Now we have four Chapters left in Book 3. I like to think of them as the Book of Marvels, the Book of Resolutions – resolving plot threads, not New Year’s resolutions – the Book of Saruman, and the Book of Stones Flung Outward. In this piece, I talk about the first two.
The Book of Marvels
I suggest you look at the Chapter from the point of view of a Rohirrim – any Rohirrim along for the described journey, from Theoden and Eomer down to the lowliest Rider. From their point of view, I think, there is the image of their jaws dropping lower and lower until they hit the floor as they see flooded Isengard. Walking trees? OK. Magical dusk under the trees in broad daylight? OK. Vanished Orcs? OK. Trees with eyes? OK. Fairy-tale Ents? OK. Rivers suddenly drying up? OK. Isengard smoking? OK. The march around them of shadowy armies, without attack or communication? OK. Total destruction of Isengard? OK. Hobbits? Well, that’s a bit much to swallow. This is Gandalf’s doing, Queen Elizabeth I might have said, and it is marvelous in our eyes.
This Chapter also could be seen as the emergence of Gandalf the Ham Impresario. Persistently, he deflects inquiries about what is going on, while it is not hard to imagine him chortling internally, “I’ve got a seeecret!” The motivation, I would guess, is the same as the one he cited in Book6: “Many folk like to know beforehand what is to be set on the table; but those who have laboured to prepare the feast like to keep their secret; for wonder makes the words of praise louder."
And, of course, no one is going to push him on it. All bear in mind the saying, “Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger.” When I was a programmer in the early ‘80s, there were all sorts of humorous variations on that going around: Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle and quick to torch your access privileges. Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup. Do not meddle in the affairs of cats, for they are subtle and will pee on your computer.
More seriously, I would call your attention to this quote from Theoden early in the Chapter: “Songs we have that tell of these things, but now we are forgetting them, teaching them only to children, as a careless custom. And now the songs have come down among us out of strange places, and walk visible under the Sun.” This is, imho, about as didactic as Theoden gets. And what he says, I believe, validates not only Tolkien but all of us who have invited fantasy and fantastical science fiction and the like into our lives as an honored guest.
I grew up in the 1950s and early ‘60s in a community of white-collar workers and business people, all of whom had stable, long-term jobs in which they could confidently expect to work until retirement. And they seemed to me to be dead, dead. They read little; their life was entirely focused on their work; they adventured little; they lacked knowledge of anything outside the United States to a degree unimaginable to us now. And it seemed that they were doomed to remain that way, mindlessly doing the same things, until retirement; and then they would have no capability to be other than they were. They would play bridge and drink until they were imprisoned in old folk’s homes, and there they would waste away from inattention. And that, it seemed, was facing me from the moment I exited college and got a job.
Consider the play “A Thousand Clowns”; I did, when I was that age. The pernicious message of that play was that you could be creative, imaginative, open to the world outside the everyday and the world of the imagination --- or you could get a job. Not both. Excess imagination was a sign of failure to mature, to take care of children, a way of deflecting responsibility, a Peter Pan syndrome. And, of course, like all great falsehoods, it had a core of truth in it. There is far less danger of lack of maturity from those who simply shoulder their tasks and do nothing else.
And here, to me, is Tolkien’s answer: the core of wonder in the child (or in the adult) is vital to being able to live deeply, to being open to understanding the new and the distant, to our ability to empathize globally based on understanding of what is commonly unnoticed or not sought out. If we do not preserve it into adulthood, then, like Theoden and the Rohirrim, we find the unknown suddenly arrived on our doorstep; and we reject it, we mishandle it, to the great detriment of our lives and our affairs. All good fantasy stretches our minds to different worlds, however imperfectly, and so trains us to see our own world more broadly, more realistically in all its fantastic variation than those who call us “naïve.” Above all, to my mind, we are not walking around with a MAGA hat on, dead to the wider world and hence effectively dead as zombies for the rest of our lives.
Better green and growing than dead.
Book of Resolutions, Book of Friends
In this Chapter, all the loose threads get tied up, the marvels of the last Chapter explained to those who didn’t know, the adventures of the hobbits and Ents brought up to the present, the Fellowship reunited except Frodo and Sam (remember them?); all those things get resolved. It is a Book of Resolutions.
And yet, one other thing seems to me to be worth examining. Here the Fellowship is almost completely reunited. And we see, in my opinion, how things have changed since the Fellowship was first formed. How new, but deep, friendships have arisen. So deep that Theoden thinks they are much older than they are. But how? How are deep friendships formed between such disparate beings?
Gimli and Legolas seems like a good test case. Gimli cries, “How did you come by the weed, you villains?” in mock reproof, and Legolas laughs, “You speak for me, Gimli. Though I would sooner learn how you came by the wine.” A good comedy act. What underlies it?
