The Last Word on Adventure -- TT 3.viii.711

'I guess that you have been having adventures, which is not quite fair without me.' 

Merry Brandybuck, A Conspiracy Unmasked

One of the more marked differences between the The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings is the initial attitude of the main characters towards the prospect of 'adventure.' Bilbo, as we recall, responded quite unfavorably when Gandalf tried to recruit him for one:  'We are plain quiet folk and have no use for adventures. Nasty disturbing uncomfortable things! Make you late for dinner! I can’t think what anybody sees in them,' (Hobbit 12).  By the time that Frodo has reached the age at which 'adventure had suddenly befallen Bilbo' (FR 1.ii.43.), however, the tales of Bilbo's exploits have taught at least some of the younger hobbits connected to him to see things differently.  Merry (FR 1.iv.102, quoted above), Pippin (FR 1.iv.104), and Sam (FR 1.iv.99), all look gleefully forward to the adventure upon which they are embarking with Frodo, even is they also realize there must also be darkness and danger for it to be an adventure:

'Three cheers for Captain Frodo and company!’ they shouted; and they danced round him. Merry and Pippin began a song, which they had apparently got ready for the occasion.  

It was made on the model of the dwarf-song that started Bilbo on his adventure long ago, and went to the same tune....

(FR 1.iv.106)

Frodo, however, who would love to go on just such an adventure as Bilbo's, is gloomily aware that his journey is quite unlikely to be one (FR 1.ii.62; cf. 1.iii.77, and note the capital A): 

‘Of course, I have sometimes thought of going away, but I imagined that as a kind of holiday, a series of adventures like Bilbo’s or better, ending in peace. But this would mean exile, a flight from danger into danger, drawing it after me.

In fact Frodo fully expects his journey 'there' to have no 'back again' (FR 1.iii.66). Even so, neither he nor any of the others ever guessed that their adventures might involve fighting before Tom Bombadil handed them the swords from the barrow (FR 1.viii.146). Had Old Tom not rescued them, again, they would have all 'come to the end of [their] adventure' (FR 1.viii.140) then and there. All the hobbits then, including the more mature and sober Frodo, approach their journey with a certain naivete. 

In keeping with this it is no surprise to find that in The Lord of the Rings 'adventure' overwhelmingly records or reports the attitudes of the hobbits towards Bilbo's journey or their own. Of the twenty-eight instances of the word, only twice does a character who is not a hobbit use it. Glóin does so, but he is speaking to Frodo of his experiences on the road to Rivendell (FR 2.i.228). Gandalf alone employs it of the exploits of those who are not hobbits, when he says rather grimly of the Dúnedain: 'It may be that this War of the Ring will be their last adventure' (FR 2.i.221), an assessment haunted by the prospect of no 'back again'.

It is also no surprise that after the Company leaves Rivendell, by which time even Sam's 'desire for adventure was at its lowest ebb' (FR 2.iii.280), the word occurs only four more times. The first three are quite matter of fact, without the least air of Adventure. Once the Company are discussing their 'adventures' with each other as they seek to decide whether to go to Mordor or Minas Tirith (FR 2.x.402). Merry and Pippin then speak of their 'adventures' when Treebeard bids them to tell him their tale (TT 3.iv.471). Frodo, too, narrates the 'adventures' of the Company when he meets Faramir in Ithilien (TT 4.vi.677). The journey to Rivendell, the seemingly hopeless quest begun there, the shattering loss of Gandalf, Boromir's near fall and his self-sacrifice, have forced a shift in perspective on the hobbits. To sit at Bilbo's feet as children and with kindling eyes hear him speak of the brave deaths of Thorin and Fíli and Kíli is one thing; to watch their friends and comrades die -- even die heroically -- is quite another. Now they have not only have they known adventure, but the loss that too often comes with it, even before they have reached the most challenging parts of their journey. 

And it is precisely in the moment before Sam and Frodo plunge into the worst part of their adventure that the last use of word comes.

The brave things in the old tales and songs, Mr. Frodo: adventures, as I used to call them. I used to think that they were things the wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for, because they wanted them, because they were exciting and life was a bit dull, a kind of a sport, as you might say. But that's not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind.

(TT 4.viii.711, italics mine)

Their growth as characters is reflected in their evolving understanding of the very words they use. Step by step on their journey they leave behind both the conceptions they had, and the hobbits they were, when they began, which makes Sam's thoughts as he crosses the Brandywine for the first time seem almost prophetic: 

Sam was the only member of the party who had not been over the river before. He had a strange feeling as the slow gurgling stream slipped by: his old life lay behind in the mists, dark adventure lay in front. 

(FR 1.iv.99)

And, as is the way of prophecy, he had no idea how true it was.

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Works Consulted

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Etymology is Destiny, Saruman, Saruman

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

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

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

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

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

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Works Consulted

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Review: The Wolf in the Attic

The Wolf in the Attic by Paul Kearney
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

An enjoyable read, which got steadily more interesting as it went along. It does a good job of maintaining a child's perspective, though it's not a children's book, and of suggesting that there's more out there in the dark, in the woods beyond the lights of Oxford, than most adults would be comfortable admitting. The characters range from a Dickensian evil landlord and a wastrel father to the Devil, werewolves, and (apparently) Cerunnos. Lewis and Tolkien also appear as peripheral characters, who are welcome and amusing, but may not be strictly necessary as themselves. On the other hand, there is no little irony in their seeming ignorance of the perilous realm that surrounds and even penetrates Oxford. And this may be the point of their presence, since their ignorance underlines the greater ignorance of the modern world.

View all my reviews

But How Do You Really Feel, Mr Bliss?

Since I never read introductions first, I only just looked at the preface to Dunning and Bliss' edition of The Wanderer just last night, after reading the poem five or six times back to back. At the end of the first paragraph (vii) appears the following sentence:

If we appear to have singled out Dr. Leslie rather often for disagreement, this is because his [edition] is usually the most accessible, and often the most able, defence of interpretations which we find unacceptable.

Well alrighty then. That in turn made me think of this passage from another source:

This was unexpected and rather difficult. There was some scattered clapping, but most of them were trying to work it out and see if it came to a compliment. 

(FR 1.i.30)

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The Wanderer, T. P Dunning & A. J. Bliss edd., Methuen 1969. 

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Tolkien and Amazon

Amazon to Adapt J.R.R. Tolkien’s Globally Renowned Fantasy Novels, The Lord of the Rings, for Television with a Multi Season Production Commitment 

Full Release Here

By now I doubt there's a Tolkien fan who has not heard this news. I have said very little about it, though I've been skeptical. Perhaps the smartest thing I've heard anyone say about it was when my friend Katherine Sas​ tossed a Tolkien quote into the middle of a heated discussion, and then vanished in a puff of logic. In the famous letter to Milton Waldman (Letters, no 131), Tolkien discussed the future he had once foreseen for the tales he was composing.

"I would draw some of the great tales in fullness, and leave many only placed in the scheme, and sketched. The cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama. Absurd."

While an older Tolkien here dismisses his own youthful dreams, he underestimates the scope and power of his vision, still rippling outward a century on.  But in the days Tolkien first dreamt these dreams, he had just lost the boyhood friends, Rob Gilson and Geoffrey Bache Smith, who, together with Christopher Wiseman, imagined a great future for themselves:

'Really, you three, especially Rob, are heroes,' [Wiseman] wrote. 'Fortunately we are not entirely masters of our fate, so that what we do now will make us the better for uniting in the great work that is to come, whatever it may be.'

