external and internal powers, but that is surely how one gets to be a ‘wraith’.

The Manichaean images of the Ring become stronger as it moves closer to Mordor. Sam’s uses of it – he puts it on twice – are conditioned by immediate necessity, like Frodo’s on Amon Hen, but he too feels it both as an external power, ‘untameable save by some mighty will’, and as an inner temptation. Here, though, it seems obvious that the temptation to become ‘Samwise the Strong, Hero of the Age’ is mostly the Ring’s, amplifying whatever petty selfish urge it can find. Sam hardly feels the temptation, and puts it aside as a ‘shadow’, mere ‘phantoms’. In a similar way, on the Stairs of Cirith Ungol, Frodo hides from the Lord of the Nazgûl, but is sensed by him. Frodo feels ‘the beating upon him of a great power from outside’, which takes his hand and moves it ‘inch by inch towards the chain upon his neck’. But this time ‘There was no longer any answer to that command in his own will’, so that he can force his hand back, to the phial of Galadriel. ‘No longer’ of course implies that there had been such an answer previously, on Amon Hen, on Weathertop, or in the Prancing Pony. But this time there is no doubt that the ‘power’ is from ‘outside’.

The last and critical scene, however, is the one on Mount Doom, in the chambers of the Sammath Naur. In the approach to this the sense of an outside power has grown stronger and stronger. Sam sees Frodo’s hand creep again and again towards the Ring, only to be withdrawn ‘as the will recovered mastery’. It is a surprise, then, that when Frodo at last glimpses the Eye, reaches for the chain and the Ring, and whispers to Sam, ‘Hold my hand! I can’t stop it’, Sam can take his hand away and hold it without effort, indeed ‘gently’. The force that is operating on Frodo is not a physical one, like magnetism, which would be unaffected by personality; what is unstoppable to Frodo is imperceptible to Sam. In the same way, the Ring is a crushing burden to Frodo, but when Sam picks him up, expecting to feel the same ‘dreadful dragging weight of the accursed Ring’, it is no weight at all. Meanwhile the outside power is having an effect on Sam, but it operates once again (as in the scene on Amon Hen) by creating a kind of dialogue. Sam finds himself holding ‘a debate with himself. One voice is optimistic, determined, set on destroying the Ring. The other voice – it is ‘his own voice’, but it twice calls him ‘Sam Gamgee’, as if it was someone else – says he can’t go on, doesn’t know what to do, and ‘might just as well lie down now and give it up’. Whose voice is this? It could, of course, just be Sam’s own feelings of downheartedness: most people talk to themselves mentally at some point. On the other hand, it could be the Ring, once more amplifying inner feelings and this time giving them a voice. When Sam finally rejects the second voice, whoever’s it is, the ground shakes and rumbles, as if some outside power had recognized and resented his decision. All this builds up to the question of what makes Frodo fail at the last hurdle. He reaches the Sammath Naur, leaving Sam behind to deal with Gollum, and when Sam follows him in, he finds that even the phial of Galadriel is no longer any use to him. In this place, ‘the heart of the realm of Sauron…all other powers were here subdued’. At that moment, standing on the very edge of the Crack of Doom, Frodo gives up. His words are:

‘I have come…But I do not choose now to do what I came to do. I will not do this deed. The Ring is mine.’

With that he puts it on for the sixth and final time. It is a vital question to know whether Frodo does this because he has been made to, or whether he has succumbed to inner temptation. What he says suggests the latter, for he appears to be claiming responsibility very firmly: ‘I will not…the Ring is mine.’ Against that, there has been the increasing sense of reaching a centre of power, where all other powers are ‘subdued’. If that is the case, Frodo could no more help himself than if he had been swept away by a river, or buried in a landslide. It is also interesting that Frodo does not say, ‘I choose not to do’, but ‘I do not choose to do’. Maybe (and Tolkien was a professor of language) the choice of words is absolutely accurate. Frodo does not choose; the choice is made for him.

The question becomes an academic one, of course, in that the result is achieved by Gollum, fulfilling Frodo’s own words a few moments before, ‘If you touch me ever again, you shall be cast yourself into the Fire of Doom’. But Tolkien was an academic, and academics often see importance in academic issues where others do not. Is Frodo guilty? Has he given in to temptation? Or just been overpowered by evil? If one puts the questions like that, there is a surprising and ominous echo to them, which suggests that this whole debate between ‘Boethian’ and ‘Manichaean’ views, far from being one between orthodoxy and heresy, is at the absolute heart of the Christian religion itself. The Lord’s Prayer, which in Tolkien’s day everyone knew, and which most English-speakers know even yet, contains seven clauses or requests, and of these the sixth and seventh are:

Lead us not into temptation,

But deliver us from evil.

