And we’re back. We wake up, and it seems as if Frodo has successfully had an adventure and been a hero. Gandalf is back, thank heavens, and gives Frodo the best return possible: friends OK, you’re OK, you did it, and (teacher’s hat on) here’s what you should learn. Now go have fun at the party. And then Frodo goes, and meets so many “high” people it makes his head spin, and he understands that everyone there is yet more than he thought, and then a reminder: Bilbo wants the Ring. He has a “waking dream” that makes Bilbo look like Gollum: the end of every hobbit addict. This isn’t over. The Tolkien Chapter ending: Time to go to bed. Council tomorrow! What will happen?
At this point, I want to talk about the next major Tolkien new/old word: “high”.
Everyone’s knee-jerk reaction is that Tolkien is glorifying an old, stratified society, like Shakespeare’s commonwealth in which it only works if everyone stays in his place and everyone does his job in his part of the hierarchy, and the king knows best. And yet, “high” doesn’t quite seem to correspond to “king.”
In England, just before the Norman Conquest, there was a king whom we know as Ethelred the Unready. Except that’s a lousy translation of the Saxon word “rede.” It’s Ethelred Bad Tactics. It’s Ethelred the Stupid and His Strategy. It’s Ethelred who screwed up and got booted out because he kept consistently making bad decisions. As far as I can tell, “rede” in this instance meant something like “the right thing to do in the short term, preferably as part of a good long-term strategy.” And right and good meant the best thing for everybody, with a broad and deep view of everybody, aimed at the nation’s welfare but also understanding the interests of other nations.
The long-term version of “rede” is “counsel.” Counsel is a plan of action based on a long-term strategy that is broadly good for everyone you’re ruling, and preferably other nations as well as they relate to you. The job of the king is counsel. If the king doesn’t tell everyone what that is, the king keeps his own counsel. If he calls in an outside advisor who can provide another counsel to incorporate in his own, that advisor is a counselor. There’s a nice poem in the English Civil War that goes, in part: “You who are masters of your own ears, Thank the Great Counsel of the King, and the King’s Great Counsel.” It says, the King had lousy counsel of his own, and lousy counselors – now that Parliament is doing the job, you don’t get your ears cut off arbitrarily. Gandalf, for example, is not a ruler, but is a counselor.
Now, what’s a prerequisite for a good counsel? A broad and deep understanding of the nation, and preferably those around it, or the whole world. And what kind of people have that? The high.
Now here’s the key part: in important ways, being high is a “meritocracy.” You can be a hobbit and be high. You can be female and “high,” like Galadriel, just as readily as you can be male and “high”. Remember, Gandalf coming back from the dead says “Counsel I gave, and counsel was given.” By whom? In context, had to be Galadriel.
You can learn to be “high”. Notice what Gandalf says to the hobbits at the end: Among the high and mighty, you are, and I no longer have any fears for any of you. All of them have to at least some degree, at that point, a deep understanding based on the history of all of The Shire, and how it fits in the wider world, and that wider world itself. This is true even of Sam, by this point. They did not inherit being “high”. And we have seen, in Frodo’s case, how it can happen. He sees the rest of the world, he learns about its history, he figures out how its beginnings lead to each of the creatures in most of the areas of the world. And, he is beginning to learn how to pity (more on that later).
A “high” king is a natural ruler. And it tends to stay that way, throughout the generations, because his children learn being “high” just by being in the family: it’s in the family discussions, it’s in the counselors around the family. In the case of the High Elves – whom Tolkien defined as those Middle-Earth Elves who visited the Undying Lands – it can be in being around the Gods, for the long-lived Elves.
You can be king, like Eomer when he became king on the field of battle, without being high. Remember his reaction in the meeting after the battle? These matters are beyond me. Instead, he trusts Aragorn to make his “high” decisions for him, in some ways like Sam’s attitude towards his Master. You can be high, like the wizards, without being king. You can be high, like Frodo, without doing any ruling or counseling at all. It isn’t easy to be high, if it’s not in the family or the extended family of the “race” (don’t forget, the “race” of Numenoreans are all descended from just regular folks who hung around Elves and got a glimpse of the Undying Lands once). But it can certainly be done.
So no, this society is not a rigid hierarchy, and it is not a society of philosopher-kings, either. It can get that way, like Hobbiton’s squirearchy; but given a choice, most people in this world will opt for Aragorn after first being put off by his being “ragged and bereft of dignity”, not just because he has the right heredity, but also because he is “high”. We find in the Appendix that he actually served an apprenticeship in Rohan and Gondor; he hid out with the Elves in Rivendell; and he even spent years protecting the hobbits in Bree and the Shire. And he has been well trained in counsel by Gandalf. Oh, yes, when push comes to shove, Aragorn’s quality of being “high” will give him an Elvish bride, and Kingship over almost all of Middle Earth (if, of course, Sauron gets offed).
So keep this in mind from now on in the story. Keep it in mind as a possible criterion for your own Presidents, Prime Ministers, and advisers, and as a good idea for you to develop this quality. And especially keep this in mind tomorrow, when Elrond shows you a “high” ruler at work.
Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings Like You’ve Never Heard It: