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.

 

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† 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

Dreamflowers and Lotus-eaters.

Upon meeting Merry and Pippin, Treebeard exchanges names with them. As he does so, he teaches them about the connection between the name of a thing and its history. Since in his language "real names tell you the story of the things they belong to," names grow longer the longer the story goes on (TT 3.iv.465). Thus, Treebeard's real "name is growing all the time." 

When he later learns that Merry and Pippin got both into and out of Lothlórien, he is surprised. The reflections on Lothlórien he offers speak very much to his idea of how names work. 

"...Laurelindórenan! That is what the Elves used to call it, but now they make the name shorter: Lothlórien they call it. Perhaps they are right: maybe it is fading, not growing. Land of the Valley of Singing Gold, that was it, once upon a time. Now it is the Dreamflower. Ah well! But it is a queer place...." (3.iv.467, emphasis mine)

From Laurelindórenan to Lothlórien, from the Land of the Valley of Singing Gold to the Dreamflower, the name is becoming shorter when it should be growing longer. To him that makes it a "queer place," which may be fading rather than growing. Treebeard does not see this as a good sign. Yet he doesn't know the half of it. He does not know, apparently, that the name is now cut even shorter, to just Lórien, which he would know could be translated as "Dreamland" (“Lórien.” Parf Edhellen, https://www.elfdict.com/wt/502964). The Golden Wood is called Lórien twice as often by the characters and narrator as it is called Lothlórien.*

The first element in Lothlórien is loth-, which is Sindarin for flower or blossom (Quenya lóte). It may be that Tolkien is remembering something from his school days and working in an obscure philological allusion to a type of dreamland he encountered in Homer's Odyssey. In the Odyssey ix.80-104 Odysseus arrives in the land of the Lotus-Eaters (λωτοφάγοι/lotophagoi), where eating the fruit of the lotus/λωτός leaves his crew in a dreamlike, happy state. As Alfred Heubeck has observed, “the λωτός- plant, with its magical properties of suppressing the desire to return home, is symbolic of the insecurity of human existence poised precariously between the spheres of empirical reality and mythical unreality” (Heubeck et al. 18, emphasis mine).** 

Heubeck's assessment of the λωτός-plant's significance resonates rather eerily with Galadriel's words to the Company when they arrive in Lórien: "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). That Odysseus has to drag his companions back to the ship by force echoes Treebeard's surprise that Merry and Pippin "ever got out"  of Laurelindórenan (TT 3.iv.465). Faramir, who is the only other character in The Lord of the Rings to call the Golden Wood by the name Laurelindórenan, will later express his own surprise that Frodo and Sam had been there, citing ancient wisdom: "For it is perilous for mortal man to walk out of the world of this Sun, and few of old came thence unchanged, ’tis said" (TT 4.v.667).

So, did Tolkien derive the loth of Lothlórien from Greek? Perhaps, perhaps not. Yet it remains an intriguing convergence of sound, meaning, and context. 

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*Not counting the Prologue, Appendices, and Index, Lórien occurs 74 times and Lothlórien 37 times. Treebeard of course mostly calls it Laurelindórenan, and a couple of times Lothlórien, but never Lórien.

** Alfred Heubeck, et al. A Commentary On Homer's Odyssey. Vol. II: Books IX-XVI. Oxford University Press. 1990.

Achilles ... terrifies us with his violent shouting.

Reconstruction of the Shield of Achilles by Kathleen Vail © All Rights Reserved

If you've really read The Iliad through, slogged through the sometimes horrid tedium of the so called battle books, the deaths of both Sarpedon and Patroclus hit you hard, with all the weight of how different it could have been for them thrown into the scales of Zeus. And now, with Patroclus' death, Achilles' wrath has a cause that even we these days can grasp fully, the needless and unexpected violent death of one we love. The rage that comes soaring up from within him, shouting 'now for wrath, now for ruin, and a red nightfall' as it were, can blow you away. As it did the Trojans, as it did me. (But then fuimus Troes.) Tennyson's version of this explosion of wrath at Iliad 18.202ff. is a marvel. Read it out loud.

Achilles Over the Trench SO SAYING, light-foot Iris pass’d away. Then rose Achilles dear to Zeus; and round The warrior’s puissant shoulders Pallas flung Her fringed ægis, and around his head The glorious goddess wreath’d a golden cloud, And from it lighted an all-shining flame. As when a smoke from a city goes to heaven Far off from out an island girt by foes, All day the men contend in grievous war From their own city, but with set of sun Their fires flame thickly, and aloft the glare Flies streaming, if perchance the neighbours round May see, and sail to help them in the war; So from his head the splendour went to heaven. From wall to dyke he stept, he stood, nor join’d The Achæans—honouring his wise mother’s word**— There standing, shouted, and Pallas far away Call’d; and a boundless panic shook the foe. For like the clear voice when a trumpet shrills, Blown by the fierce beleaguerers of a town, So rang the clear voice of Æakidês; And when the brazen cry of Æakidês Was heard among the Trojans, all their hearts Were troubled, and the full-maned horses whirl’d The chariots backward, knowing griefs at hand; And sheer-astounded were the charioteers To see the dread, unweariable fire That always o’er the great Peleion’s head Burn’d, for the bright-eyed goddess made it burn. Thrice from the dyke he sent his mighty shout, Thrice backward reel’d the Trojans and allies; And there and then twelve of their noblest died Among their spears and chariots.

