Master of Middle Earth

by Paul H. Kocher

  Their connection with Sauron is hinted at first in Tom's description of their coming: "A shadow came out of dark places far away, and the bones were stirred in the mounds. Barrow-wights walked in the hollow places with a clink of rings on cold fingers . . ." among the hills. This shadow is Sauron sending the barrow-wights. The incantation chanted by the wight who is about to kill the hobbits specifically condemns them to death "till the dark lord lifts his hand/over dead sea and withered land," after the sun fails and the moon dies. Here a servant of Sauron (and maybe Sauron himself) is looking forward to a Black Resurrection at the end of the world, when the dead arise to face judgment not by Christ but by a triumphant Dark Lord who has taken His place. It is all nonsense, of course. Tom exorcizes the wight to a prison "darker than the darkness,/Where gates stand for ever shut, till the world is mended." This mending of the world seems to refer to a Resurrection quite different from that anticipated by Sauron and his servants. Meantime Tom's song frees the minds of the hobbits from whatever limbo the wight's spell has consigned them to.

  The whole episode is significant as showing the range of Sauron's powers and his hopes. From the remoteness of Mordor he is able to bend the ghosts of dead men to his purposes nearly as absolutely as he does the still-living Nazgûl enslaved by the Ring. And he aspires to be God. If he can rule the races of Middle-earth while Earth abides, why not the souls of the dead after the world ends? Tolkien springs upon the reader surprise after surprise in the inexhaustible variety of evil beings of whom Sauron can dispose. Their powers arc many but their chief weapon is fear. Gimli points this up in retelling how Aragorn put to flight the southern wing of Sauron's armies with the shadow host of dead oath-breakers: "Strange and wonderful I thought it that the designs of Mordor should be overthrown by such wraiths of fear and darkness. With its own weapons was it worsted!"

  Sauron himself is not exempt from the same feeling of doubt and dread which he inspires in others. The finding of his Ring by his enemies rouses him to a fearful awareness of dangers he had never foreseen. Increasingly as the epic proceeds, that Eye of his, which needs no lids because it never sleeps, anxiously searches for the Ring and its bearers, while also surveying the preparations for war on both sides. With the logic of ambition he expects some one of the Western leaders to turn the power of the Ring against him. But with the lack of imagination5 that characterizes the self-involved he cannot conceive that they may refuse power and decide to destroy the Ring instead. As time goes on and the Ring still eludes him, his alarm grows. "Indeed he is in great fear, not knowing what mighty one may suddenly appear, wielding the Ring, and assailing him with war," Gandalf guesses on meeting Aragorn in Fangorn. Sauron fumbles his chance to read Pippin's mind in the palantír because he is hurried into the mistake of being "too eager" to torture the truth out of Pippin in person.

  Most drastically shocking to the Dark Lord is Aragorn's sudden revelation of himself in the Palantír as the heir of Isildur. "To know that I lived and walked the earth was a blow to his heart, I deem; for he knew it not till now . . . Sauron has not forgotten Isildur and the sword of Elendil," says Aragorn grimly after a struggle of wills in which he tears control of the Orthanc-stone away from the enemy. And he is right. The knowledge that Aragorn survives and (as he thinks) will surely become Lord of the Ring against him creates temporary tumult in Sauron's hold over Mordor. The warnings that Angmar sends back to headquarters after meeting Frodo and Sam on the stairs at Cirith Ungol go unheeded for several days while Sauron broods. The confusion among the ore guards allows the hobbits to slip into Mordor despite the battle with Shelob. And, best of all, Sauron is bluffed into launching his attack on Gondor prematurely. Down in the city Gandalf senses this with joy: "I feel from afar his haste and fear. He has begun sooner than he would. Something has happened to stir him."

