I have left off the scene with Bilbo tempted by the Ring to this part, because the Ring itself deserves separate consideration.
In the late 1910s, writing underwent a profound change: psychoanalysis became part of it. Things like Tender is the Night put in the idea of psychoses and neuroses so profound that people become uncontrollably irrational, not as part of deadly sins, but because of childhood traumas over which they had little or no control – but which could be dealt with as part of facing those traumas. The resulting richness in the writing made much previous fiction seem shallow.
And then there were those who offered an alternative richness. Of these, Tolkien strikes me as one of the most successful, and the Ring is the crux of his success. The Ring is an addiction; but even when one is conscious of it, it is an unconquerable addiction. It is not part of one’s life; like cursed gold, it is met on the road and is an imposition of someone else’s desires. But it is intelligent on its own, and is in fact the only real form of “possession” in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. This is, in fact, not “magic” as we have known it – there is very little suspension of disbelief involved. Instead, we see a seemingly super-resistant person fully in the grip of his addiction. It is the pre-psychoanalysis profound psychological problem, because it inevitably goes from a “temptation” to a psychological merging. Tolkien is setting up a seemingly impossible problem that has neither a rational nor a psychological answer: how do you destroy a purely destructive thing when it becomes you yourself?
This is one key to what makes LOTR extraordinary, and that people persistently refuse to recognize. Whoever bears the Ring will fail. There is no way out. He or she will be hurt beyond repair. No avoiding it. There is no happy ending. And yet evil does not win. And people grow. It’s happiness that cannot be complete, with a gaping flaw in it, and it’s as good as it’s going to get. Deal with it.
Now we come to the first surprise in the book. We are set up in the first Chapter for rapid action, as the suspense builds and the time intervals get shorter and the focus gets tighter, and then what happens? We relax. For seventeen years. And then, instead of another mad rush, we get a long explanation.
This seventeen years is where readers seem to split. There are those, typically men, who simply must place Tolkien in the context of action, adventure, war, politics, all the conventions of teenage boy books. To them, as in other places in the trilogy, this passage is to hurry through, ignore, and treat as wasted words. Then there are those (I admit I am one) for whom this passage is absolutely integral to the book. It, and others to follow, emphasize that this is not a war or action book, but one in which thoughts and psychology are the most important things. And, just as a great symphony distinguishes itself from a song with a beat by changes of pace to slower and faster, raising and delaying expectations and yielding a far richer range of emotions in the listener, so this kind of approach does the same for the reader. As all good literature of this type does.
And now, the explanation from Gandalf. There are two key things to note here.
First, this is the arrival of the poem that makes LOTR iconic: “One Ring to rule them all.” No one claims that Tolkien is a great poet; but he is surprisingly good. In fact, he ranks among the best at poems that stand on their own and are also keystones of a novel. It’s very easy for a reader of anything else to make fun of poetry in fantasy novels, with the mock-archaic language and funny names and attempts to mimic the sagas. No one feels like making fun of this one.
The reason, I think, is in the meter and verse. The core three lines are meant to stand alone, as they often are quoted. And there is both rhyme and not-rhyme there. There is not one meter, but a mix that varies and underlying four beats per line. In the beginning of Book II, with the Black Speech translation, we find that it’s an incantation, like our knowledge of “Bubble, bubble, toil, and trouble”. But it’s also not – it starts off like a drumbeat – One Ring. This is not a bad poem, and it is not a type of poem that any of us have seen before. And the words are alien enough to make this fantastic, but mysterious enough and consistent enough with a real-world language to make this another sophisticated culture that we don’t know yet. In three lines, Tolkien says very clearly that we are not dealing with cardboard bad guys, but a world with morality as complex, and issues as profound, as our own.
The second thing to note is that Gandalf is taking a very unusual tack in explaining things to Frodo and us. It is very hard not to be didactic in this situation, where a large clump of new worlds out there must be conveyed from a teacher to a student. But what Gandalf does, is present it as a detective story (why is the Ring important? Where does Gollum fit in? Here’s what I did to find out) instead of in sequential order or as an overall conclusion. It’s a neat trick; but what’s really important is what it’s doing to our image of Gandalf.
Up to now, Gandalf has been the deus ex machina, the wise counselor or the one who steps in where needed and magically saves the day – in The Hobbit, and with Bilbo and Frodo. Now, we are meant to see Gandalf as a separate, fundamentally equivalent person, with his own challenges, his own quests, and his own limits. Tolkien is warning us (not very effectively, as it turns out, but much better than most such stories) that Gandalf will not save the day, not just because the author is doing it that way, but because Gandalf can’t.
Waiting for Takeoff
In the next chapter, Frodo says goodbye to his life – a bit like saying goodbye to a loved one who is dying. And here is a good place to talk about Frodo, because I suspect that here is where readers begin to dissociate themselves from Frodo and search for another hero to root for. Not me.
It’s always striking to me how few folks seem to really identify themselves with Frodo. Aragorn, maybe; Arwen or Eowyn for girls; Gimli, sometimes; Gandalf; even Sam. Somehow, Frodo just doesn’t seem satisfactory as Number One. He’s not the action hero, ever. He’s not Everyman. He doesn’t come out the other end serene or powerful. He winds up backing away from violence that seems necessary; understandable, but not very masculine. He doesn’t fall in love and get married, nor is he an ascetic (and sorry, no real gays in this story). And, slowly, Tolkien switches the focus away from him and toward Sam, as Sam grows into responsibility and power. Even Tolkien himself seems, in his commentaries later, to feel Sam is in some ways more important, and Frodo is a bit more of a stick figure to represent Tolkien’s aims. And it all begins here, as Frodo says goodbye to the Shire, but as an adult who in some ways seems to be running away from life, running away from his responsibilities as a squire to the people around him to chase a childhood dream.
I think they’re flatly wrong. If there’s a horse to ride in this story, I pick Frodo. And that’s because, from the beginning to the end, Frodo is evolving and facing the problems of addiction, not in a stick-figure way in which the problem ends, one way or another, but where Frodo continually, eventually moves to a more mature, more effective way of dealing with the addiction that fully takes into account the effects on the people around him, deals with repeated failure and with the fact that he is no longer fully in control of and no longer can trust his thoughts, and makes clear the fatuity of the answers we come up with before we read the book. If you sneer at his pacifism by the end of LOTR, you fall short of him.
So, as you watch him say goodbye to his “real” life in this Chapter with some extraordinary knowledge of what lies outside, not willfully naïve but still arrogant in his belief that he knows more than others about what lies ahead, your job as a reader is to start empathizing, not looking for somebody else. Frodo will never be as cheaply satisfying as another choice. Deal with it.
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