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).

_______________________________

* 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.'

The failure of memory and the untold tale (RK 6.iii.937-38)

‘Do you remember that bit of rabbit, Mr. Frodo?’ he said. ‘And our place under the warm bank in Captain Faramir’s country, the day I saw an oliphaunt?’ 

‘No, I am afraid not, Sam,’ said Frodo. ‘At least, I know that such things happened, but I cannot see them. No taste of food, no feel of water, no sound of wind, no memory of tree or grass or flower, no image of moon or star are left to me. 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)

The passage quoted is well known as one of the most moving in The Lord of the Rings, but one factor that gives it such pathos is its remarkable ironic reversal of one of Tolkien's most famous and brilliant devices, namely, the allusion to an untold tale which, since it is to some degree familiar to the characters in the story, helps to create a sense of historical depth for the readers. Here in this passage after 937 pages of being invited to wonder at and be curious about so many of the tales of Middle-earth which The Lord of the Rings does not tell us, the readers, we see Frodo utterly bereft of a knowledge that we possess. This positions the reader beside Sam while Frodo is staring into the abyss and knows he is. In doing so it allows us to pity him in a way we ordinarily cannot. 

'I am leaving NOW. GOOD-BYE! -- the shift in narrators from Bilbo to Frodo in 'A Long-expected Party'.

'Good night, Frodo! [said Bilbo] Bless me, but it has been good to see you again! There are no folk like hobbits after all for a real good talk. I am getting very old, and I began to wonder if I should live to see your chapters of our story. Good night!' (21 October 3018)

            FR 2.i.238

The evening deepened in the room, and the firelight burned brighter; and they looked at Bilbo as he slept and saw that his face was smiling. For some time they sat in silence; and then Sam looking round at the room and the shadows flickering on the walls, said softly: 

‘I don’t think, Mr. Frodo, that he’s done much writing while we’ve been away. He won’t ever write our story now.’ (5 October 3019)

            RK 6.vi.987

Both these scenes take place in Rivendell, not quite a year apart, with many a hard day in between for Frodo and Sam. In those long months we can see that a shift has occurred in whose story it was Bilbo was to tell. For Bilbo 'our story' is either Bilbo and Frodo's story, with separate chapters of course, or perhaps 'our' refers to Hobbits more broadly, as one of Bilbo's prospective titles for the story suggests, all of which were crossed out ('Adventures of Five Hobbits': RK 6.ix.1027). We might well wonder if the idea of calling what he suffered an adventure stuck in Frodo's throat. For Sam, in the second passage, 'our' refers mostly to him and to Frodo. Though he would never begrudge Captains Meriadoc and Peregrin their share of the credit, he cherished the honor he knew his master deserved and had no objection to the blush of glory himself especially when Rosie Cotton was within earshot (RK 6.viii.1014, 1016). 

Bilbo's list of tentative, struck-through, suggestions for the title of the work encompassing the stories of Bilbo, Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin, stands in stark contrast to Frodo's grand and decisive title, seemingly conceived and executed in one go, which puts what he saw as most important boldly first and subordinates Bilbo and himself into, as it were, the metadata (RK 6.ix.1027). Whether it was Bilbo or Frodo who crossed out Bilbo's titles is uncertain, but that someone felt it right to do so (Frodo, I think) fits in very well with the Sam's impression that Bilbo hadn't gotten far at all in their absence. There are several other pieces of evidence I find quite telling in considering how much Bilbo might have written. 

1. Bilbo never changed his original version of the story of how he came by the Ring. Though he admitted it to Gandalf, to Frodo, and subsequently to all those present at the Council that he had lied about Gollum and the Ring, he didn't revise what we know as Riddles in the Dark to reflect the truth. The true version at first existed only '(as an alternative), derived no doubt from notes by Frodo and Samwise' according to the author of the Prologue, who believes Frodo and Sam could not bring themselves to alter what Bilbo had already written (FR Pr. 12). Bilbo's failure to incorporate the truth shows just how much a hold the Ring still had on him many years after he had given it to Frodo. This is especially telling given the very ugly moment he had with Frodo in Rivendell when he reached for the Ring, as a result of which he said that he understood about the Ring now (FR 2.i.232).
2. Bilbo was very keen to hear all the gossip from the Shire, and, however much he loves being in Rivendell, he misses being around hobbits. Given this and the great attention he gave to the preparations for his birthday party and his farewell presents, we can safely assume that he wanted to hear everything there was to hear about the reactions of his friends, relatives, and neighbors to his disappearance. The legend of 'Mad Baggins' must have given him quite a laugh.
3. The narrator of A Long-expected Party is very much like the narrator of The Hobbit, intrusive, humorous and prone to parenthetical asides, but his wit and persona vanish the moment Bilbo puts on the Ring and returns home to a fierce confrontation with Gandalf about leaving the Ring behind. The morning after Bilbo's departure the humor and asides return. I have discussed the use of parentheses in this chapter and in the rest of The Lord of the Rings in a series of posts beginning here but not yet completed.
4. In Letter 151 (p. 186) Tolkien says 'Frodo is not intended to be another Bilbo. Though his opening style is not wholly un-kin. But he is rather a study of a hobbit broken by a burden of fear and horror — broken down, and in the end made into something quite different.'

