Master of Middle Earth

by Paul H. Kocher

  The case is the same for the individual characters and the races in The Hobbit who will reappear in The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien's abrupt leap from a children's tale to an epic of heroic struggle requires a radical elevation of stature for all of them. As the Necromancer of The Hobbit is not yet Sauron, Gandalf is not yet Gandalf. The wizard of the child's story who "never minded explaining his cleverness more than once," who is "dreadfully afraid" of the wargs, who tricks Beorn into accepting thirteen unwanted dwarves into his house, and the like, needs nothing short of a total literary resurrection to become the messenger sent by the Valar to rally the West against Sauron. So, too, something drastic will have to be done to the petulant, cowardly dwarves who, to escape the wargs, sit "up in the trees with their beards dangling down, like old gentlemen gone cracked and playing at being boys," if their race is to be capable of producing a Gimli. Even Elrond the wise is a lesser digit who must be raised to a considerably higher power. And the elves of Riven-dell and Mirkwood! No self-respecting elf in the epic would perpetrate the nonsense they sing in The Hobbit, or dance and carol on midsummer eve, do disappearing acts at the approach of travelers in the forest, and the like, as if they were the tiny nonentities of our debased folklore, as Tolkien everywhere else deplores it. Nor, happily, can trolls be allowed to go on speaking the bastard cockney of Tom, Bert, and Bill Huggins. That Tolkien was able to accomplish all such transmutations successfully bears witness to his possession of an almost incredible power of mind and art.

  Much of this need for upgrading the characters and the plot of The Hobbit arises from Tolkien's treatment of them in many situations of that tale as seriocomic. He evidently believes that the children will enjoy laughing at them sometimes, as a relief from shivering in excitement sympathetically with them at others. In truth, The Hobbit is seldom far from comedy. Tolkien begins by making Bilbo the butt of Gandalf's joke in sending the dwarves unexpectedly to eat up all his food, proceeds on to the lamentable humor of the troll scene, hangs his dwarves up in trees, rolls them in barrels, touched the riddle scene with wit, makes the talk between Bilbo and Smaug triumphantly ridiculous, and tops it all off with Bilbo's return home to find his goods being auctioned off and his reputation for respectable stupidity in ruins. It must be acknowledged that the comedy is not invariably successful and that Tolkien's wry paternal manner of addressing his young listeners does not always avoid an air of talking down, which sets the teeth on edge. Nevertheless, The Hobbit was never meant to be a wholly serious tale, nor his young audience to listen without laughing often. In contradistinction, The Lord of the Rings does on occasion evoke smiles, but most of the time its issues go too deep for laughter. In the interval between the two stories the children are sent off to bed and their places taken by grownups, young or young in heart, to hear of a graver sort of quest in which every human life is secretly engaged.

  Chapter III : Cosmic Order

  TOLKIEN IS NOT A PHILOSOPHER or a theologian but a literary artist who thinks. Consequently he is not content merely to narrate a bare series of events but surrounds each high point of the action in The Lord of the Rings with convictions and opinions expressed by the participants as to its possible place in some larger plan under execution by greater hands than theirs. Their speculations on such a topic could easily lead to the familiar vexing, futile debates on predestination, foreknowledge, contingent futures, free will, and the rest of that thorny thicket. Tolkien, however, refuses to weigh down his story by letting his people think or talk like professionals in these areas. Virtually without exception the elves, men, hobbits, and their allies of the West come to believe in a moral dynamism in the universe to which each of them freely contributes, with out exactly knowing how, and without being at all sure how it will eventually work out in the war against Sauron. But they eschew technical terms and discuss each crisis not as an intellectual problem but as a stern occasion demanding concrete choices and chances. Being thoughtful people, though, they say quite enough in the process to give a good idea of the kind of order in which they believe and the nature of the planner operating through it.

