And now, can we finally move on to the Black Gate, and the choice of Frodo? Not quite yet. Instead, I want to tell you a story.
When I was in junior high, my English teacher gave an assignment: Take a paragraph from an author, and write a paragraph in imitation of it. Now, I was young and feisty then, so I told him I was going to pick a paragraph from Lord of the Rings. And he was surprised. He knew I had read Faulkner, and Hemingway, and Joyce, and Eliot. Why was I picking this book whose author had no reputation for producing great literature among cognoscenti? I might as well have picked Dashiell Hammett or R.F. Delderfield.
Here is the Tolkien paragraph I gave him, more or less:
“Even to the Mere of Dead Faces some haggard phantom of green spring would come; but here neither spring nor summer would come again. Here nothing lived, not even the leprous growths that feed on rottenness. The gasping pools were choked with ash and crawling muds, sickly white and grey, as if the mountains had vomited the filth of their entrails upon the lands about. High mounds of crushed and powdered rock, great cones of earth fire-blasted and poison-stained, stood like an obscene graveyard in endless rows, slowly revealed in the reluctant light. They had come to the desolation that lay before Mordor: the lasting monument to the dark labour of its slaves that should endure when all their purposes were made void; a land defiled, diseased beyond all healing – unless the Great Sea should enter in and wash it with oblivion.”
And my teacher looked at the passage, and read it, and said to me simply: “I see what you mean.”
I could stop here, with the acknowledgment by Authority that Tolkien has worth as an author. I’d like to take it a little further, however, and say why I believe he and I came to that conclusion.
First of all, this passage is actually blank-verse poetry. It has rhythm, and consonance, and a curious terseness of wording. I could see the start written:
Even to the Mere of Dead Faces
Some haggard phantom of green spring
Would come;
But here neither spring nor summer
Would come again.
Here nothing lived, not even
The leprous growths that feed on rottenness.
Second, it has a fascinating alternation of editorial morality and vivid description: “gasping” followed by “ash” and “muds”, “vomited … filth” followed by “high mounds of crushed and pulverized rock”, “cones of earth fire-blasted” followed by “obscene graveyard”. This is not the personification of Nature; it is the alternating clinical description and horror of Nature murdered.
And note the three clearest times when images of living things intrude: spring is a “haggard phantom”, the destroyers are “slaves”, and the Great Sea bathes the death as tenderly as a child untimely lost. Two images of death in life, and then one of only possible redemption. These images, to me, send a subtle message of mourning.
And Tolkien strips our senses down to sight, using the morality to fill in the other senses, as if stench and filthy touch were unnecessary to add. In fact, Frodo and Sam intrude as little as possible on this scene, so it is not their but our sight that is engaged. All this, so when Sam does comment at the end, we understand that in terse poetic fashion, he is summing up:
“I feel sick,” said Sam.
And we feel a horror beyond words: “Frodo did not speak.”
There are no old meanings of words here, and no blatantly new or rustic ones. Thus, there is a lack of flamboyance. We sense Tolkien’s deep feelings about this.
All this art is applied, not to human speech, as in Saruman achieving rhetorical seduction in two simple sentences, nor to war, nor to Proustian memories, nor to grand Melvillian or Tolstoyan generalization. It is applied to Nature, simply to mourning Nature. These bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang are not florid symbols of the death of love; they are real and irrevocable facts of the death of the world.
And that, I think is the true art of this Great Art: to see Nature not as scenery, nor as a reflection of our moods, nor as causing our moods, nor necessarily anything to do with us: rather, seeing Nature as a wholly independent thing, self-contained, complete, of value in and of itself; an insight only possible when Tolkien removes it entirely from us.
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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