Two Paragraphs and Two Threats Converging in Tolkien (FR 2.ix.382)

Here's a piece of analysis I decided to take out of my book, To Rule the Fate of Many: Truth, Lies, Pity and the Ring of Power, about which I hope to have an official, public announcement soon. (Absit omen!). I didn't really want to remove it, but I don't think it shows us as much about the argument I am making in my book as it does about Tolkien's ability to construct a scene in a landscape that is more than a backdrop but contributes meaningfully to the way in which this scene from the journey of the Company on the river quite literally flows. The River moves them all along, dividing them, grouping them, moving them apart and back together; and in the eddy and flow of the narrator's attention as it shifts from one character to the next the dreams, thoughts, and anxieties of the members of the Company converge in the two threats threatening them, one from within and one from without. So much of what we've learned about these characters and theirs stories so far is implicit here, and so much that will become clear after the convergence of the threats causes the threads of their stories to separate after the breaking of the Fellowship on Amon Hen and the meeting of Frodo and Gollum in the Emyn Muil.

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The heart of Legolas was running under the stars of a summer night in some northern glade amid the beech-woods; Gimli was fingering gold in his mind, and wondering if it were fit to be wrought into the housing of the Lady's gift. Merry and Pippin in the middle boat were ill at ease, for Boromir sat muttering to himself, sometimes biting his nails, as if some restlessness or doubt consumed him, sometimes seizing a paddle and driving the boat close behind Aragorn's. Then Pippin, who sat in the bow looking back, caught a queer gleam in his eye, as he peered forward gazing at Frodo. Sam had long ago made up his mind that, though boats were maybe not as dangerous as he had been brought up to believe, they were far more uncomfortable than even he had imagined. He was cramped and miserable, having nothing to do but stare at the winter-lands crawling by and the grey water on either side of him. Even when the paddles were in use they did not trust Sam with one.

As dusk drew down on the fourth day, he was looking back over the bowed heads of Frodo and Aragorn and the following boats; he was drowsy and longed for camp and the feel of earth under his toes. Suddenly something caught his sight: at first he stared at it listlessly, then he sat up and rubbed his eyes; but when he looked again he could not see it any more.

(FR 2.ix.382)

What beautiful paragraphs these are in detail and movement, from character to character, from boat to boat, and from threat to threat. Beginning with the loveliness of Legolas' vivid, dreamlike memory, and Gimli's chivalrous, romantic imaginings, we never expect the uncomfortable turn it takes, with the uneasiness of Merry and Pippin at the disturbing, almost threatening, behavior of Boromir. We then follow Boromir's gaze through Pippin's eyes straight to Frodo in the boat ahead with Strider and Sam. But suddenly and unexpectedly, since our attention has just been directed to Frodo, we find ourselves with Sam instead. But the introduction of Sam here, uncomfortable, unhappy, and untrusted Sam, is a misdirection. It lightens the menace of the sentences on Boromir, but only in order to refocus it a moment later on another threat that is present on the Great River, another one who has his had eyes fixed on Frodo and Frodo's burden for some time now.

It is of course Gollum whom Sam has seen, but the way in which the narrator shifts our gaze from Boromir to Gollum is masterful. Notice how Sam is looking back towards the boats behind his own. Given the previous paragraph, we might expect him to have caught the same look in Boromir's eyes as Pippin had. But it is not so. For just as we followed Boromir's gaze forward to Frodo, but found Sam instead, so, too, we now follow Sam's back, not to Boromir, but to Gollum. When Sam comes to tell Frodo what he has seen, he remarks over and over again on Gollum's eyes, five times in all, thus further pairing these two threats (FR 2.ix.382-83). Nor is this the first time that Frodo has been the object of the intense gaze of Gollum and Boromir (FR 2.vi.345; vii.358; viii.369; ix.383; cf. ix.388). As the day draws near when Frodo must decide between Minas Tirith and Mordor, danger is converging on him from more than one direction. From Gollum of course, as he tracks Frodo down the Great River, but also from his companion Boromir, who, desperate to save his homeland, feels quite keenly the anguish of the choice which lies before Frodo as he sits in the boat just ahead of him with Sam and Strider. And if Gollum, as Boromir himself said, is 'small, but great in mischief' (FR 2.ii.255), what is Boromir?

Faramir and the Shards of Boromir's Horn

Quite a while back I came to the conclusion that Faramir doesn't actually see Boromir's funeral boat, as he is convinced he does, but a vision of it, as Frodo insists. It is of course impossible to prove either way; and that is probably as it should be. The mythic aspect of Faramir's vision is far more significant than whether it is factually true. I daresay even Faramir would have thought so, regardless of what he believed. His openness to the idea that the boat could have survived the Falls of Rauros because it came from Lothlórien is sufficient evidence of this notion.

Yet the other day I noticed a detail in The Chronology of The Lord of the Rings, edited by William Cloud Hicklin, and just published as a supplement to volume XIX of Tolkien Studies. In the entry under 28 February 3019, Tolkien wrote 'First shard of horn of Boromir found' (56), and under 30 February* 'Second shard of the horn of Boromir found' (58). Hicklin comments in a single footnote to both entries (57): 'The entries regarding Boromir's horn are in pencil'. Since the Chronology is otherwise written in ink of different colors, the pencil insertions would seem to be later additions. 

Now we already know from TT 4.v.667 that the two shards were found on two different days in two different places, and we know from The Tale of Years in Appendix B (1092) that Faramir saw the boat on 29* February. Thus the first shard was found on 28 February; Faramir saw the boat on 29 February; and the second shard was found 30 February. At some point before 7 March, when Faramir speaks of the shards to Frodo, word of their discovery reaches both Faramir and Denethor. 

What I find curious in all this is that only The Tale of Years gives us a date for Faramir's sight of the boat, and only the Chronology gives us dates for the shards. The Chronology says nothing of the boat after 'Boromir's funeral boat sent down over Rauros' in the entry for 26 February (54). It could be that each text is telling us something different here. 

The silence of the Chronology on Faramir's sighting of the boat may not prove that what he saw was a vision, but it is consistent with that interpretation. As Faramir himself tells Frodo: 'Tidings of death have many wings. Night oft brings news to near kindred, ’tis said' (TT 4.v.665).

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* In the Shire Reckoning all months had 30 days, February included.

The true gift to the foes of Mordor

Here's just a wee bit from right near the very end of the conclusion of my book, To Rule the Fate of Many: Truth, Lies, Pity, and the Ring of Power:

In 1945, however, after six years of a war for survival the horror and pity Tolkien felt at the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was balanced against the recognition that the use of such power could end the war and that God ‘does not look kindly’ on such uses of power (Letters no. 102, p. 113). He knew well how easily one might hold such power to be ‘a gift to the foes of Mordor’ (FR 2.x.397), and how blandly one could assent to ‘deploring maybe evils done by the way’ in the name of doing good (FR 2.ii.259). Frodo came to pity both Boromir and Saruman, the characters who said the words just quoted, but only because Tolkien who wrote these words had pitied them first.

These* are but two examples of Tolkien seeing the applicability of the truths of his myth to the reality in which he lived. And pity is at the heart of the challenge these myths lay before us. Tolkien’s recollections of ‘being caught in youth by 1914’ (FR xxiv), his passions and fears about the war which came again in 1939, his concerns about its aftermath throughout the world as well as in his England, are as incandescent in his letters to his son, Christopher, as they are in the Dead Marshes, in the cataclysmic destruction of the enemy, and in the return of the Ringbearer to a land which no longer seemed his own and which needed a healing that only pity could bring. That pity is the true gift given to the foes of Mordor.

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*Sorry, but if you want to know what 'these' refers to, you'll have to wait until the book comes out one of these days. I should be submitting it to a publisher within the next month or so. 

 

Fear, Desire, and 'The Ring is mine.'

 

The Ring plays on fear as much as desire. To be sure Boromir and Denethor desire to save Gondor, but both share a desperate fear that they cannot succeed. Even Faramir says of his people ‘What hope have we? …. It is long since we have had any hope’ (TT 4.v.677); and even Faramir sees the temptation the power of the Ring would hold, for his brother in particular (TT. 4.v.681). For it seems a gift that will allow Gondor to survive. Frodo sets out to destroy the Ring because he fears the Shire will not survive otherwise. For all three the desire to save their homeland and their fear that they cannot will merge without their knowing it into a desire for the one weapon that seems capable of defeating Sauron. The idea of victory in battle may not come to Frodo’s mind as readily as it does to Boromir’s (and Sam’s, don’t forget.), but 'the Ring is mine' is no less of a challenge because of that. The ‘Captain-General of Gondor’ and ‘the Mister Baggins of Bag End’ are far less different than bearing and size suggest.

The fair and pleasant face of Boromir (FR 2.x.299-300)

Many a reader has noted the effect the Ring has on Frodo when he looks upon Bilbo at Rivendell and at Sam in Mordor:

Slowly [Frodo] drew it out. Bilbo put out his hand. But Frodo quickly drew back the Ring. To his distress and amazement he found that he was no longer looking at Bilbo; a shadow seemed to have fallen between them, and through it he found himself eyeing a little wrinkled creature with a hungry face and bony groping hands. He felt a desire to strike him. 

(FR 2.i.232)

and:

'No, no!' cried Frodo, snatching the Ring and chain from Sam's hands. 'No you won't, you thief!' He panted, staring at Sam with eyes wide with fear and enmity. Then suddenly, clasping the Ring in one clenched fist, he stood aghast. A mist seemed to clear from his eyes, and he passed a hand over his aching brow. The hideous vision had seemed so real to him, half bemused as he was still with wound and fear. Sam had changed before his very eyes into an orc again, leering and pawing at his treasure, a foul little creature with greedy eyes and slobbering mouth. But now the vision had passed. There was Sam kneeling before him ....

(RK 6.i.911-12)

No one, as far as I can recall right now*, has remarked on what might be another instance of this same phenomenon. To be sure, it is easily overlooked, embedded as it is within Frodo's reaction to Boromir's actual attempt to seize the Ring. By contrast, Sam was not trying to take the Ring, and Bilbo, though yearning to see and touch the Ring again, reads Frodo's reaction and repents of even asking to see it so quickly, that it's hard to see his reaching for the Ring as hostile. Consider the following:

His fair and pleasant face was hideously changed; a raging fire was in his eyes.

and

Terror and grief shook [Frodo], seeing in his thought the mad, fierce face of Boromir, and his burning eyes.

(FR 2.x.399-400)

So, perhaps we should see Frodo's perception of Boromir's face here in the context of his clearly Ring-induced perceptions of Bilbo and Sam, and allow that the image of Boromir's face that Frodo had in his mind was not entirely accurate. For, if Frodo sees threats to the Ring where there are none and momentarily perceives those he loves as evil creatures, will he not experience the same distortion of his vision when the threat is real, as it is with Boromir.

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* Please let me know if someone has made this comment before. I would love to see it.

A Wizard or a Warrior -- But Why not Both?

'I am learning a lot about Sam Gamgee on this journey. First he was a conspirator, now he's a jester. He'll end up by becoming a wizard – or a warrior!' 

'I hope not,' said Sam. 'I don't want to be neither!'

FR 1.xii.208

But maybe both?

[Sam] felt that he had from now on only two choices: to forbear the Ring, though it would torment him; or to claim it, and challenge the Power that sat in its dark hold beyond the valley of shadows. Already the Ring tempted him, gnawing at his will and reason. Wild fantasies arose in his mind; and he saw Samwise the Strong, Hero of the Age, striding with a flaming sword across the darkened land, and armies flocking to his call as he marched to the overthrow of Barad-dûr. And then all the clouds rolled away, and the white sun shone, and at his command the vale of Gorgoroth became a garden of flowers and trees and brought forth fruit. He had only to put on the Ring and claim it for his own, and all this could be.

RK 6.i.901

Two passages nearly seven hundred pages apart tell us about the working of the Ring on the mind. Do the 'wild fantasies' now arising in Sam's mind reveal the role he imagined for himself as a boy when he was listening to Mr Bilbo telling, say, the tale of Gil-Galad, just as Boromir's fantasies about becoming king of Gondor reflect his childhood desire for the Stewards to ascend the throne (FR 2.x398; TT 4.v.670)? The pull of the Ring's power allows us to imagine the fulfillment of desires we already had somewhere within us, even if we had set them aside as childish things. 

First Steps into Ithilien (TT 4.iv.648-52)

Another excerpt from To Rule the Fate of Many: Truth, Lies, Pity, and the Ring of Power, a much longer work I am writing at present.

If much of what we have seen in the first three chapters of Book Four traces a descent for Frodo, the next three chapters will show his path turn upward again. For the pity he showed Gollum is Frodo at his best, and confirms the good opinion Gandalf and Bilbo have of him. Soon, though, and in the name of his quest he uses the Ring to dominate a Gollum whom he would not kill and could not set loose. With use, the burden of the Ring increases until in doubt and despair he terrorizes Gollum with the threat of what he, as master of the Precious, would compel him to do ‘in the last need’. This is Frodo at his worst. His vaunting of his power over Gollum here is little different than Boromir’s boast as he tried to seize the Ring: ‘For I am too strong for you, halfling’. That neither Boromir nor Frodo can make good on his threat reveals once more the deception that lies at the heart of any experience of the Ring.

The green memory of the Shire, stirred by Sam’s recitation of Oliphaunt in the choking wasteland before the Black Gate, marks a turning point. It allows Frodo to reclaim some of his humanity, and with it some small hope. For his wish that the ‘third time may turn the best’ desires more than the transactional trust that has subsisted between him and Gollum thus far, an outcome possible only if they also ‘find Sméagol’ and Gollum reclaims his humanity.

Parallel to Frodo’s ascent in these chapters is his departure from ‘the desolation that lay before Mordor’ and entry into ‘Ithilien, the garden of Gondor now desolate’ which ‘kept still a dishevelled dryad loveliness’ (TT 4.iv.650). No one who has read The Lord of the Rings with the least attention needs to be reminded of this shift, so aptly described in the two phrases just quoted: from a ‘desolation’, where ‘nothing lived, not even the leprous growths that feed on rottenness’ (TT 4.ii.631) to a ‘garden … now desolate’, that is to say, a garden where no one lived.[1] Tolkien’s remarkable selection of the word ‘dryad’ here evokes the immanent loveliness of the land by conjuring the reader’s understanding of the minor deities who lived in the woodlands of Greek Mythology. When we recall that the Old English for ‘dryad’ was ‘ælfen’[2] and that the narrative has been hinting at fairy tales for some time, we can see that the relief and recovery Frodo first experienced upon hearing Sam recite the ‘old fireside rhyme’, Oliphaunt, will continue in Ithilien.[3] But there are no Elves in Ithilien. To Frodo and Sam its woodlands smell of ‘the uplands of the Northfarthing far away’, that is, they smell of home, unlike the woods through which Bilbo passed on his approach to Rivendell eighty year earlier (H 90-91). For the first time in quite a while the hearts of the hobbits are lightened.

Sam and Frodo also feel themselves ‘reprieved’ by being there (TT 4.iv.648-49). Again we encounter a remarkable choice of words. Tolkien uses ‘reprieve’ only here, at the beginning of a section which ends with another, more formal, reprieve, as Faramir and Frodo revisit the question of Gollum’s deserts; and in fact Faramir spares Frodo and Sam the full weight of the law of the land (TT 4.vi.689-93). For even to walk in Ithilien is a capital crime for those not in the service of Gondor. Given Frodo’s words to Gildor about walking ‘in our own Shire’  (FR 1.iii.83), it is likely a measure of the horrors from which they have just emerged that two hobbits of the benignly anarchic Shire do not see this situation as the world-turned-upside-down.

Yet it is just such a world, in which Sam prepares a bit of home-cooking for Frodo as he sleeps just uphill from ‘a pile of charred and broken bones and skulls’, a ‘place of dreadful feast and slaughter’ (TT 4.iv.651). Here, too, Sam and Gollum banter like old comrades about coneys and taters despite their dislike of each other. Both look upon the sleeping Frodo, Sam seeing the same light welling from within him more clearly than he had seen it – we now learn – back in Rivendell (TT 4.iv.652) and which then gave Gandalf the hope that Frodo would become ‘like a glass filled with a clear light for eyes to see that can’ (FR 2.i.223). What Gollum sees as he looks at Frodo over Sam’s shoulder we never learn – much as we never learn what Bilbo saw in Frodo’s face in Rivendell which led him to say ‘I understand now…. I am sorry’ (FR 2.i.232) – but if he sees the same light Sam does, he has also ‘shut his eyes and crawled away without a sound’ (TT 4.iv.652). Strikingly juxtaposed with Sam’s expression of love and the light of Frodo, it is a poignant reminder both of the isolation imposed by the Ring and the longing for ‘the sun on daisies’ that may lie long hidden even in the darkest heart.

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[1] See OED ‘desolate’, adj. and noun, 5 and 6a,which ‘are often combined in actual use’.

[2] For discussion of ‘ælfen’, its use to translate Latin ‘dryas’, and its close kin ‘ælf’, see Alaric Hall, Elves in Anglo-Saxon England (2007). Page numbers to follow once I get home to my bookcase. 

[3] Besides Gollum’s ‘once upon a time’ (TT 4.iii.638), he speaks of ‘wonderful tales’ which ‘we used to tell in the evening, sitting by the banks of the Great River, in the willow-lands, when the River was younger too’ (TT 4.iii.641). These Sam answers with memories of tales the hobbits in the Shire knew, in particular the Oliphaunt (TT 4.iii.646-47). This leads Frodo to imagine a fairy-tale ending: Gandalf, whom he thinks dead, breaks down the Black Gate at the head of a thousand oliphaunts, which he believes mythical (TT 4.iii.647).

Frodo, Boromir, and the Ring: Two Parallels in Characterization

Although we don't often think of Frodo and Boromir as alike, in critical situations with the Ring both react in similar ways.

1)

Boromir:

These half-elves and wizards, they would come to grief perhaps. Yet often I doubt if they are wise and not merely timid.  

(FR 2.x.398, emphasis added)

Frodo:

But into Mordor ... had [Gandalf] ever journeyed there? And here he was a little halfling from the Shire, a simple hobbit of the quiet countryside expected to find a way where the great ones could not go, or dared not go. 

(TT 4.iii.644, emphasis added)

2)

Boromir:

'Why not get rid of it? Why not be free of your doubt and fear? You can lay the blame on me, if you will. You can say that I was too strong and took it by force. For I am too strong for you, halfling,' he cried; and suddenly he sprang over the stone and leaped at Frodo.  

(FR 2.x.399, emphasis added)

Frodo:

'You revealed yourself to me just now, foolishly. Give it back to Sméagol you said. Do not say that again! Do not let that thought grow in you! You will never get it back. But the desire of it may betray you to a bitter end. You will never get it back. In the last need, Sméagol, I should put on the Precious; and the Precious mastered you long ago. If I, wearing it, were to command you, you would obey, even if it were to leap from a precipice or to cast yourself into the fire. And such would be my command. So have a care, Sméagol!'

(TT 4.iii.640, first emphasis original)

In the first set of passages both question the wisdom and courage of Gandalf, among others. In the second set both have violent responses to the question of possessing the Ring. Both are mistaken in their threats and opinions; and both are deceived by the pull of the Ring on their desires.

Did Boromir fall? (RK 5.iv.813)

'Comfort yourself!' said Gandalf. 'In no case would Boromir have brought it to you. He is dead, and died well; may he sleep in peace! Yet you deceive yourself. He would have stretched out his hand to this thing, and taking it he would have fallen. He would have kept it for his own, and when he returned you would not have known your son.' 

(RK 5.iv.813)

To judge by Gandalf's contrary to fact conditional statements, about what would have happened (but did not) if Boromir had taken the Ring (which he did not), Gandalf does not believe that Boromir fell by attempting to seize the Ring, but was redeemed by his immediate recovery and self-sacrifice. However close he may have come to a fall, taking the Ring is clearly the critical step in that descent.

This is consistent with Gandalf's statement that 'Galadriel told me that [Boromir] was in peril. But he escaped in the end' (TT 4.v.496), as well as the refusal of Gandalf, Elrond, and Galadriel to take the Ring (FR 1.ii.61; 2.ii.267, vii.x365-66).  We may also point to Aragorn's response to Boromir's dying declaration that he has failed: 'No! .... You have conquered. Few have gained such a victory' (TT 3.i.414).

None of which is to claim that it wasn't all a very near run thing for poor Boromir.

