Introduction:
‘the burden of a large story’
‘They wanted a sequel. But I wanted heroic legends and high romance. The result was The Lord of the Rings. ....
‘The magic ring was the one obvious thing in The Hobbit that could be connected with my mythology. To be the burden of a large story it had to be of supreme importance.’
Letters no. 257, p. 346
‘Tolkien was his own best critic’, writes Anna Vaninskaya
(2020: 156). Not only did revising his works release a torrent of new ideas, as
C. S. Lewis pointed out, but reading and thinking about them revealed depths he
had not fathomed before.[1] We can see this in his
letters as well as in every phase of the creation of his legendarium, so
masterfully laid out by Christopher Tolkien in The History of Middle-earth.
An essential part of being his own best critic was being his own best reader. To
call the Ring ‘the burden of a large story’ is to perceive that it is as much
the burden the story has to bear as it is the burden Frodo has to bear. It is at
once supremely important in and to the story. Similarly, in The Lord of the
Rings he saw the blending of the Elvish perspective found in the ‘high
Legends of the beginning’ and the ‘human point of view’ which first arose in The
Hobbit (Letters no. 131, p. 145). At the same time he knew, more
abstractly, that the tales of his mythology ‘must, as all art, reflect and
contain in solution elements of moral and religious truth (or error)’ (Letters
no. 131, p. 144). What is reflected is seen indirectly, if not darkly; what is
in solution is seen barely, if at all.
The Lord of the Rings embodies the synthesis of each
of these three theses – the burden of the story and the burden of Frodo, the
perspectives of Elves and Men, the reflection and solution in a secondary world
of truths fundamental to the primary world – not just individually but into a
greater whole, which, presented mythically and realized artistically, creates
and shares the significance of these truths, perspectives, and burdens metaphorically.
‘Tolkien is thinking in story,’ Simon Cook tells us in The Apprenticeship of
J. R. R. Tolkien (2018) in which he argues forcefully that the ‘allegory of
the tower’ which Tolkien told as a means to understanding Beowulf is also
of vital importance for understanding Tolkien’s own writing. In employing this
allegory Tolkien ‘is exploring a metaphor and making meaning, yet we remain on
the surface and have not the key to his intentions.’
A work ‘so multifarious and so true’ (Lewis, Letters,
4 December 1953) as The Lord of the Rings will contain many essential elements
besides those introduced above. Some of these Tolkien employed consciously, but
there were others the extent of whose presence he recognized only subsequently.
He knew well that there is far more to be found in a work, even by its author,
than any author intends, as the candor and open-mindedness of these responses
to his readers in 1956 and 1958 make clear.
Of course my story is not an allegory of Atomic power, but of Power (exerted for domination)…. I do not think that even Power or Domination is the real centre of my story. It provides the theme of a War, about something dark and threatening enough to seem at that time of supreme importance, but that is mainly ‘a setting’ for characters to show themselves. The real theme for me is about something much more permanent and difficult: Death and Immortality: the mystery of the love of the world in the hearts of a race 'doomed' to leave and seemingly lose it; the anguish in the hearts of a race 'doomed' not to leave it, until its whole evil-aroused story is complete.
(Letters no. 186, p. 246, italics original)
As for 'message': I have none really, if by that is meant the conscious purpose in writing The Lord of the Rings, of preaching, or of delivering myself of a vision of truth specially revealed to me! I was primarily writing an exciting story in an atmosphere and background such as I find personally attractive. But in such a process inevitably one's own taste, ideas, and beliefs get taken up. Though it is only in reading the work myself (with criticisms in mind) that I become aware of the dominance of the theme of Death.
(Letters no. 208, p. 267)
In his essay Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics Tolkien
talks about the Beowulf poet writing his poem without full awareness or
understanding of the theme he had set himself, and this, Tolkien avers, was a
good thing: ‘Had the matter been so explicit to him, his poem would certainly
have been worse’ (BMC 18). This remark follows from his earlier comment
that myth ‘is at its best when it is presented by a poet who feels rather than makes explicit what his theme portends; who presents it incarnate in the world
of history and geography, as our poet has done’
(BMC 16). Whether the Beowulf poet ever looked back and saw more
clearly what he had ‘felt’ when composing the poem, no one can say. But Tolkien
did. By far the greater part of his fascinating, insightful, and expansive
commentary upon The Lord of the Rings comes from the letters he wrote in
the years after he had finished it. To be sure, his published letters are only a
selection, but the principle of that selection was to make available the material
that would be of the greatest interest to readers of The Lord of the Rings
and his other published works (Letters, 1).[2]
It is reasonable then to see the letters we get before and after Tolkien declared
the work finished as representative of his chief concerns in each period.
