Tolkien Reading Day 2015 -- On Friendship

The other day, thanks to +Jeremiah Burns, I read a BBC article on a 98 year old woman whose mother gave her the middle name of 'Somme' in remembrance of the horrific battle in which her father had died some months before she was born.  It was a moving piece.  The woman, Tiny Somme Gray, said she could not sign her name without thinking of the father she had never known.  Her mother did not speak of her husband's death, she told the BBC, or visit the local WWI memorial on which his name was inscribed.  But she made certain her daughter went there and would always remember.  The depth of her sorrow is clear even now, as is the depth of the love and friendship she must have shared with her husband.

Since we were just reading the first version of the story of Túrin in our class on The Book of Lost Tales, Part II at Mythgard, I was reminded of that story, in which Túrin's father, Húrin, goes off to fight in the battle that came to be known as the Battle of Unnumbered Tears.¹  But in addition to a son, Húrin left behind Morwen, his wife who was carrying their child. Since Húrin did not return from the battle and no news of his fate could be learnt, Morwen named their daughter 'Nienor, which is Mourning' (Unfinished Tales, 73).² 

Stories like this must have been all too common in WWI.  Thousands of children, conceived on a brief visit home or a briefer honeymoon, must have been born to wives who waited in what was most likely stoic dread for the word that their child would be born too late to know its father; or, if these wives were not left pregnant, many of them must have wondered if they would ever have children at all. Among these women was Edith Tolkien, who married Tolkien 99 years ago today, on 22 March 1916, but 'May found [him] crossing the Channel ... for the carnage of the Somme' (Letters, no. 43, p. 53). He was 'a Second Lieut. on 7/6 a day in the infantry where the chances of survival were against you heavily' (Letters, no. 43, p. 53). Their first child, John, was born in November 1917:

She married me in 1916 and John was born in 1917 (conceived and carried during the starvation-year of 1917 and the great U-boat campaign) round about the battle of Cambrai, when the end of the war seemed as far-off as it does now [in 1941].

(Letters, no. 43, p. 53)

Even a quarter of a century later everything is seen in terms of the doubt and peril of the war (which seemed to be repeating itself, only worse in March 1941, when England stood entirely alone). What must it have been like for Edith in 1916 and 1917, with letters and telegrams arriving in every town in Britain every day to transform a woman's worst fear into sorrow? I have heard it said that people hated the very sight of the telegram delivery man. 

It was a time of horrors that shattered the mirror of complacency in which Europe had long admired itself.  Old Poets, like Yeats, felt it in The Second Coming.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

And Young Poets felt it more so, men like Siegfried Sassoon, a contemporary of Tolkien, who also served in France and wrote many increasingly bitter poems about the war.

Suicide in the Trenches 

I knew a simple soldier boy 
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark.  

In winter trenches, cowed and glum,
With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again. 

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you'll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.

I could easily find and cite a hundred more poems -- not to mention short stories and novels -- that would bludgeon this point home, but the wonder here is that Tolkien did not become lost as so many others of his time did.³ And I at least always hear an echo of the disillusionment and despair that inform these poems in Frodo's words to Sam in Mordor:

'No taste of food, no feel of water, no sound of wind, no memory of tree or grass or flower, no image of moon or star, are left to me now.  I am naked in the dark, Sam, and there is no veil between me and the wheel of fire. I begin to see it even with my waking eyes, and all else fades.'

(RK 6.iii.937-938)

Frodo knew 'the hell where youth and laughter go.' And so, therefore, did Tolkien. Frodo never returned from that dark wood.  Sam and Tolkien did.  When you read the WWI poets you see the way they feel about England, and how much a part of their affection for their homeland some vision of the English countryside is.  This is especially true early on in the war.  But if you know your Tolkien, it is clear that his vision is much the same as theirs.  His found expression in the Shire.

Because of his faith, because of the stories he began to write down during the war, and probably just as importantly because of his friendship and love with his wife, Edith, who subsequently vanishes from our view into the life of raising her children, and whose presence is lost in the impossible whirlwind of her husband's stories and teaching and better known friendships with C. S. Lewis and the Inklings, Tolkien was able to transform that experience into something greater.  And I don't mean something as pseudo-intellectual as 'he transformed his experience into The Lord of the Rings.'  No, if anything his writing was a tool for him as much as it was a tale for others.  He transformed his experience into a full and round and thoughtful life.  And again I do not mean he sat down to write as a form of therapy.  That was just a large part of the way he approached the world and understood it.

What do most of us know of Edith?  Not much.  But if all we know is just one thing, it is that when she died Tolkien had 'Luthien' inscribed on the headstone, to be joined by 'Beren' when he died two years later. He even said at one point in a letter to his son, Christopher, that Edith had provided the inspiration for the Tale of Beren and Luthien (Letters no. 340, pp. 420-421).  This is of course all quite romantic and charming.  But if all we do is look warmly upon it, and think how sweet it is, we are missing something very important.  The relationship of Beren and Luthien changed their world.  They were not just lovers in the old or new sense of the word.  Through their love and friendship they worked together and accomplished what all the armies of Men and Elves could not; and their love and deeds had an effect that rippled down the ages, and more than once gave birth to hope in darkness. In that respect it is the most important Tale of Middle-Earth, and the Great Tales never do end. 

That is what love and friendship, as Tolkien sees them, can do. 

We should not neglect where the Tale went in remembering the sweetness of where it came from. 

____________________________

¹ British killed and wounded at the Somme between July and November 1916 numbered over 350,000. I have long thought that these casualties, combined with Tolkien's memory of Homer, who said that the destructive wrath of Achilles μυρί᾽ Ἀχαιοῖς ἄλγε᾽ἔθηκε (Iliad 1.2) -- 'put unnumbered woes on the Achaeans' -- was the inspiration (hardly the proper word for something so grim) for the name 'Unnumbered Tears.' μυρία means 'numberless, countless, infinite.' I would be quite surprised if I were the first to point this out.

² I take a liberty here, using the more familiar, later forms of the names Húrin, Morwen, and Nienor. In The Book of Lost Tales, Part II they are called Úrin, Mavwin, and Nienóri.

³ For the WWI poets, see Santanu Das, The Cambridge Companion to the Poets of the First World War (2013); Poetry of the First World War: An Anthology, ed. Tim Kendall (2013); Max Egremont, Some Desperate Glory: The First World War the Poets Knew (2014); and John Garth, Tolkien and the Great War: On the Threshold of Middle-Earth (2004).

Gollum's Blighted Repentance and What Bilbo Saw

Gollum looked at them. A strange expression passed over his lean hungry face. The gleam faded from his eyes, and they went dim and grey, old and tired. A spasm of pain seemed to twist him and he turned away, peering back up towards the pass, shaking his head as if engaged in some interior debate. Then he came back, and slowly putting out a trembling hand, very cautiously he touched Frodo’s knee – but almost the touch was a caress. For a fleeting moment, could one of the sleepers have seen him, they would have thought that they beheld an old weary hobbit, shrunken by the years that had carried him far beyond his time, beyond friends and kin, and the fields and streams of youth, an old starved pitiable thing.

But at that touch Frodo stirred and cried out softly in his sleep, and immediately Sam was wide awake. The first thing he saw was Gollum ‘pawing at master,’ as he thought.

“Hey you!” he said roughly, “What are you up to?”

“Nothing, nothing,” said Gollum softly. “Nice Master.”

“I daresay,” said Sam. “But where have you been to – sneaking off and sneaking back, you old villain?”

Gollum withdrew himself, and a green light flickered under his heavy lids. Almost spiderlike he looked now, crouched back on his bent limbs, with his protruding eyes. The fleeting moment had passed, beyond recall. 

(TT 4.viii.714)

Of this passage, Tolkien later wrote:

“For me perhaps the most tragic moment in the Tale comes…when Sam fails to note the complete change in Gollum’s tone and aspect…. His repentance is blighted and all Frodo’s pity is…­­­­­wasted. Shelob’s lair became inevitable.”[1]

Now Sam’s reaction to waking up to find Gollum beside a sleeping Frodo is completely intelligible because this is not the first time he has done so. On that occasion, during the Sméagol-Gollum dialogue, the ‘pawing at Master’ soon threatened to become something else entirely: “Finally both [his] arms, with long fingers flexed and twitching, clawed towards [Frodo’s] neck.”[2] (TT 4.ii.634) Moved by sudden fear, Sam is sharp and hasty. So in a heartbreaking instant, clear to us all, he fails the test of Pity.[3]

And in turn Gollum, stung by Sam’s gruff accusations, “withdrew himself.” Now in the present context, with two Gollums momentarily visible to us, this is a very interesting choice of words. For in Tolkien’s usage they suggest much more than a physical withdrawal. There is only one other sentence in all The Lord of the Rings where Tolkien uses the verb “withdraw” reflexively, and in that instance the sense is clearly not just physical.[4] It is Gandalf, speaking of how perilous it would be for him to look into the palantír, who says: “even if I found the power to withdraw myself, it would have been disastrous for [Sauron] to see me….” (TT 3.xi.595).[5] So, given the vision we have just been granted of the “old weary hobbit” reaching out to caress Frodo, “himself” may well also refer to this remnant of what Gollum had once been, to Sméagol perhaps, now gone beyond recall or redemption.

And even as he draws back, the Gollum who was “almost … caress[ing]” Frodo at once becomes “almost spiderlike.” He reverts into the “nasty crawling spider on a wall” that the hobbits had first seen in the Emyn Muil,[6] and foreshadows the real monster whom the reader does not even know is there yet.

In a Tale which tells us right at the start that there is “not much hope that Gollum can be cured before he dies” and that “the pity of Bilbo may rule the fate of many” (FR 1.ii.59), Sam’s pitilessness is striking and poignant. For until now the reader has had small reason to pity Gollum, and little hint that somewhere within him there languished “an old weary hobbit” for whom we should feel pity as Bilbo did rather than loathing as Sam does. [7] And yet, in that “fleeting moment,” as our beloved Sam blunders, our hearts come to know a pity that Sam’s has not yet learned.[8] Before we consider this moment further, let us examine the portrayal of Gollum thus far.

From the first even Gandalf, who learned pity at the feet of Nienna herself,[9] has named Gollum a liar, a murderer, and a robber of cradles.[10] He has confirmed Frodo’s disgusted assertion that Gollum deserves death.[11] Aragorn in his turn was “not gentle” when he marched him from the Dead Marshes to Northern Mirkwood “with a halter on his neck, gagged, until he was tamed by lack of drink and food.”[12] And the Wood Elves, to whom Aragorn had entrusted Gollum, receive only treachery and death for their kindness (FR 2.ii.255-56).

When we first encounter Gollum in The Fellowship of the Ring, he is an elusive presence we can never quite get a look at. In the long dark of Moria his footfalls are an echo of menace and his glowing eyes bring unquiet dreams;[13] in Lorien he appears in the wake of the orcs, a shadow sniffing about for his prey just as the Black Rider in the Shire had done;[14] on the Great River he comes closer yet, still shadowy and still sniffing, and both Sam and Strider make clear that “murder by night” would be no surprise from Gollum.[15] When the company is shot at from the eastern bank by orcs, Sam assumes that Gollum’s behind it (FR 2.ix.386).[16]

All of this sets the stage for our first clear look at Gollum in The Taming of Sméagol. There we first see him coming down a sheer cliff face “like a nasty crawling spider on a wall” (TT 4.i.612).[17] There we first hear him venting his murderous hatred for “the thieves, the thieves, the filthy little thieves” who stole his Precious (4.i.613). But, with Sting at his throat, Gollum instantly becomes a groveling, lugubrious, wretch, sadly wronged by the “nice little hobbitses” to whom he of course meant no harm (4.i.614-615). Neither Frodo nor Sam are fooled by this transformation,[18] but to Sam’s staring, scowling amazement Frodo pities Gollum and shows him mercy (4.i.615).[19] And if we are not already as alarmed by this as Sam is, we need only see the flicker of “cunning and eagerness” in Gollum’s eyes as he agrees to help them (4.i.615). His immediate attempt to escape, followed by more fawning wretchedness, only strengthens the impression that Frodo’s pity is dangerous. Even the final words of the chapter, as they set out with Gollum as their guide, do not augur well: “Over all the leagues of waste before the gates of Mordor there was a black silence.” (4.i.619) Sméagol may have been tamed, but Gollum has not.[20]

This picture does not improve in The Passage of the Marshes. Twice in this chapter the hobbits fall asleep together despite their fear that Gollum will murder them if they do. The first time, Sam awakes with a shock to find, “half remorsefully,” that he had been too suspicious (TT 4.ii.623).[21] Gollum is present and awake, but leaves at once to hunt for food. Meanwhile Frodo and Sam discuss their situation. Sam wants to husband their lembas so they will have some left once their errand is done. Frodo dismisses this notion:

If the One goes into the Fire, and we are at hand? I ask you, Sam, are we ever likely to need bread again? If we can nurse our limbs to bring us to Mount Doom, that is all we can do. More than I can, I begin to feel.

(TT 4.ii.624)

Now earlier that very day, before the hobbits slept, Frodo had offered Gollum a share of their waybread. Though famished, he had rejected it with disgust “and a hint of his old malice” (4.ii.622).

You try to choke poor Sméagol. Dust and ashes, he can’t eat that. He must starve. But Sméagol doesn’t mind. Nice hobbits! Sméagol has promised. He will starve. He can’t eat hobbits’ food. He will starve. Poor thin Sméagol. 

(TT 4.ii.622)

The contrast between the scorn and self-pity Gollum feels, and Frodo’s abandonment of all hope of anything beyond the Fire, leaves all our pity with him and with Sam, who has no answer to Frodo’s despair but his tears. Then Gollum returns from the hunt:

His fingers and face were soiled with black mud. He was still chewing and slavering. What he was chewing, they did not ask or like to think. 

‘Worms or beetles or something slimy out of holes,’ thought Sam. ‘Brr! The nasty creature; the poor wretch!’ 

Gollum said nothing to them, until he had drunk deeply and washed himself in the stream. Then he came up to them, licking his lips. ‘Better now,’ he said. ‘Are we rested? Ready to go on? Nice hobbits, they sleep beautifully. Trust Sméagol now? Very, very good.’

