‘sufficient tragedy’
‘[Beowulf] is a man, and that for him and for many is
sufficient tragedy.’
(M&C,
18, italics original)
In Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics Tolkien lays
out his understanding of Beowulf, its Christian poet, and the legendary past
he was writing about, an age whose ‘days were heathen – heathen, noble, and
hopeless’ (M&C, 22). That hopelessness is rooted as deeply as
Yggdrasil because the final defeat of men and gods alike is inevitable. It is
the way the world ends. Their nobility, however, reveals itself in their fighting
on regardless, in doing deeds worthy of song even if no one is alive to hear it,
in the conviction that even final ‘defeat is no refutation’ of their ‘northern courage’
and the worth of their struggle against the darkness.
We can see this nobility in Théoden, Éowyn, and Éomer during the battle of the Pelennor Fields. The old king
has no regrets because he is dying well, having done great deeds himself. Éowyn, ‘one without hope who goes in
search of death’ (RK 5.iii.803), defies the Witch-king to defend her own.
Éomer, the young
king, ‘laugh[s] at despair’ and sings his defiance of the doom that seems to be
approaching them all (RK 5.vi.847). At the same time within the city, Denethor,
the Steward of Gondor in whom ‘the blood of Westernesse runs nearly true’(RK
6.i.758), is yielding to despair (and madness) and failing this test. And just
as the Beowulf poet reproaches those who turned to the heathen gods in
despair when their own strength proved too little to defeat Grendel (170-88), so
Gandalf rebukes Denethor by likening him to ‘the heathen kings’ of old when he
chooses death for himself and Faramir, a comparison Denethor has already
embraced on his own (RK 5.iv.825; vii.852).
Yet Gandalf acknowledges the truth that led the Steward to
despair: ‘… listen to the words of the Steward of Gondor before he died: You
may triumph on the fields of the Pelennor for a day, but against the Power that
has now arisen there is no victory’ (RK 5.ix.878, italics original; cf.
5.vii.853). In the end, as long as the Ring exists, no courage, no strength, no
will in Arda can defeat Sauron without becoming Sauron, and the quest to unmake
the Ring has never been more than ‘a fool’s hope’, another point made by
Denethor and conceded by Gandalf (RK 6.iv.825; vii.852). That much power
will crush or corrupt anyone in the end. It is as evident in the struggle
within Frodo as it is on the battlefields of Gondor. No one who partakes of the
substance of Arda Marred, whether by nature or by adoption, or who seeks to
order it, change it, or to keep it from changing, can successfully resist. Only
Bombadil who takes Arda as he finds it is beyond the pull of the Ring, and even
he could not stand against Sauron; what makes him immune does not make him a savior
(FR 2.ii.265).
The rest of us must simply fail: ‘the power of Evil in the world is not finally
resistible by incarnate creatures, however “good”’ (Letters no. 191, p.
252).
This courage to face an ineluctable universal defeat is, as W.
P. Ker, followed by Tolkien, called it, ‘perfect because without hope’ (Ker,
57-58; Tolkien, M&C 21). The pity Gandalf urges upon Frodo is
analogous. It cannot defend the Ringbearer against the pull of the Ring any
more than courage can succeed against the assault of Sauron. Yet its hopeless
perfection also defies all refutation of its worth. Pity, however, opens a door
that strength and courage, reinforced by grace, can hold open for a time. The pity
Bilbo felt for Gollum, which Frodo and Sam, too, came to share, and the mercy
they each chose to show him allowed the hope, however increasingly slim, that he
could be healed, and preserved each of them from becoming another Gollum. More
than that, as Gandalf intimated in The Shadow of the Past, pity may well
have a role to play in a much larger and providential plan. Doom, as Tolkien
knew, is as effective an agent of man’s ‘sufficient tragedy’ as hamartia
(ἁμαρτία, M&C 15). Doom hung over Túrin
Turambar, but it was his character and mistaken choices that brought it down
upon him and so many around him. Bilbo was ‘meant’ to find
the Ring, and his ‘sudden understanding’ may have been granted by Providence,
but his revulsion at the thought of killing Gollum was all his own and it came
first. His choice both embraces his doom and avoids the mistake, the ἁμαρτία, that sufficed to make Sméagol
into Gollum.
As he told Gollum’s sad story in The Shadow of the Past,
Gandalf said that Gollum was ‘bound up with the fate of the Ring’ and had ‘some
part to play yet’ (FR 1.ii.59). It is in precisely this connection, as
we know, that the pity of Bilbo would prove critical. So, it is reasonable to
think that he, too, was meant to have the Ring and to keep it hidden away until
Bilbo came along. His embrace of his doom, however, made his story a tragedy at
once. Just as sparing Gollum was all Bilbo, so the murder of Déagol
was all Sméagol.
Bilbo took a ‘leap in the dark’ (Hobbit 133). Sméagol’s leap was of a very
different kind. Seeing something he wanted, he went straight to murder to
obtain it. As A. C. Bradley pointed out in his lectures on Shakespeare, when
the Witches prophesy that Macbeth will be king, ‘[their] words … are fatal
to the hero only because there is in him something which leaps straight into
the light at the sound of them’ (1991, 320, emphasis mine). Doom and ἁμαρτία are compounded
in the sudden tragedy of Sméagol (and Macbeth and Túrin).
Yet the slow descents of Bilbo and Frodo nevertheless establish that their
keeping of the Ring also ‘ends in night’, a phrase Tolkien uses to describe the
heroic world as the Beowulf poet perceived it (M&C 23). It is
just as apt here.
