Haters Gonna Hate: Tolkien's 'Shakespeare (which I disliked cordially)'

In February 1977 Fleetwood Mac released their album Rumours, to huge acclaim and huger sales. At the time I was in high school and a fan of groups like The Rolling Stones and Bruce Springsteen on the one hand, and Yes and Pink Floyd on the other. If you think such widely divergent tastes should have been able to take in so eminently talented and accomplished a band as Fleetwood Mac, you would be quite mistaken. Not even the fay charms of Stevie Nicks could win me over. I hated the band. I hated the album. You might even say I cordially disliked it.

Forty-five years later, I think it is an absolutely amazing piece of work in pretty much every way. But if all you saw were the words, 'I hated the band. I hated the album', you might not realize that I was talking about what my opinion was about something long, long ago. You might think that I still feel that way. In truth, those two sentences in the past tense reveal nothing one way or the other about how I feel now. The best understanding of those two sentences is as a simple statement about the past. With a bit more context, it's easier to see that I was talking about feelings I had in the youth of my world. Perhaps I still have them, perhaps not, but my focus was on how I felt at that time specifically, not any other.

In a 1955 letter to W. H. Auden Tolkien spoke of his time at King Edward's School in Birmingham, which he left in 1911, forty-four years earlier, to go up to Oxford. 

I went to King Edward's School and spent most of my time learning Latin and Greek; but I also learned English. Not English Literature! Except Shakespeare (which I disliked cordially), the chief contacts with poetry were when one was made to try and translate it into Latin. Not a bad mode of introduction, if a bit casual. I mean something of the English language and its history.

(Letters no. 163, p. 213)

The context is all important here, though often little or none of it is supplied. He is speaking, as I was above, about how he felt about something he encountered over four decades earlier. The tense of 'disliked' is the same as that of all the other verbs except 'mean' in the final sentence, which refers to what he 'means' now when he says he 'learned English' then. 

Tolkien's use of 'disliked cordially' should also call to mind his other even more famous use of this phrase in his foreword to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings:

Other arrangements could be devised according to the tastes or views of those who like allegory or topical reference. But I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence.  

Contrast the present tense of 'dislike' here with the past tense used in the letter to Auden. Tolkien is speaking of his current feelings about allegory, and, as the next clause suggests, these feelings started a long time ago and have continued into the present. So, though it shouldn't need stating, the man clearly knew his business when it came to the tenses of English verbs.

This phrase 'cordially dislike' also merits scrutiny. The word 'cordially' has become rare (at least) in the United States except in the fossilized 'you are cordially invited', and those of us who know that it means 'with all one's heart', 'wholeheartedly' or 'with hearty friendliness and goodwill' might find its pairing by Tolkien with 'dislike' slightly jarring. That is precisely the point of the juxtaposition, however. It came to be used, as the OED tells us, 'chiefly as an ironic intensifier', a more striking alternative for 'thoroughly'. The two words together, moreover, were something of a pair for a while, becoming ever more frequently used until they reached a peak of popularity, perhaps not coincidentally, in the years just before Tolkien was at King Edward's School cordially disliking Shakespeare, and a second even higher peak in 1929 when Tolkien was 37. It's precisely the sort of turn of phrase that a young man as alive to language as Tolkien would have loved. His use of it in the middle of the 1950s and 1960s show that it stuck with him, becoming one of those words or phrases we pick up in youth by which younger generations can date us. Rather like the phrase 'haters gonna hate' will be some day. (See the charts below.)

So the context and the phrasing of Tolkien's remark to Auden about Shakespeare encourages us to be circumspect in assessing Tolkien's opinion of Shakespeare and in deciding if his views as a teenager bore much resemblance to his views as a mature scholar and author decades later. So what can we say about young Tolkien's response to Shakespeare? What evidence do we actually have about his feelings as a very young man and later? 

Most famously, perhaps, he found the manner in which Birnam Wood came to Dunsinane rather disappointing and unimaginative, and I have to say it is a rather prosaic way for a prophecy to be fulfilled. But not every prophecy is punctuated by a cockcrow. In the very letter to Auden quoted above Tolkien also says:

Their part [i.e., the Ents] in the story is due, I think, to my bitter disappointment and disgust from schooldays with the shabby use made in Shakespeare of the coming of 'Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill': I longed to devise a setting in which the trees might really march to war.

In On Fairy-stories(¶ 07) and elsewhere in the Letters Tolkien also denounces Shakespeare along with Michael Drayton for the part they played in making the elves into 'a long line of flower-fairies and fluttering sprites with antennae that I so disliked as a child, and which my children in their turn detested.' While we might find it tempting to associate his 'dislike' here with the 'dislike' he felt as a schoolboy, on the evidence we would be wrong to do so. For, aside from the decades separating the schoolboy from the scholar, we have evidence that young Tolkien did not find diminutive fairies as objectionable as mature Tolkien did. 

For example, he was apparently quite taken with a performance of Peter Pan he attended in April 1910 and very much wished that Edith could have seen it with him (Scull and Hammond, The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide 2017 vol. 1, p. 23). Then there is his poem Goblin Feet, written in 1915 while an undergraduate at Oxford, a poem which very much partakes of the Victorian fairy genre for which he later blames Shakespeare (Letters no. 131, p. 143; no. 151, p. 185). In 1971 he said of Goblin Feet that he 'wished the unhappy little thing, representing all that I came (so soon after) to fervently dislike, could be buried for ever.' Finally, the first fairies whom Eriol meets in the Book of Lost Tales (ca. 1918) are tiny beings who live in a tiny cottage, which he must grow smaller to enter (I.14, 235; II.25-27). 

The evidence from his youth is thus consistent with the testimony of his old age (from 1971), and not with his statement in On Fairy-stories which he might have made for rhetorical effect. Note how the citation here of his children's dislike of these fairies serves to confirm the correctness of his own. Note, too, how again in ¶ 107 Tolkien uses the opinion of his children to corroborate his assessment, citing the 'nausea' his children felt at the opening of the play Toad of Toad Hall as proof that the attempt to dramatize this fairy-story was misguided. So when we read in On Fairy-stories that he 'so disliked' fairies of this sort 'as a child' OFS ¶ 07), we may doubt that he is remembering the details correctly. It is also true and only fair to both Shakespeare and Tolkien to point out that in the sentence in which Tolkien avows this dislike since childhood, he is speaking specifically of Michael Drayton's Nymphidia, though Shakespeare is paired with Drayton in the previous sentence.

There is one other moment in Tolkien's days at King Edward's School I want to look at before moving on. In April of 1911, his last spring before going up to Oxford, Tolkien took part in the school's annual Open Debate, the topic of which was a motion that Shakespeare's plays were written, not by Shakespeare, but by Francis Bacon. Tolkien argued in favor of the motion. We need to bear two things in mind here. First, in debating societies debaters often argue positions they don't personally agree with as a means of strengthening their skills, so his arguing for the authorship of Francis Bacon tells us little or nothing. The topics of the debate, moreover, were often chosen precisely because they were controversial. At King Edward's in Tolkien's time the Debating Society considered subjects variously serious, ridiculous, and offensive: slavery vs freedom; whether school holidays should be abolished; whether the Norman Conquest was a good thing; freedom of the press; war vs international arbitration; private vs public support of drama; tennis vs cricket; whether the Chinese and Japanese were a threat to Europe; women's suffrage; public corporal punishment; whether 'the vulgar are the really happy'; whether 'the heroes of antiquity have been much overrated; or even whether 'the Debating Society does more harm than good' (Scull and Hammond, The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide 2017 vol. 1, pp. 18-30 passim).

Second, Tolkien's arguments, like the arguments of most who believe that someone other than William Shakespeare wrote the plays published under his name, rest on the assumption that the plays are much too good to have been written by someone with Shakespeare's education and background. In fact, people who dispute Shakespeare's authorship commonly love the plays themselves. Sir Derek Jacobi, for example, one of the great Shakespearean actors of our time, has prominently rejected Shakespeare's authorship of the plays. So, too, in the debate Tolkien criticized the quality of the man, not of the plays, and if he had seriously espoused this position, far from suggesting a cordial dislike of Shakespeare, it would argue that he admired the plays. His participation in the Debating Society at King Edward's and the position he argued in this debate tells us little or nothing about his opinion of Shakespeare and his works in 1911.

As we saw above, in On Fairy-stories Tolkien held Shakespeare partly responsible for the pixification of the Elves, which led him to wish 'a murrain on Will Shakespeare and his damned cobwebs' in a footnote to his letter to Milton Waldman in 1951 (Letters no. 131, p. 143) and which in a 1954 letter he called a 'disastrous debasement' and 'unforgiveable' (Letters no. 151, p. 185). While there seems no reason to doubt or fault his frustration with Shakespeare on this subject, we might wonder whether his use of 'unforgiveable' suggests that the idea of forgiveness had been weighed and rejected. Do we call something 'unforgiveable' otherwise? There is also reason to note that it is a very narrow criticism of Shakespeare on a matter that became more important to Tolkien as the years passed, by which I mean the representation of the fantastic in literature or drama.

This of course brings us back to On Fairy-stories, where he argues that drama is the wrong vehicle for fantasy. Taking the witches in Macbeth as his example, he points out that they are 'tolerable' on the page, but 'almost intolerable' on the stage.

[71] In Macbeth, when it is read, I find the witches tolerable: they have a narrative function and some hint of dark significance; though they are vulgarized, poor things of their kind. They are almost intolerable in the play. They would be quite intolerable, if I were not fortified by some memory of them as they are in the story as read. I am told that I should feel differently if I had the mind of the period, with its witch-hunts and witch-trials. But that is to say: if I regarded the witches as possible, indeed likely, in the Primary World; in other words, if they ceased to be “Fantasy.” That argument concedes the point. To be dissolved, or to be degraded, is the likely fate of Fantasy when a dramatist tries to use it, even such a dramatist as Shakespeare. Macbeth is indeed a work by a playwright who ought, at least on this occasion, to have written a story, if he had the skill or patience for that art.

This is no criticism of Shakespeare at all. Tolkien's whole point here is that 'even such a dramatist as Shakespeare' was 'likely' to fail to represent fantasy successfully on the stage. Who could succeed, if he could not? The proper mode for fantasy is narrative, i.e., a story, not drama. Tolkien's perspective here is also consistent with, and may well follow ultimately from, his boyhood dissatisfaction with Shakespeare's handling of Birnam Wood.

If we turn now to a letter Tolkien wrote to his son, Christopher, in July 1944, we shall see more of his reflections on Shakespeare and the difference between the bard on the page and the bard on the stage (Letters no. 76, p. 88; italics added). 

Plain news is on the airgraph; but the only event worthy of talk was the performance of Hamlet which I had been to just before I wrote last. I was full of it then, but the cares of the world have soon wiped away the impression. But it emphasised more strongly than anything I have ever seen the folly of reading Shakespeare (and annotating him in the study), except as a concomitant of seeing his plays acted. It was a very good performance, with a young rather fierce Hamlet; it was played fast without cuts; and came out as a very exciting play. Could one only have seen it without ever having read it or knowing the plot, it would have been terrific. It was well produced except for a bit of bungling over the killing of Polonius. But to my surprise the part that came out as the most moving, almost intolerably so, was the one that in reading I always found a bore: the scene of mad Ophelia singing her snatches.

Tolkien quite clearly enjoyed the play itself immensely. His comments on the performances of Hamlet and Ophelia make clear the emotional impact 'seeing his plays acted' had on him. Even his minor criticism of the killing of Polonius addresses the production of the scene, not Shakespeare's handling of it. It should be entirely obvious from the sentence I've put in italics, however, that what Tolkien disliked was not Shakespeare the playwright or his works, but rather an approach to studying his plays, namely reading them without also watching them. I daresay that many, or perhaps most of us, know this approach well from our own school days, and may have, at the time, disliked it cordially.

We also know that Tolkien attended other performances of Shakespeare. Besides this Hamlet (with John Gielgud in the title role, by the way), we can reasonably infer from his comments, contrasting the witches in Macbeth on the page versus on the stage, that he saw that as well at some point before he wrote On Fairy-stories. His attendance is also attested at Henry VIII, Twelfth Night, and, accompanied by C. S. Lewis, A Midsummer Night's Dream (Scull and Hammond, The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide 2017 vol. 1, pp. 252, 397, 426). Writing to his brother, Warnie, on 18 February 1940, Lewis tells him about 'the really excellent performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream which Tolkien and I saw at the Playhouse.' He says nothing about Tolkien's opinion, but would Tolkien have been shy about sharing it with Lewis (or Lewis with his brother), had it been greatly different?

Finally comes a passage in one of Tolkien's letters in which he places Shakespeare in the most exalted company (no. 156, p. 201):

There are, I suppose, always defects in any large-scale work of art; and especially in those of literary form that are founded on an earlier matter which is put to new uses – like Homer, or Beowulf, or Virgil, or Greek or Shakespearean tragedy! In which class, as a class not as a competitor, The Lord of the Rings really falls though it is only founded on the author's own first draft! I think the way in which Gandalf's return is presented is a defect.

Note here the two exclamation points. The very idea that the works of these authors can be represented as having defects is to be punctuated with raised eyebrows, as is his denial that he has the cheek to consider The Lord of the Rings in competition with their works. Yes, even Homer and Shakespeare nod, and can err in their treatment of earlier material (the witches in Macbeth, for example), but they are still among the very great and the only way in which his work can compare to theirs is in its reuse of 'earlier matter.'

So it seems fairly clear that Tolkien's attitude towards Shakespeare is not what many often take it to be on the basis of his 'cordial dislike' or his frustration with the coming of Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane Hill. Drama, Tolkien felt, was not well suited to fantasy, since it was already something of a fantasy to begin with; and the study of Shakespeare on the page alone is folly. Proper study of the plays requires both reading and viewing. Tom Shippey has said in Author of the Century that Tolkien was 'guardedly respectful' of Shakespeare. That is the least of it.

For further reading, see, e.g, 

• Michael D. C. Drout's article in Tolkien Studies 1 (2004) Tolkien's Prose Style and its Literary and Rhetorical Effects 137-63
• Janet Croft's Tolkien and Shakespeare: essays on shared themes and language (McFarland) 2007.

  

'Light as leaf of linden-tree': Chaucer, Langland, and Elven Poetry

I was browsing in the OED and MED the other day, as one does, and I decided, unsurprisingly, to see just how many times the OED quoted Tolkien. The search yielded 386 results distributed across 320 separate entries. So, for example, under 'orc' we find five quotes for 'orc' and its derivatives ('orc-guards', 'orc-speech', 'orc-host', 'orc-like'). I was scrolling through the list of entries to see where the quotes came from. As you would expect, The Lord of the Rings, The Letters, The Hobbit, and The Silmarillion provide the most quotations.

One OED entry in particular caught my eye as it moved down the page:

c. (as) light as leaf on lind (also linden, tree, etc.)and variants: as light or weightless as a leaf; (hence) cheerful, merry; (also, in negative sense) heedless, unthinking. Now archaic and rare.

Readers of Tolkien will recognize this phrase of course from several places. The first is the song about Beren and Lúthien which Aragorn sings to the hobbits at Weathertop (FR 1.x.192):

He heard there oft the flying sound

   Of feet as light as linden-leaves,
Or music welling underground,
   In hidden hollows quavering.

The second comes from the song of Nimrodel sung by Legolas in Lothlórien (FR 2.vi.339):

Her hair was long, her limbs were white,
   And fair she was and free;
And in the wind she went as light   
   As leaf of linden-tree.

The third comes from The Lay of the Children of Húrin (Lays 104), where Tolkien describes the movements of Lúthien as 'light as leaf on linden tree'. The phrase also serves as the title of a poem Tolkien published in 1925 in The Gryphon, a magazine put out by the University of Leeds, where he had been teaching since 1920. An early version of the song Aragorn sings in The Fellowship of the Ring, it was also inserted into The Lay of the Children of Húrin (Lays 108-110), which puts it in the remarkable position of being 72 lines of rhyming iambic tetrameter embedded within over 2,100 lines of unrhymed alliterative verse as in Beowulf. While in Beowulf and long before that in The Odyssey we encounter bards singing songs about the exploits of heroes, we don't get to hear the songs themselves. At best we are told what they sang about and how it affected those who heard it. So, 'Light as Leaf on Lindentree', indented, rhyming, and in an entirely different kind of verse from the surrounding lay really calls attention to itself. 

That Tolkien used variations of this phrase repeatedly, in different poems sung in different places by different characters, is even more striking because it seems to offer up this image as part of the poetic vocabulary of Middle-earth, and more specifically perhaps as part of the Elven poetic vocabulary. For the songs of Aragorn and Legolas are clearly identified as such, and 'Light as Leaf on Lindentree' is in the same meter as Aragorn's.

What's just as cool is that, in making the phrase part of the Elven poetic vocabulary, Tolkien is drawing on the Middle English poetic vocabulary of the 14th through the 16th Centuries. Not only does Chaucer use it in The Clerk's Tale and Langland in Piers Plowman, but it appears in works less well known, such as the Harley Lyrics and one of the Robin Hood ballads. The phrase then vanishes from the record in the 1500s, becoming archaic and rare as the OED tells us. I have to wonder if Tolkien's resurrection of this lovely simile after 400 years is the sole reason why the phrase is described as rare rather than obsolete. It may also be the sole recorded instance of the poetry of mortals influencing the poetry of Faërie.

See the quotes, links, and translations below, with approximate date, author if known, and title of work.

_____________________________________________

a1350 In may hit murgeþ (Harley Lyrics 2253) In May hit murgeþ when hit dawes in dounes wiþ þis dueres plawes ent lef is lyght on lynde.

'In May it is merry when it dawns. So on the downs the animals play, And leaf is light on linden.'

c1390 (?c1350) Joseph of Arimathie 585: Þer nas no lynde so liht as þise two leodes, whon þei blencheden a-boue and eiþer seiʒ oþer. 

'There was no linden as light as these two people, when they grew pale and saw each other.

(c1395) Chaucer The Canterbury Tales, The Clerk's Tale E.1211: Be ay of cheere as light as leef on lynde.

'Be always of cheer as light as leaf on linden.'

c1400 (c1378) William Langland, Piers Plowman B 1.154: Whan it [love] haued of þis folde flesshe & blode taken, Was neuere leef vpon lynde liʒter þer-after. 

'When [love] had taken part of the flesh and blood of this world, never again was a leaf lighter upon linden after that.'

a1450 The Castle of Perseverance 3596: Lo here Mankynde, lyter þanne lef is on lynde!

'Behold mankind here, lighter than leaf is on linden!

c1450 The Chance of the Dice 104: So fers ys youre corage, Y russhen forthe as lyght as leefe on lynde. 

'So fierce is your courage, you rush forth as light as leaf on linden.'

?a1475 Lessons of the Dirige (2) 395: Than were I glad and lyght as lynde To haue Parce michi, domine. 

'Then were I glad and light as linden to have "Parce michi, domine."'

a1500(a1460) The Towneley Plays 97/368: A, what I am light as lynde! 

'Ah! I am as light as linden!'

a1500 Robin Hood & the Monk st.76: Robyn was in mery Scherwode, As liʒt as lef on lynde.

'Robin was in merry Sherwood, As light as leaf on linden.'

A Reasonable Question about Amazon's Rings of Power Show

Over on twitter I was sharing some first impressions on the first two episodes of The Rings of Power, which I had the chance to see in New York City last Tuesday. A guy asked me whether 'people who are super obsessed with lore accuracy [are] going to be happy or sad' after they see the show. So I answered it with a thread there, and I've put it all together here in a more coherent form. I haven't really changed anything, but some typos and punctuation and paragraphing, to make it a bit easier to read. So here's my reply:

Okay, that's a reasonable question. There's a couple of things to consider. 

1. Compared to the First Age and the Third Age there is precious little for the Second Age, which Tolkien basically invented as backdrop to LotR as he wrote it. 
2. That means that any extended narrative of the Second Age - and 50 hours is a very extended narrative - is going to have a lot of gaps to fill, and filling those gaps is going to require inventing all sorts of things. 
3. The show also has to deal with any extremely long timeframe. The Second Age is 3441 years long. 
4. The are two basic storylines: The Elves and Sauron, and Númenor, which really don't even begin to head converge until Númenor comes to the rescue of the Elves in SA 1700, and don't fully converge until Númenor is destroyed, and the Faithful escape to Middle-earth. 
5. Some of the characters are in effect immortal and others aren't. 
6. So you have this colossal story, covering three and a half millennia, the elvish strand of which is very sketchily told, and the mortal part of which is very focused on a few centuries towards the end. This is the task these guys at Amazon have set for themselves. This is the playing field they and we are on. 

