Tolkien and Clarke's Third Law: a Corollary

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

Arthur C. Clarke's Third Law, as just quoted, is extraordinarily well known. It has reached that hallowed stage of auctoritas (gravitas is reserved for Newton) wherein, given any triad of physical or mathematical laws, no more than one of the three will be remembered at any given time by non-specialists.

Not all magic is the same, however. It can be used to dominate or control nature or other people. It can be used to create transcendent wonder and beauty, to heal and to preserve. Motives and intentions are the key, even though they are not even clear to ourselves. While Clarke is not thinking in terms of morality or intent in his formulation, Tolkien is. He regards magic which seeks to rule others as evil, and technology or "the machine" is usually the means to this end (Letters # 131 p. 205; # 155 p. 295-96; Rev.). The One Ring is a perfect example of this in his legendarium. On the other hand, a palantir would not be. It is really only a device for communicating over great distances. Tolkien, however, would certainly regard a palantir created to surveil others and strip them of their privacy as evil.

The other kind of magic, the kind that aims at beauty, healing, and preservation, I'll call enchantment. And the means to achieve it, usually through music or song, I'll call Art (as Tolkien does). This leads me to propose Tolkien's Corollary to Clarke's Third Law:

"Any sufficiently advanced Art is indistinguishable from Enchantment."

Samwise the Strong, Hero of the Age

Here's a one-paragraph excerpt from something I'm working on, which has to do with children and heroic tales in Tolkien's legendarium. First, I'll quote the passage from The Lord of the Rings I am discussing in the paragraph that follows. 

Already the Ring tempted him, gnawing at his will and reason. Wild fantasies arose in his mind; and he saw Samwise the Strong, Hero of the Age, striding with a flaming sword across the darkened land, and armies flocking to his call as he marched to the overthrow of Barad-dûr. And then all the clouds rolled away, and the white sun shone, and at his command the vale of Gorgoroth became a garden of flowers and trees and brought forth fruit. He had only to put on the Ring and claim it for his own, and all this could be. (RK 6.i.901)

Sam’s relationship to hearing and telling tales is pretty much the first thing we learn about him, and we learn it in the first real scene in The Lord of the Rings, from the very first character to speak, Sam’s own father, the Gaffer: “crazy about stories of the old days, he is, and he listens to all Mr. Bilbo’s tales” (FR 1.i.24). Despite the Gaffer’s no doubt relentless admonitions about the “trouble too big for you” that awaits Sam in the adventures he longs for, Sam knows at least some heroic poetry by heart and creates some poetry of his own. In response to one of these poems, Frodo jokes that Sam “will end up becoming a wizard—or a warrior” (FR 1.xii.208). Though Sam demurs, it’s no accident that the temptation he faces when he has the Ring takes precisely this form (RK 6.i.901). The warrior he fantasizes about becoming is also familiar. He does not walk, but strides like Aragorn, and wields a flaming sword, which recalls the name of Aragorn's sword, Andúril, the Flame of the West (RK 6.i.901). But then there's the tiniest hint of something darker. For Boromir, who would have been quite familiar with heroic tales since his boyhood, also imagined that "all men would flock to my banner" (FR 2.x.398; RK 6.i.901). 

"What really happened," or, "Was hat Ranke mit Tolkien zu tun?"

 A name I often came across when I was in school studying history and how to write it was Leopold von Ranke (1795 - 1886). Rather than try to summarize his long career as a writer and teacher of history and historiography, I'll say that he was one of those astonishing 19th century German scholars who seemed to know everything and whose days had 168 hours in them. His views on writing history were that scholars should use sources as close to the period about which they were writing as they could possibly get, and that these sources should be wide-ranging, including contemporary local documents and records not just narrative histories. The goal, Ranke believed, was to create an account of "wie es eigentlich gewesen." 

Again in the interests of brevity, I'll quote from Andreas Boldt's discussion of this phrase in Esharp's supplement from 2007. 

Many scholars have written on Ranke and analysed his understanding of history. One example of how Ranke was scrutinised is the discussion of the meaning of his most famous phrase of ‘wie es eigentlich gewesen’. The book History of the Latin and Germanic Nations is known chiefly for the statement that:

Man hat der Historie das Amt, die Vergangenheit zu richten, die Mitwelt zum Nutzen zukünftiger Jahre zu belehren beygemessen: so hoher Aemter unterwindet sich gegenwärtiger Versuch nicht: er will bloß sagen, wie es eigentlich gewesen. (Ranke, 1824, pp.v-vi).

To history has been assigned the office of judging the past, of instructing the present for the benefit of future ages. To such high offices this work does not aspire: It wants only to show what actually happened. (Stern, 1973, p.57, translation by Fritz Stern).

The meaning of Ranke’s aim to study the past ‘wie es eigentlich gewesen’ has been the subject of much debate among historians. A number of writers have translated the phrase as ‘what actually happened’, ‘as it really was’ or ‘simply tell how it was’ and have understood it as an endorsement of ‘colourless’ history. Historians, Ranke claimed, should stick to the facts and there should be no evidence of their views and commitments in their writing. It is only when they remove all trace of themselves that they can revive the past. More recent commentators, such as Iggers, have argued that such a translation is not accurate because it does not reveal Ranke’s ‘idealistic’ conception of history. He pointed out that the term ‘eigentlich’ does not only mean ‘actually’, but also ‘essentially’ or ‘characteristically’. Therefore Iggers preferred to translate the phrase as ‘[History] merely wants to show how, essentially, things happened’ (1988, p.67). The translation of Ranke’s quotation into English has its problems. One thing is certain, however, Ranke’s famous sentence is a conscious formula that contains a very complex meaning. The word ‘bloß’ shows Ranke’s modesty while the word ‘eigentlich’ touches on issues like ‘truth’ and ‘the greatest good’. The translation ‘happened’ describes an event or condition; it does not describe a development. The usual translation ‘how it really was’ is too short and does not describe what Ranke intended to say. As a more correct translation, I would suggest ‘how things really were’.

Very interesting, Tom, but what has Ranke to do with Tolkien? I can see the eyes rolling back in my readers' heads, like the guests at Bilbo's party when he won't shut up about his adventures. 

So here it is. Every time I read Letter 180 (p. 336) in Tolkien's Letters, I run into the following sentence:

"I have long ceased to invent (though even patronizing or sneering critics on the side praise my ‘invention’): I wait till I seem to know what really happened." (italics mine)

And when I think of "what really happened" and "wie es eigentlich gewesen," I think of Tolkien's famous rejection of allegory in the "Foreword to the Second Edition" of The Lord of the Rings (xxiv):

... I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse "applicability" with "allegory"; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.

Andreas Boldt's apt comment on the humility in Ranke's choice of the word bloß, "only" -- "to say only how things really were" -- fits beautifully with the humility in Tolkien's preference of "the freedom of the reader" to "the purposed domination of the author."

I can't say if Tolkien knew Ranke's work firsthand, or whether the similarity of phrasing is just coincidental. Still, Ranke would have been far better known in Tolkien's day than he is today, and the phrase "wie es eigentlich gewesen" has been quoted more and more since 1900. A Google Ngram of the phrase shows that it's been on a steeply downward trend since 2017. I guess, starting in 2017, people no longer wish to know how things really are. I'll leave it in the freedom of the reader to decide what that really means.

 ______________________________

I was curious to see how a German translation of Tolkien's Letters rendered Tolkien's statement -- "I wait till I seem to know really happened" -- and whether it would end up echoing Ranke's original phrase. Thanks to Marcel R. Bülles, Der Tolkienist, I can quote Helmut Pesch's translation: 'Ich warte, bis mir scheint, ich wüßte, was wirklich geschehen ist.'

______________________________

In the long quotation from Andreas Boldt above, he refers to the following works: 

• Iggers, G.G. 1988. The German conception of history. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press.
• Ranke, Leopold von. 1824. Geschichten der romanischen und germanischen Völker von 1494 bis 1535. Leipzig: Reimer. 
• Stern, F. 1973. The varieties of history from Voltaire to the Present. New York: Vintage.

"Fled from the Company" -- Frodo and Sam not looking back

At the beginning of Book 4, in the chapter called "The Taming of Sméagol," there's a beautifully subtle little touch, a single word that I've read countless times without catching its implications. Since the last time we saw Frodo and Sam is 200 very eventful pages ago, we can easily lose track of how little time has passed since Boromir tried to take the Ring and Frodo and Sam left all their companions behind. The drama of "The Breaking of the Fellowship" no longer stands out quite so prominently. For us. That is, for the readers. It's easy to find ourselves looking ahead, as Frodo and Sam do, as they stare out from the top of the Emyn Muil across the plain beyond which lies Mordor: 

‘What a fix!’ said Sam. ‘That’s the one place in all the lands we’ve ever heard of that we don’t want to see any closer; and that’s the one place we’re trying to get to! And that’s just where we can’t get, nohow.' (TT 4.i.603)

Gollum, too, has been following them, as they know. There may also be orcs about. And the bare hills of the Emyn Muil, which they haven't been able to find their way out of despite several days of trying, leave them feeling terribly exposed. A fix indeed. All of this draws our attention in to where they are and what they are doing. Frodo and Sam are so focused on where they are trying to go that they are no longer entirely sure of how long they've been wandering around the Emyn Muil.  

"It was the third evening since they had fled from the Company, as far as they could tell" (TT 4.i.603).

That word, fled, compresses all the drama of "The Breaking of the Fellowship"--Frodo's indecision, Boromir's attempt to compel Frodo to give him the Ring, Frodo's escape from him, his even more dangerous brush with the Eye of Sauron, the panic of the Company, the attack of the orcs--all this and more that Frodo and Sam don't know about. Of Boromir's recovery, his courageous attempt to save Merry and Pippin, and his death, they are entirely ignorant. For all they know, Boromir might be hunting them as well.

Let's look back, though, for just a moment at what Frodo had fled from:

Frodo rose to his feet. A great weariness was on him, but his will was firm and his heart lighter. He spoke aloud to himself. "I will do now what I must," he said. "This at least is plain: the evil of the Ring is already at work even in the Company, and the Ring must leave them before it does more harm. I will go alone. Some I cannot trust, and those I can trust are too dear to me: poor old Sam, and Merry and Pippin. Strider, too: his heart yearns for Minas Tirith, and he will be needed there, now Boromir has fallen into evil. I will go alone. At once."

(FR 2.x.401)

These are Frodo's thoughts as he thinks through the choice he must make. The Ring is not just a danger to him, but to his companions. We can even, I believe, see the Ring at work on him. He says "some I cannot trust." If he had said "one I cannot trust," it would have been perfectly clear whom he meant. But "some" is more than "one." Does he not trust Legolas and Gimli? They are the only members of the Company he does not name. "None" or "almost none" would have been more accurate and more honest. And it's the Company he is said to have "fled," not simply Boromir (or even "some" of his companions), which again would have been completely understandable. 

Not also that it could have said "left the Company," "(de)parted from the Company," "separated from the Company," "exited the Company," "abandoned the Company," or many other words with connotations that have nothing to do with escape. But the text doesn't choose a different word. No. It chooses fled.

Quite a fix indeed.

 

Gollum said, Sméagol said

Recently I was asked to present a 30 minute talk on the first five chapters of Book 4 of The Lord of the Rings. (When? Later in the summer. Where? That would be telling.) So, last night I was reading "The Taming of Sméagol" and "The Passage of the Marshes" and giving the matter some thought. I've thought about these chapters a lot over the years. In addition to being just so good they are essential for understanding Gollum, since Book IV is the reader's longest exposure to him.

A thought struck me as I was looking at the moment when Frodo starts calling Gollum Sméagol, after which Gollum begins using it to refer to himself. Even Sam uses it a few times. I wondered whether the narrator ever called him Sméagol when telling the story in his own voice. So, not in the speech or thoughts of the characters. Since Frodo is supposed to be the main writer of this story, what he does here might be revealing. 

I first searched for "Sméagol" plain and simple, and discovered 155 instances, not counting appendices, tables of contents, indices, etc. Scanning through these I didn't see a single instance where the narrator calls him Sméagol in direct narration. (The debate Sam overhears between Sméagol and Gollum not only represents Sam's thoughts, but also helps to distinguish for the reader which of them is speaking at a given moment.)

Without going too far down this rabbit hole, I conducted four more searches I thought could be useful. I searched:

• "said Gollum"
• "Gollum said"
• "Sméagol said"
• "said Sméagol"

The first, "said Gollum," appears forty-five times, all in Book IV. There's nothing unusual here. It's exactly what we might expect. 

The second, "Gollum said," is a bit trickier, since the search ignores punctuation. Of six results, only two represent the voice of the narrator.

• 1.i.33: "Even if Gollum said the same once," said Bilbo
• 3.iii.456: "Gollum, gollum!" said Pippin
• 4.ii.624: Gollum said nothing to them -- spoken by the narrator
• 4.iv.652: "Gollum!" said Sam
• 4.ix.717: As Gollum said -- spoken by the narrator
• 5.iv.815: "Gollum," said Pippin

The third, "Sméagol said" is much the same as the second and for the same reason. Of twelve occurrences, all in Book IV, the voice we hear is always Frodo's, Sam's, or Gollum's.

• 4.i.616 "Sméagol," said Frodo
• 4.i.618 "Sméagol," said Gollum
• 4.ii.633 "But Sméagol said..." spoken by Gollum
• 4.iii.637 "Sméagol said so" -- spoken by Gollum
• 4.iv.655 "A present from Sméagol," said Sam
• 4.vi.687 "Sméagol," said Frodo
• 4.vi.687 "Sméagol," said Frodo
• 4.vi.689 "Sméagol!" said Frodo
• 4.viii.715 "Sméagol," said Gollum
• 4.viii.715 "Sméagol," said Frodo
• 4.ix.717 "Sméagol?" said Frodo
• 4.ix.719 "Sméagol!" said Frodo

The fourth and last, "said Sméagol," is found just three times, all on 1.ii.53, when Gandalf is recounting for Frodo the conversation Sméagol had with Déagol just before he murdered him. It worth noting that Gandalf will call Gollum "Sméagol" six more times in this chapter of the The Lord of the Rings (1.ii.53, 56). Everywhere else he calls him Gollum. In this chapter, "The Shadow of the Past," Gandalf is trying to get Frodo to pity Sméagol before Frodo learns that Sméagol is Gollum.

Now I believe that, since the story of The Lord of the Rings claims to be written largely by Frodo, we should take that seriously enough to consider the implications of that assertion. This is not to say that we should think that no changes were made in later years long after Frodo and Sam were gone. But the pervasiveness of "said Gollum" versus the rarity of "said Sméagol," together with the narrator's exclusive use "Gollum" when speaking of this character, makes clear where the narrator stands on him. And this fits perfectly with the fact that Frodo may address him as "Sméagol" but, with only one exception, never speaks of him to others by any name but "Gollum."*

________________________________

The sole exception is when Frodo in Ithilien formally pledges to Faramir to take "this Sméagol" under his protection (TT 4.vi.690). The alternative was Gollum's execution.

