Is That An Allusion To Ulmo and Tuor in "The Great River" (FR 2.ix.380-81)?

... they let the River bear them on at its own pace, having no desire to hasten towards the perils that lay beyond, whichever course they took in the end. Aragorn let them drift with the stream as they wished, husbanding their strength against weariness to come. But he insisted that at least they should start early each day and journey on far into the evening; for he felt in his heart that time was pressing, and he feared that the Dark Lord had not been idle while they lingered in Lorien. 

Nonetheless they saw no sign of an enemy that day, nor the next. The dull grey hours passed without event. As the third day of their voyage wore on the lands changed slowly: the trees thinned and then failed altogether. On the eastern bank to their left they saw long formless slopes stretching up and away toward the sky; brown and withered they looked, as if fire had passed over them, leaving no living blade of green: an unfriendly waste without even a broken tree or a bold stone to relieve the emptiness. They had come to the Brown Lands that lay, vast and desolate, between Southern Mirkwood and the hills of the Emyn Muil. What pestilence or war or evil deed of the Enemy had so blasted all that region even Aragorn could not tell.

Upon the west to their right the land was treeless also, but it was flat, and in many places green with wide plains of grass. On this side of the River they passed forests of great reeds, so tall that they shut out all view to the west, as the little boats went rustling by along their fluttering borders. Their dark withered plumes bent and tossed in the light cold airs, hissing softly and sadly. Here and there through openings Frodo could catch sudden glimpses of rolling meads, and far beyond them hills in the sunset, and away on the edge of sight a dark line, where marched the southernmost ranks of the Misty Mountains. 

There was no sign of living moving things, save birds. Of these there were many: small fowl whistling and piping in the reeds, but they were seldom seen. Once or twice the travellers heard the rush and whine of swan-wings, and looking up they saw a great phalanx streaming along the sky.

'Swans!' said Sam. 'And mighty big ones too!' 

'Yes,' said Aragorn, 'and they are black swans.'

(FR 2.ix.380-81)

The Valar and Ilúvatar are famously obscure in The Lord of the Rings.  While the Dark Power, Sauron, is named and identified as a present actor in the affairs of this world from near the very beginning (FR 1.ii.47, 51), the other Powers are much harder to descry. The best example is of course Elbereth.  She is mentioned by Frodo as early as Three's Company (FR 1.iii.79) as someone whom the High Elves greatly revere. Clearly she is a godlike figure of great power -- she made the stars themselves -- but neither here nor later is she identified as one of the Valar, and it is not suggested that she is anything more than a source of inspiration or illumination to the Elves of Middle-Earth. She is sung of, sung to, invoked (with varying effect), and her name is even used as a password, but, within The Lord of the Rings itself, she is never explained.¹ Manwë, her spouse and ruler of the Valar, receives notice only from Bilbo in a single mention of the 'Elder King' in the poem Eärendil (FR 2.i.235);

Moreover, Frodo's ability in Three's Company to recognize the Elves he meets as High Elves because they call Elbereth's name reveals almost nothing.  Even an atheist, for example, could recognize as Roman Catholic someone heard reciting the Hail Mary, and could know that devout Catholics honor the Virgin Mary with a special reverence, but that does not imply any greater knowledge of the Virgin Mary or Roman Catholicism on the part of the atheist.²

It is likely, moreover, that Frodo knows little or nothing about the Valar in general or Elbereth in particular at this point -- not to mention Eru Ilúvatar -- since he is rather mystified when Gandalf hints at the intervention of Providence within time:

‘There was more than one power at work, Frodo. The Ring was trying to get back to its master. It had slipped from Isildur’s hand and betrayed him; then when a chance came it caught poor Déagol, and he was murdered; and after that Gollum, and it had devoured him. It could make no further use of him: he was too small and mean; and as long as it stayed with him he would never leave his deep pool again. So now, when its master was awake once more and sending out his dark thought from Mirkwood, it abandoned Gollum. Only to be picked up by the most unlikely person imaginable:  Bilbo from the Shire! 

‘Behind that there was something else at work, beyond any design of the Ring-maker. I can put it no plainer than by saying that Bilbo was meant to find the Ring, and not by its maker. In which case you also were meant to have it. And that maybe an encouraging thought.' 

‘It is not,’ said Frodo.  'Though I am not sure that I understand you.' 

(FR 1.ii.56, emphasis original)

One could well regard Frodo's lack of knowledge and clarity here as typical, at least for the hobbits, by whom and from whose viewpoint the Tale is told.  When, for example, Gildor invokes Elbereth's protection for Frodo, his instant response is hardly one of faith and understanding, and not at all unlike his reply to Gandalf: 'But where shall I find courage?... That is what I chiefly need' (FR 1.iii.84).

Another example of this comes in Henneth Annûn.  Faramir and the other Dunedain of Gondor turn to the West for a moment of silence before they eat, as they 'look towards Númenor that was, and beyond that to Elvenhome that is, and to that which is beyond Elvenhome and will ever be' (TT 4.v.676), but this custom is unknown to the hobbits, who are left 'feeling strangely rustic and untutored' (TT 4.v.676).  Here again the Valar are alluded to quite vaguely, not even named, not even in a periphrasis of the kind Elrond had used when he said that 'they who dwell beyond the Sea would not take' the Ring (FR 2.ii.266).  Here reference is buried in an allusion to a nameless land, remote and eternal.

Indeed the word Valar appears only three times in The Lord of the Rings. In Ithilien a soldier of Gondor calls upon them for protection from the Mûmak (TT 4.iv.661). At Aragorn's coronation Gandalf wishes that the days of the King may 'be blessed for as long as the thrones of the Valar endure' (RK 6.v.968).³ And finally in a moment that is as shining and evocative as it is mysterious, the narrator likens Théoden to 'Oromë the Great in the battle of the Valar when the world was young' (RK 5.v.838).

Yet the Valar and Ilúvatar are involved, exerting a subtle but important influence on events from afar that may be detected through seeming coincidence.  Gandalf suggests (but cannot openly say) as much in his remarks to an uncomprehending Frodo in The Shadow of the Past. In the same conversation the wizard also points out that Frodo was 'chosen,' but without saying by whom (FR 1.ii.61), and that '[i]t was the strangest event in the whole history of the Ring so far: Bilbo's arrival just at that time, and putting his hand on it, blindly, in the dark' (FR 1.ii.55-56).⁴ Gildor says of his meeting the hobbits that '[i]n this meeting there may be more than chance' (FR 1.iii.84). Bombadil remarks: 'Just chance brought me then, if chance you call it. It was no plan of mine....' (FR 1.vii.126). And finally Elrond states at the beginning of the Council:

'...The Ring! What shall we do with the Ring, the least of rings, the trifle that Sauron fancies? That is the doom that we must deem. 

'That is the purpose for which you are called hither. Called, I say. though I have not called you to me, strangers from distant lands. You have come and are here met, in this very nick of time, by chance as it may seem. Yet it is not so. Believe rather that it is so ordered that we, who sit here, and none others, must now find counsel for the peril of the world.' 

(FR 2.ii.242)

'Tuor is Led by the Swans to Vinyamar'© Ted Nasmith

We needn't labor this point. It is long established and well understood, and obvious to every attentive reader. What is not so obvious is what looks like an allusion to the Vala Ulmo, the Lord of Waters -- of lakes, streams, and rivers as well as seas -- and to Tuor, an important forefather of Aragorn, an allusion so subtly made and so quickly passed by that I've only just caught it after over four decades of reading The Lord of the Rings. Though I had at times wondered about Aragorn's comment about the swans when I encountered it, I had never given it any further thought in all the years I had known it.

Elsewhere in Tolkien, in works ranging across his entire career of work on the legendarium -- in The Book of Lost Tales, in Of Tuor and his Coming to Gondolin, and in The Silmarillion -- Ulmo is the Vala who most openly involves himself in the affairs of Elves and Men in their war against Morgoth.⁵ And not just then, it would appear: '[n]or has he ever forsaken Middle-earth, and whatsoever may have since befallen of ruin or of change has not ceased to take thought for it, and will not until the end of days' (Silmarillion, 40). So not only did Tolkien continue to cherish the links between Ulmo and Tuor and the swans as important elements in his tales, but he asserts that Ulmo's concern for Middle-earth never ended; and the intertextuality between The Lord of the Rings and the versions of Tuor's tale quoted below harmonizes nicely with Ulmo's ongoing devotion to the affairs of Middle-earth.  Let's turn to those other works for a moment.

One morning while casting his eye along the shore -- and it was then the latest days of summer -- Tuor saw three swans flying high and strong from the northward.  Now these birds he had not before seen in these regions, and he took them for a sign, and said: "Long has my heart been set on a journey far from here; lo! now at length I will follow these swans." Behold, the swans dropped into the water of his cove and there swimming thrice about rose again and winged slowly south along the coast, and Tuor bearing his harp and spear followed them. 

(BoLT 2.152)

Then Ulmo arose and spake to him.... And Ulmo said: 'O Tuor of the lonely heart, I will not that thou dwell for ever in fair places of birds and flowers.... But fare now on thy destined journey and tarry not, for far from hence is thy weird set.  Now thou must seek through the lands for the city of [Gondolin]....

(BoLT 2.155) 

And, maybe, from afar birds saw the fell winter that was to come; for those that were want to go south gathered early to depart, and others that used to dwell in the North came from their homes to Nevrast.  And one day, as Tuor sat upon the shore, he heard the rush and whine of great wings, and he looked up and saw seven white swans flying in a swift wedge southward.  But as they came above him they wheeled and flew suddenly down, and alighted with a great plash and churning of water. 

Now Tuor loved swans, which he knew on the grey pools of Mithrim; and the swan moreover had been the token of Annael and his foster-folk. He rose therefore to greet the birds, and called to them, marvelling to behold that they were greater and prouder than any of their kind that he had seen before; but they beat their wings and uttered harsh cries, as if they were wroth with him and would drive him from the shore.  Then with a great noise they rose again from the water and flew above his head, so that the rush of their wings blew upon him as a whistling wind; and wheeling in a wide circle they ascended into the high air and went away south.

Then Tuor cried aloud: 'Here now comes another sign that I have tarried too long!' And straightaway he climbed to the cliff-top, and there beheld the swans still wheeling on high; but when he turned southward and set out to follow them, they flew swiftly away. 

(Of Tuor and his Coming to Gondolin, in UT, 25-26)

And Tuor came into Nevrast, and looking upon Belegaer the Great Sea he was enamoured of it, and the sound of it and the longing for it were ever in his heart and ear, and an unquiet was on him that took him at last into the depths of the realms of Ulmo. Then he dwelt in Nevrast alone, and the summer of that year passed, and the doom of Nargothrond drew near; but when the autumn came he saw seven great swans flying south, and he knew them for a sign that he had tarried overlong, and he followed their flight along the shores of the sea. Thus he came at length to the deserted halls of Vinyamar beneath Mount Taras, and he entered in, and found there the shield and hauberk, and the sword and helm, that Turgon had left there by the command of Ulmo long before; and he arrayed himself in those arms, and went down to the shore. But there came a great storm out of the west, and out of that storm Ulmo the Lord of Waters arose in majesty and spoke to Tuor as he stood beside the sea. And Ulmo bade him depart from that place and seek out the hidden kingdom of Gondolin; and he gave Tuor a great cloak, to mantle him in shadow from the eyes of his enemies.  

(Silmarillion, 238-39)

While the presence of the swans alone clinches the allusion, I think, there's more here to link these passages than that. The swans in The Lord of the Rings seem to be flying south, just as Tuor's were. For the members of the fellowship detect them only when they hear the whirring of their wings, which suggests that the swans came up from behind them. In both cases they are also of a remarkable size, large even for swans. And like his distant ancestor Tuor, Aragorn has an errand to a white city that is nearly the last bastion of defense against the evil of its age, and the names of their destinations echo each other by sound and etymology: Gondor and Gondolin. Moreover, one of the names of Gondolin in The Book of Lost Tales is Gwarestrin, which means Tower of the Guard, just like Minas Tirith (BoLT 2.158).  Both Tuor and Aragorn feel that they have tarried on their errand.

But why black swans?  It seems too trite to think that Tolkien is here playing with the belief popular from antiquity to the 18th century that black swans did not exist -- the very source of the phrase rara avis -- or with the superstition that associated black animals with evil. Aragorn does not react to them as he did to the spying crows in Hollin (FR 2.iii.284-86). If anything, he seems surprised and pleased by the sight of them. Clearly he regards their color as noteworthy, neither common, which would call for less comment, nor unheard of, which would call for more. But what makes it noteworthy?

In Tolkien swans are most commonly identified or associated with ships, and in a lengthy scene, almost the last before this one, Galadriel comes in a swanship to bid farewell to the company, who have already embarked in their boats.

They turned a sharp bend in the river, and there, sailing proudly down the stream toward them, they saw a swan of great size. The water rippled on either side of the white breast beneath its curving neck. Its beak shone like burnished gold, and its eyes glinted like jet set in yellow stones; its huge white wings were half lifted. A music came down the river as it drew nearer; and suddenly they perceived that it was a ship, wrought and carved with elven-skill in the likeness of a bird. 

(FR 2.viii.372)

But if swans mean ships, then black swans mean black ships. What of that? Again in a scene during the company's sojourn in Lothlórien, in the powerful and memorable vision Frodo sees in Galadriel's mirror, we find black ships:

The mist cleared and he saw a sight which he had never seen before but knew at once: the Sea. Darkness fell. The sea rose and raged in a great storm. Then he saw against the Sun, sinking blood-red into a wrack of clouds, the black outline of a tall ship with torn sails riding up out of the West. Then a wide river flowing through a populous city. Then a white fortress with seven towers. And then again a ship with black sails, but now it was morning again, and the water rippled with light, and a banner bearing the emblem of a white tree shone in the sun. A smoke as of fire and battle arose, and again the sun went down in a burning red that faded into a grey mist; and into the mist a small ship passed away, twinkling with lights. 

(FR 2.vii.364)

The first black ship here is that of Elendil, whose heir Aragorn is, and who is also a descendant of Tuor.  Like Tuor, Elendil escaped from the destruction of his homeland to found a new hope. The second is the ship captured from the Corsairs of Umbar in which Aragorn arrives at the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, just in time to turn the tide of battle and save Minas Tirith.

For this allusion to have weight for us, we need to know all this.  That is not so for Aragorn, however. Nothing suggests that he knew of Frodo's vision, but he did not need such knowledge to recall the story of Tuor and Ulmo and the swans here, and therefore to see in them an omen for himself. How much more he might have seen here is debatable.  He was familiar with the Corsairs of Umbar and the danger they posed to Gondor from the time of his service there decades earlier (RK App. A 1055), and black sails appear to have been an identifying characteristic of their ships (RK 5.vi.846-47; vii.853).  Both Galadriel and Elrond subsequently direct his attention that way, as if reminding him of something he already knows (TT 3.v.503; RK 5.ii.775, 781); and once he takes control of the palantír of Orthanc he sees the threat from the Corsairs and their black-sailed ships (RK 5.ii.780-81).

Of the allusion alone can we be sure. As for the rest we can only speculate. Yet I would not find it surprising if Tolkien, whose attention to detail in such matters is a constant revelation, left such an interpretation of this omen there to be found, just as he left the allusion to the tale of Tuor and Ulmo and the swans hanging by a single clue, Aragorn's remark upon their color.

____________________________

¹ I am attending here to only those mentions of the Valar and Eru contained in The Lord of the Rings proper, not the appendices, which within the conceit of authorship are represented in the Prologue as later additions (FR 14-16). Elbereth invoked: FR 1.xi.195, xii.198, 214; sung to: FR 1.iii.79; 2.i.238, TT 4.x.729 (perhaps also an invocation), RK 6.ix.1028; sung of FR 2.i.236, viii.377-78; password: RK 6.i.912-13.

At FR 1.xii.198 Aragorn states that Frodo's invocation of Elbereth on Weathertop (1.xi.195-96) had some effect on the Witch-king, but when Frodo does it again at the Ford of Bruinen it appears to have none at all (1.xii.214).  The resolution of this seeming contradiction probably lies in the greater desperation of the Nazgûl to retake the Ring before it reaches the comparative safety of Rivendell. This harmonizes with Aragorn's earlier description of their methods: they will not attack openly themselves, 'not until they are desperate, not while all the long leagues of Eriador lie before us' (FR 1.x.174).  On this showing Strider's 'leagues' could be those between Bree and Rivendell.

