Once again, I am going to focus where the reader typically doesn’t for this Chapter that journeys to Weathertop: on the middle.
In the beginning, we wander outside Bree in a small forest through country lanes, and then we endlessly cross northern moors, with one brief passage through a mosquito-infested northern marsh, until we reach a line of low hills rising across our path. It is a new terrain. Looking back, we see that we have come through an old, old forest, and then a set of rolling downs, and we will be passing through craggy hills with jagged slopes, and a deep, hidden valley, and then rolling foothills next to an unbelievably high set of mountains, and then a huge valley next to those mountains, and then up the side of a mountain on a narrow trail, and … From the Old Forest on, we will be finding one place after another that is not just an average landscape, but a special one.
Many years after LOTR was first published, a cartographer named Barbara Strachey set out to make a series of maps of the journeys described in LOTR. And as she did so, she found two astonishing things: first, you could literally draw a topographic map of every stage – that’s how detailed Tolkien’s description of the terrain was – and second (except at a couple of points), the ground that the hobbits covered each day was indeed what a good hiker could cover, given that terrain. And note that Tolkien was indeed a day and week hiker. In other words, if I was still a hiker and Middle Earth was real, I could take Barbara’s maps and hike the “Frodo Trail”. And, as a hiker, I would love it.
We are in the world as a hiker sees it – or a soldier, or an explorer, or a forest ranger. In most of this land, your group is the only humans for miles. And you know what? That’s true of this world, as well. As a hiker knows.
There are several levels of this insight. Let’s start with a fundamental difficulty of fantasy writing.
Novels based on people’s knowledge of the Earth have a built-in advantage: the scope (the number of people, the geographic area) can be as large or as small as needed, because the reader will intuitively understand how the importance of the story applies to the whole world (or at least the part of the world that the reader cares about). By contrast, the fantasy writer trying to convey world-shaking importance must cover as much of the world as possible, else the reader clearly perceives that while this may be a big deal in Hobbiton, it’s not at all important in Minas Tirith, and way out east, there may be some huge empire we don’t know about that makes this ultimately unimportant – and so it isn’t really of world-shaking importance, after all (and if it’s science fiction, it’s not universe-shaking, either). And sketching out such an entire new world for the reader in the middle of the plot is just plain hard.
Tolkien doesn’t completely solve this problem. However, he comes amazingly close, and stretches the boundaries of how it’s done. By the end of LOTR, we have a very good picture in our minds of just about the entire West of Middle-Earth, and have been told that there really isn’t anything in the East, as well as across the Great Sea, that matters. Even the Undying Lands are now, effectively, permanently disconnected from Middle-Earth. We have been just about everywhere in Middle Earth, and what happens that affects everything there happens to the entire world. And so, it matters. As in, end-of-the-world importance (not, still, as in “a bright open-ended new future” importance; that’s what regular novels and science fiction can promise).
Next level. How did Tolkien put together this world? Well, we know from his comments (and some people have put together tentative lists of all the real-world places he drew on): he drew on the most memorable places that he had walked in and hiked through. It is as if you created a world by stitching together the Grand Canyon and surrounding badlands, the outback of Australia, the Himalayas, the Amazon, Zambezi Falls, and the moors of Scotland. This world is the distilled essence of the best of Earth, for the hiker to appreciate without the tedious work of going at the wrong time of year when the flies drive you crazy, or sifting through old logging trails that lead nowhere unusual. Go there? As a hiker I would, like a shot.
So, with Tolkien, we are seeing this world as a hiker sees it: not as a place to get through to reach people, but as an experience to be appreciated for itself, a part of a better personality. At every stage, there will be added words from the hiker’s point of view, and we will proceed at the hiker’s pace, instead of rushing towards the action. And, in many cases, the experience of these places is the psychological action, is (when it’s trying to coerce you) the physical action. For the insightful reader, this is an incredible reward – like the opening of another sense you never knew you had. For the other reader, well, as one person put it, it’s a “cracking good yarn!” and you’ll just have to put up with old Tolkien’s wordy ramblings to get there.
Final level. This extra sense is one thing that other Great Writing lacks. Jane Austen, Proust, even partially Hemingway or Conrad, view the land around them as a giant stage set, to be altered where appropriate. The horses aren’t real; the trees aren’t real; the weather isn’t real; it’s all manipulated. Shakespeare is different, because he’s typically performed on a stage, where we can fill in the “background”. And if you view all these novelists with your extra sense, their characters are all fundamentally shallow in this way. Yes, they are psychologically rich, and insightful. But their insight does not extend beyond themselves and their own little world. They have no historical scope beyond their parents; they have no geographical scope beyond their city or their little manor house. The only shadows they cast are universal individual ones.
Tolkien, they say, would be an environmentalist. That’s truer than you think. Of all the people who could fundamentally accept the notion of human-caused climate change, Tolkien would be among the first. Because this extra sense says that everything you do has serious effects on the physical world of flora, fauna, and other people, and it in turn has effects on you that can be threatening to all life on earth – including all humans. And that’s what, fundamentally, most people find hard to believe – but it’s true. Tolkien had that extra sense. Tolkien would understand and believe it. And when he succeeds in conveying that extra sense to us by elegant, musical words, that’s Great Writing. That’s Great Writing that many editors and other writers are too tone-deaf to hear.
But if you’re looking for influences, well, look at the shift in science fiction in the 1960s that produced, many would agree, works that approached great even by “mainstream” standards. Zelazny’s “A Rose for Ecclesiastes” is a masterpiece that showed the introduction of psychological fiction into science fiction. His “This Immortal” is a very good work that’s more of the Tolkien type: he shows us Earth as nature mythology that the future must preserve to grow on its own, rather than be a tourist trap – he has, a bit, that extra sense. And then there’s Frank Herbert’s Dune, whose extra dimension that gives it near-greatness is the desert and the ecology and the personalities that go with it.
And one more thing, and then, alas, we must go and torture Frodo.
This Chapter marks the point where Frodo hands over the decision-making to others. That will last nearly until the end of Book II. Frodo needs desperately to hand off this responsibility. He has been shown, in the last couple of Chapters, that he is losing awareness of when his addiction will hit. His hand put on the Ring after the song and dance at the Prancing Pony without his realizing it and without external coercion. Now he needs to concentrate on what he is thinking and doing at all times -- and deciding what to do next, when your thinking is being warped by the Ring, is a big extra burden.
But in the long run, this won’t work. Sooner or later, everyone around him will have their thinking warped by the Ring too, and he will have to ditch them or they will take the Ring from him and screw up the Quest irrevocably. And by then he will be even more addicted, and the attack from without and within that is deepening that addiction will be much stronger, because he is near Mordor. Still, every little bit helps – and so, like Frodo, we should be too busy struggling to spend much thought on the troubles of others, but at least realize that Aragorn and Gandalf, as the ones who are making the decisions from now on, are unbelievably helpful.
Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings Like You’ve Never Heard It: