The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings

by Philip Zaleski

  Seventeen years later, amid rumors of dark stirrings outside the Shire, Gandalf returns to give Frodo the true story of Bilbo’s finding of the Ring, saying just enough to make Frodo thoroughly alarmed. From now on, the reader is in the hands of an omniscient narrator who folds into a third-person, real-time account—by means of a great deal of talking—an array of first-person voices recalling past or offstage events. With Frodo, we find out that the prize Bilbo took from Gollum was the One Ring, chief among the Great Rings of Power forged by Sauron during the Second Age as a means of enslaving all of Middle-earth.

  Far from being a conventional magical device, however, the Ring proved to be an active and intelligent power. After lying hidden in the mud for more than two thousand years, it found Gollum, used him, and abandoned him. Nor was Bilbo immune to its addictive power; he would undoubtedly have been consumed by the Ring had he kept it much longer. Gandalf admits that he had initially failed to recognize the extent of the danger; now he means to terrify Frodo for his own good, warning him that the possessor of the Ring “does not grow or obtain more life, he merely continues, until at last every minute is a weariness. And if he often uses the Ring to make himself invisible, he fades: he becomes in the end invisible permanently, and walks in the twilight under the eye of the Dark Power that rules the Rings.”

  Though Tolkien indignantly rejected the comparison, there is more than a passing resemblance to the ring of power in Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, cursed by its maker, the dwarf Alberich, to destroy its possessor, “des Ringes Herr als des Ringes Knecht” (the lord of the ring as the ring’s slave). Tolkien’s Ring cannot be hidden for long; nor can it be destroyed except by casting it into the fires in which it was forged, in the volcanic heart of Mount Doom, at the center of Mordor. “Doom”—Tolkien uses the Old English word a hundred times in The Lord of the Rings, registering its full range of meanings: a fate decreed, a judgment pronounced, a world destroyed.

  But the most terrifying news Gandalf brings is his discovery that Gollum has revealed to Sauron the existence of Hobbits and the probable location of the Ring. The news prompts Frodo to cry out, “What a pity that Bilbo did not stab that vile creature, when he had a chance!” to which Gandalf responds, “Pity? It was Pity that stayed his hand. Pity, and Mercy: not to strike without need. And he has been well rewarded, Frodo. Be sure that he took so little hurt from the evil, and escaped in the end, because he began his ownership of the Ring so.” It is one of Gandalf’s many prophetic statements, and signals a major underlying Christian theme: “Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.”

  Frodo resolves to take the Ring and leave his beloved home—his first sacrificial act—thereby saving the Shire from attack. The gardener Samwise Gamgee, caught eavesdropping, is drafted to accompany him as his servant and helper; Tolkien would liken Sam to “the privates and my batmen I knew in the 1914 War, and recognized as so far superior to myself.” The growing mutual dependence of Frodo and Sam does not erase this class difference, but Sam is ennobled by his perseverance, humility, love for Frodo, and inveterate delight in Elvish marvels. Frodo, Sam, and a few Hobbit friends set out on their journey, with the terrifying Black Riders (the “Nazgûl,” once-powerful mortals, now deathless “ring-wraiths” enslaved to Sauron) close on their heels.

  And so the pattern is established for the rest of the book. From here on it is all recapitulation: a dedicated company hastily formed and soon divided; a desperate flight “from deadly peril into deadly peril” followed by a temporary sanctuary and fleeting taste of domestic comfort. As the pattern recurs, the gravity of the danger and the solemnity of the mission become more evident and sharply focused, though the joys of table and bath are not diminished.

  Such recapitulation of actions and themes is typical of epic narratives—think of Homer or Gilgamesh. For Tolkien, it was a way to link The Hobbit to its sequel, to govern the otherwise ungovernable tale he had worked on for so long and to express, in terms suited to a pre-Christian world, a distinctively Christian vision of history as a movement from types and figures toward fulfillment in the incarnate Redeemer who recapitulates all things past and future in his own Person. To the Greeks and Romans, recapitulation (Greek anakephalaiosis, Latin recapitulatio) was a rhetorical device, but for Christian writers beginning with Irenaeus, the second-century bishop and martyr, it was an essential key, revealing the Bible’s narrative of redemption. It is the pattern of recapitulation that makes the Book of Revelation (Greek: Apocalypse) an intelligible vision rather than a mad tumult of avenging angels, dragons, and worlds unmade. It serves the same function in Tolkien’s tale.