In view of this evidence, and of the evidence I have so far considered in my series of posts on the narrator's use of parentheses, I have come to the opinion that Bilbo indeed wrote very little of The Lord of the Rings. I think we might descry the limits of his involvement in the opening of A Long-expected Party up to his disappearance from that party -- which he would have found as great a delight to write as we find it to read -- but I believe he disappears as narrator the moment he vanishes from the party. If he could not bring himself to replace the lying account of the riddle game with the truth -- something even Frodo and Sam acquiesced in since it was already written -- how could he bring himself to face the ugliness of his confrontation with Gandalf over the Ring? From the moment Bilbo says '... this is the end. I am going. I am leaving NOW. GOOD-BYE! (FR 1.i.30), he is gone. Frodo picks up from there, with an 'opening style ... not wholly un-kin' but marked by 'the burden of fear and horror' he had lived through. And we can see this clearly in the juxtaposition of the party after Bilbo left, with the traumatic account of Bilbo's argument with Gandalf, and the reassertion of humor and Gandalf's warnings the next day.

Tolkien Reading Day 2022 -- Love and Friendship

Eala Earendel    engla beorhtast   
ofer middangeard    monnum sended,
ond soðfæsta    sunnan leoma,
torht ofer tunglas,--    þu tida gehwane
of sylfum þe    symle inlihtes.

Hail Earendel, brightest of angels,
sent over Middle-earth to men,
and true light of the sun,
radiant beyond the stars -- you will illuminate all time
from thy very self for ever.

Christ I.104-08

References to: 

[Cynewulf] Christ I

Corey Olsen, The Tolkien Professor, of Signum University

Shawn Marchese and Alan Sisto of The Prancing Pony Podcast 

Marcel Aubron-Bülles of The Tolkienist and the German Tolkien Society

Emily Austin of Emily Austin Design

Geoffrey Bache Smith, killed at the Somme 1916, author of A Spring Harvest

Richard Rohlin, of the Amon Sûl podcast

The true gift to the foes of Mordor

Here's just a wee bit from right near the very end of the conclusion of my book, To Rule the Fate of Many: Truth, Lies, Pity, and the Ring of Power:

In 1945, however, after six years of a war for survival the horror and pity Tolkien felt at the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was balanced against the recognition that the use of such power could end the war and that God ‘does not look kindly’ on such uses of power (Letters no. 102, p. 113). He knew well how easily one might hold such power to be ‘a gift to the foes of Mordor’ (FR 2.x.397), and how blandly one could assent to ‘deploring maybe evils done by the way’ in the name of doing good (FR 2.ii.259). Frodo came to pity both Boromir and Saruman, the characters who said the words just quoted, but only because Tolkien who wrote these words had pitied them first.

These* are but two examples of Tolkien seeing the applicability of the truths of his myth to the reality in which he lived. And pity is at the heart of the challenge these myths lay before us. Tolkien’s recollections of ‘being caught in youth by 1914’ (FR xxiv), his passions and fears about the war which came again in 1939, his concerns about its aftermath throughout the world as well as in his England, are as incandescent in his letters to his son, Christopher, as they are in the Dead Marshes, in the cataclysmic destruction of the enemy, and in the return of the Ringbearer to a land which no longer seemed his own and which needed a healing that only pity could bring. That pity is the true gift given to the foes of Mordor.

______________________

*Sorry, but if you want to know what 'these' refers to, you'll have to wait until the book comes out one of these days. I should be submitting it to a publisher within the next month or so. 

 

The One Ring as an Old Norse Poem (Dr Jackson Crawford)

Bilbo's 'Black Mark' (Letter no. 246)

In discussing Bilbo joining Frodo on the journey to Elvenhome, Tolkien comments in Letter 246 (p. 328):

But [Bilbo] also needed and deserved the favour on his own account. He bore still the mark of the Ring that needed to be finally erased: a trace of pride and personal possessiveness. Of course he was old and confused in mind, but it was still a revelation of the ‘black mark’ when he said in Rivendell (III 265 [ = RK 6.vi.987]) ‘What’s become of my ring, Frodo, that you took away?’; and when he was reminded of what had happened, his immediate reply was: ‘What a pity! I should have liked to see it again’.

Yet we find what is perhaps the most enduring evidence of the Ring's effect on him in the Prologue, where the Prologue's author points out the persistence of the lie Bilbo originally told about how he came by the Ring (FR  Pr. 12-13): 

This account Bilbo set down in his memoirs, and he seems never to have altered it himself, not even after the Council of Elrond. Evidently it still appeared in the original Red Book, as it did in several of the copies and abstracts. But many copies contain the true account (as an alternative), derived no doubt from notes by Frodo or Samwise, both of whom learned the truth, though they seem to have been unwilling to delete anything actually written by the old hobbit himself.

