Master of Middle Earth

by Paul H. Kocher

  His destruction of Isengard saves Rohan so that it in turn may help save Gondor. Aragorn's gratitude after he ascends the throne leads him to open wide areas west of the Misty Mountains to reforestation, and grants Isengard to the ents in fee. The king encourages new search for the entwives in the eastern lands, but we know they will never be found, and had better never be, since the sexes have become unsexed. Repeatedly there come ominous hints that the wild-wood will not prosper in the expanding Age of Man.

  4. Hobbits

  Treebeard hits the mark when he describes the distinguishing traits of hobbits as a race: "hungry as hunters, the Hobbit children,/the laughing-folk, the little people." Created first for a child audience, they are a combination, on the one hand, of human children living in a society where the desires of children are ideally institutionalized because there are no grownups and, on the other hand, of some of the qualities traditionally ascribed to the "little people" of folklore. To fill out the child side of the combination they are about half the size of an adult, they eat six meals a day with snacks at will in between, life is one long round of birthday parties at which presents are given and received, games are played, no serious work seems to need doing, no living need be earned, nobody gets sick or dies, people may fight and quarrel but nobody bleeds, chatter is endlessly gay and trivial if sometimes a bit cruel, and tobacco does not have to be smoked in secret behind the barn. Perhaps even the living in comfortable holes in the ground appeals to the child's love of hiding in small enclosed spaces. Of course the hobbit is also a furry creature who does not have to wear shoes, rather like a rabbit, which likewise lives in burrows. An eagle in The Hobbit, who has never seen a hobbit, thinks Bilbo looks like a frightened rabbit, and Beorn in like case says of him, "Little bunny is getting nice and fat again on bread and honey." Children easily identify with small animals, especially bunnies.

  Perhaps Edmund Wilson was half-right when he suggested in his now notorious book review that Rabbit was one component of the name hobbit.19 Hobbs, however, was a bad guess at the other component. If we are to disregard Tolkien's own etymology, holbytla ("hole-dweller"), as an afterthought appearing only late in The Lord of the Rings, the more likely candidate for the other component is Middle English Hob, for which the Oxford English Dictionary off-fers two pertinent meanings: (1) "rustic, clown"; (2) "Robin Goodfellow, hobgoblin." Robin is the English version of the "little people" of Celtic tradition. These were often thought of as silent, unseen little beings sometimes good-naturedly helping, sometimes mischievously hindering, the work of the house. The disappearance of household articles, the souring of cream, and other sorts of unexpected tricks could be traced back to them. This body of lore supplies to hobbits their silent tread and ability to disappear in an instant without being seen by other races. It also seems to give Bilbo his job with Thorin's expedition as an "expert burglar" and spy to help recover the treasure from Smaug. At first he is home-oriented and reluctant to go, but once started he uses a considerable bag of tricks and thieving skill on Gollum, on the Silvan elves, on the spiders, on Smaug, and on his own employer, Thorin, in stealing the Arkenstone.

  Of course Bilbo changes as the story unfolds; he acquires constancy, courage, and above all a sense of moral responsibility. These are adult human traits which Tolkien adds because the increasing depth of his tale demands them. In short, Bilbo grows up before our eyes and returns home so matured that Gandalf wryly congratulates him: "Something is the matter with you! You are not the hobbit that you were."

  Tolkien's Prologue to The Lord of the Rings elaborates the political, historical, and linguistic dimensions of hobbit society in preparation for the greater role it is to play, no longer in a child's tale but in an epic on the grandest scale. Yet at the start of the epic that society is still essentially the same Utopia of childhood wish fulfillment from which Bilbo long ago set out to steal treasure. Other races have their sorrows. But before the War of the Ring the whole problem of the hobbits is that they have no problems. Protected by the Dúnedain rangers from winds of the outside world, they live their tight little lives in their tight little Shire, unknowing and unknown. Scarcely anyone on Middle-earth has any idea what a hobbit is except as a figment in old songs. So far as the hobbit race is concerned, the main theme of The Lord of the Rings is to tell how the unknowing come to know, and the unknown become known and honored by other races.