  Perhaps Tolkien came upon his recapitulation design by accident, for he was initially sailing without coordinates. It is a measure of the difficulty he experienced in finding momentum for his plot, Tom Shippey suggests, “that Frodo has to be dug out of no less than five ‘Homely Houses’ before his quest is properly launched: first Bag End, then the little house at Crickhollow with its redundant guardian Fredegar Bolger, then the house of Tom Bombadil, then the Prancing Pony, and finally Rivendell, with its ‘last Homely House east of the Sea.’” It is a mark of Tolkien’s genius that he makes a virtue out of successive literary defeats.

  Some interludes serve the tale by being almost wholly serendipitous; thus the encounter with Tom Bombadil and his wife, Goldberry the river daughter, taken from Tolkien’s 1934 poem. Critics point out that this episode is not well integrated into the story; if so, that is part of its charm. Tom Bombadil is Nature personified, an impartial and independent power immune to the Ring and the terrors of history. He plays his part precisely by not having a part in the unfolding history, and his interventions on behalf of the Hobbits—rescuing them from the clutches of an evil willow tree and from certain death at the hands of ghostly barrow-wights—come at no personal cost. Frodo, by contrast, has to accept great personal cost. When he and his companions are imprisoned in the cairns of the Barrow-downs, he resists the impulse to use the Ring to save himself, chants one of Tom’s rhyming songs, and throws himself on the mercy of providence or fate. The lesson is not lost on Frodo: in the very moment when his courage awakens, so does his awareness of the need to call upon others. The episode transposes to a more somber key the encounter with trolls and the timely intervention of Gandalf in The Hobbit; here, too, a cache of charmed weapons comes to light. At the Inn of the Prancing Pony, Frodo and his companions learn, after a dangerous indiscretion, that they must be wise as serpents and innocent as doves, suspicious of strangers, and yet—when the alarming figure of Strider offers his assistance—capable of trust.

  The journey is just beginning, but the Christian themes of The Lord of the Rings are already in play: pity and mercy, faith and trust, humility, self-sacrifice, the powers of the weak, providence (disguised as chance), freedom (deformed by sin), and grace when all seems lost. Though the story is set in a distant epoch when (as Tolkien explained in a letter drafted but never sent to an inquisitive reader), “the Fall of Man is in the past and off-stage; the Redemption of Man in the far future,” the intimations of the Gospel are unmistakable. Fr. Robert Murray was right, Tolkien said, to detect a fundamental sympathy between The Lord of the Rings and the perennial Catholic vision of the “order of Grace.”

  At Rivendell, the Elven sanctuary, the flight from the Shire turns into a Quest; in a council of Elves, Dwarves, Men—and Frodo—convened by Elrond, Half-elven lord of the realm, the decision is taken to bring the Ring to the very heart of the Enemy’s territory and there cast it into the fiery chasm of Mount Doom to be unmade. It is a strategy to confound Sauron, who knows only the calculus of power and self-interest. Frodo is to be the Ring-bearer—it is his fate, or chance, or providentially ordered vocation—assisted by Gandalf, the hobbits Sam, Merry, and Pippin, the elf Legolas, the dwarf Gimli, and two men, Boromir and Strider (later revealed as Aragorn, the long-awaited king). Together they constitute a Company of Nine Walkers, the Fellowship of the Ring, uniting the free races of Mid
dle-earth.

  The Company advances through one adventure after another, involving monsters, magicians, prodigies of nature, epic battles, bold kings, ethereal queens, and underworld descents, including the death and resurrection of Gandalf. One is reminded of the heroic quest pattern common to the world’s myths and folktales—but there is a difference: in this case, the quest is not to seek a treasure but to lose one, and the chief responsibility falls upon an insignificant hobbit rather than a great hero. If The Hobbit undermines the hero paradigm, The Lord of the Rings utterly overturns it. If Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit is a version of Grimm’s brave little tailor, Frodo Baggins in The Lord of the Rings breaks the mold: he is brave without bravado, clever without dissembling, and, once committed to his task, so self-sacrificing that there is no place for him on the standard motif lists of folklore and mythology. Strangest of all, at the critical moment his quest miscarries; having arrived, utterly spent, at the “Cracks of Doom” (the expression is pure apocalyptic), Frodo declares, “I do not choose now to do what I came to do. I will not do this deed. The Ring is mine!”

