Master of Middle Earth

by Paul H. Kocher

  In all the foregoing arrangements of Peoples, and punishment or reward of individuals, the Valar are the immediate prime movers. But they are acting as executives of the will of the One, and their power of independent decision is limited. The Appendices tell of two pivotal events that reveal the outlines of these limits. When "as a reward for their sufferings in the cause against Morgoth, the Valar . . . granted to the Edain a land to dwell in . . ."—the island of Númenor, at the end of the First Age—they could triple the life spans of these men, but they could not make them undying as were the elves, because they "were not permitted to take from them the Gift of Men . . .": death (emphasis added). The Valar obeyed an edict coming down from above. On the other hand, they seem to have some discretion in applying this edict to the half-human, half-elven offspring of the two previous marriages between elves and men: "At the end of the First Age the Valar gave to the Half-elven an irrevocable choice to which kindred they would belong." Under the command to make this choice, Arwen abandons immortality in order to marry Aragorn.

  The other occasion which the Valar clearly do not, perhaps cannot, manage by themselves is the invasion of Valinor by rebellious Númenoreans demanding immortality. Then ". . . the Valar laid down their Guardianship and called upon the One . . ." who sank Númenor under the waves. These incidents serve to show that while the Valar have what Tolkien calls incomprehensibly great "demiurgic" powers,3 which they use in governing and guarding the affairs of Middle-earth and which justify the invocation of their help in prayer by many of its folk, they are only agents of "the One" and defer to his direct intervention in major emergencies. Beyond this point Tolkien does not choose to go in defining the relationship of the Valar to their superior. Why should he? He has told us all he needs to for the literary-philosophical framework of his tale.

  As the Fourth Age begins, no successor of Sauron is in sight to rally the forces of evil against civilization. But signs are not lacking that sooner or later one will arise again on Middle-earth or out of the Undying Lands—another Morgoth, a more vicious Fëanor, a Denethor more wholly lost to good. Gandalf has said as much in the Last Debate: "Other evils there are that may come; for Sauron is himself but a servant or emissary. Yet it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years in which we are set, uprooting the evils in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clear earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule."4 To judge by the history of the past three Ages evil will not be long in reviving. With brief respites Middle-earth has always been under siege by some Dark Lord or other. There seems to be something in the nature of things, or in the nature of the One who devises them,5 that requires it. Sauron is Morgoth's servant, but whose emissary is Morgoth? In one sense, nobody's. Since like everybody else, he has a will free to choose, he is self-corrupted. In another sense, his master can only be the One, who, while not creating evil, permits it to exist and uses it in ruling his word—who, in truth, needs evil in order to bring on times of peril that test his creatures to the uttermost, morally and physically, as in Sauron's war.

  If men and their colleagues of other races are to prove the stoutness of their fiber, such times must come again and again in the Fourth Age and future ages of whatever number. Evil has built-in weaknesses that make for self-defeat, and the One, with his smiling ironies, will sometimes manipulate it to that end. But the burden of The Lord of the Rings is that victory for the good is never automatic. It must be earned anew each time by every individual taking part. In this effort, says Aragorn to Éomer, man has the natural ability and the obligation to "discern" the difference between right and wrong. These are opposites, absolutes that do not vary from year to year or place to place or people to people. Those rational beings who would act well on Tolkien's Middle-earth do not have to stand on the shifting sands of historical relativism. The good is as unchanging above the tides of time as the beauty of Sam's star over Mordor, and derives ultimately from the character of the One who placed it there.

  But does death end all for those who have not the unending lives of elves? The epic abounds with hints of some kind of afterlife for them, but these are faint. For example, the dying Aragorn, when taking leave of Arwen, encourages her to believe that they will meet again: "Behold! we are not bound for ever to the circles of the world, and beyond them is more than memory." But neither he nor anyone else speculates on the question of whether the rewards of virtue extend beyond death. There is plenty of natural religion in The Lord of the Rings but the epic tends to stand back from transcendence on this point, as some of Tolkien's shorter tales do not.