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Works Consulted

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Some Thoughts on Structure and Meaning in The Lord of the Rings

Yes, Simon. There she is again

Quite a few years ago now in his still highly relevant article, 'The Interlace Structure of The Lord of the Rings', Richard West made clear how intricately woven together The Lord of the Rings is. Unlike the simpler and more 'organic' practice common in modern novels, the medieval technique of '[i]nterlace, by contrast, seeks to mirror the perception of the flux of events in the world around us' (West 78), which leads to a narrative that, like life, is 'cluttered', 'digressive', and 'chaotic' (79). But there's more to it than that, as West points out:

Yet the apparently casual form of the interlace is deceptive; it actually has a very subtle kind of cohesion. No part of the narrative can be removed without damage to the whole, for within any given section there are echoes of previous parts and anticipations of later ones. The medieval memory (lacking modern information retrieval systems and therefore necessarily greater than ours) delighted in following repetitions and variations of themes, whether their different appearances were separated by scores or hundreds of pages. Musical art gives an analogous aesthetic pleasure and shows a similar structural binding ... but in literature, the interlace structure allows detailed examination of any number of facets of a theme.

(West 79)

Now in the course of The Lord of the Rings Frodo offers to give the Ring to others three times, but all of these come in the first two books, and never again after that.  A proximate cause is easy to spot -- Boromir's attempt to take the Ring at the end of the second book -- but that is only part of it. It is not the truest cause.  For in the first two books Tolkien weaves together a series of offers by Frodo with a series of (real and imagined) attempts by others to take the Ring. How these offers and attempts are made are telling in themselves, but as with Boromir each of them is part of the larger web of the story and allows us to reflect on questions of the effect the Ring has on those who possess it, claim it, or who have considered what they might accomplish if it were theirs.

1. In The Shadow of the Past Frodo offers the Ring to Gandalf in fear, but has just proved himself unable even to throw the Ring into his fireplace, which, it has already been demonstrated, is scarcely able to warm it up (FR 1.ii.49-50, 60-61). Gandalf refuses the Ring, also out of fear, because he knows his 'pity for weakness and the desire of strength to do good' will make him a prey to the Ring's power. Given the truculence with which Bilbo, like Gollum before him, asserted and defended his claim to ownership of the Ring in A Long-expected Party, Frodo's offer to Gandalf is tantamount to a denial of a claim to the Ring. 


2. In The Council of Elrond Frodo, upon learning that Aragorn is Isildur's heir, seems almost relieved: '"Then [the Ring] belongs to you, and not to me at all!" cried Frodo in amazement, springing to his feet, as if he expected the Ring to be demanded at once.' Aragorn replies, 'It does not belong to either of us...but it has been ordained that you should hold it for a while' (FR 2.ii.237).  Frodo here in fact asserts Aragorn's claim to the Ring. This not only shows how true and wise Aragorn is by his refusal, but also supports the view taken above that Frodo has so far refused to claim the Ring. 


3. In The Mirror of Galadriel Frodo's perception of things that are hidden and secret is enlarged, because he is 'the Ring-bearer, and one who has seen the Eye' in Galadriel's Mirror. This puts him on more of an even footing with Galadriel, since it allows him to recognize her as another Ring-bearer. Now he asks her what she wants, just as she had asked all the members of the Fellowship earlier in this chapter, and the fears for Lothlórien she reveals in her response parallel Frodo's fears for the Shire in The Shadow of the Past (FR 1.ii.62), as well as those stirred in Sam by what he has just seen in the Mirror.  In all humility then, it seems, Frodo offers to give her the Ring, and by implication renounces any claim to it: 'I will give you the One Ring, if you ask for it. It is too great a matter for me.'  Like Gandalf and Aragorn, Galadriel also refuses, but not without admitting the dreams of power and glory she had dreamt, as she pondered what she would do if the Ring ever came into her possession; and not before giving Frodo a glimpse of the majesty she would attain with the One Ring on her hand (FR 2.vii.365-66). It is intriguing, however, that here the offer of the Ring is conditional -- 'if you ask for it.' Requiring her to ask for it is an assertion of power and control, and suggests that Frodo's attitude towards the Ring has been changing. It is also intriguing that no sooner does she reject the Ring than he asks her how he might use it to 'see all the [other Rings] and know the thoughts of others', which Galadriel warns him not to try, since to use the power of the Ring would require him to train his 'will to the domination of others.' To try, she says, 'would destroy you.'

In addition to these three offers to give up the Ring -- whether Frodo could have actually done so if anyone had accepted is another matter -- Books One and Two begin and end with attempts, two real and two imagined, to seize the Ring -- 

1. In A Long-expected Party Bilbo claims that the Ring is his when Gandalf urges him to give it to Frodo: 'It is my own. I found it. It came to me.' But, as Gandalf continues to press him, Bilbo grows paranoid and fears that Gandalf wants the Ring for himself and will try to take it by force.  He lays his hand on his sword, implicitly threatening the kind of violence he had so significantly eschewed by not stabbing Gollum when he had the chance (FR 1.i.34).  


2. In The Flight to the Ford the Black Riders very nearly catch Frodo at the Ford of Bruinen (FR 1.xii.213-15). He attempts to command them, but they laugh at him. His questioning Galadriel about using the Ring needs to be read in connection with his failure here. His later invocations of the Ring to control Gollum (TT 4.i.618, iii.640; RK 6.iii.943-44), his wondering whether he was ready to confront the Witch-king at Minas Morgul ('not yet' -- TT 4.viii.706), and his claiming the Ring for his own (RK 6.iii.945), are all obvious 'facets' of this 'theme', but so, too, is his subsequent mourning for its loss (RK 6.ix.1024)


3. In Many Meetings Bilbo's reaching out to touch the Ring sparks a reaction in Frodo as paranoid and close to violence as Bilbo's response to Gandalf had been (FR 2.i.232). This moment is significant in three ways: first, in showing the effect the Ring is already having on Frodo by recalling Bilbo's behavior in A Long-expected Party; second, by enabling Bilbo to understand at last what the Ring does to those who bear it; and third, by the alarmingly small effect this moment has on Frodo's understanding of what the Ring is doing to him: he just moves on. 


4. In The Breaking of the Fellowship Boromir almost succeeds in seizing the Ring for himself (FR 2.x.396-400).  Frodo escapes only because he uses the Ring, which also results in vastly expanding his perception of the world, but in doing so he nearly reveals himself to Sauron, just as he had almost done, it would seem, when looking into Galadriel's mirror 11 days earlier. 

As Boromir's attempt follows so closely upon Frodo' offer to Galadriel, it might be worthwhile to consider these two moments side by side. Galadriel confesses that she has wanted the Ring, but will not take it or ask for it. She knows well that any good she might do at first will only end in despair. Boromir does not have the wisdom to see this -- he imagines himself becoming 'a mighty king, benevolent and wise.'  He not only wants the Ring, but requests it and will brook no refusal.  Frodo's psychic brushes with Sauron in these episodes, which emphasize his own increasingly complex relationship with the Ring -- 'He heard himself crying out: Never, never! Or was it: Verily I come, I come to you?' (FR 2.x.401) -- must be viewed in context with Galadriel's silent probing of Boromir's mind at their first meeting in Lothlórien, an encounter   that left Boromir rattled and suspicious, and Galadriel concerned that he was in peril (TT 3.v.496). Who would grasp that peril better than she? Who would find her desire to save her land and people more unnerving than Boromir? As Faramir later wonders, from a fascinating perspective that encompasses both sides of the experience: 'What did she say to you, the Lady that dies not? What did she see? What woke in your heart then?' (TT 4.v.667).  Boromir and Galadriel will have seen in each other's thoughts a reflection of their own fears and desires.

There are of course other scenes in the first two books that we might examine in greater depth, to see how they might contribute to our understanding of the Ring and the relationship of Frodo and others to it. In addition to some of the passages cited within the points made above, the scenes in the Shire, at Bree, and on Weathertop would be worth closer inspection. From my discussion of these same passages we can also see that much more lies ahead, which I have not yet fully thought through, and which will doubtless alter my own understanding of what I have seen so far. Still it would be foolish to think that every last passage can or should be fitted into some sort of pattern, as tempting as that can often be. 

But there is one more rather eccentric piece of this puzzle that I think requires comment at this time. In The Old Forest Tom Bombadil comes plunging into the story like some rogue comet from the Oort Cloud. The hobbits spend most of three chapters in Tom's Country, measuring from the High Hay to the East Road beyond the Barrow-downs, just as they do later in Lothlórien. Unlike Galadriel, however, Bombadil asks to see the Ring, which Frodo, to his own surprise, gives him without demur, but when Bombadil puts on the Ring and makes it disappear instead of vanishing himself, Frodo becomes alarmed and suspicious. Even though Bombadil immediately returns the Ring, Frodo must test it to be sure he hasn't been tricked. Again, the Ring has no effect on old Tom, who sees Frodo quite clearly (FR 1.vii.132-33).  Pardoxically Frodo reveals himself by disappearing. The Ring is already at work on him. Unlike Galadriel and everyone else in The Lord of the Rings, however, Tom is his own Master and desires nothing but what he has. Thus the power of the Ring has no pull on him. He knows of the Ring, but seems to have little interest in it except as a curiosity (cf. FR 2.ii.265).

Like Lothlórien, Tom's Country is also Faërie. Under his mastery time there flows differently from time in Bree or The Shire or Rohan, but not in the same way as it does in Lórien, from which one emerges to find that one has fallen behind time in the mortal world. In Tom's Country it is always the present, but the past remains vibrant and accessible: Tom can still go singing out into the ancient starlight when only the Elf-sires were awake (FR 1.vi.131); the trees can remember 'the times when they were lords' (FR 1.vii.130); the Barrow-wights can recall the first Dark Lord (FR 1.viii.141); and visions of Dunedain kings, once and future, can rise up before the hobbits' eyes as well as in their dreams (FR 1.viii.143, 145-46).  In Galadriel's Golden Wood we may also see visions of times past and times perhaps to come, but the land itself is anchored in an age long gone: In Lórien the Elder Days 'still lived on in the waking world' (FR 2.vi.349), but only if she had the One Ring could she perhaps preserve it that way forever. Tom and his Country serve as another structural counterpoise to Galadriel and hers.