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** Achilles' mother, Thetis, had asked him not to enter battle until Hephaestus made him new armor.

The title of this post of course comes from C.P. Cavafy's allusion to this moment in his poem Trojans.

And go visit Kathleen Vail's Shield of Achilles website. It's worth every minute.

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Postscript: 

One of the most powerful moments I have ever had in a classroom was discussing The Iliad for weeks, and then watching the 1989 film Glory. I wept.  It also gave me the idea for what was my favorite exam question. I quoted the scene in The Odyssey, where the ghost of Achilles tells Odysseus that he would rather be the slave of the lowest man on earth than king of all the dead, and asked my students if they thought the men of the 54th Massachusetts would agree.

The Fairy King's Honor and the Elven King's Shame

Corot, 'Orpheus leidt Eurydice de Onderwereld uit', 1861

The Middle English Romance Sir Orfeo presents us with a retelling of Orpheus and Eurydice, in which, as Kenneth Sisam says in his Fourteenth Century Verse & Prose, 'the Greek myth is almost lost in a tale of fairyland' (13).  Tolkien, of course, knew both versions of the story quite well. Not only did he call his tale of Beren and Lúthien, 'a kind of Orpheus-legend in reverse' (Letters, no. 153), but he translated Sir Orfeo into modern English as well as producing his own edition of the original text (Hostetter 2004).

Among the many points of contact between the fairies of Sir Orfeo and the Elves of Tolkien, some of which I discuss here, is a connection between the behavior of the Fairy King and Thingol in The Silmarillion.  Once Orfeo has performed before the Fairy King, the King promises to grant him any favor he wishes. Orfeo asks for Heroudis (Eurydice). Here is the scene as Tolkien rendered it:

At last when he his harping stayed,
this speech the king to him then made:
'Minstrel, thy music pleaseth me.
Come, ask of me whate'er it be,
and rich reward I will thee pay.
Come, speak, and prove now what I say!'
'Good sir,' he said, 'I beg of thee
that this thing thou wouldst give to me,
that very lady fair to see
who sleeps beneath the grafted tree.'
'Nay,' said the king, 'that would not do!'
A sorry pair ye'd make, ye two;
for thou are black, and rough, and lean,
and she is faultless, fair, and clean.
A monstrous thing then would it be
to see her in thy company.' 

'O sir,' he said, 'O gracious king,
but it would be a fouler thing
from mouth of thine to hear a lie.
Thy vow, sir, thou canst not deny.
Whate'er I asked, that should I gain,
and thou must needs thy word maintain.'
The king then said: 'Since that is so,
now take her hand in thine, and go;
I wish thee joy of her, my friend!'

(447-476)

In The Tale of Beren and Lúthien the contrast between the two lovers is also extreme. Lúthien is the 'the most beautiful of all the Children of Ilúvatar' (Silm 165), while Beren, after years of living rough in the forest, has come 'stumbling into Doriath grey and bowed as with many years of woe, so great had been the torment of the road' (165). And Thingol also finds the idea of Beren (or any man) with his daughter monstrous: 'Unhappy Men, children of little lords and brief kings, shall such as these lay hands on you, and yet live?' (167). The price for Lúthien's hand, he tells him, is one of the Silmarils: '[a]nd those that heard these words perceived that Thingol would save his oath, and yet send Beren to his death' (167). Now setting suitors impossible tasks is at least as old as The Odyssey, and the cleverness of the challenge, here as there, often has unexpected consequences. What is noteworthy in the context of Sir Orfeo is what follows:

Then at last Melian spoke, and she said to Thingol: 'O King, you have devised cunning counsel. But if my eyes have not lost their sight, it is ill for you, whether Beren fail in his errand, or achieve it. For you have doomed either your daughter, or yourself. And now is Doriath drawn within the fate of a mightier realm.' But Thingol answered: 'I sell not to Elves or Men those whom I love and cherish above all treasure. And if there were hope or fear that Beren should come ever back alive to Menegroth, he should not have looked again upon the light of heaven, though I had sworn it.' 

But Lúthien was silent, and from that hour she sang not again in Doriath. A brooding silence fell upon the woods, and the shadows lengthened in the kingdom of Thingol.