  The farthest look into the future of mankind on earth is taken by Legolas and Gimli when they first enter Minas Tirith and see the marks of decay around them. The dwarf comments that all the works of men, however promising at first, "fail of their promise." Legolas counters that, even so, "seldom do they fail of their seed," which springs up afresh in unlooked-for times and places to outlast both elves and dwarves. Gimli is unconvinced. Human deeds, he still thinks, "come to naught in the end but might-have-beens." The elf takes refuge in a plea of ignorance: "To that the Elves know not the answer"—and presumably if not the elves, then nobody.

  This sad little fugue about the outlook for humanity by representatives of two neighbor races is uncharacteristic in its sadness of the epic as a whole. The Lord of the Rings is at bottom a hopeful tale. The whole venture of the Ring always looks desperate. So does combat after combat against wildly superior armies. Yet against all persuasions to despair, Gandalf, Aragorn, Elrond, Faramir, and those who fight beside them hope on and keep on acting upon their hope. Without that, Sauron would have won a dozen times over. Tolkien himself is pessimistic about many aspects of our present age, but he is personally too robust to give up on man. I find the same stoutheartedness in the epic in the teeth of tragedy acknowledged and faced down. It strikes me rather as being a paean to hope.

  Chapter IV : Sauron and the Nature of Evil

  LIKE GREEK DRAMA or Miltonic epic which begin late along their plot lines, The Lord of the Rings begins just before the climax of Sauron's efforts to subdue the West, which have extended far back through the Second and Third Ages. Indeed, when Tolkien comes to write his account of the War of the Ring he has so much that is important to summarize about the events leading up to it that he criticizes the work in the Foreword, for all its three volumes, as "too short."

  To see Sauron in full stature we had best attend carefully to the long tale of his past guile, ambition, and triumph told in snatches by Gandalf, Elrond, and others, and by Tolkien in the Appendices. All the more so because Sauron, never personally appearing in any scene of the epic, is in some danger of becoming a shadowy impersonality who does not seem real in himself but fades into a symbol of evil. Yet his was the seductive charm of body and mind that tempted the Númenorean king Ar-Pharazon to defy the Ban of the Valar by arms, provoking the One to an anger that drowned all Númenor under the sea at the end of the Second Age—a signal victory. In the same Age he had already sown the first seeds of the War of the Ring by deceiving the elven smiths of Eregion into forging the rings of power, by which he designed to gain dominion over elves, dwarves, and men. This bold scheme of Sauron's, boundless in its ambitious reach, is the true beginning of Tolkien's epic.

  Sauron perpetrated deception of the elven smiths by appealing to what he knew to be the ruling passion of the elves: "their eagerness for knowledge, by which Sauron ensnared them. For at that time he was not yet evil to behold, and they received his aid and grew mighty in craft, whereas he learned all their secrets, and betrayed them, and forged secretly in the Mountain of Fire the One Ring to be their master." As a result, the elves made three rings for themselves, seven that they gave to the dwarf leaders, and nine that they turned over to Sauron for the use of the chiefs of men. All were rings of power, but they reflected the characteristics peculiar to the races for which they were intended. The elf rings,
for instance, increased "understanding, making, and healing, to preserve all things unstained." The dwarf rings, appealing to the treasure hunger that was the besetting sin of that race, served "to inflame their hearts with a greed of gold and precious things, so that if they lacked them all other good things seemed profitless, and they were filled with wrath and desire for vengeance on all who deprived them." The rings directed at men stimulated and implemented their ambition for power. Sauron gave these to chiefs of the Dúnedain, especially Angmar, who had not gone to Númenor: "Nine he gave to Mortal Men, proud and great, and so ensnared them. Long ago they fell under the dominion of the One, and they became Ringwraiths, shadows under his great Shadow, his most terrible servants."