² I do not suggest here any connection between Elbereth and the Virgin Mary, except perhaps in the degree of reverence the Elves show her. The example means to indicate that the ability to identify someone as belonging to a certain group because of a reference that person makes does not entail any greater familiarity with that person's beliefs.

³ It is interesting to note that the word Valar is used in Gondor and by the people of Gondor. This contrasts with Elrond's avoidance of the word. Without more evidence it is difficult to say much, but this may reflect a difference in human and elven attitudes towards the Valar.

⁴ Gandalf then goes on to say: 'There was more than one power at work, Frodo. The Ring was trying to get back to its master.... So now, when its master was awake once more and sending out his dark thought from Mirkwood, it abandoned Gollum. Only to be picked up by the most unlikely person imaginable: Bilbo from the Shire!' We appear to have here an example of what Ilúvatar tells Melkor in the Ainulindalë: 

'And thou, Melkor, shalt see that no theme may be played that hath not its uttermost source in me, nor can any alter the music in my despite. For he that attempteth this shall prove but mine instrument in the devising of things more wonderful, which he himself hath not imagined.'

(Silmarillion, 17)

⁵ The Silmarillion, 26-27, 40, 103, 114-15, 125-26, 155, 158, 196, 209, 212, 238-41, 243-44, 247, 249.

Swanships and Swanroads in Tolkien and Beowulf

From the earliest days of the legendarium the swanships were present.  In 1917 (or so) Tolkien wrote in The Book of Lost Tales, Part One¹:

Now do the Solosimpi take great joy of [?their] birds, and of the swans, and behold upon the lakes of Tol Eressëa already they fare on rafts of fallen timber, and some harness thereto swans and speed across the waters; but the more hardy dare out upon the sea and the gulls draw them, and when Ulmo saw that he was very glad.  For lo! the Teleri and the Noldoli complain much to Manwë of the separation of the Solosimpi, and the Gods desire them to be drawn to Valinor; but Ulmo cannot yet think of any device save by help of Ossë and the Oarni, and will not be humbled to this.  But now does he fare home in haste to Aulë, and those twain get them speedily to Tol Eressëa, and Oromë was with them, and there is the first hewing of trees that was done in the world outside Valinor. Now does Aulë of the sawn wood of pine and oak make great vessels like to the bodies of swans, and these he covers with the bark of silver birches, or .... with gathered feathers with the oily plumage of Ossë's birds, and they are nailed and [?sturdily] riveted and fastened with silver, and he carves the prows for them like the necks of upheld swans, but they are hollow and have no feet; and by cords of great strength and slimness are gulls and petrels harnessed to them, for they were tame to the hands of the Solosimpi, because their hearts were so turned by Ossë.

(BoLT 1.124)

And though Tolkien never wrote more than a few scraps and notes of Eärendil's tale, he nevertheless had at least one detail of his ship clear in his mind. It was 'shaped as a swan of pearls' (The Book of Lost Tales, Part Two, 263).  Tuor, Eärendil's father, had a boat just like those of the Elves of Tol Eressëa, 'with a prow fashioned like to the neck of a swan' (BoLT 2.151), and he was subsequently guided by swans on a path that led him in time to Gondolin, where he adopted the swan's wing as the sign of his house (2.152-160).²  In his later years, after Gondolin had fallen, Tuor built a ship called 'Swanwing' in which he sought to sail to Valinor (2.253-55, 260, 263, 265), on whose shores was Alqualuntë (later Alqualondë), 'Swan-Haven,' where the ships of the Solosimpi were berthed (BoLT 1.163-64). 

In Tolkien's painting of Taniquetil from the 1920s, we can glimpse just such a ship

in the sea at the foot of the mountain:

Nor does Tolkien abandon the swanships as Middle Earth develops.  The one in which Galadriel comes to bid farewell to the Fellowship is only the most famous example from The Lord of the Rings (FR 2.viii.372-73):

They turned a sharp bend in the river, and there, sailing proudly down the stream toward them, they saw a swan of great size. The water rippled on either side of the white breast beneath its curving neck. Its beak shone like burnished gold, and its eyes glinted like jet set in yellow stones; its huge white wings were half lifted. A music came down the river as it drew nearer; and suddenly they perceived that it was a ship, wrought and carved with elven skill in the likeness of a bird.... 

Aragorn stayed his boat as the Swan-ship drew alongside.... 

The Swan passed on slowly to the hythe, and they turned their boats and followed it.

In the song Bilbo sings at Rivendell he can still say of Eärendil's ship: '[h]er prow he fashioned like a swan' (FR 2.i.234); and the banner of the Prince of Dol Amroth bears 'a white ship like a silver swan upon blue water' (RK 5.viii.871; cf. 6.iv.953). We can also find swans and swanships in The Silmarillion (61, 238), and the link between these birds and Tuor is maintained in the lengthy fragment Of Tuor and His Coming to Gondolin in Unfinished Tales (25-28). 

So clearly the images of the swans and the swan-ships had an abiding appeal for Tolkien, but where the swanships come from is a question that to my knowledge has not been answered.  There are a number of possibilities, and though I incline more to one than the others, it is not implausible or unlikely that several influences combined to produce the swanships.

The first is simple, and might seem ridiculous.  Indeed it might be ridiculous, but that in itself does not rule it out.  When I first read of the swanship of Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings, I found it odd, but I could visualize it immediately.  At that time I was a little boy spending my summers in a small beach town adjacent to Asbury Park, NJ, and in the lake between the two towns there was a swan-boat:

As I was considering this, and actually inclining to dismiss it, the latest issue of The Tolkien Society's newsletter, Amon Hen (253), arrived in my mailbox.  Inside, by chance, was a request from one member, Mr Anthony Roland Clent, to contact him if anyone remembered 'the "Swan" boats at Hinksey boating pool' at Oxford in the 1940s and 1950s, which he saw as a possible source of inspiration for Tolkien. And while I don't consider chance-if-chance-you-call-it an adequate basis for scholarship, it made me think twice.  Now the swan-boats at Hinksey Park cannot be the inspiration for the swanships themselves, since the park did not exist until the mid 1930s,³ and both The Book of Lost Tales and the painting of Taniquetil predate this. It's quite possible, however, that the boats at Hinksey influenced Tolkien's description of them in The Lord of the Rings.⁴ As the gentleman from The Tolkien Society put it in his reply to my email:

I cannot but think that Tolkien used the idea of these two boats at Hinksey for his Swan boat of Galadriel. The description is uncannily similar to how I remember them, with their "white wings half lifted", and I guess Tolkien must have seen them if he ever walked down that way. They were not, alas, propelled by two elves clad in white, using black paddles....

For a medievalist and a man of his time like Tolkien inspiration might also be found in the tale, first found in the late 12th century, of the Knight of the Swan and more recently in Wagner's Lohengrin. In sum, a mysterious knight arrives in a boat drawn by a swan to rescue a woman in peril. Here there clearly seems to be a link to the passage of The Book of Lost Tales I quoted above, which describes the swans pulling the rafts on the lakes of Tol Eressëa.

Lohengrin Postcard ca. 1900

17th Century Woodcut

But while this might explain the swans drawing the boats in the lakes, it does not explain the swanships themselves.  For this we must look elsewhere.  Fortunately an answer seems to be ready at hand, in a source that will surprise no one.

                             Hét him ýþlidan
gódne gegyrwan;   cwæþ, hé gúþcyning
ofer swanrade        sécean wolde
mærne þéoden,      þá him wæs manna ðearf.

(Beowulf  198-201)

                             He ordered his ship built,
A great wave-walker, and said he would seek
Over the long sea, the swan's road,
that well-known king needing brave new men.

