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

From Lady Philosophy to Gollum: 'The roots of those mountains must be roots indeed' (FR 1.ii.54)

In telling Gollum's story to Frodo, Gandalf introduces him as follows:

'Long after, but still very long ago, there lived by the banks of the Great River on the edge of Wilderland a clever-handed and quiet-footed little people. I guess they were of hobbit-kind; akin to the fathers of the fathers of the Stoors, for they loved the River, and often swam in it, or made little boats of reeds. There was among them a family of high repute, for it was large and wealthier than most, and it was ruled by a grandmother of the folk, stern and wise in old lore, such as they had. The most inquisitive and curious-minded of that family was called Sméagol. He was interested in roots and beginnings; he dived into deep pools; he burrowed under trees and growing plants; he tunnelled into green mounds; and he ceased to look up at the hill-tops, or the leaves on trees, or the flowers opening in the air: his head and his eyes were downward.'

(FR 1.ii.62)

The scene starts out like a fairy tale, and all seems well and good as we begin the transition from the formidable matriarch of the family to her grandson. The initial shine imparted by 'most inquisitive and curious-minded' is more glitter than gold, however. For the first often means not just 'curious' but 'unduly or impertinently curious; prying', and the second 'having a curious or inquisitive or strange mind'. 'Curious', too, often has a condemnatory sense: '[d]esirous of knowing what one has no right to know, or what does not concern one, prying'. From here, it is literally and metaphorically downhill. Yet it is more than simply that. Sam, being a gardener, also has his head and eyes turned downwards, often but not always. He has not forgotten what is above. He could never have seen that star above Mordor, had he done so, never have taken from it the lesson of hope and beauty that he did. 

It also seems clear that, however we may construe what happens when he first sees the Ring, Sméagol had begun this 'descent' of his own free will before that day in The Gladden Fields. His choice prepared him for the secrets hidden beneath the Ring's precious beauty. The comfortless dark beneath the Misty Mountains, within which he sought to hide from the light of the sun, was already within him.

All of this makes the following passage from Boethius' The Consolation of Philosophy (5 pr. 2) seem rather apposite:

'But [I asked] in this series of closely connected causes is there any freedom of choice for us, or does the chain of Fate constrain the very impulses of human minds, too?'

'There is freedom of choice', [Philosophy] said. 'For no rational nature could exist without freedom of choice being present in it. That which can employ reason of its own nature has the judgement by which it discerns one thing from another; on its own, therefore, it recognizes the difference between what is to be shunned and what is to be desired. Truly what a man judges desirable he pursues, and truly he flees what he thinks must be shunned. So in those creatures in whom reason exists, there is also the freedom of willing and not willing. But I claim that this freedom is not equal in all creatures. 

'For in higher and divine beings there is at hand a penetrating judgement and a will uncorrupted and the power to achieve what is desired. Human souls must be freer in truth when they maintain themselves in contemplation of the divine mind, truly less free when they are dispersed to bodies, and even less so when they are bound to earthly flesh and blood. Truly extreme is their slavery when they have surrendered to their faults and fallen from the possession of their proper reason. For when they cast down their eyes from the light of the highest truth to dark and lower things, at once they live blind in a cloud of ignorance, and are ruined by destructive passions, by yielding and agreeing to which they foster the slavery they have brought upon themselves, and in a certain way, they are captives because of their own freedom. Nevertheless the gaze of Providence, looking out from eternity, descries all these things and establishes what is predestined according to their merits.'

The interplay of free will and Providence in Boethius and Tolkien deserve more attention than I will give it here, especially that final sentence which seems to indicate that what is predestined for us is what we have deserved. That is what is interesting here, not that 'aha! Tolkien's source for this portrayal is in Boethius!'. Quellenforschung, though fun for kids of all ages, needs to earn its keep here by answering the question: 'So what?'.  Here we can see the choices of all those who possess the Ring, or wish to, or fear to, reflected in the descent that Boethius describes. 

That is an essay for another day. It is worth noting, however, the connection between Boethius and Tolkien does not stop with the words I've just quoted above. For the next section, which is in verse, not only confirms the link, because Sméagol-Gollum seeks to hide from the Sun (personified with the capital letter) beneath the Misty Mountains: 'The Sun could not watch me there' (FR 1.ii.54). And perhaps the sun could not, and the Eye could not, but the swift glance of the mind of Ilúvatar could and did.

''All things he sees and all he hears"

Sang honey-voiced Homer 

Of bright Apollo with his clear light;

Yet he cannot break through the inmost

Bowels of the earth or sea with the 

Weak illumination of his rays.

Not so the Founder of the Great World:

To Him as He looks upon all things from above

The Earth with its mass is no obstacle;

Night does not block the stars with its mists;

What is, what was, and what is to come

He perceives with His mind in a single glance;

Since He alone looks upon all things,

You could say that He is the true sun.

(Cons. 5 m. ii)

__________________________

'sed in hac haerentium sibi serie causarum estne ulla nostri arbitrii libertas an ipsos quoque humanorum motus animorum fatalis catena constringit?' 

'est', inquit; 'neque enim fuerit ulla rationalis natura quin eidem libertas adsit arbitrii. nam quod ratione uti naturaliter potest id habet iudicium quo quidque discernat; per se igitur fugienda optandaue dinoscit. quod uero quis optandum esse iudicat petit, refugit uero quod aestimat esse fugiendum. quare quibus in ipsis inest ratio etiam uolendi nolendique libertas, sed hanc non in omnibus aequam esse constituo. nam supernis diuinisque substantiis et perspicax iudicium et incorrupta uoluntas et efficax optatorum praesto est potestas. humanas uero animas liberiores quidem esse necesse est cum se in mentis diuinae speculatione conseruant, minus uero cum dilabuntur ad corpora, minusque etiam cum terrenis artubus colligantur. extrema uero est seruitus cum uitiis deditae rationis propriae possessione ceciderunt. nam ubi oculos a summae luce ueritatis ad inferiora et tenebrosa deiecerint, mox inscitiae nube caligant, perniciosis turbantur affectibus, quibus accedendo consentiendoque quam inuexere sibi adiuuant seruitutem et sunt quodam modo propria libertate captiuae. quae tamen ille ab aeterno cuncta prospiciens prouidentiae cernit intuitus et suis quaeque meritis praedestinata disponit.'

Πάντ᾽ ἐφορᾶν καὶ πάντ᾽ ἐπακούειν
puro clarum lumine Phoebum
melliflui canit oris Homerus;
qui tamen intima uiscera terrae
non ualet aut pelagi radiorum
infirma perrumpere luce.
haud sic magni conditor orbis:
huic ex alto cuncta tuenti
nulla terrae mole resistunt,
non nox astris nubibus obstat; 
quae sint, quae fuerint ueniantque
uno mentis cernit in ictu;
quem quia respicit omnia solus
uerum possis dicere solem.

Gollum before The Taming of Sméagol (II)

And I waited.  Until that night when he left this house. He said and did things then that filled me with a fear that no words of Saruman could allay.  I knew at last that something dark and deadly was at work.  And I have spent most of the years since in finding out.

(FR 1.ii.48)

So speaks Gandalf, recounting to Frodo his alarm at the way Bilbo had behaved the night he departed Bag End seventeen years earlier.  We have already seen that Bilbo's behavior that night suggests much about Gollum, that he is jealous of his ownership of the Ring, and of his right to claim it for his own; and that he is willing to kill to keep it.  Gandalf is of course here explaining to Frodo how he became convinced that Bilbo's magic ring was The One Ring. That is his point, but in making it he reveals more about Gollum than the reader had known before:¹

A shadow fell on my heart [when Bilbo found his ring], though I did not know yet what I feared.  I wondered often how Gollum came by a Great Ring, as plainly it was -- that at least was clear from the first.  Then I heard Bilbo's strange story of how he had "won" it, and I could not believe it.  When I at last got the truth out of him, I saw at once that he had been trying to put his claim beyond doubt.  Much like Gollum with his "birthday present".  The lies were too much alike for my comfort. Clearly the ring had an unwholesome power that set to work on its keeper at once.

(FR 1.ii.47-48)

And Gandalf has already delineated for Frodo some of the effects that the 'unwholesome power' of a Great Ring has on its keeper.  In addition to turning the keeper into a liar, who will say anything to justify his claim to the Ring, and someone ready to commit murder to keep it (FR 1.i.34):

A mortal, Frodo, who keeps one of the Great Rings does not die, but he does not grow or obtain more life, he merely continues, until every last minute is a weariness.  And if he often uses the Ring to make himself invisible, he fades: he becomes in the end invisible permanently, and walks in the twilight under the eye of the Dark Power that rules the Rings.  Yet sooner or later -- later, if he is strong or well meaning to begin with, but neither strength nor good purpose will last -- sooner or later the Dark Power will devour him.

(FR 1.ii.47, emphasis Tolkien's)

Frodo's concern here is quite naturally with his ring, the effect it had on Bilbo, and the woe that Sauron's attention might bring down upon The Shire.  But he's as mystified as he is terrified, and so Gandalf proves to him that his ring is The One and begins to narrate its history.  In doing so of course he comes back to Gollum, but he does so in a way that justifies Gildor's later cautioning Frodo about the subtlety of wizards (FR 1.iii.84).  When he reaches Gollum's part in the history of the Ring, Gandalf doesn't tell Frodo that it's Gollum he is speaking of.  Rather, he tells the story of Sméagol and Déagol, two people of whom neither Frodo nor the reader has ever heard before (FR 1.ii.52-54).²

What of them?  From the first the portrayal of Sméagol sounds a troubling note.  For although he is likely of hobbit kind and apparently of good family (FR 1.ii.52-53), he seems to have been strangely different:

The most inquisitive and curious-minded of that family was called Sméagol.  He was interested in roots and beginnings; he dived into deep pools; he burrowed under trees and growing plants; he tunnelled into green mounds; and he ceased to look up at the hill-tops, or the leaves on the trees, or the flowers opening in the air: his head and his eyes were downward.

(FR 1.ii.53)

The substance and movement of this description is revealing.  Sméagol is always seeking, but never finding.  He dives, he burrows, he tunnels, ignoring what is green and alive around him.  Note how each clause of the semicolonic structure includes a new element, until the clause after the last semicolon ('and he ceased....') where the use of 'or' begins to exclude the life and beauties of the world above, and this leads to the final full colon and the verdict: 'his head and his eyes were downward.' 

Having described Sméagol's character, Gandalf shows it in action. While Déagol sits in their boat fishing, Sméagol goes 'nosing about the banks' of the river, no doubt ignoring the beauty of the 'great beds of iris and flowering reeds' that cover the Gladden Fields in spring. But he has nevertheless been keeping his eye on Déagol from behind a tree. He sneaks up behind him and demands the ring that not he -- not Sméagol the diver into deep pools -- but Déagol had found at the bottom of the river.

' "Give us that, Déagol, my love," said Sméagol, over his friend's shoulder. 

' "Why?" said Déagol. 

' "Because it's my birthday, my love, and I wants it," said Sméagol. 

' "I don't care," said Déagol.  "I have given you a present already, more than I can afford.  I found this, and I am going to keep it." 

' "Oh, are you indeed, my love," said Sméagol; and he caught Déagol by the throat and strangled him, because the gold looked so bright and beautiful.  Then he put the ring on his finger.'

(FR 1.ii.53)

Even before Sméagol has become the Ring's keeper, with love professed three times he kills a friend to get what he wants. It is impossible to know here where the unwholesome power of the Ring begins and native villainy ends. It's like some black inversion of Peter denying Christ three times before the cock crows, announcing dawn and repentance. 

But for Sméagol only more darkness will come.  Soon the invisibility conferred by the Ring allows him to learn 'secrets, and he put his knowledge to crooked and malicious uses.  He became sharp-eyed and keen-eared for all that was hurtful. The ring had given him power according to his stature' (FR 1.ii.53).  Like the description of his downward looking nature, this, too, ends in a verdict.  The Malice of Gollum (the name he has now earned from his revolted family), will play a role as important in the end as the Pity of Bilbo. It also links him from the first to Sauron, to whom Gandalf has already attributed malice as a motive.³

Gollum's family now 'shunned' and 'kicked him' because of what he had become. Finally his sneaking and spying and thieving caused such strife that 'his grandmother, desiring peace, expelled him from the family and turned him out of her hole' (FR 1.ii.53-54). His own grandmother disowned him.  Again we have something that passes for a judgement -- if your grandmother casting you out is not damning, what is? -- and this is not Gandalf's judgement, but that of Gollum's family at the time.

'He wandered in loneliness, weeping a litttle for the hardness of the world, and he journeyed up the River, till he came to a stream that flowed down from the mountains, and he went that way.  He caught fish in deep pools with invisible fingers and ate them raw.  One day it was very hot, and as he was bending over a pool, he felt a burning on the back of his neck, and a dazzling light from the water pained his wet eyes.  He wondered at it, for he had almost forgotten about the Sun. Then for the last time he looked up and shook his fist at her. 

'But as he lowered his eyes, he saw far ahead the tops of the Misty Mountains, out of which the stream came,  And he thought suddenly: "It would be cool and shady under those mountains.  The Sun could not watch me there.  The roots of those mountains must be roots indeed; there must be great secrets buried there which have not been discovered since the beginning." 

'So he journeyed by night up into the highlands, and he found a cave out of which the dark stream ran; and he wormed his way like a maggot into the heart of the hills, and vanished out of all knowledge.  The Ring went into the Shadows with him, and even the maker, when his power had begun to grow again, could learn nothing of it. 

'Gollum,' cried Frodo.  'Gollum?  Do you mean that this is the very Gollum-creature that Bilbo met?  How loathsome!'

I think it is a sad story,' said the wizard, 'and it might have happened to others, even to some hobbits that I have known.'

'I can't believe that Gollum was connected with hobbits, however distantly,' said Frodo with some heat.  'What an abominable notion!'

(FR 1.ii.54)

First let's consider Frodo's reaction.  While it is difficult to know if he realizes who Sméagol is before Gandalf reveals it, you would guess that the reference to a birthday and a present should at least have made Frodo cock an eyebrow.  What is certain is how Frodo responds to the realization.  He is appalled.  Though Gandalf thinks the story of Sméagol is 'sad,' Frodo finds it 'loathsome,' and he rejects the notion that Gollum was a hobbit, or anything remotely resembling one, as 'abominable.' More than that, besides denying that Gollum could be a hobbit, he calls him that 'Gollum-creature,' thus refusing him any form of humanity at all.  He is a creature, not a person.  And Frodo will keep up this pitiless refrain throughout the scene -- 'What a pity Bilbo did not stab that vile creature, when he had a chance' (FR 1.ii.59).

Now let's ask a question.  Why does Gandalf withhold the name of Gollum? Why doesn't he just say openly and immediately that Gollum and Sméagol are one? Because Gandalf is up to more than merely narrating the history of the Ring, and trying to save the world. As we all know, one of the most important and often quoted sentences in The Lord of the Rings is Gandalf's assertion that

'My heart tells me that [Gollum] has some part to play yet, for good or for 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)

Those last few words -- 'yours not least' -- how often we overlook them.  How often we omit them from our discussions of the role of Pity. I know I have certainly neglected them.  We focus on the tides of fate, on 'chance if chance you call it,' on the Rings of Power, and Towers White and Dark, and the doom of Elves and Men, Dwarves and Hobbits; and on the Pity that saves the world from a 'second darkness' (FR 1.ii.51). And it's easy to do so because Pity accomplishes precisely that.

But Gandalf is a wizard, and therefore subtle.  As his words suggest when taken all together, he gives thought to the fate of Middle-Earth, and the Shire, and Frodo, too.  His pity reaches even further, into the future and to all in darkness.⁴ Gandalf suppresses the identity of Sméagol because he is trying to elicit Frodo's pity -- and given Frodo's reaction, he is entirely correct to do so  -- in order to save Frodo also and especially, but, as we shall presently see, not even Gollum is absent from his thoughts.

Previously Gandalf had pointed out that he knew 'once he had got the truth out of [Bilbo]' that his ring 'had an unwholesome power that set to work on its keeper at once' (FR 1.ii.49); that 'sooner or later' a Ring of Power will 'devour' that keeper regardless of his strength or intentions (1.ii.47); and that Bilbo's behavior the night he left had frightened him and convinced him that 'something dark and deadly' was at work.  Since that night, Gandalf has been worried about Frodo, who has been the keeper of the Ring for seventeen years now. Note the shift in Gandalf's tenses, from past when speaking about Bilbo, to the present and present perfect when speaking about Frodo.  His anxiety for Frodo is a constant thing.

'No, I was not troubled about dear Bilbo any more, once he had let the thing go.  It is for you that I feel responsible. 

'Ever since Bilbo left I have been deeply concerned about you, and about all these charming, absurd, helpless hobbits.  It would be a grievous blow to the world, if the Dark Power overcame the Shire; if all your kind, jolly, stupid Bolgers, Hornblowers, Boffins, Bracegirdles, and the rest, not to mention the ridiculous Bagginses, became enslaved.'

(FR 1.ii.49, emphasis original)

Note also how he embeds Frodo firmly in the Shire among his fellow hobbits, yet singles him out. Just as Bilbo and Sméagol, the hobbits, were set apart by the Ring, so, too, is Frodo.⁵  And in answer to Frodo's denial that Gollum could be a hobbit, Gandalf insists upon it, averring that he knows more about the history of hobbits than hobbits do, and that Bilbo and Gollum understood each other as well as only two hobbits could (FR 1.ii.54). When Frodo again rejects this claim, Gandalf uses the assertion that Gollum was a hobbit to introduce his strongest plea for pitying Gollum on his own merits (as it were):

'But there was something else in it, I think, which you don't see yet. Even Gollum was not wholly ruined.  He had proved tougher than even one of the Wise would have guessed -- as a hobbit might.  There was a little corner of his mind  that was still his own, and light came through it, as through a chink in the dark, a light out of the past.  It was actually pleasant, I think, to hear a kindly voice again, bringing up memories of wind, and trees, and sun on the grass, and such forgotten things.

'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.  No, not though he possessed the Ring so long, almost as far back as he can remember.  For it was long since he had worn it much: in the black darkness it was seldom needed. Certainly he had never "faded".  He is thin and tough still.  But the thing was eating up his mind, of course, and the torment had become almost unbearable. 

'All the "great secrets" under the mountains had turned out to be just empty night: there was nothing more to find out, nothing worth doing, only nasty furtive eating and resentful remembering.  He was altogether wretched. He hated the dark, and he hated light more: he hated everything, and the Ring most of all.'

(FR 1.ii.54-55)

It all starts off with such promise in the first paragraph. After hearing of the murderous, malicious, sneaking Gollum whose offenses were so rank that his own grandmother cast him out, who shook his fist at the sun and who 'wormed his way like a maggot into the heart of the hills,' we are now afforded a glimpse of the last remnant of Sméagol the hobbit, whom Bilbo the hobbit had touched.⁶  It's a rare, poignant moment that evokes pure pity for Gollum, the last for a very long time.

And yet Gandalf's pity is not blind.  As his contrast between 'the little corner of [Gollum's] mind that was still his own' and the 'evil part of him' suggests, he sees that the largest part of Gollum's mind is evil.  He does not ignore or conceal the evidence of his repulsive deeds of ancient days when he still might have been called Sméagol, or the horror of his current actions now that he has emerged from beneath the mountains to hunt for Bilbo:

'[Mirkwood] was full of the rumour of him, dreadful tales even among the beasts and the birds.  The Woodmen said that there was some new terror abroad, a ghost that drank blood.  It climbed trees to find nests; it crept into holes to find the young; it slipped through windows to find cradles.'

(FR 1.ii.58)

And his evil has led him inevitably to Mordor, which 'draws all wicked things' (FR 1.ii.58), and from which he has lately returned, so Gandalf thought, '[o]n some errand of of mischief' (1.ii.59).⁷ Given the Ring, given the malice that moves both Gollum and Sauron, it seems inevitable that they meet, and at least appear to be in league.⁸ From murderer of poor Déagol to vampire-like cannibal of children in their cradles, from outcast consumed with self-pity⁹ to vengeful ally of Sauron, Gollum may stir Gandalf's fathomless pity, but that does not alter the truths of his character that the wizard so clearly sees and portrays. The Ring has devoured so much of him that only a little of him has not been 'wholly ruined,' the very last of Sméagol, the bit for which Gandalf has 'not no hope' of a cure (FR 1.ii.55).  Yet even so Gandalf cannot deny that Frodo is right when he declares that Gollum deserves death.  All he can do is urge him to pity, and explain that life is often more complicated than verdicts of death would have them be. Let us turn back again to a fuller quotation of the passage with which we began when we asked why Gandalf did not identify Sméagol:

'Deserves [death]! I daresay he does.  Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life.  Can you give it to them?  Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement.  For even the very wise cannot see all ends.  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 for 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)

That Gollum deserves death is a large part of the reason why Gandalf fails, and why he suppressed the identify of Sméagol in the first place.  He hoped to win Frodo to pity before he knew the truth, and to suggest through the fact that Sméagol was a hobbit, that the same could have happened to Bilbo, and still might happen to him. But Gandalf cannot make an argument strong enough, or present a portrait of Gollum pitiable enough, to overcome Frodo's fear of Sauron and loathing of Gollum, passions which play the same role here as Bilbo's anger and jealousy of the Ring did the night he left.¹⁰ Every time Gandalf appeals to pity, Frodo rejects him, ultimately scorning even his claims of experience.  He does not care that his friend has seen Gollum, and he doesn't want to see him for himself.

Nor is it accidental that Gandalf never refers to Gollum as Sméagol anywhere but in this conversation.  This isn't just Gandalf being clever, as it might at first seem, and using the name as a rhetorical tool.  It also confirms something for us, that for him Sméagol is a remote figure gone so far away that there is little or no hope that he can ever return.¹¹ 'Not no hope' in fact, but almost none.  The same may be said of his attempt.to convince Frodo, who from the start resists Gandalf 'with some heat' (FR 1.ii.54).  And he continues to resist until the moment the subject of Gollum is dropped.  Frodo's last words on Gollum here --  'All the same...even if Bilbo could not kill Gollum....' (FR 1.ii.60) -- are words of unwilling concession and chilling disappointment. They are hardly to his credit, but they reveal the depths of his fear, his loathing, and his failure to comprehend the implications of possessing the Ring that Gandalf has been trying to get across to him.

In A Long-Expected Party we could learn little about Gollum, only what we were able to glean from Bilbo's words and deeds. The Shadow of the Past lends a substance to his character that goes beyond hints and inferences.  Gollum is the murderer of a friend, a cannibal who preys on the young and weak; he is vengeful, resentful, full of justifications and self pity; he is a sneak, a spy, a liar, a spirit of malice; at best he is a tool of Sauron, at worst a servant. He hates even that which he holds most precious.  The Ring and the Dark Power that rules it have devoured him almost completely.

Thus far the portrayal of Gollum.  Given all that Gandalf has said, and all that Frodo learned from Bilbo, Frodo's loathing is entirely justified.  It is also clear that there was a darkness in Gollum before he ever touched the Ring, a darkness that, as it were, responded to its call.  It may have 'an unwholesome power that set[s] to work on its keeper at once,' but it makes a difference who that keeper is.  The touch of the Ring alone is not enough to work the instantaneous corruption of its keeper. It does not have this effect on Bilbo or Frodo, who possess the Ring for many years, or on Gandalf who handles it (FR 1.ii.49-50).  Moreover, the wizard's description of what the Ring would do to him if he took it fits in with this assessment.¹²  And when Frodo says that he will keep the Ring to guard it, Gandalf replies that 'whatever it may do [to you], it will be slow, slow to evil, if you keep it with that purpose' (FR 1.ii.62).  This statement can only remind us of almost the last thing Gandalf says about Bilbo and the Ring:

'What a pity that Bilbo did not stab that vile creature, when he had a chance!' [cried Frodo.] 