Once again I am indebted to the indispensable James Tauber and The Digital Tolkien Project for their expertise and labor in the fields of Arda

The Second Tolkien Conference Switzerland -- Announcement

The 2026 Tolkien Conference Switzerland, organized by the University of Zurich, the University of Lausanne, and Friedrich Schiller University Jena, will take place on Saturday, March 14, 2026, once again at the University of Zurich as a hybrid conference.

Sign up here

The 2026 topic is: 'Leadership in Tolkien's Middle-earth'. We have already confirmed several international high-profile speakers: 

• Matthew T. Dickerson,  
• Judith Klinger, 
• Christine Lötscher,  
• José María Miranda Boto,  
• Annika Röttinger and 
• Claudio Testi.

As part of the supporting program, the two podcasters from 'Typisch Ravenclaw' will analyze and compare political systems in Middle-earth based on The Economist's Democracy Index in a live podcast (tbc).

 

A Ghostly Link between Tolkien and Charles Williams?

I was reading Charles Williams' 1945 novel All Hallows' Eve yesterday morning. It's a rather spooky story, the first chapter of which is told from the point of view of a ghost, a young woman named Lester Furnival. At first she doesn't realize that she's dead, that she's been killed by a plane that crashed on the streets of London in the last days of the Second World War. She walks the streets of a ghostly version of London. She encounters her husband, who is still alive, and for a moment they are able to see each other. But he vanishes, as if the living are as ghostly to the dead as the dead are to the living. She then meets a friend, also dead, whom she had been on her way to meet when she had been killed. 

In the second chapter, Lester's husband, Richard, is walking through London several months after the war has ended. His wife has been dead and buried for a while now. Then suddenly he sees her.

She was [there]. It was along Holborn that he was walking, for he had half-thought of going that night to look for Simon’s hall or house or whatever it was. And there, on the very pavement [i.e., sidewalk], the other side of a crossing, she stood. He thought for the first second that there was someone with her.... They stood on either side that Holborn by-way, and gazed [across the street at each other].

I then recalled a letter from 3 April 1944 in which Tolkien recounted a visit he made to his hometown of Birmingham and his old school, King Edward's, two days earlier. Unhappy about the damage done to the city by Nazi bombs and (even worse) by the modern architecture of (too many) new buildings, he writes, "I couldn't stand much of that or the ghosts that rose from the pavements" (Letters #58 p. 101). 

Now it's nothing new or surprising that someone who survived the Great War should speak of ghosts, or even write about seeing the ghosts of the dead on the streets of London, and its well-known that Tolkien lost two extremely close friends to the Somme, both of whom he knew from King Edward's School. They were not all, of course. Over 1,400 students and masters served, and over 250 died. Tolkien will have known a good many of these. 

What I found interesting is that on 10 November 1943, Williams had read two chapters of his new novel All Hallows' Eve to Tolkien (Letters #51b p. 89). By the middle of October, according to his biographer, Grevel Lindop, Williams thought he had about twenty-five percent of the novel done (Lindop p. 379). So the first two chapters (out of ten) sounds about right for what Williams read to Tolkien. Years later Tolkien would claim that he had been "in fact a sort of assistant mid-wife at the birth of All Hallows Eve, read aloud to us [i.e., Tolkien, C. S. Lewis & other Inklings] as it was composed" (Letters #259 p. 489). Tolkien and Lewis both provided feedback, but, Tolkien avers, that Lewis was the greater influence. Still, Tolkien seems to remember himself as quite engaged with the book. 

So, we have Tolkien speaking figuratively about ghosts rising from the pavement in war damaged Birmingham just under six months after Williams had read to him about a ghost appearing on the pavement of war damaged London. This could just be a coincidence, and it probably is, but it might also be a recollection, conscious or not, of some strange and striking writing by Charles Williams.

_________________________________

Grevel Lindop. Charles Williams: The Third Inkling. Oxford University Press 2015.

"I will bear Frodo, though I do not know the way."

So I was reading Tolkien et la mémoire de l'antiquité, or Tolkien and the Memory of Antiquity. It's a recent very interesting book by Isabelle Pantin and Sandra Provini on Tolkien's reception of Greek and Latin sources like Vergil's Aeneid. 

"il s'agisse ... pour Frodo d'accepter le fardeau de l'Anneau plutot que de jouire d'une existence paisable dans le Comte."

"for Frodo ... it is a question of accepting the burden of the Ring rather than enjoying a peaceful existence in the Shire."

The word fardeau means burden. That's what caught my eye. It made me think of a line in the famous "To be, or not to be" soliloquy in Hamlet Act 3 Scene 1. Hamlet asks "who would fardels bear?" That is, "who would bear burdens?" (if they didn't have to).

Me being me, I immediately began reimagining crucial moments in The Lord of the Rings. 

At Rivendell:

"I will bear fardels," [Frodo] said, "though I do not know the way."

And on the slopes of Mt Doom:

"Come, Mr. Frodo!" he cried. ‘I can’t bear fardels for you, but I can bear you."

 

Foalókë & The Digital Tolkien Project -- How it Helps my Work, part 2

At the end of last year I shared a post on how The Digital Tolkien Project helps my work, in particular in studying the story of Túrin as told in The Book of Lost Tales. I now have a little more to show on the same subject, picking up more or less where I left off.

Parallel to this use of Turambar is that of Foalókë, the other name in the title. Tolkien employs Foalókë eighteen times in this story (Tauber, “‘Foalókë’ in The Book of Lost Tales. ”). The first two times come when the narrator is giving the title at the beginning (LT II.70). The last sixteen all occur after Túrin has met the dragon and the dragon has won his hoard (91, 94-99, 103-04, 105-06, 108, 108). Significantly, for according to the “Qenya Lexicon” Foalókë designates a lókë, a dragon, who guards a foa, a hoard (“The Qenya Lexicon” 38).[1] The single use of just lókë, moreover, is found precisely at the narrator’s transition from characterizing lust for gold as a trait common to all dragons to identifying and explaining the actions taken by Glaurung in pursuit of his lust: “Thus it was that this lókë….” (LT II.85). Túrin becomes Turambar and Glaurung becomes Foalókë in the same scene.

---

[1] With foalókë Tolkien is likely thinking of OE hordweard, “guardian of the hoard,” a poetical word used several times of dragons in Beowulf (Fulk et al. 2293, 2302, 2554, 2593; “DOE: Hord-Weard”). It’s not impossible that Tolkien intends lókë to remind the reader of the treacherous and deceptive Norse god, Loki. He thus implies to the reader the untrustworthiness of a dragon through the similarity of the sounds.

Túrin's "tide of ill" in The Book of Lost Tales (LT II.87)

In The Book of Lost Tales the narrator of Túrin's story says of his choosing to pursue the orcs who had taken Failivrin (Finduilas) captive says that his life could have turned out differently if he had done so. As the last clause of sentence indicates, the dragon, Glomund (Glaurung), was of the same opinion and refused to let that happen.

Maybe in that desperate venture [Túrin] had found* a kindly and swift death or perchance an ill one, and maybe he had rescued* [Finduilas] and found* happiness, yet not thus was he fated to earn the name he had taken anew, and the drake reading his mind suffered him not thus lightly to escape his tide of ill. 