 (TT 4.ii.624)

Gollum needles the hobbits for their fear of him. He licks his lips, and makes clear that he had been watching them while they slept so beautifully.[22] He then asks and answers his own question, quite smugly in fact – as if not murdering them in their sleep were an unanswerable proof of his good will. But he has misjudged the hobbits. They make no reply. In fact Sam’s answer was given before he was asked, in that cold shiver of loathing and disgust.[23] Thus, a scene that begins with Sam feeling half remorseful ends with the repulsiveness and menace of Gollum confirmed. Once again our pity is elsewhere.

The second time Frodo and Sam fall asleep together is far more unsettling. Sam awakens to hear the disturbing conversation between Sméagol and Gollum, the two different ‘thoughts’ of their companion which here manifest themselves quite distinctively.[24] Of these two ‘thoughts,’ the one the narrator calls Gollum is clearly the more dangerous, just as we might expect:

Each time that the second thought spoke, Gollum’s long hand crept out slowly, pawing towards Frodo, and then was drawn back with a jerk as Sméagol spoke again. Finally both arms, with long fingers flexed and twitching, clawed towards his neck. 

(TT 4.ii.633-34)

On this showing we can hardly be surprised at Sam’s reaction when he awakens later on the Stairs to find Gollum ‘pawing at master,’ words which the narrator himself puts into quotes, to emphasize that Sam habitually thought this way.[25] We can also see where the narrator stands. This is the only scene in The Lord of the Rings where the narrator in his own voice calls Gollum Sméagol, and he does so only to distinguish the one ‘thought’ clearly from the other.[26] Elsewhere he is always just Gollum.

How then – after we have been so carefully schooled to loathe Gollum, and to think Frodo’s pity unwise even if morally right[27] – how then do we now find ourselves so struck by pity and a sense of loss? The narrator can move us so much only by radically shifting our perspective:

For a fleeting moment, could one of the sleepers have seen him, they would have thought that they beheld an old weary hobbit, shrunken by the years that had carried him far beyond his time, beyond friends and kin, and the fields and streams of youth, an old starved pitiable thing.

With these words the narrator steps out of the narrative to comment upon the scene, but amid the pathos evoked by this comment it is all too easy to overlook a very important point. With these words the narrator – Frodo, as we must recall, who is not omniscient – also steps beyond what he could have known. In that fleeting moment when Sméagol the old weary hobbit appears, Frodo and Sam, the only possible witnesses, are both asleep. So where does this vision come from?

We find a clue far back in The Shadow of the Past, where Gandalf is telling Frodo of Bilbo’s encounter with Gollum. It is also the only prior passage in the Tale which evokes unmixed pity for Gollum:

There was a little corner of [Gollum’s] mind that was still his own, and light came through it, as through a chink in the dark: a light out of the past. It was actually pleasant, I think, to hear a kindly voice again, bringing up memories of wind, and trees, and sun on the grass, and such forgotten things. 

(FR 1.ii.55)

The conversation between them grows more heated as Frodo’s fear mounts, until finally he rejects even the pity that Bilbo showed in not murdering Gollum, pity that Gandalf says was Bilbo’s salvation as well. Frodo feels no such pity. “You have not seen him,” Gandalf replies. “No, and I don’t want to,” is Frodo’s tart answer (FR 1.ii.59). And it is precisely this conversation that Frodo remembers when Gollum is at his mercy in the Emyn Muil: “I will not touch the creature. For now that I see him, I do pity him” (TT 4.i.615).

Given the connection between seeing Gollum and pitying him, one last passage merits our attention:

Bilbo almost stopped breathing, and went stiff himself. He was desperate. He must get away, out of this horrible darkness, while he had any strength left. He must fight. He must stab the foul thing,[28] put out its eyes, kill it. It meant to kill him. No, not a fair fight. He was invisible now. Gollum had no sword. Gollum had not actually threatened to kill him, or tried to yet. And he was miserable, alone, lost. A sudden understanding, a pity mixed with horror, welled up in Bilbo’s heart: a glimpse of endless unmarked days without light or hope of betterment, hard stone, cold fish, sneaking and whispering. All these thoughts passed in a flash of a second. He trembled. And then quite suddenly in another flash, as if lifted by a new hope and resolve, he leaped.

(The Hobbit, 97)

Here, in another fleeting moment, we behold another vision of an old weary hobbit. What Bilbo saw beneath the Misty Mountains, we see as in a mirror on the Stairs of Cirith Ungol. In The Hobbit Bilbo, poised to commit murder out of fear, glimpses the hobbit that Gollum was, and turns to pity.[29] In The Two Towers Gollum, also poised for murder, sees in Frodo what he himself has lost to the Ring – and what Frodo will lose before the end – and nearly repents.[30] But he stumbles against the pitilessness of fearful, watchful Sam, and “withdraws himself.”[31] As Bilbo leaped forward, Gollum fell back.

The similarity in these two passages is of course no accident. For, as we learn from John Rateliff, Tolkien wrote them both at about the same time in 1944.[32] And if this were any other author we might end now with a comment on how cleverly Tolkien uses the one passage to illuminate the other, and how the both of them work together to reveal the razor’s edge between murder and repentance, between pity and pitilessness, between leap of hope and lapse into despair.