'Pity? It was Pity that stayed his hand. Pity, and Mercy: not to strike without need. And he has been well rewarded, Frodo. Be sure that he took so little hurt from the evil, and escaped in the end, because he began his ownership of the Ring so. With Pity.'

(FR 1.ii.59)

Gandalf's Pity is high and pure.  It is written out, along with Mercy, in Mythic Capitals.  It is aware of the crimes or sins of its object, and does not excuse them. It can even agree that those crimes may merit death.  It proceeds, as Saint Augustine would put it, 'with a love of men and a hatred of their sins' ('cum dilectione hominum et odio vitiorum,' letter 211.11).  When combined with the Mercy that does not 'strike without need' and that spares those who in fact deserve punishment, it comes near to Grace.¹³

Such Pity is impossible for Frodo to comprehend.  Even as he reluctantly concedes the wisdom of Gandalf and Bilbo's pity for Gollum  --  'All the same...even if Bilbo could not kill Gollum....' (FR 1.ii.60) -- he is too afraid, too filled with loathing, and too inexperienced to share the feeling.  The crimes and character of Gollum are too undeniably dark for that, and have been portrayed as such at such great length that it is quite difficult for the reader, who experiences Middle-Earth through the eyes of Frodo (and the other hobbits), to see Gollum except as he does here.  The effects of this will be long-lasting.

________________________________

¹ As I pointed out in my first post we cannot assume that the reader has read The Hobbit or the Prologue to The Lord of the Rings, and, therefore, knows something about Gollum already. I will discuss the portrayal of Gollum in those texts in my fourth post on this subject.

² In fact no reader, not even one who had read The Hobbit or the Prologue, could have immediately recognized Sméagol as Gollum. The names Sméagol and Déagol and their tale appear here first.  The first clue that Sméagol and Gollum are the same is the mention of his birthday.

³ 'And hobbits as miserable slaves would please [Sauron] far more than hobbits happy and free.  There is such a thing as malice and revenge' (FR 1.ii.49).  But when Frodo asks for an explanation of this statement, Gandalf never gives him one.  Is this because there is no explanation of the malice and vengefulness of evil?

⁴ RK 5.iv.813-814: ' "You think, as is your wont, my lord, of Gondor only," said Gandalf. "Yet there are other men and other lives, and time still to be. And for me, I pity even his slaves." '

⁵ We have already seen in the text that Frodo is set apart from other hobbits, and the Ring has already begun to effect him.  He is not aging normally (FR 1.ii.43), he is restless, he is reluctant to part with the Ring even for a moment (FR 1.ii.49), and cannot bring himself to do anything that might harm it (FR 1.ii.49-50, 60-61). Indeed there is a strong parallel between the behavior of Frodo here and Bilbo's in the scene with Gandalf in chapter one, though obviously matters here never approach violence.

⁶ This passage also lays the foundations for the famous 'two thoughts' scene at TT 4.ii.632-634.  Already there are two of him.

⁷ Cf. Gandalf's account of his interview with Gollum, whom Aragorn captured after he left Mordor (FR 1.ii.57; emphasis Tolkien's):

'He muttered that he was going to get his own back. People would see if he would stand being kicked, and driven into a hole and then robbed. Gollum had good friends now, good friends and very strong. They would help him. Baggins would pay for it. That was his chief thought.' 

In The Hunt for the Ring Tolkien wrote:

But Sauron perceived the depth of Gollum's malice towards those that had 'robbed' him, and guessing that he would go in search of them to avenge himself, Sauron hoped that his spies would thus be led to the Ring.

(UT 357). 

Though this passage harmonizes with what Gandalf thought and said in The Shadow of the Past, that in itself is no proof that Tolkien had this in mind when he was writing that chapter.  Christopher Tolkien, however, argues that The Hunt for the Ring was part of the the writings referred to by his father in a letter of 1964 (not, alas, in The Letters) as being extant at the time of the writing of The Lord of the Rings, and originally intended for inclusion (UT 11).

⁸ Malice is ascribed directly to Sauron at 1.ii.49, and Gollum is said at 1.ii.53 to have put the fruits of his invisibility to 'malicious uses.' Later, at 2.ii.254 Gandalf speaks of the Ring as being 'fraught with all [Sauron's] malice,' and just over two hundred words later Strider says that '[Gollum's] malice is great and gives him a strength hardly to be believed in one so lean and withered' (2.ii.255). For Gollum's malice, see further TT 4.i.622, vi.688-89, 691; RK 6.iii.943.

Though it should surprise no seasoned reader of The Lord of the Rings, the catalog of characters possessed of malice is nevertheless rather breathtaking. Aside from Sauron (FR 2.ii.269; TT 4.iv.659 ; RK 5.iv.808; ix.879; 6.i.898; 6.iii.935, 942), we have in the order in which it was first used of them: Old Man Willow and the trees of the Old Forest (FR 1.vii.130); Caradhras (FR 2.iii.293); orcs (FR 2.ix,386); Wormtongue (TT 3.vi.520); Minas Morgul/The Nazgul (TT 4.vi.692; RK 5.iv.823); Shelob (TT 4.ix.719, 720, 724; x.728, 730); the Witch King (RK 5.iv.822; vi.841); the Watchers at the Tower of Cirith Ungol (RK 6.i.902, 903, 914); Saruman (RK 6.viii.1018).
 
Cf. Legolas' words upon entering Fangorn -- 'I can catch only the faintest echoes of dark places where the hearts of the trees are black.  There is no malice near us; but there is watchfulness, and anger' (TT 4.v.491) -- with Treebeard's remarks that some trees have bad hearts, and that in some parts of the forest the 'Darkness has never been lifted' (4.iv.468).  This likely refers, at least in part, to the Huorns, 'hundreds and hundreds' of whom dwell 'deep in the darkest dales' (TT 4.ix.565).

⁹ Cf. Gollum's 'weeping a little for the hardness of the world' after he is cast out (FR 1.ii.54).  The world wasn't hard.  He was justly punished by his peers for his misdeeds. And he shakes his fist at the sun, as if it were out to get him.  This is self-pity, and the reverse of that coin is resentment.  Cf. also Gandalf's reference in the same passage to his 'wet eyes.'  Eyes are always wet.  So it is idle to point this out unless 'wet' means 'wet with tears.'  Not idly do the adjectives of Gandalf fall. It's a nice touch.

¹⁰ We might pursue the parallel further. It continues, but with a difference. Frodo, who tries to give the Ring away, resolves to accept the journey before him, but he does not see it as an adventure; he sees it as exile and sacrifice. It is Sam, hauled through the window, who sees it as an adventure, and who gets Frodo to laugh. But his laugh is at the ridiculousness of Sam's fear of Gandalf, not the laugh of heart's ease that bursts from Bilbo afer he relinquishes the Ring. See FR 1.i.35-36; ii.60-64.

¹¹ As Gollum himself says when Frodo first calls him Sméagol: 'Don't ask Sméagol. Poor, poor Sméagol, he went away a long time ago.  They took his Precious, and he's lost now' (TT 4.i.616).  It is interesting that Frodo, who never call him Sméagol beforehand, begins to do so almost as soon as he actually sees him.  He starts calling him Sméagol the instant he begins to pity him (TT 4.i.615-616).

¹² Gandalf's '[y]et the way of the Ring to my heart is by pity, pity for weakness and the desire of strength to do go' (FR 1.ii.61). Not only does this statement suggest a slow process rather than an instantaneous conversion, as does his subsequent declaration that Frodo's intention to keep the Ring to protect it would substantially delay any ill effects the Ring might have (1.ii.62). Consider also Galadriel's response to Sam when he says that, if she had the Ring, she would 'make some folk pay for their dirty work:' 'I would....That is how it would begin. But it would not stop with that, alas!' (2.vii.366). Then there's Bombadil, over whom the Ring has no power at all, and who, says Gandalf, 'would soon forget it, or most likely thow it away,' (2.ii.265).

¹³ In letter 246 (p. 320) Tolkien comments on Pity in a footnote, to explain his remark in the text of the letter that 'all Frodo's pity is (in a sense*) wasted' when Gollum failed to repent: '*In the sense that "pity" to be a true virtue must be directed to the good of its object. It is empty if it is exercised only to keep oneself "clean", free from hate or the actual doing of injustice, though this is also a good motive.' Gandalf's pity is clearly of the first kind; Frodo's, when at last he comes to feel it, is a more complicated question, despite the implication of Tolkien's words here that Frodo at that point felt the former, better kind of pity.

The Gladden Fields -- Great Beds of Iris and Flowering Reeds

[Sméagol] had a friend called Déagol, of similar sort, sharper-eyed, but not so quick and strong.  On a time they took a boat and went down to the Gladden Fields, where there were great beds of iris and flowering reeds.

(FR 1.ii.53)

I was reading this passage the other day, and a question arose in my mind that I had never considered before -- what color were these irises?  As I learned after a few minutes of research, there are up to 300 species of iris in a multitude of colors -- hence, according to what I've read, the name 'iris,' which comes from the Greek word for 'rainbow.'

Since Tolkien doesn't explicitly say here what color these irises are, we are of course entirely free to imagine any color we wish.  Tolkien, however, was both a very visual writer in general and one with a quite clear and specific love of flowers -- from the individual flowers, elanor and niphredil and symbelmynë, to the long and elaborate description of the herbs and flowers of Ithilien¹ -- and so it is difficult to believe that Tolkien had no image of these flowers in his mind when he wrote.  After a bit of investigation, I think we can figure out not only the color, but what species he had in mind.

