The true gift to the foes of Mordor

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

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

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

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

 

Σοφιστής and 'Saruman', part two

Recently I suggested that 'Saruman' is Tolkien's rendering into Old English of the Ancient Greek σοφιστής. Last night I discovered another interesting piece of evidence to support that suggestion. While looking at the entry for σοφιστής in the Liddell-Scott-Jones Greek-English Lexicon, I found the following quotation from Demosthenes used to illustrate the pejorative sense of the word (II.2):

'γόητα καὶ σοφιστὴν ὀναμάζων' (Dem. 18.276).

We may easily render this straightforward phrase 'naming [me] a cheat and a sophist', but that would obscure a very interesting connection for us. The word γόητα, here translated 'cheat', is the accusative singular of γόης, the first meaning of which is 'sorcerer, wizard'. We find γόης and σοφιστής similarly paired at Plato Smp. 203d, with the addition of φαρμακεύς, another word for 'sorcerer'. Γοής is of course related to γοητεία, a word Tolkien knew well, as his discussion of it in a 1956 letter to Naomi Mitchison attests (Letters # 155). Note that the qualities Tolkien attributes to goeteia -- namely, 'to terrify and subjugate' and to 'deceive or bewilder unaware Men' -- are not at all unlike the qualities of Saruman's voice, by which he can persuade or daunt others.

But I suppose that, for the purposes of the tale, some would say that there is a latent distinction such as once was called the distinction between magia and goeteia. Galadriel speaks of the 'deceits of the Enemy'. Well enough, but magia could be, was, held good (per se), and goeteia bad. Neither is, in this tale, good or bad (per se), but only by motive or purpose or use. Both sides use both, but with different motives. The supremely bad motive is (for this tale, since it is specially about it) domination of other 'free' wills. The Enemy's operations are by no means all goetic deceits, but 'magic' that produces real effects in the physical world. But his magia he uses to bulldoze both people and things, and his goeteia to terrify and subjugate. Their magia the Elves and Gandalf use (sparingly): a magia, producing real results (like fire in a wet faggot) for specific beneficent purposes. Their goetic effects are entirely artistic and not intended to deceive: they never deceive Elves (but may deceive or bewilder unaware Men) since the difference is to them as clear as the difference to us between fiction, painting, and sculpture, and 'life'.

Goeteia -- and goety, its obsolete English descendant -- operate by invocation, that is to say, by being spoken or cried aloud. The Ancient Greek verb at the root of γοητεία is γοάω, to wail or bewail, especially the dead. That last sentence in the letter is of particular interest since it allows us to see a link between the power of Saruman's voice and Faërian Drama as a product of the power of Elvish minstrelsy. That, however, is an essay for another time. For today it will suffice to note the connections between γοητεία, σοφιστής, and Saruman, which make seeing Saruman as a translation of σοφιστής even more plausible. It draws Saruman even closer to those venal amoralists who used the power of their voices to make the morally worse argument defeat the morally better argument. 

Σοφιστής and 'Saruman', or, Tolkien at play in the fields of philology

Every now and then I see a connection that has been staring me in the face for a long time, one of those connections that seems unbelievably obvious in retrospect. By a long time I mean well more than half of my life, since I have been reading Tolkien for nearly 50 years and Greek for more than 40. Recently I have been read Dennis Wilson Wise's perceptive article, 'Between Rage and Eloquence in Saruman and Thrasymachus', in The Journal of Tolkien Research 3 (2016), and currently I am reading Simon Critchley's book, Tragedy, the Greeks, and Us (2019).

Thrasymachus, to whom Wise compares Saruman, was a Sophist, one of those allegedly unscrupulous moral relativist teachers for hire who appeared across the Greek world in the Fifth Century B.C. and taught the art of persuasion. Wise argues that it is no accident that Thrasymachus and Saruman have so much in common. Rather, he argues, Tolkien constructed his portrait of Saruman with the Sophists in mind.

Last night I read the following in Critchley (94): 

The Greek word sophistes originally meant "skilled craftsman" or "wise man", but was used to describe travelling teachers who visited Athens from the mid-fifth century BCE and acquired a negative connotation in the comedies of Aristophanes, like The Clouds, and then in the writings of Plato and, later, Aristotle.

I knew all this, just as I knew that sophistes (σοφιστής) combines σοφία, 'skill', 'craft', 'wisdom', with the agent suffix -στής. I also knew that Saruman is formed in precisely the same way, combining saru, a Mercian dialectal form of Old English searu, 'skill' or 'craft' with the agent suffix -man. Not until I read Wise and Critchley in close proximity did I make the obvious connection. 

Saruman is not attested in extant Old English, but it is more than a significant name invented by Tolkien to suggest to those who know Old English that this particular wizard is cunning and crafty. It is a translation of σοφιστής into Old English, which subtly ties the portrayal of Saruman into the moral concerns of Greek philosophy and politics. 