Are these variants of each other, saying the same thing? Or (much more likely) do they have different but complementary intentions, the first asking God to keep us safe from ourselves (the Boethian source of sin), the second asking for protection from outside (the source of evil in a Manichaean universe)? If the latter is the case, then Tolkien’s double or ambiguous view of evil is not a flirtation with heresy after all, but expresses a truth about the nature of the universe denied to the philosopher Boethius, and possibly even to the rationalist Lewis.

There is no doubt that the Lord’s Prayer was in Tolkien’s mind as he wrote the Sammath Naur scene, for he said as much in a private letter to David Masson, with whom he had been discussing the criticisms made of him, as mentioned above. In this letter (kindly shown to me by Mr Masson, of the Brotherton Library in Leeds), Tolkien quoted the last three clauses of the Lord’s Prayer, including ‘Forgive us our trespasses’, and commented that these were words which occurred to him, and that the scene in the Sammath Naur was meant to be a ‘ “fairy-story” exemplum’ of them. Tolkien did not comment on the Prayer’s apparent tautology, nor on the ambiguity of his own presentation of evil throughout, but they are of a piece. One can never tell for sure, in The Lord of the Rings, whether the danger of the Ring comes from inside, and is sinful, or from outside, and is merely hostile. And one has to say that this is one of the work’s great strengths. We all recognize, in our better moments at least, that much harm comes from our own imperfections, sometimes terribly magnified, like traffic deaths from haste and aggression and reluctance to leave the party too soon: those are temptations. At the same time there are other disasters for which one feels no responsibility at all, like (as Tolkien was writing) bombs and gas-chambers. They may in fact all be connected, as Boethius insisted: no human being can ever see enough to tell. But our experience does not feel like that. It is a mistake just to blame everything on evil forces ‘out there’, the habit of xenophobes and popular journalists; just as much a mistake to luxuriate in self-analysis, the great skill of Tolkien’s contemporaries, the cosseted upper-class writers of the ‘modernist’ movement.

And, of course, things would be much easier for the characters in The Lord of the Rings if this uncertainty over the nature of evil were to be withdrawn. If evil was just the absence of good, then the Ring could never be more than a psychic amplifier, and all the characters would need to do would be to put it aside, perhaps give it to Tom Bombadil: in Middle-earth we are assured that would be fatal. Conversely, if evil were only an external force without echo in the hearts of the good, then someone might have to take it to Orodruin, but it would not need to be Frodo: Gandalf could take it, or Galadriel, and whoever did so would have to fight only their enemies, not their friends or themselves. But if that were the case (and most fantasies are far more like that than The Lord of the Rings), then the work would be a lesser one, just a complex war-game of ‘Dungeons and Dragons’; as it would be a lesser one if it veered instead in the direction of philosophical treatise or confessional novel, without relevance to the real world of war and politics from which Tolkien’s experience of evil so clearly originated. Positive forces: 1

Luck

One more question about the scene in the Sammath Naur is, of course, what made Gollum fall? There is absolutely nothing in the text to say. It is just an accident: one more example of that ‘biased fortune’ which according to Colin Manlove makes Tolkien’s work impossible to take seriously. But it is clearly not just an accident: it is the result of a string of decisions taken at one time or another. By Bilbo, who refrained from murdering Gollum when he had the chance many years before, in chapter 5 of The Hobbit. By Gandalf and the elves, who do not execute or dispose of him when he is in their power, but ‘treat him with such kindness as they can find in their wise hearts’. By Frodo, who allows him to come along on the journey into Mordor, and even goes some way towards reforming him and returning him to being Sméagol again. Finally by Sam, who after many betrayals spares Gollum yet again on Mount Doom, clearly out of a sort of sympathy: the ‘something that restrained him’ from a killing thrust is an awareness of what it means to have borne the Ring. Gandalf hints prophetically at what will happen almost at the start of the story (in a passage probably written in late on). When Frodo says indignantly, ‘what a pity that Bilbo did not stab that vile creature’, Gandalf replies, picking up the implications of people’s words as he so often does, ‘it was Pity that stayed his hand’; furthermore Bilbo took so little harm from the addiction of the Ring, he asserts, ‘because he began his ownership of the Ring so. With Pity.’ Frodo remembers this conversation when he and Sam capture Gollum in the Dead Marshes, and he gets his reward for it, as Bilbo got his, with a kind of poetic justice. Frodo spares Gollum from Sting, and Gollum in the end rescues Frodo from the Ring. Gandalf’s statement has been cited already, ‘even the very wise cannot see all ends’, but one can recognize now that it is a Boethian statement as well as one about narrative. Moreover, most people can see a pattern once it has been traced out, and the death of Gollum confirms a pattern already expressed several times in the proverbs of Middle-earth – ‘a traitor may betray himself, and do good that he does not intend’, for instance, which Gandalf again prophetically says to Pippin (V/4).