But that would not be enough for Tolkien, who writes under the pretense that not he, but Frodo is the author. Nor would it explain how Frodo the narrator can narrate for us the fleeting moment that he did not see and that no one could have told him of. The answer is not far to seek, I think. Frodo, the subcreator, knew the true story of Riddles in the Dark years before Bilbo left for Rivendell.[33] He was in fact the likely source of the version of this chapter which contains the truth.[34] And in composing this Tale he admittedly relied on the recollections of his friends for events he did not witness.[35] For the journey from Ithilien onward, he would have had to rely heavily on Sam, since the Ring had driven all but the image of itself from his mind.[36] And when they came to recount that moment on the Stairs, it is all too easy to see Sam, who had expressed regret for his harshness even at the time, and who had since learned pity by experience, [37] telling Frodo that what he saw when he awoke that day might not have been Gollum ‘pawing at master,’ but rather an old weary hobbit, “miserable, alone, [and] lost.”[38]

________________________

Author's Note

This post was first presented at the Third Annual Mythmoot in Baltimore, Md, on 1/10/2015.  It took its first beginnings from our class discussions in The Two Towers course at Mythgard Institute in the summer of 2013.  Some months later I sent Corey Olsen an email running the idea in this paper by him.  He was very encouraging and suggested I submit it for presentation at the next Mythmoot.

The more I thought my way through this idea, the more ideas came to me, too many to be included in 15 to 20 minutes. Most of these involved analyses that I believe supported the point I was attempting to make in this paper.  They became footnotes.  But it was also clear to me that at least some of these observations were interesting in their own right and deserved more attention.  Anyone who has read the Tolkien posts on my blog (assuming anyone reads my blog at all) will recognize the seeds of these posts in the footnotes to this paper.  Wherever one of those ideas has led to a post, I have included the link at the end of the footnote.  I am still mining the material, and more will be added.  I can only hope that this vein leads to mithril, and not a balrog.

My thanks to all at Mythgard and Mythmoot for the kindness and courtesy with which they heard me out.

_________________________

Footnotes

[1] The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, selected and edited by Humphrey Carpenter (Boston, 1981), letter 246, p 330. Cf. also letter 165, p. 221, quoted below n. 31. All citations of The Lord of the Rings are from the one volume 50th anniversary edition (New York, 2004).

[2] At Henneth Annûn Gollum clearly means to attack Frodo: “He spat and stretched out his long arms with white snapping fingers,” (TT 4.vi.688). It seems unlikely, however, that Sam saw this given his reluctance a few minutes earlier to approach the edge of the platform overlooking the pool (4.vi.684)

[3] For Tolkien’s assessment of Sam’s failure here, see Letters (1981) letter 246, p. 329-330.

[4] A search reveals twenty two instances of the verb “withdraw” in The Lord of the Rings. Twelve times the verb is intransitive, nine times transitive (including these two passages), once a gerund. In all the other transitive uses of the verb the object is something like “gaze,” “forces,” etc. Whenever Tolkien means to indicate merely physical removal or retreat – as in, e.g., “the further you go, the less easy it will be to withdraw,” (FR 2.iii.281) or “Strider withdrew into a dark corner,” (FR 1.x.166) – he simply uses the intransitive, which again suggests that the reflexive use of the transitive is not equivalent to the intransitive use. The two are not synonymous. The noun “withdrawal” does not occur.

[5] Even if we allow that a physical withdrawal is part of what Gandalf refers to, more important and difficult would be the mental or spiritual withdrawal. Compare the experience of Pippin, who “gave a gasp and struggled” when the light within the palantír went out. Then, the moment he regains consciousness, “he struggled to get up and escape” (TT 3.xi.592-93) . And when Pippin recounts his own experience with Sauron he says “I struggled. But [Sauron] said ‘Wait a moment! We shall meet again soon.’” (TT 3.xi.593). Cf., too, Aragorn’s contest with Sauron for mastery of the palantír, which he twice calls a struggle (RK 5.iii.780). Clearly the heart of the struggle here is not physical. Thus, neither is the withdrawal.

[6] TT 4.i.612. Gollum is twice more likened to a spider (TT 4.i.614, iii.645), and once to “some large prowling thing of insect-kind” (TT 4.i.615). Since Tolkien originally described Gollum as coming down the wall “like a fly” (The History of Middle Earth, VII.329 n. 15, italics his), and retroactively inserted the references to Shelob into the Sméagol/Gollum dialogue (HME VIII.115), it may be that the spider comparisons were also inserted as the solitary Shelob replaced what had been a Mirkwood-like horde. In general see HME VIII.187-191.

[7] The one sure hint, however, is long ago at FR I.ii.55. Gollum’s youthful interest in tales parallels Sam’s own, and Sam takes note of it (TT 4.iii.641, 646-647). It sparks perhaps the kindest impulse Sam ever has towards him (TT 4.viii.713), but it does not suggest their kinship as hobbits. Neither is typical: Sam view stories as more than childhood entertainments; and Gollum is a murderer (cf. Frodo’s words at RK 6.viii.1006).