In view of all this, here's a question -- how do I feel about there being hobbits in the story? Because I am a big lore guy, and a big book lore guy. I haven't even watched the PJ films in years because I don't want my understanding of the books influenced by what PJ did in the films (good or ill, he changed things). There's no mention of hobbits anywhere before TA 1050. As Merry & Pippin told Treebeard, they got left out of all the old tales. So any inclusion of hobbits before that time is unsupported by the lore, and the show is starting a couple of thousand years before that. It's all completely fabricated from what we know of hobbits much later and then retrojected thousands of years. [Note: they aren't even called hobbits in the show, but Harfoots.]

Does that bother me as a lore guy? A whole lot less than Denethor being turned into a flaming nitwit (pun intended) in PJ's films. Or Elrond heading for the Grey Havens when everyone's back is turned. Or hobbits feet always being done wrong because One hobbit has exceptionally large and furry feet which he proudly displays on tables at parties.* Or, finally a whole lot less than if they had turned the show into game of thrones, a fantasy series which on both page and screen shares none of the heart of Tolkien's legendarium (and to be fair, that doesn't seem to be its goal). 

Did I see anything in those first two episodes, which seemed to contradict established canon? Yes. Do I wish they had done it differently? Yes. Actually I saw more than one thing. Will I keep watching? Yes. But you know what I wouldn't watch? A show that got every last detail of lore 100% right, (as if that were even possible given what they are attempting) but missed the tragedy and joy and sorrow and pity that are at the heart of the legendarium from the Music of the Ainur to the Dagor Dagorath. So, there's my answer. Sorry it's so long, but, as a lore guy, you must have made it through the Council of Elrond, right? This isn't anywhere near that long. Hope it helps. 

* I'll be putting up a post on hobbit feet soon, to follow up on this burning issue.

The Wheel of Fire: Between Thought and Expression

'And the Ring is so heavy, Sam. And I begin to see it in my mind all the time, like a great wheel of fire.'

(RK 6.i.919)

'I am naked in the dark, Sam, and there is no veil between me and the wheel of fire. I begin to see it even with my waking eyes, and all else fades.

(RK 6.iii.937-38)

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

.... Then the vision passed and Sam saw Frodo Frodo standing, hand on breast, his breath coming in great gasps, and Gollum at his feet, resting on his knees with his wide-splayed hands upon the ground.

(RK 6.iii.943-44)

Mentioned only three times, twice by Frodo and once by Sam, the wheel of fire remains a fascinating, perplexing image. Unlike the Eye of Sauron, the purport of which the narrative makes clear, why Frodo sees the Ring as a wheel of fire receives no discussion and has no self-evident explanation. To the readers in the Primary World, that is, to us, the wheel offers several possibilities. From Greek Mythology we may know that Ixion was bound to a flaming wheel in Tartarus as punishment for his crimes against the gods, and Tolkien was surely alive to what his readers might make of such an image. In a 1944 letter to his son, Christopher, while discussing the power legends hold he expresses his astonishment that someone would choose 'Ixion' as the name for a brand of motorcycles: 'How could a maker of motorbikes name his product Ixion cycles! Ixion, who was bound for ever in hell on a perpetually revolving wheel!' (Letters no. 75, p. 88). From Shakespeare we may know the wheel as one of the tormenting visions of Lear's madness (King Lear 4.v:43-46)

You do me wrong to take me out o' the grave:
Thou art a soul in bliss; but I am bound
Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears
Do scald like moulten lead.

From history we may know of the medieval torture device sometimes called the 'Catherine wheel', or, more recently, of the wheel to which soldiers were once tied for punishment in a pose that reminded many of crucifixion. It was called Field Punishment No. 1, and, as John Garth has pointed out(1), Tolkien likely witnessed it during the Great War. From the Bible we may know of the wheels and fire appearing in the visions in Ezekiel, though these are associated with cherubim and the glory of God. We may even be familiar with the firework called a Catherine Wheel (evidently not in Gandalf's repertoire), whose swift turning and bright ring of fire creates the illusion of black emptiness rimmed with fire (curious, that). So torment, fire, and otherworldly visions are what the wheel can most readily convey to us, which accords perfectly with what we see of Frodo's experience. 

So much for us, but none of this would have the least meaning for anyone in Middle-earth, and it is for readers within the Secondary World that Frodo supposedly wrote the book. It seems too important and potent an image to think that it is simply a passing artefact of translation(2), like 'express train' in A Long-expected Party (FR 1.i.28), or 'all aboard, Sam'(3) in Three is Company (FR 1.iii.70). Rather, the cluster of associations that the wheel of fire can have for us, the reader in the Primary World, signals the importance of this image for understanding Frodo's relationship with the Ring. That Sam also sees the Ring as a wheel of fire when he looks upon Frodo 'with other vision' on the slopes of Mount Doom (RK 6.iii.943) confirms that it is more than just a vision of torment or madness or divine revelation, but a manifestation of the Ring's irresistible power. To understand this better, we must return to Lothlórien and what Frodo sees in the Mirror of Galadriel.

For the first such image appearing in Frodo's mind is not the wheel of fire, but the Eye of Sauron. After the Mirror shows him a succession of glimpses into the past and possibly the future, an image more real than realistic suddenly commandeers his vision. Catlike, cyclopean, disembodied, bound in flame, empty within and without, the Eye is looking for the Ring, and for him. Although Galadriel does not know all that was visible in the mirror, she knows he saw the Eye. So it is a manifestation of Sauron she is aware of herself, even if it is not his incarnate form, which was recognizably male and presumably Elven to judge by the words of Pippin and Aragorn, who saw Sauron in the palantír (TT 3.xi.592-93; RK 5.ii.780), and of Gollum, who saw him in person (TT 4.iii.641).  

In his next encounter with the Eye, upon Amon Hen, Frodo feels its attention rather than seeing an image of it. At the same time he perceives the 'fierce eager will' behind the Eye, of which he then says 'almost like a finger he felt it, searching for him' (FR 2.x.401). This collocation of eye, will, and finger ought to make clear the metaphorical territory into which Frodo the narrator has strayed as he tries to communicate his experience. That he soon hears a 'Voice', which no one would mistake for a real voice, and which contends with the Eye, only confirms the metaphorical nature of the bodily attributes 'eye' and 'finger'. To be sure, the Voice is Gandalf's, but it is not the voice of Gandalf sitting on a mountaintop shouting out loud.

This approach to the Eye continues in The Passage of the Marshes, where in a single paragraph the narrator all but declares how much of the language used to describe his perception of the Ring and Sauron is metaphorical. The burden of the Ring may grow, but its weight does not actually change as Sam's experience carrying Frodo proves (RK 6.iii.941). The 'Eye' is what he calls 'that horrible growing sense of a hostile will', which seeks to 'pierce all shadows' and 'veils' and 'pin you'. And the metaphor of how he can sense the location of its 'heart' is fine and apt, but it is nevertheless a metaphor. Sauron's Eye is nothing like the sun, not even an invisible sun.

In fact with every step towards the gates of Mordor Frodo felt the Ring on its chain about his neck grow more burdensome. He was now beginning to feel it as an actual weight dragging him earthwards. But far more he was troubled by the Eye: so he called it to himself. It was that more than the drag of the Ring that made him cower and stoop as he walked. The Eye: that horrible growing sense of a hostile will that strove with great power to pierce all shadows of cloud, and earth, and flesh, and to see you: to pin you under its deadly gaze, naked, immovable. So thin, so frail and thin, the veils were become that still warded it off. Frodo knew just where the present habitation and heart of that will now was: as certainly as a man can tell the direction of the sun with his eyes shut. He was facing it, and its potency beat upon his brow.

(TT 4.ii.630, emphasis mine)

So powerfully has the Eye been imagined in these three scenes in Lothlórien, upon Amon Hen, and in the Dead Marshes that it comes as something of a surprise to recognize that we get very little of Frodo's perception of it from here on. Frodo the narrator presently comments that Gollum has 'probably' also been feeling 'the pressure of the Eye' (TT 4.ii.630-31), though he also points out, perhaps in belated self-reproach, that Frodo the character didn't give a thought to what Gollum might have been suffering. Twice later on while Sam is wearing the Ring he feels anything but invisible to the Eye he knows is 'searching for him' (TT 4.x.734) and he perceives 'now more strong and urgent than ever, the malice of the Eye of Mordor, searching, trying to pierce the shadows' (RK 6.i.898). Sam's perceptions, however, lack the vividness of Frodo's. As receptive as Sam is to seeing things with 'other vision' -- like the clear light he thinks he sees shining from Frodo sometimes (TT 4.iv.652; cf. FR 2.i.223), or like the, as it were, transfigurations of Frodo he views in the Emyn Muil and on Mount Doom (TT 4.i.618; RK 6.iii.944) -- he never sees the Eye as Frodo does.

At the same time direct and indirect reminders of the Eye abound in mentions of the Red Eye as the livery of Mordor (TT 3.i.416; iii.451; RK 6.i.903) or the red lights like eyes in the Towers of the Teeth and the tower at Cirith Ungol (TT 4.iv.649; x.733-34; RK 6.i.898. 908). Even the flies of Mordor are 'marked like orcs with a red eye-shaped blotch (RK 6.ii.921).(4) Yet like the rest of the eyes, including that of Sauron himself, they fail to see what they most need to see. Instead the buzzing and stinging of the flies and the 'clouds of hungry midges' serve as a grimly humorous parallel to Sam's suffering in the Midgewater Marshes, where he had quipped 'What do they live on when they can't get hobbit?' (FR 1.xi.182-83). The red-eyed orc-gear he and Frodo had been wearing to conceal their identity now seems less important than having skin as thick as an orc's.

Once the hobbits have entered Mordor, however, Frodo the character never speaks of the Eye again, though there are two moments which merit our attention. In the first moment Sam observes his master's behavior, much of which will be familiar.

Sam guessed that among all their pains [Frodo] bore the worst, the growing weight of the Ring, a burden on the body and a torment to his mind. Anxiously Sam had noted how his master’s left hand would often be raised as if to ward off a blow, or to screen his shrinking eyes from a dreadful Eye that sought to look in them. And sometimes his right hand would creep to his breast, clutching, and then slowly, as the will recovered mastery, it would be withdrawn. 

(RK 6.iii.935) 

Again, as in The Dead Marshes, we start with a reference to the burden of the Ring and its seeming change in weight, which will soon be shown to be merely a delusion of the bearer (RK 6.iii.941). So, not everything the Ringbearer experiences or describes as if it were a physical effect or object has physical existence. That's a thought we should hold on to. 

Next Sam's speculations on Frodo's left hand recall his master's perceptions of the Eye back in The Dead Marshes. Only he is actually watching from the outside in, and cautiously describing, the 'potency' of that unseen sun which 'beat upon [Frodo's] brow. This transition from Frodo's internal perceptions in The Dead Marshes to the strictly external perceptions of an excluded Sam in Mount Doom emphasizes the distance between the one experience and the other, with its 'as if' and its 'a dreadful Eye' rather than 'the dreadful Eye.' In view of the phrasing it may be worth recalling here that Sam has not seen, and never will see, the Eye, though he has felt its attention, just as he has felt the burden of the Ring.

The shift in attention then from Frodo's left hand to his right offers a counterbalance more than opposition. In the Dead Marshes we glimpse (TT 4.ii.630), through Sam's anxious eyes, Frodo trying to hide from the gaze of Sauron, but Sam is at a remove, able only to guess at what Frodo sees, and still under the false impression that the physical weight of the Ring grows along with the spiritual burden. In Mordor (RK 6.iii.935), we and Sam are still farther off, shut out entirely from the struggle between the desire that moves Frodo's hand towards the Ring and the will that forces it back again. If in his mind here Frodo sees the Eye or senses its hunting gaze, and raises his left hand to shield himself against it, what does he see or perceive in his mind when he lifts his right hand to reach for the Ring?

In the second moment, we may observe a curious turn. For by chance Frodo 'sees' the Eye when its attention is entirely elsewhere, on the battle outside the Black Gate. It is neither looking for him nor, as at Amon Hen, does it become aware of his gaze: 'but Frodo at that dreadful glimpse fell as one stricken mortally. His hand sought the chain about his neck' (RK 6.iii.942). What Frodo glimpses even for an instant is so powerful, full of such malice and terror, that the mere sight of it strikes him down and his hand reaches for the Ring. Sam has to stop it. Frodo has to beg him. 

There is no hint whatsoever here that Frodo feels any pressure to put on the Ring, as he often tells the reader elsewhere that he did. On some of those occasions the urge clearly comes from outside him, as at Weathertop or with the Black Riders in the Shire. On others it is fear and a desire to escape, as in the Barrow, or fear that Bombadil has not given him back the real Ring and a desire to prove that it is 'his Ring'. Sometimes it is merely that most Bagginsish of desires, to avoid an awkward situation. And course these motives can overlap, as when Frodo wants to disappear in The Prancing Pony, feeling embarrassed as much as compelled. 

Frodo's most recent claim that he felt such an external pressure to put on the Ring, in the Morgul Vale as the Witch-king passed by, is harder to credit. For if the Witch-king had perceived that the Ring was close by and sent out a command to its bearer to put it on, as he had done successfully at Weathertop, it's impossible to believe he would have just marched away. The desire Frodo feels there to put on the Ring is also clearly connected to his desire to defy the Witch-king, as he had done unsuccessfully at the Ford of Bruinen, but he has since grown wise enough to know he does not have the strength, 'not yet' (TT 4.viii.706). These last two words, however, not only reveal his desire to put on the Ring and issue the challenge, but also that he is gauging his and the Witch-king's strengths. 

While Sam has the Ring, he twice finds his hand reaching for it. The only external pressure he feels upon himself is the terror of his situation. In the first instance he is surprised in the pass by the arrival of the orcs, and he takes the Ring in his hand before he realizes it and puts it on without a second thought. His mind is on how its now too late for him to escape and 'save the Ring'. Likewise, once he's inside the tower looking for Frodo, he is again surprised by an orc and reaches for the Ring. Sam, however, is under no illusions about his strength. Previously, when he had the Ring on and was tempted by the fantasy of being 'Samwise the Strong, Hero of the Age', he recognized at once that it was a delusion. He may feel the temptation to claim the Ring and challenge Sauron, but he knows how that would end. He knows also that there is a price in torment to be paid for rejecting the fantasy of power so alluring that he can do nothing but want it. He has watched that torment in Frodo, and even in Gollum for some time now.

What Frodo sees in his mind as his hand reaches for the Ring is the wheel of fire, which he has already told Sam he has begun to see in his 'mind all the time, like a great wheel of fire' (RK 6.i.919), and of which he will soon say: 'I am naked in the dark, Sam, and there is no veil between me and the wheel of fire. I begin to see it even with my waking eyes, and all else fades' (RK 6.iii.938). 

The simile in his mind's eye in his first statement about the wheel becomes the much more vivid metaphor of the second. It proves in fact to be far more than metaphor. For, now that it is visible to his 'waking eyes', it is no longer a description or a comparison that aims to convey meaning by juxtaposing less and more familiar things. It is a vision or a hallucination. 

But the final report on the wheel of fire belongs to Sam, and what he sees the narrator twice calls a 'vision'. Again, keep in mind that the narrator is Frodo who must have relied on Sam to know what Sam saw. When Sam sees with 'other vision', as he does here, what he sees always touches upon Frodo's moral or spiritual state. Such a vision can be simple, as in the clear light which Sam and Gandalf saw shining through Frodo at Rivendell and which Sam and perhaps even Gollum saw again later in Ithilien. The interpretation of this even so may vary. Sam sees it as indicative of what Frodo is, but to Gandalf that light promises much, yet offers no guarantee against the darkness. Or the vision may be far more complex, as in Frodo's vision of Galadriel in Lothlórien where he saw light and darkness, beauty and terror, love and despair combined into a mixture in which the evil elements subvert the good even though the image of the good never entirely vanishes from sight.

Just so here. The white in which the figure is cloaked too easily deceives because it is so often associated with goodness, with Gandalf, with Elbereth, with the White Tree. Saruman, too was cloaked in white , was called the White, and was leader of the White Council. Yet his treachery was not new, just newly revealed, and 'long years of death' will soon be revealed in him (RK 6.viii.1020). Saruman's orcs wear the White Hand as their token. Whatever he may once have been, Saruman has become a walking, talking whited sepulcher. And when Frodo sees beneath the black robes of the undead Ringwraiths, their clothes and faces and hair are white and grey. In the same way neither the 'simple white' worn by Galadriel nor the shining beauty of 'the Sea and the Sun and the Snow upon the mountain' which she would have put on if she had accepted the Ring would have made her less evil in the end (FR 2.vii.366).

What Sam sees with his 'other vision' is also not described as Frodo, but as a 'figure', which becomes Frodo once again only after the vision passes. This 'figure', moreover, is 'untouchable now by pity.' Now as everybody knows, Gandalf stressed at the outset the crucial role that the pity Bilbo showed Gollum might play (FR 1.ii.59). Despite rejecting Gandalf's argument for pity, Frodo, too, finally came to pity Gollum when they met at last, a scene in which Frodo not only remembered Gandalf's words to him about pity, but in which Frodo actually continued their conversation, speaking aloud to someone he believed to be dead (TT 4.i.615). Sam, moreover, will also pity Gollum and spare his life mere moments after the 'figure' 'untouchable by pity' turns away, presumably to destroy the Ring, so Sam believes, but, as it turns out, to claim the Ring (RK 6.iii.944-47). Without these three moments of pity by Bilbo, Frodo, and Sam, for someone who does not deserve pity, but death, the Ring does not go into the fire. Divine Pity does not intervene. There is no eucatastrophe on Mount Doom. So, for Frodo to have 'now' become, or to be 'now' seen as, a 'figure' 'untouchable now by pity' cannot be good. 

A remark Gandalf makes to Denethor has a bearing here. Rejecting Denethor's claim that Boromir would have brought him the Ring (RK 5.iv.813), Gandalf tells him that Boromir would not have done so, but 'would have stretched out his hand to this thing, and taking it he would have fallen. He would have kept it for his own, and when he returned you would not have known your son.' So, too, Frodo, 'having stretched out his hand to this thing' and having taken it, is for the moment no longer recognizable. (Remember also how Bilbo and Sam were both suddenly unrecognizable, when Frodo felt they were after his Ring?)

Finally, the 'figure' has the wheel of fire in its hand, the same hand which has repeatedly reached for the Ring, the same hand which Frodo has had increasing difficulty stopping, and the same hand which Sam sees on Frodo's breast clutching the Ring through his shirt (TT 4.viii.706; 6.iii.935, 943-44). And the voice which speaks from the wheel of fire clearly speaks as Frodo: 'You cannot betray me or slay me now' and 'Begone and trouble me no more. If you ever touch me again ....' At least in and for this moment, Frodo and the wheel of fire seem to be one, as if the wheel of fire is to Frodo as the Eye is to Sauron. In the struggle within Frodo between what I shall call the 'Ring-bearer-will' -- that is, 'the Ring is my burden' -- and the 'Ringlord-will' -- that is, 'the Ring is mine' -- the wheel represents Frodo's understanding of what he will become when his will breaks and he claims the Ring for his own, as he presently shall in Sammath Naur. Had Frodo prevailed in his challenge to Sauron -- as he could not have done -- the livery of his Dark Tower would have been the wheel of fire.

_____________________

1 John Garth, 'Frodo and the Great War', in The Lord of the Rings 1954-2004: Scholarship in Honor of Richard E. Blackwelder, edd. Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull. Marquette 2006, p. 50 with no. 51. Garth draws on Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory. Oxford 1975, pp. 118-19. 

2 Artifact of translation -- In translated works, as The Lord of the Rings claims to be, a translator will at times err in allowing an anachronism or other error to creep into the text because the words chosen to represent the original excel at communicating the idea or image in terms better suited to the reader than to the text. To say that the dragon firework at Bilbo's party passed overhead with a sound like an express train makes perfectly clear to the reader, but makes no sense regarded in context since there were no trains, express or otherwise, in Middle-earth. A perfect example is in Aubrey De Selincourt's translation of book 2, chapter 56 of Livy's History of Rome, where the consul is said to have 'stuck to his guns.' Perfectly clear to the reader, but absurd since guns did not exist in 471 B.C.E.