Of course, even if Gollum’s death remains not just an accident, one may still feel the neatness of his fate to be ‘too good to be true’. Before deciding about that, though, it is as well to consider the meaning of the terms ‘fate’ and ‘accident’, and others related to them. The word Tolkien uses is sometimes ‘chance’, but he tends to qualify it. Tom Bombadil says, when he rescues the hobbits from Willow-man, ‘Just chance brought me then, if chance you call it’ (my emphasis). Ruin was averted in the Northlands, Gandalf says in Appendix A (III), ‘because I met Thorin Oakenshield one evening on the edge of Bree. A chance-meeting, as we say in Middle-earth’ (my emphasis again). The suggestion both times is that ‘chance’ is just a word people use to explain things they do not understand, but that this is a sign only of the limits of their understanding. But if this is the case, what would a less limited understanding make of events?

There are a few hints in The Lord of the Rings of superhuman powers outside Middle-earth. We learn from The Silmarillion that Gandalf, like Saruman and indeed Sauron, is a Maia, a spiritual creature sent originally for the relief of humanity and the other sentient species. Indeed, Tolkien said in a letter addressed to Robert Murray in November 1954: ‘I wd. venture to say that [Gandalf] was an incarnate “angel”’ – surely meaning the word, as often, etymologically, i.e. as in Greek angelos, ‘messenger’(see Letters, p. 202). Gandalf says himself that after the fight with the Balrog, ‘Naked I was sent back’. He does not say who sent him back, or who sent him in the first place, but we can infer again from The Silmarillion that it was the Valar, the powers protecting Middle-earth under God, or under Eru, the One. The Valar however show no sign of direct interference in the affairs of Middle-earth. The Gondorians shout ‘May the Valar turn him aside!’ as the oliphaunt charges, but we never know whether they do or not. The beast does swerve, but that could be chance again. Or is ‘chance’ the way the Valar work?

There are two things one can say about this. The first is that (as perhaps no one in the world knew better than Tolkien) people have a strong tendency to invent words which express their feeling both that some things are just accidents, and that there may well be some patterning force in just accidents. The Old English word is wyrd, which most glossaries and dictionaries translate as ‘fate’. Tolkien knew that the etymologies of the two words were quite different, ‘fate’ coming from the Latin fari, ‘to speak’, so ‘that which has been spoken’, sc. by the gods. The Old English word derives from weorÞan, ‘to become’: it means ‘what has become, what’s over’, so among other things, ‘history’ – a historian is a wyrdwritere, a writer-down of wyrd. Wyrd can be an oppressive force, then, for no one can change the past; but it is perhaps not as oppressive as ‘fate’ or even ‘fortune’, which extend into the future. As mentioned above, however (p. 27), there is a curiously exact modern English parallel to it, the word ‘luck’. The OED is reluctant to accept the idea, but it is an attractive thought that this derives from Old English (ge)lingan, ‘to happen’, and must have meant originally, ‘what has happened, what has turned up’: so you can have good luck or bad luck, depending as we say on ‘the luck of the draw’. Almost everyone believes, however, even now, at some level or another, that luck means more than that. As was said in chapter I, the dwarvish belief that Bilbo is one of those people who possess more than their share of it has modern parallels. We no longer believe in ‘the Fates’, but we still personify luck, Lady Luck; people say someone is having ‘a run of luck’; you can ‘back your luck’ – Farmer Giles does in Tolkien’s story Farmer Giles of Ham, and it pays off; and you can give luck some assistance – Farmer Giles’s advantageous position at the rear of the column when the dragon charges it is brought about ‘As luck (or the grey mare herself) would have it’. ‘Trusting to luck’ on its own is not however thought to be a sensible strategy, and here again ancient and modern opinions are in striking agreement. ‘Wyrd often spares the man who is not doomed’, says Beowulf, but he adds, ‘as long as his courage holds’. Gimli says to Pippin and Merry, ‘Luck served you there’, but he too adds, ‘but you seized your chance with both hands, one might say’. Pippin and Merry had indeed at that moment had some assistance from something, for as Gríshnakh drew his sword to kill them, an arrow pierced his hand: ‘it was aimed with skill, or guided by fate’. But which?

