Master of Middle Earth

by Paul H. Kocher

  This is the situation in Gondor during the early centuries of the Third Age. The Stewards alleviate the decay by mixing their Númenorean stock with that of sturdy sailors and mountaineers who, having had no dealings with elves, are not consumed by the contrasts of deathlessness. Nevertheless, a grievous aftermath remains. The people of Gondor now deeply distrust and fear elves. The attitude held toward them by even so wise and tolerant a man as Faramir is curiously ambivalent. He regrets that "Men now fear and misdoubt the Elves, and yet know little of them. And we of Gondor grow like other Men, like the men of Rohan; for even they, who are foes of the Dark Lord, shim the Elves . . ."; yet he censures those few men who visit Lórien, "For I deem it perilous now for mortal man wilfully to seek out the Elder People." But in the next breath he adds, "Yet I envy you that have spoken with the White Lady." Boromir, Denethor and others in Minas Tirith hold the same prejudice. The Rohirrim feel it in virulent form. The desire for immortality by Man goes underground during the latter part of the Third Age, when the elves become fewer and more withdrawn. But the problem in another guise is painfully resurrected in Aragorn's wooing of Arwen, and in their eventual parting at his death. "If this is indeed, as the Eldar say, the gift of the One to Men, it is bitter to receive," she says, she who has known what it is to be immortal. She never really reconciles herself to death. From varying angles Tolkien keeps studying the probable consequences to both immortal elves and mortal men of living together on the same planet.

  Faramir, one of the most high-souled and thoughtful men in the whole epic, divides the civilizations of men into three classes: the High, or pure Númenorean; the Middle, the Men of the Twilight, like the Rohirrim and their kin the Bardings; the Wild, the Men of Darkness, such as the woses of Druadan Forest, and perhaps the more primitive of the hill tribes. No doubt several factors enter into the classification, but the primary one for Faramir is the "love of war and valour as things good in themselves, both a sport and an end," which has lowered Gondor from the High, where it used to be, to the level of the Rohirrim, a young people whose values all reflect a zest for battle. Gondor, too, now esteems a warrior above men of other crafts. "Such is the need of our days." It was otherwise in happier times when Minas Tirith cherished the original Númenorean virtues of "gentleness and arts." These were the teachings of the elves. To them Faramir remains nostalgically loyal, though the safety of his city has forced him to take up the sword in defense against Sauron: "I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend: the city of the Men of Númenor; and I would have her loved for her memory, her ancientry, her beauty, and her present wisdom." Herein lies the real breach between him and his elder brother Boromir, whom he laments. Boromir was totally the "man of prowess," a great captain, ambitious to be king. Faramir, by contrast, has no personal ambitions and would be glad to see the line of Elendil restored. Knowing his brother only too well, he is completely able to understand why the trial of the Ring was too sore for Boromir, while he himself would not pick it up even if he found it lying in the highway.

  Faramir, however, is no pacifist. Unlike Frodo he has not renounced the sword, though he detests having to use it. Once faced with the dire needs of his city against invading armies, he becomes a brave and resourceful war leader. Only the entreaties of Frodo induce him to spare Gollum, whom he is quite ready to kill as a potential danger. On the other hand his grim performance of duty is at the opposite pole from the pomp with which Théoden, for instance, invests war. Nor is he like Aragorn, who neither loves nor hates fighting but accepts it as a fact of his times, a duty which he must perform in the recovery of his throne and, later, its protection. Through these figures and others in The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien is exploring several possible positions toward war and peace. He speaks for himself more openly in "The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth" (see Chapter VII).

  Middle-earth at the end of the Third Age is so embattled a world that few opportunities exist in the epic for picturing societies wholly at peace. The agriculture of the Shire and the commerce of Bree are brief exceptions. In the quieter landscape of The Hobbit, though, Tolkien has time to imagine the town of the men of Esgaroth built out over the waters of Long Lake on wooden pilings for greater safety. The idea of it may come from his recollection of the lakeside dwellings of our primitive ancestors which some archeologists postulate. In any case, Lake-town is pictured as a merchant community trading with the Silvan elves and with men farther south along the River. But even trade corrupts. The Master is a merchant prince whose mind is given altogether "to trade and tolls, to cargoes and gold, to which habit he owed his position." War, here too, is inescapable. The town has been wrecked before by Smaug and is presently burned again. But once the dragon is killed and the ore army driven off in the Battle of the Five Armies, new dwarf and human settlers crowd in, the valley blossoms, "and much wealth went up and down the Running River; and there was friendship in those parts between elves and dwarves and men."