  Those readers who find the hobbit atmosphere of the opening episodes tedious do so, I suspect, because they look at these child-men with purely adult eyes. So regarded, they do indeed become as tiresome as too many hours spent exclusively among the antics of the young. But Tolkien manages to see them both with the eyes of the child, and so to find them charming, and with the eyes of the man, and so to see what they lack in the larger canvas of the life of Middle-earth. Frodo is his spokesman on both counts, Frodo who can look at the Shire partly from the outside because he has been Bilbo's pupil and has talked with elves and dwarves: "... there have been times when I thought the inhabitants too stupid and dull for words, and have felt that an earthquake or an invasion of dragons might be good for them. But I don't feel like that now. I felt that as long as the Shire lies behind, safe and comfortable, I shall find wandering more bearable . . ." So Frodo is fully aware of its stifling stagnation, but values too its warm safety. He can see it both ways. Likewise nobody is a stauncher champion of hobbits than Gandalf. He knows they are "amazing creatures" whose toughness of moral fiber suits them uniquely to resist the temptation of the Ring. But their mixture of follies and virtues inevitably strikes him as seriocomic: "Ever since Bilbo left I have been deeply concerned . . . about all these charming, absurd, helpless hobbits. It would be a grievous blow to the world if the Dark Power overcame the Shire; if all your kind, jolly, stupid Bolgers, Hornblowers, Boffins, Brace-girdles, and the rest, not to mention the ridiculous Bagginses, became enslaved." That is the right way for us to look at the hobbits as a race, if we can.

  Indeed they are very like us. "It is plain," to repeat what Tolkien says in the Prologue, "that in spite of later estrangements Hobbits are relatives of ours: far nearer to us than Elves, or even than Dwarves. Of old they spoke the languages of Men, after their own fashion, and liked and disliked much the same things as Men did." If, in their original gay innocence, they resemble human children, hobbits suffering under the tyranny of Sauron and his agents intensify their resemblance to our sadder and wiser selves as grown men. Particularly, Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin, who together represent most of the qualities of their race, grow increasingly human as the epic progresses. Tolkien's literary method requires them to. His decision to describe from their point of view every scene in which they are present (very few scenes are without at least one hobbit) makes it imperative that their point of view become quite like ours. Otherwise we as readers would not understand what is happening, or share in the grave trials which the hobbits are singled out to undergo, especially in Mordor. Consequently, with a few vestigial exceptions, the differences between hobbit and man are for all practical purposes extinguished once the pressures on the Fellowship turn severe. And Frodo and Sam especially are in effect human during the long physical and moral struggle toward Mount Doom. In conclusion, the Shire after the War is so much like any other devastated land that even there the actions of the four protagonists on their return, the responses of the population to their leadership, and the final cleansing of the place are all too familiar to twentieth-century experience.

  So much has been written about Frodo, and much of it so well, that here I shall zero in on only one strangely revealing aspect of his character, his dreams. No one else in the whole epic dreams so constantly and so diversely. Faramir is indeed visited several times by a dream, once shared by Boromir, warning him to seek in Rivendell the sword that was broken, now that Gondor is in desperate straits. Faramir also dreams of the drowning of Númenor. But that is all. Frodo's visions in sleep set him apart as unusual even before he leaves the Shire, and begin to affect his
conduct and personality: ". . . strange visions of mountains that he had never seen came into his dreams." These would seem to be the Misty Mountains, for he is influenced to undertake his journey toward them. About to enter the Old Forest, he hears in a dream the sound of the sea and catches sight of the white tower at the Grey Havens where departing elves take ship for the West. He has never in his life been near either but he will be embarking there himself one day when the mission to Mordor is over. This dream, then, is a prevision of the future. The elf lords, Aragorn, and others sometimes have true hunches about coming events but not in dreams. For better or worse Frodo seems gifted with a power possessed only by the greatest among other races. While asleep in the house of Tom Bombadil he witnesses from afar Gandalf's rescue from Saruman's stronghold of Orthanc by the eagle Gwaihir, a feat which is taking place at about that same time. Frodo has the same sort of vision of a present event occurring somewhere else when a dream in the inn at Bree shows him the Black Riders attacking his house at Crickhollow in a vain attempt to seize him. It is almost as if he were looking into a Palantír or viewing Galadriel's mirror. Both these latter dreams are informative and monitory.

  Alone among the hobbits in Rivendell, Frodo is given visions of Elvenhome in the Uttermost West: "... seas of foam that sighed upon the margins of the world." Alone among the Fellowship in Lórien, he receives from Galadriel a gift that puts him under the protection of Elbereth, the phial of water from her mirror in which is caught the light of Eärendil's star, a gift most precious to elves. Although Frodo cannot actually turn into an elf, his innate spiritual kinship to them is revealed by his physical state after recovery from the wound inflicted by Angmar on Weathertop. Gandalf sees a transparency about him and speculates to himself that Frodo "may become like a glass filled with a clear light for eyes to see that can." Sam had perceived this light "shining faintly" within his beloved master in Elrond's house, but on their journey to Mordor when Frodo slept "the light was even clearer and stronger." His face is "old, old and beautiful." In the extremity of his travail as they near Mount Doom Frodo casts aside all weapons and armor. He prefers possible capture to the use of arms, a preference which he holds to later in refusing to fight in the battle to free the Shire or to strike back at Saruman when attacked. For him struggles for the right must hereafter be waged only on the moral plane.

  Yet even while he is taking this lofty moral stance he tells Sam that he is falling more and more under the evil domination of the Ring and that he has lost the power to give it away or remain sane if it is taken from him. Evidently he is being torn by stronger and stronger forces of good and evil pulling his mind in opposite directions. It is necessary to stress that Frodo does not win his battle against evil in the climactic moment of choice at the Cracks of Doom. When he announces there, "I do not choose now to do what I came to do . . . The Ring-is mine!" and sets it on his finger he becomes the slave of the Ring. Only its providential destruction by Gollum saves him, and the West, from utter defeat. He can be hailed by the host in Ithilien afterward not for final victory, which was not his doing, but only for his heroic stamina in getting the Ring to the one place where it could be destroyed.

  During the rest of his days on Middle-earth Frodo remains torn between the newly contending elements of his nature. Had he clearly mastered the Ring he would be whole and at peace. But since it came close to mastering him, he is still in the power of its memory. He still loathes it and longs for it after the fashion of Gollum. Here Frodo's propensity to dream is a curse because he cannot forget the "precious" even in sleep. In the midst of a Shire restored to happiness Farmer Cotton finds him one day "half in a dream," desperately clutching the white gem Arwen gave him and pining for the Ring. "It is gone forever," Frodo tells him, "and now all is dark and empty."20

  Waking or asleep, Frodo is afflicted by a second life of memory, much as elves are. As an elfin princess married to a mortal, Arwen will have to endure a double life of the past superimposed upon the present all the rest of her days. Since her tragedy parallels Frodo's, she alone understands his case and tries to help him with the gift of a jewel conferring hope, "when the memory of the fear and the darkness troubles you . . ." Foreseeing also that there will be no cure for him on Middle-earth, she presents him with the place in the Undying Lands which she forfeits by wedding Aragorn. She could hardly make such a transfer unless Frodo has grown enough like an elf to be capable of the impress of immortality.

  5. Men

  In our world Man is without rival in intelligence and general culture. On Tolkien's Middle-earth he is only one of half a dozen highly developed species, each with its own genius, which are at least his equals and in some respects perhaps his superiors. How would we behave under similar circumstances? Tolkien does not, of course, try to answer that question. But he does set himself the fascinating task of imagining human reaction to the kinds of other intelligent beings who live side by side with man under the kinds of conditions he chooses to visualize for his epic and its historical backgrounds.

