End of the book Fellowship of the Ring, and of the first movement of the symphony. End of the story for Frodo, and beginning of the rest of the larger story. Three things. Pity. The decision. The ending.
It’s a bit ahead of the real knowledge of pity for Frodo, when he sees Gollum face to face for the first time; but he’s about ready now. Here’s the key sentence, way back when, from Gandalf – no, not that one – “As for me, I pity even his slaves.” This isn’t a modern/old word problem; it’s just the closest word Tolkien can come to the concept. How can Gandalf pity an Orc?
Gandalf is high. That means, among other things, that Gandalf knows almost all creatures from their beginnings to now. And, as it turns out, he knows more or less the beginnings of Orcs. We find out that neither Sauron nor Morgoth can create – that’s God’s ability. What they can do is warp and crush and stretch existing beings to their own particular purposes. Dragons are lizards stuffed with big pieces of Morgoth. Trolls, we will find out, are distortions of Ents. And Orcs – Tolkien is not quite sure that it’s not Men – but, Tolkien thinks that probably they are manglings of Elves, bred and beaten to be brutish fighting machines, generation after generation after generation. But underneath that, somewhere in the deepest, darkest, dustiest corner of the Orc’s soul, there huddles the sad, hurting, bruised, fearful figure of a little Elf, almost forgotten by that hulking testosterone-poisoned macho WW I staff sergeant that is dominating things. And Gandalf can see that Elf.
OK, so how can Gandalf kill that Orc at the drop of a hat? You’re making the same mistake Sam did, watching Frodo operate: you’re confusing pity with blindness. Gandalf and Frodo and you are not pitying the whole Orc; you are pitying only that part of the Orc, and you know exactly when it’s there. When an Orc is on the prowl, it’s kill or be killed; there’s no Elf in there to see. It’s only when Sauron loosens his grip, when you aren’t around other Orcs to whip up each other’s longing for the good old days when you could hunt in packs and didn’t have to follow that slave driver Sauron, when you’re alone and at a loss about what to do, that the Elf suddenly notices how quiet things are, pokes a head out of his cellar – and, just occasionally, is looked at before the sergeant kicks him downstairs again. At those moments, and only at those moments, do you outside the Orc show pity that the Elf can see; and he might very well dare, since there’s someone out there who understands him and cares about him, to see if that person is the way out of his endless nightmare. There is effectively no hope now for Sauron, or the Nazgul. There is pity, and hope, for that little Elf in his slaves, because they are controlled but not quite completely replaced with evil things. There is hope that, someday, that little Elf will be able to live.
Understand, pity is not necessary to being high; it’s just that if you add pity, it is much more unlikely that you will ever lose being high. Saruman, now, that’s an interesting example. Did you know that Gandalf is a disciple of the Goddess of pity, and Saruman a disciple of Aule – both Gods feel pity, it’s just that she is more focused on pity and he is more focused on his craft? And so Saruman gets so wrapped up in his craft that he thinks the craft of wizardry is more important to success than the human beings he is trying to encourage to resist Sauron – and he starts experimenting with turning humans into Orcs and thinks he can control the Ring’s addiction by the craft of wizardry and use it to build crafted “order”, and he falls into sin. And it’s far easier to fall into sin because he doesn’t have that extra measure of understanding – looking for and seeing that little Elf because you know it might be there -- and visceral pull to help that pity gives. And so, we see him, as the story progresses, becoming less and less high, until Frodo notes at the end that “he was once of a high and mighty race” – not any more.
Meanwhile, Gandalf specializes in silly things like hobbits, little toy crafts, but he understands them and he pities that crushed hobbit, Gollum. And that pity based on understanding of just where in Gollum immature Smeagol whimpers and hides, hoping against hope to grow up, and when he will show up, will prevent a dire fate of many. So will Frodo’s understanding and pity. And Sam’s.
That kind of pity. A good thing for us to have? We’ll never know unless we become high ourselves.
The decision. OK, in case it isn’t really, really, really clear by now, Frodo has split Bilbo’s decision in two parts. “I am leaving (everyone else).” He made that decision mostly back in Rivendell. “I am going NOW.” He makes it right here. And he makes it, in case you hadn’t noticed, when he is forced and stumbles and is enticed into an absolute peak of highness.
