In this, the second Chapter of Book 6, the chapter before Mount Doom, so much happens, and so little. We dodge Orcs, and see in the confrontation between two of them the way that evil eats itself when it can find no one else to eat, like perhaps Shelob in some distant future, and are driven as much as driving towards some path through the blind searchers that seek to re-imprison us, and at the end we seemingly are much as we were at the beginning, still with some distance to travel to Mount Doom, still Frodo and Sam, still with possible dangers to face.
And yet, how little is seemingly changing, and how much is actually changing. Frodo loses hope with every step, until he is almost fatalistic. At the beginning of the Chapter, Frodo is still taking the lead; by the end, he is stumblingly, blindly following the lead of Sam, who has become the true leader of the Quest, in the footsteps of Gandalf, Aragorn, and Frodo, and is fully, magnificently up to the task. And Gollum reappears, and we realize with a sinking feeling but no surprise that he will be with us until the end. Because, I believe, like the gebbeth ghoul-Ged in Wizard of Earthsea, he is not only Frodo’s nemesis, the Fury that pursues him, but also Frodo himself, the part of Frodo that is now possessed by the Ring. But he cannot be incorporated in order for Frodo to mature; the Ring must be rejected until the Fire if the Quest is to succeed.
And there’s another thing going on in this Chapter, which is what I want to talk about. We are nearing the end of the Frodo Trail.
We are, in fact, pretty much done now. What’s left to see is Mount Doom and Barad-dur, in order to pretty much fully comprehend Middle-Earth. The rest – Far Harad, Rhun, Gondor beyond the Ered Nimrais, the Greyflood – that’s the sauce, the potentially wondrous icing on the cake. We are nearing the end of our Journey.
And so, I want to raise the question: What are journeys for? What do they mean, for Frodo and Sam, for Tolkien, and for us? What is their point? What can they achieve for us? I raise this question now, rather than at the end of LOTR, because, fundamentally, there won’t be time for it then; there will be too much to sum up.
In my typical arrogant way, I sum up the ideas about journeys in literature and life as follows:
First, there is the idea of a journey to get something done. And that is, I believe, its common meaning in literature and life. We travel to do a job, or to visit someone. James’ Daisy Miller travels to exotic Italy to find a husband. London’s Buck travels to the white, wild spaces of Alaska to serve his masters. The destination of the journey is often merely the background for the plot, giving it color, specificity, and a uniqueness that the plot itself does not give.
Then there is the journey for adventure, as so ably represented by The Hobbit and all the adventure and children’s books that we love so much. True, they give us a picture of a wider world, as Bilbo himself notes; but mostly they give a thrill to everyday living, investing what we have done or could do with an aura of the magical. Outward Bound. Climbing the Alps, the Himalayas.
The journey away is well analyzed, imho, by Dorothy Dunnett, who noted in her Niccolo series (Spring of the Ram) that those who travel often are going away from something rather than towards something, and that the situation that they are avoiding will be no better on their return, no matter what they do on their journey – indeed, it may be worse. And that is often the purpose of vacations – who has not taken a vacation just to get away from work, and then has come back to find the work piled up and new complications arisen in their absence?
Perhaps the most fascinating type of journey is the journey of self-discovery, ably defined by T.S. Eliot in Little Gidding: “the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive at where we started/And know the place for the first time.” This takes us beyond quick spa visits or self-help courses, and more into the realm of Frodo returning to the Shire and saying, “it will not be the same, for I will not be the same.” And I think that a larger quote of that section is called for, since it has a wonderful resonance with Tolkien’s love of Nature:
“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate [to Bag End]
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning; …
heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.”
All of these are worthy aims of a journey, and I think in some ways all apply to Frodo and Sam. But not to us readers in our Quest for meaning in LOTR, and I suspect, not to Tolkien himself. And that brings me to the last of my categories: the journey to become “high” (spare me the drug jokes, please).
This journey aims to learn about things, to enrich our knowledge of the world until it becomes deep in history and profound in meaning, and so enrich our minds and souls with empathy and pity. And then to act as a “high” person should act. It is what Frodo has chosen to do with the Quest, and what Sam has found himself doing perforce as the Quest demanded it of him. It is what we do with eco-tourism, and the love of the retired for visual history. It also has two key characteristics: One, the journey is the destination. Two, the map is the story.