(168)

Unlike the Fairy King, who accepts Orfeo's reproof without demur and calls him 'friend' as he sets Heroudis free, Thingol disregards the warnings of his farseeing wife, and scorns the obligations imposed upon him by his own oath. Instead, he openly avows oath-breaking and murder. Moreover, there's a progression from 'Melian spoke' through 'Thingol answered' to '[b]ut Lúthien was silent', which tightly binds Thingol's 'cunning counsel' and his appalling willingness to break his oath to Lúthien's songless silence and the shadows grown long in Doriath. 

Thus both the taking of the oath by a fairy king and his willingness to be forsworn have consequences far beyond anything we moderns might at first suspect in Sir Orfeo, where it seems 'only' the Fairy King's honor is at stake. Yet the honor of the King of Faërie in a medieval Romance, or something modelled on one like The Tale of Beren and Lúthien, must be a serious matter. The Fairy King in Sir Orfeo certainly seems to think so, since his reluctance to keep his promise is overcome by a mere reminder of how 'foul' it would be for him to fail to do so. There is no question that he would shame himself if he denied his vow, and so he fulfills it. In Thingol, however, we see a character of greater moral complexity, but less intergrity, than the character on whom he is based. Of course, having children will do that to you.

________________________________________

Works Consulted

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Gollum before The Taming of Sméagol (V)

In the first study of this series I proposed considering only the references to Gollum that we find in The Lord of the Rings proper, that is, excluding not only The Hobbit but also the Prologue to The Lord of the Rings. My reasons for doing so are quite simple. First, there can be no certainty that a first time reader of The Lord of the Rings will have already read The Hobbit or even the Prologue. Second, Tolkien rewrote The Hobbit to suit the darker and more tormented creature into which Gollum had evolved in The Lord of the Rings. Thus, the portrayal of Gollum in this work has to stand or fall on its own, however much consideration of other material might enhance our understanding of it.  Having now completed our analysis of how Tolkien laid the groundwork for Gollum's arrival in the Tale itself, we can in all fairness explore the larger context and its relationship to The Lord of the Rings. 

Now Tolkien's original public, in 1954 and 1955, will have included many who knew only the first edition of The Hobbit (1937), as well as some who knew only the second (1951); and by discussing both versions of Bilbo's story the Prologue very clearly addresses both sets of these readers. As a result, what is a straightforward narrative of how Bilbo came by the Ring in each edition, becomes a more complex tale of lies and silent dishonesty, theft and hatred, near murder and sudden pity, which reveals more about the corruption worked by the Ring than either edition does if taken alone.

As Tolkien wrote with silken understatement on his proposed revisions in 1947, the year he submitted them to Allen and Unwin, '[...] if The Hobbit ran so the Sequel would be a little easier to <conduct> as a narrative (in Ch, II [i.e., The Shadow of the Past]), though not necessarily "truer".' (Rateliff, The History of the Hobbit, 732). 'Not necessarily "truer" ' is a fascinating comment, which suggests that some doubt may attach even to the second version. It brings to mind how Bilbo is still attempting to justify how he got the Ring many years after the wizard had already 'badgered' him into telling 'the truth' (FR 1.i.33); and Gandalf called the lies Bilbo and Gollum told about how they came by the Ring 'too much alike for comfort' (1.ii.48). If, as Gandalf also says, 'Gollum is a liar, and you have to sift his words' (1.ii.56), what does that mean for Bilbo, whom we know to be a liar as well? It is quite possible that Bilbo never told the whole truth until the Council of Elrond, years after he had let the Ring pass to Frodo and had been bitterly confronted with the spiritual and moral effect it was having on him. For only then can he say that he 'understand[s] now' and ask forgiveness for his lies (2.i.232; ii.249).

However that may be, the simultaneous existence of two versions -- the one a lie, the other not necessarily truer -- argues that simple 'retcon' was not the point. Had it been so, we would expect the second version to suppress and supersede the first entirely. How do these two texts allow us to construe Gollum, and Bilbo, too, for, as we have seen here, it is from his behavior in A Long-expected Party that we glean our first impressions of Gollum in The Lord of the Rings? Since the 1937 Hobbit has long been out of print and the oft announced facsimile has not yet appeared, direct comparison of the two texts of Riddles in the Dark is not as easy as one could wish. We are not without resources, however. John Rateliff's The History of the Hobbit and Douglas Anderson's The Annotated Hobbit are works of the first importance. Also of great worth is Bonniejean Christensen's Gollum's Character Transformation in The Hobbit, the first work I know of to study the texts side by side. I would also gratefully draw the reader's eye to the parallel presentation of both versions in their entirety found here.  Being able to read each one from start to finish without the need for notes or substitutions, and then to compare them directly, is an invaluable tool.

With the exception of a dozen or so words, the 1937 and the 1951 texts of Riddles in the Dark are identical for almost the first 3,500 words. Before examining the differences, which quite naturally garner most of the attention, I'd like to look first at the words that are the same, because in both cases they establish a foundation for the rest of the action, and because Tolkien clearly decided there was no need to change them. The first 3,500 words take the story to the point where Gollum shrieks his last wrong answer -- 'String, or nothing!' -- and Bilbo, sword in hand, puts his back to the wall.  What can we see then in this section?