As with the ironies of interlace, the logic of luck (or chance, or fate, or fortune, or accident, or even wyrd) seems in Tolkien’s view to be this: there is no knowing how events will turn out, and it is certainly never a good idea for anyone to give up trying, whether out of despair or out of a passive confidence that some external power will intervene. If there is an external power (the Valar), it has to work through human or earthly agents, and if those agents give up, then the purpose of the external power will be thwarted. As Galadriel says, some of the things in her mirror ‘never come to be’. One might note also that some power or other sent the dream that brought Boromir to Rivendell; but it sent the dream first and most often to Faramir, who was ‘eager’ to follow its warning, only to be brushed aside by his brother. Boromir says that he took over because ‘the way was full of doubt and danger’, but there is some reason to disbelieve him. It would probably have been better for all if Faramir had been allowed to take the Valar’s advice. But people can avert the intentions of Providence, and obeying them (in so far as they can be detected) brings no guarantee of success or safety. The most one can say is that luck may turn out better than one expects, as in the case of Gollum in the Sammath Naur: but your courage has to hold (so Beowulf), you have to seize your opportunity with both hands (so Gimli), and being ‘too eager to deal out death in judgement’, and more generally knowingly doing wrong to improve your chances, will probably be counter-productive (so Gandalf). Only the last opinion is really open to the charge of bias, and of that no mere mortal can be sure. Positive forces: 2

Courage

Tolkien was, to put it mildly, not fortunate in his critics. They accused him of rigging the plot – I have tried to answer that just above. They accused him of failing to obey his own ground-rules over the Ring – I have tried to answer that by the word ‘addiction’. They accused him of making his good and evil characters morally indistinguishable: this was answered with fierce logic by W.H. Auden, who pointed out first in 1955, then in 1961, that a major difference was that the good characters, the Gandalfs and the Galadriels, could imagine becoming bad, whereas Sauron’s great weakness, even tactically, is that he cannot imagine the self-destructive strategy of destroying the Ring for ever. Just to show that any stick would do to beat some dogs, other critics complained that the good characters were just too good, without the expected human admixture of sin and weakness – thus taking no notice of the wraiths and the whole consistent idea of the wraithing process. However, one complaint which particularly annoyed Tolkien was that by Edwin Muir in the Observer (see Letters, p. 230). Muir reviewed each volume of The Lord of the Rings as they came out, successively in the Observer for 22nd August 1954, 21st November 1954, and 27th November 1955, and especially on the first and third occasions with strong reservations (he did like the Ents). Muir’s complaint in the third review, the annoying one, was that the whole work was sub-adult in its painlessness: ‘The good boys, having fought a deadly battle, emerge at the end of it well, triumphant and happy, as boys would naturally expect to do.’ There is a simple reply to this, which is to say that Frodo at least does not end up well, or happy, and that he avoids any suggestion of triumph, seeming in the end incurably scarred, a ‘burnt-out case’. He is admittedly taken away to be healed of his wounds, like King Arthur, though that is not the way Muir put it. But there are other people, and creatures, and things, which cannot be taken away or healed. In fact it is much easier to make a case out for Tolkien as a pessimist than as a foolish or childish optimist; it is another of the qualities which mark him out from most of those who have imitated him.

Thus, it is obvious that many if not most of the senior characters in The Lord of the Rings envisage defeat as a long-term prospect. Galadriel says, ‘Through ages of the world we have fought the long defeat’. Elrond agrees, saying ‘I have seen three ages in the West of the world, and many defeats and many fruitless victories’. Later on he queries his own adjective ‘fruitless’, but still repeats that the victory long ago in which Sauron was overthrown but not destroyed ‘did not achieve its end’. The whole history of Middle-earth seems to show that good is attained only at vast expense while evil recuperates almost at will. Thangorodrim is broken without evil being ‘broken for ever’, as the elves had expected. Númenor is drowned without getting rid of Sauron. Sauron is defeated and his Ring taken by Isildur, but this only sets in motion the crisis at the end of the Third Age. Moreover, it is made extremely (one might have thought, unmistakably) clear that even the destruction of the Ring and the overthrow of Sauron will conform to the general pattern of ‘fruitlessness’ – or perhaps one should say that the fruit will be bitter. The destruction of the Ring, says Galadriel, will mean that her ring and Gandalf’s and Elrond’s will all lose their power, so that Lothlórien ‘fades’ and the elves ‘dwindle’. Along with them will go the ents and the dwarves, indeed the whole of Middle-earth, to be replaced by modernity and the dominion of men; all the characters and their story will shrink to misunderstood words in poems here and there, lists of names with their meaning forgotten like the Dvergatal, correspondences visible only to the philologist. Beauty especially will be a casualty. Théoden asks in ‘The Road to Isengard’ (III/8), ‘However the fortunes of war shall go, may it not so end that much that was fair and wonderful shall pass out of Middle-earth?’ Gandalf replies only, ‘The evil of Sauron cannot be wholly cured, nor made as if it had not been.’ Treebeard confirms Théoden’s fear in much the same way as Gandalf when he says of his own doomed and dying species, ‘songs like trees bear fruit only in their own time and their own way, and sometimes they are withered untimely’ (III/4). The collective opinion of Middle-earth might well be summed up in Gandalf’s aphoristic statement, ‘I am Gandalf, Gandalf the White, but Black is mightier still’ (III/5).

