The Road to Middle-Earth: How J. R. R. Tolkien Created a New Mythology

CHAPTER 5

INTERLACEMENTS AND THE RING A problem in corruption

Lothlórien has won many hearts, and even the most censorious of Tolkien’s critics have accordingly been ready to grant him the ability to create nice settings. ‘What is outstanding, though, is the scenery’, declared the kindly reviewer for the Bath and West Evening Chronicle (7 December 1974).¹ However good scenery is not one of the major virtues on the critical scale; many published opinions throw it in as a sop, a makeweight to balance what they see as much more serious flaws deep in the heart of the Tolkienian ‘fable’, in the essential story of The Lord of the Rings. The characters, it is often alleged, are flat; there is not enough awareness of sexuality; good and evil are presented as absolutes, without a proper sense of inner conflict within individuals; there is something incoherent in the ‘main pattern’ of the story, which prevents one from reading it as ‘a connected allegory with a clear message for the modern world’. Most of all, The Lord of the Rings is felt not to be true to ‘the fundamental character of reality’, not to mirror ‘an adult experience of the world’, not to portray ‘an emotional truth about humanity’. Professor Mark Roberts, speaking from the centre of the critical consensus, declared: ‘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.’ The archaism of the settings, in short, goes along with an escapism of intention, a deliberate turning away from real life and from present-day experience.²

Now it is evident that some of these statements have gone beyond compromise. When people start appealing to ‘truth’, ‘experience’ and ‘reality’, still more to ‘the fundamental character of reality’, they imply very strongly that they know what these things are, an insight not likely to be shaken by argument. Probably at the bottom of the confrontation between The Lord of the Rings and its critics there lies some total disagreement over the nature of the universe, a disagreement surfacing in strong, instinctive, mutual antipathy. Nothing will cure this. However it ought to be possible to bring the reasons for it out into the light, and by doing so to show that whatever may be said of Tolkien’s view of reality, it was neither escapist nor thoughtless. A sensible place to begin this endeavour is with the mainspring of the story’s action, the Ring (here capitalised to distinguish it from the relatively insignificant stage-prop or ‘Equalizer’ of The Hobbit).

The most evident fact to note about the Ring is that it is in conception strikingly anachronistic, totally modern. In the vital chapter ‘The Shadow of the Past’ Gandalf says a great deal about it, but his information boils down to three basic data: (1) the Ring is immensely powerful, in right or wrong hands; (2) it is dangerous and ultimately fatal to all its possessors – in a sense there are no right hands; (3) it cannot simply be left unused or put aside, but must be destroyed, something which can happen only in the place of its origin, Orodruin, Mount Doom. ‘There is only one way’, he says to Frodo, and it is essential to the story that this should be accepted as true: the Ring cannot be kept, it has power over everybody, it has to be destroyed. Spread over sixteen pages (45–60) these remarks function as part of a story, but as soon as they are put together it is a dull mind which does not reflect, ‘Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely’. That maxim, one could say, is the core of The Lord of the Rings, and it is reinforced from the start by all that Gandalf says about the way Ringbearers fade, regardless of all their ‘strength’ or ‘good purpose’, and further by his violent refusal to take the Ring himself:

‘Do not tempt me! For I do not wish to become like the Dark Lord himself. Yet the way of the Ring to my heart is by pity, pity for weakness and the desire of strength to do good. Do not tempt me! I dare not take it, not even to keep it safe, unused. The wish to wield it would be too great for my strength …’ (p. 60)

His renunciation makes sense in an age which has seen many pigs become farmers; no reviewer has ever balked at this basic opening move of Tolkien’s.

Yet the opinion that ‘power corrupts’ is a distinctively modern one. Lord Acton gave it expression for the first time in 1887, in a letter which Tolkien might have been interested enough to read – it is in a strongly anti-Papal context.³ William Pitt had said something similar a hundred years before, ‘Unlimited power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who possess it’, but before that the idea does not seem to have been attractive. It might even have been thought perverse. Lord Acton’s actual words were: ‘Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men …’, and with this latter opinion no medieval chronicler, romancer or hagiographer would have been likely to concur. There is as it happens an Anglo-Saxon proverb analogous to Lord Acton’s, but still significantly different. What it says is Man deþ swá hé byþ þonne hé mót swá hé wile, ‘Man does as he is when he may do as he wishes’, or more colloquially ‘you show what you’re like when you can do what you like’.⁴ This is certainly cynical about the ill-effects of power, but what it implies is ‘power exposes’, not ‘power corrupts’. The idea that a person once genuinely good could be made bad merely by the removal of restraints is not yet present. Tolkien is certain to have felt the modernity of his primary statement about the Ring. One has to wonder then why he made it and how he related it to the archaic world of his plot. Does Lord Acton’s Victorian proverb, in Middle-earth, ring true?

There is at least a plausible argument to say that it does not. Thus Gandalf says at the start that the Ring will ‘possess’ and ‘devour’ any creature who uses it, while Elrond later goes further and says ‘The very desire of it corrupts the heart’ (p. 261). As has been said, these are essential data for the story, and some of the time they seem to be confirmed. Gollum, for instance, is presented throughout as very nearly enslaved to the Ring, with only fleeting traces of free will left, and those dependent on keeping away from it. Much higher up the moral scale Boromir bears out Elrond’s words. He never touches the Ring, but desire to have it still makes him turn to violence. Obviously his original motive is patriotism and love of Gondor, but when this leads him to exalt ‘strength to defend ourselves, strength in a just cause’, our modern experience of dictators immediately tells us that matters would not stay there. Kind as he is, one can imagine Boromir as a Ringwraith; his never-quite-stated opinion that ‘the end justifies the means’ adds a credible perspective to corruption. The same could be said of his father Denethor, to whom Gandalf again makes the point that even unhandled the Ring can be dangerous: ‘if you had received this thing, it would have overthrown you. Were it buried beneath the roots of Mindolluin, still it would burn your mind away.’ With examples like these, it is easy to go further and accept, for the purposes of the story, that even Gandalf’s good intentions would not resist the Ring, and that Galadriel too does right to refuse it at p. 357. While the Ring stays a veiled menace, one may conclude, it works perfectly well.

The problem comes from the apparent immunity of so many other characters. Frodo, after all, is in contact with the Ring nearly all the time, but shows little sign of being corrupted. He goes through great labours to get rid of it. Furthermore when he does give way and claim it for his own, he loses it almost immediately to Gollum, who bites off Ring and finger with it. Gandalf had said much earlier that ‘Already you too, Frodo, cannot easily let it go, nor will to damage it. And I could not “make” you – except by force, which would break your mind.’ But in the Sammath Naur we have force being used very strongly, in the shape of Gollum’s teeth; yet Frodo’s mind remains unaffected. Anyway, what about Sam, who takes the Ring but hands it back with only momentary delay, Pippin and Merry, who show no desire for it at all, Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli, who display the same indifference without the excuse of ignorance, and Boromir’s brother Faramir, who realises the Ring is in his power but refuses to take it, with no more sign of mental turmoil than a ‘strange smile’ and a glint in the eye? One sees the beginnings of a serious criticism of the very basis of The Lord of the Rings here: the author appears to have presented a set of rules and then observed them only partially, reserving as it were the right to exceptions and miracles. This is what has made some people think that in this work the distinction between good and bad is simply arbitrary, residing not in the nature of the characters but in the needs of the plot.⁵

Actually all the doubts just mentioned can be cleared up by the use of one word, though it is a word never used in The Lord of the Rings. The Ring is ‘addictive’. All readers probably assimilate Gollum early on to the now-familiar image of a ‘drug-addict’, craving desperately for a ‘fix’ even though he knows it will kill him. For the same reason they understand why Gandalf tells Frodo not to use the Ring (use always causes addiction); why Sam, Bilbo and Frodo nevertheless survive their use of it (addiction in early stages is curable); why Boromir succumbs to the Ring without handling it (use has to be preceded by desire); and why Faramir can shrug it off (a wise person is capable of stifling the desire to become addicted, though no wisdom will stifle addiction once contracted). As for the scene in the Sammath Naur, it is even more Providential than it looks. What Gandalf said to Frodo at the start, we should realise, was that he might be able to give the Ring away or destroy it, though only with a struggle; he could not however be made to want to do so (except by some kind of dangerous thought-control). In the end Frodo does want to destroy the Ring but has not the strength. Gollum is accordingly necessary after all – a striking irony. Extending the parallel with heroin one may say that addicts can be cured by the use of external force, and often they have to be, though their co-operation certainly helps. To expect them to break their syringes and throw away their drugs by will-power alone, though, is to confuse an addiction, which is physical, with a habit, which is moral. In this aspect of the Ring as in others Tolkien is totally consistent.