  The first serious discussion about these matters takes place early in Part I, Book I, when Gandalf explain to Frodo what the Ring is and how Bilbo came to get it from Gollum in the caverns under the Misty Mountains: "Bilbo's arrival just at that time, and putting his hand on it, blindly, in the dark" was not the accident it seems but "the strangest event in the whole history of the Ring so far." At the call of Sauron's will his Ring was leaving Gollum to return to its maker, but Bilbo found it because "there was something else at work beyond any design of the Ring-maker. I can put it no plainer than by saying that Bilbo was meant to find the Ring, and not by its maker. In which case you also were meant to have it." Plainly Gandalf is saying that the "something else" which thwarted Sauron was stronger than he and used this recall of the Ring as a means of putting it, instead, into the possession of the Dark Lord's enemies through Bilbo. This intervention, coming just at this juncture, is crucial. Control of the Ring gives the West its one slim chance of defeating Sauron. Had the Ring remained with Gollum, or even stayed lost, Sauron's armies were strong enough to win easily without it, as everyone admits. The free people can overcome him only by destroying the Ring, and with it the vigor which he himself poured into it in the Second Age, and which is still necessary to his hold on life in Middle-earth. Bilbo's picking up the Ring in the dark is the first step on the long road to Mount Doom.

  No conscious choice of Bilbo's led to his finding the Ring. He did not even know what it was at the time. But the incident did require of him a decision whether or not to kill Gollum. Out of pity he freely chose not to kill, a choice highly commended by Gandalf, which won Bilbo the personal "reward" of taking little hurt from the evil of the Ring. More importantly, Gandalf guesses, he knows not how, that Gollum is "bound up with the fate of the Ring," and that he "has some part to play yet, for good or ill, before the end." This can only be a piece of inspired foresight on Gandalf s part, however vague its content. He has no rational way of knowing that only Gollum, stumbling down into the Cracks of Doom with the Ring, will save it from Sauron at the last moment and accomplish his destruction.

  Many of the wise on Middle-earth have such general glimpses of the future, but they are never more than vague and unspecific. The future is the property of the One who plans it. Yet is it fixed in the sense that every link in the chain of its events is foreordained? It cannot be, because in his encounter with Gollum Bilbo's choice to kill or not to kill is genuinely free, and only after it has been made is it woven into the guiding scheme. Tolkien leaves it at that. Human (or hobbitic or elvish or dwarfish or entish) free will coexists with a providential order and promotes this order, not frustrates it.

  Gandalf has said that Bilbo was "meant" to find the ring in order to pass it on to Frodo as his heir. Frodo was "meant" to wear it from then on. But Gandalf does not assume that Frodo will necessarily do what he was intended to, though he should. When Frodo, rebelling at first against the duty imposed on him, asks the natural question, "Why was I chosen?" the wizard can only reply that nobody knows why; Frodo can be sure only that it was not because of any surpassing merits he has: "But you have been chosen, and you must therefore use such strength and heart and wits as you have." The reasons why one instrument is "chosen" rather than another are not outwardly visible to any eyes on Middle-earth. Yet Gandalf carefully goes on to inform Frodo that he is free to accept or reject the choice: .. the decision lies with you." The option not to cooperate with the grand design is open to Frodo's will, as it is to that of all other intelligent creatures who are aware of the issues. Frodo groans but takes up his appointed burden. Sam later does the same on the trip to Rivendell when he tells Frodo: "... I have something to do before the end, and it lies ahead, not in the Shire. I must see it through . . ." It is no business of Tolkien's to tell us what would have happened had these choices been refused by the hob-bits. We are left at liberty to presume that other persons wou
ld have taken their place. For it is becoming clear that the designer is working against Sauron and would, if necessary, have brought forward alternative means to confound him.

  This impression is strongly fortified by a passage in Appendix B defining the mission of the five wizards, led by Gandalf and Saruman, to Middle-earth, as understood by later chroniclers: "It was afterwards said that they came out of the Far West and were messengers sent to contest the power of Sauron, and to unite all those who had the will to resist him; but they were forbidden to match his power with power, or to seek to dominate Elves or Men by force and fear . . . They came therefore in the shape of men . . ." Who "sent" them and who "forbad"? Surely it was either the Valar or the One who established them as guardians of Middle-earth and whose design they were charged to administer. It says a good deal about the character of that designer that he cared enough about the future of Middle-earthly peoples to send messengers to help them against evil and yet confined that help to education and persuasion, leaving their wills unforced. Stress is put on the moral side of the struggle against Sauron and on each person's right to select his own role, or lack of any role, in it. Being either one of the Valar himself or at least instructed by them, Gandalf knows as much as any creature can when he suggests a personal will that "means" and "chooses" as it works out its design. And no less so when he reminds all comers that they are the final masters of their own decisions, though what the consequences will be is not for them to know.