This sounds ominously like a Manichaean statement, and also a ‘defeatist’ one. However, as has been said, Tolkien was careful to voice rebuttals of Manichaeanism several times and in several ways. With his best friends dead in Flanders, he was likely also to have no patience whatsoever with ‘defeatism’ in its original meaning, French défaitisme, a word which came into being about 1918 to express the war-weariness of the Allies, the feeling (especially among civilians) that the sacrifices already made should now be abandoned for an inconclusive peace. Why then the work’s continuing pessimism and expectations of defeat?

One answer must be that Tolkien wanted in a way to reintroduce to the world ‘the theory of courage’: not just courage, N.B., nor images of courage, but the ‘theory of courage’, which he had said in his Beowulf lecture of 1936 was the ‘great contribution’ to humanity of the old literature of the North (Essays, p. 20). What Tolkien meant was this. The mythology we find still expressed in Old Norse (Tolkien believed that it must have been present also, and earlier on, in Old English) was like the traditional Christian one in that it too ended in a Day of Doom, an Armageddon, in which the forces of good and evil finally confronted each other. The difference was that in the Norse one it was the forces of evil, the giants and the monsters, which won, so that the Norse Armageddon was called Ragnarök, ‘the destruction of the gods’. If the gods and their human allies are going to lose, though, and this is known to everyone, what in the world would make anyone want to join that side? Why not imitate the monsters instead, or become, so to speak, a devil-worshipper? The truly courageous answer – Tolkien called it a ‘potent but terrible solution’ (Essays, p. 26) – is to say that victory or defeat have nothing to do with right and wrong, and that even if the universe is controlled beyond redemption by hostile and evil forces, that is not enough to make a hero change sides. In a sense this Northern mythology asks more of people than Christianity does, for it offers them no heaven, no salvation, no reward for virtue except the sombre satisfaction of having done right. Even the heathen Valhalla is only a waiting-room and training-ground for the final defeat. Tolkien wanted his characters in The Lord of the Rings to live up to the same high standard, and was careful therefore to remove easy hope from them, to make them conscious of long-term defeat and doom.

Nevertheless Tolkien was himself a Christian, who did not believe that the universe was controlled ‘beyond redemption’ by the powers of evil; and he lived in a world in which the ‘potent and terrible solution’ of the ‘theory of courage’ had vanished almost beyond revival, or even understanding (try fitting it, for instance, into the plot of Star Wars). In his academic work he became accordingly significantly more nervous about seeing continuity from pagan to Christian eras in Old English poems – as one can see from his 1953 essay-poem rewriting The Battle of Maldon as ‘The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son’, see pp. 294-6 below. In his creative work he needed a new image for ultimate bravery, one which would have some meaning and some hope of emulation for the modern and un- or anti-heroic world. It was a problem he had faced before (see chapter I, and the discussion of Bilbo’s modernistic style of courage as opposed to the traditional heroic model of Beorn or Thorin); and in The Lord of the Rings he was to solve it once again through the hobbits, in a development of the cold-blooded, solitary, and non-aggressive courage shown in The Hobbit by Bilbo. But this time the hobbits are not so solitary, usually found in pairs, and the image of courage they project has a more social element about it: it is centred, unexpectedly, on laughter, cheerfulness, an attitude which far from speculating about its chances on Doomsday refuses ever to look into the future at all. There is about it at times an element of deliberate paradox.