  Such a restoration of peace and friendly commerce between all the free peoples is Tolkien's idea of what constitutes a happy ending. The whole struggle of the War of the Ring has this as its ultimate goal. Tolkien, however, does not desiderate any such mingling of species as will erode the special identity of each.

  They are not to inhabit the same towns and adopt the same modes of life. Dwarves and elves may help to rebuild Minas Tirith but, after the work is done, dwarves will return to their smithies in the caves of Aglarond, Erebor, and the Iron Mountains, elves to their hunting and song in Mirkwood. Hobbits may come as visitors, but the Shire will remain their home. Ents must herd their trees in Fangorn Forest. Hobbits and men will continue to live together in Bree, but mark the conditions: ". . . on friendly terms, minding their own affairs in their own ways, but both rightly regarding themselves as necessary parts of the Bree-folk. Nowhere else in the world was this peculiar (but excellent) arrangement to be found." Bree's arrangement is unique, made possible only by the fact that hobbit and Man are very close kin. Even there the two species pretty much go their separate ways, without intermarriage.

  The general rule is that the free peoples do not interbreed. In most cases it is physically impossible anyway, but where possible it seldom happens. The three lonely unions between elf maidens and men, with their historic but largely tragic results, only prove the rule. Sexual matings between free and unfree peoples are disastrously wrong. The original breeding of ores and trolls by Morgoth, followed later by the crossing of ores with men by Sauron and Saruman, is regarded with horror by everyone in the West. Such unions produce not only the Uruk-hai but "squint-eyed" half-men. Bill Ferny's accomplice in Bree is one of these.

  On quite a different footing, of course, is intermarriage between members of different tribes or clans within the same species. The three branches of hobbit folk freely intermarry, as do the various families of elves. Faramir praises the Stewards' success of strengthening the failing stock of Númenorean Gondor by unions with more primitive peoples of mountain and seashore; Faramir himself happily weds Éowyn of Rohan, and so on.

  The coexistence of the free peoples of Middle-earth with one another is founded on mutual respect and appreciation. Radically incompatible with these is the kind of contempt Boromir expresses for all half-lings, elves and wizards, not to mention Aragorn, in the scene when he tries to take the Ring from Frodo at Parth Galen. In this context his saying, "Each to his own kind," is in effect a proclamation of the superiority of men over other species, of Gondoreans over other men, and eventually of Boromir over other Gondoreans. In some degree some members of all the other species are smirched by this sense of the alienness of other peoples and the peculiar excellence of their own. Summed up in Boromir's words, which might have come straight from the brain of Sauron, the principle is at the root of all division on Middle-earth: "Each to his own kind." The business of The Lord of the Rings is to eradicate it inside the civilization of the West. Aragorn
the statesman makes a beginning by reaching out to the men of the South and the East through treaty and alliance. But for the most part the bringing of Southrons and Easterlings into full reconciliation with the West is left as unfinished business.

  Chapter VI : Aragorn

  IN HIS ESSAY "On Fairy-stories" Tolkien takes pains to make the point that most good fairy stories are not "stories about fairies" but about "the adventures of men in the Perilous Realm." Aragorn is unquestionably the leading man in The Lord of the Rings, which is a fairy tale within Tolkien's broad definition of the genre, yet he is probably the least written about, least valued, and most misunderstood of all its major characters. By some critics, like Roger Sale,1 he is completely neglected in favor of Frodo as central hero; by others, like William Ready, he is dismissed as "almost too good to be human; he has some of the qualities of a noble horse."2 Mr. Ready wants him to display "a sharp taste for sin."