3 The phrase 'all aboard', like 'express train', has no place in Middle-earth, since it evokes the boarding call used to warn passengers that their boat or train was about to depart. While it fits nicely with 'express train', Tolkien may well have associated the phrase with boats. According to the OED, the phrase's link with trains is far more American than British. If so, that is intriguing since hobbits dislike boats and travel by water and the Sea is symbolic of death to them.

4 All other references to the Eye or uses of the word that invoke it, even proleptically: FR 1.i.34; vii.132-33; 2.ii.274; TT 3.i.414; iii.451, 452; v.499; ix.564; x.582; xi.589; 4.i.605; ii.625, 631, 632; iii.642, 648; iv.651; vii.702; x.733, 738; RK 5.iv.821; ix.879; x.885; 6.i.898 (twice), 903, 907-08; ii.921, 923, 924; iii.935-36, 942 (twice), 946.

The Pity of Théoden (TT 3.vi.519-20)

Gandalf and Frodo's argument over Bilbo's pity and mercy and the death which they agree Gollum deserves versus the healing the wizard hopes Gollum may yet find inform the entire moral structure of The Lord of the Rings (FR 1.ii.59-60). And the moment in which Bilbo showed that mercy is echoed over and over in decisions we see characters make.

We don't often think of Théoden in this connection, however, even though once you see it, it seems so obvious. (The italics are mine.)

'Mercy, lord!' whined Wormtongue, grovelling on the ground. 'Have pity on one worn out in your service. Send me not from your side! I at least will stand by you when all others have gone. Do not send your faithful Gríma away!'

'You have my pity,' said Théoden. 'And I do not send you from my side. I go myself to war with my men. I bid you come with me and prove your faith.'

....

'.... See, Théoden,[said Gandalf] here is a snake! With safety you cannot take it with you, nor can you leave it behind. To slay it would be just. But it was not always as it now is. Once it was a man, and did you service in its fashion. Give him a horse and let him go at once, wherever he chooses. By his choice you shall judge him.'

'Do you hear this, Wormtongue?' said Théoden. 'This is your choice: to ride with me to war, and let us see in battle whether you are true; or to go now, whither you will. But then, if ever we meet again, I shall not be merciful.' 

(TT 3.vi.519-20)     

The King, who has the right to deal out death in judgement (as Frodo did not), now healed by Gandalf, does not need his teaching to show pity and mercy. He does not strike without need, even if Wormtongue's just punishment for his treason should be death. Rather he offers him a chance for healing, a chance to redeem himself. Gandalf affirms the correctness of what would be just as well as the correctness of the mercy the King offers. 

Wormtongue of course rejects Théoden's mercy, only to end up dead months later at the feet of Frodo, who has just once again offered pity and mercy to both Wormtongue and Saruman (RK 6.viii.1019-20).


_____________

My thanks to Matthew DeForrest, whose article, Pity, Malice and Agency in Tolkien's Subcreation, in Critical Insights: The Lord of the Rings, ed. Robert C. Evans, Salem (2022) 227-40, brought Théoden's pity and mercy to my notice in his discussion of those qualities in Tolkien, and in this mirror I saw reflected the scene with Gandalf and Frodo.

Of Kubla Khan in Greek, Tolkien in his Cups, and a Boat of Melted Butter.

In Tolkien's youth it was nothing unusual for Latin and Greek students to be told to translate a piece of English verse into verse in Latin or Greek. This is even more daunting than it sounds since Greek and Latin prosody has very different rules. When Tolkien says to W. H. Auden that his 'chief contacts with [English] poetry were when one was made to try and translate it into Latin' (Letters, no. 163, p. 213), this is what he is talking about, as Auden likely knew from his own experience. Some people were actually quite good at this, and kept it up long after they had finished school themselves. In Oxford and Cambridge of Tolkien's day it was something of a college industry.

I remember one day when I was an undergraduate studying Greek one of my more terrifying professors showed us a version of Coleridge's Kubla Khan translated into Greek by an Oxford don named Maurice Bowra. It was really quite good and a lot of fun, too. Aside from the Greek being neatly turned and the versification skillfully handled, Bowra had also rendered the cultural references into something a Greek 2,500 years ago would have understood. The names 'Kubla Khan' and 'Xanadu' would have meant nothing to Sophocles, for example, but Minos and Knossos would have conveyed just the necessary air of power both mythic and exotic. So 'In Xanadu did Kubla Khan' became 'In Knossos did King Minos' (ἐν Κνωσῷ βασιλεὺς Μίνως).(1) As mere American undergraduates of a decidedly less heroic age, my classmates and I were as awed to read this as we were grateful that no one was going to ask us to do anything similar.

Tolkien and Bowra knew each other. In the preface (p. viii) to the 1938 Oxford Book of Greek Verse in Translation, edited by Bowra and T. F. Higham, Tolkien receives thanks for his 'valuable help' with the seventy-four page essay Higham wrote on Greek Poetry in Translation.(2) What help Tolkien gave seems unknown, however. Both Tolkien (1945-1955) and Bowra (1951-?) were later members of the Oxford Dante Society, and it is perhaps at the meetings of this society, which seem to have always included a dinner, that the rest of our story begins.

For C. S. Lewis' brother, Warnie, ran into Tolkien one summer evening in 1966 at gathering in Wadham College of those who had known C. S. Lewis. Warnie's diary entry for 22 July 1966 tells an intriguing tale:

'in company with Tollers, who struck me as having had as much sherry as was good for him, and he told me some fantastic story about how he had once emptied a sauce boat of melted butter over [Maurice] Bowra's head.'(3)

We do not know why Tolkien did this to Bowra, though the reputation of Bowra's sharp tongue lives on even today. But again, I emphasize, we do not know. We also cannot say when it happened. It is tempting, however, to suspect a link between the buttering of Bowra and the meeting of the Oxford Dante Society on 15 February 1955 at which Tolkien's resignation was 'accepted with regret'.(4) That Warnie didn't already know the tale suggests that Tolkien didn't talk about it, at least not without a tongue-loosening amount of sherry in him. It's also true that he had run into Warnie at a gathering in Wadham College, of which Bowra had long been the warden (head). So he may well have been there, and seeing him would certainly have called that previous meeting to mind, whenever it may have happened. 

Such memories might also have inspired Bowra five years later to write a letter attacking Tolkien's qualifications for government honors for which both he and Tolkien were then under consideration. Bowra disparaged Tolkien's academic output and dismissed the idea that someone who wrote 'only children's tales' merited recognition as a Companion of Honour.(5) (Tolkien in the end received the lesser distinction of Commander of the Order of the British Empire.)

It's worth noting that Tolkien had already felt the sting of such criticism long before. In letter 211, dated to 14 October 1958, Tolkien writes (p. 278):

I have only just returned from a year’s leave, one object of which was to enable me to complete some of the ‘learned’ works neglected during my preoccupation with unprofessional trifles (such as The Lord of the Rings): I record the tone of many of my colleagues.

And in letter 182 from sometime in 1956, he says (p. 238):

Most of my philological colleagues are shocked (cert. behind my back, sometimes to my face) at the fall of a philological into ‘Trivial literature’; and anyway the cry is: ‘now we know how you have been wasting your time for 20 years’. So the screw is on for many things of a more professional kind long overdue.

The similarity of these criticisms voiced at Oxford following the publication of The Fellowship of the Ring on 29 July 1954 and The Two Towers on 11 November 1954, to the comments in Bowra's 1971 letter invite us once again to wonder if a connection might exist between the butter boat incident and Tolkien's resignation from the Oxford Dante Society on 15 February 1955. Perhaps at table that evening Bowra unleashed his caustic wit at Tolkien, who was already sore from the criticism of his colleagues, but was not to be intimidated either. Perhaps not. We may never know, but it's a fine and fantastic image to cherish for a moment. 

ADDENDUM:

Lee Smith has suggested to me the perfect instance of provocation for the butter boat incident. Bowra makes some suitably witty and acid remark about there not being enough butter to scrape over their bread as he asks Tolkien to pass the butter. Which Tolkien does. 

I dedicate this post to my good friend, Shawn Marchese, who is leaving the Prancing Pony Podcast, but not (probably) because he has poured a sauce boat of melted butter over Alan's head. 

_____________________________________

(1) For Kubla Khan, see S. T. Coleridge, C. M. Bowra, et al. in Greece & Rome 3 (1934) 178-82. https://www.jstor.org/stable/641030.

(2) I owe my discovery of the acknowledgement of Tolkien in The Oxford Book of Greek Verse in Translation to Cristina Scull & Wayne G. Hammond, The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Reader's Guide, Part I (2017: 195). 

(3) Warnie's diary entry is quoted in Cristina Scull & Wayne G. Hammond, The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Reader's Guide, Part I (2017: 195) and in Chronology (2017:703). They draw the quote from Warnie's papers at the Marion E. Wade Center, at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois. Charles E. Noad in Maurice Bowra and the Inklings, Amon Hen 227 (2011: 12-17) notes Warnie's story, but does not speculate (as I do) about the story behind it.

(4) Cristina Scull & Wayne G. Hammond, The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Chronology (2017: 47). 

(5) Cristina Scull & Wayne G. Hammond, The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Reader's Guide, Part I (2017: 195-96) and Chronology (2017: 789-90, 863)

Hailing Frequencies Closed -- Nichelle Nichols (1932-2022)

Damn it. 

When I was a little boy, Uhura always struck me as so calm, so perfectly poised, and so completely on top of everything she had to do. Even in those episodes when they tried to make her act scared, that never seemed to fit her character. I never bought it. Now, when she had to play her part in Mirror, Mirror, fending off evil Sulu and tricking him, she did it with such sang froid and such charm -- that was Uhura all over. That was the Uhura I knew.

Yet there was more. Something seemed to emanate from her that I can only call beauty. I don't mean her looks -- though she certainly had the looks, and that silky voice -- but it was something that came from within which told you you were in the presence of someone very special and good. If anyone tries to tell me that this was just acting, I won't believe you. But if it was just acting, Nichelle Nichols was as stunning an actress as I have ever seen.

I didn't know anything about what she meant to others, to men and women of color in my own country and in other places. How could I? I was an eight year old white kid from a middle-class family. I had pretty much everything. Including hope. Maybe it was her cool competence playing itself out against the backdrop of the riotous  1960s in the United States that gave me this hope that we had somehow turned a corner, that what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature had prevailed, that the heart and words of Martin Luther King had rung in a new dream for us all. Lieutenant Uhura, I think, was one of those better angels to me.