He is, however, once again being distinctively modern. The phrase ‘drug addict’ is not recorded by the OED till 1920; probably the concept was created by the synthesis of heroin in 1898. As for the term ‘addictive’, by some oversight the full OED did not recognise its existence till after Tolkien’s death. Still, during Tolkien’s lifetime the words and the realities behind them were becoming more and more familiar, bringing with them, one should note, entirely new ideas about the nature and limitations of human will. As with ‘power corrupting’, Tolkien was during the 1930s and 1940s reacting quite evidently to the issues of his time. These deliberate modernities should clear him of any charge of merely insulated ‘ivory tower’ escapism. They ought to suggest also that he thought more deeply than his critics have ever recognised about just those issues he is commonly alleged to ignore: the processes of temptation, the complex nature of good and evil, the relationship between reality and our fallible perception of it. Nothing can prevent people from saying that the answers he gave were not ‘adult’ or ‘fundamental’, but it should be obvious that such adjectives are as culture-biased as Saruman’s ‘real’: by themselves they express only the prejudices of the user. Tolkien was, in short, trying to make Middle-earth say something, as well as conducting his readers on a tour of it. Decision on whether the message is right or wrong should at least come after working out what the message is. But proper understanding of that, as often, depends on comparing ancient things and modern ones, checking old texts against new understandings, and against timeless realities. Views of evil: Boethian and Manichaean

A good way to understand The Lord of the Rings in its full complexity is to see it as an attempt to reconcile two views of evil, both old, both authoritative, both living, each seemingly contradicted by the other. One of these is in essence the orthodox Christian one, expounded by St Augustine and then by Catholic and Protestant teaching alike, but finding its clearest expression in a book which does not mention Christ at all: Boethius’s De Consolatione Philosophiae, a short tract written c. AD 522–5 by a Roman senator shortly before his execution by *Thiudoreiks (or Theodoric), king of the Goths. This says that there is no such thing as evil: ‘evil is nothing’, is the absence of good, is possibly even an unappreciated good – Omnem bonam prorsus esse fortunam, wrote Boethius, ‘all fortune is certainly good’. Corollaries of this belief are, that evil cannot itself create, that it was not in itself created (but sprang from a voluntary exercise of free will by Satan, Adam and Eve, to separate themselves from God), that it will in the long run be annulled or eliminated, as the Fall of Man was redressed by the Incarnation and Death of Christ. Views like these are strongly present in The Lord of the Rings. Even in Mordor Frodo asserts that ‘the Shadow … can only mock, it cannot make: not real new things of its own’ (p. 893), and Fangorn has already corroborated him, ‘Trolls are only counterfeits, made by the Enemy in the Great Darkness, in mockery of Ents, as Orcs were of Elves’ (p. 474). What the difference is between a real thing and a ‘counterfeit’, one cannot tell, but anyway the idea of perversion as opposed to creation comes over. It goes with Elrond’s firm statement even earlier that ‘nothing is evil in the beginning. Even Sauron was not so’ (p. 261). On these ultimate points Tolkien was not prepared to compromise.

Still, there is an alternative tradition in Western thought, one which has never become ‘official’ but which nevertheless arises spontaneously from experience. This says that while it may be all very well to make philosophical statements about evil, evil nevertheless is real, and not merely an absence; and what’s more it can be resisted, and what’s more still, not resisting it (in the belief that one day Omnipotence will cure all ills) is a dereliction of duty. The danger of this opinion is that it tends towards Manichaeanism, the heresy which says that Good and Evil are equal and opposite and the universe is a battlefield; however the Inklings may have had a certain tolerance for that (see C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, Book 2, section 2). Furthermore one can imagine statements about the nature of evil which would go past Boethius but stop short of Manichaeus. Tolkien perhaps found such opinions in a work he knew well, King Alfred the Great’s personal translation of Boethius into Old English.

This is a remarkable book, mainly because while King Alfred showed a decent regard for the philosopher he was translating, he was not too modest to add bits of his own. He had moreover, unlike Boethius, had the experience of seeing what Viking pirates did to his defenceless subjects; and again unlike Boethius had taken such drastic measures against evil as hanging Viking prisoners, and rebellious monks, and in all probability cutting the throats of any wounded pirates so unlucky as to be left on the battlefield. All this did not stop Alfred from being a Christian king; indeed some of his recorded behaviour seems almost Quixotically forgiving. Nevertheless his career reveals the strong point of a ‘heroic’ view of evil, the weak point of a Boethian one: if you regard evil as something internal, to be pitied, more harmful to the malefactor than the victim, you may be philosophically consistent but you may also be exposing others to sacrifices to which they have not consented (like being murdered by Viking ravagers or, as The Lord of the Rings was being written, being herded into gas-chambers). In the 1930s and 1940s Boethius was especially hard to believe. Still, his view could not just be set aside.

Tolkien’s way of presenting this philosophical duality was through the Ring. It seems in several ways inconsistent. For one thing it is notoriously elastic, and not entirely passive. It ‘betrayed’ Isildur to the arrows of the orcs; it ‘abandoned’ Gollum, says Gandalf, in response to the ‘dark thought from Mirkwood’ of its master; it all but betrays Frodo in the Prancing Pony when it slips on to his finger and proves his invisibility to the spies for the Nazgûl then present. ‘Perhaps it had tried to reveal itself in response to some wish or command that was felt in the room’, thinks Frodo, and he is clearly right. For all that it remains an object which cannot move itself or save itself from destruction. It has to work through the agency of its possessors, and especially by picking out the weak points of their characters – possessiveness in Bilbo, fear in Frodo, patriotism in Boromir, pity in Gandalf. When Frodo passes it to Gandalf so that its identity can be confirmed, ‘It felt suddenly very heavy, as if either it or Frodo himself was in some way reluctant for Gandalf to touch it’ (p. 48, my italics). Maybe the Ring is magically conscious of Gandalf’s power: maybe, though, Frodo is already afraid that he will lose it. These two possible views of the Ring are kept up throughout the three volumes: sentient creature, or psychic amplifier. They correspond respectively to the ‘heroic’ view of evil as something external to be resisted and the Boethian opinion that evil is essentially internal, psychological, negative.

The point is repeated in several scenes of temptation. Frodo puts on the Ring six times during The Lord of the Rings: once in the house of Tom Bombadil (which does not seem to count), once by accident in the Prancing Pony, once on Weathertop, twice on Amon Hen, once in the final scene in the Sammath Naur. On several other occasions he feels an urge to, most strongly in the valley below Minas Morgul, as the Ringwraith leads out his army. Four of these scenes at least are highly significant. Thus on Amon Hen Frodo puts on the Ring, contrary to Gandalf’s injunction, simply to escape from Boromir, and the narrator ratifies his decision: ‘There was only one thing to do’. He keeps it on, though, goes to the summit of Amon Hen and sits on the Seat of Seeing. There the Eye of Sauron becomes aware of him and leaps towards him like a searchlight:

Very soon it would nail him down, know just exactly where he was. Amon Lhaw it touched. It glanced upon Tol Brandir – he threw himself from the seat, crouching, covering his head with his grey hood.

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. (p. 392)

This is a scene which has puzzled and irritated critics. Dr C. N. Manlove writes ‘the Voice’ off as ‘providential’, and clearly thinks it one more example of the ‘biased fortune’ which in his opinion makes it impossible to take the story seriously. Actually the Voice is Gandalf’s, as we might have guessed from its asperity, and as is anyway confirmed on p. 484: it may seem fair enough to let a wizard oppose a necromancer. More remarkable is the opposition between Never! and I come to you. Is this a struggle inside Frodo’s soul, between his conscious will and his unconscious wickedness (the sort of wickedness which might earlier have made him reluctant to hand over the Ring to Gandalf)? Or is I come to you the voice of the Ring itself – or even a projection from the voice of the Enemy, saying to Frodo what he wants to hear, putting words in the mouth but not in the heart, creating ugly fictions as he does later with the phantasmal corpses of the Dead Marshes? Either view is possible. Both are suggested. Evil may accordingly be an inner temptation or an external power.

Similar uncertainty dramatises other scenes when Frodo puts on the Ring, or tries to, or is ordered to. In the valley of Minas Morgul the Ringwraith sends out a command for him to put it on, but Frodo finds no response to it in his own will, feeling only ‘the beating upon him of a great power from outside’. The power moves his hand, as if by magnetism, but he forces it back, to touch the phial of Galadriel and be momentarily relieved. Perhaps the same thing happened to him on Weathertop, where he put the Ring on as the Ringwraiths closed in, but the words used there are ‘temptation’ and ‘desire’ – ‘his terror was swallowed up in a sudden temptation to put on the Ring. The desire to do this laid hold of him, and he could think of nothing else.’ He had felt a similar urge in the Barrow, as the wight’s fingers came towards him, and there the temptation offered was to abandon his friends and use the Ring to escape. On Weathertop we are told he had no such conscious and immoral thought. Nevertheless it seems that there the external power is abetted by some inner weakness, some potentially wicked impulse towards the wrong side. In the chambers of Sammath Naur one’s judgement must also be suspended. Frodo makes a clear and active statement of his own evil intention: ‘I will not do this deed. The Ring is mine!’ But at the same time we have been told that even the phial of Galadriel loses its virtue on Mount Doom, for there Frodo is at ‘the heart of the realm of Sauron … all other powers were here subdued’. Are Frodo’s will, and his virtue, among those powers? To say so would be Manichaean. It would deny that men are responsible for their actions, make evil into a positive force. On the other hand to put the whole blame on Frodo would seem (to use a distinctively English ethical term) ‘unfair’; if he had been an entirely wicked person he would never have reached the Sammath Naur in the first place. There seems to be a mixed judgement on him. Frodo is saved from his sin by his own earlier repeated acts of forgiveness to Gollum, but in a sense punished by the loss of his finger. ‘If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out …’ As it happens the quotation that ran in Tolkien’s mind when he considered this scene very much implies the dual nature of wickedness, but comes from the Lord’s Prayer: ‘And lead us not into temptation; but deliver us from evil.’^* Succumbing to temptation is our business, one might paraphrase, but delivering us from evil is God’s. As for the questions of how far responsibility is to be allocated between us and our tempters, how much temptation human beings can ‘reasonably’ be expected to stand – these are obviously not to be answered by mere mortals. Tolkien saw the problem of evil in books as in realities, and he told his story at least in part to dramatise that problem; he did not however claim to know the answer to it.

One can see, then, a philosophical crux in the very nature of the Ring, one that was certainly apparent and deeply interesting to Tolkien, and one which he furthermore expressed with great care and deliberation. This is not important just for Frodo. The uncertainty over evil in a way dominates the entire structure of The Lord of the Rings. All the characters would find decisions much easier if evil were unquestionably either just Boethian or else just Manichaean. If evil were only the absence of good, for instance, then the Ring could never be anything other than a psychic amplifier; it would not ‘betray’ its possessors, and all they would need do is put it aside and think pure thoughts. In Middle-earth we are assured that would be fatal. However if evil were merely a hateful and external power without echo in the hearts of the good, then someone might have to take the Ring to the Cracks of Doom, but it need not be Frodo: Gandalf could be trusted with it, while whoever went would have only to distrust his enemies, not his friends and not himself. As it is the nature of the Ring is integral to the story.