(transl. Williamson)

Swanrad, the swan-road, as the context makes clear, is a kenning for the sea, much like the better known hronrad, the whale-road (Beowulf 10). But there's something odd about it.  Swans may be water fowl, but they are not seabirds.  That Tolkien perceived this is evident: in the lakes of Tol Eressëa swans pull the rafts of the Elves; but in the salt sea petrels and gulls are harnessed to the swan-ships.  Robert Woodward resolved this oddity by pointing out that swanrad is in fact a double kenning, in which swan is itself first a kenning for ship, and then is joined to rad to become a kenning for the sea.⁵ And it's only a few lines later, as Woodward notes, that the poet likens the 'neck' of the ship to a bird's:

Gewát þá ofer wægholm    winde gefýsed
flota fámiheals    fugle gelícost,

(Beowulf  217-18)

Over the scending sea, driven by the wind,
Went the ship, foamy-necked much like a bird,

(transl. mine)⁶ 

Heals, the second element in the adjective fámiheals, means both prow and neck, and the poet plays ably on both these senses in fámiheals fugle gelícost.  Birds don't move fast enough through the water to make the sea foam around them, but ships do; and ships don't have necks, but birds do. 'Its foamy prow so like a bird's neck' catches, I think, the double sense of it, but loses the poem's eloquent compression. Nevertheless, the poet evokes the image of a bird here to describe Beowulf's ship, and it can hardly be an accident that seventeen lines earlier he had chosen to use swanrad when he could just as easily have used hronrad,⁷ but instead of the whale he conjured the swan, whose neck curves so like the prow of a ship of this era.

The famous Oseberg ship, built ca. 820

And Tolkien's close attention to this passage could not be more clear.  He chose these very lines (210-228) to illustrate his explanation of the workings of alliterative verse in his essay On Translating Beowulf (61-71), in which he also already discussed swanrad, though the meaning of rad was his subject there (51-52). We have three separate renderings of fámiheals fugle gelícost by him: in verse as 'foam-throated, like a flying bird;' in prose as 'with foam at the throat most like unto a bird;' and a literal prose version in the Old English word order, 'foamy-neck (to) bird likest.'⁸ 

If, moreover, we turn back for a moment to consider Galadriel's swan-ship, 'wrought and carved with elven skill in the likeness of a bird,' we can see an interesting progression in Tolkien's description of it.  When the members of the fellowship first see it, they take it to be a proper 'swan.' Then they realize that it is in fact a 'swan-ship.'  And finally it becomes a 'Swan.'  From 'swan' to 'swan-ship' to 'Swan,' it's like watching the birth of a kenning.  If Tolkien did not recognize the swan in swanrad as itself a kenning for ship, he turned it into one here.

Now Old English possesses a second word for swan, ilfette/ilfettu, which establishes another link to the swanships and the Elves in The Book of Lost Tales.  In a marginal gloss on the words 'Kópas Alqualuntë, the Haven of the Swanships,' Tolkien wrote Ielfethyþ. This word, Christopher Tolkien explains,

is Old English, representing the interpretation of the Elvish name made by Eriol in his own language: the first element meaning 'swan' (ielfetu), and the second (later 'hithe') meaning 'haven, landing place.'

(BoLT 1.164)

As Christopher Tolkien's note indicates, ielfethyþ is his father's coinage through the character of Eriol, the seafarer who finds his way to Tol Eressëa and learns the stories told in The Book of Lost Tales (1.13-27). Why use ielfethyþ when swanhyþ would have worked just as well? Not to conceal one connection by choosing the less obvious synonym, but, I would argue, to suggest another by echoing ilfe, the Old English for elves, the entry for which directly precedes ilfette in Bosworth Toller.⁹

Hyþ, the second element in ielfethyþ, also has echoes in this connection since 'hithe' is used by Tolkien only to describe the landing place where the swan-ship of Galadriel lands; he spells it 'hythe' in an archaic manner evocative of Old English; and the three times the word 'hythe' appears here are the only three times the word appears in The Lord of the Rings (FR 2.viii.371, 373, 377).  Except for Christopher Tolkien's note above, it also does not appear, in either spelling, in The Hobbit, The Silmarillion, The Book of Lost Tales, or Unfinished Tales.  In an author so careful of his words, so knowledgeable about them, and so inclined to archaic words in the right context, the fact that he uses 'hythe' three times here and nowhere else indicates great deliberateness in choosing it.  It was not merely an old word that meant 'landing.'

On balance then there seems to be ample evidence for tracing Tolkien's inspiration for the swanships to the combination of swanrad and fámiheals fugle gelícost. Other influences are not to be ignored for other aspects of the swanships, like the Knight of the Swan and the likelihood that Tolkien saw swanboats at Hinksey Park. Michael Martinez has summarized still other likely reasons for the imagery of swans in Tolkien.  But the ships themselves first sailed the swanroad.

_____________________________________

¹ For those not familiar with The Book of Lost Tales, a couple of quick observations may be useful. First, it contains early versions of many stories that we later see in The Silmarillion, but these stories often differ greatly in emphasis, tone, style, names, and characterization (to name a few). Some find these differences as surprising as The Silmarillion itself is to those who have known only The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. The Book of Lost Tales, however, is as interesting a work in its own right as it is as a precursor to the later tales. Second, Christopher Tolkien performed heroic work on chaotic manuscripts to come up with a publishable version, reading nearly unreadable handwriting set down in faded 70 year old pencil on paper that had sometimes held older versions which had been erased and overwritten. No doubt an electron microscope and a palantír would have come in handy.

For the date see The Book of Lost Tales, Part One (Boston 1984) 1.203; The Book of Lost Tales, Part Two (Boston 1984) 2.146-47; Unfinished Tales (1981) 4-5.

² At BoLT 2.160 Tuor names himself as being 'of the house of the Swan.' He seems to have taken this description to himself rather than inheriting it: 'This [dwelling] by slow labor [Tuor] adorned with fair carvings of the beasts and trees and flowers and birds that he knew about the waters of Mithrim, and ever among them was the Swan the chief, for Tuor loved this emblem and it became the sign of himself, his kindred and folk thereafter' (2.152).

³ Hinksey Park was built on the grounds of the former Oxford Waterworks, which were purchased for this purpose in 1934.  See here.

⁴ I contacted the gentleman who had placed the notice in Amon Hen by email, to which he was kind enough to reply as quoted.  Unfortunately he did not have a photograph of his swan-boats, and I have so far been unable to find one.

⁵ Robert H. Woodward, 'Swanrad in Beowulf,' Modern Language Notes 69 (1954) 544-46.  He also identifies parallels in Old Norse using svan.

⁶ I supply my own translation here because I think a more literal rendering is necessary to the point being made. I also think Williamson's otherwise excellent translation of Beowulf stumbles on fámiheals fugle gelícost, for which he gives us 'the foam-necked floater.' To be sure flota is a rather colorless word for ship, but the super-literal 'floater' conceals more than it reveals. And revelation is what we seek here.

⁷ On hronrad see Tolkien, Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary (2014) 141-43, where he argues that "'whale road'-- which suggests a sort of semi-submarine steam engine running along submerged metal rails over the Atlantic" is not quite the right translation for this word.

⁸ The poetic and the literal prose translations come from On Translating Beowulf, 63 and 69 respectively, reprinted in in The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays (London, 2006), and the prose from Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary (New York 2014).

⁹ What the difference may be between swan and ilfette is unknown to me. Hexam. 8 suggests that to some there was one: sume fugelas beóþ langsweorede swá swá swanas ond ilfette. 'Some birds are long-necked like swanas and ilfette. According to Bosworth Toller, in Icelandic svanr, the cognate of swan is only poetical, while alpt/alft, the cognate of ilfette, was the normal word for swan, but it does not appear from the citations in Bosworth Toller that Old English maintained so neat a distinction.

The Naming of Sméagol

In The Taming of Sméagol a newly captured Gollum asks the hobbits about their destination:

'And where are they going in these cold hard lands, we wonders, yes we wonders?' He looked up at them, and a faint light of cunning and eagerness flickered for a second in his pale blinking eyes.

 ....  

Frodo looked straight into Gollum's eyes which flinched and twisted away.  'You know that, or you guess well enough, Sméagol,' he said quietly and sternly. 'We are going to Mordor, of course.  And you know the way there, I believe.' 

'Ach! sss!' said Gollum, covering his ears with his hands, as if such frankness, and the open speaking of the names, hurt him.