I didn't know then, or learn for years afterwards, of the role Martin Luther King had played in keeping Nichelle Nichols from quitting Star Trek. That blew my mind as much he did and as Uhura did. It seemed to reaffirm what they stood for, and what I think I suspected even as a little boy watching Star Trek: that the future I saw every week on the bridge of the Enterprise was the promised land that King told us that we would all one day get to. Because it isn't the promised land unless every last one of us is there.

Lately all that hope seems so far away. I don't know that I believe in a promised land any more. I don't know that I can still sing that anthem of my youth in a land that is forgotten. Every day more of us seem to bear the mark of Cain. Every day more seem proud to wear it. Every day more seem proud to declare that we are not our brother's keeper. But the seed of Cain is monstrous. It can never do more than live in darkness and rail against the light.

When I saw that Nichelle Nichols had died, I wanted to weep, something I never do for people I don't know who have lived long, long lives. I keep choking up as I write this. But is it because there is no hope or because I have lost the courage to dare to hope in the face of darkness?

I don't know. The odds don't seem too good right now. But then I think of Uhura, so cool and brave and smart, and she reminds me of my favorite line by her, delivered as she sends Kirk and others off to rescue Spock from death itself: 'All my hopes.'

 

All our hopes, Ms. Nichols, all our hopes.

Somme Starlight

This year on Tolkien Reading Day I discussed the well-known tale of the inception of J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth in a couple of lines he read the Old English poem Crist in 1913, which refer to the morning-star as Earendel. Convinced that there was a lost story behind that name, in 1914 he showed his close friend Geoffrey Bache Smith a poem he had written about Earendel. When Smith asked him what it all meant, Tolkien declared he would try to find out. 

Over the course of decades Tolkien thought and wrote more about Earendel, although he never fully told his whole story. For so important a figure in his mythology to be most conspicuous by his absence is frustrating, but Verlyn Flieger has recently suggested that Tolkien may have left this story an 'untold tale' on purpose. In time he reshaped the name into Eärendil, 'the looked for that cometh at unawares, the longed for that cometh beyond hope! Hail Eärendil, bearer of light before the Sun and Moon! Splendour of the Children of Earth, star in the darkness, jewel in the sunset, radiant in the morning!' (S 248-49). When he sailed his ship, Vingilot, into the sky, wearing the silmaril bound upon his brow, it shone as a star of hope for the Elves and Men of a Middle-earth devasted by a hopeless war against Morgoth. Even Maedhros and Maglor, the bloody-handed, last remaining sons of Fëanor, were moved when they saw it.

Now when first Vingilot was set to sail in the seas of heaven, it rose unlocked for, glittering and bright; and the people of Middle-earth beheld it from afar and wondered, and they took it for a sign, and called it Gil-Estel, the Star of High Hope. And when this new star was seen at evening, Maedhros spoke to Maglor his brother, and he said: 'Surely that is a Silmaril that shines now in the West?' 

(S 250)

Seven thousand years later in another war without hope, Sam Gamgee raised his eyes above the wastes of Mordor:

There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach. 

(RK 6.ii.922)

Before continuing with Tolkien, let's take a moment to consider a quote which does not come from Tolkien at all, but from John Buchan's The Battle of the Somme (1916), a battle which he covered as a correspondent for The Times, while simultaneously holding an appointment at Wellington House, more transparently described as the British War Propaganda Bureau. Buchan, to be fair, does seem to have had a genuine interest in producing a work of History rather than a mere sham to be foisted on the British people. In this quote Buchan is not speaking in his own voice, but passing on the words of a witness whom he never identifies. He is describing the early morning hours of 14 July 1916:

“It was a thick night, the sky veiled in clouds, mottled and hurrying clouds, through which only one planet shone serene and steadily high up in the eastern sky. But the wonderful and appalling thing was the belt of flame which fringed a great arc of the horizon before us. It was not, of course, a steady flame, but it was one which never went out, rising and falling, flashing and flickering, half dimmed with its own smoke, against which the stabs and jets of fire from the bursting shells flared out intensely white or dully orange. Out of it all, now here, now there, rose like fountains the great balls of star shells and signal lights—theirs or ours—white and crimson and green. The noise of the shells was terrific, and when the guns near us spoke, not only the air but the earth beneath us shook. All the while, too, overhead, amid all the clamour and shock, in the darkness and no less as night paled to day, the larks sang. Only now and again would the song be audible, but whenever there was an interval between the roaring of the nearer guns, above all the distant tumult, it came down clear and very beautiful by contrast, Nor was the lark the only bird that was awake, for close by us, somewhere in the dark, a quail kept, constantly urging us—or the guns—to be Quick-be-quick.”

            (p. 33 Kindle edition)

The framing of this quote is marvelous. It begins with the planet shining high and steady and serene and ends with the beauty of larks' who sang above the trenches in the dawn (a constant of the poetry of this war) while the artillery barrage flashed and thundered, but who were heard only in the silent moments between detonations. In the planet and the larks, we see something of the remoteness of the beauty above the 'forsaken land' which we also find in Tolkien's accounts of Sam and Maglor and Maedhros gazing up at that same white star seven millennia distant from each other, but equally gazing up at it without hope until they see it. Fëanor's sons eschew a hope they recognize for a tragedy they have helped stage, being unable to let go of the hold their oath has on them; Sam takes the lesson of the selflessness of hope from the selfishness of his defiance. Like Maedhros and Maglor, however, the speaker of this quote finds the situation on the ground more complicated and less clear. The quail, sharing the darkness and the earth with the men in the trenches, call ambiguously. Are they encouraging the guns to be quick and done, or the soldiers to be quick rather than dead?

That planet, though. Shining high in the East before dawn in mid-July of 1916, it could be Jupiter or Venus. According to an astronomical almanac I found for 1916, Jupiter would have risen about 11:40 PM on 13 July, followed by Venus at roughly 3:30 AM on 14 July, and the sun at 4:13 AM. So Jupiter would have been much higher in the sky before dawn than Venus, though Venus would have been much brighter. So, I would guess that the planet Buchan's source was looking at was Jupiter. But Buchan's anonymous source was not the only British soldier who might have gazed up at the sky from the battlefields of the Somme. Buchan also tells us that the last week of July and the first fortnight of August had 'blazing summer weather', which he contrasts with the 'rain and fog' of the third week of July. Together with a remark about the heat on men wearing steel helmets, this gives us a picture of a hot sun beating down out of a clear sky (p. 38 Kindle edition). Again according to that almanac, Venus rose earlier and grew brighter each morning, peaking at a stunning apparent magnitude of -4.7 in early August. In technical terms that's really-damn-bright™.

Perhaps on one of those early mornings or towards the end of a duty shift at night, Tolkien looked up from the forsaken land of the Somme, and the high beauty of the morning star -- Venus, Earendel, Eärendil, call it what you will -- smote his heart and hope returned for a while. It's hard to believe he didn't see it, and that seeing it he wouldn't have thought of the lines from Crist with which his quest for Eärendil began. My incredulity proves nothing, of course. Yet Tolkien would have needed any glimpse of hope he could get during these weeks especially. For around 16 July he learned from Geoffrey Bache Smith that their other close TCBS friend, Christopher Quilter Gilson, who was also at the Somme, had been killed on the battle's first day. Perhaps, too, years later he remembered seeing the morning star above the Somme and wrote it into Maedhros and Maglor, but especially into Sam. 

Given the horrors of the battlefield and the loss of so beloved a friend, Tolkien might not have seen hope in the beauty of the morning star. It may well have been far too soon for hope, at least for himself. After all neither Maedhros and Maglor nor Sam take the sight of the morning star as a sign of hope for themselves, that they would succeed or survive, but only for the world at large. 

His song in the Tower had been defiance rather than hope; for then he was thinking of himself. Now, for a moment, his own fate, and even his master’s, ceased to trouble him. He crawled back into the brambles and laid himself by Frodo’s side, and putting away all fear he cast himself into a deep untroubled sleep. 

(RK 6.ii.922)

'I went out into the wood – we are out in camp again from our second bout of trenches still in the same old area as when I saw you – last night and also the night before and sat and thought.' 

Tolkien replying on 12 August 1916 to Geoffrey Bache Smith's letter about Christopher Quilter Gilson's death. (Letters #5, p. 9).

Hjelm Dyb and Helm's Deep

Hjelm Island from Hjelm Dyb, photo courtesy of Dr. B. A. Kaiser

                                  

I just learned that there is a small island off the coast of Denmark, called Hjelm, which is separated from the mainland by a body of water called Hjelm Dyb.*

And yes, Tolkien fans, Hjelm Dyb means exactly what you think it means, though obviously this is 'deep' in a different sense which Tolkien knew also quite well ('The love of the Elves for their land and their works is deeper than the deeps of the Sea' [FR 2.vii.365]).

I don't know if Tolkien knew about Hjelm Dyn, but he did have Gimli say of Helm's Deep: "Give me a year and a hundred of my kin and I would make this a place armies would break upon like water" (TT 3.vii.532).

Elsewhere in the chapter Helm's Deep he continues to use sea related comparisons to describe this stronghold:

• "the great stones of it were set with such skill that no foothold could be found at their joints, and at the top they hung over like a sea-delved cliff" (TT 3.vii.533); 
• "But the Hornburg still held fast, like an island in the sea" (TT 3.vii.536).

He also compares the attacking forces to the sea three times.

• "They wavered, broke, and fled back; and then charged again, broke and charged again; and each time, like the incoming sea, they halted at a higher point" (TT 3.vii.533).
• "Against the Deeping Wall the hosts of Isengard roared like a sea" (TT 3.vii.535).
• "Over the wall and under the wall the last assault came sweeping like a dark wave upon a hill of sand." 

So, this is all quite fun and fascinating and it certainly wasn't beyond Tolkien to take a phrase like 'Hjelm Dyb' and transform it. Whether he knew about the Danish island and the body of water is the question. It may well be unanswerable. I'd be interested to know if anybody else has any ideas. Obviously, Danish Tolkien fans would be most likely to see the words 'Helm's Deep' and recognize the echo, whether Tolkien intended it or whether it's coincidental. 

I have learned since first posting this that a Danish historian named Casper Clemmensen has just published a book on Tolkien and Jutland, Tolkien og det mytiske Jylland, which makes this and other similar observations. 