All four hobbits in the main story are militarily unambitious, even in their most dramatic moments. Merry stabs the Nazgûl when the ‘slow-kindled courage’ of his race finally stirs, but it is from behind; Pippin is allowed to stab the hill-troll, one might think, in order to let him ‘draw level with old Merry’. They seem, however, to be less affected than most of their seniors by the despair and demoralization which is the main weapon of the Black Riders, perhaps because they are less sensitive, perhaps because they refuse to predict or rationalize. In Minas Tirith it is Pippin who cheers Beregond when they hear the Rider’s cry the first time, pointing to the sun and the banners and declaring, ‘my heart will not yet despair’. Merry’s duty meanwhile is to ‘lighten [Théoden’s] heart with tales’. He feels the ‘great weight of horror and doubt’ which settles on him and the Riders at the end of ‘The Ride of the Rohirrim’, but he is also the first to see the change. Part of the reason may be their (highly English) frivolity. They joke continually with each other, and with Théoden – who being English as well takes it in the right spirit. Merry apologizes for the habit in ‘The Houses of Healing’, ‘it is the way of my people to use light words at such times’, but Pippin’s last thought, as he falls under the weight of the troll:

laughed a little within him ere it fled, almost gay it seemed to be casting off at last all doubt and care and fear.

Pippin at that moment thinks he is dead and his cause totally defeated, but what cheers him at this last moment is the thought that he has been right all along, ‘it ends as I guessed it would’. Sam and Frodo react in much the same way after the destruction of the Ring. They too think that they are as good as dead, and furthermore that this is exactly what one might have expected. Frodo indeed brings up but rejects the idea of the compulsory happy ending, saying seriously, ‘it’s like things are in the world. Hopes fail. An end comes…We are lost in ruin and downfall, and there is no escape’. He turns out to be wrong, of course, but there is no denying the force of what he says as a general rule. But Sam’s reaction is merely to reflect, ‘What a tale we have been in’, and to wonder what the title of it will eventually be. Sam in any case had reached the point of paradox rather earlier (IV/3), in that, Tolkien explains, he had:

never had any real hope in the affair from the beginning; but being a cheerful hobbit he had not needed hope, as long as despair could be postponed. Now they had come to the bitter end. But he had stuck to his master all the way; that was what he had chiefly come for, and he would still stick to him.

Is it possible, one might ask, to be ‘cheerful’ and without hope at the same time? Modern optimistic convention says not (‘Ya gotta have hope’, says the song in the American musical), but the Gamgee family seems to take a sceptical view of that idea: While there’s life there’s hope, says the Gaffer, conventionally enough, but he usually tacks on the deflating words, and need of vittles. Sam is in a way presenting a modern version of the ‘theory of courage’, which did not have to be offered the bribe of assured victory at Ragnarök to do its duty. Perhaps the argument may be that only those who need hope to keep going will fall prey to despair when their hope is withdrawn. Those who, like Sam and Pippin, felt from the start that the whole thing was going to be a disaster remain immune, even cheerful, when their expectations are confirmed. Tolkien knew that in the Norse mythology Vön, Hope, is not one of the three cardinal virtues but, contemptuously, the drool that runs from the mouth of Fenris-Wolf; he also knew that ‘cheerfulness’ is in its origin at least a virtue of the face alone, chair being the Old French word for face – when Sir Gawain sets off to face apparently certain death, the poet remarks (Tolkien’s translation):

The knight ever made good cheer [= put a good face on it], saying, ‘Why should I be dismayed? Of doom the fair or drear by a man must be assayed.’

Modern convention again disagrees, but there is an old and still-powerful opinion which says that the face is more important than the heart: because it is, or it should be, under conscious control.

The most characteristic moment of Tolkien’s new-model theory of courage is however at the end of Book IV/8, ‘The Stairs of Cirith Ungol’. Here Sam and Frodo take what they expect to be their last meal, and consider the theory of narrative. The great tales do not come to an end, says Frodo, but in case that should sound too optimistic he adds that the people in them do. Sam pursues the idea of the continuing tale, and suggests with comic loss of grammar, and indeed bathos, that maybe in the future some father will say to his son that Frodo was ‘the famousest of the hobbits, and that’s saying a lot’ (actually, we know, not much). And Frodo laughs:

Such a sound had not been heard in those places since Sauron came to Middle-earth. To Sam suddenly it seemed as if all the stones were listening and the tall rocks leaning over them. But Frodo did not heed them; he laughed again. ‘Why, Sam,’ he said, ‘to hear you somehow makes me as merry as if the story was already written. But you’ve left out one of the chief characters: Samwise the stouthearted. “I want to hear more about Sam, dad. Why didn’t they put in more of his talk, dad? That’s what I like, it makes me laugh.”’

They carry on talking, and then fall asleep. There Gollum finds them, to be touched by the peace in their faces, and to creep up and try to touch Frodo’s knee, seeming for a moment not Gollum but Sméagol again, ‘an old weary hobbit, shrunken by the years…an old starved pitiable thing’.