Bilbo spares hardly a thought for the ring he finds in the darkness -- 'a turning point in his career, but he didn't know it [....] it did not seem of any particular use at the moment' -- because he is too given over to the misery of being lost and cut off from his friends. His mind turns to the idea of frying bacon and eggs at home, a comforting thought if his hunger had not made him 'miserabler'. Next the hope of homely solace his pipe promises is 'shattered' by a lack of matches, leaving him 'crushed'. So though his thought seeks back beyond the moment for comfort, it fails to find any in the usual places. Yet his search is not wholly vain. For he finds his 'sword' from the storied elven city of Gondolin, so small that he had forgotten he had it, but its legendary connections and his sudden grasp of its usefulness against goblins comfort him. They enable him to go on. In the sword Bilbo 'comes upon' another ancient artifact, endowed with a certain power, which he has discovered only belatedly and which he had forgotten he possessed, and it helps him to continue on his journey. The same will be true of the ring. Most importantly at this moment, however, is that Bilbo has reached beyond the normal hobbitish comforts of food and pipe-weed to take hold of a wider and deeper world, one in which he 'explore[s ...] caves, and wear[s] a sword instead of a walking-stick' just as he had fancied he might do while still in Bag End (Hobbit 24).^[1] 'Go forward? Only thing to do. On we go.' And now that Bilbo has in this way recovered from his initial desperation, and by means of the sword and its associations found the courage to move forward, his native hobbit talents -- resilience, stealthiness, sense of direction underground -- and his native hobbit fund of 'wisdom and wise sayings' come to the fore.  A turning point indeed.

Advancing through the darkness steadily, though not without fear of 'goblins or half-imagined things', Bilbo is brought to a halt by a lake that blocks his path. We are told that the water may be home to 'nasty, slimy things with big bulging eyes [...] strange things' and 'other things more slimy than fish' and in the tunnels are still 'other things', which had been there before the goblins and still lived in 'odd corners, slinking and nosing about' (emphases mine). By this lake beneath the mountains, in this darkness full of things, lives Gollum, 'darker than the darkness', who catches and eats both fish and goblin, 'which he thought good, when he could get it'. His origins are a mystery, and even the goblins keep away from his lake, 'for they had a feeling that something unpleasant was lurking down there' (emphasis mine).

Thus, as we see later in The Lord of the Rings, the reader is prepared for Gollum's entrance. For he is both like and unlike those things in the lake and the tunnels; he preys on the blind fish whom he can see with his 'pale lamp-like eyes'; and though he does not seem to be one of the original residents of the tunnels, he, too, slinks and noses about the odd corners of the darkness. But he also practices something that is not quite cannibalism, but also not quite not, on the goblins whom he 'throttles from behind'.  Mysterious, monstrous, and murderous describe him, but don't disclose precisely what he is.

Yet we also may see similarities to Bilbo: in the darkness of the tunnels Gollum retains his sense of direction, and he can move stealthily.  As with Bilbo his eating habits and opinions on food also receive emphasis. These similarities furnish a common stage upon which the riddles and the well-known, supposedly inviolable, rules of the ancient Riddle Game play themselves out. Together with the memories of sunlight on daisies and of his grandmother when they lived 'in a hole in a bank by a river' (Hobbit 85-86) -- which suggest that Gollum was not always darker than darkness and a devourer of squeaking baby goblins (92, 95) -- these similarities establish a link not just between Gollum and Bilbo, but between Gollum and, as it were, humanity. Gollum may be depraved and monstrous, but he is not a monster per se, a creature of a different order like trolls or goblins, Mirkwood spiders or dragons. He was not born this way:

'Praps ye sits here and chats with it a bitsy, my preciousss. It likes riddles, praps it does, does it?' He was anxious to appear friendly, at any rate for the moment, and until he found out more about the sword and the hobbit, whether he was quite alone really, whether he was good to eat, and whether Gollum was really hungry. Riddles were all he could think of. Asking them, and sometimes guessing them, had been the only game he had ever played with other funny creatures sitting in their holes in the long, long ago, before the goblins came, and he was cut off from his friends far under under the mountains. 

'Very well, said Bilbo, who was anxious to agree, until he found out more about the creature, whether he was quite alone, whether he was fierce or hungry, and whether he was a friend of the goblins. 

"You ask first," he said, because he had not had time to think of a riddle. 

So Gollum hissed: 

    What has roots as nobody sees,
    Is taller than trees,
       Up, up it goes,
       And yet never grows? 

'Easy!' said Bilbo. 'Mountain, I suppose.' 

'Does it guess easy? It must have a competition with us, my preciouss! If precious asks, and it doesn't answer, we eats it, my preciousss. If it asks us, and we doesn't answer, [...]'

(Hobbit 84)

Sharing the riddles, they have some kind of cultural heritage in common. So again Gollum is not wholly alien. More than that -- whatever Tolkien may have envisioned Gollum to be when first writing the story -- he also comes of a people who dwelt in holes. Not only are Bilbo and Gollum both playing for time here, but the close parallelism of the sentences describing their thinking -- 'anxious...until...whether...whether...whether' -- reinforces how alike they are. Yet these similarities open a dangerous door, when the most chilling difference between them turns their 'chat' into a 'competition' in which Bilbo's life is the stake.

This brings us to the first divergence in the texts, which begins directly after 'If it asks us, and we doesn't answer':

'we gives it a present, gollum.' (1937) 

or

'then we does what it wants, eh? We shows it the way out, yes!' (1951)

To begin with, in both of these statements there is a severe dissonance between the two parts of the wager: Bilbo is supper, or gets a present; Bilbo is supper, or gets shown out. Having introduced us to Gollum by first indicating his strangeness and monstrosity, and by then tempering that impression through the suggestion that he and Bilbo are not so different after all, Tolkien now brings that strangeness and monstrosity rushing back again with the shockingly unequal terms of the contest. For, while being eaten is clearly not a good result for Bilbo, not getting to eat him is scarcely an equivalent evil for Gollum. There are, as it were, other fish in the sea.

Then, too, there is the absurdity of his sincere offer of a present and, though Bilbo wins the contest in a questionable fashion, Gollum's distress at being unable to find it and his many apologies as he shows Bilbo the way out instead. As John Rateliff has pointed out, in the 1937 Hobbit Gollum is more honorable than Bilbo (Rateliff, 166-67). And it seems clear that Bilbo felt that even a ghastly cannibalistic creature like Gollum could be trusted to abide by the rules of the Riddle Game. Else Bilbo would not have begun 'to wonder what Gollum's present would be like' when it appeared he was about to lose. It isn't until Gollum begins to paw at him and Bilbo asks his unexpected and unfair final question -- 'What have I got in my pocket?' -- that Bilbo becomes unsure of 'how the game was going to end, whether Gollum guessed right or not' (89-90). And even then, with his back to the wall and his sword out, Bilbo asks 'What about the present?', which he felt that he had won 'pretty fairly' and had a right to by the time honored children's law of 'finding's keeping'. Yet the narrator is dismissive of Bilbo's fears, and asserts that even for creatures like Gollum the rules of the Riddle Game are inviolable.^[2] 

As frightening and dangerous as Gollum is in the 1937 Hobbit, his firmly abiding by the rules of the game which he himself initiated (no doubt thinking he would win) renders him harmless in this instance and almost admirable (but not quite entirely so since he considers cheating). Indeed Bilbo, having realized that he already possessed the present Gollum had meant to give him, prevaricates and manipulates his dismayed competitor: 

'The ring would have been mine now, if you had found it; so you would have lost it anyway. And I will let you off on one condition.' 

'Yes, what iss it? What does it wish us to do, my precious?'  

'Help me get out of these places.' 

Now Gollum had to agree to this, if he was not to cheat. He still very much wanted just to try what the stranger tasted like; but now he had to give up all idea of it. Still, there was the little sword; and the stranger was wide awake and on the look out, not unsuspecting as Gollum liked to have things which he attacked. So perhaps it was best after all. 

Now we should not be too hard on Bilbo here. That would be missing the point about Gollum as well as Bilbo. For using cunning and lies to escape from a dangerous creature is as old as heroic tales themselves. It is a mark of the hero's intellectual prowess. We need only cite the story of Odysseus and Polyphemus, the cyclops, in Book Nine of The Odyssey. There Odysseus is trapped underground with a cannibalistic adversary, as remarkable for his one eye as Gollum is for his two. Odysseus uses his wits to save himself along with many of his men, though he also commits the nearly disastrous mistake of telling the creature his true name. (There's an interesting parallel to explore here, if someone else hasn't already done so.) Bilbo is clever enough to find a way to use the rules of the game against Gollum, so that Gollum feels he has no choice but to fulfill his part of the bargain: " 'Must we give it the thing, preciouss? Yess, we must! We must fetch it, preciouss, and give it the present we promised.' "  To be sure, he remains aware of Bilbo's sword, but that seems more to confirm him in the decision he's has already made than to decide him.

Still the last we see of Gollum, and the last any public reader ever expected to see before 1954, is him fulfilling the obligation imposed on him by the terms of the contest he had proposed.  So he is a strange creature, frightening, dangerous, capable of monstrous acts to satisfy his hunger, but not so different from hobbits that he can't be dealt with. Unlike the Gollum we meet later in The Lord of the Rings, who haunts Frodo's tracks from Moria onward and who cannot be gotten rid of, this Gollum goes away once he has lived up to his promise. To have met him makes for a good story, which is precisely what Bilbo makes of it.