Letter
131, the ever cited ‘Waldman letter’ of late 1951 (Letters, 167), marks
a terminus before which Tolkien’s comments to his correspondents almost
invariably addressed the practical challenges of finishing the work, and after
which theological, philosophical, and thematic reflections, often in response
to questions or criticisms of readers and critics alike, became increasingly
common. Wishing to see The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion published
together, a desire which Allen and Unwin seemed reluctant to gratify, Tolkien
set out to persuade Milton Waldman of Collins to take on both works. To accomplish
this end Tolkien had to step back and think through his legendarium as a whole just
as he had done with Beowulf in his 1936 lecture and as he had done with Faërie
in On Fairy-stories in 1939.[3]
So many of the larger questions he weighs in his later correspondence find their
first expression here.
Clearly The Lord of the Rings reflects its author’s
mind and meditations from beginning to end. Such themes as Death and
Immortality, Power realized in Art versus Power realized in domination, the role
small hands play while the eyes of the great are elsewhere, and the essential
relationship between high and low, great and small, which gives meaning to the lives
and efforts of both, are present throughout, but in telling his story the elements
of the metaphor remained largely in solution. With the Waldman letter he begins
to precipitate those long meditated elements out of solution.
Indeed
important texts he composed in the 1950s, such as Laws and Customs among the
Eldar and the Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth may well owe their existence
to the shift away from narrative to philosophical and theological concerns that
we first see in Letter 131. The much lamented failure to complete the tale Of
Tuor and his Coming to Gondolin at all or The Silmarillion to his satisfaction
probably finds some of its explanation here, alongside the profound
disappointment inflicted by Collins’s unwillingness to publish The Silmarillion,
which was so severe that for some time he stopped working on it entirely (S&H
C 405-06). Much as Lewis might have predicted, Tolkien explored so many
thoughts in the process of reviewing his entire legendarium that it led him to
produce new works and to reexamine and reformulate the metaphysical foundations
of his world more directly.
One important
element we do not find reflected upon in Letter 131, or anywhere before Letter 153
of 1954 in fact, is pity. A part of Gandalf’s exchange with Frodo on pity is
present from the very first draft of The Lord of the Rings. Crucially,
however, the effect of Bilbo’s pity is solely to save him from becoming another
Gollum, or worse: ‘he would not have had the ring, the ring would have had him
at once. He might have become a wraith on the spot’ (Shadow 81). There
is not the least hint that ‘the pity of Bilbo may rule the fate of many’ (FR
1.ii.59) as in the published text, or, as in Letter 153, that ‘it is the Pity
of Bilbo and later Frodo that ultimately allows the Quest to be achieved’ (Letters,
191). Consider, too, Letter 181 of 1956 in which Tolkien states that ‘the “salvation”
of the world and Frodo’s own “salvation” is achieved by his previous pity
and forgiveness of injury’ (Letters, 234, italics original). Letters 191
and 192, both of 1956, also emphasize the importance of pity, mercy, and
forgiveness in this context (Letters, 251-53); and in letter 246 of
1963 Tolkien again calls out ‘that strange element in the World that we call Pity
and Mercy’ (326).[4]
Parallel
with the limited scope of pity in the first draft of The Lord of the Rings is
the limited conception of the power of the Ring. It is not yet the One Ruling
Ring. Until Bilbo’s magic ring becomes the ‘one Ring to rule them all’, Bilbo’s
pity cannot play the role Gandalf suggests it may well play in the fate of the
world. Indeed it has no need to do so. Once the conception of the Ring changes,
the two are woven together, with each other as well as with the themes of Death
and Immortality. For the Power of the Ring encourages mortals to think
they can cheat death, and immortals that they can preserve the world from the
fading which is a part of its nature, and their own. Mortals with Rings of Power like the Nazgûl end up undead; immortals
like the Elves ‘embalm’ what they would save.[5]
Against the Ring pity offers the only real defense, but in the end the pity of
this world cannot withstand the enticements of such power. Frodo will
fail.