The story also repeatedly reflects back on the nature of temptation and of the Ring. When Gandalf says to Frodo of his wound on Weathertop, ‘your heart was not touched, and only your shoulder was pierced; and that was because you resisted to the last’, he may be making a moral statement (Frodo was rewarded) or a practical one (he dodged, called out, struck back, put off the Ringwraith’s aim). When he says of Bilbo that he gave up the Ring ‘of his own accord: an important point’, he may be saying only that Bilbo can’t have become too badly addicted, or more moralistically that Bilbo’s good impulse will help his cure. When Glóin describes the dwarves’ urge to revisit Moria we cannot be sure whether this is the prompting of Sauron from outside or dwarvish greed and ambition from inside. All one need say is that this is how things often are. Maybe all sins need some combination of external prompting and inner weakness. At any rate, on the level of narrative one can say that The Lord of the Rings is neither a saint’s life, all about temptation, nor a complicated wargame, all about tactics. It would be a much lesser work if it had swerved towards either extreme. Conceptions of evil: shadows and wraiths

One word which for Tolkien expressed this distinctive image of evil was ‘shadow’. Do shadows exist or not? It is an ancient opinion that they do and they don’t. In the Old English poem Solomon and Saturn II^* the pagan Saturn asks the Christian Solomon (he is a Christian in this text) ‘what things were that were not?’ The answer is oblique, but it contains the word besceadeð, ‘shadows’. Shadows are the absence of light and so don’t exist in themselves, but they are still visible and palpable just as if they did. That is exactly Tolkien’s view of evil. Accordingly Mordor is ‘Black-Land’, ‘where the shadows lie’, or even more ominously ‘where the shadows are’ (my italics), Aragorn reports that ‘Gandalf the Grey fell into shadow’, Gandalf himself says that if his side loses ‘many lands will pass under the shadow’. At times ‘the Shadow’ becomes a personification of Sauron, as in Frodo’s remark about mocking and making quoted earlier, at times it seems no more than cloud and mirk, as when the Riders’ hearts ‘quailed under the shadow’. At times one does not know what to think: Balin goes off to Moria and disaster after ‘a shadow of disquiet’ fell upon the dwarves, and when Glóin says this it appears only a metaphor for mundane discontent. It is an ominous metaphor, though. Maybe the ‘shadow’ was a Mordor-spell, maybe Balin simultaneously fell and was pushed. In such phrases one sees a characteristic Tolkienian strength: his ideas were often paradoxical and had deep intellectual roots, but they appealed at the same time to simple things and to everyday experience. Tolkien could be learned and practical at once, a style common enough in Old English but (he probably reflected) less and less so as the Norman Conquest and the Renaissance wore on, seeing to it that ‘education’ meant increasingly ‘education in Latin’ and the creation of a distinctive literary caste.

Tolkien’s other main source for his image of ‘the shadow’ was probably Beowulf, lines 705–7. Here Beowulf and his men are waiting (the latter without hope) for the appearance of Grendel the man-eater. They did not expect to get home, says the poet; still, they went to sleep. Then he adds with sudden confidence, ‘It was known to men that the demon-enemy could not draw them under shadow (under sceadu bregdan), as long as God did not wish it.’ This is a tough thought, for all its confidence. ‘Draw them under shadow’ may mean no more than ‘pull them out of the hall and into the dark’, but it implies also ‘going we know not where’, dying and being handed over for ever to the powers of evil. As for the phrase about God not wishing it, that seems on the whole a benevolent assertion of divine power. But what if God does wish it? Notoriously He does sometimes wish things like that, for even in Beowulf they have happened before. Tolkien was perhaps attracted by the phrase under sceadu, and also by the tableau of silent, rather sullen Anglo-Saxon courage. He would not have disagreed either with the implications about the unfairness of Providence; we should note that a recurrent prospect in The Lord of the Rings is for Frodo to be taken by Sauron and tormented till he too goes ‘under the shadow’, worn out by addiction and privation and torture and fear to a state of nothingness like that of ‘the haggard king’ of Minas Morgul.⁶ This doesn’t happen, but no one says it can’t. Indeed Gandalf says explicitly that it can. If the Morgul knife had reached its mark, ‘You would have become a wraith under the dominion of the Dark Lord’ (p. 216). And Tolkien’s second word for expressing his concept of the ambiguity of evil is ‘wraith’.

As so often, this may well take its source from a philological puzzle, and an uncertain entry in the OED. If one looks up the word ‘wraith’ in that dictionary – it may be remembered that Tolkien worked on its ‘w’ entries in his youth, see Biography p. 140 – one finds a striking contradiction. First the OED says that ‘wraiths’ are ghosts, are dead, sense 1, ‘An apparition or spectre of a dead person: a phantom or ghost’. Then it says that they may be alive, sense lb, ‘An immaterial or spectral appearance of a living being’. These apparently irreconcilable opinions are backed up, even more surprisingly, by quotations from the same author, Gavin Douglas, the sixteenth-century Scottish translator of Virgil’s Aeneid: for sense 1, entirely unambiguously, ‘In diuers placis The wraithis walkis of goistis that are deyd’, but for sense lb, and note the alternative word offered, my emphasis, ‘Thidder went this wrath or schaddo of Ene’, (i.e. Virgil’s hero Aeneas, who may be walking through the underworld but is definitely himself alive). According to Gavin Douglas and the OED, then, wraiths may be alive or dead, just as, in Tolkien, the chief Ringwraith is ‘undead’, while all the wraiths seems to be, like shadows, both material presences and immaterial absences: under their hoods and cloaks there is nothing, or at least nothing visible, but just the same they can wield weapons, ride horses, be pierced by blades or swept away by flood. Meanwhile, if there was one thing more stimulating to Tolkien than a modern authority failing to make sense of an early text, it was perhaps a modern authority confessing itself baffled by a problem in etymology; and for ‘wraith’ the OED can do no better than the phrase ‘Of obscure origin’. This is, frankly, weak. The word’s early Scottish associations should have suggested that it has gone through similar sound-changes to the word ‘raid’, a Scottish word whose standard English equivalent is ‘road’. And just as ‘raid / road’ derive from the Old English verb rídan, so ‘wraith’ presumably derives from Old English wríðan, ‘to writhe’.⁷ But why should ‘writhing’ create a ‘wraith’?

One may detect here something of a crux in the thinking of the Inklings generally, for the word and the idea are common to both Tolkien and Lewis, and to some extent Charles Williams as well: one wonders which of them thought of it first. Tolkien, at least, is the most likely to have noted the words derived from wríðan: ‘wreath’ (a twisted thing, but also an immaterial twisted thing, see his phrase ‘a wreath of snow’ p. 285); ‘wrath’, a twisted emotion; ‘wroth’, the adjective from ‘wrath’, and the regular past participle ‘writhen’, a very rare word but nevertheless used twice in LOTR.⁸ One underlying meaning in all this is ‘bent’, and ‘bent’ is the word which C. S. Lewis used in his 1938 novel Out of the Silent Planet to describe the Devil, Satan, Lucifer, who is the ‘bent’ Oyarsa or demiurge of Earth, the ‘silent planet’ itself. At very much the same time, and indeed, according to Christopher Tolkien (see Lost Road, p. 9) ‘in the actual context of [Tolkien’s] discussions with C. S. Lewis in 1936’, Tolkien was using the word wraithas, by now translated back to its ‘reconstructed’ or ‘asterisk’ form in Proto-Germanic, to express his myth of the ‘Lost Straight Road’ to the Undying Lands, now lost precisely because the world has become ‘bent’. Westra lage wegas rehtas, nu isti sa wraithas is the sentence which keeps recurring, ‘a straight road lay westward, now it is bent’ (Lost Road, p. 43). To return to the Ringwraiths, they are in origin ‘bent’ people, and people who have been bent, perhaps, into a perfect self-regarding ‘wreath’, ‘wraith’, or Ring.

The psychological observation which underlies this puzzle in etymology seems to me to be both acute and highly contemporary. One of the strange features of the twentieth century has been the curious bloodlessness of its major demonic figures, and the repeated origin of disaster in loudly proclaimed good intentions – reform and revolution turning again and again to terror and mass murder, and throwing up leaders who for all their cruelties seem to have gained little or nothing in the way of personal satisfaction from them. By comparison with the warlords of the past, Attila or Alaric or Genghis Khan, Hitler and Stalin and their henchmen do appear as wraith-like figures, dreadful shadows, bureaucrats of genocide:⁹ their original impulses (to rescue their people? to throw off oppression?) as lost as Boromir’s would be, or Denethor’s, or Gandalf’s, if any of these were to take the Ring. There is a terrible ‘applicability’ about the idea of the wraiths, which many if not most of Tolkien’s readers have been well able to follow. Boethius, with his view that evil is above all an absence, and that the first victim of the evil person is himself, would have been well able to follow it too; and might also have noted Tolkien’s occasional suggestions of the ‘wraithing’ process starting even in the most well-intentioned characters, and signalled by careful choice of words.¹⁰ At the same time there is no doubt that the wraiths have to be fought physically as well as psychologically, as in the Manichaean world of Tolkien’s own war experience. The Boethian and Manichaean views of evil appear incompatible, but in Tolkien’s work neither can be entirely discounted. The opposing forces: luck and chance

Tolkien’s image of good is as complex as his image of evil, but often appears on the surface to be weaker and more limited. Once more he pulled a hint for his fiction from an ancient Beowulfian mystery. That poem opens with the funeral of the ancestor of one of its characters – Scyld, the king of the Danes, who according to legend came drifting to land as a baby, naked on a wooden shield. Now at the end of his life the Danes send him back to the sea in an unmanned funeral barge laden with treasure. ‘By no means did [the Danes] provide him with less gifts, less national treasure’, says the poet with proud understatement, ‘than those did (þonne þá dydon) who sent him out at his beginning, alone over the waves, being a child.’ Who are ‘those’? The line is a very odd one, both technically^* and ideologically. The Beowulf-poet was a Christian. There should have been no room in his universe for sub-divine but superhuman powers, other than devils or angels; however the senders of Scyld seem supernatural in knowledge and purpose, while showing no interest in the inhabitants of Denmark’s souls. One might put Scyld down to divine Providence, except that the word is þá, ‘those’, not he, ‘He’. In Beowulf the matter is then dropped for good, but it leaves behind the implication that there are powers at work in the world, possibly beneficent ones, which human beings are not equipped to understand.