What, finally, is the theme whose facets we are examining through this extensive and intricate web? Perhaps that which Gandalf touched upon first in The Shadow of the Past and which Elrond expands upon in The Council of Elrond, two chapters which occupy the same position and play much the same part in their respective books:

‘A mortal, Frodo, who keeps one of the Great Rings, does not die, but he does not grow or obtain more life, he merely continues, until at last every minute is a weariness. And if he often uses the Ring to make himself invisible, he fades: he becomes in the end invisible permanently, and walks in the twilight under the eye of the dark power that rules the Rings. Yes, sooner or later – later, if he is strong or well-meaning to begin with, but neither strength nor good purpose will last – sooner or later the Dark Power will devour him.’

(FR 1.ii.47)

And:

'Alas, no,' said Elrond. 'We cannot use the Ruling Ring. That we now know too well. It belongs to Sauron and was made by him alone, and is altogether evil. Its strength, Boromir, is too great for anyone to wield at will, save only those who have already a great power of their own. But for them it holds an even deadlier peril. The very desire of it corrupts the heart. Consider Saruman. If any of the Wise should with this Ring overthrow the Lord of Mordor, using his own arts, he would then set himself on Sauron's throne, and yet another Dark Lord would appear. And that is another reason why the Ring should be destroyed: as long as it is in the world it will be a danger even to the Wise. For nothing is evil in the beginning. Even Sauron was not so. I fear to take the Ring to hide it. I will not take the Ring to wield it.' 

'Nor I,' said Gandalf. 

Boromir looked at them doubtfully, but he bowed his head. 'So be it,' he said.  

(FR 2.ii.267)

This is how good becomes evil. Boromir's question to Frodo on Amon Hen -- if the Wise won't wield the Ring, someone has to: 'Why not Boromir?' (FR 2.x.398) -- is not all that different from Frodo's asking Galadriel about using the Ring himself the moment she has refused his offer.

It will be interesting to see how this line of inquiry unfolds from here.




Richard C. West, 'The Interlace Structure of The Lord of the Rings' in Jared Lobdell, A Tolkien Compass (1975), pp. 77-94.

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Works Consulted

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No Laughing Matter: the Ring and the Quality of the Dúnedain

'We know the Ring is no laughing-matter; but we are going to do our best to help you against the Enemy,' says Merry to Frodo at Crickhollow  (FR 1.v.104), revealing for the first time the stout heart and shrewd mind he shows throughout the tale. There are, however, a couple of moments involving the Ring and humor that are themselves quite telling about the characters involved.

In The Prancing Pony, Strider several times indulges in humor at his own expense as he tries to convince the hobbits that he is not only a friend, but also the genuine Strider.  He banters with Frodo about his 'rascally look', 'with a curl of his lip and a queer gleam in his eye' (FR 1.x.164). He takes up Pippin's glib comments about 'lying for days in ... ditches' making them all look like Strider and responds that they would die in those ditches years before they looked like him, 'unless you are made of sterner stuff than you look to be' (FR 1.x.170-71).  Later he jokes with Frodo about how he looks: '"I see," laughed Strider. "I look foul and feel fair. Is that it?"' (FR 1.x.171). (Note also how Tolkien uses the easily spotted allusions to Shakespeare in these last two statements to draw our attention.)

But even before this last jest Strider's grim and self-effacing humor has already culminated in his pretending to threaten them to kill them and take the Ring, all in the effort to make a point to them about who he is, and is not:

Pippin subsided; but Sam was not daunted, and he still eyed Strider dubiously. 'How do we know you are the Strider that Gandalf speaks about?' he demanded. 'You never mentioned Gandalf, till this letter came out. You might be a play-acting spy, for all I can see, trying to get us to go with you. You might have done in the real Strider and took his clothes. What have you to say to that?' 

'That you are a stout fellow,' answered Strider; 'but I am afraid my only answer to you, Sam Gamgee, is this. If I had killed the real Strider, I could kill you. And I should have killed you already without so much talk. If I was after the Ring, I could have it – NOW!' 

He stood up, and seemed suddenly to grow taller. In his eyes gleamed a light, keen and commanding. Throwing back his cloak, he laid his hand on the hilt of a sword that had hung concealed by his side. They did not dare to move.  Sam sat wide-mouthed staring at him dumbly. 

'But I am the real Strider, fortunately,' he said, looking down at them with his face softened by a sudden smile. 'I am Aragorn son of Arathorn; and if by life or death I can save you, I will.' 

(FR 1.x.171)

Turning from one Captain of the Rangers to another, we find a similar moment with Sam and Faramir in Ithilien.  In his righteous eagerness to defend Frodo from what he feels are the unjust insinuations of Faramir, Sam gives away the secrets his master has tried so hard to conceal, that it is the One Ring which Frodo is carrying, and that Boromir tried to take it from him.

'Now look here, sir!' He turned, facing up to Faramir with all the courage that he could muster. 'Don't you go taking advantage of my master because his servant's no better than a fool. You've spoken very handsome all along, put me off my guard, talking of Elves and all. But handsome is as handsome does we say. Now's a chance to show your quality.' 

'So it seems,' said Faramir, slowly and very softly, with a strange smile. 'So that is the answer to all the riddles! The One Ring that was thought to have perished from the world. And Boromir tried to take it by force? And you escaped? And ran all the way – to me! And here in the wild I have you: two halflings, and a host of men at my call, and the Ring of Rings. A pretty stroke of fortune! A chance for Faramir, Captain of Gondor, to show his quality! Ha!' He stood up, very tall and stern, his grey eyes glinting.

Frodo and Sam sprang from their stools and set themselves side by side with their backs to the wall, fumbling for their sword-hilts. There was a silence. All the men in the cave stopped talking and looked towards them in wonder. But Faramir sat down again in his chair and began to laugh quietly, and then suddenly became grave again. 

'Alas for Boromir! It was too sore a trial!' he said. 

(TT 4.v.680-81)

Aside from the simple physical parallelism of Sam Undaunted standing up to a Man literally twice his size, we have him challenging Faramir to prove his quality, just as he had challenged Strider to prove his (though not in so many words). But the parallel works both ways, Faramir responds with humor and a feigned threat, just as Aragorn had done. He stands tall. There is a light in his eyes, and his stern manner frightens them. His 'Ha!' nicely punctuates his statement, just as Strider's 'NOW!' does his.  And as Aragorn had suddenly smiled at them to reveal his jest, Faramir does the same with laughter. But their humor offers no simple release. There's too much pain and irony in it for that.  Aragorn is the heir of Isildur, who did not destroy the Ring, and he lays his hand on the hilt of the broken sword with which Isildur cut it from Sauron's. Faramir realizes he had guessed the meaning of his and Boromir's dream aright after all -- 'So that is the answer to all the riddles' (emphasis mine) -- and that he was now presented with the same 'trial' as his brother had been, and with a far greater advantage of strength over Frodo than Boromir had boasted of. In the words 'Alas for Boromir!' his own situation confronts him.

Yet both Faramir and Aragorn turn from their sad humor to matters more serious.  Aragorn pledges his life to Frodo and the hobbits. Faramir briefly mourns his brother's 'too sore a trial,' and then tells the hobbits that he would not pick up the Ring if he found it in the road, converting a boast he had made in ignorance into a vow he would die to keep.  Since both Aragorn and Faramir have the hobbits at their mercy, and the Ring within their grasp, we should not be surprised to recall here another Captain of the Dúnedain, Boromir.  For during the scene in Ithilien with Faramir, only the reader is aware, poignantly so, that Boromir did not fall entirely, but after Frodo's escape recognized what he had done, repented of it, and in dying to protect Merry and Pippin redeemed himself.  'Few have gained such a victory,' Aragorn tells him before he dies (TT 3.i.414).

Yet back at the Council of Elrond, when Boromir first saw the Ring and he was pondering the 'riddle' of the dream he shared with his brother, his 'eyes glinted as he gazed at the golden thing’ (FR 2.ii.247). Unlike Faramir and Aragorn, however, he finds nothing to laugh at in the situation or in himself. Boromir came to Imladris to seek 'the meaning of a riddle' (FR 2.ii.247), but the answers he receives offer him nothing but doubt and perplexity. It is only in his 'too sore a trial' that he will find the crucible of his quality.

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Works Consulted

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These Are Not The Elves You're Looking For. (I)

Cover Image © John Howe

Last year several friends asked me to join them in writing an article for a festschrift to honor the scholarly achievements of Verlyn Flieger. What emerged from our collaboration builds upon Professor Flieger's work, further exploring dreams and enchantment and how they expand the perception of time and the world in The Lord of the Rings. Like every other study, this one suggested new lines of inquiry. For one of us that meant investigating more deeply the relationship between forests and Faërie; for another a continuing effort to understand how On Fairy-stories relates to the legendarium as it unfolded.^[1]  As for me, I turned to the study of the Elves themselves, who, as Tolkien said, 'have their being' in Faërie (OFS para. 10).^[2]  Through scrutiny of 'their being' I hope to grope my way to a better understanding of Faërie itself.  The question is where to begin.

For we all know that Tolkien came to scorn the cowslip fairies of his Victorian youth. Nevertheless, they left their mark on him, a mark clearly visible not only in early poems like Goblin Feet (1915),^[3]  but also in his more mature works.  It is, for example, quite prominent in Errantry (1933) and in the 'tra-la-la-lally' Elves of The Hobbit (1937).^[4]  We may even catch the vanishing echo of their song in the laughter of Gildor's troop in the woods of the Shire (FR 1.iii.78-85).  But by the time Tolkien was writing the first chapters of his 'new Hobbit' and preparing his essay On Fairy-stories,^[5] he had also seen that the 'business [of rationalization and literary fashion that led to the debasement of the fairies] began ... long before the nineteenth century, and long ago achieved tiresomeness, certainly the tiresomeness of trying to be funny and failing' (OFS para. 8-9).^[6]  Much of the blame for this he laid at the feet of Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night's Dream and of Michael Drayton (especially) in Nymphidia.

The matter is of course by no means pat, with a clear division between works in which we find fairies in the Victorian mold and works in which we do not.  For even in an early poem like You and Me and the Cottage of Lost Play (1915), which is contemporary with Goblin Feet, there abides a more sober sense of loss and a longing which we find even more strongly in Kortirion among the Trees (1915).^[7]  And if in The Book of Lost Tales Tinúviel can be a bit silly and hide under flowers like a proper Victorian fairy, Turgon and Fëanor are made of more dangerous and tragic stuff.^[8]  But it is also clear from the narrative perspective of The Book of Lost Tales that a breach we cannot mend has opened between us and fairies, and between what the fairies were and what they have become. The fairies who tell Eriol the tales have diminished and gone into the West, but whether they have remained who they were before is not as certain.