So, despite saying 'I understand now' after he saw Frodo's reaction to his reaching for the Ring the night before the Council (FR 2.i.213) and despite saying 'Perhaps I understand things a little better now' (FR 2.ii.249) when he apologized to Glóin for not having told him the truth nearly eighty years earlier, nevertheless Bilbo left the original account in place, the lie, in his memoirs, leaving Frodo and Sam the unenviable dilemma of whether they should change it for him. This means that the first edition of The Hobbit is, therefore, a direct consequence of the deceptions and self-deceptions caused by the power of the Ring over its bearers. It is far more important, however, and far less amusing to recognize how subtle, how nearly invisible, and how permanent an effect the Ring has. Bilbo's newfound understanding, his apology to Frodo, and the apology he offers to Glóin and the other dwarves with which he begins his true and public account of the lies he told, do not prevent him from maintaining the lie for posterity. Understanding, regret, and shame cannot overcome the lie. (In a culture that prizes honor, being revealed as a liar brings shame.) Bilbo could not, it seems, even bring himself to ask Frodo to make the change for him. 

The near invisibility of these details should also help us see Frodo's struggles after the Ring's destruction more clearly. Think of how surprised Sam is that Frodo is going to take ship at the Grey Havens (RK 6.ix.1029), and how Frodo 'concealed' his illnesses from Sam (RK 6.ix.1023, 1025). Who would understand Frodo's suffering better than Sam, and who would understand this better than Frodo? Yet understanding is not enough. To be sure Frodo is protecting Sam, but the deceits that come with the Ring don't go with the Ring when it is destroyed any more than the longing for it. It becomes more remote but remains potent.

So what's a (Tolkien) scholar anyway?

Someone on the internet attacked Luke Baugher, a friend of mine, the other day because he disputed a claim about Tolkien made in connection with the upcoming series on Amazon. Actually I should say someone attacked my friend's credentials; the threat of personal physical violence came later, perhaps from another troll, but that's for the police to decide. I want to talk about the first attack, in which the attacker denounced 'self-proclaimed scholars', in this case of Tolkien. What is a scholar and when does a person get to call themselves one?

So what does the OED have to say about this word? The word first appears in Old English about a thousand years ago, meaning from early on both someone in school to receive an education and someone who has studied a subject at an advanced level at a university. Starting out as a reference to someone schooled in Latin and Greek, 'scholar' expanded to include Scripture and other disciplines within the Humanities as they appeared. 

Here's the definition most relevant to this discussion:

2a. A person who is highly educated and knowledgeable, usually as a result of studying at a university; (in early use) a person who has knowledge of the Greek and Latin languages and their literature. In later use chiefly: a person who pursues or is expert in a particular field of study, esp. in the humanities.

I will use myself as an example here to start with. I have a B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in Classics. I spent twelve years as a full time student, taking classes, passing exams, writing papers and dissertations, sitting up all night reading many nights and spending school holidays in the cool quiet of the farthest reaches of the basement of the library studying. (Being found in one of these odd corners during a holiday by one of my professors, a rather grumpy Jesuit who was himself a scholar of Aristotle, was how I earned his respect at last.). I later spent as many years teaching at the University level, presenting papers at conferences, and publishing an article or more a year in peer-reviewed scholarly journals in Classics. Though I left Academia long ago, I have never ceased reading the primary texts which brought me there in the first place, like the works of Homer and Sophocles and Plato and Aristotle. All along the line my work and my credentials were vetted and approved by others who had similar knowledge and experience. In recent years I have spent my time writing and reading about Tolkien and his works. I have presented papers at conferences and published articles in scholarly journals on the subject. I am currently finishing up a book on Pity in Tolkien, which a couple of University Presses have expressed interest in. This book is as much the product of fifty years of reading Tolkien and books about Tolkien as it is of my more recent close focus on his works in print and online. 

I generally don't call myself a scholar any more than I insist that people address me as Doctor. That's my decision. I don't care about titles. I never have. Others do for various reasons. (The obnoxious habit some people have of omitting a title a woman has earned while including in the same breath a title a man has earned gives doctors who are women an excellent reason for insisting on the title.) Yet if I call myself a scholar, I am not proclaiming myself a scholar. The dictionary definition and the degrees I earned at the schools I attended proclaim me a scholar, as would the long years of diligent study if I lacked the degrees. The degrees themselves are not a prerequisite, but a formal recognition of achievement by one's peers. The study and the knowledge are a prerequisite. 

So when I saw that my friend, Luke Baugher, who, aside from being the editor of Mallorn, The Tolkien Society's peer-reviewed journal, had earned a doctorate from the University of Glasgow and had written a dissertation on Tolkien -- a fine dissertation which I was privileged to read -- was derided as a 'self-proclaimed' Tolkien scholar, I had to laugh at the ignorance and foolishness of the accusation. My friend has the credentials, he has the knowledge, and he has the experience. He did not proclaim himself a scholar. The University of Glasgow and his mentor, Dr Dimitra Fimi, proclaimed him a scholar. And only 'the heir to the throne of the kingdom of idiots'* would question her scholarship. 

_______________

*This was revealed to me in a dream by Londo Mollari, though I already knew it.

The Passing of Evenstar (with Homer on the side)

Since the early part of the fourteenth century, to say that someone has 'passed away' has often meant that they have died. (OED pass away c). That is certainly the normal understanding of the phrase today. There is also another meaning, of much the same vintage, though increasingly unfamiliar and all but obsolete, namely 'to leave' or 'to depart' (OED pass away b). At some point in the thirteenth century both of these meanings crossed from Anglo-Norman French into Middle English and appeared in written form soon after 1300. The related noun 'passing' arose in English by ca. 1350. It was used first to describe the death of a person and later the ceasing to exist of other things (OED passing).