[8] Sam will learn pity once he has borne the Ring (RK 6.iii.944), but “for the good of Gollum too late” (Letters, 246, p. 330).

[9] “Wisest of the Maiar was Olórin. He too dwelt in Lórien, but his ways often took him to the house of Nienna, and of her he learned pity and patience” (The Silmarillion 30-31). As pity is Gandalf’s greatest strength, so it is his greatest weakness: “Yet the way of the Ring to my heart is by pity, pity for weakness and the desire of strength to do good…. The wish to wield it would be too great for my strength” (FR 1.ii.61).

[10] “The Woodmen [of Mirkwood] said that there was some new terror abroad, a ghost that drank blood. It climbed trees to find nests; it crept into holes to find the young; it slipped through windows to find cradles” (FR 1.ii.58). Gollum’s cannibalism, already established in Riddles in the Dark, is a trait he shares with orcs: TT 3.iii.446 (man- and orc-flesh), and 450 (Pippin’s refusal to eat meat provided by the orcs); 4.iv.651 (the bones in Ithilien). Sam initially thought “the desire to eat hobbits” was the chief danger Gollum posed (TT 4.ii.634).

[11] Though Gandalf of course does not think that such a sentence should be carried out: FR 1.ii.59.

[12] FR 2.ii.253. In The Hunt for the Ring we are given a detailed description of  the route they took, and  told that, “according to Aragorn,” this journey lasted from 1 February to 21 March, close to 900 miles on foot in 50 days (Unfinished Tales, Boston 1980, p. 343).  Not gentle indeed.

[13] In Moria: FR 2.iv.312, 318.

[14] In Lorien: FR 2.vi.345; Black Rider: 1.iii.75-76, iv.86, xi.189; cf. 1.v.108.

[15] On the Anduin: FR 2.ix.382-84. That Gollum will murder them in their sleep is a frequent – and not unjustified – concern of Sam’s. He warns Frodo about precisely that before they fall asleep on the stairs of Cirith Ungol: “If we’re caught napping, Stinker will come out on top pretty quick” (TT 4.viii.714). See also 4.i.617; ii.621, 622-24, 633-35.

[16] Not unreasonably so. Grishnákh for one knows who Gollum is (TT 3.iii.455-56).

[17] See above n. 6.

[18] When Sam objects that Gollum’s plan is no doubt to “throttle us in our sleep,” Frodo agrees, but denies that Gollum’s plans for them should have a bearing on theirs for him (TT 4.i.615). Expecting mischief, they then pretend to sleep, and subdue him again when he attempts escape (4.i.616-619).

[19] Frodo’s pity and mercy, and Sam’s reaction to them, mark the emergence of the difference of opinion between Frodo and Sam about Gollum. Sam soon recognizes that Frodo and Gollum can communicate with each other in a way he doesn’t understand. Indeed the three of them are on proximate roads which meet up on the slopes of Mt Doom, when Sam, now a ringbearer too, can understand, and feel the pity Frodo feels here.

[20] The title of this chapter, The Taming of Sméagol, is positively tricksy in view of the narrator’s use of “Sméagol.” See below n. 26, and my post "The Naming of Sméagol."

[21] But even this realization is tempered and cautious: “then it also occurred to him that his master had been right: there had for the present been nothing to guard against” (TT 4.ii.623, italics added).

[22] Just the day before Sam and Frodo had discussed their fears, but made no effort to conceal them. Sam “did not really care whether Gollum heard him or not” (TT 4.ii.622), and Frodo had answered “speaking openly” (4.ii.623).

[23] Later at TT 4.iii.640-641 Frodo speaks of trusting Gollum, but adds that he has had little choice. While unaware of Gollum’s conversation with himself (TT 2.ii.632-34), Frodo is not blind: he reduces Gollum to cowering terror by threatening him with the Ring.

[24] “Gollum was talking to himself. Sméagol was holding a debate with some other thought that used the same voice but made it squeak and hiss. A green light and a pale light alternated in his eyes as he spoke” (TT 2.ii.632). Thus we see differences in speech, eyes, action, and thought, both in the sense of intent, and of mind or what we might today be more inclined to call “personality.” This use of the word "thought" seems unprecedented in Modern English. Tolkien had to dig deep for it. It was used in the Lindisfarne Gospels over a millenium ago. See my post "The Naming of Sméagol," note 3.

[25] “Pawing:” TT 4.i.618; ii.633, 634; iii.637; iv.651; viii.714. Only two other characters are so described, Grishnákh (3.iii.455; ix.564), and Sam, of all people, when Frodo, fearing for the Ring, sees him as an orc (RK 6.i.912) Sam of course had had Gollum’s fingers at his own throat within seconds of meeting him (TT 4.i.614). See also Gollum’s catchy endorsement of fish (“Makes eyes bright, fingers tight,” TT 4.vi.686; cf. 688).