There’s an old joke. Who wants to go to Heaven? Everyone in the church class for kids raises his hand except Johnny. Johnny, don’t you want to go to Heaven? Oh, yes, Father, but I thought you meant right now. Lord, give me chastity – but not just yet.
That’s what Frodo is saying, but what it comes out as in feelings is fear. As he says, Frodo is afraid. Afraid to make the decision to leave right now, right now; afraid of what will happen if he does.
Frodo is an addict. And what do addicts say, to the bitter end? I can quit any time I want. I can get all the way to the Cracks of Doom and then cast the Ring in the Fire, if you’ll just give me this and that and …
Because leaving now means stripping away all those friendly crutches. You’re not going to do that unless it’s absolutely rubbed in your face that far from giving you this and that, or even lessening the addiction to give you the best chance of shaking it when push comes to shove (and that’s the non-addict part of Frodo talking), every one of them is going to try to take your stash from you.
So Frodo understands that the decision point is really near now, and he tries to get away and force himself mentally to make it, and then, sure enough, Boromir shows up and is tempted and goes into a fantasy and then tries to grab the Ring and Frodo absolutely has to put it on and he’s so panicked he’s operating on instinct and the Ring subtly starts to guide his thinking and it sends him up to the top of the Hill of Seeing. And what does he see?
He sees everything that’s going on, all over the world. As we find out later, some things controlled by Sauron, like the Palantir, don’t lie by commission; they’re just selective in what they show; they lie by omission. What he sees is, in some sense, part of what’s happening. And he’s high: he understands what he’s seeing and its roots all the way back to the beginning, he can fill in the gaps, he can even, when the Ring doesn’t have too firm a grip on him, feel pity. And now Sauron springs his second trap: if he is to understand completely, he needs to look at Sauron. He reflexively moves toward it; the Ring takes over, and now he is fighting hard to stop it but it’s stronger, and now Sauron realizes he’s somewhere out there and is coming to take him away, ha ha! And then suddenly another voice pops into his head and says take it off! Fool, take it off!
Oh, come on, you know who that is. Who else is constantly calling everybody a fool? It’s Gandalf, of course. Knew he’d be back, somehow.
And Frodo’s addiction is suddenly countered by an equal and opposite opponent, leaving the non-addict Frodo to take the decision. And he takes off the Ring.
And what he says is, this Ring is horrible. I can’t ruin my friends’ lives by forcing them to live with it any longer, or by failing the Quest, and I can’t ruin the world I understand and pity by doing that. And I have to leave them, leave everybody, right now. The attempts to grab the Ring have already started, and all my no longer friendly crutches are going instead to be barriers to succeeding from now on, and all that’s going to get worse from now on instead of better. But the underlying thought in there somewhere is, I know from now on that, instead of fighting the addiction of the Ring alone, there is probably always going to be something out there, call it the Gods, call it the good part of the world, call it Galadriel, call it Sam, call it whatever you want, that can step in and add its strength to mine, not for my purposes, but for the purposes of the Quest. The Ring has just shown me that I can’t do the job without that. The voice has just shown me that I can still do the job, even without those Fellowship crutches or any others. That’s all the non-addict side of Frodo speaking, with one second left to choose.
And finally, the end of the book The Fellowship of the Ring.
I am going to close this part of my gloss on a bit of a personal note. When I was a kid, I was a bit of a packrat for books. And especially for this weird library my parents had. And so, I read a strange conglomeration of Great Writing and little jewels and what everyone read and what only a small collection of England freaks read: For Whom the Bell Tolls and Far from the Madding Crowd and Clair Bee sports books and Swallows and Amazons and Alice Through the Looking Glass and The Last of the Wine and John Buchan fantasies about the wild and destructive Greek God Pan lurking just beyond the manicured lawn and Churchill’s History and on and on. And then, one day, I saw a little faded red book tucked between a book of Adlai Stevenson’s speeches and The Glory That Was Rome, and I realized I hadn’t read this one. I think my parents got it because they thought it was a good English kid’s book for us kids like The Hobbit, read 20 pages, and realized to their horror that it was adult, and sounded like it was going to be depressing. And so they tucked it away forever in the next available space on their endless shelves as if in a circular file, and there I found it – not the trilogy, not the Hobbit, just The Fellowship of the Ring.