No one in my audience will find it in the least surprising that I learned that 'pass away' can mean 'depart' from reading Tolkien. Nor will they fail to be amused that the last use of the word in this sense documented by the OED dates to 1879, seventy-five years before the publication of The Lord of the Rings. His first use of it in fact seems to play on both meanings, as well as to suggest the secondary connotation of pass away/depart, which the OED gives as 'to break away, to escape as from restraint.' At Weathertop, where Tolkien may have felt all the connotations of 'pass away' were in play, Aragorn uses it to sing of Beren and Lúthien:

Long was the way that fate them bore,
    O’er stony mountains cold and grey,
Through halls of iron and darkling door,
    And woods of nightshade morrowless.
The Sundering Seas between them lay,
    And yet at last they met once more,
And long ago they passed away
    In the forest singing sorrowless.

        (FR 1.xi.193)

Since Beren and Lúthien both died and were restored to life before they departed into the forest singing sorrowless, their tale plays on all three of the meanings I mentioned above, death, departure, and escape from restraint. They of course die again in the end, but it is again mysterious, since in dying the death of Men, Lúthien breaks free from the world all other Elves are bound to remain within. Small wonder their tale is the Lay of Leithian, or the lay of 'release from bondage'. The more the reader knows of the history of the phrase and the backstory of Beren and Lúthien, the more the reader sees, but at the same time it becomes no easier to pin the phrase down to one meaning here. 

As this first instance suggests, we shall often find the phrase used in mythic contexts. It next appears in Bilbo's poem about Eärendil ('from east to west he passed away' -- FR 2.i.235) and Gimli's poem about Khazad-dûm (in Elder Days before the fall / of mighty kings in Nargothrond / and Gondolin, who now beyond / the Western Sea have passed away' -- FR 2.iv.316). In Lothlórien come the first entries in prose, but even so an air of enchantment attaches to 'the gentle rain that fell at times, and passed away leaving all things fresh and clean' (FR 2.vii.358), and in Frodo's vision in Galadriel's mirror 'a small ship passed away into the mist' in the west (FR 2.vii.364). That the next reference is merely lyrical and in prose, not mythic or poetic, comes as a surprise, until we realize that an east wind, in passing away, would pass away westward (FR 2.ix.385). And in his lament for his fallen comrade it is of the West Wind that Aragorn imagines someone asking for tidings of Boromir who, the West Wind replies, 'passed away / Into the shadows of the North. I saw him then no more' (TT 3.i.417). Only a few pages later Aragorn's epic chase of the orcs begins, redirecting the poem's search for news of Boromir to a pursuit of those who slew him and abducted those he was defending. Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli, the Three Hunters disappear into the dusk (TT 3.i.420): 'They passed away, grey shadows in a stony land'.

Treebeard's two uses of the phrase are grim, once using it of the Elves fleeing the Great Darkness west across the Sea, which for him marks a dividing line between the 'old Elves', who 'wished to talk to everything' (TT 3.iv.468), and the Elves who took refuge in the West or in hidden valleys and sang only of the past. He then draws a sharp line both between the Ents and their own future and between the Elves who 'passed away'. The Ents will emerge from their hidden lives to challenge the darkness and help others before they 'pass away'. So unlike the Elves who 'departed' long ago, the Ents will 'die', in part because they have no offspring and in part because they will no longer hide from the enemy. Instead of composing songs about a lost past, they will attempt deeds worthy of song (TT 3.iv.486). Through the different senses of 'passing away' -- hiding versus marching, singing the 'glorious deeds of heroes'* versus performing deeds fit to be sung, departing versus dying -- Tolkien so aptly reveals what Treebeard feels about his world, the Elves, and his own people.

[* I interrupt this blogpost with a massively intrusive authorial aside, because I can:  

When the embassy comes to Achilles in Book 9 of the Iliad (9.189), they find him playing a lyre he had taken as plunder, 'with which he was delighting his heart and singing the glorious deeds of heroes' (κλὲα άνδρῶν). It's got nothing to do with Tolkien, but I love the phrase. So there.

On the other hand it is also true that singing such songs on a lyre he had plundered from a defeated enemy underlines the fact that Achilles is sitting in his tent singing songs about the past while his fellow Achaeans desperately need him to be performing such acts instead. By having Treebeard make references to songs the Elves who have 'passed away' make and songs which the deeds of the Ents before they 'pass way' will merit, Tolkien illustrates the character of Treebeard and his situation much as Homer did with Achilles and his situation.

End of aside. Move along.] 

The phrase can be just as poignant and revealing in connection with things that have not passed way, but where its use suggests something disheartening and unnatural. Hearing the trumpets ring out from the Black Gate lifts Frodo's heart for a moment, which sinks once he recognizes that the call portends 'no assault upon the Dark Lord by the men of Gondor, risen like avenging ghosts from the graves of valour long passed away' (TT 4.iii.639). Not only were the soldiers fit to make such an assault long gone to their graves, but so, it seemed to Frodo, was the necessary valor. While 'passed away' here strictly applies only to the 'valor' which has departed, as a transferred epithet it covers the ghosts of the men of Gondor in its shade. If, looking back from the end of this story, we know that Frodo's despair is premature, we should also know that it is not wholly unreasonable. For we must also look back with Frodo from this moment to the dead faces he saw in the marshes, illusions conjured by Sauron of the dead buried there long before. As the attack on the Black Gate in books Five and Six shows, such valor has not entirely passed away, but it is insufficient to defeat the armies of Mordor as the Men and Elves who lie buried in the Dead Marshes did. The world behind seems more and more an illusion, and soon to be forgotten, as they head towards Mordor, with no army at their backs or distracting the enemy, and ahead of them a land where night once fallen never seems to 'pass away' (TT 4.vii.699).