What we saw in the previous Chapter, with Gimli’s description of the Glittering Caves of Aglarond and Legolas’ reaction to it, lays the clues. Gimli pours out his heart to Legolas – knowing that Legolas will ultimately understand and accept his openness, as he did in the boat leaving Lothlorien when Gimli poured out his heart about Galadriel. And Legolas expresses honestly his confusions and doubts about Dwarves, knowing the Gimli will allow for them, as he also did in that boat. And I suspect those characteristics will continue in the future. For Gimli, whoever else he may confide in, Legolas is the friend who will listen to your deepest hopes and fears. For Legolas, Gimli will be always there, to kick around or raise a question, to present an alternative, to be his complement in areas where he senses he needs one, as an Elf never can.
One of the hallmarks of Tolkien’s writing is how much the characters evolve. In a lousy fantasy, the characters stay pretty much the same until their ends. In a good murder mystery, the detective learns one thing about himself or herself. In LOTR, Merry, Pippin, Frodo, Sam, Gimli, Legolas, and others learn many things about whole different civilizations and Nature itself, and it changes them more profoundly. But here’s the thing: this knowledge does not break up their friendships; they do not grow apart (unless we include Frodo’s inability to stay with Sam at the end). Instead, the knowledge, even when they part for a while and undergo different experiences in the interim, seems to cement the friendships further. And so, we can envision the future that the Appendixes describe: that Gimli will leave his people to share with Legolas the experience of the Undying Lands; that Legolas will give him that grace.
But the friendships of Merry and Pippin with Gimli, especially, are quite different from this. Underneath the banter is the Gimli who will frantically dig for Pippin after the Last Battle. It is not the friendship of friendships; but it is friendship all the same. And that raises the question: what is it about these hobbits that seems to attract such friendship, from Gimli, from Legolas, from Aragorn?
I would argue that in the way they come across to friends, Merry and Pippin are very much like Bilbo. And what the non-hobbit perceives is something like this. Yes, they are comical. Yes, their manners are rustic. But they have empathy – they try to put themselves in your place, to explain themselves to you, with self-deprecating honesty – “It is the way of our people to use light words at such times, and to say less than we mean.” They have a surprising ability to see the best in you: a dwarf is a good person to have at your back; Elves talk lightly and feel deeply; a Man’s a man for a’ that. And their very irrepressibility makes them difficult to insult; they feel far less itchy pride. As they become more “high”, these qualities shine forth more clearly in Merry and Pippin, as they did in Bilbo. And these qualities of being worthy of deep friendship will in the end lay them to rest in the company of the high of Rohan and of Gondor, as Bilbo is worthy of the Undying Lands.
And then there’s Aragorn. And what strikes me at this moment, even though it doesn’t appear in this Chapter, is the quality of the Number 2s, the second in command, that he attracts. Halbarad. Eomer. Faramir. These are worthy folk that are powerful in their own right. And yet, they not only subordinate themselves to him; they regard him as a friend, and he regards them so. Granted, there are other factors – to Halbarad, he is the culmination of his people’s dream; to Faramir, he is the promised king – but there is also an unusual quality of friendship in the relationships here. There is no “team of rivals”, as in Lincoln’s cabinet; there is loyalty, but there is also friendship.
Friendship in these cases is a two-way street of respect. I would guess that Obama had it with Biden, and Clinton with Gore before Clinton mucked it up. But the example I really think of is Richard III. Yes, that Richard III. Shakespeare’s monster.
Except that I believe that most historians, whatever their take on the controversy about “who killed the princes”, would concede that Shakespeare’s portrayal of Richard III’s character is simplistic if not unfair. He was, it appears, an intelligent man. He did surprisingly forward-looking things with his Parliament run by Catesby and Ratcliffe in his brief 2-year reign. But above all, if we simply look at his life before the death of his brother the King, it is well summed up by his motto: “Loyaulte me lie” – Loyalty binds me. Loyalty to his brother, when the rest of his brothers turned against the King. Loyalty in war, when he shared his brother’s exile and was an effective, independent, but fully subordinate commander of the King’s armies. Loyalty, and devotion, and the friendship of brothers. In the case of Halbarad, Eomer, and Faramir (more or less), loyalty, devotion, and the friendship of brothers in arms.
We have seen Strider the “just plain folks” buddy. We have seen Aragorn the lonely leader. Now, perhaps, even in this Chapter, as he notes that he is Strider and Aragorn too, and considers the implications of pipeweed in Isengard as a leader, and reassures Pippin as a friend that he did right, we are perhaps seeing Aragorn as a leader and a friend, both at once. A leader of leaders. A friend of the friend-worthy.
And so, I say that we have seen three types of friendship here; and yet, they form already a seamless whole, a friendship of the Fellowship, encompassing easily the comical and the deep. And they all will deepen, as individual members evolve and become “higher”, into legendary friendships. And little or no pity is involved. Just an indefinable thing that, were a single man and woman involved, we might call the ripening of affection into love.
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
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