The 1951 version, with which we are all familiar, tells another story. How different from the positive, near sprightly 'We gives it a present!' is the concessive, almost disappointed 'then we does what it wants, eh? We shows it the way out, yes!' Not very convincing. Every reference to the 'present' disappears. Bilbo's curiosity about what kind of present it would be becomes a 'hope that the wretch would not be able to answer'. When Gollum seems about to be stumped by the egg riddle, Bilbo now pushes him about his 'guess' instead of his 'present'. And when Gollum finally loses the match, Bilbo is much more interested in what he has won, and more pushy about getting it, whereas in 1937 it had been more a matter of principle:

(1937) 'What about the present?' asked Bilbo, not that he cared very much, still he felt that he had won it, pretty fairly, and in very difficult circumstances too. 

(1951) 'Well?' he said. 'What about your promise? I want to go. You must show me the way.'

By removing the ring as a present one of the most intriguing, and touching, links between Bilbo and Gollum in the 1937 Hobbit vanishes without a trace: that Gollum had received as a birthday present the very ring he meant to give Bilbo as a present for winning their contest; and Gollum, dismayed that he cannot find it, splutters profuse apologies. There's a charm in this, that he was going to pass on the present that he had received. Nor does the 1937 text cast the least doubt cast upon Gollum's claim that it was his birthday present. 

But from Gandalf we know that Gollum's story was a lie, even if he had all but convinced himself of its truth -- he was still telling the tale over 75 years later -- and only he could have told Bilbo (FR 1.ii.48, 56). So the 'birthday present' part of the story is no invention of Bilbo's. What is more, in the 1951 version the introduction of the ring as belonging to Gollum, and his assertion that it was his birthday present serves to darken the narrative. Whereas in the 1937 Gollum went to fetch his 'birthday present' to give it to Bilbo, in the 1951 he goes off to get it so he can kill and eat Bilbo. That is what his 'birthday present' is good for -- just ask the 'small goblin-imp' he had dined on earlier that day -- and that is his sole motive for fetching it. So what had supplied a charming touch in the first edition is turned on its head in the second to illustrate Gollum's treachery and ghoulish appetites. The transformation is so complete in fact that we might well wonder if Tolkien had this in mind when he said the second version was not necessarily truer.

Indeed the whole new section introduced in the 1951 text -- from Bilbo's demand that Gollum fulfill his promise to Gollum's discovery that his ring was lost -- does not just explain Gollum's motives and provide details about his use of the ring and its effects on him. It also contains information that Bilbo could not have known (what Gollum was thinking) at the time, or at any time before Gandalf learned them from Gollum decades later (how Gollum handled the ring), or finally before Gandalf had disclosed to him that this ring was connected to Sauron ('the Master who ruled them all'). Just as Gandalf had detected the falsity of Bilbo's initial story that he had won the ring because it was too much like Gollum's tale that it had been a present -- 'The lies were too much alike for comfort' (FR 1.ii.48) -- so we, too, may come to believe that Bilbo's new version is too much like the version Gandalf tells Frodo decades later. It is also true, however, that the claim that Gollum meant to cheat all along seems to have existed before Gandalf spoke to Frodo about it, since Frodo himself advances that claim (FR 1.ii.54).

This argues the existence of three and perhaps four versions of the story: the first coming down to us in the 1937, which represents what Bilbo 'told the dwarves and put in his book'; the second being that which he told Gandalf and then Frodo (FR 1.i.40); the third being the tale as he told it at the Council of Elrond when he had come to 'understand things a little better now' (FR 2.ii.249); and the fourth -- which may or may not be the same as the third -- coming down to us in the 1951 text, and which was preserved in 'many copies' of the Red Book as 'the true account (as an alternative), derived no doubt from notes by Frodo and Samwise, both of whom learned the truth' (FR Pr. 13). In this context, which Tolkien's own assertion that the later version was 'not necessarily "truer" ' has provided us, it will be interesting to note that, while Bilbo says that the tale he tells at the Council of Elrond is 'the true story', Gandalf says only that Bilbo's and Gollum's versions 'agree' (FR 2.ii.254).

What we should take away here is not that none of these accounts are reliable, but that anyone who possesses the Ring, even briefly, is susceptible to its dire influence. Viewed together from the perspective of The Lord of the Rings, both the 1937 and the 1951 versions show this influence. In the first tale Bilbo substantially whitewashes Gollum's character in order to support the story of the 'present'; in the second he blackens Gollum's name by adding grisly emphasis to his cannibalism and by portraying him as intending to break his promise the moment he had the opportunity to do so.^[3]  The falsehoods Bilbo told to justify himself and his possession of the Ring in the 1937 have their analog in the falseness of Gollum in the 1951. Tolkien, moreover, meant for both of these versions of what happened that day to survive. Otherwise he would have just suppressed the 1937 version entirely, and not incorporated it into The Lord of the Rings as a lie Bilbo told, or inserted an account into the Prologue to explain variant manuscript traditions of the Red Book from which the 1937 and 1951 texts purportedly descend. For 'many copies' are not all copies. Together, their layered textuality tells a richer and more complete tale about Bilbo, Gollum, and the Ring than either could have done alone.