At Dunharrow the next day, Théoden takes the same darkness Frodo had seen flowing out of Mordor the day before as harbinger of 'the great battle of our time, in which many things shall pass away' (RK 5..iii.801). Unsurprisingly, light is closely associated with the departure or passing of Sauron's greatest weapons, the Ringwraiths, whose leader is twice called a 'shadow of despair' (RK 5.iv.818; vi.841). Sometimes the effect is direct and causal, as when Gandalf drives off the Nazgûl who are pursuing Faramir and his men (RK 5.iv.810). When Éowyn kills the fell beast ridden by the Witch-king, the shadow which had descended on the field with its arrival 'passed away; a light fell about her ....' (RK 5.vi.839-40, 842), but this shadow is at least as spiritual as it is physical. For its departure seems to free Merry from his terror of even being noticed by the Witch-king, so that he can stab him, saving Éowyn and enabling her to kill this 'shadow of despair.' Confronted with his own destiny, understanding too late the words of the prophecy of his downfall, the Witch-king, who could strike Frodo dumb and shatter his sword with a wave of his hand and with a word break the gates of Minas Tirith, has his words of power, the terror of his presence, and his threats of spiritual torture stripped from him. He is reduced to a merely physical assault and the cry of hatred he utters as he attacks Éowyn becomes a wailing cry that 'pass[es] with the wind' as he finally dies (RK 5.vi.842). 

Even the Witch-king's passing, however, does not lift every shadow. '[Y]our enemy has passed away', Aragorn says to her as he tries to heal her of her wounds, and not without effect, but as Aragorn knows her wounds are far deeper than any she could have suffered in battle (RK 5.viii.867). In Mordor, Sam finds his spirits lifted by the 'woe and dismay' which he hears in the voice of the Nazgûl bringing word of the Witch-king's destruction, but Frodo does not (RK 6.ii.919): 

‘Well no, not much, Sam,’ Frodo sighed. ‘That’s away beyond the mountains. We’re going east not west. And I’m so tired. 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.’

The valor Frodo had hopelessly assumed was long passed away has not forgotten him, however. For a few days later Merry 'despondently' watches Aragorn's forces 'pass away out of sight down the great road', on their hopeless way to attack the Black Gate, in order to draw Sauron's attention away from Mordor and Frodo (RK 5.x.883). That the valor of this forlorn hope proved sufficient for its task helped save it in the end because it gave the Ring-bearer the chance to fulfill his quest (even if not in the way anyone might have guessed). 

Nevertheless, the passing of the One Ring is the passing of them all, and as Gandalf tells Aragorn, 'though much has been saved, much must now pass away' (RK 6.v.970). Some of what will pass away, however, is no bad thing. For Arwen arrives to marry Aragorn (RK 6.v.972):

And Frodo when he saw her come glimmering in the evening, with stars on her brow and a sweet fragrance about her, was moved with great wonder, and he said to Gandalf: ‘At last I understand why we have waited! This is the ending. Now not day only shall be beloved, but night too shall be beautiful and blessed and all its fear pass away!’

That Frodo speaks these words of the imminent marriage of two whose fate is closely woven with his own is surely significant -- Frodo who had been impatient to leave and who at Rivendell had been oblivious to the clues of Aragorn and Arwen's involvement. Gandalf had told him when he was eager to leave that Bilbo was waiting for the same day as they were (xxxxx), the day when all the night's fear should pass away. 'This is the ending' -- the happy ending for Aragorn and Arwen, who will live happily ever after till the end of their days.* 

But the passing away of the fear of the night for some is accompanied by the passing away of much else for others. Arwen herself says, when Frodo expresses his desire to see Bilbo and disappointment that he had not come to the wedding, that 'all that was done by that power [i.e., of the Ring] is now passing away' (RK 6.vi.974), which includes Bilbo's preservation to his vast age. When she further says that 'he awaits you, for he will not again make any long journey save one', she means that Frodo and Bilbo will make that journey together. And if Frodo does not understand her, as it seems by his reply he might not, she tells him that he may 'pass into the West' in her stead to find the healing that may (and will) elude him in Middle-earth (RK 6.vi.974). 

Frodo makes no reply to Arwen's offer, but silently accepts the jewel she says will bring him comfort 'when the memory of the fear and the darkness troubles' him'. More open and telling is the scene between Gimli and Éomer which follows at once. There with chivalrous courtesy they settle the matter of Éomer's 'rash words concerning the Lady in the Golden Wood', but end on a note of loss, since Gimli's 'heart forebodes fears that soon [the Morning, i.e., Galadriel] will pass away for ever'. What neither of them mentions, however, or perhaps even grasps is that the Evening, too will before long also pass away. Nor might the first time reader, since much is implicit in the phrase 'the Choice of Lúthien' which those who have not yet read the Tale of Aragorn and Arwen in Appendix A, or 'Of Beren and Lúthien' in The Silmarillion could well miss. The shift in scene from Aragorn, Arwen, and Frodo, to Gimli and Éomer underscores the larger perspective of what the world will lose when all that is to be lost will have passed away. 