This breach has two inseparable aspects, the one literary, the other mythological. The English literary tradition turned away from what Tolkien called the 'true tradition' of  Faërie that we find still alive in The Faërie Queene of Edmund Spenser, in which fairies were powerful and perilous and fair.^[9] A contemporary of Shakespeare like Drayton, Spenser shares in a mythology of Faërie descended from named poets like Gower, Chaucer, and Thomas the Rhymer, as well as from the unnamed poets of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and of Sir Orfeo. Much farther back, though unremembered in Spenser's day, was Beowulf, which for centuries lay lost in the streams of time, like the One Ring beneath the waters of Anduin, forgotten yet waiting only for the right hand to wield it.^[10] 

But it's a long road from the ylfe of Beowulf to the elves of Spenser.  The Beowulf poet traces the lineage of his elves to Cain himself (111-114),

Þanon untydras ealle onwocon,
eotenas 7 ylfe 7 orcneas,
swylce gi|[ga](ntas), þa wið Gode wunnon
lange þrag(e).(He) him ðæs lean forgeald!

From whom all monstrous creatures descend,
the ettens and elves and hellish undead,
the giants, too, who fought against God
for a long season; for that he repaid them.

By contrast Redcrosse, the first of Spenser's 'Faerie Knights' (FQ 1 proem 14), is called 'a valiant Elfe' (FQ 1.i.xvii.1 = Book 1, Canto 1, Stanza xvii, Line 1, for example) and described as very much a Christian:

And on his brest a bloudie Crosse he bore,
The deare remembrance of his dying Lord,
For whose sweete sake that glorious badge he wore,
And dead as living ever him ador'd.

(FQ 1.i.ii.1-4)

And though not an elf by blood, but a child stolen in infancy, Redcrosse was raised to believe he was of fairy race (FQ 1.i.lx.1-lxvi.9). Learning that he is a human changes nothing for him or his role. He still stands allegorically for Holiness, and still slays the dragon that laid Eden waste. The sort of divide we see between humans and elves in Beowulf does not exist in The Faerie Queene. They are not part of that monstrous race of Cain.  It's as if we begin with the Beowulf poet, who straddled the worlds of Northern and Christian myth, and confronted a question like that posed by Alcuin: 'What does Ingeld have to do with Christ?'; and then end with Spenser, who lived in a day when Reason and the Reformation were displacing Medieval views of the world and enchantment,^[11] and reducing fairies to 'a rustic folk of dell and cave' (FR 2.vii.365).  Yet Spenser's reply to Alcuin's question would seem to be 'everything.'

So, just as Tolkien's own presentation of fairies and elves over time admits of no pat distinctions, neither does the tradition on which he draws. As James Wade has recently argued in his Fairies in Medieval Romance, the fairies -- or perhaps we might say the 'being' of the fairies -- vary from work to work depending on the subcreative goals of the author. There was no canonical portrayal of fairies to which the writers of Romance had to adhere, no 'straightforward chronological process' in which the fairies evolved.^[12]  Even Morgan le Fay, who between the 12th and 16th centuries tended to grow increasingly human, never shakes the dust of Faërie off herself once and for all: she remains forever 'le Fay'; she must take Arthur to Avalon even when healing no longer awaits him there; and in some 16th century Romances like Huon de Bordeaux and Mervine son of Ogier, she fully reverts to her otherworldly state.^[13] Indeed, as Tolkien already knew, this indeterminacy is part of the essence of Faërie (OFS, para 12):

The definition of a fairy-story—what it is, or what it should be—does not, then, depend on any definition or historical account of elf or fairy, but upon the nature of Faërie: the Perilous Realm itself, and the air that blows in that country. I will not attempt to define that, nor to describe it directly. It cannot be done. Faërie cannot be caught in a net of words; for it is one of its qualities to be indescribable, though not imperceptible. It has many ingredients, but analysis will not necessarily discover the secret of the whole.

As a philologist and a writer of fairy stories, Tolkien was in a rare position that few before him could have justly claimed, both to survey the entirety of the English literary tradition of the Otherworld, from Beowulf to Peter Pan, and in consequence to seek out the lost road to a truer and more perilous Faërie, where the Green Knight might take the head you came with quicker than Robin Goodfellow could give you another. Mending the literary aspect of the breach -- or at least stitching it up in the hope that it might heal -- would also repair the mythological, and reconnect England and its literary tradition to a lost mythology. That Tolkien said he had once hoped to do precisely this scarcely needs repeating,^[14] and we should not forget that directly before he began The Lord of the Rings and On Fairy-stories Tolkien had been working on The Lost Road and the Beowulfian King Sheave with their explicit connection of England, Men, and Elves. So a desire to mend that breach in the literary and mythological tradition is very much in evidence precisely as he begins to compose his great work and to articulate his notion of fairy stories.^[15] 

Now Tom Shippey has called Sir Orfeo ' "the master-text" for Tolkien's portrayal of the elves.'^[16]  Consider for just a moment how appropriate this is if true. The 'master-text' of Tolkien's own mythic figures draws on another tale with the deepest of roots, a remote and ancient myth that Tolkien found compelling (Letters, no. 153).^[17] Not only that but Sir Orfeo is a text that transforms important aspects of what it finds in Orpheus and Eurydice. Orfeo succeeds where Orpheus fails, and Faërie stands in for Hades. Otherworld replaces Underworld. To mend the literary-mythological breach, Tolkien draws on both Sir Orfeo and Orpheus and Eurydice to construct the Tale of Beren and Lúthien, which is so fundamental to his own legendarium and which has transformations of his own. Here a female elf sings to win back her dead mortal love. Since the Halls of Mandos are in the Undying Lands, moreover, we find the Underworld and Otherworld also combined. Most importantly Lúthien's success comes with a price. In reclaiming Beren from death she willingly sacrifices her own immortality, a choice whose effects will ripple through the entire history of Middle-earth. Thus, Tolkien uses myth to repair and refashion myth.  On this showing, Sir Orfeo would seem a very good place to start.

The first thing we see is that the 'being' of the fairies is different with respect to the world than the 'being' of men is. The world which they inhabit is larger. It spans the border between what we mortals see as the waking and dreaming worlds.  They come to Heurodis as she sleeps beneath the ympe-tree, first the two fairy knights, then the fairy king himself who abducts her, shows her his realm, and returns her, promising that he will take her away for good the next day and woe betide any attempt at resistance.  The following day, despite all Orfeo's preparations to fight for his wife, she vanishes without a trace from the midst of the troops surrounding her (57-194).^[18]

Now no one, not the two maids of Heurodis who watched while she slept, nor Orfeo her husband ever questions her experience or suggests that 'it was just a dream.' Not even the narrator calls it a dream (sweven). Everyone (including the reader) simply accepts that the world contains both seen and unseen, both ordinary mortals and fairies, of whom Heurodis can say 'I saw not ever anywhere / a folk so peerless and so fair' (147-48).  And though Orfeo marshals his troops to defend his wife, it is all for nothing:

And yet from the midst of that array
the queen was sudden snatched away;
by magic was she from them caught,
and none knew whither she was brought.

(191-94)

Even considering so little of Sir Orfeo as this, we can already see points of contact with Tolkien. The fairies' peerless beauty, a given, is merely the easiest to spot. For Ilúvatar made the Elves to be 'the fairest of all earthly creatures' (Silm. 41). That the Elves perceive and dwell in a larger world is clear in the ability of Gildor and Glorfindel to sense and recognize others concealed and at a distance (FR 1.iii.80; xii.209); in the power of Galadriel and Elrond to communicate directly and silently with the minds of others (FR 2.vii.356-58; RK 6.vi.985); and in the truth that Gandalf tells Frodo, that 'those who have dwelt in the Blessed Realm live in both worlds at once, and against both the Seen and the Unseen they have great power' (FR 2.i.222-23). We may also detect something of that larger world in Frodo's ability to see both the Black Riders themselves and the Elf lord 'as he is on the other side' only after the sorcery of the Morgul-blade has begun to alienate him from his own (FR 1.xii.222). Orfeo, too, cannot see the fairies until he has lost his own world and become a wildman in the forest, playing his harp and singing for the beasts who disregard him once his song is over (195-280).

But, as the studies of both Wade and Tolkien caution, we should not expect a direct and simple correspondence between the fairies of Sir Orfeo and the Elves of  Middle-earth. Tolkien borrows, chooses, and transforms what he finds. In Tolkien, for example, it is the Elves who have the power to stir up visions through song (Silm. 140-41, 170-71; FR 2.ii.233; RK A 1058); in Sir Orfeo, however, it is to a mortal man, Orfeo himself, that this power belongs:

no man hath in this world been born
who would not, hearing him, have sworn
that as before him Orfeo played
to joy of Paradise he had strayed
and sound of harpers heavenly,
such joy there was and melody. 

(41-46)

Moreover, the arbitrary and cruel exercise of the Fairy King's power in abducting Heurodis has no true parallel in Tolkien, only the very limited similarity found in Eöl's capture of Aredhel (Silm. 132-33), both of whom are Elves. The Elves of Tolkien are Good People, after all (Hobbit 60, 179). Yet, while they do not arbitrarily carry mortals off against their will, and while they may know some of them from afar -- Gildor recognizes Frodo, and two of the Elves at Rivendell seem to know Bilbo (Hobbit 59) -- they themselves remain mysterious, elusive, and inscrutable, just like the Fairy King in Sir Orfeo.

This has been only the briefest beginning on this project of mine, to examine closely the primary sources which Tolkien drew on to sub-create his Elves. The point is not source-hunting per se, but the far more important goal of seeing how Tolkien uses those sources to compose the 'heroic legends and high romance' that he so desired (Letters no. 163), and to create Elves of his own whose keen eyes never lose sight of the ‘starlight on the western seas’ (FR 1.iii.79), just as the feet of the hobbits never lose touch with the soil of the Shire.^[19] That he appears to do so as eclectically as his models did should surprise no one.


I presented a version of this post on 25 September 2016 at the 3rd Mythgard Midatlantic Speculative Fiction Symposium in College Park, MD.  A more complete analysis of the entirety of Sir Orfeo and the relationship of its fairies to Tolkien's Elves will appear in Tolkien Studies 16.