  Thereafter until the end of the tale signs of the Dark Lord's "doubt" and strained watching multiply, alternating with times when the Eye is "turned inward, pondering tidings of doubt and danger," thinking of Aragorn and the sword of Elendil which once killed Sauron on the slopes of Baraddur. Finally when he glimpses Frodo near the Cracks of Doom Sauron at last sees the magnitude of his folly in one flash and blazes with wrath and fear. "Wise fool," Gandalf calls him. So he is. But his very folly, his misjudgments, his fears, his doubts, his memories of past defeat, his hatred of Gondor for humiliations of old are what keep him a living figure instead of impersonal evil. One can almost sigh as well as shudder when at the moment of dissolution he still stretches out over the world "a vast threatening hand, terrible but impotent," before the wind blows him away.

  The question remains how far Tolkien wishes his treatment of evil to be considered not only moral but metaphysical. As remarked in Chapter III, Tolkien does not write in the technical language of philosophy. In one passage of his essay "On Fairy-stories" he deliberately sidesteps the epistemological problem of whether and in what form a physical world exists apart from man's perceptions. Recovery he defines as "a regaining of a clear view" of things, and adds, "I do not say 'seeing things as they are' and involve myself with the philosophers, though I might venture to say 'seeing things as we are (or were) meant to see them'—as things apart from ourselves."6 The philosophers with whom he prefers not to involve himself are probably those of the idealist school from Berkeley down to our modem phenomenologists who, each in his own way, echo Coleridge's dejection, ". . . we receive but what we give/And in our life alone does Nature live." Yet of course Tolkien cannot escape metaphysics. By introducing the word meant he implies intention, and only a person of some kind can have an intent for mankind. He is merely turning an epistemological problem into a theological one. Without using blatantly theological terms his ideas are often clearly theological nonetheless, and are best understood when viewed in the context of the natural theology of Thomas Aquinas, whom it is reasonable to suppose that Tolkien, as a medievalist and a Catholic, knows well. The same is true in the area of metaphysics. Some of Thomas' less specifically Christian propositions about the nature of evil seem highly congruent with those which Tolkien expresses or implies in laymen's terms in The Lord of the Rings. We must be very tentative, of course, and alert not to force a literary masterpiece into any tight philosophical mold, Thomistic or otherwise. Middle-earth is avowedly pre-Christian.

  "Nothing is evil in the beginning. Even Sauron was not so." It is well to repeat often Tolkien's basic moral and ontological dictum. Before he succumbed to the promptings of Morgoth, Sauron had the excellence native to the species into which he was born, whatever that species was. So did Saruman; so did Gollum; so did the Nazgûl, and all the rest. Grima Wormtongue, even, did Théoden honest service before he sold himself to Saruman. Sauron may have been a valar, as Auden suggests,7 or he may have belonged to some other powerful race. It is not very important. What matters is that he had great gifts of mind, a full range of perceptions, a handsome body, and a sense of fellowship that made him welcome to everyone. After his fall, his moral vision narrowed down to what could serve his ambitions. This is a grievous loss of perceptive faculties, resulting in the blindness and lack of imaginative insight we have so often noted. It is also monomania. After a time his body became black and burning hot, so ugly that he had to hide himself away in Mirkwood and Mordor. This process describes not merely an almost Platonic loss of personal beauty but a diminution of physical existence. It is also a loss of normal intercourse with others, a retreat into a loneliness cut off from equals. Literally and figuratively, light is exchanged for darkness. Sauron's every change is a deterioration from those good and healthy norms with which he began. Aquinas would call them all losses of Being. Evil is not a thing in itself but a lessening of the Being inherent in the created order.