As if to confirm this change in perspective the final appearance of the phrase within The Lord of the Rings proper comes in the famous scene Gandalf and Elrond, Galadriel and Celeborn converse telepathically far into the night after everyone else has gone to sleep. Like 'grey figures, carved in stone, memorials of forgotten things now lost in unpeopled lands', their near invisibility here prefigures their later disappearance into the West where they shall soon 'pass away'. Their silent conversations about times past and a future that they will not be present to see recall the image of the old hobbit Bilbo conjures in I sit beside the fire and think:

I sit beside the fire and think 

of people long ago, 

and people who will see a world

that I shall never know.

The next time we encounter the phrase is in Appendix A, where it is not dramatic, but historiographic, referring first to the dating of the end of the Third Age, 'when the Three Rings passed away in September 3021' (RK App. A 1033), and similarly to the persistent memory among Arvedui's descendants of the claim he had made to the throne of Gondor 'even when their kingship had passed away' (RK App. A, 1, iv, 1049-50). Though not without some poignancy, these references look back from a later time with a more detached perspective. 

Wholly unlike these are the uses of 'pass away' in The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen, with its return to dramatic narrative and the theme of Death and Immortality immanent in The Lord of the Rings and the legendarium as a whole. As in The Lord of the Rings proper, we first meet the phrase in connection with the tale of Beren and Lúthien. Here again, as in A Knife in the Dark, Aragorn is singing the lay aloud, but suddenly seeing Arwen for the first time, he believes he is seeing Lúthien herself and 'fearing that she would pass away and never be seen again, he called to her crying, Tinúviel, Tinúviel! even as Beren had done in the Elder Days long ago' (RK App. A 1, v, 1058).

The fear that she will 'depart' or even 'escape', in short, that he will lose her for ever, spurs him to cry out the name Beren had cried out, unknowingly but correctly, as he tried to keep Lúthien from fleeing him. This meeting of course does not just set up Arwen's making the Choice of Lúthien. It adds depth to Aragorn's singing this song to the hobbits at Weathertop. Most importantly of all, perhaps, it foreshadows Arwen's calling Aragorn by his Elvish name when she faces his death, his passing away in the other sense: 

‘“Estel, Estel!” she cried, and with that even as he took her hand and kissed it, he fell into sleep. Then a great beauty was revealed in him, so that all who after came there looked on him in wonder; for they saw that the grace of his youth, and the valour of his manhood, and the wisdom and majesty of his age were blended together. And long there he lay, an image of the splendour of the Kings of Men in glory undimmed before the breaking of the world. 

‘But Arwen went forth from the House, and the light of her eyes was quenched, and it seemed to her people that she had become cold and grey as nightfall in winter that comes without a star. Then she said farewell to Eldarion, and to her daughters, and to all whom she had loved; and she went out from the city of Minas Tirith and passed away to the land of Lórien, and dwelt there alone under the fading trees until winter came. Galadriel had passed away and Celeborn also was gone, and the land was silent.

‘There at last when the mallorn-leaves were falling, but spring had not yet come,1 she laid herself to rest upon Cerin Amroth; and there is her green grave, until the world is changed, and all the days of her life are utterly forgotten by men that come after, and elanor and niphredil bloom no more east of the Sea. 

‘Here ends this tale, as it has come to us from the South; and with the passing of Evenstar no more is said in this book of the days of old.’

(RK App. 1, v, 1063, emphasis added)

Aragorn does not stay because she has called him by his Elvish name, but the miraculous preservation of his body is a sign, a promise, that his Hope that there is something beyond the Death and that it is not merely memory is correct. As Beren waited for Lúthien, Aragorn will wait for Arwen. How else could we read this description of what happens when he returns the gift? So, too, Arwen, in sorrow but not despair, returns to Cerin Amroth where she and Aragorn had pledged themselves to each other and she had made the Choice of Lúthien, and just as he gave back the gift in the land of his ancestors, she gives back the gift in the land of hers, at the same time affirming the choice the Elves had made, which we see in the passing of Galadriel, to 'cast away all' rather than submit to Sauron. The enduring greenness of her grave, like the preservation of Aragorn's body, confirms that their Hope, the naked Estel of Elves and Men is correct, even if Men who come afterwards forget. The gift of memory is a belongs to the Elves, not to Men. 

Over and over we have seen Tolkien play on the different senses of 'pass away' to accentuate the sorrow and the loss of the world, but even when the good seem to pass into darkness, it is the evil and the darkness that are truly empty and transient, as Sam (and Tolkien) saw so clearly: 

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.921) 

________________________________

.

