I promised you, last time, a look at a high personage in action. And the Great Council is just that. But first, of course, the obvious facts of what happens there. Frodo takes on the burden of the rest of his Quest. The Fellowship is beginning to be appointed. Boromir is tempted. And we are reminded that the first book has been only one-sixth of the true story, and things are going to get even harder from here out. No more confusion about what should be done, it seems.
So I want to talk about two things: how a high personage conducts a meeting, and dwarves.
The high ruler here is Elrond. Elrond wants to create a counsel. And so he calls a meeting. In that meeting (as they’re all facing related problems) are not the rulers of other key states, but their counselors who are also high, as well as people in training to be high. Galdor is from Cirdan of the Havens, who almost certainly has been getting reports from Elves who are leaving as well as dealing with the nearby Dwarves and possibly with the Undying Lands. There’s a messenger from Thranduil, Legolas, who I view as a counselor in training. Gloin, the action hero from the Hobbit who has clearly from his description become a counselor, and who has a wealth of knowledge of Elves and hobbits, as well as the nearby Men, is here. Gandalf is here in his capacity as counselor – and you don’t get much broader and deeper. Bilbo, with his deeper understanding of the Elves and Men and Dwarves, is pretty high himself. Frodo is in training, and, although we don’t know it yet, so is Sam. And Boromir is in training as well – although something seems to have gone wrong there. He’s been too busy fighting to really look around, and he was always the football hero older brother, not the bookish younger one. And, of course, Aragorn – and we find in the Appendix that Aragorn has not only been brought up among Elves, but has also served an apprenticeship in Rohan and Gondor, where he was also giving some counsel, and has been for years keeping a close eye on Bree and the hobbits. So this Council covers most of the bases – not Lothlorien and not Rohan, but it turns out that we know enough to go on.
Now here’s the way Elrond organizes it. First, he adopts the role of First, and talks about the forging of the Ring and everything up to where someone else can take over. Then he successively points to people who have some information to contribute and asks them to tell a story.
Here I’m going to pause, and note something that may surprise you. If you are trying to understand something, asking someone to tell their story is actually often the best way to do it. You don’t pre-assume the answers. Instead, you allow the person to generate things that may surprise you and cause you to change the framework you’ve been using. It’s very flexible. And the person telling the story tells it as a coherent whole, from beginning to end, as he or she lives it, so that we also see how it all fits together. Smart move, Elrond.
Next, Elrond does not suddenly step in before the end of this process and interpose his own pre-existing counsel. He doesn’t try to steer people towards his framework and thereby influence the findings of the Council. He is what business folks call a facilitator, who makes sure that everyone else in the meeting is fully heard about a point and doesn’t interrupt them to hurry on to where he has already determined he wants to go. Eventually, he comes to a counsel, and starts making decisions; but by then, we’re pretty much at consensus, a consensus that is almost certainly different in some ways from the counsel Elrond had walking in.
And finally, that consensus, that counsel, leaves maximum opportunity for changes to be made by each of the realms once they get back. It’s what some theories call business agility: focusing on everyone having a deep understanding of what’s going on, so that if something unexpected happens in one area, the people in that area know how to adapt. And, as it turns out, that’s crucial. When they get back, Sauron is going to attack every one of them simultaneously, like the North attacking the South in the later stages of the Civil War. All of them react the same way: they don’t try to make a deal, and they don’t surrender; because they understand that if just one of them gives way, all the rest are gone – and they also understand that no help may be coming from anyone else. They survive. And because of that, most of Middle-Earth is spared.
Now here’s the bad sign. Boromir shows towards the end that he just hasn’t been getting it. And the reason he hasn’t been getting it is that he’s seeing everything from the point of view of Gondor. And the reason he sees everything from the point of view of Gondor is that he hasn’t really tried to train to be high. You can blame part of that on the need for a war hero in the fight against their neighbor Sauron. But it’s also true that he’s not really seeing the signs that he should be doing that. And so, something is clearly wrong with Gondor. But they’re not all like that; in Book IV, we’ll meet Faramir.
Now for those pesky dwarves. And we see that the friction, the differences between Elves and dwarves are more complex than just being apples and oranges. Rather than wait around, I want you to understand what Tolkien was thinking (or at least what I infer from what he said).
The Elves were originally one of the three major creations of God (the first being life in general, the third being Men), and he sent his children, the “Gods” I’ve been referring to, down to Earth, where they got into a big fight to prepare the way for those creations against Morgoth, with Sauron being one of the folks on the bad side. Now here’s the thing: one of the “good” Gods was Aule, who, like Hephaestus in Greek legends, just loved to create “artificial” things, just for the joy of creation. And he got to feeling really bad about how life was going to suffer dealing with the bad guys, and so he created some folk who could handle anything you threw at them – they were just tough as rock. And then God poked his head into the laboratory and said, you created beings on your own. Don’t you know how empty they are, without my help? And Aule said, oh dear, you’re right, I was thoughtless and cruel, I’ll just destroy them and never do it again. And God said, that’s the understanding I’ve been looking for. So now that you understand what it’s about, I’m going to give those little toys life, so that you can see a bit more of yourself in this Middle Earth and learn from that.
Now the point of this story is that the Elves are interested in understanding life, and growing it, and remembering it. And their vulnerability to Sauron is the promise that they can hold the life they hold dear frozen in time, and it will never “fade away” completely. Meanwhile, the dwarves are interested in crafting, and creating, like Aule. And their vulnerability to Sauron and his ilk is the promise that they can hoard all the tools for crafting, more and more, and more than they need, so they can craft and admire more and more cool stuff just for themselves.
Later on, Galadriel says to Gimli, your hands will flow with gold, and yet over you gold will have no dominion. She’s not talking only about money. She’s talking about the fact that he will be a superb craftsman, with lots of superb gold to craft with, but he will not give in to its temptation to be greedy for more and not share it.
So what happens when the dwarves of Moria get together with the Elves and Sauron sticks his nose in? The dwarves want to create cool stuff. The Elves want to create stuff that will help them preserve their favorite things against the march of time. And Sauron walks in, and helps the Elves create Rings that do this, and he creates a super-Ring to control them, and make them tempt the bearer. He can’t figure out where the Elves’ Rings are, so they are free to preserve Lothlorien and other places frozen in time. But he also creates Dwarven Rings, with his Ring to control them, and the Dwarves’ Rings make them greedy for gold, and true-silver, and all those things that make fantastic crafted gems, and crowns, and the like.
So do not think for one moment that the dwarves are greedy for riches that they sit there and hoard, or gruff, uncultured fighting machines. With the Dwarves, Tolkien is making a point that he makes about his own view of writing: it’s OK if it’s about the joy of creation, not the possession of the result for one’s own selfish purposes. Moria was a creation every bit as good in its sphere as Lothlorien in its sphere. And this was because both were originally created unselfishly, not focusing on a self-serving end. The dwarves are Tolkien’s way of saying, writing and similar kinds of creation are actually the height of goodness, as long as you’re not focusing on using the result for your own selfish needs or control over others.
Council’s over. We’ve got a counsel. Now we’ll make detailed but flexible plans, and then we’re off.
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
- www.dailykos.com/…