(TT 4.i.616)

Those last words -- 'as if such frankness, and the open speaking of the names, hurt him' --  bear special notice.  The names -- plural and definite, including both Mordor and Sméagol  --  assert a sureness about the truth of this explanation that makes the words 'as if' seem a courtesy paid in passing.  In a legendarium born from a single name such an emphasis on names and their power is never to be ignored. And so, when I noticed not long ago that the narrator, while speaking in his own voice, rarely calls Gollum Sméagol, it led me to investigate the use of this name. Let's look at The Two Towers since that is where it occurs most often by far.

For starters, the name Sméagol is used there 145 times, all of them, unsurprisingly, in Book Four.  Of these instances ninety-five are Gollum referring to or addressing himself.  That's 65 percent of the total.  How fascinating that after being seemingly hurt by hearing his name openly spoken Gollum then proceeds to use it with such tiresome frequency (even more tiresome if you're counting).  It suggests that Frodo's calling Gollum by his true name has opened a door within him that had long been shut.  Now back in The Shadow of the Past Gandalf had said of Gollum that:

'There was a little corner of his 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)  

It was also in this very conversation with Gandalf that Frodo learned Gollum's real name, which Gandalf, there can be little doubt, had learned directly from Gollum.¹ It is further true that Gandalf calls him Sméagol only in telling the story of how he came by the Ring five hundred years earlier; in speaking of the 'present' he always calls him Gollum.  So even quite early in the Tale we can see a connection established in Frodo's presence between Sméagol and the other 'forgotten things' of Gollum's past. We also see, later in the same conversation, Gandalf express the admittedly wan hope that 'Gollum can be cured before he dies' (FR 1.ii.59).

Thus, by addressing Gollum as Sméagol, Frodo evokes (and perhaps seeks to evoke), the memory of these things, just as Gandalf implies Bilbo had done.  Yet the portrait of Gollum is too complex and cunning for evocation to lead simply to reformation, even if it opens the door to the hope of a cure. The signals from Gollum remain mixed throughout, just like Sméagol and Gollum themselves.  (I almost feel I should say 'himselves'.)

And how could it be otherwise when the first two times Gollum uses his own name he equates Sméagol with the Ring itself: 'Don't ask Sméagol.  Poor, poor Sméagol, he went away long ago.  They took his Precious, and he's lost now' (TT 4.i.616)?  No Precious, no Sméagol.  The implication of this is clear. Gollum also sees a distinction between himself and the lost Sméagol, though it is not the same distinction as Gandalf saw.  For in Gollum's mind Sméagol was lost not with the murder of Déagol centuries before, but with the loss of the Ring to Bilbo.

The complexity of this portrait is also clear in the first thing Gollum does after he is called Sméagol.  Once Sam and Frodo pretend to trust him and feign sleep, he tries to escape (4.i.617), making no attempt to recover the Ring he has sought since the desire of it drove him from the darkness beneath the Misty Mountains 75 years earlier (FR 1.ii.57; RK B 1089).  The hobbits  --  'The thieves, the thieves, the filthy little thieves.  Where are they with my Precious? Curse them. We hates them,' (TT 4.i.613)  --   seem to be asleep, all at his mercy now, and his Precious is right at hand.  And Gollum runs (TT 4.i.617).

Nor does the picture grow less complicated after Frodo compels him to swear by the Ring in the next scene and 'the new Gollum, the Sméagol' begins to emerge.  For this Gollum, too, is problematic and conflicted.  Despite 'the Sméagol's' usefulness and friendliness, Sam dislikes and mistrusts him even more 'if possible' than the old Gollum (TT 4.i.619), and Frodo trusts him only provisionally (TT 4.i.624, iii. 640, iv.649).

And there are few things that demonstrate Frodo's much underestimated caution towards Gollum more than the fact that Frodo calls him Sméagol only when addressing him directly. The sole exception is when Frodo, in a highly formal context, responds to Faramir's asking him whether he takes 'this creature, this Sméagol under [his] protection.' (TT 4.vi.690).  In addition to still addressing him as Gollum at times (TT 4.i.614, 615; iii.640), Frodo also still thinks of him as Gollum (4.i.615; iii.643; vi.686-87), which he continues to do in The Return of the King (RK 6.i.914; ii.929; iii.947).

This practice of Frodo the character is supported by the custom of Frodo the narrator, who refers to him as Gollum 251 times in Book Four, but calls him Sméagol a total of seven times in only three places.²  The first is in the title of the initial chapter of Book Four, The Taming of Sméagol, a title for which I believe the text suggests a 'tricksy' meaning  --  namely, that it is not Gollum, but Sméagol, who is tamed.  However that may be, it is nevertheless a chapter title, and so more of a comment upon the narrative from the editorial heights than a part of the narrative itself.  On the second occasion the narrator uses 'Sméagol' five times, in the famous scene, witnessed by Sam, in which the two different 'thoughts' that are Gollum argue with each other  (TT 4.ii.632-34). Here the narrator's use of Sméagol helps to differentiate clearly between these 'thoughts,' separating the more threatening Gollum from the less threatening Sméagol.³

In the third instance the narrator adopts a high mythic style to trace the history of 'Shelob the Great, last child of Ungoliant to trouble the unhappy world,' and explain Gollum's knowledge of her:

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)

Note how the very syntax of 'Sméagol' here, in apposition and logically subordinate to the grammatical subject 'Gollum,' mirrors the reality it describes.  'Sméagol' is parallel but secondary, intimately linked yet adjectival, a rhetorical alternative to the repetition of the subject.  Sméagol modifies Gollum, and yet his role as the one 'who pried into all dark holes' must have been crucial to finding her.

This passage, moreover, is like a bookend or a counterbalance to the passage in The Shadow of the Past quoted above (FR 1.ii.55), in which Gandalf speaks of the pleasant memories Bilbo's kindly voice stirred in Gollum, and of the bit of light that still reached him out of the past.  Whatever slender hope that passage seemed to offer, this seems to take away, and conclusively so since it comes after Gollum's betrayal of the hobbits and the missed opportunity to repent upon the stairs (TT 4.viii.714).⁴ Indeed the grimness of that final coordinate clause ('and the darkness...regret.') makes Gollum's failure to repent, the necessary precursor to a cure, feel almost predictable, as if we should have known.⁵ That is not the case, as I believe the larger context of the Tale in Book Four demonstrates, but it adds further complexity. Gollum's being cut off from light and regret both makes repentance more difficult for him, and shows clearly how strong the urge to repent must have been for him to get as close to it as he does.

If we turn to Sam's uses of Sméagol, it is clear that he, too, becomes increasingly aware of the complications that the very notion of a Sméagol poses for dealing with Gollum.  Aside from trusting 'the new Gollum, the Sméagol' less than the old (4.i.619), he's at first fairly sure the distinction won't make a difference in practice: 'Sméagol or Gollum, he won't change his habits in a hurry, I'll warrant' (4.ii.622-23). But maintaining that attitude soon proves challenging:

Sam frowned.  If he could have bored holes in Gollum with his eyes, he would have done.  His mind was full of doubt.  To all appearances Gollum was genuinely distressed and anxious to help Frodo.  But Sam, remembering the overheard debate, found it hard to believe that the long submerged Sméagol had come out on top: that voice at any rate had not had the last word in the debate.  Sam's guess was that the Sméagol and Gollum halves (or what in his own mind he called Slinker and Stinker) had made a truce and a temporary alliance: neither wanted the Enemy to get the Ring; both wished to keep Frodo from capture, and under their eye, as long as possible  -- at any rate as long as Stinker still had a chance of laying hands on his 'Precious'.  Whether there really was another way into Mordor Sam doubted.

(TT 4.iii.638-39)

Yet alongside his doubts and suspicions Sam also arrives at moments here and there where he displays something I can only call 'not-unkindliness' towards Gollum.  In Ithilien, for example, when Gollum brings Sam the rabbits he requests, Sam offers to cook for Sméagol in some surprising future that no one could have expected Sam ever to envision:

'But be good Sméagol and fetch me the herbs, and I'll think better of you.  What's more, if you turn over a new leaf, and keep it turned, I'll cook you some taters one of these days. I will: fried fish and chips served by S. Gamgee.'