(LT II.87)

That last phrase--“to escape his tide of ill”--is quite lovely, but as enigmatic as it is evocative. Does tide here allude to the unstoppable tides of the ocean, or does it mean time or season as in yuletide? The latter meaning is older by far. Old English tid** appears in the Old English version of Bede's Ecclesiastical History of England, in the gospel of Matthew in the Lindisfarne Gospels, and in Beowulf (147). The former is not found before the 14^th Century. 

In The Book of Lost Tales Tolkien uses tide in both senses, but mostly in reference to the sea. The context, however, normally contains one or more other words that establish the connection to the natural phenomenon. 

So, for example:

"but the Ainur put it into [Tuor's] heart to climb from the gully when he did, or had he been whelmed in the incoming tide" (LT II.151).

"The went the Man of the Sea out when the tide began to creep in slow and shallow over the long flats" (LT II.317)

"When that tide again forsook the Hungry Sands..." (LT II.318).

But there are examples where it refers to time. Thus, high-tide*** in the first example below refers not to the sea but to a high-time, that is, a time of celebration or festival, like Christmas. And day-tide**** in the second means simply daytime.

"this year you will celebrate the death of Karkaras with a high-tide greater than even before, O King" (LT II.231).

Of this converse of Eriol and Vairë upon the lawn that fair day-tide came it that Eriol set out not many days thereafter (LT I.95).

Some of the poetry from the war years, which Christopher Tolkien includes in The Book of Lost Tales, also signifies time by tid:

Still their old heart unmoved nor weeps nor grieves, 
Uncomprehending of this evil tide, 
Today’s great sadness, or Tomorrow’s fear 

(LT II.296)

So, again, which meaning of tide is Tolkien using here? While it could be a figurative use of tide to suggest the overpowering, irresistible force of evil, as it is at LT II.232--"valiantly they warded the palace of the king until the tide of numbers bore them back"--the "tide of ill" which the dragon has in mind is the calamitous life of woe and sorrow to which Melkor had cursed Túrin and his family. As the narrator indicates earlier in the sentence by saying that Túrin and Finduilas might have "found happiness," he is thinking about a span of time, not being swept away by the force of a moment. Tolkien being Tolkien, however, he might mean both (as a reader rightly commented below).

_______________________

*In less archaic English we would say "would have found" for "had found," and "would have rescued" for "had rescued" and "would have ... found" for "had ... found."

** “Tide, N., Sense I.1.” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford UP, December 2025, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/5003698957.

*** “Day Tide, N., Sense 1.” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford UP, September 2025, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/9829095802.

**** “High Tide, N., Sense I.1.” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford UP, September 2025, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/1021614943.

"...the language ... of Mordor, which I will not utter here."

 ‘I cannot read the fiery letters,’ said Frodo in a quavering voice. 

‘No,’ said Gandalf, ‘but I can. The letters are Elvish, of an ancient mode, but the language is that of Mordor, which I will not utter here. But this in the Common Tongue is what is said, close enough: 

One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, 
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.

(FR 1.ii.50)

From time to time someone will ask why Gandalf will not utter the Black Speech in Bag End, but will do so in Rivendell. I saw this just the other day. It's a reasonable question. Here's the passage from The Council of Elrond for comparison. 

Upon this very ring which you have here seen held aloft, round and unadorned, the letters that Isildur reported may still be read, if one has the strength of will to set the golden thing in the fire a while. That I have done, and this I have read: 

            Ash nazg durbatulûk, ash nazg gimbatul, ash nazg thrakatulûk
                                        agh burzum-ishi krimpatul.

The change in the wizard’s voice was astounding. Suddenly it became menacing, powerful, harsh as stone. A shadow seemed to pass over the high sun, and the porch for a moment grew dark. All trembled, and the Elves stopped their ears.

‘Never before has any voice dared to utter words of that tongue in Imladris, Gandalf the Grey,’ said Elrond, as the shadow passed and the company breathed once more.

(FR 2.ii.254)

Gandalf recites the enchantment in the Common Speech in Bag End. Nothing happens. Gandalf recites the enchantment in the Black Speech in Rivendell, the power of the Ring is invoked. The Elves don't just cover their ears because Gandalf has said some ugly words. His indiscretion is not social. He is not Gandalf the Gauche. He is Gandalf the Grey, a being of great power, calling upon the Ring of Sauron in a language it understands, as it were. A moment later he again recites the spell in the Common Speech. Again, nothing happens.

So, when Gandalf said to Frodo that he would "not utter [the language of Mordor] here," the word here does not mean here in the Shire. It means here in the presence of the Ring. He won't do it because he has an idea of what is going to happen. True, he doesn't want to frighten Frodo any more than he is already frightened. True, he doesn't want to risk drawing the attention of the Eye. The Shire is not safe enough. Rivendell is much safer than Hobbiton. Why does he do it at all? He is making a point and removing all doubt that this is in fact the One Ring.

"So let us forgive him" -- from the stairs of Cirith Ungol to the slopes of Mt Doom

The scene in The Two Towers where Gollum comes back down the stairs of Cirith Ungol to find Frodo and Sam asleep is remarkable for many reasons. Gollum, looking upon them, nearly repents of his decision to betray the hobbits to Shelob so he can get the Ring back. Sam, who has every reason to suspect Gollum is up to no good, treats Gollum harshly and Gollum responds in kind. Gollum's "repentance is blighted," as Tolkien says in one of his letters (Letters #246 p. 466). The reader is left in the unaccustomed position of pitying Gollum and being disappointed in Sam. Gollum, who began the scene close to repentance, ends it with a renewed commitment to treachery. Sam, who began in anger and suspicion, ends in grudging remorse and apology. Frodo's attempt at conciliation fails utterly.

The scene is about two pages long. Gollum is the only character awake for the first half page. Sam wakes up and clashes with Gollum on the second half of that page. At the start of the second page Sam awakens Frodo. Just before Sam wakes up, the narrator draws attention to the fact that neither Frodo nor Sam could have witnessed Gollum's moment of near repentance, and explains what they would have seen if they had been awake. It is the moment that sets up the astonishing pathos of the scene:

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.

(TT 4.viii.714). 

One of the most basic conceits of The Lord of the Rings is that Frodo largely wrote the book he gave to Sam to finish. Obviously, Frodo could have written what he saw after he woke up, and Sam could have told him about what had gone on after he woke up. Not only would Gollum have been unlikely to have filled Frodo and Sam in on what he was experiencing at the start of the scene, but after the end of this scene they see very little of Gollum for the rest of the book. So the narrator of the book isn't supposed to be omniscient, and Sam couldn't have seen more than an old weary looking Gollum touching Frodo's knee. Incredulity is a very weak argument, but it is very hard to believe that Tolkien both slipped up on the narrator's perspective and then called attention to that slip by pointing out that no one could have seen Gollum before Sam woke up. What we see here is one of the most thematically significant moments in the whole story, the moment in which the reader suddenly sees Gollum precisely as Bilbo saw him in The Hobbit, precisely as Gandalf thought Frodo needed to see him, though he at first refused to do so, and precisely as Sam sees him on the slopes of Mt Doom. With pity. If this happened by chance, it's chance-if-chance-you-call it.

But what is more important than how we might square the creation of this scene with the supposed narrator's limited perspective -- and I have my theories -- is how we read this moment in the thematic context of the book. We need to read it in the context of the movement from pity to mercy and thence to forgiveness. That forgiveness comes only after Gollum betrays them once more and is again shown mercy, this time by Sam who has finally suffered enough to realize what he saw when he opened his eyes on the stairs of Cirith Ungol. That mercy enabled the eucatastrophe in the Chambers of Fire. I think we may be able to fully understand the importance of what happens on the stairs if we read it in dialogue with Frodo's words after the Ring is destroyed:

‘Your poor hand!’ he said. ‘And I have nothing to bind it with, or comfort it. I would have spared him a whole hand of mine rather. But he’s gone now beyond recall, gone for ever.’ ‘

Yes,’ said Frodo. ‘But do you remember Gandalf’s words: Even Gollum may have something yet to do? But for him, Sam, I could not have destroyed the Ring. The Quest would have been in vain, even at the bitter end. So let us forgive him! For the Quest is achieved, and now all is over. I am glad you are here with me. Here at the end of all things, Sam.' 

(RK 6.iii.947)

I really think that reading the second scene in the context of the first is much more important than sorting out the narrative questions arising from the sudden seeming omniscience of the narrator on the stairs. Going forward from the forgiveness meted out on the slopes of Mt Doom, there is no further context to consider, unless it's Frodo's attempt to spare Saruman and Wormtongue in the Shire. For Gollum is never mentioned again within the story. Frodo's last word on Gollum is "So let us forgive him."

Númenor: the Downfall is in the Details

Tolkien speaks of (some of) the names the island we mostly call Númenor in three different versions of "The Fall of Númenor," and in a chapter of his unfinished novel "The Lost Road." The first two versions of "The Fall of Númenor" and the chapters from "The Lost Road," all written shortly before Tolkien began The Lord of the Rings, were published by Christopher Tolkien in The Lost Road. The third version of "The Fall of Númenor," written in the mid-1940s in connection with "The Notion Club Papers," was published in Sauron Defeated.

Please note that "The Lost Road" is not the same as The Lost Road. The first is an unfinished story, and the second is the volume of The History of Middle-earth in which the first is published. So, too, "The Fall of Númenor" is not The Fall of Númenor, the elegant compendium of Númenor's history published by Brian Sibley in 2022.

The first version of "The Fall of Númenor" says:

It was called by the Gods Andor, the Land of Gift, but by its own folk Vinya, the Young; but when the men of that land spake of it to the men of Middle-earth they named it Númenor, that is Westernesse, for it lay west of all lands inhabited by mortals. Yet it was not in the true West, for there was the land of the Gods. The chief city of Númenor was in the midmost of its western coasts, and in the days of its might it was called Andúnië, because it faced the sunset; but after its fall it was named in the legends of those that fled from it Atalantë the Downfall.

(Lost Road, 19). 

The second version of "The Fall of Númenor" says:

That land was called by the Valar Andor, the Land of Gift, and by its own folk it was at first called Vinya, the Young; but in the days of its pride they named it Númenor, that is Westernesse, for it lay west of all lands inhabited by mortals; yet it was far from the true West, for that is Valinor, the land of the Gods. But its glory fell and its name perished; for after its ruin it was named in the legends of those that fled from it Atalantë, the Downfallen.

(Lost Road 24-25)

In "The Lost Road" Elendil says:

"And for the men of the Three Houses they made Vinya, the New Land, west of Middle-earth in the midst of the Great Sea, and named it Andor, the Land of Gift; and they endowed the land and all that lived thereon with good beyond other lands of mortals."

(Lost Road 64-65).  

 The third version of "The Fall of Númenor" says:

That land the Valar called Andor, the Land of Gift; and by its own folk it was at first called Vinya, the Young; but in the days of its pride they named it Númenor, that is Westernesse, for it lay west of all lands inhabited by mortals; yet it was far from the true West, for that is Valinor, the land of the Gods. But the glory of Númenor was thrown down [> overthrown] and its name perished; and after its ruin it was named in the legends of those that fled from it Atalantë, the Downfallen.

(Sauron Defeated 332-333)

Of all the names we see in these texts, "Vinya, the Young," is the one I find most interesting. In the first place "Vinya" suggests that at this point Men possess an innocence and humility before the Gods/Valar and even a sense of wonder at this island manufactured expressly for them in the midst of the Sea. Yet the shadow is always closer than we think. The name Númenor is a mark of its pride, an assertion of its preeminent glory to the seemingly lesser mortals back in Middle-earth, and above all it asserts the claim of Númenor to be "the true West." In each version of "The Fall of Númenor" the claim is swiftly rejected, and the downfall follows at once as proof of the error of false pride. 

In the other text, "The Lost Road," Elendil twice refers to the island as Vinya and twice as Andor (Lost Road 58, 64-65). The uses of Vinya are particularly revealing in a couple of ways. In the passage quoted above, he is speaking of the history of the island to his son. In the other passage he wishes that it had not been his fate to be born in Vinya because he would rather be in Tol Eressëa (58). This is a measure of his respect and admiration for the Elves and Valar. In both passages, Tolkien originally had Elendil say "Númenor" but then changed it to "Vinya" (70 n.3). In fact, "Vinya" as well as "Andor" first appeared in a replacement passage. The original was much briefer and more neutral, with any hint of the pride of the Númenóreans buried much deeper, if it is there at all:

It was called Númenor, that is Westernesse, and Andúnië or the Sunsetland, and its chief city in the midmost of its western coasts was in the days of its might called Númar or Númenos; but after its fall it was named in legend Atalantë, the Ruin.

(14)

Vinya, the Young, disappears in the transition from the earlier versions of Númenor's story to Akallabêth, its final version. Why Tolkien made this change we do not know. Presumably, the change reflects the much greater prominence given to Eärendil as the star that guided the ships of the Edain to Númenor, and to the new name for the island, "Elenna," which means "Starwards" (S 260-61). More thought is needed on this change, but today is not that day. Still, I find something quite appealing in the notion that the name by which we all know the island, and by which everyone in The Lord of the Rings wistfully calls the island, was once a product of the pride that destroyed it. 

______________________

Aldarion founded a great harbor on the shores of Middle-earth, which he called "Vinyalondë." This is usually taken to mean "New Haven," perhaps the "vinya" here refers to Númenor itself, and so would mean "Númenor-haven."

A sad tale of Milton Waldman, to whom Tolkien wrote a famous letter

Lately, I've spent a fair amount of time reading, outlining, and thinking about Tolkien's famous letter (# 131) to Milton Waldman of Collins Publishing. For a letter it's huge, much larger than we've been led to believe. It's always spoken of as being "some ten thousand words long" as the introduction to it in The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien has it, but in truth it's over 14,000 words. That's quite a difference. It's also huge in a much more important way because it really represents the first time Tolkien steps back and attempts to explain his entire legendarium, from the Music of the Ainur to The Lord of the Rings to someone outside his immediate circle of family and members of the Inklings. Fans and scholars, myself included, have long mined it for information, but no one that I have come across has sat down to read it as an essay of sorts, which I have come to believe is as important to the study of Tolkien as Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics and On Fairy-stories. 

The other day I was looking at the following passage in which Tolkien is explaining the Valar:

"On the side of mere narrative device, this is, of course, meant to provide beings of the same order of beauty, power, and majesty as the ‘gods’ of higher mythology, which can yet be accepted – well, shall we say baldly, by a mind that believes in the Blessed Trinity."