The same is true of The Lord of the Rings, though there as in Beowulf, the lurking powers are never allowed to intervene openly. From The Silmarillion we can infer that Gandalf is a Maia, a spiritual creature in human shape sent for the relief of humanity; much later than he finished the trilogy Tolkien indeed reportedly said ‘Gandalf is an angel’.¹¹ During the action of The Lord of the Rings, though, Gandalf never looks very much like an angel, or at least not one of the normal iconographic kind. He is too short-tempered, for one thing, and also capable of doubt, anxiety, weariness, fear. Obviously too strong a flurry of angelic wings, too ready recourse to miracles or to Omnipotence, would instantly diminish the stature of the characters, devalue their decisions and their courage. How then does beneficence operate; and has Gandalf superiors? ‘Naked I was sent back’, he says at one point (recalling the story of Scyld), but he does not say who sent him. ‘May the Valar turn him aside!’ shout the Gondorians as the ‘oliphaunt’ charges. But the Valar don’t. Or perhaps they do, for the beast does swerve aside, though this could be only chance. Can ‘chance’ and ‘the Valar’ be equated? Is ‘chance’ the word which people use for their perception of the operations of ‘those’, the mysterious senders of Scyld and of Gandalf too?

Tolkien had, probably, been developing some such thought as this for many years. He uses the word ‘chance’ quite often in a suggestive way in The Lord of the Rings. ‘Just chance brought me then, if chance you call it’, says Tom Bombadil when he rescues the hobbits from Willow-man; ruin was averted in the Northlands, says Gandalf in Appendix A III, ‘because I met Thorin Oakenshield one evening on the edge of spring in Bree. A chance-meeting, as we say in Middle-earth.’ Obviously chance is sometimes meant, as Gandalf says of Bilbo’s finding of the Ring, though even Gandalf can only recognise such ‘meanings’ retrospectively. However ‘chance’ was not the word which for Tolkien best expressed his feelings about randomness and design. The word that did is probably ‘luck’.

This is, of course, an extremely common English word. It is also rather odd, in that no etymology of it is known. The OED suggests, without conviction, that it might come from words like Old English (ge)lingan, ‘to happen’, giving then a basic meaning of ‘happenstance, whatever turns up’. Tolkien would have liked that, for it would make ‘luck’ a close modern equivalent of the Old English word usually translated ‘fate’ and derived in exactly the same way from the verb (ge)weorþan, ‘to become, to happen’. The Beowulf-poet often ascribes events to wyrd, and treats it in a way as a supernatural force. King Alfred brought it into his translation of Boethius too, to explain why divine Providence does not affect free will: ‘What we call God’s fore-thought and his Providence’, he wrote, ‘is while it is there in His mind, before it gets done, while it’s still being thought; but once it’s done, then we call it wyrd. This way anyone can tell that there are two things and two names, forethought and wyrd’.¹² A highly important corollary is that people are not under the domination of wyrd, which is why ‘fate’ is not a good translation of it. People can ‘change their luck’, and can in a way say ‘No’ to divine Providence, though of course if they do they have to stand by the consequences of their decision. In Middle-earth, one may say, Providence or the Valar sent the dream that took Boromir to Rivendell (p. 240). But they sent it first and most often to Faramir, who would no doubt have been a better choice. It was human decision, or human perversity, which led to Boromir claiming the journey, with what chain of ill-effects and casualties no one can tell. ‘Luck’, then, is a continuous interplay of providence and free will, a blending of so many factors that the mind cannot disentangle them, a word encapsulating ancient philosophical problems over which wars have been fought and men burnt alive.

As important to Tolkien, though, was that it is a word (like ‘shadow’) which people use every day, and with exactly the right shade of uncertainty over whether they mean something completely humdrum and practical or something mysterious and supernatural. When Farmer Giles of Ham fires his blunderbuss at the giant he hits him ‘by luck’, indeed ‘by chance and no choice of the farmer’s’: thoughts of the Valar enter no one’s mind. On the other hand his advantageous position at the rear of the knightly column which Chrysophylax decimates came about when his grey mare went lame, ‘As luck (or the grey mare herself) would have it’. It is not providence, but it may have been meant just the same. The browbeating of the dragon outside its den, however, is something even the grey mare’s prudence would not stretch to. ‘Farmer Giles was backing his luck’, as people often do; and it is common knowledge that while this is irrational it works much more often than mere ‘chance’ would dictate. People in short do in sober reality recognise a strongly patterning force in the world around them, and both in modern and in Old English have a word to express their recognition. This force, however, does not affect free will and cannot be distinguished from the ordinary operations of nature. Most of all it does not decrease in the slightest the need for heroic endeavour. ‘God helps those who help themselves’, says the proverb. ‘Wyrd often spares the man who isn’t doomed, as long as his courage holds’, agrees Beowulf. ‘Luck served you there,’ says Gimli to Merry and Pippin (p. 550); ‘but you seized your chance with both hands, one might say.’ If they hadn’t, ‘luck’ would no doubt by that time have looked very different.

In Middle-earth, then, both good and evil function as external powers and as inner impulses from the psyche. It is perhaps fair to say that while the balances are maintained, we are on the whole more conscious of evil as an objective power and of good as a subjective impulse; Mordor and ‘the Shadow’ are nearer and more visible than the Valar or ‘luck’. This lack of symmetry is moreover part of a basic denial of security throughout The Lord of the Rings. Repeatedly we are told that if its characters fail to resist the Shadow, they will be taken over, but if they do resist they may get killed; similarly if they reject the vagaries of chance (if Frodo for instance had refused to leave the Shire with the Ring), it’s likely something highly unpleasant will happen, but if they accept and obey things could grow even worse. The benevolent powers offer no guarantees. The best recommendation Gandalf can make is not to think about such things. ‘But let us not darken our hearts by imagining the trial of their gentle loyalty in the Dark Tower. For the Enemy has failed – so far’ (p. 486). Since it hasn’t happened, in other words, it isn’t wyrd, and so need not be explained. Still, it is essential to the story that such thoughts be entertained, as indeed Gandalf also says to Pippin: ‘If you will meddle in the affairs of Wizards, you must be prepared to think of such things’ (p. 580). Without them the characters’ courage would look smaller; and courage is perhaps the strongest element in the Tolkienian synthesis of virtue. Apparent paradoxes: happy sadness and hopeless cheer

This has been both resented and denied: resented, simply because courage is no longer a very fashionable part of virtue; denied, in that some have said things are too easy for Frodo and his companions all through. They do escape, after all. Only Boromir of the Nine dies during the course of the action, and he deserves it. Gandalf is resurrected. Pathos is created only by the sacrifice of a few members of the virtuous side, mostly old ones like Théoden or Dáin, or peripheral ones like Háma and Halbarad and the list of mere names in the Rohan dirge after the Pelennor Fields. In a review in the Observer (27 November 1955) – one which Tolkien very much resented, see Biography, p. 297 – Edwin Muir propounded a thesis that the non-adulthood of the romance was shown by 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 are only one or two minor casualties.’ In this there is a kind of truth (for Tolkien was kind-hearted about things like the ‘evacuation’ of Minas Tirith and the survival of Bill the pony), but also an evident falsehood. When all is over Frodo for one is neither ‘well’, ‘triumphant’ nor even ‘happy’. And he only exemplifies a much stronger theme in the work as a whole: the failure of the good, one might even say a sense of ‘defeatism’. In the strict or dictionary sense The Lord of the Rings evades that concept totally, for according to the OED ‘defeatism’ is a straight borrowing from French défaitisme, recorded in English for the first time in 1918 and meaning ‘Conduct tending to bring about acceptance of defeat, esp. by action on civilian opinion’. With his best friends dead in Flanders Tolkien had cause to hate that idea like poison, and indeed no one in Middle-earth is allowed to voice it. Even Denethor’s reaction to defeat is to commit ceremonial suicide, not negotiate for some ‘Vichy’ status though that is what Sauron’s mouthpiece offers on p. 872, in a speech full of the Middle-earth analogues of ‘reparations’, ‘demilitarised zones’ and ‘puppet governments’. Gandalf rejects that proposal with particular violence, and at all times discussion of odds or probabilities turns him hard and obstinate: ‘“Still,” he said, standing suddenly up and sticking out his chin, while his beard went stiff and straight like bristling wire, “we must keep up our courage. You will soon be well, if I do not talk you to death. You are in Rivendell, and you need not worry about anything for the present.”’ ‘Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof’ seems to be his motto. Yet Gandalf also on occasion, together with the other wise men and women of the story, accepts defeat as a long-term prospect, a prospect which The Lord of the Rings as a whole does not deny.

Thus Galadriel says of her life, ‘Through ages of the world we have fought the long defeat’. Elrond agrees, ‘I have seen three ages in the West of the world, and many defeats and many fruitless victories’. Later 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 at all ‘ended for ever’, as the elves had thought. Númenor is drowned without getting rid of Sauron. Sauron is defeated and his Ring taken by Isildur, only to set in motion the crisis at the end of the Third Age. And even if that crisis is surmounted, it is made extremely clear that this success too will conform to the general pattern of ‘fruitlessness’ – or maybe one should say its fruit will be bitter. Destruction of the Ring, says Galadriel, will mean that her ring and Gandalf’s and Elrond’s will also lose their power, so that Lothlórien ‘fades’ and the elves ‘dwindle’. Along with them will go the ents and the dwarves, indeed the whole imagined world of Middle-earth, to be replaced by modernity and the domination of men; all the characters and their story, one might say, will shrink to poetic ‘rigmaroles’ and misunderstood snatches in plays and ballads. Beauty especially will be a casualty. ‘However the fortunes of war shall go …’, asks Théoden, ‘may it not so end that much that was fair and wonderful shall pass for ever out of Middle-earth?’ ‘The evil of Sauron cannot be wholly cured’, replies Gandalf, ‘nor made as if it had not been.’ Fangorn agrees when he says of his own dying species, ‘songs like trees bear fruit only in their own time and their own way, and sometimes they are withered untimely’. The collective opinion of Middle-earth is summed up in Gandalf’s aphoristic statement: ‘I am Gandalf, Gandalf the White, but Black is mightier still.’