  Tolkien was at pains to explain the deeper meaning of this seeming rebellion on Frodo’s part. “I do not think that Frodo’s was a moral failure,” he told one reader. Like all who consent to be placed in “‘sacrificial’ positions,” Frodo should be judged by the “motives and disposition” with which he began; in his case, by his humility, his desire to save those he loved, his willingness to extend that love even to the unlovable Gollum, and his consent to suffering and death, if need be. He had fulfilled his contract with every ounce of his strength.

  By the end of the tale, however, Frodo’s will is so damaged that it is difficult to call it unambiguously free. The meaning lies in the ambiguity. In a discarded version, Tolkien had him say “But I cannot do what I have come to do” and there is only a hair’s breadth of a difference—for Tolkien is working within the Augustinian tradition, which will brook no Pelagian optimism about the perfectibility of the human will. The power of the Ring to enslave is beyond measure, and men of goodwill can be broken even by lesser enchantments. Choices made with the best intentions can founder or seem to do so: witness the recurring lament, voiced by Frodo, Aragorn, Sam, and others, “All my choices have proved ill.” Many of the characters are fated to repeat the deeds of their forerunners; recapitulation is tinged with fatalism in this pre-Christian epoch, and resignation is the better part of wisdom. There remains only just that spark of freedom sufficient to enable the characters at key moments to respond to the lot they are given.

  We are in a pagan world, consoled—like the philosopher Boethius in his prison cell—by intimations of Gospel hope, rumors of grace. Hence, though the wise are monotheists who believe in divine providence, they do not expect God to show his hand; nor, for that matter, does a wise Christian claim knowledge of the exact workings of grace. Help comes “unlooked-for”—a homely expression Tolkien prefers to abstract theological words like “providence”; “unlooked-for” occurs sixteen times in The Lord of the Rings, and with mounting frequency—twice in The Fellowship of the Ring, six times in The Two Towers, eight times in The Return of the King (as well as eight times in The Silmarillion, but not at all in The Hobbit).

  Other key words are “dwindle,” which occurs thirty times in The Lord of the Rings, and “diminish,” which occurs sixteen times. The Men of Westernesse were diminished when their hero fell to the Orcs at the beginning of the Third Age; and by the latter days of Third Age, in which the events of The Lord of the Rings unfold, all the Free Peoples of Middle-earth (Dwarves, Elves, Ents, Hobbits, and Men) have been diminished by wars, plagues, departures, and betrayals. The corrupt figures—Sauron the Dark Lord and Saruman the wizard—cannot bear to accept their own diminishment; they are consumed by a diseased will to power and by the wrath and envy that their failures provoke. Throughout Tolkien’s mythology this theme recurs, as power-wielders among each of the several kinds of beings—Morgoth among the Valar, Fëanor among the Elves, Túrin Turambar among Men, and the idolatrous Númenóreans—succumb to the ofermod, overmastering pride, for which Tolkien blamed Beorhtnoth at the Battle of Maldon. In contrast, the faithful among the Valar, Elves, and Men accept their place in the created order and humbly repent when they err. Galadriel, the visionary Elven queen with the light of the Two Trees in her golden hair, has so far conquered her will as to refuse the One Ring when Frodo offers it to her and to declare, in words reminiscent of John the Baptist (John 3:29), “I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.”

  In other words, optimism must die so that hope unlooked-for—or, in Lewis’s words, “good news, news beyond hope”—may live. There is no room for the illusion that victory in war is a guarantee of perpetual peace or that evil can be permanently subdued in this world. Death itself is an indelible feature of a world whose redemption is in the far future. The Elves, immortal while the world lasts, experience nostalgia for death; the Númenóreans, envious of Elvish immortality, are destroyed by their disordered craving; and for mortals like Frodo who are deeply wounded, the only cure is to die from this world and pass into the next. “All this stuff,” Tolkien told Milton Waldman, “is mainly concerned with Fall, Mortality, and the Machine.”

  Perhaps it needs saying that even if the whole work serves (like all fairy tales, if Tolkien is right) as praeparatio evangelica, there is no unambiguous Christ figure in The Lord of the Rings—rather, there are several partial Christ figures: Strider/Aragorn is Christ as anointed healer and king who travels the paths of the dead to bring victory and peace, and the Half-elven Arwen is his Christ-like bride; Gandalf is Christ as prophet and priest transfigured and risen from the dead; Frodo is Christ in Gethsemane and on the Cross bearing the sins of the world, and Sam is Christ refracted in the saints of the Church militant, typifying the servant-saint who remains at his post till the last. As for the Virgin Mary, whose veneration was so central to Tolkien’s Catholicism (“Our Lady, upon which all my own small perception of beauty both in majesty and simplicity is founded,” as he put it in his 1953 letter to Fr. Robert Murray), her light is refracted in all the lovely Elven and Half-elven women of legend, in Arwen, and above all in the power and humility of Galadriel—yet even Galadriel can only partially foreshadow the glorious Queen of Heaven.

  Tolkien found the early reviews of The Fellowship of the Ring, which began appearing in August 1954, “a great deal better than I feared.” Lewis may have been right to warn him that his endorsement might do Tolkien more harm than good, given the hostility to Lewis in some literary circles. But as Tolkien told Rayner Unwin, “I should not have wished other than to be associated with him—since only by his support and friendship did I ever struggle to the end of the labour.” Lewis’s dust-jacket endorsement would stand:

  If Ariosto rivalled it in invention (in fact he does not), he would still lack its heroic seriousness. No imaginary world has been projected which is at once so multifarious and so true to its own inner laws; none so seemingly objective, so disinfected from the taint of an author’s merely individual psychology; none so relevant to the actual human situation yet so free from allegory. And what fine shading there is in the variations of style to meet the almost endless diversity of scenes and characters—comic, homely, epic, monstrous, or diabolic!

  There were similarly ecstatic blurbs by Richard Hughes, the poet, novelist, and screenwriter for Ealing Studios, comparing The Fellowship of the Ring to The Faerie Queene, and Naomi Mitchison ranking it with Malory.

  Jack Walter Lambert, the literary and arts editor for The Sunday Times (London), was among the early reviewers who, unfortunately, took the measure of The Fellowship from the blurbs on the dust jacket and the impressions created by its first, Hobbit-centered, chapter: “On the jacket Ariosto, Malory and Spenser are evoked: skirting these peaks, glorious but seldom climbed, it may be more helpful to suggest that those who enjoy, say, the Brothers Grimm, Peacock in ‘The Misfortunes of Elphin,’ ‘The Wind in the Willows,�
�� or T. H. White’s ‘The Sword in the Stone,’ will find this bizarre enterprise very much to their taste.” The most he was willing to say was that the book “sweeps along with a narrative and pictorial force which lifts it above” the level of “whimsical drivel with a message.” Alfred Duggan, the historical novelist and stepson of Lord Curzon, wrote in The Times Literary Supplement that he admired the “sound prose and rare imagination,” but thought it odd that Hobbits, obviously meant for light entertainment fare, “had intruded into the domain of the Nibelungs” and gotten mixed up in what looked like an anti-Soviet allegory. In reviews of the subsequent volumes, though he remained generally appreciative, he registered his disappointment that the allegory didn’t gel. Peter Green, fiction editor at The Daily Telegraph (and a classicist who would later write an important history of the Hellenistic age as well as a biography of Kenneth Grahame), regarded The Fellowship as “a bewildering amalgam of Malory, Grimm, the Welsh Mabinogion, T. H. White, and ‘Puck of Pook’s Hill.’ The style veers from pre-Raphaelite to Boy’s Own Paper. And yet this shapeless work has an undeniable fascination especially to a reviewer with a severe cold in the head.” “I must say that I was unfortunate in coming into the hands of the D. Telegraph, during the absence of Betjeman,” Tolkien told Rayner Unwin. “My work is not in his line, but he at any rate is neither ignorant nor a gutter-boy. Peter Green seems to be both. I do not know him or of him, but he is so rude as to make one suspect malice.”