(Letters, revised, # 133, p. 206)

The nature of the Valar is of course of great interest on its own, but what caught my attention this time through was that last bit of explanation from "which" to "Trinity." In particular the odd phrase "well, shall we say baldly" reads as an attempt to be delicate yet candid. So, I decided to see what more I could learn about Milton Waldman. What I learned was as heartbreaking as it is intriguing. Be warned. The tale involves three people dying, two of them small children.

First I discovered that in the 1920s Waldman had been married to Barbara Hazel Guggenheim, daughter of Benjamin Guggenheim, whose older brother, Solomon, later founded the well-known museum at 1071 Fifth Avenue in New York City. Benjamin did not have a museum named after him, but perhaps he should have. He went down on the Titanic, choosing to make sure women and children made it aboard the lifeboats at the cost of his own life. When last seen he was dressed in formal attire and smoking a cigar. 

While Hazel's father's story is intriguing, her story is horrifying. She and Milton had two young sons, Terrence, born in 1924, and Benjamin, born in 1926. On October 20th 1928 Hazel and her boys were visiting a relative who lived at 20 East 76th Street in New York City. Milton was not with them because he had remained at home in Paris on business. Somehow -- how is not at all clear; there seems to have been a tussle involving the children and their mother too close to the edge -- both Terrence and Benjamin fell to their deaths from the rooftop penthouse garden on the sixteenth floor. It was ruled accidental. The next day, October 21st, they were buried in the Guggenheim Mausoleum in the Salem Fields Cemetery in Brooklyn, which is connected with Temple Emanu-El on Fifth Avenue in New York City. 

The story of these two little boys, the elder four and the younger just over a year, dead almost a century ago, seems more important than the reasons behind Tolkien's words in the letter to Waldman. If only for a moment they are remembered here again. I think I will go visit their graves.

In 1930 Milton and Hazel divorced, and Milton moved to London where he remained until his death in 1976. 

 

____________________________

The sources for this post may be easily found by following the links above. I also consulted findagrave.com. 

There's also a rather scurrilous tell-all style biography of Hazel's sister, Peggy, which speaks of the incident and includes some rather horrifying gossip. The chapter in question is called "Medea," which tells you a lot about what some people thought happened. Yet no one saw it happen. The book is Peggy, the Wayward Guggenheim by Jacqueline Weld.

Tolkien: The Monsters and the Fascists

 

War must be, while we defend our lives against a destroyer who would devour all; but I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend: the city of the Men of Númenor; and I would have her loved for her memory, her ancientry, her beauty, and her present wisdom. Not feared, save as men may fear the dignity of a man, old and wise.

(TT v.672)

With the rise of fascism from its too shallow grave, the liking so many of its adherents have for The Lord of the Rings as well as for other books they don't understand, like the Iliad and the Odyssey, has received a lot of attention. Tolkien himself didn't have much time for fascists, composing a famously salty 1938 letter to Rütten & Loenig, a German publisher who wished to publish a translation of The Hobbit but had the effrontery to ask Tolkien whether he was Aryan (Letters #29 & 30 pp. 47-48). Tolkien recognized, however, that his own publisher, Allen & Unwin, had a substantial financial interest in this matter, and that he could not assume that he could speak for them. So, he composed another letter, less scathing, and told Allen & Unwin to send the one they deemed more appropriate. Unfortunately, the letter that was actually sent has not yet been discovered. Yet the surviving letter makes clear the anger and contempt Tolkien feels towards the Nazi regime that required publishers to ask such questions. In any event, whatever precisely Tolkien said in the letter that Allen & Unwin sent to the German publisher, nothing further seems to have happened.

In a 1941 letter he called Hitler "that ruddy little ignoramus" and said that the "burning private grudge" he bore the Nazis for their perversion of pagan Germanic mythology and literature to serve their racist nationalism "would probably make me a better soldier at 49 than I was at 22" during the Great War (Letters # 45 p. 77). In this same letter he said that Germany in the Nazi era was "under the curse of God." As Tolkien well knew, saying this consigned the Nazis to the same hellish status as the Beowulf-poet banished Cain and his descendants, most prominently Grendel and his mother.

He was also aware that fascism could grow in other lands, including his own, provided there was malice enough to nurture it. He wrote to his son, Christopher, in 1944 in a letter of particular relevance to more recent times: 

"We knew Hitler was a vulgar and ignorant little cad, in addition to any other defects (or the source of them); but there seem to be many v. and i. l. cads who don’t speak German, and who given the same chance would show most of the other Hitlerian characteristics" exterminating of the entire German nation as the only proper course after military victory: because, if you please, they are rattlesnakes, and don’t know the difference between good and evil! (What of the writer?) The Germans have just as much right to declare the Poles and Jews exterminable vermin, subhuman, as we have to select the Germans: in other words, no right, whatever they have done. Of course there is still a difference here. The article was answered, and the answer printed. The Vulgar and Ignorant Cad is not yet a boss with power; but he is a very great deal nearer to becoming one in this green and pleasant isle than he was.

                (Letters # 81 pp. 133-34). 

Earlier that same year Christopher, had written to him complaining about some of his comrades in the RAF at the post where he was stationed, apparently comparing them to orcs. Tolkien replied "I think the orcs as real a creation as anything in ‘realistic’ fiction... only in real life they are on both sides, of course.... In real (exterior) life men are on both sides" (Letters # 71 p. 118).  

And so here we are, a hundred years and a few weeks after the German publication of Hitler's Mein Kampf, a work so stuffed with hatred of the Jews, daft misunderstandings of the world, and conspiracy theories that we could rename it "Project 1925." Are we really so surprised that Grishnákh can read? Yet those who consider empathy a weakness or a sin and the lethality of our weapons a virtue can never fully understand what they read, especially if it's fiction, which depends so much on a shared humanity. They look at Homer or Tolkien and see only the sharpness of the sword, the swiftness of the arrow, and the glory of the warrior (TT 4.v.672). They never see how extremely important a moment it is when Sam looks upon the enemy soldier dead before him in Ithilien:

It was Sam’s first view of a battle of Men against Men, and he did not like it much. He was glad that he could not see the dead face. He wondered what the man’s name was and where he came from; and if he was really evil of heart, or what lies or threats had led him on the long march from his home; and if he would not really rather have stayed there in peace – all in a flash of thought which was quickly driven from his mind. (TT 4.iv.661)

Sam's "flash of thought" echoes other such moments in Tolkien, as when in The Hobbit Bilbo stands armed and invisible behind Gollum and his immediate desire is to kill him, but "a sudden understanding" came upon him in a "flash," in which he grasped the horror of Gollum's life and pitied him; and then a second "flash" gave him the "strength and resolve" to turn his back on murder (The Annotated Hobbit 133). Frodo has a similar moment when he and Sam catch Gollum near the Dead Marshes (TT 4.i.614-15). Another occurs on the stairs of Cirith Ungol, though there it is the readers who, guided by the narrator, look upon Gollum with pity and wish that Sam had seen all that they had (TT 4.viii.713-14). And again on the slopes of Mount Doom Sam, sword in hand, looks down at Gollum, meaning to kill him, but instead pities and spares him (RK 6.iii.943-44).

Without all these moments in which Bilbo, Frodo, and Sam choose pity and show mercy, Gollum is not there on Mount Doom to make sure, however inadvertently, that the Ring goes into the fire. He regains his Precious, but he is also set free from the misery he brought upon himself when he murdered Déagol instead of sparing him. As Gandalf replies when Strider explains why he, Legolas and Gimli, pursued the orcs who had captured Merry and Pippin rather than going after Frodo and Sam, "the choice was just, and it has been rewarded" (TT 3.v.500). Sméagol's choice 500 years earlier in the Gladden Fields was unjust and its own punishment. The pity of Bilbo, Frodo, and Sam finally allowed him to be released from that sentence.

So much depends upon what governs our actions. Are pity and mercy, born of empathy for another, our guide? Or is it the self-centeredness that has lost sight of everything but its own immediate desire? The Lord of the Rings shows how very large the implications of pity can be for the world. I analyzed it at great length in my book. But such moments are crucial as far back as the Iliad, too, and the fates of individuals and cities depend on them. When Achilles kills Hector near the end of Book Twenty-two, he knows full well that he is quite literally determining his own fate.

In the Iliad Hector's death is the last and loudest note in a long crescendo of death, which many readers never fully experience because of the way we often read Homer nowadays. In the classroom, where the dearth of time conspires with the limits of interest, we often jump over Books Ten through Fifteen, which provide a grim, bloody account of the steadily worsening fortunes of the Greeks in the absence of Achilles. Over and over in these books Homer catalogs the men killed, telling their names and speaking of their homes and of their families who will never see them again. The dead have "lost the day of their homecoming," a phrase Homer employs more than once in the Odyssey, which is of course all about coming home from war. This heartbreak is true for both Greeks and Trojans, and by being told their names -- 95 out of 108 of the dead are named -- and about their families it is as if we meet them before they die. In Book Sixteen, with the Greeks on the brink of annihilation, Achilles' closest friend, Patroclus, prevails upon him to allow him to take their troops back into the battle, since Achilles still refuses to return himself. Patroclus drives back the Trojans, killing Sarpedon, a powerful Trojan ally and a son of Zeus so beloved by his father that he is tempted to set his fate aside, save him, and send him home. But Zeus decides that he must not save him. His part is to ensure that what should be shall be.

Patroclus then goes too far and tries to storm Troy, but Apollo drives him back and helps Hector kill him. Neither Sarpedon nor Patroclus will see the day of their homecoming. Their climactic deaths, one on each side, touch and involve the very gods. The killing continues through Book Seventeen, which ends with the day begun at the start of Book Eleven. The events of these books take place on a single day, a day so heavy with the mounting burden of both sides' losses -- 141 named victims out of 154 -- that far more than one day seems to pass. Yet this pain is only a prelude to the next day's far more heartbreaking slaughters and lost homecomings as Achilles returns to the battlefield to avenge Patroclus and kill Hector, thus assuring that his own death and Troy's fall will soon follow (Books Nineteen to Twenty-two). Loss on loss, grief on grief. Small wonder, then, that the phrase κακῶν Ἰλιὰς, "an Iliad of woes," became proverbial among the Greeks and Romans for an "endless series of woes."

All those families, those fathers and mothers, wives and husbands, children and siblings who shall never meet again, all those women of Troy and their children who will be carried off into slavery when their husbands and fathers have been killed, all those lives they might have lived -- they are what the bright sword, the swift arrow, and the glorious warrior defend. These are what war strips from everyone, on every side. Even for those who make it home in the end, like Odysseus, it is a long, long road. There is a passage early in Book Sixteen, which describes the incessant blows of the assault Ajax must endure as he tries to hold the line against the Trojans trying to storm the Greek camp (16.102-111). It may also be seen as an apt metaphor for the avalanche of deaths overwhelming the readers in the sorrows of war.

Αἴας δ᾽ οὐκ ἔτ᾽ ἔμιμνε: βιάζετο γὰρ βελέεσσι:

δάμνα μιν Ζηνός τε νόος καὶ Τρῶες ἀγαυοὶ

βάλλοντες: δεινὴν δὲ περὶ κροτάφοισι φαεινὴ

πήληξ βαλλομένη καναχὴν ἔχε, βάλλετο δ᾽ αἰεὶ                105

κὰπ φάλαρ᾽ εὐποίηθ᾽: ὃ δ᾽ ἀριστερὸν ὦμον ἔκαμνεν

ἔμπεδον αἰὲν ἔχων σάκος αἰόλον: οὐδὲ δύναντο

ἀμφ᾽ αὐτῷ πελεμίξαι ἐρείδοντες βελέεσσιν.

αἰεὶ δ᾽ ἀργαλέῳ ἔχετ᾽ ἄσθματι, κὰδ δέ οἱ ἱδρὼς

πάντοθεν ἐκ μελέων πολὺς ἔρρεεν, οὐδέ πῃ εἶχεν             110

ἀμπνεῦσαι: πάντῃ δὲ κακὸν κακῷ ἐστήρικτο.

Ajax could hold out no longer; he was being forced back by their spears.

Zeus's will and the noble Trojans kept striking him, overpowering him.

His shining helm rang dreadfully in his ears as it was struck, 

And he was being struck ceaselessly on his well-made helmet.

His left arm was exhausted from constantly holding up his flashing shield. 

Though the Trojans struck it hard with their spears, they could not knock it away. 

But Ajax gasped in pain all the time now. Sweat streamed down his every limb.

No way could he even catch his breath. Woe piled every which way upon woe.

Just as the will of Zeus and the ceaseless blows from the Trojan spears beat down even Ajax, the best Greek warrior after Achilles -- both "will" and "Trojans" are subjects of the verb "kept striking," which thus combines divine and human agency -- so the relentless cataloging of the dead over the course of Books Ten through Fifteen wears down the readers with its pity and horror. When Book Sixteen begins away from the battlefield in the camp of Achilles and Patroclus, it is almost a relief. Yet Patroclus and Achilles see disaster coming. Their discussion of what is to be done covers the first 101 lines of Book Sixteen, which then pivots swiftly back to the worsening fortunes of Ajax we just read about (16.102-111). I have highlighted certain words in the text and translation to show how the emphasis in this passage shifts from the relentlessness of the use of force against Ajax to the completeness and seeming endlessness of his woe. Homer then briefly pivots away again, and reinvokes the Muses, as if he needs fresh inspiration to tell the even darker tale of woe to come: "Tell me now, Muses who dwell in Olympian homes, how fire first fell upon the ships of the Achaeans" (16.112-13). Homer frames this moment of woe piled upon woe between the discussions of Patroclus and Achilles and the new invocation of the Muses, after which the story turns back again to Ajax, and then to Achilles and Patroclus once more.

Imagine, if you will, that the Iliad ended with Book Twenty-two. We would have a very different poem: Hector killed brutally outside the gates of Troy, his home; his corpse stripped, abused, and mutilated; his father and mother watching it all from the walls; lamenting the loss of their son and their city's champion, amid the wailing of the Trojans and jubilant singing of the Greeks; his wife at home, eager for his return, preparing for his return, then hearing his mother's shattering cry; overwhelmed, rushing to the wall, grief-stricken by his loss and mourning all the sorrows it entails for Troy, for herself, and for their little boy. The last line of Book Twenty-two is, and in our imagining here the last line of the Iliad would be, ὣς ἔφατο κλαίουσ᾽, ἐπὶ δὲ στενάχοντο γυναῖκες: "So she spoke, crying out in pain, and the women wailed in answer" (22.515). This would be a brutal ending of unimaginable sorrow, unnumbered tears, and wholly without consolation. Only a barbarian, Conan the barbarian in fact, could look upon such an ending without horror. Crush your enemies? Check. See them driven before you? Check. Hear the lamentations of their women? Check. In this the barbarian is more honest than the fascist. He does not romanticize his own brutality, or wrap it in flags and glory, exceptionalism and toxic delusions about masculinity.