  Tolkien does not write in so many words about Being, any more than he does about form, substance, essence, existence, and other metaphysical concepts. But as his evildoers suffer loss after heartbreaking loss from origins which he holds up as admirable these losses cry out for on
tological interpretation. One of the few detailed descriptions we get of Sauron's omnipresent Eye overtly pulls us along in that direction: "The Eye was rimmed with fire, but was itself glazed, yellow as a cat's, watchful and intent, and the black slit of its pupil opened on a pit, a window into nothing." To see into Sauron's Eye is to look into nothingness. Sauron is getting as close as a subsisting creature can get to absolute non-Being. His watchtower on Minas Morgul is built in the same image. Its searchlight is "like a noisome exhalation of decay, a corpse-light, a light that illuminated nothing. In the walls and towers windows showed, like countless black holes looking inward into emptiness . . ." The emptiness, be it noted, is "inward." Resemblance to Sauron's restless Eye is enhanced by the revolving tower, "first one way and then another, a large ghostly head leering into the night." And here again (for the symbolism pursues us through the epic) the light of Mordor is no light but the flicker of darkness over the dead. Add Gandalf's stern command to Angmar when he confronts the Nazgûl at the gates of Gondor: "Go back to the abyss prepared for you! Go back! Fall into the nothingness that awaits you and your Master." Over and over Tolkien's own words connect Sauron and his servants with a nothingness that is the philosophical opposite of Being.

  Add, finally, the outer and inner decay of Saruman who "was great once, of a noble kind that we should not dare to raise our hands against. He is fallen . . ." —to repeat what is virtually Frodo's epitaph over him. After the defeat of his armies he still has at least the spell of his wonderful voice left to him but he misuses that too and cheapens it by cursing as he rejects chance after chance to redeem himself to usefulness. In the end he trudges the roads in "rags of grey or dirty white," an object of sorrow to Gandalf: ". . . alas for Saruman! ... He has withered altogether." His death finishes the downward plunge. The spirit rising from his shrunken body is dissipated by a wind from the West, "and with a sigh dissolved into nothing." That word nothing is a repeated knell for the passing of the lords of wickedness in The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien is careful never to say anything explicit about the nothingness to which they go, doubly careful never to call it hell, but it shares with hell the distinguishing feature of total estrangement from ultimate Being.

  Chapter V : The Free Peoples

  CRITICS LIKE EDMUND WILSON, who pontificates that "for the most part such characters as Dr. Tolkien is able to contrive are perfectly stereotyped,"1 or Mark Roberts, to whom The Lord of the Rings is "simply an adventure story"2 are refuted on their own ground, I hope, by chapters prior and subsequent to this one. My concern here is to demonstrate that these critics, and others, are taking too narrow a view of what a Tolkien "character" is. As Tolkien conceives the matter, characters are not limited to the individuals who play parts in the war against Sauron. They include also, and perhaps even predominantly, the various races to which each person belongs. Tolkien is at least as interested in exploring the characteristic traits of elves, hobbits, dwarves, men, ents, and other intelligent species who swarm Middle-earth as he is in depicting, say, Frodo, Elrond, Aragorn, and Gimli, or in telling the events of the War of the Ring. The essay "On Fairy-stories," that indispensable handbook of Tolkien theory, should have warned the commentators to look at the epic in that light. The aim of The Lord of the Rings is certainly to tell a story of more than ordinary fascination, but it is also to satisfy our basic human hungers to hold communion with as wide a range as possible of creatures like and unlike ourselves.3 In Tolkien's analysis, this is one of the imperatives of good fantasy.

  The question has inevitably been raised whether Tolkien wants us to view each of his many intelligent species as having its niche in some sort of vertical Chain of Being in which some are "higher" than others.4 If so, by what principle of classification? Today's spirit of egalitarianism predisposes us against any such interpretation. Moreover, Tolkien's own wide dissemination of consciousness, the power of speech, and especially moral freedom among nearly all the living creatures of his world may seem to blur the distinctions that we usually regard as existing between species in these particulars. Nevertheless there are cogent reasons for thinking that he means to set at least one major grouping of species above all the rest.

  This grouping consists of those whom Treebeard, in reciting his catalogue of "living creatures" to Merry and Pippin in Fangorn Forest, calls "the free peoples":

  Learn now the lore of Living Creatures!