From Google Maps of course

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*I would like to thank my good friend, Dr. Brooks Kaiser of the University of Southern Denmark for letting me know about Hjelm and Hjelm Dyb. May the wind be ever at your back as you sail there.

Hope Shall Come Again: 'The Choices of Master Samwise' and 'The Children of Húrin'

In 'The Choices of Master Samwise', when Sam believes Frodo to be dead, his anguish leads him to contemplate his own death, by suicide:

He looked on the bright point of the sword. He thought of the places behind where there was a black brink and an empty fall into nothingness. There was no escape that way. That was to do nothing, not even to grieve.

(TT 4.x.732)

When the orcs arrive in the pass and discover Frodo's dead body (as Sam still believes), Sam again imagines his own death:

How many can I kill before they get me? They’ll see the flame of the sword, as soon as I draw it, and they’ll get me sooner or later. I wonder if any song will ever mention it: How Samwise fell in the High Pass and made a wall of bodies round his master. No, no song. Of course not, for the Ring’ll be found, and there’ll be no more songs.

(TT 4.x.735)

In these moments one of the Great Tales of the First Age resonates within Sam's soul. Unlike the many explicit evocations of the Tale of Beren and Lúthien in The Lord of the Rings, the allusions here are far more obscure, to the Tale of the Children of Húrin, where Túrin fell upon his sword, where his sister, Nienor, leaped to her death; and where their father, Húrin, made the heroic last stand to end all heroic last stands. To catch these allusions, however, requires detailed knowledge of a Tale never mentioned at all in The Lord of the Rings. Its two chief figures, Húrin and his son Túrin are scarcely more than names on a list of elf-friends mentioned by Elrond (FR 2.ii.270). Until The Silmarillion was published in 1977, moreover, no other information was available. We don't even know that Húrin and Túrin are father and son. Húrin and his family might as well have been the cats of Queen Beruthiel. Their story seemed just as unknowable. 

What's more surprising is that, as far as I have been able to tell, no one spotted these allusions even after the publication of The Silmarillion. Despite multiple versions of the story appearing across the decades in Unfinished Tales, The Book of Lost Tales I, The Lays of Beleriand, The Shaping of Middle-earth, The Lost Road, The Children of Húrin, and elsewhere.

Part of what we see here is Tolkien's craft. He knows that he can draw on the mythic power of the Tale of the Children of Húrin without needing to draw our attention to the allusions by introducing explanations that would distract from the moment and the momentum of the story; and he can draw on this power in this way precisely because it is mythic and therefore transcends the particular details of the moment. What we see here is yet more evidence for how important these Great Tales are to the narrative and to the characters within it. The connection between the Tale of Frodo and Sam and the larger Tales of which theirs is a part does not need to be made explicit to be effective.

Part of it, finally, is that Sam is on the knife-edge of Tragedy here. If he makes a mistake in his choices, all is lost for him, and all is lost for Middle-earth. Sam, moreover, believing his master to be dead, already sees himself as in a story that has turned tragic. The Tale of the Children of Húrin is the tale for this crisis rather than the Tale of Beren and Lúthien because it is a Tragedy, and Beren and Lúthien, for all of its tragic moments, is a fairy-story that goes beyond sorrow into joy. We talk about Tolkien and fairy-stories far more often than we do about Tolkien and Tragedy. But in On Fairy-stories Tolkien speaks of the two types of story together. Each helps him define the other. He says:

At least I would say that Tragedy is the true form of Drama, its highest function; but the opposite is true of Fairy-story. Since we do not appear to possess a word that expresses this opposite—I will call it Eucatastrophe. The eucatastrophic tale is the true form of fairy-tale, and its highest function.

(OFS ¶ 99)

And if the catastrophe that marks a Tragedy cleanses us or purges us by means of fear and pity, then we can see the parallel between Drama and Fairy-stories even more clearly. For the eucatastrophe that is the 'true form' and 'highest function' of a fairy tale cleanses us through Escape, Recovery, and Consolation. It includes the renewed clarity of 'vision' we gain through Recovery (OFS ¶ 83-84). but goes beyond it by allowing a 'vision' of a transcendent reality (OFS ¶ 103).

There is more to be explored here, which I don't have time for right now. For example, an essential aspect of the situation Sam finds himself in here is the battle he has with Shelob directly before he comes to believe Frodo dead. For the narrator there names both Beren, the fairy-tale hero who also fought giant spiderlike monsters, and Túrin, the tragic hero who slew a dragon by stabbing him from below only to learn terrible truths about his own life in doing so. Sam of course is neither of these great heroes, sons of the chieftains of their peoples, and further reflection on these passages may well help us more deeply understanding of On Fairy-stories, The Lord of the Rings, and how the dynamic balance of Tragedy and Eucatastrophe fundamentally shapes Tolkien's Secondary World.

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If anybody knows of another discussion of these particular allusions to The Children of Húrin in The Choices of Master Samwise, please do let me know. I would be eager to see it. 

Fear in a handful of dust: reflections in Frodo's dusty mirror (FR 1.iii.68)

‘I shall get myself a bit into training, too,’ he said, looking at himself in a dusty mirror in the half-empty hall. He had not done any strenuous walking for a long time, and the reflection looked rather flabby, he thought. 

(FR 1.iii.68)

Anton Chekhov famously advised younger writers that the details they introduce early in their works are not to be taken lightly. A loaded gun onstage in the first act must be used before the end. We call this Chekhov's Gun. That he also famously broke his own rule in The Cherry Orchard need not detract from lesson. For he did not break his rule lightly. Donald Rayfield has noted that the failure of the gun to go off in The Cherry Orchard reflects the thematic failure of the characters to do anything.* Great writers are masters of the rules, even their own. 

The detail of course need not be a loaded gun. It can just as well be a mirror. If an author calls attention to a mirror, whether actual or enchanted, the reader should pay attention. We would naturally expect more from an enchanted mirror. In Harry Potter, for example, the Mirror of Erised reveals the greatest desire of those who look into it, which tells a great deal about their character. The Mirror of Galadriel is more challenging, with its visions of past, present, and future, and who knows which is which and who is who; and as with all things prophetic, sometimes the visions glimpsed come true only because the one who sees them tries to stop them. 

Whether ordinary or enchanted, however, mirrors in stories present not only reflections of, but reflections on, those who look into them. Naturals mirrors, bodies of clear, still water can also reveal whether we are a Narcissus or Durin when we look into them. Windows, too, can open onto new sights or old sights made as new, as when Frodo has his blindfold removed in Lothlórien:

The others cast themselves down upon the fragrant grass, but Frodo stood awhile still lost in wonder. It seemed to him that he had stepped through a high window that looked on a vanished world. A light was upon it for which his language had no name. All that he saw was shapely, but the shapes seemed at once clear cut, as if they had been first conceived and drawn at the uncovering of his eyes, and ancient as if they had endured for ever. He saw no colour but those he knew, gold and white and blue and green, but they were fresh and poignant, as if he had at that moment first perceived them and made for them names new and wonderful. In winter here no heart could mourn for summer or for spring. No blemish or sickness or deformity could be seen in anything that grew upon the earth. On the land of Lórien there was no stain. 

(FR 2.vi.350)

With 'no stain', no blindfold, with nothing to come between the one perceiving and the thing perceived we see a different world. Tolkien spoke of this 'clear view' of the world and its importance in his essay On Fairy-stories:

Recovery (which includes return and renewal of health) is a re-gaining—regaining of a clear view. I do not say “seeing things as they are” and involve myself with the philosophers, though I might venture to say “seeing things as we are (or were) meant to see them”—as things apart from ourselves. We need, in any case, to clean our windows; so that the things seen clearly may be freed from the drab blur of triteness or familiarity—from possessiveness. Of all faces those of our familiares are the ones both most difficult to play fantastic tricks with, and most difficult really to see with fresh attention, perceiving their likeness and unlikeness: that they are faces, and yet unique faces. This triteness is really the penalty of “appropriation”: the things that are trite, or (in a bad sense) familiar, are the things that we have appropriated, legally or mentally. We say we know them. They have become like the things which once attracted us by their glitter, or their colour, or their shape, and we laid hands on them, and then locked them in our hoard, acquired them, and acquiring ceased to look at them.  

(OFS ¶ 83)

So when we see the mirror in the hall at Bag End and it is dusty, both the mirror and the dust upon it are details we should not take lightly. Frodo's grimy mirror is as much a signal as Chekhov's Gun. The dust on the mirror, moreover, is more problematic than dirt on a window. For it affects the light reflected twice, both before and after it reaches the mirror. The image is thus distorted in its creation and in its perception. The dust here invites us to note more than that Frodo is less fastidious housekeeper than his uncle was. (But, really, what would Bilbo say?). So what is Frodo not seeing as he was meant to see it?

He notices he's carrying some extra weight around his middle, which given his age is nothing unusual. Nor is it surprising that he looks forward to walking some of those pounds off on the journey he is about to set out on. What he is not seeing is something that his neighbors clearly have noted despite the weight he's put on, namely, that at fifty he looks the same as he had seventeen years earlier when Bilbo left, like 'a robust and energetic hobbit just out of his tweens'. He was showing the same 'queer' 'preservation' which Bilbo had shown (FR1.ii.42-43). He knows all about this particular effect of the Ring. He also knows that he must leave the Shire in order to save it and get rid of the Ring. That is the entire point of the journey he is about to embark on. Yet when he looks in the mirror, he does not even notice how young he looks, let alone make a connection between his youthful appearance and its 'preservation' by the Ring. 

The next time he looks in a mirror, in Rivendell, he will at last pick up on how young he looks as well as how much thinner he looks: 

Looking in a mirror he was startled to see a much thinner reflection of himself than he remembered: it looked remarkably like the young nephew of Bilbo who used to go tramping with his uncle in the Shire; but the eyes looked out at him thoughtfully. ‘Yes, you have seen a thing or two since you last peeped out of a looking-glass,’ he said to his reflection. ‘But now for a merry meeting!’ He stretched out his arms and whistled a tune. 