(TT 4.iv.654)

I want to emphasize here --  since I don't think I had ever noticed this before now, and had to consult six different editions dating back to the 1960s to be fairly sure there was no typo --  that the correct reading of the text clearly seems to be what I have reproduced above: 'But be good Sméagol and....' That is, while Sam is indeed addressing Gollum directly here, he is not calling him by name (which would be 'But be good, Sméagol, and....').  He is telling him to be 'good Sméagol' rather than 'bad Sméagol,' namely Gollum. It's a subtle difference, but it suggests an awareness on Sam's part that a real change in Gollum may be possible, even if not inevitable or, for that matter, at all likely.

This fits in both with the banter that goes on between Sam and Gollum in the passage, especially Sam's mockery of Gollum's manner of speech just two paragraphs above, and Sam's telling Frodo when he wakes up that the rabbits are 'a present from Sméagol...though I fancy Gollum's regretting them now' (TT 4.iv.655). But neither has Sam, in asking Sméagol to hunt for them and in speaking to him not unkindly, forgotten who they are dealing with.  For just that very morning Sam had come across in the woods the remnants of a 'dreadful feast and slaughter....he said nothing: the bones were best left in peace and not pawed and routed by Gollum' (TT 4.iv.651).

And not only that: as they are eating the stewed rabbit a little later Sam warns Frodo that they should not both fall asleep together: 'I don't feel too sure of [Gollum], There's a good deal of Stinker -- the bad Gollum, if you understand me -- in him still, and it's getting stronger again' (TT 4.iv.655-56).  Sam has not forgotten the overheard conversation between Slinker and Stinker, in which Gollum had had the last word, a word that had dismayed even Sméagol: 'She might help.  She might, yes' (TT 4.ii.633).

Sméagol/Gollum is a complex, tormented soul.  Gandalf felt that a cure for him was not beyond all hope, and Frodo thought that he was 'not altogether wicked' (TT 4.vi.691) but Faramir's assessment that 'malice eats [this creature] like a canker, and the evil is growing' (4.vi.691) is also correct.  Even Sam, as hostile and suspicious as he usually is of Sméagol/Gollum, is well aware of the straining, shifting currents of good and evil within him.  The one thing that this examination of the use of 'Sméagol' has told us is that there is no hard and fast, black and white, split between the two 'thoughts' or, as Sam sees it, 'halves' that are Sméagol and Gollum.  He is as trackless and treacherous as the Dead Marshes themselves.

The two characters who know him best, Frodo and Sam, are ambivalent about him in different degrees.  Frodo does not trust him, and is not fooled by him.  He knows he's dangerous, and that even the promise made on the Ring itself will only hold him for so long.  But Frodo's experience with the Ring since The Shadows of the Past has changed him.  (And not just what he has suffered himself, but what he has seen others suffer because of the Ring, specifically Boromir, who tried to take the Ring from him by force mere days before he meets Gollum and shows him mercy.) For him calling Gollum Sméagol is an attempt to reach the 'little corner of his mind that,' as Gandalf said 'was still his own,' Frodo does so out of Pity, not self-interest.  That he still calls him Gollum sometimes and thought and later wrote of him as Gollum probably reflects his understanding of how meager the hope of curing him was, and perhaps also the reality of how the Tale turned out.  In the end he proved to be Gollum, and so he was called, but it was a very near run thing.

Sam, ever protective and fearful for his Master, has not yet learned Pity.  His experience of the Ring and his seeming failure of Frodo lie before him yet.  He has also heard the Sméagol/Gollum debate and seen Gollum's hands grasping for a sleeping Frodo's throat.  So, while he can be not unkindly to Sméagol and can allow a glimmer of hope for him, he cannot forget the growing danger Gollum poses.  And it's true that Gollum merits his suspicions, even at the moment of his near repentance,⁶ but as Bilbo, Gandalf, and Frodo saw, and as Sam will see (RK 6.iii.944), Sméagol deserves his Pity.

In so narrow a view as I have taken here, it is all too easy to mistake, to misunderstand, to misrepesent, unwillingly, uniwttingly, the complex joint portrait of all three of the main characters of Book Four.  What is really needed is an in depth, page by page exploration at length of the rich web woven here.

______________________________________________________

¹While it is nowhere explicitly stated that Gandalf learned the name Sméagol from Gollum himself, there really is no other possibility. Note how in telling Frodo the story of Sméagol and Déagol Gandalf witholds the information that Sméagol and Gollum are one until the very end. It may be that he's trying to set Frodo up to feel pity for Gollum when he reveals their identity.  If so, he fails, for the moment.  Later, when Faramir reaches Minas Tirith with the news that he had seen Frodo and Sam with Gollum, Gandalf says: '...my heart guessed that Frodo and Gollum would meet before the end' (RK 5.iv.815).  It is tempting to read this presentiment back into his conversation with Frodo at Bag End, but it may not be justified.

²'Gollum' occurs 305 times in Book Four. Fifty-four times it is used in direct address or direct speech by a character or in 'the gollum noise.' The other 251 times belong to the narrator.  Gollum actually never calls himself 'Gollum' as far as I have been able to find.  I am not counting the noise he makes in his throat as a form of self-address, even if others derived a name for him from it.  The text uses capitalization and italics to make clear the distinction between the 'gollum noise' and Gollum used as a name. Sam's 'Gollum! I'll give him gollum in his throat, if I ever get my hands on his neck' (TT 4.i.604) is the perfect illustration.  For further examples, see TT 3.iii.455-56; 4.i.613, 614, 615, 616.  Oddly enough, at least as far back as the 1960s American editions of The Lord of the Rings, but not of The Hobbit, were italicizing the 'gollum noise.'

³'Thought' is the word used in that scene to describe the two different aspects of Gollum that are speaking.  We would be quite naturally inclined to call them 'personalities,' but not Tolkien of course.  Aside from the fact that 'personality' as we mean it here is a coinage of only the late 18th century (OED s.v. 2), he probably would have disliked it for all of the freight of Psychology that it carried with it.  But in any event the word would have been ill suited stylistically for The Lord of the Rings.  On the other hand, however, 'thought' used in this sense seems unparalleled in recent centuries, though not entirely new.  The OED s.v. 1b shows an early meaning (two citations from the Lindisfarne Gospels, ca 950) which clearly appears to have the sense 'mind.'

⁴I am currently preparing a paper on the scene of Gollum's near repentance for presentation at Mythmoot III in January 2015. I will of course also post that paper here, but likely not for some time yet.

⁵This clause has always sounded to me like a dim and dark echo of the final verse of the 23rd psalm: 'Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.'

⁶A point I owe to Corey Olsen.  See The Two Towers, Class 08: Doom and Great Deeds from about 25:00 onwards.

_______________________________

The tabulation below presents the uses of 'Sméagol' in the order in which they occur, separated by chapter (starting in The Two Towers, since the bulk of the uses occur there and since the story there is our focus), and annotated with  speaker and form of speech.  Having to count, over and over, the number of times Gollum calls himself 'Sméagol' gives one a new and better understanding of why Strider gagged Gollum while he marched him to the halls of Thranduil.


FrDA = Frodo, the Character, in Direct Address to Gollum
FrDS  = Frodo, the Character, in Direct Speech about Gollum
GS     = Gollum, addressing or referring to himself
FrN    = Frodo the Narrator.
SDA  = Sam, in Direct Address to Gollum
SDS   = Sam, in Direct Speech about Gollum
ST      = Sam's Thoughts as reported by the narrator.
FaDA = Faramir, in Direct Address to Gollum
FaDS  = Faramir, in Direct Speech about Gollum
GaDS = Gandalf, in Direct Speech about Gollum

Sméagol in The Two Towers:

The Taming of Sméagol:

01. 4.i.603 Title of Chapter = FrN
02. 4.i.616 FrDA
03. 4.i.616 FrDA
04. 4.i.616 GS
05. 4.i.616 GS
06. 4.i.618 GS
07. 4.i.618 GS
08. 4.i.618 FrDA
09. 4.i.618 GS
10. 4.i.618 GS
11. 4.i.618 FrDA
12. 4.i.618 GS
13. 4.i.619 ST
14. 4.i.619 GS
15. 4.i.619 GS
16. 4.i.619 GS

