by Karen Haber
This “trochaic” alternation of stress and relief is of course a basic device of narrative, from folk tales to War and Peace; but Tolkien’s reliance on it is striking. It is one of the things that makes his narrative technique unusual for the mid-twentieth century. Unrelieved psychological or emotional stress or tension, and a narrative pace racing without a break from start to climax, characterize much of the fiction of the time. To readers with such expectations, Tolkien’s plodding stress/relief pattern seemed, and seems, simplistic, primitive. To others, it may seem a remarkably simple, subtle technique of keeping the reader going on a long and ceaselessly rewarding journey.
I wanted to see if I could locate the devices by which Tolkien establishes this master rhythm in the trilogy; but the idea of working with the whole immense saga was terrifying. Perhaps some day I or a braver reader can identify the larger patterns of repetition and alternation throughout the narrative. I narrowed my scope to one chapter, the eighth of Volume I, “Fog on the Barrow Downs”: some fourteen pages, chosen almost arbitrarily. I did want there to be some traveling in the selection, journey being such a large component of the story. I went through the chapter noting every major image, event, and feeling-tone, in particular noting recurrences or strong similarity of words, phrases, scenes, actions, feelings, and images. Very soon, sooner than I expected, repetitions began to emerge, including a positive/negative binary pattern of alternation or reversal.
These are the chief recurrent elements I listed (page references are to the George Allen & Unwin edition of 1954):
• A vision or vista of a great expanse (three times: in the first paragraph; in the fifth paragraph; and on p. 157, when the vision is back into history)
• The image of a single figure silhouetted on the sky (four times: Goldberry, p. 147; the standing stone, p. 148; the barrow-wight, p. 151; Tom, pp. 153 and 154. Tom and Goldberry are bright figures in sunlight; the stone and the wraith are dark looming figures in mist)
• Mention of the compass directions—frequent, and often with a benign or malign connotation
• The question “Where are you?” three times (p. 150, when Frodo loses his companions, calls, and is not answered; p. 151, when the barrow-wight answers him; and Merry, on p. 154, “Where did you get to, Frodo?” answered by Frodo’s “I thought that I was lost,” and Tom’s “You’ve found yourself again, out of the deep water.”)
• Phrases describing the hill country through which they ride and walk, the scent of turf, the quality of the light, the ups and downs, and the hilltops on which they pause: some benign, some malign
• Associated images of haze, fog, dimness, silence, confusion, unconsciousness, paralysis (foreshadowed on p. 148 on the hill of the standing stone, intensified on p. 149 as they go on, and climaxing on p. 150 on the barrow), which reverse to images of sunlight, clarity, resolution, thought, action (pp. 151-153)
What I call reversal is a pulsation back and forth between polarities of feeling, mood, image, emotion, action—examples of the stress/release pulse that I think is fundamental to the structure of the book. I listed some of these binaries or polarities, putting the negative before the positive, though that is not by any means always the order of occurrence. Each such reversal or pulsation occurs more than once in the chapter, some three or four times.
darkness/daylight
resting/traveling on
vagueness/vividness of perception
confusion of thought/clarity
sense of menace/of ease
emprisonment or a trap/freedom
enclosure/openness
fear/courage
paralysis/action
panic/thoughtfulness
forgetting/remembering
solitude/companionship
horror/euphoria
cold/warmth
These reversals are not simple binary flips. The positive causes or grows from the negative state, and the negative from the positive. Each yang contains its yin, each yin contains its yang. (I don’t use the Chinese terms lightly; I believe they fit with Tolkien’s conception of how the world works.)
Directionality is extremely important all through the book. I believe there is no moment when we don’t know, literally, where north is, and in which direction the protagonists are going. Two of the windrose points have a pretty clear and consistent emotional value: east has bad connotations, west is benign. North and south vary more, depending on where we are in time and space; in general I think north is a melancholy direction and south a dangerous one. In a passage early in the chapter, one of the three great “vistas” offers us the whole compass view, point by point: west, the Old Forest and the invisible, beloved Shire; south, the Brandywine River flowing “away out of the knowledge of the hobbits”; north, a “featureless and shadowy distance”; and east, “a guess of blue and a remote white glimmer . . . the high and distant mountains”—where their dangerous road will lead them.