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 Works Consulted

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^[1] See Simon John Cook, How to Do Things with Words: Tolkien’s Theory of Fantasy in Practice, Journal of Tolkien Research: Vol. 3: Iss. 1, Article 6. Now available for download from: http://scholar.valpo.edu/journaloftolkienresearch/vol3/iss1/6

^[2] Nor of course does it just contain Elves: 'Faërie contains many things besides elves and fays, and besides dwarfs, witches, trolls, giants, or dragons: it holds the seas, the sun, the moon, the sky; and the earth, and all things that are in it: tree and bird, water and stone, wine and bread, and ourselves, mortal men, when we are enchanted'(OFS para. 10).

^[3] Compare the impact which attending a performance of Peter Pan in April 1910 had on him: 'Indescribable but shall never forget it as long as I live. Wish E[dith] had been with me.' Carpenter, Tolkien: A Biography (1977) 47-48, quoting from Tolkien's (unpublished) diary.

^[4] Though published in 1937 of course, The Hobbit had been completed by the beginning of 1933, and so therefore dates to about the same period as Errantry.  On the chronology of composition, see Rateliff, History (2011) xiii-xxii.

^[5]  See Cook, above n. 1.

^[6] OFS para. 7:

The diminutive being, elf or fairy, is (I guess) in England largely a sophisticated product of literary fancy. It is perhaps not unnatural that in England, the land where the love of the delicate and fine has often reappeared in art, fancy should in this matter turn towards the dainty and diminutive, as in France it went to court and put on powder and diamonds. Yet I suspect that this flower-and-butterfly minuteness was also a product of “rationalization,” which transformed the glamour of Elfland into mere finesse, and invisibility into a fragility that could hide in a cowslip or shrink behind a blade of grass. It seems to become fashionable soon after the great voyages had begun to make the world seem too narrow to hold both men and elves; when the magic land of Hy Breasail in the West had become the mere Brazils, the land of red-dye-wood. In any case it was largely a literary business in which William Shakespeare and Michael Drayton played a part. Drayton's Nymphidia is one ancestor of that long line of flower-fairies and fluttering sprites with antennae that I so disliked as a child, and which my children in their turn detested. 

The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries in England experienced a decline in the belief in magic, ghosts, and fairies. See Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth Century England, Penguin (1991) 724-34 on fairies in particular.

^[7]  On Tolkien and Warwick, Lynn Forest-Hill, 'Elves on the Avon,' TLS 8.7.05, is good, though she might give too much weight to the influence of biographical details.

^[8] As Rateliff, 119-21, notes, Tolkien at times 'blends two different traditions' and the sillier fairies are more often found in his poetry than his prose. On Lúthien, see The Book of Lost Tales 2.11-13;  on Turgon 2.160-62; on Fëanor 1.149-51, 162-68.

^[9] But are in most cases visually and, it would seem, physically indistinguishable from humans, like Spenser's Redcrosse.

^[10] On the loss and rediscovery of Old English, see John D. Niles, The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England 1066-1901: Remembering, Forgetting, Deciphering, and Renewing the Past, Wiley Blackwell (2015), especially 49-108 on the 16th and 17th centuries. A visual clue to how thoroughly Beowulf was forgotten may be gleaned from the Google Ngram I have embedded at the end of this post.

^[11] See Thomas, above n. 6.

^[12] The phrase, which strictly refers to the transformation of Morgan le Fay only, is from James Wade, Fairies in Medieval Romance Palgrave MacMillan (2011) 18.

^[13] See the excellent discussion of these matters in Wade (2011) 1-21.

^[14] In late 1951 Tolkien wrote:

 'Do not laugh! But once upon a time (my crest has long since fallen) I had a mind to make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story-the larger founded on the lesser in contact with the earth, the lesser drawing splendour from the vast backcloths – which I could dedicate simply to: to England; to my country'

(Letters, no. 131)

^[14] For recent discussion of Tolkien’s writing of the early chapters of The Lord of the Rings and On Fairy-stories, and of the effect these had on each other, see Cook, above n. 1.

^[16] Shippey, The Road to Middle-earth (2003) 62. To be fair, Shippey focuses his claim more precisely on 'the description of the hunting king in Sir Orfeo', lines 281-302.

^[17] As did Lewis. See An Experiment in Criticism, chapter 5, 'Myth'; and Barfield, who wrote Orpheus: a Poetic Drama (1983), a pdf of which is available from Barfield's literary estate.

^[18] The translation and line numbers of Sir Orfeo offered throughout are Tolkien's, since it is his perspective on and understanding of this poem that is at issue. Tolkien himself prepared an edition of the poem, upon which he based his translation, but it was not published until 2004. See Carl Hostetter, Sir Orfeo: A Middle English Version by J. R. R. Tolkien, Tolkien Studies 1 (2004) 85-123. http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/laskaya-and-salisbury-middle-english-breton-lays-sir-orfeo offers an easily accessible version of the standard text with notes and introduction.

^[19] Both the ‘being’ of the Elves and the ‘being’ of the hobbits are essential to The Lord of the Rings, as Tolkien suggests in his letter to Auden (no. 163):

Since The Hobbit was a success, a sequel was called for; and the remote Elvish Legends were turned down. A publisher's reader said they were too full of the kind of Celtic beauty that maddened Anglo-Saxons in a large dose. Very likely quite right. Anyway I myself saw the value of Hobbits, in putting earth under the feet of 'romance', and in providing subjects for 'ennoblement' and heroes more praiseworthy than the professionals: nolo heroizari is of course as good a start for a hero, as nolo episcopari for a bishop.

The Last Temptation of Galadriel -- Catechism, Gospel, and Fairy-story in 'The Mirror of Galadriel'

In discussing Death as the Gift of Ilúvatar to Men, Tolkien once wrote that a "divine 'punishment' is also a divine 'gift' " (Letters, no. 210). While this subject and this statement are both of prime importance for understanding Tolkien, it is to an easily unnoticed aspect of his words here that I would draw attention.  For Tolkien reveals an encompassing and unexpected vision of two sides of a critical subject. We may see him doing the same elsewhere, in obvious places, as when he shows both the beauty of courage on the Pelennor Fields and the horror of war in the Dead Marshes; or, more subtly, in Gandalf's hearty concession that Gollum deserves death, while nonetheless insisting that mercy be shown him because life and death are not equally in our power. I would argue that another subject of which Tolkien sees both sides is temptation. 

Say 'temptation' of course, and all our thoughts fly to the One Ring, and its gravitational drag on the character, good or bad, of the sentient beings of Middle-earth. We think of the times that Frodo offers the Ring to another, whether implicitly or explicitly. 'Do not tempt me!' Gandalf cries twice, alert with passion and the fear of his own pity (FR 1.ii.61). We think of Galadriel's bemused 'I do not deny that my heart has greatly desired to ask what you offer' (FR 2.vii. 365). We think of Strider's gentle 'It does not belong to either of us' when Frodo makes the connection between him, the Ring, and Isildur (FR 2.ii.247). And we smile at the fantasies of Gollum the Great and Samwise the Strong, no less grim for being more foolish (TT 4.ii.633; RK 6.i.901). With Faramir we sigh 'Alas for Boromir! It was too sore a trial!' (TT 4.v.681). And with Sam our hearts break when at the end of the quest Frodo fails. To hear him say 'The Ring is mine' (RK 6.iii.945) is both horrifying and inevitable.

So we should find it no surprise that of the eight times a form of 'tempt' or 'temptation' appears in the text of The Lord of the Rings six are clearly and closely connected to the Ring. Besides the two emphatic uses we've already seen, Frodo is twice tempted to put on the Ring because of what he perceives to be a suggestion (Bree) or a compulsion (Weathertop) from outside himself (FR 1.ix.157; xi.195). When Gandalf the White learns that Frodo and Sam have crossed the river alone, he says that the 'deadly peril' of being 'tempted to use the Ring' 'is removed' (TT 3.v.500). In Mordor, though Sam only briefly bears the Ring, he, too, feels its ineluctable pull (RK 6.i.901):

Already the Ring tempted him, gnawing at his will and reason. Wild fantasies arose in his mind; and he saw Samwise the Strong, Hero of the Age, striding with a flaming sword across the darkened land, and armies flocking to his call as he marched to the overthrow of Barad-dûr. And then all the clouds rolled away, and the white sun shone, and at his command the vale of Gorgoroth became a garden of flowers and trees and brought forth fruit. He had only to put on the Ring and claim it for his own, and all this could be.

Of the two remaining instances, in one a sleepy Frodo is on watch beside the Great River, struggling against 'the temptation to lie down again', and just about to give in when Gollum appears (FR 2.ix.383-84). It's hard to resist the idea that Frodo's temptation here is similar to those he experienced at Bree and Weathertop, in that yielding to it will expose him to greater danger from someone who is looking for the Ring and watching him. However that may be, Gollum at any rate is being tempted into danger by his desire for the Ring. For, as we are about to discover, Strider knows that Gollum is on their trail and has been trying to capture him (FR 2.ix.384)

Now before considering the last of the uses of 'tempt' within The Lord of the Rings, it will be useful to note the two that are in the book, but not inside the tale proper. The first is in the Prologue, which of course purports to be written by someone within the same world but of a later time and who regards the events of the legendarium as historical. That writer tells us that Bilbo had been 'tempted to slay Gollum with his sword' in order to get away with the Ring and his life (FR Pr.12), but Bilbo's sudden pity for Gollum enables him to resist this temptation that would have made Bilbo no less a murderer than Gollum. And in the synopsis to The Return of the King we find the statement -- 'Faramir ... resisted the temptation to which Boromir had succumbed' -- and so again we see the usage clearly linked to the Ring.

Now, returning to the last of the uses within the tale, we come to the one which is most revealing about the subject of temptation. After the Company's meeting with Celeborn and Galadriel, during which she probed each of their minds, the members talk about their experience with her. Boromir, who only reluctantly and suspiciously entered 'that perilous land' (FR 2.vi.338), speaks of his own:

'To me it seemed exceedingly strange,' said Boromir. 'Maybe it was only a test, and she thought to read our thoughts for her own good purpose; but almost I should have said that she was tempting us, and offering what she pretended to have the power to give. It need not be said that I refused to listen. The Men of Minas Tirith are true to their word.' But what he thought that the Lady had offered him Boromir did not tell. 