It is always a pleasure to see Tolkien at play in the fields of philology.

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I intend to spend more time researching this and writing it up. To my knowledge no one has observed this connection before me, but I only made the connection last night. I also know of at least one occasion where Tolkien considered the use of names based on Greek.

'untouchable now by pity' -- Frodo on the slopes of Mt Doom (RK 6.iii.944)

Then suddenly, as before under the eaves of the Emyn Muil, Sam saw these two rivals with other vision. A crouching shape, scarcely more than the shadow of a living thing, a creature now wholly ruined and defeated, yet filled with a hideous lust and rage; and before it stood stern, untouchable now by pity, a figure robed in white, but at its breast it held a wheel of fire. Out of the fire there spoke a commanding voice. 

(RK 6.iii.944)

The disturbing description of Frodo in this passage is fascinating. Frodo is now ‘a figure’, an 'it', not Frodo himself. He is ‘untouchable now by pity’, which given Gandalf’s emphasis on the crucial role of Pity (FR 1.ii.59), can only be a bad thing. That a commanding voice -- whose? -- speaks out of the fire blurs the distinction between Frodo and the Ring, the 'wheel of fire' which he has declared to be the only thing that he can see any more (RK 6.ii.919; iii.938). Indeed they now seem one, though whether it matters any longer whether Frodo has claimed the Ring or the Ring Frodo may be impossible to say.  What of “robed in white”? Gandalf is now robed in white, though Frodo doesn't know that. So was Saruman before he lost his way. Most importantly, perhaps, Galadriel wears white, while black is the color of Sauron and his servants. Is this the nearly fallen Frodo’s vision of himself that we are seeing? Like Galadriel’s projection of herself as a ruling queen? Yet she knew it would all end in despair.

In answer to these questions the text is silent. Yet it is Sam who takes up the Pity that the figure of Frodo has laid down (RK 6.iii.944).

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Works Consulted

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Etymology is Destiny, Saruman, Saruman

As many are aware, Tolkien derived the name 'Saruman' from Old English. The entry in Bosworth- Toller for searu starts with ambiguity (I.) and moves straight to the 'bad sense' (II.). The good sense (III.) comes in a distant and by comparison feeble third, all the examples of which are adverbial uses of the instrumental case. searwum, 'skillfully, ingeniously, with art'. Amid the wealth of marvelous, damning examples under sense II. we find right near the end of the section a quote from the Blickling Homilies (173.8) in which St. Peter tells St. Paul of Simon Magus and recounts

'Hwylce searwa se drý árefnde what artifices the sorcerer practised'

So while it is true to say that searu can be either negative or positive, the surviving evidence indicates that negative is the far more common meaning. When we also consider that the word is so frequently ambiguous that this uncertainty merits the first place in the dictionary entry, it seems a fitting source for the name of a wizard who, even as his 'wickedness' was 'laid bare' (TT 3.ix.567), had proclaimed himself no longer Saruman the White, but 'Saruman of Many Colours' (FR 2.ii.259):

'I looked then and saw that his robes, which had seemed white, were not so, but were woven of all colours, and if he moved they shimmered and changed hue so that the eye was bewildered.'

Since Tolkien named him Saruman from his first appearance in his plot outlines (Treason 70, 72-73), his character and his fate were coeval with his name.

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Works Consulted

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'Radagast The Bird-Tamer!' and the Characterization of Saruman (FR 2.ii.238-39)

Radagast's Cunning © Lucas Graciano 

At the Council of Elrond Gandalf describes Radagast as 'a master of shapes and changes of hue; and he has much lore of herbs and beasts, and birds are especially his friends' (FR 2.ii.257), and then says that he had asked him to tell 'all the beasts and birds that are [his] friends' to bring word of the Nine to Gandalf and Saruman at Isengard (2.ii.257).  Gandalf then tells of Saruman's reaction to the mention of Radagast:

'Radagast the Brown!' laughed Saruman, and he no longer concealed his scorn. 'Radagast the Bird-tamer! Radagast the Simple! Radagast the Fool! Yet he had just the wit to play the part that I set him. For you have come, and that was all the purpose of my message. And here you will stay, Gandalf the Grey, and rest from journeys. For I am Saruman the Wise, Saruman Ring-maker, Saruman of Many Colours!'

...

'I liked white better,' I said.

(2.ii.238-39)

Note the chiastic word order of the repeated Radagasts and Sarumans. Saruman begins with Radagast's color and ends with his own; ends with Radagast's simplicity and foolishness and begins with his own wisdom; and in the middle, further accentuated by capital letters and hyphenated compound words, are the characteristics on which he heaps the greatest scorn and in which he takes the greatest pride: Bird-tamer and Ring-maker. Chiasmus is of course an ancient rhetorical device, long a part of the arts of persuasion for which Saruman was justly renowned (TT 3.ix.567). Yet Gandalf wryly punctures all his rhetoric with a few pointed words.