But this is not all. For with the 'revelation' that Gollum was not a funny little creature of gruesome appetites who nevertheless kept his promises, a new door opens. Not a drop of the 'bless us and splash us' Gollum survives. He is now shrewd, horrid, and terrifying, recalling with pleasure the squeak of the goblin child he had devoured earlier that day, and seething with a rage at the loss of his precious that boils over when he realizes the truth of what Bilbo has in his pocket. Bilbo, a bit highhanded until now in demanding the fulfillment of Gollum's promise, flees for his life at the last possible moment, and now it is a murderous creature with glowing eyes that pursues him through the darkness.

At this instant Gollum becomes for the reader what we have seen him portrayed to be in our studies of him in the first half of The Lord of the Rings.  At this instant Bilbo, with rage and murder at his heels, discovers the power of the Ring and the tables turn. He becomes the pursuer, and invisibility gives power to his fear and desperation, the power of murder with impunity, just as it had to Gollum. But, unseen, Bilbo can also glimpse what was invisible to him before.^[4] 

Not only does the unfairness of invisibly murdering an unarmed opponent from behind hit Bilbo hard,^[5] overwhelming his fear of Gollum and the goblins and his desperation to escape and rejoin his friends. He is also struck, and far more profoundly, by the 'sudden understanding' of how desperate, fearful, and alone Gollum is: the horror of that life -- to which possession of the Ring has now brought Bilbo perilously closer -- allows pity through the door the Ring has opened.

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

(Hobbit 97)

As Gandalf says to Frodo years later, hinting at divine intervention, there was more than one power at work in Bilbo's finding the Ring (FR 1.ii.56). Even without this hint, however, it is hard to avoid seeing some measure of the same in Bilbo's back to back flashes, of insight and inspiration, and harder still not to think of the phrase 'a leap of faith' when reading the final sentence of this paragraph. Not that Bilbo has undergone some kind of religious conversion here, or that Tolkien means to suggest that he has, but he has changed; and by calling this notion to our minds Tolkien suggests a larger spiritual context of which Bilbo, like Frodo later, is himself unaware. 

And this is of course the third major change in the 1951 text. First we saw the increased savagery and treachery of Gollum in company with the elimination of his 'present' to Bilbo. Then the ring became the One Ring.  Now, on the very precipice of murder, Bilbo finds insight and pity, and 'a new strength and resolve'.  This leads directly, as it was meant to do, to Gandalf's attempts to elicit Frodo's pity for Gollum, and his flat assertion of the importance of Bilbo's pity:

'I have not much hope that Gollum can be cured before he dies, but there is a chance of it. And he is bound up with the fate of the Ring. My heart tells me that he has some part to play yet, for good or ill, before the end; and when that comes, the pity of Bilbo may rule the fate of many -- yours not least.'

(FR 1.ii.59)

Here we always think first of Frodo, and then of the fact that the Ring is destroyed because Bilbo showed pity and mercy to Gollum. But we should also remember that Gollum is one of those many to whose fate Gandalf refers. For in the midst of all his concerns about Sauron and the Ring, Gandalf has not forgotten him. Bilbo's putting his hand on the Ring in the darkness was, ultimately, what brought Gollum out from under the mountains, and what gave Gandalf the hope -- not much hope, as he says, nor yet a hope forlorn -- that Gollum could be cured. The 'something else' that Gandalf said was at work in Bilbo's finding the Ring was at work here, too. Indeed the memories that the Riddle Game sparked in him, which are also evoked by their absence in Bilbo's flash of insight, and by Gandalf at Bag End with Frodo, all point to Gollum's corruption and the possibility -- and difficulty -- of his cure:

[...] Gollum brought up memories of ages and ages and ages before, when he lived with his grandmother in a hole in a bank by a river, "Sss, sss, my preciouss," he said. "Sun on the daisies it means, it does."

But these ordinary above ground everyday sort of riddles were tiring for him. Also they reminded him of days when he had been less lonely and sneaky and nasty, and that put him out of temper. What is more they made him hungry [...].

(Hobbit 97)

and

[...] a glimpse of endless unmarked days without light or hope of betterment, hard stone, cold fish, sneaking and whispering.

(Hobbit 97)

and

‘But there was something else in it, I think, which you don’t see yet. Even Gollum was not wholly ruined [...]. 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: 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.

‘But that, of course, would only make the evil part of him angrier in the end – unless it could be conquered. Unless it could be cured.’ Gandalf sighed. ‘Alas! there is little hope of that for him. Yet not no hope.