  It is not clear why this demand, more appropriate to a realistic novel than to heroic fantasy, should be made, on penalty of being horsy, of Aragorn alone among the foes of Sauron. What is clear is that if it were made of all alike it would blur the clear dichotomy between good and evil on which Tolkien has chosen to build his epic. Of course, Mr. Ready may mean only that Aragorn has no weaknesses, suffers no limitation. If so, he is demonstrably wrong. But merely to dwell on Aragorn's faults in order to refute Mr. Ready's school of criticism would be too negative a stance for a fair-minded reader to adopt. Our understanding of this complex man will be better served by showing how his varied qualities complement or contend with one another, and how he struggles to keep uppermost those that are best. This is the same struggle that has to be waged under different guises by all the leaders and many of the followers of the West. Without it they would not be good. One of Tolkien's major achievements in these degenerate days is to win our sympathy for their triumph over the evil from within.

  Admittedly, Aragorn is rather more difficult to know truly than any other important person in the story. The fault is partly Tolkien's. As noted elsewhere, in the Introductory Note to Tree and Leaf he confessed that during the period 1938-1939 when he first brought Aragorn (disguised as Strider) and the hobbits together at Bree he "had then no more notion than they had of . . . who Strider was; and I had begun to despair of surviving to find out." Consequently, Tolkien had not put into the narrative before then any preparatory allusions to Strider's real identity, his present reasons for interest in the Ring, and his many past years of travel and labor connected with it in the Wild. We do not begin to get most of this essential information about Isildur's heir until the Council of Elrond several chapters later, and only in retrospect can understand his actions and feeling at Bree. Even at Rivendell we may well miss the bare hints which are all that Tolkien finds space for about Aragorn's love for Arwen since youth. Yet this, along with his concurrent planning to recover the throne of Gondor, is basic motivation without a knowledge of which Aragorn remains a mystery. Unless the reader is very alert to the few obscure references to Arwen scattered here and there later on, he can easily wake up somewhere in Volume III with a shock of total surprise at Aragorn's approaching marriage to the lady. Not until the beautiful "Tale of Aragorn and Arwen" in Appendix A do we fully grasp her influence upon his life and see him whole.

  No doubt Tolkien, making a literary virtue out of his unforeseen introduction of Strider, plays up for all they are worth the resulting sense of mystery and the excitement of gradual discovery of the truth about him. But Tolkien has not escaped the risks of puzzling readers into misconceptions that are hard to root out even on rereading the text several times. For instance, the travel-worn stranger with the "pale stern face" and "dark hair flecked with grey" sitting in the shadows in the common room of the inn at Bree may seem unduly secretive until we know his background. His father was killed by Sauron's ores when he was a baby and he has been reared to manhood by Elrond in Rivendell under an assumed name to hide him from the Enemy, who would give much to trap the only remaining man with clear title to the thrones of both the North and the South Kingdoms. All his life he has been making arduous journeys far east and south to learn of those regions and peoples at first hand and to spy on Sauron. Under false names he has fought for both Rohan and Minas Tirith. Chief of the Dúnedain, he has quietly led them in patrols that have slipped along the borders of the Shire to guard it and the Ring it holds. They are homeless and solitary men, these Rangers, as their work demands, and he has become as grim and stern as any of them. Not the less so because as a young man he fell in love with the elfin princess Arwen, daughter of Elrond, whom by her father's command he cannot marry until he regains his throne. The long years pass without bringing him nearer to either goal, until the Ring reappears. Shortly before coming to Bree he has returned from a joint search with Gandalf for Gollum, whom he captured clear down near the borders of Mordor. And within the past week his Rangers have been routed by incursions of the nine Black Riders under the command of Angmar, the ancient enemy of his race.

  This is the ambitious, weary and apprehensive prince who impatiently watches the foolish antics of the hobbits under the suspicious eyes of the crowd in the inn. To his mind the hobbits badly need taking in hand, as children who are playing games with the fate of Middle-earth. Having trailed them to Bree after overhearing their good-byes to Bombadil, he must now undertake to guide them to the safety of Rivendell. But how to persuade them to accept him—a complete stranger? He has asked the innkeeper Butterbur to take a message to the hobbits that he wants to talk to them, and has been ignominiously turned down. Like other folk in Bree, Butterbur is parochially contemptuous of mysterious Rangers. The incident has not decreased Aragorn's sense of anger and frustration, but it is typical of him that he manages to master them. After some mild but unsuccessful warnings to Frodo in the taproom to be more cautious, he quietly invites himself into the hobbits' private room and patiently sets out to win their confidence. He does not make the mistake of being ingratiating; on the contrary, he starts out with a shock tactic. Because of the debacle in the common room he treats them like the children they have shown themselves to be, and proposes to give them unspecified valuable information in exchange for the "reward" of being allowed to accompany them. The proposal is meant to be indignantly refused and when it is, Aragon applauds.