And so, as I often did, I read it, and I overran lunch, and then stopped between chapters and grabbed the cold remains of lunch, and then all the way to dinner, and I had to come on time, so I finished Book I and went to bed, and started the next morning, and did the same thing with lunch, and in the late golden summer afternoon, I came to the end and Frodo pushing off from Parth Galen and stepping on the opposite shore, taking his first step into Mordor, in the golden summer-like light and warmth of high afternoon.
And by this time, I was drunk on new words and sensations that captured what I felt as a chubby eleven-year-old, wandering among the deserted lawns and gardens and rippling waters of the sea inlets in the neighborhood in the summer afternoon sun that turned trees and leaves and lawns into hazy gold and green like the final shot of a movie blurring together into memory. But most of all, I was blown away by the ending. I had never seen such an ending.
Up to then, I think, what I had seen were endings that were completely final, like each of GA Henty’s books, or cliffhangers that were supposed to leave you desperate to go on, like the Burroughs Mars books I ran across later in which Dejah Thoris is trapped in a chamber for a year, and you have to get to the next book, and the next, until finally in the final book John Carter gets to the time he can see the chamber opening; and that book ends finally. Here was an ending that left me, as I once called it, “completely incomplete”: it was the springboard to a greater story, and it was a complete story to savor in itself. It was like hearing the first movement of a great symphony, and then taking your time to applaud as if that was the end, because if it had been the end that would have been just fine.
As so often happens, it has taken me some time to pinpoint better what I mean. Here’s what it reminds me of: In an otherwise not too memorable Stephen Donaldson fantasy novel, one character asks another, essentially, what do you really want out of life? And the character replies, I want to fulfill the meaning of my life.
If you think about it, that’s typically a two-step process, for the character, for Frodo, and for me and hopefully you as you have become Frodo, as you have followed the book being told almost entirely from his point of view – something that will change from now on. The first step is to come up with a candidate meaning, prepare yourself, and decide if it’s the right meaning for you. The second step is to go fulfill that meaning.
The thing is, that first step is complete in and of itself, if the meaning that you find is going to be the core of any future meaning you find – and, sure enough, life will expand your horizons. And that’s where Frodo is. He has trained, so that he will live the meaning he chooses to the fullest, because he is now high. He has met the challenges and made the right choices for the right reasons, so that he has found that single best meaning of his life that ripples outward in all directions: get the Ring to the Cracks of Doom so that it will be cast into the Fire. The rest, except for the wider story, is just detail – does he fulfill it or not? Even if he dies right now, the story that I experience as Frodo will be, for me, completely incomplete.
Another silly analogy. Portnoy’s Complaint. The guy starts talking to his analyst, and the complaints come faster and faster, and build to an absolute peak, as he tells the story of his life up to now sequentially as an exercise in tragicomic, more and more desperate attempts to give himself some sense, any sense, that he is a deeply meaningful person, and then you hear everything building to an absolutely desperate climax, so that he sounds like he’s going crazy, and then he suddenly just plain screams. And then, in a mock Viennese accent, the analyst says, So. Now ve may perhaps to begin, yes? And that’s the right point to end the book. In the way I’ve just described, it’s like the ending to the book The Fellowship of the Ring: this guy’s story is completely incomplete.
And so, Frodo makes his decision, and we do not stop there. We walk with him down to the shore, and cast off, and circle back to pick up that unexpected addition that promises marvelous surprises to come, Sam, and we paddle across the wide lake with muscles and purpose, and just before we take just one step onto the opposite shore, into Mordor, into the second step of the process, into fulfilling what we just now have finally and fully confirmed is the core of the one true meaning of our lives – now, now, we end.
I know Tolkien didn’t necessarily intend to have three books and end the first at the end of Book II. I salute the genius at his publishers’, whoever he or she was, who did that. It doesn’t matter. For me, what an ending.
p.s. It’s time for the little fella who comes at the end of the grand parade in Mr. Peabody cartoons, cleaning up the horses’ leavings and the confetti. This little fella says to you: I’m going to return to the subject of endings at the end of the whole thing.
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
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