(quoted in Garth [2003] 137)

'The great work that is to come', and '[o]ther minds and other hands' are bitter counterpoints indeed to '[b]y 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead' (FR xxiv). Not that Tolkien meant Gilson, Smith, and Wiseman when he spoke of other hands, but it may be that the idea of a cooperative vision he shared with them continued here in a different form. This would be no surprise since one might to some degree characterize the development of his legendarium as an attempt to answer the question of G. B Smith, who had asked Tolkien what the first Eärendil poem was all about when he heard him read it in 1915. 'I don't know. I'll try to find out' (Carpenter, 75).

I would love it if someone made a series that was consistent with Tolkien's vision in the sense that it remained 'high fantasy'. We've already seen how very close to that mark Peter Jackson's films sometimes came, and yet how embarrassingly far off he was at other times. There were spectacular moments in them, both good and bad -- inventions, adaptations, disasters -- and I am sure that we could not all agree on what these bad and good parts were. One invented character I have spoken of before is Tauriel. She is an excellent case in point for me. I like the character -- she falls within the 'scope of other minds and hands' -- but she was shoddily and clumsily used in the service of an insipid subplot. Or so I believe. Many others, people whose opinions I respect, hate Tauriel root and branch. 

Today's tendency in stories with large amounts of 'action' is that each installment must be a new spectacle that outdoes what came before. It's hard to go back to The Hobbit after you've made The Lord of the Rings, and not try to remake it in the image of its more grown-up successor. By making The Lord of the Rings first, Peter Jackson filmed himself into a corner. But we can see this effect at work even where the books are concerned. The pull of The Lord of the Rings led Tolkien to try to rewrite The Hobbit completely in the early 60s. Master of Retcon that Tolkien was, he failed.

We can also see a similar phenomenon in the reaction of many to the long denouement of The Lord of the Rings, who believe that we could do without much of the Tale after the coronation and marriage of Aragorn. I am not here to argue this point, though I disagree. I will, however, gladly concede that the pace of the Tale certainly downshifts once the hobbits turn for home. Everything from the last words of Book IV -- "Frodo was alive but taken by the enemy -- the words that catapulted my eleven year old self out the door, onto my bike, and over to Ruth's Stationery on Main Avenue in the desperate hope that the third volume was still there, which, thank God, it was -- everything from those words on until the end of The Steward and the King passed in such breathless terror and joy that no one (except perhaps Tolkien) would have complained much if the book had ended with that chapter's final words:

And Aragorn the King Elessar wedded Arwen Undómiel in the City of the Kings upon the day of Midsummer, and the tale of their long waiting and labours was come to fulfilment.

(RK 6.v.974-75)

But while I am sure that in the long nights of his wandering Aragorn had meditated 'on the very great pleasure which a pair of fine eyes in the face of a pretty woman can bestow', The Lord of the Rings is no Jane Austen novel. Its meditations don't stop there. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.)  Aragorn's love of Arwen is an important, if underplayed, element of the story, as is Sam's for Rosie Cotton. But both Sam and Strider also see the world at times sub specie aeternitatis. The hobbit raises his eyes to the stars to glimpse the transcendent (RK 6.ii,922); the Man looks beyond the Circles of the World (RK App. A 1063). 

Is it an accident then, I wonder, that Sam's first (recorded) thoughts of Rosie come after he has recognized that 'in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing' (RK 6.ii. 922; iii.934, 939)? 

Such thoughts are more often than not lost in a two or three hour film. More often than not, though perhaps not always. Yet the small screen affords writers far more time to develop the subtle characterizations and character histories that make such moments work. I have seen shows like Babylon Five and the rebooted Battlestar Galactica, for example, blend action (and plenty of it) with plot and character so expertly over time that all of a sudden this viewer found himself on the verge of tears, both kinds. And I still do when I watch again.  Both of these series, moreover, are structured more like novels, B5 at least intentionally so, with very little that is merely episodic. I am sure that there are further examples that will spring to the mind of those better versed in recent television drama than I am.  And it is these series' adaptation of the approach to storytelling found in books that gives me hope that a television series might be the best place for telling stories of Middle-earth.  So Amazon may be the best place after all, provided the writers keep Middle-earth a world of high fantasy.