What do I mean, the journey is the destination? I mean that the place visited is identical with the point of the visit. I mean that the point of having created Gondor, for Tolkien, or the places of the Elves and Dwarves, was in some sense to explore that part of his personality, visually, as well as that part of the world of Nature and people with which he had surrounded himself. I mean that the point of visiting the places that Tolkien has us visit, for us, is to incorporate and appreciate the sights and sounds and fragrances and deep history not only of Middle-Earth but of our Earth in order to become higher, place by place, piece by piece, until in our lives as in those of “high” people of Middle-Earth, they become a completed picture, an integrated new reality through which we swim effortlessly. But here’s the thing: each piece added is a goal in itself, a destination in itself, because the process never ends. We do not have just one end to our journey, just one home to return to. We are creating new homes, a world of them, world without end.
And that brings me to my second point: the map is the story.
When I contemplated the end of my career, or the point at which I accumulated enough money, what I hoped to do was to start a company to develop infrastructure software. In particular, it seemed to me that a significant market need existed for a “Swiss army knife” for creating maps with new features. Maps that would incorporate the features of nature or the imaginary continents of fantasy and science fiction writers and game worlds, and automagically generate the weather and other details associated with the maps. Maps that showed changes over time as the fortunes of battle swayed, or the propagation of a disease or new idea across the US, for the history lecturer or health care analyst. Maps that showed the timing of sales penetration across geographies or the interaction of weather and sales not as slice-of-time statistics but as seasonal or unique trends playing out in speeded-up time for the market analyst and data scientist, and even with manipulatable assumptions to allow them to assess the relative NPV of alternatives into the future. And my elevator pitch, my slogan, my brand was going to be this: The map is the story.
I am never going to do this. But, by the way, if anyone’s interested, afaik it’s still doable in today’s computer software market. If someone does it, I will give them my brand. Free.
You can probably already see where I’m going with this. As L.E. Modesitt has given me the permission to quote, “the new becomes the old/With the way the story’s told”. And the way the story is told is determined, in LOTR, by the map. To tell the story, Tolkien had to fill in Gondor. And so in this blank space in the map he created Faramir, and Ithilien, and disheveled, dryad loveliness, and a whole new piece of “highness.” And so have we, following in his footsteps.
Because that is a fundamental change in writing fantasy, or for that matter some science fiction, since his time. For Donaldson, for Le Guin in Earthsea, for Robert Jordan, for many, many others, the need to fill in the map, to take us there, drives the story. In many ways, in many cases, it is the story; it defines the destination of the journey and also the goals of the Quest.
And what marvelous maps! From the first efforts of Christopher Tolkien spring those of Barbara Strachey and Karen Wynn Fonstad and all the related game worlds, and then their offshoots populated the worlds of fantasy and science fiction from the rational musings of David Weber to the raucous multitudes of Brandon Sanderson and the Dunnettesque agonies of Janny Wurts, as well as game worlds and skilled artists beyond count.
What a wonderful gift Tolkien has given the fantasy/scifi world, with the back of his hand, so to speak. Not just world-building; map-building. Map-building that changed the way many of these authors write their stories forever.
And that about wraps it up. But not quite. There’s still a little bit more to our journey into journeys.
Learning. And creation.
In my connection with the agile marketing movement, which I have been attempting to help foster since I was present at its birth, I try to present the world of the customer, of companies and their relationships to customers who are us, as having three often-intermixed goals:
1. Do. In the traditional market, we the customer just want to use a company to get something done. A task. A job. Give me a tool. Give me raw meat and a skillet so I can cook.
2. Socialize/Communicate. In this, a newer market, it’s all about touching other people. Give me a phone. Email. A letter. A blog post. Facebook.
3. Learn. This is the newest, smallest, but best market – because you engage the customer for a lifetime. It’s game worlds. It’s YouTube how-to videos. It’s fanfiction and comments. It’s your most rabid customers who want to design products of their own.