[26] In The Two Towers “Sméagol” occurs 145 times. Sixty five percent of the time (95/145) it is used by Gollum referring to himself. Frodo uses it 31 times, Sam 9, and Faramir 4. The narrator employs it in his own voice five times in this scene. If we allow that The Taming of Sméagol is named by the narrator, that accounts for one more instance, but a chapter title is a comment on the Tale rather than a part of the Tale itself. The narrator calls him “Sméagol” only one other time, in a passage of high mythic style introducing “Shelob the Great, last child of Ungoliant to trouble the unhappy world.”

Already, years before, Gollum had beheld her, Sméagol who pried into all dark holes, and in past days he had bowed and worshipped her, and the darkness of her evil will walked through all the ways of his weariness beside him, cutting him off from light and from regret. 

(TT 4.ix.723) 

“Sméagol” is here in apposition to “Gollum,” and as such is syntactically and logically subordinate, a supplemental description of the main subject. Sméagol’s characteristic of prying into dark holes both explains his acquaintance with her and recalls Gandalf’s initial description of him as unduly interested in things that were secret and hidden (FR 1.ii.53). The sentence is very interesting otherwise. In The Lord of the Rings only Sauron is said to have been worshiped by anyone (RK 5.ii.782, x.888), and as Galadriel entertains the idea of what would happen if she had the Ring, she appears “worshipful” to Frodo (FR 2.vii.366). There is what seems to me a bleak echo of the sixth verse of the twenty-third Psalm in “and the darkness…beside him.” Lastly, the sundering of Gollum from regret makes clear the difficulty of repentance.

In FR only Gandalf and Legolas use "Sméagol" in The Return of the King only Gollum. Appendix B reveals an interesting progression: he is Sméagol when he kills Déagol (RK B.1087), Sméagol-Gollum while under the Misty Mountains (1089), and Gollum once he leaves (1089). It may be coincidence, but the transition from Sméagol-Gollum to simply Gollum matches up pretty closely with Gollum’s statement at TT 4.i.616: “Don’t ask Sméagol. Poor, poor Sméagol, he went away long ago. They took his Precious, and he’s lost now.” “They” of course can only refer to Bilbo.

For an extended analysis of the use of "Sméagol," see my post "The Naming of Sméagol."

[27] By recalling Frodo’s conversation with Gandalf from The Shadow of the Past the narrator underlines the moral correctness of Frodo’s pity and mercy.

[28] Note the echo of the words “….while he had any strength left….He must stab the foul thing” in Frodo’s statement to Gandalf: “What a pity Bilbo did not stab that vile creature when he had the chance” (FR 1.ii.59).

[29] Bilbo of course need not have recognized Gollum as a hobbit per se then or later, but he had to come to see him as a person, not a “foul thing.” The sentence “And he was miserable, alone, lost” signals this transition. Gollum is now “he,” not “it,” which produces an intriguing moment of ambiguity. Every other “he” in this paragraph refers to Bilbo. And that ambiguity allows recognition, pity, horror. Aristotle would have been pleased.

[30] What Frodo will lose bears a remarkable resemblance (RK 6.iii.937-38): “No taste of food, no feel of water, no sound of wind, no memory of tree or grass or flower, no image of moon or star are left to me.” Cf. Sam, who bears the Ring long enough to learn pity at last (RK 6.iii.944): “and now he dimly guessed the agony of Gollum’s shrivelled mind and body, enslaved to that Ring, unable to find peace or relief ever in life again.”

[31] See Letters, letter 165, p. 221 (the italics are Tolkien’s; “horses” seems a slip for the “horns” heard at RK 5.iv.829):

…I am most stirred by the sound of the horses of the Rohirrim at cockcrow; and most grieved by Gollum’s failure (just) to repent when interrupted by Sam: this seems to me really like the real world in which the instruments of just retribution are seldom themselves just or holy; and the good are often stumbling blocks....

[32] “Bilbo’s sudden insight into Gollum’s inner life here is on par with the unwitnessed moment outside Shelob’s lair when Gollum briefly appears as ‘an old weary hobbit […’] – not surprisingly because both passages were written at about the same time.” John Rateliff, The History of the Hobbit, revised and expanded one-volume edition (London, 2011) p. 745 n 38. Rateliff also cites HME VIII.183-84, where Christopher Tolkien establishes the date of this chapter of The Lord of the Rings as May 1944 on the basis of his father’s letters. For the dating of these revisions to The Hobbit see Rateliff pp. xxvii, and 731-32.

[33] When he was 99 (TA 2989), Bilbo adopted Frodo as his heir, and brought him to live at Bag End (FR 1.i.21). Soon thereafter he told him the true story, which Gandalf already knew (FR 1.i.40).