On the Beauty of the Ring

In reading Lisa Coutras' fascinating 2016 book, Tolkien's Theology of Beauty: Majesty, Splendor, and Transcendence in Middle-earth (9781137553447) last night, I came upon an interesting passage in which she states that 'while beauty illuminates goodness and truth, it carries an inherent danger. Beauty can easily deceive by nature of its attractiveness' (15). Coutras goes on to illustrate this essential observation by the beauty of Galadriel in her moment of temptation and by the beauty of Saruman's voice. As a counter example, she gives us Aragorn looking foul and feeling fair. 

To support her point here,* I can only point to the beauty of the Ring as the supreme example of such perilous and deceptive beauty. The allure of its beauty captivates Bilbo (FR 1.ii.47), Frodo (FR 1.ii.60), Sméagol who kills for it (FR 1.ii.53. 56), Déagol (FR 1.ii.53), and Isildur who will do nothing to endanger the Ring because of its beauty: 'of all the works of Sauron, the only fair' (FR 2.ii.253). Sauron, too, had once been deceptively and dangerously fair, but once he had transferred much of his native strength into the Ring he found that he could not recreate a fair form to mask his evil after he perished in the Downfall of Númenor. This was true even while he still had the Ring in his possession as he did in the years between his return from Númenor and his second death at the hands of Gil-galad and Elendil. 

As I have suggested before, I think it is reasonable to believe that what went into the Ring that made it so beautiful that characters as varied as Isildur and Sméagol fell prey to its allure at once was the very power which had made Sauron able to assume so pleasing a guise in the first place. Like Morgoth, the transference of power permanently outside himself left him unable to restore his appearance. Since Sauron had begun his existence as a transcendent being, it makes sense that the beauty which was originally his would be manifested in the form he took within the world, but as time went on and he grew more corrupt and evil only the appearance of beauty remained.

________________________________

* To which she may return later. I haven't gotten very far. It's one of those marvelous books whose footnotes and bibliography send one off on equally fascinating expeditions into the rabbit-holes of Academe.

I have wept like Stoner

Sloane had no family; only his colleagues and a few people from town gathered around the narrow pit and listened in awe, embarrassment, and respect as the minister said his words. And because he had no family and loved ones to mourn his passing, it was Stoner who wept when the casket was lowered, as if that weeping might reduce the loneliness of the last descent. Whether he wept for himself, for the part of his history and youth that went down into the earth, or whether for the poor thin figure that had once kept the man he loved, he did not know.

John Williams, Stoner, p. 89,

Many years ago now, on the day I was signing my first contract to teach full time at a small liberal arts college somewhere north of New York City, my father died. In truth he died before I left the city that morning. Strangely enough, I had woken up almost an hour before my alarm was set to go off. The time, 6:17 AM, later proved to be the time he died. That morning I thought it strange to wake up so spontaneously and so early when I usually needed more than one alarm to reach me. But I did not know as I set out for my glorious day that there was this shadow behind me. 

At the college I met the members of the department, and sat down to have a good conversation with its senior member, a wonderful, brilliant, funny, strange and somewhat mad Socratic figure of a man named James Day. We hit it off at once and I returned to the city somewhat triumphantly. On the way home from the train station I stopped at my local pub for a celebratory pint. Unasked, the bartender poured me a shot of whiskey, then stood in front of me to pour a second, and a third. I looked at him.

'Call your mother,' he said.

The only grieving I knew then was to mourn outwardly, grim-faced and inky-cloaked. I was, so I thought, the one who had to be strong for everyone else. We had a wake for my father, and then buried him funeral in the fitting, cold, pouring rain of early March. We went on. In the fall I went off to begin teaching. James Day, though nothing like my father, became a surrogate. He was so much that my father was not. To begin with, we could talk about Greek together, and did at great length in the campus cafe, in the pub, at his home, in restaurants over a meal. We spent a great many hours together, and I came to love him very much. 

A few years later I moved on to another small liberal arts college even further north. One day that winter a phone call came -- I am no longer sure from whom -- to tell me that James had died. His health had long been terrible, and he refused to change the way he lived. Perhaps he thought it would have made no difference, but I don't think he wanted it to. The news brought down a terrible silence within me. I went outside to split some firewood for the woodstove, since it seemed I needed something to do. 

In time I realized I was weeping as I set up the wood and let the axe fall, and set up the next piece and let the axe fall again. I did not know who I was weeping for, whether for James or for my father, for myself or for us all. The tears all flowed together. I don't think I have ever wept so long.

A year or so later I met one of James' sons, and from what James had once told me I believed there had been some estrangement between them. Yet one night in his house James had shown me videos of this son performing various impressive feats on a skateboard. Never had I heard James so purely delighted for so long. He laughed and he smiled and he beamed. I made a point of telling his son that because I knew James never could, or at least that he never had. To me it seemed that his son was moved to hear of his father's delight and pride. I was moved to tell him. Because we too often say what we shouldn't to those we love and too seldom say what we should. But mostly it becomes too late to say anything and we can only weep without knowing who we are weeping for. 

Guests, ghosts, and other creatures: Men as 'Guests' in Arda.

If you look up the word gyst -- 'guest, visitor, stranger, outsider, outlandish creature, enemy' -- in the Dictionary of Old English, you will find the following note: 

Wordplay on the senses of gyst¹;‘visitor, stranger’, and gāst‘spirit, soul; demon’ is common in poetry; some poetic examples spelled gæst(-) may alternatively be read as forms of gāst

Turning to the entry for gāst/gǣst -- 'breath, air, wind, spirit, soul, person, ghost, angel, demon', etc. -- you will find the same note. This observation is by no means new. Tolkien was well aware of it. He spoke of it in an appendix to Beowulf: The Monsters and Critics (1983: 35). 