It is a sign of a kind of hardness in the fable, not recognized by Edwin Muir, that this moment of sentiment is immediately dissipated by Sam. He wakes up, sees Gollum ‘“pawing at master,” as he thought’, speaks to him roughly (Gollum for once answers ‘softly’), and then accuses him of ‘sneaking off and sneaking back – you old villain’. At this ‘Gollum withdrew himself…The fleeting moment had passed, beyond recall’. Among the unnoticed casualties of Middle-earth, one should realize, is the old hobbit Sméagol, as well as the creature he turns into, Gollum. Most of the characters indeed bear a burden of regret, expressed again with deliberate paradox in Treebeard, who knows his race and his story are sterile, but who looks as a result, according to Pippin, ‘sad but not unhappy’ (III/4). Can you be ‘sad’ and ‘(not un) happy’ at the same time? Not according to modern semantics, but Tolkien often took no notice of that. Treebeard’s sad happiness (an old meaning of ‘sad’ is ‘settled, determined’, as C.S. Lewis pointed out in his Studies on Words), and Sam’s hopeless cheer (identical with Sir Gawain’s), form an image of courage which, above all, can carry on in the complete absence of any trust in luck. Some conclusions

There is a final unrecognized touch of hardness in The Lord of the Rings in the oblivion that is settling over Frodo in its final chapters. He may have great honour elsewhere, but in the Shire Sam is ‘pained’ to see how little respect he is given. His pacifism and lack of aggression mean that he takes no part in the final ‘Battle of Bywater’ except to intervene to protect the prisoners. His name is not at the top of the Roll which has to be learned by heart by all Shire-historians, and his family, unlike the Cottons, Gamgees, and Fairbairns, gains no advancement from it. Indeed he has no family: his story, like Treebeard’s, will prove to be sterile, and in spite of Sam’s imaginings he will never be ‘the famousest of the hobbits’ in the Shire itself. Nor does he appear to be curable, at any rate in this world. And he insists on almost the last page of the entire work, as he and others have done all the way through, that that is the way things are:

‘It must often be so, Sam, when things are in danger: some one has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them.’

The lack of respect and attention paid to this best of the ‘good boys’ contradicts not only Edwin Muir but the whole system of war memorials, minutes’ silences, Earl Haig funds and poppy-days familiar to Tolkien as to all inhabitants of post-World War I Britain. Or at least it does so on the surface: what Frodo says is in fact similar to the words on the Imphal-Kohima monument, now itself largely forgotten, and themselves often misquoted. They go (in evident parallel to the epitaph of Simonides for the Spartans at Thermopylae, Golding’s ‘Hot Gates’):

When you go home tell them of us and say

For your tomorrow we gave our today.

Like several of the major authors of fantasy mentioned above, Tolkien was a war-survivor, and his work expresses along with a strong belief in (a kind of) Providence the disillusionment of the returned veteran.

If one turns now from the incipiently sublime to the near-ridiculous, there is, as I have suggested before, a fierce and a strong competition among literary critics for the honour of having made the least perceptive comment on Tolkien. One of the contenders must be the dismissal offered by Professor Mark Roberts of Keele University, who said of The Lord of the Rings in an article in Essays in Criticism for 1956:

It doesn’t issue from an understanding of reality which is not to be denied, it is not moulded by some controlling vision of things which is at the same time its raison d’être.

In this post-modern world it is of course hard to conceive of any ‘understanding of reality’ which will not be denied by someone or other, but Professor Roberts spoke from a simpler critical era; he was clearly trying to write Tolkien off in the language and from the perspective of the then-dominant F.R. Leavis – and indeed it is true that The Lord of the Rings, like the rest of modern fantasy, would never fit into the neat succession of Leavis’s ‘Great Tradition’. When Roberts says, however, that the work has no ‘controlling vision of things which is at the same time its raison d’ être’, one has to wonder how he could be so blind. As I have tried to show in this chapter and the preceding one, The Lord of the Rings fits together, whether one likes the result or not, on almost every level. The complex interlacement of the narrative structure positively generates ironies (and anti-ironies) for the reader, uncertainties and ‘bewilderment’ for the characters. Those uncertainties, about themselves and others, are mirrored by the ambiguous nature of the Ring, part psychic amplifier, part malign power, and of the ultimate source of the evil that surrounds it, perhaps internal, perhaps external. I have argued that the work’s ‘controlling vision of things’ is in fact a double vision, between the opinions I label ‘Boethian’ and ‘Manichaean’; and that both opinions are presented at one time or another with equal force, whether it is in the Dead Marshes (Manichaean, but maybe an illusion) or the Field of Cormallen (Boethian, but rapidly evanescent). As the characters steer their way through these consistent uncertainties, they are guided by a developed theory of ‘chance’ or ‘luck’ which is at the same time perfectly familiar, perfectly colloquial, and also philologically and philosophically consistent; and by a theory of courage which is similarly ancient in its roots, and familiar in contemporary times (as Tolkien said himself) from one First World War memoir after another. It is reasonable to imagine someone rejecting Tolkien’s vision (though it has proved powerful to many, like me, who unlike him are not committed Christians). But there is something wilful and weary about the inability to see that there is any vision there at all.