  Step by step he arouses the hobbits to the dangers of their situation. He warms them to him by making fun of his own wayworn appearance which causes the innkeeper to scorn him: " 'Well, I have a rascally look, have I not?' " he asks Frodo "with a curl of his lip and a queer gleam of his eye." Aragorn is hiding here the very real hurt he feels. But when Butterbur enters the room again with a pointblank warning to the hobbits not to "take up with a Ranger," thereby disturbing Aragorn's efforts at conciliation, Aragorn strikes back acidly, asking whether Butterbur is prepared to guard them against the Black Riders. And the discovery that Butterbur is holding an important letter from Gandalf to Frodo, which he has totally forgotten to deliver for months, snaps Aragorn's patience with the "fat innkeeper who only remembers his own name because people shout at him all day." Aragorn is capable of lasting anger at laxity and stupidity and ingratitude. These are still in his mind weeks later at Elrond's Council when he says of his Rangers: "Travellers scowl at us and countrymen give us scornful names. 'Strider' I am to one fat man who lives within a day's march of foes that would freeze his heart, or lay his little town in ruin, if he were not guarded ceaselessly." Aragorn will have a long memory for injuries when he ascends the throne, but he will restrain it with a sense of justice, as at Rivendell he pulls himself up short with the reminder that his own policy has deliberately kept the Shire folk ignorant of their own danger: "Yet we would not have it otherwise. If simple folk are free from care and fear, simple they will be, and we must be secret to keep them so." The wisdom of such a policy may be debated, but certainly its intention is generous.

  But back to Bree—Aragorn is deeply shaken with hatred and fear of the Blac
k Riders while he tries to make the hobbits realize how terrible they are. His face is "drawn as if with pain, and his hands clenched the arms of his chair . . . while he sat with unseeing eyes as if walking in distant memory." He is reliving recent encounters with these living dead, whom he now proposes to face again, and is perhaps also remembering that his ancestors in the North Kingdom were obliterated ages ago by Angmar, their captain, his hereditary foe. Aragorn may resent slurs by others against his conviction of his own high worth, but he can be curiously humble about it himself when he offers his help to the hobbits on their journey: "I am older than I look. I might prove useful."

  Aragorn's problem with the hobbits is largely resolved for him by Gandalf's letter of identification. When Frodo asks him why he didn't reveal himself before as a friend of the wizard, Aragon gives several practical reasons but ends with the real one, which is emotional: " 'But I must admit,' he added with a queer laugh, 'that I hoped you would take to me for my own sake. A hunted man sometimes wearies of distrust and longs for friendship. But there, I believe my looks are against me.'" He is weary of the pretenses imposed by his life of enforced disguise, and longs to be given the trust which he is finding out can only be won by first giving trust himself.

  Throughout this scene Aragorn is holding powerful feelings under rein. Sometimes they escape for a moment, as with Butterbur. So also in the case of Pippin, whose well-meant but tactless remark that they would all look as disreputable as Strider "after lying for days in hedges and ditches" provokes him to a tart outburst, "It would take more than a few days, or weeks, or years, of wandering in the Wild to make you look like Strider . . . And you would die first, unless you are made of sterner stuff than you look to be." And Sam's persistent doubt that he is the real Strider draws a raw assertion of power: " 'If I had killed the real Strider, I could kill you. And I should have killed you already without so much talk. If I was after the Ring, I could have it—NOW!' " That he could easily take the Ring from the hobbits by force or fraud and use its magic to win his long-sought throne, and with it the maiden he loves, has not failed to cross his mind. Like every other leader of the West he is given one fateful chance to yield to its temptation. But he conquers it and is never bothered by it again. Taking his hand off his sword, he smiles suddenly. "I am Aragorn son of Arathorn; and if by life or death I can serve you, I will." By confiding to the hobbits his true identity he puts his life in their hands. And by his pledge of help he subordinates his own ambitions to their safety as bearers of the Ring.