  But this plot of Sauron's demands a price. He can forge a ruling Ring strong enough to control all these subordinate rings only by pouring into it a large portion of his own native vigor, as Gandalf explains: ". . . he made that Ring himself, it is his, and he let a great part of his own former power pass into it, so that he could rule all the others." The price is greater than he realizes. As long as his vigor is undivided Sauron's spirit can survive death after death, living to fight another day by incarnating itself each time in a new body, as he has done twice before—after the drowning of Númenor and after his defeat by Elendil and Gilgalad, in both of which he perished. But once he infuses part of his strength into a Ring that can be lost he is weakened even while the lost Ring is intact, and he becomes vulnerable to permanent loss of the power to occupy any physical body if the Ring is ever destroyed. This, of course, is the one capital flaw that the West is finally able to exploit.

  Why does Sauron ever embark on the forging of the rings in the first place under conditions of such peril? He need not have. The immediate answer must lie somewhere in his character. In his customary arrogance and blind contempt he never takes seriously, perhaps never sees at all, the possibility that he may one day lose the ruling Ring. Besides, he is an obsessed being, driven by his fever to dominate everything and everybody. He cannot rest. He is always on the offensive, always reaching out to draw all life to himself in order to subdue it. As W. H. Auden well remarks, this kind of lust of domination "is not satisfied if another does what it wants; he must be made to do it against his will."1 It would be a mistake, moreover, to generalize Sauron into a conscious champion of the cause of abstract evil. He is quite simply a champion of Sauron, so far as his intent goes. That he is being used unwittingly by a higher power as one protagonist in a conflict between good and evil has been suggested in the previous chapter.

  Setting aside its deadly risk to himself, Sauron's plot with the rings has only partial success. It works perfectly with the human ringwraiths, but with the dwarves it fails to do more than exacerbate their greed. By nature dwarves are not easily digestible. "Though they could be slain or broken, they could not be reduced to shadows enslaved to another will." From the beginning the dwarves "were made ... of a kind to resist most steadfastly any domination." Since Sauron's whole appetite is for command of other wills, he is balked of his purpose here, though his ability to ruin the lives of individual leaders like Thráin and his partial perversion of general dwarf nature might count as success enough for a less exacting gourmet. One remembers the gloating message he sends after seeing Pippin in the Palantír: "Tell Saruman that this dainty is not for him. I will send for it at once." Pippin, like every other living being, is to Sauron an impersonal "it" to be devoured.

  Sauron's worst failure, however, is with the elf rings, and the manner of it tells much about him. After all the rings have been forged he stands triumphantly on Mount Doom, sets the ruling Ring on his finger, and repeats aloud in the Black Speech the spell by which it rules the others. He is arrogantly unaware that in Eregion across the long miles Celebrimbor, king of the elves, is "aware of him" and hides the elf rings so that no elf will wear one (until after the ruling Ring is lost). He then launches war against Sauron. Like Galadriel in Lórien he perceives the Dark Lord and knows his mind, though Sauron gropes for his thoughts in vain. This basic epistemological superiority of the good over the evil is symbolized by Lórien's light, which pierces to the heart of the darkness of Dol Guldur but cannot be pierced by it in return. Other instances of this blindness of Sauron will appear in due course. Lacking imaginative sympathy an evil intelligence cannot by understanding penetrate a good one, which does have that power in reverse. The former is too involved in self.