  Man is not the earliest civilized creature to arise on Middle-earth. He is preceded by elves and ents. We cannot be sure where dwarves and hobbits stand in the order of chronological succession, but they seem later than man; wizards, ores, and trolls, are definitely later. At some time early in the First Age the three tribes of the Edain drift westward from somewhere in the east and encounter the elves, some of whom have never left the mainland while others, having sailed to the Uttermost West to be tutored by the Valar, have already sailed back in pursuit of Morgoth. These latter, especially, have been educated to a state of wisdom and achievement far above that of barbaric man. Moreover, all elves are immortal, whereas man is mortal. He does not realize how mortal he is until he meets others who are not so. There is nothing in our experience to parallel the shock of such a meeting. Its effects never cease throughout the three Ages in which elves and men inhabit the same Middle-earth.

  The first fruits are an alliance in which the human tribes array themselves unreservedly on the side of these apparently superior beings in their war against Morgoth. The fact that both species are soon soundly beaten is not enough to break Man's loyalty. The difference between mortal and immortal is a natural barrier to intermarriage between the two races which neither seems anxious to breach. Besides, the barrier is strengthened by an edict of the Valar, who manage such matters, that any elf who marries a human being must become mortal. In all the long centuries of the First and Second Ages only two elf maidens, Lúthien and Idril, are willing to make the sacrifice for love, and no male elves. The appearance of several generations of their offspring, part-elf, part-human, poses a new difficulty that the Valar resolve with another ruling, that each of these offspring must choose categorically between mortality and immortality. Elrond chooses to be elf but his brother Elros elects to be Man.

  That there is something to be said on each side Tolkien has observed before in his essay "On Fairy-stories." Human tales about elves, he says, often depict the tedium of escape from mortality: "Few lessons are taught more clearly in them than the burden of that kind of immortality, or rather endless serial living, to which the fugitive would fly." And if elves tell corresponding stories about men they "are doubtless full of the Escape from Deathlessness." Each species yearns to have the gift of the other, but would not like it if once achieved. The Lord of the Rings has moments of hesitation in deciding whether death may not be a greater boon than "endless serial living." For example the Edain, who are given the island of Númenor as a reward for their fight against Morgoth, are granted life spans thrice that of ordinary men, but "they must remain mortal, since the Valar were not permitted to take from them the Gift of Men (or the Doom of Men, as it was afterwards called)." Here death can be called a gift or a doom depending on who you are. Arwen, for one, comes to look upon it as a bitter doom. The higher authority of God forbids even the Valar to change the ordained composition of the races. Men must be men and die; elves must be elves and live on and on. There is no amb
iguity about the preferences of either men or elves in the epic, however. The "Ban of the Valar" operates only in one direction. It prevents the Númenoreans from sailing to the Undying Lands of the elves, where presumably they might try to steal undying life, but does not prohibit elves from sailing to Númenor, for no danger exists of their trying to seize death.

  The elves did come to Númenor with their advanced teachings, to the high profit of the Edain there, but the denial of immortality rankled the Edain. Their discontent festered, and finally they organized a naval expedition to seize the Uttermost West. Man's hunger for more and more life gave Sauron a fatal argument with which to drive Númenor into disobedience, but its people were obviously ripe for rebellion anyway. Even the drowning of the island and all its rebels did not still the same hunger among Númenoreans settled on mainland shores. The dwellings of the elves and the Valar, removed from "the circles of the world," were now beyond their reach. But "many" of these shore-dwellers looked for an alternative in the Black Arts and so "fell into evils and follies," as Faramir tells Frodo. In Gondor itself the frantic search for more life took varying forms, all morbid: old men compounded elixirs to lengthen their years, or cast horoscopes to calculate how many years of life remained to them; kings built tombs more splendid than the palaces they lived in; men mused about their ancestors instead of having children. The thought of death "was ever present" to the exclusion of the life that was legitimately theirs. So, immersed in death, they forgot that Sauron might come alive again.