The implications of that could be alarming. It sounds Manichaean. However as has already been seen Tolkien was careful to voice rebuttals of Manichaeanism and assertions of the nonentity of evil many times throughout. Why then the continuing pessimistic expectations of defeat? The answer, obviously enough, is that a major goal of The Lord of the Rings was to dramatise that ‘theory of courage’ which Tolkien had said in his British Academy lecture was the ‘great contribution’ to humanity of the old literature of the North. The central pillar of that theory was Ragnarök – the day when gods and men would fight evil and the giants, and inevitably be defeated. Its great statement was that defeat is no refutation. The right side remains right even if it has no ultimate hope at all. In a sense this Northern mythology asks more of men, even makes more of them, than does Christianity, for it offers them no heaven, no salvation, no reward for virtue except the sombre satisfaction of having done what is right. Tolkien wanted his characters in The Lord of the Rings to live up to the same high standard. He was careful therefore to remove easy hope from them, even to make them conscious of long-term defeat and doom.

Nevertheless Tolkien was himself a Christian, and he faced a problem in the ‘theory of courage’ he so much admired: its mainspring is despair, its spirit often heathen ferocity. One can see him grappling with the difficulty in his poem-cum-essay ‘The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son’, published in 1953, the year before The Fellowship of the Ring.¹³ This is a coda to the Old English poem The Battle of Maldon, which commemorates an English defeat by the Vikings in AD 991, and celebrates especially the unyielding courage of the English bodyguard who refused to retreat when their leader was killed, but fought round his body till all were dead. The very core of the sentiment is expressed by an old retainer called Beorhtwold: ‘Heart shall be bolder, harder be purpose, / more proud the spirit, as our power lessens …’ These lines, said Tolkien, ‘have been held to be the finest expression of the northern heroic spirit, Norse or English; the clearest statement of the doctrine of uttermost endurance in the service of indomitable will’. Nevertheless he felt uneasy about them. He thought they were old already in 991; he saw they could be said as well by a heathen as a Christian; he thought the fierce spirit they expressed was one of the reasons for Beorhtnoth’s rash decision to let the Vikings cross the river and fight on level ground; they had led to defeat and the death of the innocent.

In Tolkien’s poem, accordingly, the words are not given to Beorhtwold but form part of a dream dreamt by the poet Torhthelm:

‘It’s dark! It’s dark, and doom coming!

Is no light left us? A light kindle,

and fan the flame! Lo! Fire now wakens,

hearth is burning, house is lighted,

men there gather. Out of the mists they come

through darkling doors whereat doom waiteth.

Hark! I hear them in the hall chanting:

stern words they sing with strong voices.

(He chants) “Heart shall be bolder, harder be purpose,

more proud the spirit as our power lessens!

Mind shall not falter nor mood waver,

though doom shall come and dark conquer.”’ (Tree, p. 141)

Tolkien himself did not think the dark would conquer. The voices Torhthelm hears are those of his pagan ancestors, no better than the Vikings ‘lying off London in their long vessels, / while they drink to Thor and drown the sorrow / of hell’s children’. They are as wrong as Gandalf, or even more so; Tídwald rebukes Torhthelm for being ‘heathenish’ when he wakes up, and the poem ends with the monks of Ely singing the Dirige or ‘dirge’ from the Office of the Dead. However, Tolkien admired the aesthetic impulse towards good beneath the pride and sorrow. In Middle-earth he wanted a similar ultimate courage undiluted by confidence – but at the same time untainted by rage and despair. One may say that the wise characters in The Lord of the Rings are often without hope and so near the edge of despair, but they do not succumb. That is left to Denethor, who will not fight to the last, but turns like a heathen to suicide and the sacrifice of his kin.

Tolkien needed a new image for ultimate bravery, one milder but not weaker than Beorhtwold’s. He centred it, oddly enough, on laughter, cheerfulness, refusal to look into the future at all.¹⁴ There are hints of this in Middle English – the critical moment in Sir Orfeo comes when the king in his madness sees ladies at falconry, and laughs – while there is a modern analogue in Joseph Conrad’s The Shadow-Line (1917), where laughter is an exorcising force. In The Lord of the Rings it can be expressed by such high-status characters as Faramir, who says at one point that he does not hope to see Frodo ever again, but nevertheless invents a picture of them in an unknown future ‘sitting by a wall in the sun, laughing at grief’. However the true vehicle of the ‘theory of laughter’ is the hobbits; their behaviour is calqued on the traditional English humour in adversity, but has deeper semantic roots.

Thus it is Pippin who looks up at the sun and the banners and offers comfort to Beregond, and Merry who never loses heart when even Théoden appears prey to ‘horror and doubt’. But Sam on the road to Mordor goes beyond both. He has less hope even than Faramir. Indeed, we are told, 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 were 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. (p. 624)

Is it possible, one might wonder, to be ‘cheerful’ without any hope at all? Certainly it seems hardly sensible, but the idea rings true – it is corroborated by several first-hand accounts of the First World War, perhaps especially by Frank Richards’s Old Soldiers Never Die (published 1933, and written significantly enough by a ranker, not an officer). Sam’s twist on semantics is repeated by Pippin. He describes Fangorn and the last march of the Ents: was it ‘fruitless’? Evidently not, in the short term, but in the long term Fangorn knows his race and story are sterile. The realisation makes him, according to Pippin, ‘sad but not unhappy’, and to modern English semantics the phrase makes almost no sense, like hopeless cheer. However an early meaning of ‘sad’ is ‘settled, determined’; ‘cheer’ comes from Old French chair, ‘face’. The paradoxes put forward Tolkien’s theses that determination should survive the worst that can happen, that a stout pretence is more valuable than sincere despair.

However the best delineation of Tolkien’s new model of courage is perhaps at the end of Book IV chapter 8, ‘The Stairs of Cirith Ungol’. Here Sam and Frodo, like Faramir, have little hope but still think of others in the future maybe ‘laughing at grief’. Frodo indeed laughs himself: ‘Such a sound had not been heard in those places since Sauron carne to Middle-earth. To Sam suddenly it seemed as if all the stones were listening and the tall rocks leaning over them.’ But then they fall asleep, and Gollum returns, to see and for a moment to love and aspire to the ‘peace’ he sees in their faces. It is characteristic of a kind of hardness in the fable that on this one occasion when Gollum’s heart is stirred and he makes a gesture of penitence, Sam should wake up, misunderstand, and accuse Gollum of ‘pawing’ and ‘sneaking’. Gollum gets no credit for his minor decency. But then he gave Frodo no credit earlier for his decency in saving Gollum from Faramir and the archers, preferring to spit, bear malice, and complain about ‘nice Master’s little trickses’. This is no excuse for Sam, but it shows maybe where criticisms like Edwin Muir’s break down. The good side in The Lord of the Rings does win, but its casualties include, besides Théoden and Boromir, beauty, Lothlórien, Middle-earth and even Gollum. Furthermore the characters are aware of their losses all the time, and bear a burden of regret. They just have to make the best of things and not confuse ‘sorrow’ with ‘despair’;¹⁵ even the hobbits’ schoolboy humour has a point. Tolkien after all put forward his theses about courage and about laughter fairly clearly. The critical inability to see them comes partly from mere ideological reluctance; partly, though, from unfamiliarity with the basic structural mode of The Lord of the Rings, the ancient and pre-novelistic device of entrelacement. The ethics of interlace

There is a minor mystery about this mode, for Tolkien might have been expected not to like it. Its greatest literary monuments are the sequence of French prose tales from the thirteenth century about King Arthur, known as the Vulgate Cycle and transposed into English only in highly compressed form by Sir Thomas Malory; and the later Italian epics about the knights of Charlemagne, Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato, ‘Roland in Love’, and Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, ‘Roland Run Mad’, imitated in English by Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. Hence, no doubt, the early reviewers’ comparisons of Tolkien with Malory, Spenser, Ariosto. However Tolkien disobligingly remarked that he hadn’t read Ariosto and wouldn’t have liked him if he had (Biography, p. 291), while Spenser exemplified much that he hated (see above). As for King Arthur, Tolkien might well have seen him as a symptom of English vagueness. Why should Englishmen take interest in a Welsh hero committed to their destruction, and known anyway via a French rehash? Still, the fact remains that Tolkien did produce a narrative of entrelacement. He had read a good deal of French romance for his Sir Gawain edition, and may have reflected further that even Beowulf has a kind of ‘interlace’ technique. He knew also that the Icelandic word for ‘short story’ is þáttr, ‘a thread’; sagas often consist of several þættir, strands woven together. The image is in Gandalf’s mind when he says to Théoden, ‘There are children in your land who, out of the twisted threads of story, could pick the answer to your question.’ To unravel entrelacement – that is at least one route to wisdom.¹⁶

The narrative of the great ‘interlaced’ romances is, however, by no means famous for wisdom. Malory’s editor, Eugene Vinaver, comments:

Adventures were piled up one upon the other without any apparent sequence or design, and innumerable personages, mostly anonymous, were introduced in a wild succession … The purpose of their encounters and pursuits was vague, and their tasks were seldom fulfilled: they met and parted and met again, each intent at first on following his particular ‘quest’, and yet prepared at any time to be diverted from it to other adventures and undertakings.¹⁷

The result was meaningless confusion. This is very much not the case with Tolkien. The basic pattern of the centre of The Lord of the Rings is separations and encounters and wanderings, but these are controlled first by a map (something no Arthurian narrative possesses), and second by an extremely tight chronology of days and dates. Along with this goes a deliberate chronological ‘leapfrogging’.

To particularise: the narrative of The Fellowship of the Ring is single-stranded, following Frodo, with the exceptions of the ‘flashback’ narratives embedded in ‘The Shadow of the Past’ and ‘The Council of Elrond’. The Nine Walkers themselves stick together from the leaving of Rivendell to the end of the volume, apart from losing Gandalf in Moria. But on Amon Hen, on the 26th February, the fellowship is dispersed. Boromir is killed. Frodo and Sam canoe away by themselves. Pippin and Merry are kidnapped by the Uruk-hai. Aragorn, left to choose between chasing the latter or following the Ring, decides to pursue the orcs, along with Legolas and Gimli. The fates of these three parties are then followed separately. Briefly, what happens is that chapters 1 and 2 of Book III take Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli from the 26th to the 28th February; chapters 3 and 4 lead Pippin and Merry from the 26th February to the 2nd March; chapters 5–7 return to Aragorn and his companions and ‘leapfrog’ them past Merry and Pippin again to the 4th March; while in chapter 8 these two sub-groups of the fellowship meet again on the 5th, for Merry and Pippin to bring their story up-to-date again in recounted narrative. By chapter 11 they are splitting up again, Gandalf (who had returned from Moria in chapter 5) riding off with Pippin, Merry setting off with Théoden, Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli going together once more towards the Paths of the Dead. They will not gather again till chapter 6 of Book V, ‘The Battle of the Pelennor Fields’. These, however, are not the only strands. All the time Frodo and Sam are spinning another, and doing it with the same chronological overlapping. They too depart on the 26th February, and have reached the 28th by the start of Book IV. By the end of that book, though, they have got to the 13th March, some eight days later than the last events of which we are told in Book III. Gandalf and the others do not ‘catch up’ with Frodo and Sam till chapter 5 of Book V, but then they continue once again to the 25th March, which the two hobbits do not reach for another three chapters.

Now this unnatural form of presentation works well for surprise and suspense. It is a shock to have the battle of Helm’s Deep decided by the Ents and Huorns, who were last seen marching on Isengard, but whose powers have never come out in the open before. It is a good ‘cliffhanger’ scene at the end of Book V, as Pippin falls in the black blood of the troll, to have his fate decided by events of which we have no knowledge. But Tolkien meant more by entrelacement than that.

One example of a retrospective connection has already been given. As Frodo feels the pressure of the Eye on Amon Hen, a Voice speaks to him and gives him a moment of freedom to act. This voice is Gandalf’s, though Frodo thinks he is dead and the reader does too. Gandalf says as much on p. 484, though he is laconic about it – ‘I sat in a high place [the great tree in Lothlórien?], and I strove with the Dark Tower’ – since Aragorn and the others he is addressing can have no idea what is being referred to. Gandalf remarks at the same time that he sent Gwaihir the eagle to watch the River; presumably he was the eagle Aragorn saw, but thought nothing of, as he stared out from Amon Hen on the first page of The Two Towers. Other cross-connections are frequent. Fangorn looks long at the two hobbits when they tell him Gandalf is dead; he does so because he doesn’t believe them, having seen Gandalf himself a couple of days before. But we do not realise this till Gandalf remarks on their near-meeting some thirty pages later. Across the whole breadth of the story, meanwhile, fly the Nazgûl. Frodo and Sam feel their presence three times as they wander across the Emyn Muil and the Dead Marshes, on pp. 593, 616, and 620, i.e. on the 29th February, 1st March and 4th March. Gollum feels sure this is no coincidence. ‘“Three times!” he whimpered. “Three times is a threat. They feel us here, they feel the Precious. The Precious is their master. We cannot go any further this way, no. It’s no use, no use!”’ What he says sounds plausible enough, but it’s wrong. Three times is a coincidence, and actually we can guess each time what the Nazgûl are doing. The first was coming back from a fruitless wait for Grishnákh the orc, dead and burnt that same day, with the smoke from his burning ‘seen by many watchful eyes’. The second was probing towards Rohan and Saruman. The third was heading for Isengard, to alarm Pippin on its way with the thought that it had somehow been despatched for him (p. 585). Meanwhile the body of Boromir establishes a similar transverse thread as it drifts down the Great River, to be seen by Faramir, to have the workmanship on its belt noted and compared with the broaches of Sam and Frodo eight days later. These references and allusions tie the story together, we would say, or to use Gandalf’s image show one thread twisting over another. They prove the author has the story under control, and are significant to any reader who has grasped the entire plot. However that is not how they appear to the characters, or to the reader whose attention has lapsed (as whose does not?). In this contrast between half- and full perception lies the point of interlacings.

For to the characters the story appears, to repeat a term used already, as a ‘bewilderment’. They are lost in the woods and plains of Middle-earth. They also do not know what is going on or what to do next. Aragorn has to choose between going to Mordor or to Minas Tirith; delays, and then finds himself choosing between Sam and Frodo or Merry and Pippin; picks one quest, and then has to decide whether to rest or pursue by night. Neither decision nor delay seems to pay off. ‘All that I have done today has gone amiss’, he says (p. 404); ‘Since we passed through the Argonath my choices have gone amiss’ (p. 415); ‘And now may I make a right choice, and change the evil fate of this unhappy day!’ (p. 409). Éomer’s intervention does not help him much, for he and his companions cannot decide at the end of chapter 2 whether they have seen Saruman or not. It appears they did (we learn later, p. 487), but the next time they think someone is Saruman it is Gandalf. Furthermore the appearance of Saruman to drive off the borrowed horses is coincidental with the arrival of Shadowfax – the note of joy in their whinnyings puzzles Legolas, though their eventual return with Shadowfax provides an equine equivalent for the unexpected return of Gandalf. Simultaneously, in Fangorn Forest, Gandalf, Saruman and Treebeard himself are wandering, meeting or not meeting seemingly at random. The effect as a whole is like that of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where pairs of lovers wander in another enchanted wood, their paths crossed and tangled by Puck, Oberon, Titania and the infatuating Bully Bottom. ‘Infatuation’ is indeed a word one might use as well as ‘bewilderment’. It means following the ignis fatuus, the ‘will o’ the wisp’ that traditionally leads travellers into bog or quicksand; an analogue to the multiple wanderings of Book III is Frodo staring at the corpse-candles in chapter 2 of Book IV, to be warned by Gollum not to heed them, or the dead, rotten, phantasmal faces in the marshes below: ‘Or hobbits go down to join the Dead ones and light little candles. Follow Sméagol! Don’t look at lights!’

Even though it comes from Gollum, this is good advice. For of course Aragorn and the others, including Frodo, are in their feelings of confusion and meaninglessness absolutely wrong – ‘infatuated’, ‘bewildered’, drowning in a bog of mere events, caught in a strangler’s net of wyrd. They have good apparent grounds for despair. But as it turns out (as it happens, as ‘chance’ or ‘luck’ would have it) there are things in the web of story to refute those grounds. As Gandalf points out, all Sauron and Saruman and the orcs have done between them is ‘bring Pippin and Merry with marvellous speed, and in the nick of time, to Fangorn, where otherwise they would never have come at all!’ – and so, one might say, though it is beyond Gandalf’s knowledge at the time, to rouse the Ents, overthrow Saruman, save Rohan, and free Théoden to make his decisive intervention at Minas Tirith. There are still several things one can not say: for instance, that Saruman’s treachery was accordingly a Good Thing, or that the rescue of Minas Tirith is a reward for Aragorn’s persistence. After all, if Saruman had stayed loyal things might have ended better; if Aragorn had abandoned the chase Merry and Pippin would have stirred up Fangorn just the same. What one can be absolutely sure about is that giving up does the other side’s work for them, and ruins all your own possible futures and other people’s as well. The despair of Denethor killed Théoden, as predicted by Gandalf on p. 832.¹⁸ While persistence offers no guarantees, it does give ‘luck’ a chance to operate, through unknown allies or unknown weaknesses in the opposition.

As a working theory this is impregnable, whether considered sceptically or superstitiously. To it the entrelacements contribute a recognisable attitude towards reality. Events in the world, they say, appear chaotic and unplanned, appear so all but unmistakably. But however strong that impression is, it is a subjective one founded on the inevitably limited view of any individual. If individuals could see more widely – as we can, by virtue of the narrative structure of The Lord of the Rings – they would realise that events have a cause-and-effect logic, though there are so many causes that perhaps no one but God can ever see them all at once. The world is a Persian carpet, then, and we are ants lumbering from one thread to the other and observing that there is no pattern in the colours. That is why one of Gandalf’s favourite sayings is ‘Even the wise cannot see all ends’, and why he often demonstrates its truth himself. Thus it is ironic that he more than once offers a cold-hearted appraisal of the junior hobbits’ utility. ‘If these hobbits understood the danger’, he says to Elrond, ‘they would not dare to go.’ But they would still want to, he concludes, and their wish should outweigh their ignorance. He says to Pippin later, ‘Generous deed should not be outweighed by cold counsel’. In the end he is proved both right and wrong: Merry and Pippin between them rouse the Ents, save Faramir, kill the Ringwraith. The last deed is caused by the sheer chance of finding a dagger ‘bound round with spells for the destruction of Mordor’ in the wight’s barrow. ‘Glad would he have been to know its fate who wrought it slowly long ago’, comments the narrator; and his comment shows that the ancient smith was not glad, did not know, was condemned to defeat and death and oblivion in the barrows. Still, even after thousands of years hope should not be lost: nor relied on.

It is Pippin too who looks in the palantír and so misleads Sauron into thinking Saruman may have the Ring. This may have helped draw on the Enemy’s hasty stroke, thinks Gandalf on p. 797. More important is the fact that Aragorn has the stone available to him, and that Sauron (having seen a hobbit in the same stone) thinks Aragorn also has the Ring: it is because Aragorn showed himself to Sauron in the palantír that Sauron neglects his guard. ‘The Eye turned inward, pondering tidings of doubt and danger: a bright sword, and a stern and kingly face it saw’ (p. 902). But once more ironically, it is what the Eye does not see that matters. The bright sword and kingly face turn out not to be critical. It is the two ants creeping along the Ephel Dúath who are going to change reality. Indeed Frodo and Sam provide perhaps the strongest effects of the entrelacement. Their bewilderments, infatuations, sense of being lost and abandoned, are much stronger than those of Aragorn or Gimli or anyone else in the more active half of the story. But by the time we come to following their strand along we know that these are not true. ‘All my choices have proved ill’, says Frodo within a couple of pages of the start of his quest. But his words echo unmistakably those of Aragorn nearly two hundred pages earlier; and we know Aragorn was wrong. What counts, then, is that Frodo should go on choosing. We perceive his doubt and weariness simultaneously as a natural reaction to circumstances, and as a temptation, even a phantasm or illusion of the Dark Tower. Evil works, we realise, by sapping the will with over-complication. Like ‘the Shadow’, this is in fiction an external force with physical effects of which sensitive characters like Legolas can be aware; it appeals to a recognition of truth outside fiction, however, in its buried statements that clouds have silver linings, that fortune favours the brave, that even in reality things are not always as they seem.