[34] “But many copies [of the Red Book] contain the true account (as an alternative), derived no doubt from notes by Frodo or Samwise, both of whom learned the truth, though they seem to have been unwilling to delete anything actually written by the old hobbit himself” (FR pr. 13).

[35] The book Frodo hands Sam in The Grey Havens has this periphrasis below the title: “…being the memoirs of Bilbo and Frodo of the Shire, supplemented by the accounts of their friends and the learning of the Wise” (RK 6.ix.1027. We can see this process at work, for example, in Pippin’s recollection of Treebeard’s eyes (TT 3.iv.463), and in the tale telling in the evening after the Field of Cormallen (RK 6.iv.955-56).

[36] Frodo’s memory loss as he describes it at RK 6.iii.937-38 seems nearly total. Aside from the Ring, “all else fades.”

[37] “Sam felt a bit remorseful, though not more trustful. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, but you startled me out of my sleep. And I shouldn’t have been sleeping, and that made me a bit sharp.’ ” (TT 4.viii.715). Further down the same page he also says: “ ‘I said I was sorry, but I soon shan’t be.’ ”

[38] The passage in The Grey Havens where Frodo sees “a far green country under a swift sunrise” offers an intriguing parallel (RK 6.ix.1030). Sam must be the author here, but he cannot have witnessed this scene. The text specifically mentions Frodo’s dream “in the house of Bombadil” (FR 1.viii.135), which this scene realizes. Sam, therefore, must have known of this dream because Frodo had told him, or because he had read it in the book. But this scene is all Sam, and fits his character as described from the beginning: “They are sailing, sailing, sailing over the Sea, they are going into the West and leaving us.” (FR 1.ii.45). He uses the dream to give Frodo the happy ending he feels he was denied (RK 6.ix.1029). Not of course that any reader should doubt that this is what actually happened.

See also my "Happy Endings, by S, Gamgee,"

The Mythgard Institute

In the winter of 2012 I was poking around the internet, looking as we all do for god knows what  -- our futures perhaps -- when I came across this guy named Corey Olsen who was calling himself "The Tolkien Professor."  Now I'll admit that my first reaction (okay, it's my default reaction) was skepticism.  "The Tolkien Professor" just sounded a bit geeky, and I'm old enough to remember when geek was not a compliment.  And what was with that definite article, huh?  The Tolkien Professor?  Was that like The O'Neill, The O'Donnell, The Humongous?

But since an essential part of real skepticism is to investigate those things at which we first look askance, and since I have always loved Tolkien, I decided to check it out.  First I listened to the podcasts of his undergraduate classes at Washington College, then to his Tolkien chats and Q&A sessions, and the Silmarillion Seminar (of blessed memory).  As someone who has read The Lord of the Rings so many times that, if I told you how many, you would roll your eyes and assume I was wearing a costume as I wrote this,* I can reasonably lay claim to being a competent judge.

And let me tell you this: Corey Olsen knows his stuff.

Now don't misunderstand me.  The discussions on the podcasts are only very seldom about whether Balrogs have wings (since of course they don't).  Rather, they are serious literary discussions that explore the ceaselessly amazing world of Middle Earth through careful study of the texts themselves.  At the same time they are also lighthearted, full of humor, and untrammeled by ponderous literary theories.  Instead they pay attention to what the author actually wrote.  Inconceivable.

While Professor Olsen's undergraduate lectures are still available through iTunes and his website (www.tolkienprofessor.com), ever since 2012 he has been embarked on a new adventure, creating and building up The Mythgard Institute, which offers graduate courses online for Master's credit and for auditing. (Tuition for both is quite reasonable.)  While many of the early courses have focused on Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, and Fantasy and Science Fiction, the range of courses and the number of professors have been steadily expanding.  Most recently, for example, Professor Olsen, a Medievalist and Chaucerian by trade, has offered two semesters on Chaucer.  I have audited both of these classes, and rarely have I had so much fun and learned so much at the same time.  I'm thinking of making a pitch for more Middle English next spring or summer.  How about Gawain and the Green Knight and Pearl?

But wait there's more.  In addition to the Mythgard Institute there's also The Mythgard Academy, which since the summer of 2013 has offered free courses on works and authors proposed and voted on by those of us who have made voluntary contributions (think NPR).  But to listen and participate is absolutely free, and if you miss a session the recordings are usually posted within a day or two.  Nor are the readings limited to Tolkien.  We recently had a course on Ender's Game, which raised my opinion of Orson Scott Card as a writer, and in the end of July or beginning of August we'll be starting Frank Herbert's Dune.  I'm very much looking forward to that.

Clearly I am quite pleased to have made this discovery.  I have learned a lot about Tolkien and tons about Chaucer.  I can't find enough good things to say about the job Corey Olsen does.  I just wanted to take the opportunity to say that.

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*Don't own one. Never worn one.  Not that there's anything wrong with that.  It's all in good fun.  And the only convention I've ever been to was the first Star Trek convention in New York when I was eleven.  Even then no pointed ears.