  Gandalf had intended to escort the Ring-bearer to Rivendell to guard him from Sauron's agents along the way. Tolkien first strips Frodo of protection through Saruman's imprisonment of Gandalf and then restores it by Frodo's apparently accidental encounter with Gildor's elves just as he is about to be attacked by Black Riders. Gildor, knowing how rare the meetings of elves with other creatures in the woods are, suspects a hidden intention behind this one: "In this meeting there may be more than chance; but the purpose is not clear to me, and I fear to say too much." Being no more informed than anyone else on Middle-earth of the aims of this "purpose," the elf is reluctant to give any advice that may unduly influence Frodo's choices and so make them less free. What he can and does do is pass along to "those that have power to do good" the news that the hobbits are in peril. So warned, Bombadil, and later Aragorn, arrive at critical moments as substitutes for Gandalf to give them the aid which he cannot give.

  Frodo himself raises the question whether his rescue by Bombadil from Old Man Willow was only happenstance: "Did you hear me calling, Master, or was it just chance that brought you at that moment?" Tom's answer is both yea and nay, but the yea is louder. He did not hear Frodo calling for help, and he was on an errand that afternoon which took him to that part of the Old Forest to gather waterlilies. On the other hand, he had been alerted by Gildor that the hobbits were in need and he was watching the danger spots. In sum, says Tom, "Just chance brought me then, if chance you call it. It was no plan of mine, though I was waiting for you." The incredulous "if chance you call it" tends to deny that the rescue was really chance, however mortals may commonly define the concept. "It was no plan of mine" invites the thought that there was a plan, though it was not his. Questions of this sort are meant to live on in the back of the reader's mind and to make him doubt that Aragorn's very opportune appearance later on at a time of maximum danger in the inn at Bree is as fortuitous as it seems.

  Tolkien is here facing a joint literary-philosophical imperative. Literarily, he wants to keep an atmosphere of wonder at the mysterous hand which is guiding events, but he must not let this theme become so strong or definite as to persuade his readers that the hobbits are certain to reach Rivendell safely. To do so would be fatal to the suspense, and therefore to the story as story. Philosophically, if the guiding hand is really to guide effectively, it must have power to control events, yet not so much as to take away from the people acting them out the capacity for moral choice. The latter, being fundamental to Tolkien's conception of man (and other rational beings), must be preserved at all costs. So Tolkien cannot allow his cosmic order to be a fixed, mechanistic, unchangeable chain of causes and effects. The order must be built flexibly around creaturely free will and possible personal providential interventions from on high.

  Tolkien uses several techniques to attain the desired balances. For one thing he never speaks about these matters as author, and thereby avoids authorial certitudes. His characters may be certain, or virtually so, that a providential order is at work but they are never sure of its final outcome, or exactly how it operates. Witness Gandalf, who is positive that the Ring was "meant" to fall into the hands of the West but not what its future is to be after that, and who guesses that Gollum has a part yet to play but knows not whether it is for good or ill. Witness also Gildor, who intuits a supervening purpose in his meeting with the hobbits but confesses his ignorance of its aims. And Bombadil, who, while intimating that his rescue of Frodo was not coincidence, regards himself as ultimately outside the contending forces in the War of the Ring.

  Another technique Tolkien finds handy is to couple every incident anyone calls foreordained with some no-table exercise of free will by one of the characters involved in it. For example, as noted, Bilbo and Frodo arc said to be chosen as Ring-bearers, but Bilbo is given the option to spare or kill Gollum, and Frodo can always decline to serve. This duality is repeated again and again straight through to the end of the epic. Yet another device is to let most of the major characters voice premonitions or prophecies, seeming to entail a definite foreseeable future, yet to keep these either misty in content or tentative in tone, so loosening their fixity and hinting that the routes are various by which they may come true.

  All these devices Tolkien handles with persuasive tact. But they are successful also because they create for life on Middle-earth a kind of atmosphere that our own existential experience of living accepts as genuine. Very common for us is the sense that our lives are bound in with larger patterns that we cannot change. Yet tomorrow seems never sure, and at every new crossroads nothing is stronger than the feeling inside us that we are the masters of our alternatives.