(FR 2.vii.358)

We can see here how, at least in Boromir's mind, testing and tempting are two faces of the same coin, differentiated by the good purpose of the one and the ill purpose of the other. Other evidence shows us that Tolkien himself saw testing and tempting as synonymous. Later in this same chapter, when Frodo freely offers Galadriel the Ring, she refuses it and all that accepting it would have entailed. Having done so, she famously comments: 'I pass the test' (FR 2.vii.365-66). In three separate letters, moreover, the only three which mention this moment, Tolkien refers to it each time as the 'temptation' of Galadriel (nos. 210, 246, and 297n.). We may also see in another letter in which Tolkien discussed the 'tests' that 'angelic' beings in the material world were liable to face experiences that he might have equally well have called 'temptations' (Letter no. 156).^[1] So the temptation to claim, or take, or use such power as the Ring offered is not itself the whole of temptation. There is more to it than that.

We can also see a quite similar understanding of temptation/testing in a text that Tolkien, as a devout Catholic who lived long under the guardianship of a priest, would certainly have known, The Catechism of Trent, which communicated the official teachings of the Roman Catholic Church for over four centuries. Its most prominent statement on temptation comes in its discussion of the Sixth Petition of the Lord's Prayer, i.e., 'Lead us not into temptation':

Question IX - The meaning of the word "Temptation" and how we are tempted by God. 

But to understand the force of this petition, it is necessary to say what "temptation" means here, and also, what it is "to be led into temptation". "To tempt" is to sound him who is tempted, that, eliciting from him what we desire, we may extract the truth. This mode of tempting does not apply to God; for what is there that God does not know? "All things are naked and open to his eyes." (Heb. 4.13) Another kind of tempting is when, by pushing scrutiny rather far, some further object is wont to be sought for either a good or a bad purpose; for a good purpose, as when someone's worth is thus tried, in order that having been ascertained and known, he may be rewarded and honoured (Job xlii.10ff.), and his example proposed to others for imitation (James v.11); and that, in fine, all may be excited thereby to the praises of God.... 

Question X -- How the Devil Tempts Man  

Men are tempted to a bad purpose, when they are impelled to sin or destruction, which is the peculiar province of the devil; for he tempts with a view to deceive and precipitate them into ruin, and is therefore called in scripture "the tempter" (Matt. iv.3) 

(490-91)*

As we can see here, the distinction in motivation that Boromir draws between 'testing' and 'tempting' resonates with the distinction drawn in the catechism between 'tempting' to 'learn the truth' or to try 'someone's worth', and  'tempting' 'to deceive and precipitate them into ruin'. Being suspicious of Galadriel to begin with because of ignorance, Boromir can hardly be blamed for being uncertain of her motives, even though Aragorn presently rebukes him when he openly suggests that she may be up to no good (FR 2.vi.359). The other members of the Company also felt that they had been tested whether by being offered something or by being asked a hypothetical question. This is true even though no one else seems to have doubted Galadriel's intentions.

All of them, it seemed, had fared alike: each had felt that he was offered a choice between a shadow full of fear that lay ahead, and something that he greatly desired: clear before his mind it lay, and to get it he had only to turn aside from the road and leave the Quest and the war against Sauron to others.

(FR 2.vii.538)

In only two cases do we obtain a reasonably clear indication of the choices Galadriel seemed to be suggesting they could make. Both Merry and Sam felt they had been offered, more or less, the same thing, but Sam's explanation, the only detailed one we get, is remarkable, almost iconic, in its implications:

'If you want to know, I felt as if I hadn't got nothing on, and I didn't like it. She seemed to be looking inside me and asking me what I would do if she gave me the chance of flying back home to the Shire to a nice little hole with – with a bit of garden of my own.' 

(FR 2.vii.538)

Sam's feeling naked before Galadriel because she knows his innermost desires bears a striking resemblance to the statement in the Catechism that 'all things are naked and open to [God's] eyes', words which are themselves a quote from Hebrews 4.13. And, very interestingly, the temptation of the garden returns when Sam is bearing the Ring. Only then it has swollen to such godlike proportions that, although I have already quoted it above, it bears revisiting in full:

Already the Ring tempted him, gnawing at his will and reason. Wild fantasies arose in his mind; and he saw Samwise the Strong, Hero of the Age, striding with a flaming sword across the darkened land, and armies flocking to his call as he marched to the overthrow of Barad-dûr. And then all the clouds rolled away, and the white sun shone, and at his command the vale of Gorgoroth became a garden of flowers and trees and brought forth fruit. He had only to put on the Ring and claim it for his own, and all this could be.

Now the most direct comparison we can make here is to Boromir's rant to Frodo upon Amon Hen

Boromir strode up and down, speaking ever more loudly; almost he seemed to have forgotten Frodo,while his talk dwelt on walls and weapons, and the mustering of men; and he drew plans for great alliances and glorious victories to be; and he cast down Mordor, and became himself a mighty king, benevolent and wise.

(FR 2.x.398).

Two things distinguish Sam's fantasy and Boromir's here. The first is quite obvious. Boromir's temptation fantasy stops with him defeating Mordor and becoming a great king. Sam's goes far beyond the mortal heroism of overthrowing Barad-dûr to embrace a perspective and powers that border on the divine. The second is that, the Ring already being in his possession,  Sam just had to do 'claim it for his own, and all this could be' (emphasis mine). The scope of this vision, and the turn of phrase in that last sentence, should remind us of Satan's temptation of Jesus in the wilderness.

(8) Again the Devil took him up into a very high mountain, and shewed him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them, (9) and he said to him: all these I will give thee, if falling down thou wilt adore me. 

(Matthew 4:8-9, emphasis mine)** 

(5) And the Devil led him into a high mountain, and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time; (6) And he said to him: To thee I will give all this power, and the glory of them; for they are delivered to me, and to whom I will, I give them. (7) If therefore thou wilt adore before me, all shall be thine.

(Luke 4:5-7, emphasis mine)**

Now the texts of Matthew 4:1-11 and Luke 4:1-13 are quite similar throughout the entire 'temptation in the wilderness', but, more importantly, the word they both repeatedly use here, the word we traditionally render as 'tempt', is the Greek verb πειράζω. The Liddell-Scott-Jones Greek English Lexicon defines this verb as 'to try', 'to tempt', 'to put to the test' in senses both good and bad.^[2]  This is the same word, for example, used to describe the attempts of the pharisees and others to test Jesus with questions about the law and other matters (Matt. 16:1, 22:35; cf. Luke 10:25). Greek expresses these two meanings, which English treats as overlapping, with a single word. Were we to consult the Latin New Testament, there we would also find a single verb, tempto, also defined as 'to try', 'to tempt', and 'to put to the test'.

The close semantic kinship between 'test' and 'tempt' that we see here brings us back to Boromir's uncertainty in the scene in which, as Galadriel herself later admits (FR 2.vii.365), she was 'testing the heart[s]' of the Company. Yet we can now see this moment in a different light. For her role here is that of ὁ πειράζων (as Matt. 4:3 puts it), 'the one who tests' or 'tempts'.^[3]  To meet an elf or fairy, especially a female, and find oneself tested is no strange thing for those who enter the woods of Faërie, which, like the biblical wilderness, is a place of tests and otherworldly encounters.  Unlike the devil in the wilderness, however, Galadriel is not tempting the companions 'with a view to deceiv[ing] and precipitat[ing] them into ruin' -- to borrow the words of the Catechism quoted above -- but testing them 'for a good purpose, as when someone's worth is thus tried.' (Compare Boromir's 'for her own good purpose.'). Nor, despite the evocation of the Catechism and Hebrews 4:13 in Sam's feeling of nakedness, is she God who knows everything. As she herself concedes, she knows what will be only 'in part' (FR 2.vii.357). 

Galadriel thus plays in her own world -- that is to say, within the legendarium -- a role in between those played by God and the Devil in ours. This middle position is consistent with Tolkien's remarks in On Fairy-stories that the Road to Faërie is not the road to Heaven or to Hell (OFS para. 6), an idea with roots that go back beyond the ballad of Thomas the Rhymer, which he quotes, to The Romance and Prophecies of Thomas of Erceldoune. We may also see a kindred notion in the portrayal of the elves in The South English Legendary, as angels who fell to earth -- but not to Hell -- because they sought to remain neutral in Lucifer's rebellion. Exiles perhaps, like Galadriel and Gildor, but not the damned.

On the other hand, Galadriel's role as 'tester' here is of far greater import than is common in medieval Romances, where the consequences of failing the test are serious, but personal.  Sir Launfal, for example, temporarily loses the favor of his elven lady and is put on trial at Arthur's court, and Sir Gawain comes very close to losing his head to the Green Knight's axe. Galadriel's testing of the hearts of the Company, however, is intimately tied to the quest to destroy the Ring, the most dire matter in all of Middle-earth. We need only recall the famous lines with which she introduces her test: 'your Quest stands upon the edge of a knife. Stray but a little and it will fail, to the ruin of all. Yet hope remains while all the Company is true' (FR 2.vii.357). In its significance, therefore, her test is far more like the temptation of Christ in the wilderness, even if she and Satan had opposite purposes.

What of the purpose of her test then? If she was not tempting them to their ruin as well as to 'the ruin of all', as Satan tempted Christ, then she was trying their worth. Again we may ask, to what end? If we expand our focus on her words about 'the edge of a knife', we will begin, I think, to get a better idea. These are her words immediately before her testing of them begins:

But even now there is hope left. I will not give you counsel, saying do this, or do that. For not in doing or contriving, nor in choosing between this course and another, can I avail; but only in knowing what was and is, and in part also what shall be. But this I will say to you: your Quest stands upon the edge of a knife. Stray but a little and it will fail, to the ruin of all. Yet hope remains while all the Company is true.

(FR 2.vii.357)

What matters most, is whether the members of the Company are true. Hers is a test of their character, or as Sam later puts it to Faramir, of their quality (TT 4.v.682).  What she seems to offer them can be attained (if at all) only by proving themselves untrue. Thus, Boromir was not far wrong, grasping her means, but mistaking her ends.^[4] The way in which she frames her statement here, moreover, links its terms of hope, peril, help ('avail'), and knowledge intimately together and points directly ahead to her testing of their characters, the most important aspect of which seems to be what it told each of them about themselves. Sam's blushing, Merry's skittish reticence, Frodo and Gimli's blunt refusals to say anything, all suggest that they have seen something significant, while Boromir's boast of trustworthiness and his aspersions on Galadriel are the remarks of a man trying to defend himself from a thought he didn't like having.