Pity thus plays an essential and paradoxical role in the
lives of the characters and in the fate of all Middle-earth, and is a key to understanding
The Lord of the Rings and seeing more deeply into Tolkien’s legendarium
as a whole. If pity does not rule the fate of many, the Ring of Power will. For
that is what Sauron made it to do. In this book I shall trace the long arc of
pity and the Ring from the moment Bilbo stood poised in the darkness behind
Gollum until Frodo, hurt beyond healing by the burden of the Ring, gazed upon
Saruman’s corpse in the morning of the Shire and watched his fallen spirit
scattered on the wind, the both of them unable to return home.
‘The Ring left him.’
(FR 1.ii.55, italics original)
If the ‘real theme’ of The Lord of the Rings is Death
and Immortality, and if the Power of the Ring seems to offer Men and Elves the
means to challenge these ‘dooms’ of their nature in addition to attaining more
worldly ends, we must also question the nature of the Ring itself. The answer will
affect our understanding both of the ‘temptations’ offered by the power of the
Ring, and of the interplay of pity and the Ring. Does the Ring then possesses a
consciousness and agency of its own? Scholars and fans alike commonly speak as
if it does. Gandalf does so himself when he tells Frodo that the Ring left
Gollum, a statement which gives by far the strongest evidence for consciousness
and agency, but only if Gandalf means it to be taken literally. That Frodo
mocks Gandalf’s assertion, I would argue, leaves room for us to doubt this,
especially since Gandalf does not reply with a reaffirmation that the Ring made
a conscious decision to leave Gollum and acted upon it, a point not to be
neglected or passed over if true, but hammered home. Who would need to understand
this more than Frodo?
Yet Gandalf does pass over it, and moves immediately on to
another point which he considers more important and which he admits he cannot state
‘more plainly’, that Bilbo was ‘meant to have the Ring and not by
its maker’ (FR 1.ii.55, italics original). Gandalf, moreover, has used
metaphor earlier in this conversation to describe the Ring devouring its
possessor (FR 1.ii.47, 55, 57). He has even employed outright deception,
withholding as long as he can the truth that the hobbit Sméagol is in fact the
creature Gollum, because he believes it to be of the utmost importance to the
world that Frodo, who is also ‘meant to have the Ring’, pity Gollum as
Bilbo had done.
This combination of reticence, deception, and metaphor warns
against making any easy judgement about the Ring and its effect on its
possessor. While Frodo reasonably and (I believe) rightly scoffs at Gandalf’s
assertions about the Ring’s consciousness and agency, he is nevertheless rarely
sure whether the urge to put on the Ring comes from the Ring, from within
himself, or from elsewhere. This makes the distinction between the possibilities
integral to the power of the Ring and the desires of those who possess or might
possess the Ring inherently difficult to maintain, increasingly so as the Ring comes
closer to its source. This is challenging for the reader as well as for the
Ringbearer owing to the psychological, moral, and spiritual complexity of the
struggle between ‘the Ring is my burden’ and ‘the Ring is mine’.
[1]
Thus Lewis in Tolkien’s obituary in The Times (3 September 1973): ‘His
standard of self-criticism was high, and the mere suggestion of publication
usually set him upon a revision, in the course of which so many new ideas
occurred to him that where his friends had hoped for the final text of an old
work they actually got the first draft of a new one.’ The Tolkien Society
reprinted the obituary in full in Mallorn 8 (1974) 40-43. Lewis’s
comment appears unsourced in Humphrey Carpenter’s biography of Tolkien (1977: 138).
[2]
Larger thematic concerns do not of course go unmentioned beforehand. Gollum’s
near repentance touches upon pity: Letters, no. 96, p. 110. Letter no.
66, p. 78 addresses power: ‘For we are attempting to conquer Sauron with the
Ring. And we shall (it seems) succeed. But the penalty is, as you will know, to
breed new Saurons, and slowly turn Men and Elves into Orcs. Not that in real
life things are as clear cut as in a story, and we started out with a great
many Orcs on our side.’ For more on Power and the Machine: no. 75, p. 87; no
109, p. 121.
[3] On the Beowulf lecture, see S. Cook (2018), and Tolkien and M. Drout (2011). For On Fairy-stories, see V. Flieger and D. Anderson (2014).
[4] To the distinction between pity and Pity we shall return below.
[5] For Elves’ attempts to preserve the world from ‘fading’ as ‘embalming’, see Letters, no. 131, p. 151, and no. 154, p. 196.