  Because Elrond's Council is a turning point in the history of Middle-earth and because he himself, with Gandalf and Galadriel, is the wisest of the assembled leaders of the West, his solemn opening statement to them that some force greater than themselves has brought them together at this crisis carries special weight. To decide what to do with the Ring, he says, "That is the purpose for which you are called hither. Called, I say, though I have not called you to me, strangers from distant lands. You have come and are here met, in this very nick of time, by chance as it may seem. Yet it is not so. Believe rather that it is so ordered that we who sit here, and none others, must now find counsel for the perils of the world." Nothing could be plainer than Elrond's rejection here of chance as the cause of the Council, however much on the surface it may seem to be so. Almost as plain is his language pointing to the personal nature of the summoner.

  Words like purpose, called (thrice spoken), ordered, believe look to some living will and even have a distantly Christian aura. Moreover, whoever did the calling was concerned for the West's welfare in the struggle against Sauron. Yet the whole purpose of assembling its leaders was not to force any course of action upon them but to have them freely debate it for themselves. The conclusions of the Council are not predetermined in any way, though its summoning was. Noteworthy also is the care with which Elrond avoids giving the supreme being any of the traditional names for God.

  The Council having agreed at length that the Ring must be carried back to Mordor to be destroyed, a silence ensues until Frodo, overcoming "a great dread," speaks up with an effort to offer himself as carrier. This is the vocabulary of free choice. Elrond accepts it as such while at the same time believing that the same power that convoked the Council has also appointed Frodo to undertake the task. He sees no clash between the two ideas: "If I understand aright all that I have heard ... I think that this task is a
ppointed for you, Frodo; and that if you do not find a way, no one will. . . But it is a heavy burden ... I do not lay it on you. But if you take it freely, I will say that your choice is right . . ." Though Frodo is a chosen instrument most likely to succeed, it is not a foregone conclusion that he will succeed. Providence, for its own reasons which finite minds cannot understand, may perhaps intend Sauron to win this bout in the never-ceasing war between good and evil. Elrond leaves the end open. Frodo has the right to accept or refuse the office as he wills, and no other person should tell him what to do. Yet refusal may bring unspoken penalties, since all acts have their consequences. If Frodo's acceptance would be "right," would not refusal be, if not "wrong," at least an abdication of duty, diminishing him morally? Much is implicit here. Among the natural inferences also is that Frodo's appointment to carry the Ring is of like kind with the selection of Bilbo and Frodo to find and receive it earlier, and was made by the same all-seeing mind, in which Gandalf and Elrond, both pupils of the Valar, firmly believe.

  Elrond here has ventured only a very generalized and conditional forecast of possible coming events. Gandalf's death in combat with the Balrog in Moria, however, is one of those main forks in the plot of which Aragorn as well as Gandalf has rather clear knowledge in advance. Aragorn is so sure beforehand of personal disaster to Gandalf that he insists on trying the alternate route over the Redhorn Gate first, and when they are forced by storm toward the old dwarf kingdom utters the strongest possible alarm to him: "I will follow your lead now—if his last warning does not move you . . . And I say to you: if you pass the doors of Moria, beware!" Aragorn does not say precisely what he fears, but the severity of his agitation can be for nothing less than Gandalf's death, and he accurately fears for no one else in the Company, since all the rest are saved by Gandalf's sacrifice of himself. Gandalf, too, knows what awaits him. Rebuking Gimli weeks later for saying that the wizard's "foresight failed him" in entering Moria, Aragorn implies that Gandalf foreknew and accepted the result: "The counsel of Gandalf was not founded on foreknowledge of safety, for himself or others . . . There are some things that it is better to begin than to refuse, even though the end may be dark." But the inference also is that Gandalf could have chosen not to accept death, as Frodo could have chosen not to accept the Ring. The foreseen event will occur only if a creaturely will freely consents first. In this way Tolkien keeps his providential plan personalized, nonmechanistic, and not rigidly determined yet quite potent enough, withholds advance details about the precise shape and manner of the event foreknown, and, not incidentally, enhances the suspense of his tale.