The points of the Native American and the airplane compass—up and down—are equally firmly established. Their connotations are complex. Up is usually a bit more fortunate than down, hilltops better than valleys; but the Barrow-downs—hills—are themselves an unlucky place to be. The hilltop where they sleep under the standing stone is a bad place, but there is a hollow on it, as if to contain the badness. Under the barrow is the worst place of all, but Frodo gets there by climbing up a hill. As they wind their way downward, and northward, at the end of the chapter, they are relieved to be leaving the uplands; but they are going back to the danger of the Road.
Similarly, the repeated image of a figure silhouetted against the sky—above seen from below—may be benevolent or menacing.
As the narrative intensifies and concentrates, the number of characters dwindles abruptly to one. Frodo, afoot, goes on ahead of the others, seeing what he thinks is the way out of the Barrow-downs. His experience is increasingly illusory—two standing stones like “the pillars of a headless door,” which he has not seen before (and will not see when he looks for them later)—a quickly gathering dark mist; voices calling his name (from the eastward); a hill, which he must climb “up and up,” having (ominously) lost all sense of direction. At the top, “It was wholly dark. ‘Where are you?’ he cried out miserably.” This cry is unanswered.
When he sees the great barrow loom above him, he repeats the question, “angry and afraid,” “ ‘Where are you?’ ” And this time he is answered, by a deep, cold voice out of the ground.
GOLLUM COMING DOWN THE CLIFF
The Two Towers
Book 4, Chapter I: “The Taming of Smeagol”
The key action of the chapter, inside the barrow, involves Frodo alone in extreme distress, horror, cold, confusion, and paralysis of body and will—pure nightmare. The process of reversal—of escape—is not simple or direct. Frodo goes through several steps or stages in undoing the evil spell.
Lying paralyzed in a tomb on cold stone in darkness, he remembers the Shire, Bilbo, his life. Memory is the first key. He thinks he has come to a terrible end, but refuses to accept it. He lies “thinking and getting a hold on himself,” and as he does so, light begins to shine.
But what it shows him is horrible: his friends lying as if dead, and “across their three necks lay one long naked sword.”
A song begins—a kind of limping, sick reversal of Tom Bombadil’s jolly caroling—and he sees, unforgettably, “a long arm groping, walking on its fingers towards Sam . . . and towards the hilt of the sword that lay upon him.”
He stops thinking, loses his hold on himself, forgets. In panic terror, he considers putting on the Ring, which has lain so far, all through the chapter, unmentioned in his pocket. The Ring, of course, is the central image of the whole book. Its influence is utterly baneful. Even to think of putting it on is to imagine himself abandoning his friends and justifying his cowardice—“Gandalf would admit that there had been nothing else he could do.”
His courage and his love for his friends are stung awake by this i
magination: he escapes temptation by immediate, violent (re)action, and he seizes the sword and strikes at the crawling arm. A shriek, darkness, he falls forward over Merry’s cold body.
With that touch, his memory, stolen from him by the fog-spell, returns fully: he remembers the house under the Hill—Tom’s house. He remembers Tom, who is the Earth’s memory. With that he recollects himself.
Now he can remember the spell that Tom gave him in case of need, and he speaks it, calling at first “in a small desperate voice,” and then, with Tom’s name, loud and clear.
And Tom answers: the immediate, right answer. The spell is broken. “Light streamed in, the plain light of day.”
Emprisonment, fear, cold, and solitude reverse to freedom, joy, warmth, and companionship . . . with one final, fine touch of horror: “As Frodo left the barrow for the last time he thought he saw a severed hand wriggling still, like a wounded spider, in a heap of fallen earth.” (Yang always has a spot of yin in it. And Tolkien seems to have had no warm spot for spiders.)