  Sauron being what he is, that part of himself which he pours into the ruling Ring makes of it a living will to devour utterly the wills of those who wear the lesser rings. As has been said in the previous chapter, for Tolkien every intelligent being is born with a will capable of free choice, and the exercise of it is the distinguishing mark of his individuality. Nothing can be more precious. So Gandalf, Elrond, Galadriel, Aragorn, and other leaders of the West are careful never to put pressure on another's choices, even to the point of reluctance to give him advice when he asks for it By contrast, Sauron, who hates any freedom other than his own, focuses his attack in devising the rings against this ultimate bastion of freedom. His ruling Ring is at once a powerful instrument of coercion on all who come within its influence, particularly its wearers, and a carrier of temptation to them to coerce the wills of others. Its method is the subtle one of gradually capturing the mind by radiating an incessant inflationary spell over whatever desires are dearest to it, however harmless or even noble they may seem. So, wearing the ring, Sam sees himself "striding with a flaming sword" to make all Mordor into a garden, Gollum will become the Gollum, Isildur is to shine as the great winner of werglid for the deaths of his father and brother. Gandalf dares not wear it, knowing that "the way of the Ring to my heart is by pity, pity for weakness and the desire of strength to do good." Neither dares Galadriel to accept it, when offered the Ring by Frodo and urged by Sam to take it "to make some folk pay for their dirty work." "I would," she replies sadly. "That is how it would begin. But it would not stop with that, alas!" The Ring can work only by coercion of the will. Such is its nature. Anyone who uses coercion in even the best of causes is using an evil means to a good end and thereby corrupting the end—and himself. By definition, good objects turn bad when achieved by the absolute power over others' wills which the Ring confers.

  "The very desire of it corrupts the heart," warns Elrond. That is why any gifted person who elects to make the Ring his permanent mode of action inevitably becomes another Dark Lord, and consequently why it cannot be allowed to go on existing.

  In the Nazgûl, who are victims of the Ring's power carried to its last degree, the fullness of that power is most clearly visible. Not only are they its slaves, no longer having any wills of their own, but through it they have suffered far-reaching physical changes. The process of lengthening life which has kept Bilbo and Frodo young for some scores of years has prolonged theirs for tens of centuries since the rings were forged in the Second Age. They seem never to have died in the usual sense. They still inhabit their original bodies, but these have faded and thinned in their component matter until they can no longer be said to exist in the dimension of the living. Their flesh is not alive, not dead, but "undead." They have moved into a half-world of shadows, not lighted by our sun but not given over to complete darkness and nothingness either. In consequence their senses have altered so that normal perceptions have dulled or disappeared, while other nameless ones have sharpened. Aragorn describes them to the hobbits on Weathertop: "They themselves do not see the world of light as we do, but our shapes cast shadows in their minds, which only the noon sun destroys; and in the dark they perceive many signs and forms that are hidden from us . . . And at all times they smell the blood of living things, desiring and hating it. Senses, too, there are other than sight or smell." Just as men can feel their presence near, "they feel ours more keenly. Also ... the Ring draws them."

  By putting on the Ring when the ringwraiths attack the camp, Frodo foolishly throws himself into their world. He is able to see for the fi
rst time the bodies under their cloaks, and their eyes can see him. Aided by this vision, Angmar succeeds in wounding Frodo with the Morgul knife, and until he is healed at Rivendell Frodo drifts in and out of their land of shades. A shadow seems to him to lie between him and the faces of his friends. The woods and meadows recede as if into a mist. At the Ford the Black Riders look solid and he can suddenly hear their voices and dreadful laughter calling him to Mordor. Gandalf tells Frodo as he recovers in Rivendell what he has escaped: "If they had succeeded you would have become as they are, only weaker and under their command. You would have become a wraith in the dominion of the Dark Lord; and he would have tormented you for trying to keep his Ring . . ." Frodo's peril was gravest when he was wearing the Ring, moreover, "for then you were half in the wraith-world yourself, and they might have seized you." In the last stages of his journey across Mordor to Mount Doom Frodo is sinking rapidly into his world as his resistance to the Ring wanes and its strength waxes in the land where it was forged. "The Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie" blends imperceptibly into the wraith world of the Ring. Why should it not? The Ring, being only an extension of Sauron's personality and power, makes a world like its master's. Sauron is literally as well as figuratively the Dark Lord of a region which he has created (or uncreated) hospitably dark to house himself and those he has made like him. But, like Marlowe's Hell, Mordor has no geographical limits and is wherever its victims are.