We must be careful in treating Boromir's testing here. There are two main dangers. The first is to read the text backwards from Boromir's attempt on the Ring, and, therefore, to oversimplify and obscure what is going on here. The second is to keep our understanding of the portrayal in the book separate from the very different portrayal in Peter Jackson's film.  There, in keeping with Jackson's view of men as weak, we see a Boromir much more troubled from the beginning. He wrestles with the temptation of the Ring well before this moment.  Frodo is aware of this, as is Galadriel who telepathically warns Frodo that Boromir will try to take the Ring.

Jackson has clearly chosen to read Boromir's actions backwards in adapting the books to the screen. In his view of Boromir he has excellent company. For Sam Gamgee sees him in precisely the same way, as he tells Faramir:

Now I watched Boromir and listened to him, from Rivendell all down the road – looking after my master, as you'll understand, and not meaning any harm to Boromir – and it's my opinion that in Lórien he first saw clearly what I guessed sooner: what he wanted. From the moment he first saw it he wanted the Enemy's Ring!

(TT 4.v.680)

But while Sam is excellent at guessing Frodo's mind (FR 2.x.403, 405-06; TT 3.i.419), he is no oracle when it comes to others', especially when he is 'looking after his master' as he admits he was doing with Boromir. He is not always entirely right (or wrong), and when speaking to Faramir he does not know his brother's whole story. To take two outstanding examples, Sam long entertained doubts about Strider, even beyond Weathertop, so much so that Frodo is able to say -- not without some humor -- that Sam 'never quite trusted' Strider until Glorfindel came along (FR 2.i.220). It is also in his zeal to protect his master that he spoils Gollum's best and perhaps only chance at repentance (TT 4.viii.714-16). In the case of Aragorn, he is flat out wrong; in the case of Gollum he mistakes him, critically, in what one could argue was the moment he most needed to get him right.^[5] 

By contrast Galadriel, whatever precisely passed between her and Boromir, did not think it worth mentioning to anyone in the Company as far as we can tell; and when she later speaks to the returned Gandalf she, evidently, expresses her concern in such a way that she seems at least as anxious for him as she may be about him. And Gandalf sees it the same way: 'Galadriel told me that he was in peril. But he escaped in the end. I am glad. It was not in vain that the young hobbits came with us, if only for Boromir's sake' (TT  3.v.496). It would be hard to see what Galadriel meant by 'avail', if, as a result of her testing him, she knew that Boromir would try to take the Ring and said nothing.

This concern that he was in peril is thus quite revealing. It indicates that her testing of their hearts had to do with the members of the Company being the right people in the right place at the right time. As long as they are all true, hope remains. That she says nothing to any of them about what she learned shows that she tested them for their own sake, so that they would know what they needed to know about themselves in order to go on. When Frodo later inadvertently turns the tables on Galadriel and tests her heart by freely offering her the Ring, he allows her to face the test of character she had set them, but in a far more real and dangerous way. For Frodo has the power to grant her desire. But Galadriel is true even when she is in peril. She passes the test. And so hope remains.

Torn between his fear for Gondor and the power the Ring seems to offer, Boromir falls, but not beyond redemption.^[6] He 'escapes', as Gandalf says. 'Few have gained such a victory', declares Aragorn (TT 3.i.414), who seems unlikely to lie to a dying comrade: they are not speaking of his battle with the Orcs, who defeated him, but of his struggle with the Ring.^[7] But how does he escape his peril? To be sure his failure to seize the Ring is essential, but not decisive on its own. Losing the Ring to Bilbo did not save Gollum. Yet it made his redemption possible.

Ironically -- and here I believe Tolkien is dealing in some very sly irony as he realizes the idea of the 'fortunate fall' -- it is Boromir's physical fall that precipitates his recovery of spirit.  When Frodo slipped on the Ring and vanished, Boromir

gasped, stared for a moment amazed, and then ran wildly about, seeking here and there among the rocks and trees. 

'Miserable trickster!' he shouted. 'Let me get my hands on you! Now I see your mind. You will take the Ring to Sauron and sell us all. You have only waited your chance to leave us in the lurch. Curse you and all halflings to death and darkness!' Then, catching his foot on a stone, he fell sprawling and lay upon his face. For a while he was as still as if his own curse had struck him down; then suddenly he wept. 

He rose and passed his hand over his eyes, dashing away the tears. 'What have I said?' he cried. 'What have I done? Frodo, Frodo!' he called. 'Come back! A madness took me, but it has passed. Come back!'

(FR 2.x.399-400)

Note the hint at something more than random 'chance' in the narrator's suggestion that it was 'as if his own curse had struck him down'. Note, too, the parallel to Bilbo's behavior at Rivendell, where Bilbo, having asked Frodo if he might 'see [the Ring] for just a moment', 'to peep at it again', then reaches for it instead. Seeing Frodo's strong, almost violent reaction, Bilbo 'passed his hand across his eyes. "I understand now", he said.  "Put it away" ' (FR 2.i.232).^[8] Boromir, too, understands now.  Like Galadriel (FR 2.vii.366), and like Gandalf before her (FR 1.ii.61), he has seen the possibilities the Ring offers him, and the consequences. How far the knowledge he gains from Galadriel's test has brought him, aided now by his 'fortunate fall', is summed up in the transition he makes from imagining himself transformed by the Ring into 'a mighty king, benevolent and wise' (FR 2.x.398) to seeing the madness of this vision for what it is (2.x.400), confessing his error, and begging the true king to save his homeland (TT 3.i.414). 

If the visit to the Faërie of Bombadil prepared the hobbits to encounter a world that is larger -- in more than one sense of the word -- than the world to which they are accustomed, the visit to the Faërie of Galadriel^[9] turns the attention of the Company momentarily inward, to the field where the inner battle against the evil of the Ring must be fought even as the outer quest enters its decisive phase. That it does so finds another interesting parallel in the gospel, since it is after Jesus faced his tests in the Wilderness that he began his ministry in earnest. And just as the temptations of Christ range from the mundane (bread) to the grandiose (power), so, too, do the tests of the Company, from Sam and Merry's hole with a bit of garden to Boromir's visions of using the Ring to defeat Sauron, tests which are recapitulated on a grander and darker scale with Sam, Frodo, and Galadriel in the latter half of the chapter.

What Tolkien has done in The Mirror of Galadriel is to re-frame the testing that visitors to Faërie often encounter in a far more serious way. Galadriel does not test the Company merely for the sake of testing them, but neither does she seek to seduce and ruin them. Her testing of them stands upon the same knife edge as the Quest does, and as she herself does. In the understanding of testing and temptation found in the Catechism and the Gospel, and in the parallel between forests in fairy-stories and the wilderness in the Bible, Tolkien discovers a means and a stage that suit the high tone of his tale. And if we recall that he regards the story of Christ as the fairy story that came true (OFS para. 104-05), it only makes sense that he would find that it suits his 'own good purpose'.

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Works Consulted

*The biblical citations presented as footnotes in the Catechism I have converted into inline citations for the sake of ease and clarity.

**The translation is the Douay-Rheims of 1899, a Catholic version, which Tolkien would have been familiar with.

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^[1] Thus:

Why [the Istari] should take [a human] form is bound up with the 'mythology' of the 'angelic' Powers of the world of this fable. At this point in the fabulous history the purpose was precisely to limit and hinder their exhibition of 'power' on the physical plane, and so that they should do what they were primarily sent for: train, advise, instruct, arouse the hearts and minds of those threatened by Sauron to a resistance with their own strengths; and not just to do the job for them. They thus appeared as 'old' sage figures. But in this 'mythology' all the 'angelic' powers concerned with this world were capable of many degrees of error and failing between the absolute Satanic rebellion and evil of Morgoth and his satellite Sauron, and the fainéance of some of the other higher powers or 'gods'. The 'wizards' were not exempt, indeed being incarnate were more likely to stray, or err. Gandalf alone fully passes the tests, on a moral plane anyway (he makes mistakes of judgement). For in his condition it was for him a sacrifice to perish on the Bridge in defence of his companions, less perhaps than for a mortal Man or Hobbit, since he had a far greater inner power than they; but also more, since it was a humbling and abnegation of himself in conformity to 'the Rules': for all he could know at that moment he was the only person who could direct the resistance to Sauron successfully, and all his mission was vain. He was handing over to the Authority that ordained the Rules, and giving up personal hope of success.

^[2] πειράζω occurs in various forms in each text.  We also find the noun πειρασμός and ἐκπειράζω, an intensive form of the verb.  Matthew: πειρασθῆναι -- 'to be tempted' (4:1); πειράζων -- 'one who tempts', (4:3); (Οὐκ) ἐκπειράσεις -- 'thou shalt (not) tempt' (4:7). Luke: πειραζόμενος -- 'being tempted' (4:2); (Οὐκ) ἐκπειράσεις -- 'thou shalt (not) tempt' (4.:12); πειρασμὸν -- 'temptation' (4:13). 'Try' in the definition of course means 'test' -- as in 'you're trying my patience'. 'Try' as in 'try to' is a related, but separate verb.

^[3] My pedantry gene requires me to concede that, since Galadriel is female, we should have ἡ πειράζουσα instead of ὁ πειράζων.

^[4] It may be that the thought of other, similar encounters with Galadriel lies at the back of the suspicions of her 'nets' and 'deceptions' we discover among the Rohirrim: TT 3.ii.432; vi.514.

^[5] TT 4.viii.714-15. See Tolkien, Letters, no. 246. At the moment in question Sam has ample reason to mistrust Gollum and to believe him dangerous. As is often the case in The Lord of the Rings, however, the course that reason dictates is not the correct one.

^[6] Gandalf, for one, believed that both Saruman and Gollum, whose deeds were far worse than Boromir's, could be redeemed (FR 1.ii.59; TT  3.x.577, 583-84). According to Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age even Sauron was once not beyond redemption, if he had sincerely repented (Silmarillion, 285). In The Hunt for the Ring Christopher Tolkien writes of a version in which Saruman considers repentance (UT 346).

^[7] This interpretation of Aragorn's words to Boromir I owe to Corey Olsen.

^[8] Compare also the powerful scene in The Tower of Cirith Ungol (RK6.i.911-12), where passing visions of the Ring cause Frodo to see Sam as an orc.

^[9] By this turn of phrase I am not suggesting that there is more than one Faërie, only that Faërie has different aspects in different places.