There is indeed a corpus of proverbs scattered through The Lord of the Rings, which add weight to the implications of interlace. ‘Oft the unbidden guest proves the best company’, says Éomer, and later ‘Twice blessed is hope unlooked-for’. ‘Where will wants not, a way opens’, says his sister, more solemnly but also more familiarly. ‘Oft hope is born, when all is forlorn’, says Legolas. He, Aragorn and Théoden also state proverbs about freshness, with respectively ‘Rede oft is found at the rising of the sun’, ‘None knows what the new day shall bring him’, and ‘In the morning counsels are best …’ Legolas adds a spatial metaphor with his ‘Few can foresee whither their road will lead them …’ It should be noted that most of these are neutral on the optimism / pessimism scale, while some of the characters’ proverbs approach the meaningless. ‘Strange are the turns of fortune’, says Gandalf (which could be good or bad depending on context), and ‘Hope oft deceives’, says Éomer (also so true as to be non-predictive). Still, most of those quoted so far are real proverbs as the place-names of the Shire are real place-names, and they have a similar function: to draw us in, to make connections between experience inside and outside the story. Within this continuum, however, other proverbs are planted, sounding much the same as the others but more original and so closer to Tolkien’s own intention. ‘Often does hatred hurt itself, says Gandalf; ‘Oft evil will shall evil mar’, says Théoden; ‘The hasty stroke goes oft astray’, says Aragorn; ‘A traitor may betray himself, Gandalf again. It takes the action of the whole of The Lord of the Rings to make these ring true and there is a vein of proverbial wisdom (about God being on the side of the big battalions) which would utterly deny them. These invented sayings show in miniature the ‘contrivance’ of which the trilogy has often been accused. Only a fool, though, would deny that the contrivances have a point; only a very careless reader would think that the entrelacements of this romance are purely for variety, and have nothing to say about ‘the fundamental character of reality’ at all. Just allegory and large symbolism

Tolkien’s proverbs edge, on the whole, towards the archaic. So does his use of omens and prophecies – a feature of The Lord of the Rings which may furthermore seem to deny the idea of free will being left intact by the forces of providence. Galadriel seems to know in advance that Aragorn will take the Paths of the Dead, Aragorn to know that he and Éomer will meet again, ‘though all the hosts of Mordor should stand between’. Someone (or something) foreknew that the Ringwraith would not fall ‘by the hand of man’. These cross-temporal flashes suggest, perhaps, that some things are bound to happen regardless of what people do or choose. Yet that would clearly be a false conclusion. The words of prophecies could be fulfilled after all in many different ways. We are left always at liberty to suppose that Aragorn and Éomer could have met once more as prisoners, say, that the Grey Company could have quailed and turned back. If Merry had failed to stab the Ringwraith, it might have died aeons later at the hands of some other woman, hobbit, elf-hero. As Galadriel says of her Mirror (p. 354): it ‘shows many things, and not all have yet come to pass. Some never come to be, unless those that behold the visions turn aside from their path to prevent them.’ She articulates a theory of compromise between fate and free will once more at least a millennium old: in the Solomon and Saturn poem Saturn asks which will be the stronger, wyrd ge warnung, ‘fated events or foresight’, and Solomon tells him that ‘Fate is hard to alter … And nevertheless an intelligent man can moderate all the things that fate causes, as long as he is clear in his mind’. It is important to realise though, that antiquarian as Tolkien’s motives often were,¹⁹ and ‘pre-scientific’ as the opinions of Galadriel and Solomon seem, what Tolkien was writing about is still in a way a live issue. ‘Every bullet has his billet’ is a distinctively modern saying, first recorded in that form in 1765, and in use up to the present day to indicate that sometimes no precautions work; yet saying the proverb, and believing it, probably never stopped anyone taking cover. ‘God helps those who help themselves’, to repeat a proverb mentioned earlier. Tolkien in other words never lost his belief in the reality and continuity, not only of language and of history, but of human nature and of some intellectual problems.

This should be kept in mind when considering the much vexed question of allegory, or symbolism, in The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien’s opinions here are clear only up to a point. As is well known, he wrote in the ‘Foreword’ to the second edition: ‘I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence.’ He went on, though: ‘I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse “applicability” with “allegory”; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.’ Some relation between fiction and fact might be perceived, then; and ‘The Scouring of the Shire’ had ‘some basis in experience’ though no ‘contemporary political reference whatsoever’, not even to Britain’s Socialist ‘austerity’ government of 1945–50. As Tolkien wrote of Beowulf, it was important to preserve a balance, to see that the ‘large symbolism is near the surface, but … does not break through, nor become allegory’. ‘Allegory’ would after all imply, to Tolkien (see above here and here), that The Lord of the Rings had only one meaning, which would have to remain constant all the way through; he toyed contemptuously with the notion in the ‘Foreword’ as he sketched out a plan for his work as a real allegory with the Ring itself as President Truman’s atomic bomb.²⁰ ‘Large symbolism’, however, should not be a matter of one imposed diagram, but of repeated offered hints. The hints would work only if they were true both in fact and in fiction. History, thought Tolkien, was varied in its applicability. But if you understood it properly, you saw it repeating itself.

Some of Tolkien’s hints have been glanced at already. The Riders of Rohan, and the Rangers of Gondor, will not offer the excuse that they were ‘Only obeying orders’; one cannot avoid the contrast with the Nazis. When Gandalf tells Frodo about the Ring, Frodo replies ‘I wish it need not have happened in my time’, but Gandalf reproves him: ‘So do I … and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide’ (p. 50). The rebuke is deserved by Frodo, but also by Neville Chamberlain with his now infamous promise that he brought ‘peace in our time’.²¹ Elrond, on p. 237, has learnt better. He remembers a moment when ‘the Elves deemed that evil was ended for ever’ but knows that ‘it was not so’. Tolkien himself fought in ‘the war to end all wars’, but saw his sons fighting in the one after that. Other ironies are not hard to discover. As Gandalf and Pippin ride from the Anórien towards Minas Tirith, they find their way blocked by men building a wall (p. 732). It is Denethor’s insistence on defending this (p. 798) that nearly kills Faramir, and all it does in practice is to obstruct the arrival of the Rohirrim (p. 819) by which time it is already a ‘ruin’, for all the ‘labour’ wasted on it at the start. Men of Tolkien’s generation could hardly avoid thinking of the Maginot Line. Gandalf’s advice, ‘But leave your trowels and sharpen your swords!’, has more than an immediate relevance. The hint is unmistakable, as are others in the trilogy, of Vichyism and quislings, of puppet governments and demilitarised zones. How well do they hang together, though? Did Tolkien go on from the exploitation of occasional scenes to the manipulation of plot, the creation of recognisably symbolic characters, the thing Alfred Duggan the TLS reviewer asked for so plaintively, ‘a clear message for the modern world’? Of course Tolkien would have scorned ‘message’ as much as ‘modern’. Still, he created two characters in The Lord of the Rings of particular suggestiveness, both of them originally on the right side but seduced or corroded by evil, and so especially likely to have analogues in the real world: these are Denethor and Saruman, each of them seen faintly satirically, almost politically.

To take the more obvious example first, Saruman shows many signs of being equatable with industrialism, or technology. His very name means something of the sort. Searu in Old English (the West Saxon form of Mercian *saru) means ‘Device, design, contrivance, art’. Bosworth-Toller’s Dictionary says cautiously that often you cannot tell ‘whether the word is used with a good or with a bad meaning’. When Beowulf walks into Hrothgar’s hall the poet says appreciatively that ‘on him his armour shone, the cunning net (searo-net) sewed by the crafts (orþancum) of the smith’. Jewellers are searo-cræftig, and wizards snottor searu-þancum, ‘wise in cunning thoughts’. The word stretches from wisdom to plot and treachery, though. Beowulf denies he ever sought out searo-niþas, ‘cunning malices’, Grendel’s corpse-holding glove is searo-bendum fœst, ‘fixed with cunning bands’. The word implies cleverness, but is nearly always linked with metal: iron in armour and clasps, but also silver and gold. The dragon’s treasure is a searu-gimma geþræc, ‘a heap of cunning jewels’, in the Riming Poem the poet says obscurely sinc searwade, ‘treasure played the traitor’. That means ‘left its possessor’, suggest Messrs Bosworth and Toller. To Tolkien, with his theory of dragonish ‘bewilderment’, it meant more likely ‘stayed with its possessor’, driving him insidiously to greed and cunning.

These cruxes all form part of Saruman’s character. He is learned, but his learning tends to the practical. ‘He has a mind of metal and wheels’, says Fangorn. His orcs use a kind of gunpowder at Helm’s Deep (p. 525); thirty pages later the Ents meet at Isengard, or ‘Irontown’, a kind of napalm – perhaps one should say with closer reference to Tolkien’s own experience, a Flammenwerfer. The implication is that Saruman has been led from ethically neutral researches into the kind of wanton pollution and love of dirt we see in ‘The Scouring of the Shire’ by something corrupting in the love of machines or in the very desire for control over the natural world. And for this there is a real-world connection, for Tolkien’s own childhood image of industrial ugliness in the midst of natural beauty was Sarehole Mill, with its literally bone-grinding owner ‘the White Ogre’, see Biography p. 36. The Oxford Dictionary of English Place-Names takes the first element of this place to be a personal name Searu, or perhaps the word ‘sere, withered’; Tolkien would automatically have corrected to Mercian Saru, but might well have seen all the proposed meanings as relevant, ‘grey and withered’, but also ‘cunning and mechanical’. It is interesting, too, that Saruman’s Orc-men call him ‘Sharkey’ or ‘Old Man’. To a medievalist the name might well suggest the ‘Old Man of the Mountains’ or leader of the Assassins as described in Mandeville’s Travels. ‘Old Man’ is simply Arabic shaikh (cp. Orkish sharkú). And Mandeville’s Old Man ruled, of course, by feeding his followers hashish and deluding them with dreams of paradise. So, we might think, ‘cunning man’, or ‘machine man’, or ‘technological man’, keeps a Utopian carrot dangling in front of our noses, of a world of leisure and convenience where each new mill grinds faster than the one before. But as Ted Sandyman ought to have realised, ‘you’ve got to have grist before you can grind’; machine-masters end up machine-minders, and all for nothing, or rather for an insidious logic of expansion.

This may not be a totally convincing critique of modern society, but it has clear modern relevance and is more than mere dislike. There is something suggestive also in Saruman’s notorious ‘voice’, which always seems ‘wise and reasonable’, and wakes desire in others ‘by swift agreement to seem wise themselves’. Gandalf’s harshness represents denial of Utopias and insistence that nothing comes free. Even Lotho ‘Pimple’, Frodo’s relative, has a place in the argument because he is such an obvious Gradgrind – greedy and bossy to begin with, but staying within the law till his manipulators take over, to jail his mother, kill him and eat him too (if we can believe the hints about Gríma Wormtongue). Jeremy Bentham to Victorian capitalists? Old Bolshevik to new Stalinist? The progression is familiar enough, and it adds another modern dimension to Middle-earth or rather a timeless one, for though in the modern age we give Saruman a modern ‘applicability’, his name, and the evident uncertainty even in Anglo-Saxon times over mechanical cleverness and ‘machinations’, shows that his meaning was ancient too.

Saruman nevertheless does have one distinctively modern trait, which is his association with Socialism. His men say they are gathering things ‘for fair distribution’, though nobody believes them – a particularly strange compromise of evil with morality, for Middle-earth, where vice rarely troubles to be hypocritical. It is worth saying accordingly that Denethor, contrasted with Saruman as he is in other ways with Théoden, is an arch-conservative. In almost his last speech he declares:

‘I would have things as they were in all the days of my life … and in the days of my longfathers before me … But if doom denies this to me, then I will have naught: neither life diminished, nor love halved, nor honour abated.’ (p. 836)

‘I will have naught’ is a particularly ominous expression. As The Lord of the Rings was coming to the end of its gestation it became possible for the first time for political leaders to say they wanted nothing and make it come true. Denethor clearly will not submit to the Enemy, as Saruman did, but he also cares nothing in the end for his subjects, while his love even for his sons would take them both to death with him. ‘The West has failed’, he says. ‘It shall all go up in a great fire, and all shall be ended! Ash! Ash and smoke blown away on the wind!’ He does not say ‘nuclear fire’, but the thought fits. Denethor breaks his own staff of office as Saruman does not. He mingles an excess of heroic temper – the ancient Ragnarök spirit, one might say, which Tolkien with significant anachronism twice calls ‘heathen’²² – with a mean concern for his own sovereignty and his own boundaries: a combination that unusually and in this one particular case makes no sense at all before 1945 and the invention of the ‘great deterrent’.

It is a risky business finally to draw a Tolkienian ‘inner meaning’ from these various ‘applicabilities’. Tolkien himself insisted that he had not intended one; and finding one need not be the ultimate necessity for the critic, since after all political messages add nothing to Tom Bombadil, or the Ents, or the Riders of Rohan, or the entrelacements, or most of the things discussed in this chapter and the ones around it. The real point is that Tolkien’s theories about nature, evil, luck and our perception of the world generated as a sort of by-product modern applications and political ones. His attachment to the ‘theory of courage’ made him believe that the Western world in his lifetime had been short not of wit or of strength, but of will. His readings of heroic poems made him especially scornful of the notion that to say ‘evil must be fought’ is the same as saying ‘might is right’.²³ He thought that England, in forgetting her early literature, had fallen into liberal self-delusions. Naturally all these ‘morals’ or ‘meanings’ can in themselves be accepted or rejected, depending very much on the varied experience of readers. What cannot be denied is that they emerge from much experience in the author, and much original thought, that they are moreover integrated in a fiction which has a power independent of them. Tolkien was not writing to a thesis. A good deal of what he wrote may be taken as a rejection of the ‘liberal interpretation of history’, and indeed of the ‘liberal humanist tradition’ in literature;²⁴ nevertheless the centre of his story is the Ring and the maxim that ‘power corrupts’, a concept unimpeachably modern, democratic, anti- though not un-heroic. Eucatastrophe, realism, and romance

It should be clear by this time that if there is one critical statement entirely and absolutely wrong, it is the one quoted at the start of this chapter, about The Lord of the Rings not being ‘moulded by some controlling vision of things which is at the same time its raison d’être’. The ‘vision of things’ is there in the Ring, in the scenes of conflict and temptation, in the characters’ words and attitudes, in proverbs and in prophecies and in the very narrative mode itself. Naturally this ‘understanding of reality’ can be ‘denied’: so can they all. But not to see that it exists shows a surprising (and therefore interesting) blindness. It is matched only by Alfred Duggan’s insistence in the TLS that in The Lord of the Rings all the good and bad sides do is try to kill each other, so that they cannot be told apart: ‘Morally there seems nothing to choose between them.’²⁵ The difference is at the very heart of the plot. As W. H. Auden saw, in his piece for The New York Review of Books (22 January 1956), it is vital that Sauron does not guard the Cracks of Doom and discover Frodo because he is sure Aragorn will take the Ring:

Evil, that is, has every advantage but one – it is inferior in imagination. Good can imagine the possibility of becoming evil – hence the refusal of Gandalf and Aragorn to use the Ring – but Evil, defiantly chosen, can no longer imagine anything but itself.

Not to see points like that (and there are more obvious ones) is in a way shameful. The repeated blindnesses of critics can only be explained by a deep dissatisfaction in them with the very data of ‘fairy-story’, an inhibition against accepting the conventions of romance.

Of these the greatest must be the ‘happy ending’ (one brought about, more often than not, by ‘hap’ or ‘chance’ or ‘luck’). Tolkien, of course, being a Christian, did in absolute fact believe that in the end all things would end happily, that in a sense they already had – a belief he shared with Dante, and a matter of faith beyond argument. It needs to be said though that he was capable of envisaging a different belief and even bringing it into his story. Frodo and Sam debate it after they have destroyed the Ring and are caught in the fall of the Dark Tower:

‘I don’t want to give up yet’ [said Sam]. ‘It’s not like me, somehow, if you understand.’

‘Maybe not, Sam,’ said Frodo; ‘but it’s like things are in the world. Hopes fail. An end comes. We have only a little time to wait now. We are lost in ruin and downfall, and there is no escape.’ (p. 929)

He does not change his mind, nor his perception of how ‘things are in the world’. They are changed for him by the eagles who come and take him in his sleep to a new world – which Sam, with a resurrected Gandalf in front of him, very nearly perceives as Heaven. The difference between Earth and Middle-earth, one might say, is that in the latter faith can, just sometimes, be perceived as fact. And while this is an enormous difference, it is not the same as that between the adult and the child.

It cannot be denied that there is a streak of ‘wish-fulfilment’ in The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien would have liked to hear the horns of Rohan blow, and watch the Black Breath of inertia dissolve from his own country. If his work has an image inside itself, it is I think the horn that Éomer gives to Merry, only a small one, but one from the hoard of Scatha the Worm and brought from the North by Eorl the Young. It is a magic one, though only modestly so: ‘He that blows it at need shall set fear in the hearts of his enemies and joy in the hearts of his friends, and they shall hear him and come to him.’ When Merry blows it in the Shire the revolution against sloth and shabbiness and Saruman-‘Sharkey’ is on: no doubt Tolkien would have liked to be able in his own person to do the same. He got closer to his goal than many, however, at least when it came to bringing ‘joy’. At the same time his portrayal of Frodo quietly sliding down to sleep, dismissal and an oblivion which would include ents, elves, dwarves and the whole of Middle-earth, shows that he recognised the limits of his own wishes and their non-correspondence with reality. The last word on the relationship between his literary mode and that of realism may perhaps go to Professor Frank Kermode, who wrote:

Romance could be defined as a means of exhibiting the action of magical and moral laws in a version of human life so selective as to obscure, for the special purpose of concentrating attention on these laws, the fact that in reality their force is intermittent and only fitfully glimpsed.

Professor Kermode made those remarks however à propos of Shakespeare’s Tempest.²⁶ And one has to say that while both Prospero and Gandalf are old men with staffs, Prospero brushes aside the oppositions of reality with an ease which Gandalf is never allowed to aspire to.

^*Tolkien wrote this in a letter of 12 December 1955 to Mr David I. Masson, who kindly showed it to me and has given me permission to quote from it here. Irritated evidently by the TLS review of 25 November 1955 (to which Mr Masson had written a reply, published TLS 9 December 1955), Tolkien remarked that the reviewer should not have made such a fuss over giving quarter to orcs. ‘Surely how often “quarter” is given is off the point in a book that breathes Mercy from start to finish: in which the central hero is at last divested of all arms, except his will? “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us. Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil”, are words that occur to me, and of which the scene in the Sammath Naur was meant to be a “fairy-story” exemplum …’ See also Letters, p. 252.

^*There is a text and translation of this poem, and an introduction to it, in my Poems of Wisdom and Learning in Old English (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer Press, 1976; Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1976). Tolkien certainly studied the poem, for it is the best riddle-contest in Old English, and most like the Old Norse ones from the Elder Edda and The Saga of King Heidrek. Gollum’s ‘Time’ riddle in The Hobbit is based on Saturn’s ‘Old Age’ one.

^*It is the only instance, out of 63 occurrences in the poem, where the word þá as an unsupported demonstrative takes alliteration and stress, so gaining unusual if not unnatural prominence.