So now we can look more at Ithilien as part of Gondor, and Gondorians, as we move from the fight against the Haradrim to Henneth Annun and the temptation of Faramir. What can we say of Gondor? Where do these representatives of the deep history of Men fit with Elves and Dwarves and Hobbits and Ents?
Let’s start by setting the stage. If Elves, Dwarves, and Hobbits are said by Tolkien to be parts of his own personality, then I think it fair to say that Men are most of his personality, able (like Aragorn) to encompass the Hobbit, Elf, and Dwarf parts of their personalities and thus connect with Hobbits, Elves, and Dwarves at some level. But in this “myth” that Tolkien is telling, the distinguishing characteristic of Men is their mortality, their short life span (except for a few) that renders them prone to greed to “have it all now” (like Grima) or lust for power to extend their lifespans (like the Nazgul). And indeed, in a marvelous short story in one of Christopher Tolkien’s books, JRR tells of the original temptation of Man, when they first “awoke”, and were seduced from listening to the small voice of Eru by the loud and glittering promises of Morgoth of immediate knowledge, and immediate power.
But the deep history of Gondor stems from the fact that some men and women eventually rejected Morgoth, and escaped him, and fled over the mountains into Beleriand, where they found the Elves battling Morgoth. And many of those wanderers aided the Elves in that fight, including Beren, Turin, and Earendil Beren’s descendant. But in the tumult of the final battle, waves entered into Beleriand and the lands were broken up.
And so, in the Second Age, the survivors of that group of Men were given an island within sight of the Undying Lands, but forbidden to ever go there – the Undying Lands, one explanation was, were not the resting place after death of Men. And on that island they founded Numenor, that over the years of the Second Age grew so great that they dared to challenge Sauron in Middle-Earth, and won. But that same greatness led to pride and an urge to cheat death that led some Numenoreans to become the Nazgul, and others to commit to a king who, tempted by captive Sauron, dared to attack the Gods themselves. And so a Great Wave swallowed the island of Numenor, and the armies of Numenor as they poised to attack the Undying Lands. But the few who were Faithful and rejected Sauron fled to Middle-Earth on the wings of the storm, as told in the verses mentioned by Gandalf on the ride to Minas Tirith. And they founded Gondor, and Arnor; but only Gondor survived to the end of the Third Age.
Thus the deep history of Gondor is one of brave deeds, but also of great waves that obliterate. And now Gondor faces again the prospect of a Great Wave that will destroy, a wave, as we will soon find out, of darkness – only there is nowhere to flee to. This time, it’s for keeps, and there seems no real hope. Damrod says so. Faramir as much as says so. Beregond will say so.
What then sustains Gondorian leaders and soldiers in the face of this despair? I would argue it is partly their deep history, and the added “highness” it gives them. Unlike the Rohirrim, even at the level of the common soldier they are not reflexively wary of other lands, other peoples. Their extra courtesy and “civilization”, too, show at least some concern for others as a baseline for behavior. They take pride in being a shelter for other lands against Sauron.
And we could stop here. But I want to propose an alternate way, a complementary way of looking at Gondor.
When I was working there as a programmer and manager, Prime Computer gave a very valuable course in communicating that stressed a technique called reflection. The idea was that you validated your attention to the other person by “reflecting back” what they said – not what you wanted them to say, but what they actually said. And what I found was that it was especially valuable when you reflected back not the dry specifics or logic of what the other person said, but also the feelings behind it. Like this: Not “what I hear you say is that this project is not going to get done on time” but “what I hear you say is that you feel you’ve done a lot of good work on this project – which you have -- and it’s frustrating to feel it’s going to waste.”
Suppose I were in the position of “reflecting back” to a Gondorian or Tolkien about what I hear underlying their words about their history? I think what I would say is, “What I think I hear, among other things, is a strong sense of loss.” What loss?
Tolkien himself said that he strongly associated Gondor with a recurring dream he had about an enormous oncoming wave, utterly high and all-englobing, a dream to which he gave great unexplained significance. And it appears that this dream began in his teens or earlier. Recent research has suggested that dreams are our ways of working out the stresses in our daily lives, and things like PTSD happen when the stress is simply too great to be handled by a dream – and so the dream mechanism must try again the next night, and the next, and sometimes for the whole of our lives. What was it in Tolkien’s life that might have been like that?
Well, he lost his father early on; but he didn’t really remember him. Then he lost his childhood home in South Africa. Then he came to England on the great waves of the Atlantic Ocean. And then he lost his mother. And then, of course, all but one of his closest childhood friends in the War.
The one that should have had the strongest effect, in my mind, is the loss of his mother. Because it appears that the dream began before his war experiences. But that should have also been strongly associated with the loss of home, and periodic separation from his mother. Loss of a parent, and loss of home.
Now, I’m probably over-analyzing this. But it does have a striking resonance with the one occurrence of that dream in Gondor’s collective myth and collective unconscious: The Great Wave that swallowed Numenor whole, and last of all the sad figure of Tar-Miriel, unwilling wife of the last king of Numenor, desperately seeking survival or forgiveness at the defiled altar to the Gods at the top of the great mountain that stood in Numenor’s center. The Wave that swallowed Gondorians’ ultimate parents, and their childhood home.
The reason I lean toward this is that I, too, have experienced the loss of my parents, twelve years ago, after long lives. And I can attest to my ongoing feelings of a particular kind of loss, which I summarized once in a musical I wrote as “No one there to answer me/No one there to hold/The morning rain’s like ashes/The memories like gold.” That is the feeling I most strongly get from Gondor’s collective myth and collective memory: A loss of ultimate parents and with it the childhood home, the memories like gold. Associated with the image of a Great Wave that swallows all, inexorably. The Great Wave of darkness that now faces them, literally, again.
And so, I think of the Men of Gondor as the People Under the Wave.
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
- www.dailykos.com/…
- www.dailykos.com/…
- www.dailykos.com/…
- www.dailykos.com/…
- www.dailykos.com/…
- www.dailykos.com/…
- www.dailykos.com/…
- www.dailykos.com/...
- www.dailykos.com/…
- www.dailykos.com/...