The second of these, Socialize/Communicate, is actually another type of Journey. We travel to connect with people, to re-connect with old friends and classmates. But that’s not the point of this addendum. It’s the third type, Learn, that really has to do with Tolkien’s type of journey. And what the insights of agile marketers have to say about Learn is that Learn works best when it is intimately linked to Create.
Here’s how it works, in the context of a company: I come out with a game product, and invite you the passionate user to play with it during beta testing and beyond. You give me feedback, but you also suggest improvements of your own, and in many cases, if I permit you, go off and create those improvements on your own, for me to incorporate or not. Then I build on those improvements to create my next rev, with improvements of my own, and the cycle begins again. The customer is learning; and also creating; and both give him extraordinary customer satisfaction. And it keeps on going, world without end, in an open-ended process where neither side is really sure what the next rev is going to be; and that’s great!
Now let’s drop the crass business talk, and talk about what it really says about our psyches. For at least some of us, the thing that gives us most satisfaction over the course of a lifetime is learning, preferably accompanied by creating. Or creating, which gives us the secondary satisfaction of learning. It’s great because it’s a satisfaction that never ends. There’s always more to learn, if you can make learning the point of life in itself. And if you can put aside the natural or self-imposed modesty of worrying about whether what you are creating is original, you get to the unsubvertible satisfaction of creating – that up until you created it, as far as you were concerned, it was indeed original. Sure, over time, you learn that most of your ideas and creations aren’t original. But as you learn this, you also learn better how to be really original. And hopefully, you learn to take satisfaction in your originality no matter what anyone else says. As long as you’re honest with yourself about what is really valuable to others about your originality. And then your satisfaction with your learning and creativity is complete, a wave, endlessly flowing.
All right, too much talking. In the context of Tolkien and journeys, this means that the satisfaction we should take from our journeys into Tolkien and the real world is to take joy in the learning involved in being “high”, and in the creativity involved in applying that highness to real-world situations. And believe you me, I can attest to the satisfaction I feel when I learn more about the travails of the cotton slave in the antebellum south, or the oppression of Ukrainians assailed from steppe and civilization because they happen to live in perhaps the richest farmland in all of the world, vulnerable on all sides, and apply it to empathy and pity and creative attempts to help. In the midst of the horror of Mordor, or of the real world, the fundamental things apply, and, I think, that should be one of them. Whatever else befall, at least from the journey we will take the satisfactions of the learning of highness and the creativity of its application, hopefully in partnership with dear friends.
Thus, in this Journey, the Road goes ever on and on. The map goes ever on and on, from Here Be Dragons to Here Be yellow-cedar and Sami. The story goes ever on, from Tolkien to S.A. Chakraborty and Elizabeth Rush. The journey, the destination, the learning, the creation go ever on and on, from Mount Doom to the castles of the mind and macramé.
An endless, happy ending.
Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings Like You’ve Never Heard It:
- The First of a Series of Ramblings About JRR Tolkien
- Part II. Pre-Psychology Writing, Poetry, and a New Hero
- Part III. Torture, Enlightenment
- Part IV. Weather, Mushrooms, Leaders
- Part V. In the Moment, Sam the Obscure
- Part VI. Folk Songs, Master, First, Fair
- Part VII. Hiking, Curses, Noble Language
- Part VIII. The Hiker’s Extrasensory Writing
- Part IX. Torture, Elves, Endings
- Part X. Your Highness
- Part XI. Business Meetings, Dwarves
- Part XII. Horns of Wild Memory
- Part XIII. Ecstasies of the Dwarves
- Part XIV. Valaraukar, the Third Touch of God
- Part XV. Memory, Nature, Passion
- Part XVI. The Gift of Enchantment
- Part XVII. Frontier Maturity
- Part XVIII. Pity, Decisions, Endings
- Part XIX. Into the Shadow, Kings, Names, Winds
- Part XX. People of the Morning, Child Soldiers
- Part XXI. Herdsmen and High Trees
- Part XXII. The Faith of God
- Part XXIII. Theoden’s Law
- Part XXIV. Helm’s Deep, Zangra, and A Life Worthy of Song
- Part XXV. Book of Marvels, Book of Friendship
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