(FR 2.i.225)

Although Aragorn had rebuked him for joking about becoming so thin that he would turn into a wraith (FR 1.xi.184), he still sees only a little more than he had when he looked in the mirror at Bag End. Although he has in fact only just barely escaped being turned into a wraith by the Nazgûl, Frodo still makes no connection between his appearance and the Ring. He is surprised and, I think, clearly pleased by his young, trim appearance. Yet there is also a distance between him and the reflection. 'It' does not look like him, but like 'the young nephew of Bilbo', and it is not 'his eyes' that look out at him, but 'the eyes.' He addresses 'it' in the second-person, as people sometime do, but, while he whistles a tune and anticipates an evening of mirth, he leaves the eyes and their thoughtful look behind. By contrast in Bag End, he had looked at 'himself' in the glass, and not a 'reflection of himself', and had spoken to himself in the first-person as he did so. Even if he now sees the remarkable preservation which he did not see before, his identification with the reflection is less. 

Considering what else Frodo and others see and how they see it on this Frodo's first day conscious in Rivendell will help us understand his interactions with his reflections. In Gandalf's conversation with Frodo that morning the complexities of perceiving the world and those in it accurately come to the fore several times. These range from simple matters of misperception based on misconceptions -- such as the moral and intellectual qualities of Men or the truth about Strider and the Rangers -- to more recondite questions of the horizons of mundane reality -- the visibility of the Black Riders to Frodo and the light shining from Glorfindel, whose worlds overlap with, but are not perceptually the same as, the everyday world.

Near the end of their conversation Gandalf 'took a good look at Frodo': 'there seemed to be little wrong with him. But to the wizard's eye there was a faint change, just a hint as it were of transparency....' Yet the subtle eye of Gandalf is uncertain what to make of this 'transparency.' He concedes that such transparency is not unexpected. In addition to the grave wound inflicted on him by the Morgul knife, which was causing him to fade into the world of the Ringwraiths (FR 2.i.219, 222), Frodo is a mortal who possesses a Ring of Power and has used it more than once to become invisible. One of the first lessons Gandalf tried to impart to Frodo was that mortals who use such rings fade (FR 1.ii.47).

As a result, Gandalf found himself not quite certain what the hobbit would come to in the end. While he expected that Frodo would not come 'to evil', he qualified that notion with 'I think', followed by the concession that not even Elrond could 'foretell' what would become of Frodo. (And foretelling presupposes foreseeing.) His final thought, that Frodo 'may become like a glass filled with clear light for eyes to see that can' sounds much more hopeful, and it is, but it must nevertheless be read in the context of Gandalf's just expressed uncertainties, which his use of 'may become' shows to be unresolved because the future he hoped for is unrealized so far. If Frodo is filled with light now, Gandalf doesn't seem to see it -- even if Sam apparently can (TT 4.iv.651-52). The wizard's immediate pronouncement to Frodo -- 'you look splendid' -- further emphasizes his private reservations by disassociating them from his outward certainties.

That same evening Frodo's unexpected 'merry meeting' with Bilbo takes a very dark turn when Bilbo asks to see the Ring and then reaches out to touch it. As he does so, Frodo suddenly sees Bilbo as through 'a shadow', and his beloved uncle appears to him to be a Gollum-like creature whom he wished to strike. What Bilbo sees in Frodo's face at this moment is never described, but it was clearly more than a thoughtful look in his eyes. His reaction makes plain that what he saw reflected in Frodo's face brought home to him an understanding of the Ring which years of badgering by Gandalf and his own nearly violent clash with Gandalf the night he left Bag End had been unable to accomplish. 

Bilbo looked quickly at Frodo’s face and passed his hand across his eyes. ‘I understand now,’ he said. ‘Put it away! I am sorry: sorry you have come in for this burden; sorry about everything. Don’t adventures ever have an end? I suppose not. Someone else always has to carry on the story. Well, it can’t be helped. I wonder if it’s any good trying to finish my book? But don’t let’s worry about it now – let’s have some real News! Tell me all about the Shire!’ 

(FR 2.i.232)

We see a very different Bilbo here than the one who argued fiercely with Gandalf about the Ring back in the Shire. That Bilbo had laid his hand on the hilt of his sword when Gandalf insisted he leave the Ring behind. That Bilbo, even after he backed down and let go of his sword, tried to suggest that Gandalf was the problem (FR 1.i.34): 'I don't know what has come over you, Gandalf'. This Bilbo passes his hand in front of his eyes, as if to wipe away what he has seen, and backs down, not because he has been intimidated, but because he understands. He says he is sorry three times, and in this moment at last sees the matter of the Ring as a burden, which only a minute earlier he had made light of: 'Fancy that ring of mine causing such a disturbance!' (FR 2.i.232). His reaction here has far more in common with the 'sudden understanding' and the pity he felt for Gollum beneath the Misty Mountains long ago. True Hobbit that he is, Bilbo then deflects the burden of the moment with levity and an appeal for all the gossip from home, thus converting this sharp instant back into the sort of a 'merry meeting' Frodo had looked forward to as he walked whistling away from the looking-glass in which he could not quite see as clearly as Bilbo just has.

The dust on the mirror at Bag End, obscuring Frodo's image of himself and skewing his perception is the metaphorical herald of the shadow that falls between him and Bilbo here. He's looked through this shadow before, however, as we can see in The Flight to the Ford, when he was fading because of the wound inflicted at Weathertop. It obscured the faces of his friends during the day and by the night it made the world seem 'less pale and empty' (FR 1.xii.210, 211). Yet metaphorical or not, it still obscures his view and hints at the influence the Ring already has over him, much like his inability to throw the Ring even into a fire that he knew could not harm it and his reluctance to let Gandalf touch it. 

But it is more than this. For, at the far end of this spectrum of occlusion, we find the Eye of Sauron looking at Frodo out of the last mirror he looks into, and the Eye also cannot see what it is searching for, cannot descry what it is most important to it without a blunder by the Ring-bearer, cannot read the hearts of others, because for all its watchfulness it is covered in the glaze of its own possessiveness and measures all other things by its own desires. It is framed by and filled with emptiness.

But suddenly the Mirror went altogether dark, as dark as if a hole had opened in the world of sight, and Frodo looked into emptiness. In the black abyss there appeared a single Eye that slowly grew, until it filled nearly all the Mirror. So terrible was it that Frodo stood rooted, unable to cry out or to withdraw his gaze. The Eye was rimmed with fire, but was itself glazed, yellow as a cat’s, watchful and intent, and the black slit of its pupil opened on a pit, a window into nothing. 

(FR 2.vii.364, italics added)

After the crisis passes in Bilbo's argument with Gandalf about the Ring, Bilbo also passed his hand over his eyes as if clearing something from his vision, and spoke of the feeling that the Ring was an eye looking at him. He wanted just to put it on and disappear. In reply Gandalf tells him to 'stop possessing it' (FR 1.i.33). Such possessiveness gave the Ring 'far too much hold on you. Let it go! And then you can go yourself, and be free.' (FR 1.i.33). And it is of course in giving it up that he became as free of the Ring as he ever could be. 

Possessiveness, Tolkien tells us in the passage of On Fairy-stories quoted above, keeps us from seeing things 'as we are (or were) meant to see them'. As he says, we find things attractive because of 'their glitter, or their colour, or their shape', things we then appropriate and possess like a dragon brooding upon their hoard, things we then stop looking at because the possession has become what matters. Recall how Frodo looks at the Ring: 

It now appeared plain and smooth, without mark or device that he could see. The gold looked very fair and pure, and Frodo thought how rich and beautiful was its colour, how perfect was its roundness. It was an admirable thing and altogether precious. 

(FR 1.ii.60)

Or how Déagol 'gloated over' it, if ever so briefly:

And behold! when he washed the mud away, there in his hand lay a beautiful golden ring; and it shone and glittered in the sun, so that his heart was glad. 

(FR 1.ii.52)

An ordinary person who has 'appropriated' and 'possessed' an ordinary thing in the sense Tolkien means these words in On Fairy-stories would need to experience the Recovery of a 'clear view' which fairy stories offer before he can see that thing 'as we are (or were) meant to see them.' Even so, to shake a person free of such possessiveness might take some doing, or so Tolkien's likening the possessor to a dragon sitting on a hoard suggests. Viewing these passages alongside the description of possessiveness in On Fairy-stories, I think we can safely say that we see as we were meant to see them, and perhaps even as they really are. Possessiveness may not blind the possessor (though it very well might), but it obscures their view, whether we think of it metaphorically as dust on the mirror, dirt on a window, or a shadow between familiar faces which we find we no longer know. 

The power of the Ring complicates matters, however. Its color, shape, glitter, and beauty are a small part of its allure, yet it is not 'so small a thing' as Boromir calls it when about to succumb to its pull (FR 2.x.397-98). To speak more precisely, the power inherent in the Ring captures its possessor, just as the gravity of a more massive body captures a less massive body. The possessor is possessed in turn, and so enslaved, and so devoured. The possessiveness powered by the Ring does 'play fantastic tricks' with the faces of our familiares and sets them friends against each other. Frodo sees not just Bilbo as a Gollum-like creature, but Sam as an Orc (RK 6.i.911-12; cf. 6.iii.936). Sméagol murders Déagol; Bilbo threatens Gandalf with a sword; Frodo does the same to Sam. The thirty-three year old face fifty year old Frodo sees in the mirror should be both familiar and not startlingly, not remarkably, but disturbingly strange. He should see its 'likeness and unlikeness' to the face he knows as that of Frodo Baggins. He should know it isn't right, but the dust and shadows of the possessiveness that comes with the Ring prevents him from having a 'clear view.' 

As Gandalf thought when he looked at Frodo that morning at Rivendell, 'he is not half through yet.' By the time he is all the way through, he will be more in need of Recovery, of the clear view, the fairy tale can bring. But as Frodo learns tales don't always end well for those inside them. Whatever glimpse of joy the eucatastrophe of Mount Doom may bring the reader, it brings Frodo consolation for the loss of the thing that possessed him. He must leave the tale, and seek his Recovery elsewhere, where 'the grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise' (RK 6.ix.1020).

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* The wikipedia article on Chekhov's Gun quotes three examples of Chekhov giving this advice, and provides the citations for The Cherry Orchard and the work of Donald Rayfield. I will confirm these citations at the first opportunity.

Star Trek: Picard offers us a splendid example of Chekhov's Gun. In the fourth episode of the second season a gun hangs above the mantel in Chateau Picard and in the fifth episode one of the characters uses it. Extra points here since this also counts as an allusion of Pavel Chekov of Star Trek: The Original Series.

QED: 'I will show you fear in a handful of dust.'