This episode is the climax of the chapter, the maximum of stress, Frodo’s first real test. Everything before it led towards it with increasing tension. It is followed by a couple of pages of relief and release. That the hobbits feel hungry is an excellent sign. After well-being has been restored, Tom gives the hobbits weapons—knives forged, he tells them rather somberly, by the Men of Westernesse, foes of the Dark Lord in dark years long ago. Frodo and his companions, though they don’t know it yet, are of course themselves the foes of that lord in this age of the world. Tom speaks—riddlingly, not by name—of Aragorn, who has not yet entered the story. Aragorn is a bridge-figure between the past and the present time; and as Tom speaks, the hobbits have a momentary, huge, strange vision of the depths of time, and heroic figures, “one with a star on his brow”—a foreshadowing of their saga, and of the whole immense history of Middle-earth. “Then the vision faded, and they were back in the sunlit world.”
Now the story proceeds with decreased immediate plottension or suspense, but undecreased narrative pace and complexity. We are going back toward the rest of the book, as it were. Toward the end of the chapter, the larger plot, the greater suspense, the stress they are all under, begins again to loom in the characters’ minds. The hobbits have fallen into a frying pan and managed to get out of it, as they have done before and will do again, but the fire in Mount Doom still burns.
They travel on. They walk, they ride. Step by step. Tom is with them, and the journey is uneventful, comfortable enough. As the sun is setting they reach the Road again at last, “running from South-west to North-east, and on their right it fell quickly down into a wide hollow.” The portents are not too good. And Frodo mentions—not by name—the Black Riders, to avoid whom they left the Road in the first place. The chill of fear creeps back. Tom cannot reassure them: “Out east my knowledge fails.” His dactyls, even, are subdued.
He rides off into the dusk, singing, and the hobbits go on, just the four of them, conversing a little. Frodo reminds them not to call him by his name. The shadow of menace is inescapable. The chapter that began with a hopeful daybreak vision of brightness ends in a tired evening gloom. These are the final sentences:
Darkness came down quickly, as they plodded slowly downhill and up again, until at last they saw lights twinkling some distance ahead.
Before them rose Bree-hill barring the way, a dark mass against misty stars; and under its western flank nestled a large village. Towards it they now hurried, desiring only to find a fire, and a door between them and the night.
These few lines of straightforward narrative description are full of rapid reversals: darkness/lights twinkling—downhill/up again—the rise of Bree-hill/the village under it (west of it)—a dark mass/misty stars—a fire/the night. They are like drumbeats. Reading the lines aloud I can’t help thinking of a Beethoven finale, as in the Ninth Symphony: the absolute certainty and definition of crashing chord and silence, repeated, repeated again. Yet the tone is quiet, the language simple, and the emotions evoked are quiet, simple, common: a longing to end the day’s journey, to be inside by the fire, out of the night.
After all, the whole trilogy ends on much the same note. From darkness into the firelight. “Well,” Sam says, “I’m back.”
There and back again. . . . In this single chapter, certain of the great themes of the book, such as the Ring, the Riders, the Kings of the West, the Dark Lord, are struck once only, or only obliquely. Yet this small part of the great journey is integrally part of the whole in event and imagery: the barrow-wight, once a servant of the Dark Lord, appears even as Sauron himself will appear at the climax of the tale, looming, “a tall dark figure against the stars.” And Frodo defeats him, through memory, imagination, and unexpected act.
The chapter itself is one “beat” in the immense rhythm of the book. Each of its events and scenes, however vivid, particular, and local, echoes or recollects or foreshadows other events and images, relating all the parts of the book by repeating or suggesting parts of the pattern of the whole.
I think it is a mistake to think of a story as simply moving forward. The rhythmic structure of narrative is both journeylike and architectural. Great novels offer us not only a series of events, but a place, a landscape of the imagination that we can inhabit and to which we can return. This may be particularly clear in the “secondary universe” of fantasy, where not only the action but the setting is avowedly invented by the author. Relying on the irreducible simplicity of the trochaic beat, stress/unstress, Tolkien constructs an inexhaustibly complex, stable rhythmic pattern in imagined space and time. The tremendous landscape of Middle-earth, the psychological and moral universe of The Lord of the Rings, is built up by repetition, semirepetition, suggestion, foreshadowing, recollection, echo, and reversal. Through it the story goes forward at its steady, human gait. There, and back again.
THE
LONGEST
SUNDAY
DIANE DUANE
I can see the morning sunlight now—the way it fell across the slightly faded, repetitively flowered yellow wallpaper of the dining room in the front of our house. It was 6:30 in the morning. I looked up, stunned by that sudden light intruding into darkness, having just come to the end of the second volume of The Lord of the Rings, and thought in utter horror:
There’s another volume! And I don’t have it!
AND IT’S SUNDAY!
Samwise lay on his face outside the shut gate. The war-arrow was making its way through Rohan. Gondor was about to be besieged. Dark shadows were abroad in the upper sky; Middle-earth was in deep trouble. And I was in nearly as evil a case, for the bookstore over in the next town, where I had bought the first two volumes of The Lord of the Rings, was now closed. This was the mid-1960s, in suburban New York, and in our neighborhood about the only things open on Sundays were churches.
Sam’s despair had nothing on mine, I thought. And then I took the thought back, for Middle-earth, a world I had barely heard of a couple of days before, was now more important to me than my own.
I still don’t know what made me buy the first two volumes and not the third. Did the bookstore guy (not an expert) really not know that there was another volume? Did I not know, or care? Even at this distant remove, I’d like to leave the bookstore guy some room for forgiveness. Sometimes, when I’m in a hurry, I’m not very observant. Did I genuinely miss any references to third volume? Did I pick this book up, dip in, realize that it was something special, and then just snatch up whatever was there and run out with it, heedless of minor matters such as extra volumes, but knowing I was onto something hot?
At that point, it didn’t matter. I was in that peculiar torment known only to a dedicated reader who can’t finish what she’s reading. Being (luckily) a very fast reader, I had now become addicted to reading any given book in one sitting. The results of this could sometimes be comical if the subject matter was too radical or too exciting. I once got myself spanked, after one shattering afternoon spent
reading Starship Troopers in its entirety, by going home from the library and immediately explaining to my father, with completely unconscious but rock-solid condescension, that all wars were caused by population pressure. I was nine at the time, and I still wonder about the unconsciousness (or sneaky boldness) of the librarian who shelved the book down in the children’s library, right next to Starman Jones. More to the point, I tended to take my reading unusually seriously—possibly the reaction of someone who had been using it as a way to mitigate the effects of a fairly boring childhood. Then as now, reading as anodyne worked two ways: it both helped the situation and, occasionally, made it worse, by drawing other people’s attention to the fact that a person “spends all the time with her nose in a book,” as if there were some better place for one’s nose to be (in someone else’s business? Where it’s not wanted?).
At the time, I was dimly aware that my parents regarded this leaning of mine toward escapism as slightly unnerving, possibly a sign of some instability. They had a slight case of something I’ve since seen more virulent cases of: a suspicion about the desirability of allowing kids to read fantasy—either because of an idea that the child might not be able to tell the difference between reality and fantasy, or because of the feeling that adults have some dire responsibility to keep the noses of the next generation firmly against the grindstone of merciless reality until they’ve lost beyond recall the ability to recognize that there are things worth escaping from, and places (real and unreal) worth escaping to.
I later, to my pleasure, discovered that Tolkien was under no illusions about this particular perception of “concerned adults”: his feeling was that the people most concerned with or alarmed by the possibility of other people escaping, were jailers. But at the time, mostly I knew that I was imprisoned in a world I didn’t particularly care for, and I looked forward to the day when I would be able to get out of the present set of circumstances. Meanwhile, I had to settle the issue of where I would go and what I would do with myself when it came time for college, and whatever would follow. And so I read voraciously, evaluating every possible option, finding out as best I could what the world was like, especially all parts of the world that did not look anything like a “bedroom community” in a suburb of New York City.