But though Homer acknowledges the barbarous darkness, he does not embrace it. He mourns it. He does not end there any more than he began there. The last thing that Hector says to Achilles before he dies is that he, too, will soon die before the gates of Troy. Achilles knows this. The choice before Achilles has been evident since the beginning, between war, glory, and an early death on the one hand, and home, obscurity and a long life on the other. Between the glory of the warrior and that which they defend. In Book Twenty-four, when Priam risks everything to beg Achilles for the return of his Hector's body, the son who will never see his father again meets the father who will never see his son again. Both weep, not for each other but because they see the reflection of their own loss in each other. They do not become friends. How could they be anything but enemies after so much blood? But they recognize each other's humanity. For his son, Priam humbles himself before his son's murderer; and Achilles feels pity for his own father and shows mercy to Priam. At least for now, Achilles and Priam free themselves for now from the power the force of violence wields over everyone in war, stripping them of their humanity and reducing them to objects even while they still live. Through pity and mercy they create what Simone Weil called "that small space between impulse and action where thought lives," without which "there is no place for justice or prudence."† In that space, Achilles returns Hector's body and arranges a truce so the Trojans may bury Hector. And that is where the Iliad ends. In loss and sorrow, with almost total loss soon yet to come, its final quietly dignified words directed not to the sword and the warrior, but to that which they defend: "ὣς οἵ γ᾽ ἀμφίεπον τάφον Ἕκτορος ἱπποδάμοιο" (24.804) / "And so they buried Hector the tamer of horses." It brings a melancholy closure not entirely unlike Sam's "Well, I'm back"  (RK 6.ix.1031). Buried just below the surface of these words are others left unsaid: "Well, I'm back. (But Mister Frodo's not.)" Whatever a war's goal may be, whatever its result, such loss and sorrow are its cost, even for those who come home alive. 

In the Odyssey when a bard sings of the war at Troy, Odysseus does not strut and preen. He weeps. Helen in the Iliad and Alcinous, King of the Phaeacians, in the Odyssey both say that the gods bring sorrows to humans so that there will be songs for later generations (Iliad 6.357-58; Odyssey 8.579-80).†† Homer begins the Iliad by asking the goddess to sing about the countless sorrows and deaths caused by the wrath of Achilles, which sent their ghosts down to Hades and left their bodies unburied to be eaten by the dogs and birds. So it was going to be for Hector. And while it was true that Zeus commanded Achilles to return the body, in the actual scene between Achilles and Priam in Book Twenty-four, empathy, pity, and mercy eclipse that command. It's not Zeus's command that moves our hearts, but the unfolding of the tragic drama between Achilles and Priam, the both of them weeping together.

Are we to imagine that the Greeks, who were not entirely dim, listened to bards sing Homer's Iliad and Odyssey for centuries, memorized these poems in whole or in part, and held competitions at the Olympic Games in reciting them, but heard none of this? That they heeded the ring of steel and the thrum of bowstring, but not the wailing cries of those the warriors slew or failed to save? They, too, had fathers, sons, brothers, and husbands who lost the day of their homecoming at war. In Athens, for one, a public funeral was held every year for those who had died at war in the previous twelve months. In Athens, the texts of the Iliad and Odyssey achieved their final form. In Athens, the first day of the Panathenaic Games was all about poetry and music, including contests in the performance of Homer as at the Olympic Games. In Athens, Tragic Poets like Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, received the legacy of Homer, and they streamlined it to focus on the woes of Homeric epics, not the battles, even though we seem to think that battles are more dramatic, given the endless series of car-chases, fight scenes, and explosions so common in popular entertainment in recent decades.

The Greeks knew the value of courage and skill in battle, and that sometimes, as they saw it, war was necessary. They knew the value of life and love and home. And they knew the bitter cost we have to pay to hold onto or win these things. Tolkien knew it, too. His very first tale of Middle-earth, The Fall of Gondolin, written directly after his own experiences on the Somme, draws on the story of the fall of Troy. Despite much hard fighting and truly glorious feats of prowess by the Elves, the city falls with terrible loss of life. Fifty years after Tolkien wrote this, he made clear in the "Foreword to the Second Edition" of The Lord of the Rings that he still felt sorrow for what was lost in the Great War: 

One has indeed personally to come under the shadow of war to feel fully its oppression; but as the years go by it seems now often forgotten that to be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years. By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead.

(xiv) 

So is there the thrill of glory in the sound of "the horns of the Mark at the coming of the morning" (RK 5.iv.829; 6.vi.978)? Of course there is. Or in the hobbits rising up against their oppressors in "The Scouring of the Shire" (RK 6.viii)? Again, of course. But there is also the weeping of the army of the West at the Field of Cormallen as a minstrel sings of the war, and the tears shed in the Grey Havens as Frodo is about to go into the West (RK 6.iv.954; ix.1030). There is the litany of the named dead, ending "red fell the dew in Rammas Echor," as grim, still, and final a line as the last line of the Iliad (RK 5.vi.849). There is Merry weeping at Théoden's burial and calling him father as the Riders of the King's House sing of the history of the Mark and of how Théoden's death brought hope out of loss, and therein lay its glory (RK 6.vi.976): 

Out of doubt, out of dark, to the day’s rising 

he rode singing in the sun, sword unsheathing. 

Hope he rekindled, and in hope ended;

over death, over dread, over doom lifted

out of loss, out of life, unto long glory.

And so they buried Théoden King of the Horse-lords.

 

____________________________________

† Simone Weil, Simone Weil's The Iliad or the Poem of Force. James P. Holoka ed. & trans.. 2003. Peter Lang Publishing.  (L'Iliade ou la poème de la force. Les Cahiers du Sud.1940). The translations offered in the text and below are my own.

Celui qui possède la force marche dans un milieu non résistant, sans que rien, dans la matière* humaine autour de lui, soit de nature à susciter entre l'élan et l'acte ce bref intervalle où se loge la pensée. Où la pensée n'a pas de place, la justice ni la prudence n'en ont.

One who has the power moves through a medium that offers no resistance, without which there is nothing in the human material* around him of such a nature as to create that small space between impulse and act where thought lives. Where there is no room for thought, there is room for neither justice nor prudence.

*Weil's thesis is that the use of force in war reduces humans to objects without souls. This is as true of the conqueror as of the conquered. So the "medium that offers no resistance" and "the human material around him" refer to all that is left of us once force has stripped away our soul. Impulse leads to action without pause or reflection.

†† Speaking of herself and Paris, Helen says:

  

οἷσιν ἐπὶ Ζεὺς θῆκε κακὸν μόρον, ὡς καὶ ὀπίσσω
ἀνθρώποισι πελώμεθ᾽ ἀοίδιμοι ἐσσομένοισι.

Iliad 6.357-58

[upon us] Zeus laid a destiny of woe, so that even

for men in days to come we shall be famous in song.

In Phaeacia the king Alcinous, sees Odysseus weeping to hear a bard singing of the Trojan War, and he says to him:

τὸν δὲ θεοὶ μὲν τεῦξαν, ἐπεκλώσαντο δ᾽ ὄλεθρον
ἀνθρώποις, ἵνα ᾖσι καὶ ἐσσομένοισιν ἀοιδή.

Odyssey 8.579-80