The Passage of the Marshes

17. 4.ii.620 GS
18. 4.ii.621 GS
19. 4.ii.621 GS
20. 4.ii.622 FrDA
21. 4.ii.622 GS
22. 4.ii.622 GS
23. 4.ii.622 GS
24. 4.ii.622 GS
25. 4.ii.622 GS
26  4.ii.622 SDS
27. 4.ii.623 GS
28. 4.ii.624 GS
29. 4.ii.625 FrDA
30. 4.ii.625 GS
31. 4.ii.625 GS
32. 4.ii.625 GS
33. 4.ii.625 GS
33. 4.ii.628 GS
35. 4.ii.628 GS
36. 4.ii.628 ST
37. 4.ii.628 GS
38. 4.ii.629 GS
39. 4.ii.629 GS
40. 4.ii.629 GS
41. 4.ii.632 FrN
42. 4.ii.632 GS
43. 4.ii.633 GS
44. 4.ii.633 GS
45. 4.ii.633 GS
46. 4.ii.633 FrN
47. 4.ii.633 GS
48. 4.ii.633 FrN
49. 4.ii.633 FrN
50. 4.ii.634 FrN
51. 4.ii.634 GS
52. 4.ii.634 GS

The Black Gate Is Closed

53. 4.iii.637 GS
54. 4.iii.637 GS
55. 4.iii.637 GS
56. 4.iii.637 GS
57. 4.iii.637 GS
58. 4.iii.637 GS (quoted back, inaccurately, at  # 73)
59. 4.iii.637 GS
60. 4.iii.638 GS
61. 4.iii.638 GS
62. 4.iii.638 GS
63. 4.iii.638 GS
64. 4.iii.638 GS
65. 4.iii.638 GS
66. 4.iii.638 GS
67. 4.iii.638 GS
68. 4.iii.638 GS
69. 4.iii.638 ST
70. 4.iii.638 ST
71. 4.iii.640 FrDA
72. 4.iii.640 FrDA
73. 4.iii.640 GS
74. 4.iii.640 FrDA (quoting, inaccurately, # 57)
75. 4.iii.640 FrDA
76. 4.iii.640 FrDA
77. 4.iii.640 FrDA
78. 4.iii.641 GS (as quoted by FrN)
79. 4.iii.641 GS
80. 4.iii.642 GS
81. 4.iii.643 GS
82. 4.iii.643 GS
83. 4.iii.643 GS
84. 4.iii.643 GS
85. 4.iii.643 FrDA
86. 4.iii.646 GS
87. 4.iii.646 GS
88. 4.iii.647 GS
89. 4.iii.647 GS
90. 4.iii.647 GS
91. 4.iii.647 GS
92. 4.iii.647 FrDA

Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit

93. 4.iv.648 GS
94. 4.iv.652 GS
95. 4.iv.653 GS
96. 4.iv.653 GS
97. 4.iv.653 GS
98. 4.iv.654 GS
99. 4.iv.654 GS
100. 4.iv.654 GS
101. 4.iv.654 GS
102. 4.iv.654 GS
103. 4.iv.654 SDA
104. 4.iv.654 GS
105. 4.iv.654 GS
106. 4.iv.654 SDA
107. 4.iv.655 SDS

The Window on the West

none

The Forbidden Pool

108. 4.vi.686 GS
109. 4.vi.687 FrDA
110. 4.vi.687 FrDA
111. 4.vi.687 FrDA
112. 4.vi.687 FrDA
113. 4.vi.687 FrDA
114. 4.vi.687 GS
115. 4.vi.687 GS
116. 4.vi.687 FrDA
117. 4.vi.687 GS
118. 4.vi.687 GS
119. 4.vi.688 FrDA
120. 4.vi.689 FrDA
121. 4.vi.690 GS
122. 4.vi.690 FaDS
123. 4.vi.690 FrDS
124. 4.vi.691 FaDA
125. 4.vi.693 FaDS
126. 4.vi.693 FaDS

Faramir uses 'Sméagol' three times when speaking of him to Frodo, each time with evident distrust and loathing; and once he addresses him directly.  But Faramir knows of no other name for him than Sméagol.  Neither Frodo nor Sam call him Gollum in front of Faramir. Neither Sam nor, it would appear, Frodo had any intention of mentioning him if they didn't need to do so (TT 4.v.672; vi.685).

Journey to the Crossroads

127. 4.vii.695 GS
128. 4.vii.696 FrDS
129. 4.vii.696 FrDS

The Stairs of Cirith Ungol

130. 4.viii.713 SDS
131  4.viii.715 GS
132. 4.viii.715 GS
133, 4.viii.715  FrDA
134. 4.viii.715 GS
135. 4.viii.715 FrDA
136. 4.viii.715 GS
137. 4.viii.716 FrDA
138. 4.viii.716 GS

Shelob's Lair

139. 4.ix.717 FrDA
140, 4.ix.717 GS
141. 4.ix.719 FrDA
142. 4.ix.719 FrDA
143. 4.ix.723 FrN
144. 4.ix.724 GS
145. 4.ix.726 GS

GS = 94/145 = 64.82%

FrDA/S = 31/145 = 21.37%

FrN = 7/145 = 4.82%

ST/SDS/SDA = 9/145 = 6.2%

FaDA/FaDS = 4/145 = 2.75%


Sméagol in The Fellowship of the Ring

The Shadow of the Past

01. 1.ii.53 GaDS
02. 1.ii.53 GaDS
03. 1.ii.53 GaDS
04. 1.ii.53 GaDS
05. 1.ii.53 GaDS
06. 1.ii.53 GaDS
07. 1.ii.53 GaDS
08. 1.ii.53 GaDS
09  1.ii.56 GaDS

The Council of Elrond

10. 2.ii.255 Legolas says: 'Sméagol, who is now called Gollum.'


Sméagol in The Return of the King

Mount Doom

01. 6.iii.943 GS
02. 6.iii.943 GS

Appendix B in The Return of the King shows a noteworthy progression in the uses of both names.  He is 'Sméagol' when he kills Déagol (1087, under the year 2463), 'Sméagol-Gollum' for as long as he is under the Misty Mountains (1087, under the year 2470; 1089, under the year 2941), and 'Gollum' alone once he leaves the mountains to hunt for the Ring (1089, under the year 2944).

Frodo's question to Galadriel

At the end of The Mirror of Galadriel, after she has refused Frodo's offer of the Ring, he asks her a very telling question.

... 'I pass the test,' she said.  'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.' 

They stood for a long while in silence.  At length the Lady spoke again. 'Let us return!' she said.  'In the morning you must depart, for now we have chosen, and the tides of fate are flowing.'

'I would ask one thing before I go,' said Frodo, 'a thing which I often meant to ask Gandalf in Rivendell.  I am permitted to wear the One Ring: why cannot I see all the others and know the thoughts of those that wear them?'

'You have not tried,' she said. 'Only thrice have you set the Ring upon your finger since you knew what you possessed.  Do not try.  It would destroy you.  Did not Gandalf tell you that the rings give power according to the measure of each possessor?  Before you could use that power you would need to become far stronger, and to train your will to the domination of others.  Yet even so, as the Ring-bearer and as one that has borne it on finger and seen that which is hidden, your sight is grown keener.  You have perceived my thought more clearly than many that are accounted wise.  You saw the Eye of him that holds the Seven and the Nine.  And did you not see and recognize the ring upon my finger?  Did you see my ring?' she asked turning again to Sam.

'No, Lady,' he answered.  'To tell you the truth, I wondered what you were talking about.  I saw a star through your fingers.  But if you'll pardon my speaking out, I think my master was right.  I wish you'd take his Ring.  You'd put things to rights.  You'd stop them digging up the Gaffer and turning him adrift.  You'd make some folk pay for their dirty work.'

'I would,' she said.  'That is how it would begin.  But it would not stop with that, alas!  We will speak no more of it.  Let us go!'

(FR 2.vii.366)

Our attention in this chapter is usually taken up by events that are far more dramatic: Galdariel's 'testing' of the hearts of the Fellowship at their first meeting; the visions Sam and Frodo see in her mirror; or Galadriel's eloquent rejection of the Ring just a moment before this.  While that's all quite understandable, I'm not sure that any of these events is more revealing than this one: Frodo asks someone who clearly could use the Ring to devastating effect about using the Ring himself.