(FR 1.ii.55)

The contrast between these two passages in The Hobbit and that from The Lord of the Rings shows the beginning and growth of the idea of the darkness of Gollum's days and its hopelessness before Bilbo discovered pity in his condition. The first passage, present in the 1937 and retained in the 1951, shows that darkness at its full. Even pleasant memories reinforce the horror. In the second passage, introduced in the 1951, Bilbo peers into that darkness and turns away from the path to murder. The third passage, part of a conversation in which Gandalf vainly encourages Frodo to pity Gollum as Bilbo had done, builds upon the two that went before to suggest that Gollum may yet return from the darkness of his soul just as he emerged from the shadows beneath the Misty Mountains.

Nevertheless, the narrative of The Hobbit moves onward so swiftly, without the least glance back at Gollum, and the characterization of him has been so powerfully negative, that it is not easy to see even the potential for something else. Nor, moreover, does the hint of something else become detectable until Gandalf's conversation with Frodo in The Lord of the Rings. Even then, Frodo's reaction to the suggestion that Gollum was a hobbit, that he was to be pitied, and that he might be better cured than killed is as fierce as only denial can be. Here, too, the story moves swiftly on, and every mention of Gollum until he appears in The Taming of Sméagol emphasizes the danger he poses. Even in the Prologue, written with a certain air of historiographical detachment, he is 'loathsome', murderous, cannibalistic, and 'his heart was black and treachery was in it' (FR Pr. 11-12).

In the end Gandalf's hope that Gollum might be cured proves vain, but its failure should neither obscure nor invalidate the suggestion of the text that by guiding Bilbo's hand to the Ring that day beneath the Misty Mountains the other 'power' which was at work made redemption something possible to hope for. It was a near run thing, that moment on the stairs of Cirith Ungol when Gollum nearly repented (TT 4.viii.714-15), and Tolkien called it 'perhaps the most tragic moment of the Tale' (Letters, # 246, p. 330). Indeed the echo of tragedy sounds first in the moment of Bilbo's horror and pity. Yet tragedies don't begin with one feckless friend murdering another over a 'birthday present' fished comically out of a river. Like the hint at a leap of faith at the paragraph's end, the echo of tragedy here in Bilbo's moment of horror and pity again suggests a larger spiritual context, one characterized by 'Bilbo was meant to find the Ring, and not by its maker' (FR 1.ii.56, emphases original), one which, as here, uses evil against itself to create a greater good and beauty (Silm. 17, 98).

Thus, we can see that the darkness within Gollum is present from the first, no matter how much of a shock the Gollum of The Lord of the Rings must have been to those who had read the 1937 Hobbit. It is, however, clearly with the 1951 text that the truly evil Gollum we hear so much of in the first half of The Lord of the Rings makes his debut. That's no surprise. What is unexpected is the way in which the two portrayals of Gollum in the first two editions of The Hobbit work together to create a fuller portrait of Gollum, Bilbo, and the Ring's power over them. Tolkien's decision not to do anything as ordinary as repudiate the earlier version, but to retain it as a lie, side by side with the newer version, which is itself 'not necessarily "truer" ' is nothing short of a brilliant example of Tolkien's eccentric genius in the telling of Tales. Then the characterization expands with the perspective of the story. For not only does he suggest in passing the slim chance that Gollum might repent of his evil and be cured -- an essential point for a Christian like Tolkien -- but he weaves that possibility into the long game of the plot and the role of providence within history, where it will lie forgotten until Frodo meets Gollum, and comes to understand the pity of Bilbo.  Yet, if in the end the burden of his deeds and the corruption of the Ring proved too much for him, if in the end he could not be saved, that was of old the fate of Arda Marred.

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Gollum Before the Taming of Sméagol (I)

Gollum Before the Taming of Sméagol (II)

Gollum Before the Taming of Sméagol (III)

Gollum Before the Taming of Sméagol (IV)

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^[1] See Olsen (2012) 85-87, 109. Necessarily, all page numbers cited above for The Hobbit derive from the 1951 edition.

^[2] Since we are concerned with the perception of the reader, the identity of the narrator here, whether Bilbo or some later writer need not detain us here. It is also true that, regardless of the narrator, the accounts of Bilbo underlie the texts, with perhaps an admixture of what Gandalf learned from Gollum.

^[3] Note Bilbo's words to Gandalf on the night of his farewell party: 'Gollum would have killed me, if I hadn't kept it' (FR 1.i.34), which strongly suggest that Bilbo's admission of 'the true story' to Gandalf years before had included a claim of Gollum's motives. This 'agrees' with Frodo's assertion about his intentions (FR 1.ii.54).

^[4] For a discussion of the question of invisibility, see most recently Jane Beal, Why is Bilbo Baggins Invisible? The Hidden War in The Hobbit, The Journal of Tolkien Research (2015) vol. 2, iss. 1, article 8.

^[5] 'No, not fair' brings Bilbo's rush of breathless fear, indeed near panic, to a dead halt.