The subtlest and best touch of all, however, is 'Bird-tamer' itself, which reveals far more about Saruman than Radagast. For Saruman can only see Radagast's relationship with the birds as one of power and mastery. In Saruman's eyes he has tamed rather than befriended them.  Seeing no possibility but power, he parallels and contrasts Radagast's Bird-taming with his own Ring-making. Thus his own rhetoric betrays him, revealing that mastery, not friendship, now characterize him and his relations with others. 

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Works Consulted

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The biter bit -- Gandalf and Sauron Share a Perspective

© Jeff Murray

As Merry tells his comrades of the storming of Isengard by the Ents, he doubts the accuracy of Saruman's previous repute, 'wonder[ing] if his fame was not all along mainly due to his cleverness in settling at Isengard.' 

'No,' said Aragorn. 'Once he was as great as his fame made him. His knowledge was deep, his thought was subtle, and his hands marvellously skilled; and he had a power over the minds of others. The wise he could persuade, and the smaller folk he could daunt. That power he certainly still keeps. There are not many in Middle-earth that I should say were safe, if they were left alone to talk with him, even now when he has suffered a defeat. Gandalf, Elrond, and Galadriel, perhaps, now that his wickedness has been laid bare, but very few others.' 

(TT 3.ix.567, emphasis mine)

Later, after Pippin has looked into that same palantír and encountered Sauron, Gandalf says: 

'Easy it is now to guess how quickly the roving eye of Saruman was trapped and held; and how ever since he has been persuaded from afar, and daunted when persuasion would not serve. The biter bit, the hawk under the eagle's foot, the spider in a steel web! How long, I wonder, has he been constrained to come often to his glass for inspection and instruction, and the Orthanc-stone so bent towards Barad-dur that, if any save a will of adamant now looks into it, it will bear his mind and sight swiftly thither.... 

'I wish I had known all this before,' said Pippin. 'I had no notion of what I was doing.'

'Oh yes, you had,' said Gandalf. 'You knew you were behaving wrongly and foolishly; and you told yourself so, though you did not listen. 

(TT 3.xi.598, emphasis mine)

Pippin's experience with the palantír re-enacts for us, on a smaller scale, that of Saruman himself, who thus became the fool (TT 3.viii.583) that Gandalf often considered Pippin to be (FR 2.iii.272, iv.306-07, 313; TT 3.ix.570, xi.593-94, 598; RK 5.i.754). To Sauron he is now one of 'the smaller folk' whom he 'could daunt.'

'In which case it is no longer white' -- The Exeter Book and Saruman

In the 'Riming Poem' in the Exeter Book (Thorpe, p. 354, ll. 57-62) appear the following verses:

Searo hƿít solaþ
sumur hát cólað
foldƿéla fealleð
feondscipe ƿealleð
eorðmæȝen ealdaþ
ellen cólað 

The white by craft grows soiled
Summer heat gets cold
Earthly wealth fails
Hatred grows hot
Strength gets old
courage goes cold

As many Tolkien fans know, the first element of the name of the fallen wizard, Saruman the White, derives from the Old English noun 'searo', which means 'craft,' quite often in the bad senses of 'artifice, wile, deceit, stratagem, ambush, treachery, plot.'[1]  And Gandalf recounts a conversation with Saruman in which the latter scorns his color:

 

'For I am Saruman the Wise, Saruman Ring-maker, Saruman of Many Colours!"

'I looked then and saw that his robes, which had seemed white, were not so, but were woven of all colours. and if he moved they shimmered and changed hue so that the eye was bewildered.

'"I liked white better," I said.

'"White!" he sneered. "It serves as a beginning. White cloth may be dyed. The white page can be overwritten; and the white light can be broken."

'"In which case it is no longer white," said I.'

(FR 2.ii.259)

It is at this point of course that Gandalf reveals that Saruman the White has been corrupted, and that whatever skills he possesses have now proven 'crafts' in the wicked sense.  When seen later, after his overthrow, he is of course now clothed 'in rags of grey or dirty white' (RK 6.vi.983; viii.1020).

Given all this, and Tolkien's undoubted knowledge of the Exeter Book, it may be that we find here at least a part of the reason (aside from the obvious) for why Saruman was white to begin with, and why he failed in the end.  Though Tolkien is not much known for irony, this conversation between Gandalf and Saruman may be dripping with it.

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[1] As Tom Shippey notes in The Road to Middle-Earth (revised and expanded 2003) p. 123, Tolkien often uses the Mercian dialect of Old English in generating words rather than the standard West Saxon, thus ‘saru’ instead of ‘searo.’