Is Frodo's question merely an innocent one?  Can any such question about the Ring be innocent? His remark that he had 'often meant to ask Gandalf at Rivendell' seems almost disingenuous or -- what is perhaps more likely -- self-deceived.  For Gandalf had been telling him since the night Bilbo left the Shire seventeen years earlier that he should not use the Ring, as well as pointing out the harmful effects of doing so (FR 1.i.36, 40 [three times]; ii.48-49, 53-54; iii.67, 75; x.170); much of the point of the Council of Elrond was that the Ring could not be used (FR 2.ii.67); and Frodo had also spent over two months in Rivendell with Gandalf.  If he failed to ask, it was not because an opportunity to do so was wanting. Given the opposition of Gandalf and Elrond to using the Ring, Frodo may also be overstating the case when he says that he is permitted to wear it.¹

Frodo, moreover, phrases the question as if he sought merely awareness (to see the holders of the other Rings) and information (to know their thoughts), but Galadriel immediately understands the matter very differently.  To her it is plainly a question of power and domination. They are the prerequisite means for using the Ring to the end Frodo mentions.  Consider also her words about her own experience with Sauron, who 'gropes ever to see me and my thought.  But the door is still closed,' (FR 2.vii.365, emphasis mine).  It seems clear that she can remain unseen and keep her thoughts unknown only because she has her ring and Sauron lacks his.  But if he were to regain the One, 'then we are laid bare to the Enemy,' and the Elves 'will cast all away rather than submit to Sauron,' (FR 2.vii.365).

It's very interesting in this context that Galadriel seems to have the ability to know Frodo's thoughts.  For at their very first meeting she penetrates his mind, and those of the rest of the company, and can tell enough about them from what she sees there to 'test' them.  As she does so, she 'holds' them with her eyes; almost none of them can 'long endure' her gaze; and it is she who 'at length ... release[s] them from her eyes,' (FR 2.vii.357).  As for the test itself,

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 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.358)

Galadriel here demonstrates the very power and dominance she later tells Frodo he would need to develop in order to use the Ring as he wishes.  We might also glimpse these abilities of hers elsewhere. Unlike Celeborn, she knows for a fact that Gandalf set out with the Company (FR 2.vii.355); she knows that Gandalf told Frodo about how the Ring confers power proportionally on its users (FR 1.ii.53); and she knows precisely how many times Frodo has used the Ring, which would seem an odd detail for Elrond to include in a report, even one carried by his redoubtable sons (FR 2.iii.274).² Rather, she learned these facts directly from Frodo's thoughts.

It is also interesting that on this same occasion, her eyes start out on Frodo and seem to be on him still when she says '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; cf. 358: 'She held you long in her gaze, Ring-bearer.') We most often tend to think of Boromir in this context, but Galadriel appears to have been looking at Frodo, she says 'all,' and Frodo is of course far more exposed to temptation than any of them.  His peril is always the greatest, and our sympathy for his courage and suffering should not blind us to that. His inability to throw the Ring into the fire at Bag End predicts his inability to do the same at Mt Doom (FR 1.ii.61).  And the lonely road he is travelling ends with the words 'The Ring is mine' (RK 6.iii.945).  We may not like that, but we can't forget it.  The attempt to use the Ring destroys the weak, and 'the very desire of it corrupts the heart[s]' of the powerful and the Wise (FR 2.ii.267).  This is fact.

But isn't it only natural that, after what he's been through, Frodo would feel the need for power?  After all he's been hunted by Black Riders, Orcs, and Gollum; speared in Moria; stabbed by an enchanted blade on Amon Sûl and nearly turned into a wraith himself; attacked by a blackhearted willow; taken prisoner by the undead; and stunned to witness the death of the most powerful person he knows at the hands of an ancient demon. And, perhaps most pertinently here, the one time he defied the Nazgûl they laughed at him and would have captured him and the Ring if not for the intervention of others more powerful than they (FR 1.xiii.214-15).

Yes, of course it's natural.  Nothing in fact could be more natural under these circumstances than for Frodo to wish for the power to use the Ring, if only to protect himself and his friends, to save the Shire and fulfill his Quest.  In the same way, however, Gandalf might desire the strength to do good out of pity (FR 1.ii.61), and Boromir might desire strength to defend Minas Tirith (FR 2.ii.267, x.397-399). But, as Galadriel says to Sam, 'That is how it would begin. But it would not stop with that, alas!'  Seen in this way, her words are as much a warning to Frodo not to try to use the Ring as they are an explanation to Sam of why she cannot take it.

This passage shows quite nicely the grey and subtle dangers of the Ring.  In one moment Frodo is humble and noble enough to give Galadriel the Ring of his own free will; in the next he is shading the truth and asking her how to use the Ring to dominate others.  Frodo's progress here from the one to the other mirrors what Galadriel says her own would be if she had the Ring.  This scene offers a neat conclusion to a chapter that begins with Galadriel testing the hearts of Frodo and his companions, then testing Sam and Frodo further with her mirror, until Frodo in turn tests her heart with his gentle offer of incredible dominion.  Yet his test will not be over for as long as he carries the One.  The emphasis Frodo places on himself in his question is as telling as the question itself: 'Why cannot I see all the others and know the thoughts of those that wear them?'  We have not seen the last of the will to dominate revealed in these words.³

All of this may seem to suggest a darker vision of Frodo than is the norm, but that is to see only a part of the picture here.  For Frodo's question and Galadriel's answer are not all there is to this scene.  Her words both before and after Frodo's question are also important:

'Let us return!' she said.  'In the morning you must depart, for now we have chosen, and the tides of fate are flowing.'

and

'We will speak no more of it.  Let us go!'

We have chosen?  Galadriel pairs herself with Frodo.  For they have something essential in common. Both have chosen to reject the Ring -- she by refusing Frodo's offer of the Ring, and he by making the offer.  But so far from being alarmed when Frodo reveals his temptation by the Ring -- which he does not perceive as clearly as she perceives hers -- Galadriel counsels him against even attempting to use the Ring as suggests.  For, no matter how innocent his desire may seem to him, the will to dominate lies at its root.  She points out that as Ring-bearers they already see much that others do not, like Sam, for example, who not only does not see the ring on her finger, but still thinks she should take the One despite all she said in her rejection of it. She says that they will speak no more of it, not because their choice at this moment has delivered them from temptation, but because there is nothing more to say of it.  As Frodo's experience will increasingly reveal, the test never ends while the Ring lasts.⁴ They must go on.  That is all they can do.  The tides of fate are flowing.

___________________________

¹ I can find no passage in The Lord of the Rings to support Frodo's claim. Permission may be implicit in his position as Ring-bearer, but permissibility and advisability are two different things.  But I would not wish to overstate my case by arguing from silence.

² Note also how Galadriel's words at FR 2.vii.355, before Aragorn tells her that Gandalf is dead: 'Now tell us where [Gandalf] is; for I desired much to speak with him again. But I cannot see him from afar, unless he comes within the fences of Lothlórien: a grey mist is about him, and the ways of his feet and of his mind are hidden from me.' She clearly expects to be able to see him and know his thoughts, likely because they both held Rings.  Cf. also RK 6.vii.985, where the keepers of the Three and Celeborn converse with each other telepathically by mutual consent. Frodo is not talking about consensual perception and knowledge, however.

³ A line may be drawn from this moment through to 'The Ring is mine' at RK 6.iii.945. Consider also the way Frodo uses the power of the Ring over Gollum in The Taming of Sméagol (TT 4.i.618) and The Black Gate is Closed (TT 4.iii.640-41).  Even in the darkly humorous scene at Henneth Annûn where Frodo threatens Gollum with the Ring, Frodo is exerting his will to dominate another (TT 4.vi.687-688).  Finally, as Frodo watches the Witch King leads his troops off to war in Gondor, he realizes 'that he had not, even if he put [the Ring] on, the power to face the Morgul-king -- not yet.' (TT 4.viii.707).  Not yet?  Indeed.

⁴ In his Mythgard Academy class on The Two Towers, Corey Olsen argues (starting at about 20:00), rightly I think, that by not taking the Ring from Frodo by force once he came within her reach Galadriel had already passed the test, that is, before Frodo ever offered her the Ring.  But I would suggest that her words here, especially 'now we have chosen,' indicate that the choice is never so simple or so easy that one can make it only once.