It is reasonable to assume that Tolkien was thinking of an iris he knew.  Two species of iris are native to the United Kingdom, iris foetidissima and iris pseudacorus.  While the former is more at home in woods and in drier soil, the latter flourishes in wetlands and by water, just like the Gladden Fields.  That of course tends to suggest that iris pseudacorus is the one Tolkien meant, but that is not the end of that.  For when you look up iris foetidissima, you are told that two common names for it are gladwin iris and also simply gladdon. So we have two pieces or evidence that point in opposite directions.

But this is Tolkien we're talking about here.  And what may look confusing to our myopic vision of English comes into focus when seen through eyes of the philologist who gazes undismayed into the deeps of time. If you turn to the OED and look up 'gladdon,' you will read the following, under the very first  heading '[a] popular name of the iris (Iris Pseudacorus and Iris foetidissima; the latter is sometimes distinguished as 'stinking gladdon').'  So 'gladdon' once applied to both species, and by once I mean, of course, anciently.  The OED cites it as a gloss of the Latin herbal name 'scilla' as early as 700, with which it is also paired in a medicinal text from circa 1,000:²

'wið wæter seocnysse ȝenim þas wyrte þe bulbi scilitici oðrum naman glædene nemneð' 

'in a case of water sickness take that plant which people call "squill roots" and also, by another name, "gladdon". '

The early 15th century Middle English Romance, The Wars of Alexander (lines 4093-94), is also cited: '... a dryi meere, Was full of gladen & of gale & of grete redis' -- '...a dry lake [which] was full of gladdon and of sweet gale and large reeds.'

So, quite clearly, Tolkien had ancient authority to take 'gladdon' as iris pseudacorus. And if we turn to Unfinished Tales we can see from a note that Tolkien was undoubtedly using 'gladden' to mean 'iris' (441),³ and he translates Loeg Ningloron, the Sindarin name of the Gladden Fields, as 'pools of the golden water flowers' (UT  450). We may then on balance safely conclude that Tolkien has in mind the iris pseudacorus, whose flowers are golden indeed,

and not iris foetidissima, even though in more modern usage it has monopolized the use of 'gladden.  It is true that its flowers are sometimes yellowish, but hardly 'golden' by comparison, and almost all the images of foetidissima I have been able to find make it appear that purple is far more common.

As an odd side note here, the pseudacorus blooms in mid to late Summer, which allows us to narrow down Gollum's birthday to that time of year.  For, as we all know, it was on Sméagol's birthday that he and the insufficiently generous Déagol went down to the Gladden Fields for the day.  Whether you view this as an occasion to celebrate is entirely up to you. 

____________________________

¹ An amazing description that zooms in from large to small, from the four points of the compass and the mountain tops down to the trees, the bushes, the rocks the flowers, the grass and the streams.  Not a bit of effort is wasted, the last sentence of the previous paragraph serves as introduction (and contains what may be the loveliest phrase in Tolkien -- 'a dishevelled dryad loveliness')

...Ithilien, the garden of Gondor now desolate kept still a dishevelled dryad loveliness. 

South and west it looked towards the warm lower vales of Anduin, shielded from the east by the Ephel Dúath and yet not under the mountain-shadow, protected from the north by the Emyn Muil, open to the southern airs and the moist winds from the Sea far away.  Many great trees grew there, planted long ago, falling into unattended age amid a riot of careless descendants; and groves and thickets there were of tamarisk and pungent terebinth, of olive and of bay; and there were junipers and myrtles; and thymes that grew up in bushes, or with their woody creeping stems mantled in deep tapestries the hidden stones; sages of many kinds putting forth blue flowers, or red, or pale green; and marjorams and new-sprouting parsleys, and many herbs of forms and scents beyond the garden lore of Sam.  The grots and rocky walls were already starred with saxifrages and stonecrops.  Primeroles and anemones were awake in the filbert-brakes; and asphodel and many lily-flowers nodded their half-opened heads in the grass: deep green grass beside the pools, where falling streams halted in cool hollows on their journey down to Anduin.

A passage like this makes it nearly impossible to imagine that Tolkien never thought about the irises of the Gladden Fields.

² I believe my translation is more or less correct, but my Old English is not as strong as I would like it to be. I don't believe in any case that I have committed some crucial error. But if anyone has any suggestions to improve the accuracy of the translation, please do let me know.

³ 'Gladden Fields...the great stretches of reed and gladden (iris) where the Gladden River joined the Anduin.'  UT 280 n. 13 for a natural history of the Gladden Fields. Granted that the text "The Disaster of the Gladden Fields" later than the publication of The Lord of the Rings, which makes its weight as canon ponderable, to conclude that Tolkien intended the word 'gladden' to mean what he knew it meant is hardly the same thing as reading later versions of Galadriel backwards into The Lord of the Rings.  This isn't retcon, but recognition.   Citations of Unfinished Tales are to the 1980 American first edition.

And I can't believe I just wrote a post on flowers.