What Professor Roberts meant, no doubt, was that Tolkien did not share his vision and the vision of his class and time, and the difference is especially strong over the question of the nature and source of evil, which I take to be the central issue of The Lord of the Rings, as of so many modern fantasies. It is worth reflecting for a moment on the opinions about this available to Tolkien and his fellow-veterans from the official spokesmen and spokeswomen of his contemporary culture, say in the 1920s and 1930s. There was a Freudian view, slowly making its way into general consciousness in the early years of the twentieth century, as one can see from the OED’s reluctant and belated entries on words like ‘repression’, ‘complex’, ‘unconscious’, ‘trauma’: Lewis in particular continually objected to this, probably with the backing of his fellow-Inklings, as tending to dissolve responsibility or any sense of personal guilt. There was what one might call the ‘Bloomsbury’ view, expressed by writers like Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, Bertrand Russell, and above all G.E. Moore, whose Principia Ethica has been called the most significant philosophical work of the century. But while summarizing the views of all the ‘Bloomsberries’ together would be a difficult occupation, one can say with some conviction that there is nothing in the Principia Ethica which has any but the remotest bearing on the immediate issues of evil in the twentieth century – industrialized war, carpet bombing, the use of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, genocide and the massacre of non-combatants, several of these matters of personal experience to Tolkien and his fellow-veterans. Bloomsbury views of vice and virtue are essentially private; they are like Freud’s in being above all about human relationships.

Meanwhile, and even more prominent than the last two, there are the traditional views and images of evil as put forward by literary tradition. It is astonishing how often Tolkien was reprimanded by critics for not returning to these images – which, however, his fellow-writers (often and for good reason keen medievalists) had seen, considered, and discarded as no longer possible, ‘not enough any more’, to repeat Vonnegut on Dostoyevsky. Why could Tolkien not be more like Sir Thomas Malory, asked Muir, in the third Observer review of those cited above, and give us heroes and heroines like Lancelot and Guinevere, who ‘knew temptation, were sometimes unfaithful to their vows’, were engagingly marked by adulterous passion? But T.H. White had already considered that paradigm, was indeed rewriting it at the same time as Tolkien as The Once and Future King; and he had seen the core of Malory’s work not in romantic vice but in the human urge to murder. In White the poisonous adder which allegedly provokes the last disastrous battle is no adder but a harmless grass-snake, and the flash of the sword which brings on the two armies is not natural self-defence but natural blood-lust, creating a continuum from cruelty to animals to world wars and holocausts. Malory has to be rewritten to encompass a new view of evil. Or, Muir asked in the first of his reviews, why could Tolkien have not given us anti-heroes more like the Satan of Paradise Lost, at once ‘both evil and tragic’? But C.S. Lewis had already considered that paradigm, had indeed rewritten Paradise Lost in 1943 as Perelandra, or Voyage to Venus. In that he made clear his opinion that there was nothing at all grand, dignified and tragic about evil, which was instead tedious, sordid and squalid, showing itself in petty mutilations which disgusted even a man like his hero Ransom who had been (like Tolkien) ‘on the Somme’. Other writers, like Vonnegut and Heller, spent close to twenty years trying to work out a literary mode which could encompass their experiences of insanity, the absurd, the non-volitional. The ‘Great Tradition’ of the English novel was no use to them in this.

To return to what was said at the beginning of this chapter, for all its antiquarian knowledge and antiquarian charm, no one could mistake The Lord of the Rings for anything but a work of the twentieth century. It shows above all the difficulties which that century has created for traditional views of good and evil, though it also tries to re-assert them. Aragorn says to Éomer, ‘Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear; nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among Men. It is a man’s part to discern them.’ But one may feel as much sympathy with Éomer’s uncertainty, and with his question, ‘How shall a man judge what to do in such times?’ In the next chapter I go on to discuss the contemporaneity of The Lord of the Rings, which has led some into thoughts of political allegory, and also the drive towards a more enduring mythology which I believe underlies contemporary applications.