  First name the four, the free peoples:

  Eldest of all, the elf-children;

  Dwarf the delver, dark are his houses;

  Ent the earthborn, old as mountains;

  Man the mortal, master of horses:

  Having listed elves, dwarves, ents, and men as free peoples, Treebeard clears his throat and proceeds to call off the names of a selection of beasts, birds, and reptiles:

  Hm, hm, hm.

  Beaver the builder, buck the leaper,

  Bear bee-hunter, boar the fighter;

  Hound is hungry, hare is fearful...

  hm, hm.

  Eagle in eyrie, ox in pasture,

  Hart horn-crowned; hawk is swiftest,

  Swan the whitest, serpent coldest. . . .

  Several observations stand out. Four species are "free peoples" whereas all the others are not. And these four are named "first," with the inference that they deserve priority. Hobbits and wizards do not appear on the list because it is one which Treebeard learned long ago as a young ent before the ents met either of those races. So far as hobbits are concerned, after inspecting Merry and Pippin, Treebeard makes a place for them in proper alphabetical order between ents and men:

  Ents the earthborn, old as mountains,

  the wide-walkers, water drinking;

  and hungry as hunters, the Hobbit children,

  the laughing-folk, the little people ...

  Wizards never do get into Treebeard's catalogue. By his standards, if the five of them can be called a race at all, they are rank newcomers who did not turn up until the middle of the Third Age. "I do not know the history of wizards," he remarks with some disdain.

  Elrond also has a concept of "free peoples" as distinct from other living creatures, and in choosing members of the Fellowship of the Ring he is politic enough to include at least one representative of each. In his mind the category embraces men, wizards, dwarves, elves, and of course hobbits. He omits ents not because he does not know of them or does not rate them among free peoples but because of obvious disparities in size, habits, location, and so forth, which would make their membership in the Company impracticable.

  In the phrase free peoples both the adjective and the noun are operative words. Ores, trolls, dragons, and their like do not qualify for the designation because they are not free any longer. According to Tolkien's basic maxim that "Nothing is evil in the beginning" they were free once, but they have surrendered their wills to Sauron and become his slaves. On the other hand the normal creatures of the wild whom Treebeard classes as "living" but not as "free peoples" have not attained the level of social organization that would earn them the title of "peoples." This defect implies also a lower order of both intelligence and moral perception than that which characterizes the five or six races to which Elrond and Treebeard assign primacy among the living beings of Middle-earth. Within these half-dozen, however, neither the elf nor the ent proposes any ranking of superiority. Elrond makes his selections in no particular order. Treebeard's roll call is a mnemonic device and therefore strictly alphabetical and alliterative, with the single exception of the elves to whom ents historically give the place of honor as the one race which taught them language. Consequently, the only vestige of a Chain of Being which Tolkien, through Treebeard and Elrond, is accepting is the dominance of the free peoples. The gulf between them and all other creatures alive can be bridged by conscious communication of many kinds, including speech, but never completely erased.

  The Christian root of this type of dualistic thinking by Tolkien stands revealed in his essay "On Fairy-stories," in which he formulates
the relations between human and subhuman life in terms of the doctrine of Creation and Fall. Tolkien accepts the doctrine that at his creation Man was given dominion over all other creatures. In order that he might rule them justly both he and they were endowed with understanding of each other's speech. The Fall did not take away Man's ordained superiority but it did sever the tie of communion through language. Ever since, "a strange fate and guilt lies on us. Other creatures are like other realms with which Man has broken off relations, and sees now only from the outside at a distance . . ." Fantasy tries to satisfy our hunger for reconciliation by creating many varieties of living creatures with which we can once more converse. But it does not try to pretend that the breach can ever really be healed this side of Paradise; it does not gloss over the "sense of separation" from the subhuman, which must continue to haunt us all our lives as a result of the Fall.