Which all makes me wonder about the use of the 'guests' to describe Men, as seen by the Elves who quickly came to believe that the fëa of Men, that is, their souls or spirits, did not have Arda as their proper home. They were strangers in Arda, guests (S 42; Morgoth 315). The fëa of Men are at once gyst and gāst.

I want to explore this more later, but I am trying to finish my darn book. 

Shakespeare's Silmarillion

Shakespeare's Silmarillion:

Melkor: do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will - Eru: Mine. Melkor: I do not well understand that. Eru: I can fret you, I can play upon you. Mine instrument.

_______________

I just wanted to add that it took me the longest time to see Eru's use of the word 'instrument' as a musical reference, despite that the entire metaphor of the Ainulindalë is musical. I had always seen 'instrument' as 'tool.' Once I made the connection, as blindingly obvious as things always are in hindsight, my mind leapt to Hamlet.

The Rules of Engagement: Scholars and Texts

These days it is not unusual to hear that scholars must engage with the scholarship of other scholars. This is as it should be. We are not writing in a vacuum. There is quite a lot out there that merits our diligence and will repay our scrutiny. I have been reading scholarship in several different fields for many years now and have learned so much from it. There have been other occasions, however, when I have read scholars that seem to be paying more attention to agreeing or disagreeing with the opinions of other scholars than they pay to the texts or events they claim to be writing about. However weighty the opinion of, say, Harold Bloom might be, I have a hard time regarding any opinion he uttered as evidence of anything but his own opinion. No opinion is evidence of anything but itself and the process by which it is reached. In the scales of argument it cannot have the same weight as the text.

I have also seen scholars create paragraphs of argument by stringing together quotation after quotation from the writings of other scholars. As long as it's all properly cited and quoted of course and done with restraint, there's nothing wrong with it. I have done it myself, but I try to keep it to a minimum. Sometimes, though, it seems like an box labelled 'scholarly engagement' is being lazily checked, and I wonder if the scholar whose name is on the work even has an opinion of their own on the text or events they are writing about. 

Laziness (if that is what this is and I am not being unkind) is one fault. Inattention is another. Today I was reading a particular article on Tolkien for the third or fourth time -- an article with more than a few thoughtful observations -- and found my eye drawn to a quotation from a very important passage for understanding the evolving relationship of Frodo and the Ring. The context here is crucial. I can't see how we can hope to understand without both of these paragraphs. Below I give those paragraphs. The parts presented in orange are the only words quoted in the article I was reading, with ellipses judiciously inserted so as not to distract us from the point the scholar was trying to make. 

All that host was clad in sable, dark as the night. Against the wan walls and the luminous pavement of the road Frodo could see them, small black figures in rank upon rank, marching swiftly and silently, passing outwards in an endless stream. Before them went a great cavalry of horsemen moving like ordered shadows, and at their head was one greater than all the rest: a Rider, all black, save that on his hooded head he had a helm like a crown that flickered with a perilous light. Now he was drawing near the bridge below, and Frodo’s staring eyes followed him, unable to wink or to withdraw. Surely there was the Lord of the Nine Riders returned to earth to lead his ghastly host to battle? Here, yes here indeed was the haggard king whose cold hand had smitten down the Ring-bearer with his deadly knife. The old wound throbbed with pain and a great chill spread towards Frodo’s heart.

Even as these thoughts pierced him with dread and held him bound as with a spell, the Rider halted suddenly, right before the entrance of the bridge, and behind him all the host stood still. There was a pause, a dead silence. Maybe it was the Ring that called to the Wraith-lord, and for a moment he was troubled, sensing some other power within his valley. This way and that turned the dark head helmed and crowned with fear, sweeping the shadows with its unseen eyes. Frodo waited, like a bird at the approach of a snake, unable to move. And as he waited, he felt, more urgent than ever before, the command that he should put on the Ring. But great as the pressure was, he felt no inclination now to yield to it. He knew that the Ring would only betray him, and that he had not, even if he put it on, the power to face the Morgul-king – not yet. There was no longer any answer to that command in his own will, dismayed by terror though it was, and he felt only the beating upon him of a great power from outside. It took his hand, and as Frodo watched with his mind, not willing it but in suspense (as if he looked on some old story far away), it moved the hand inch by inch towards the chain upon his neck. Then his own will stirred; slowly it forced the hand back and set it to find another thing, a thing lying hidden near his breast. Cold and hard it seemed as his grip closed on it: the phial of Galadriel, so long treasured, and almost forgotten till that hour. As he touched it, for a while all thought of the Ring was banished from his mind. He sighed and bent his head. At that moment the Wraith-king turned and spurred his horse and rode across the bridge, and all his dark host followed him. Maybe the elven-hoods defied his unseen eyes, and the mind of his small enemy, being strengthened, had turned aside his thought. But he was in haste. Already the hour had struck, and at his great Master’s bidding he must march with war into the West.

(TT 4.viii.706)

The scholar here sees Frodo responding with assurance to the 'command that he should put on the Ring' and offers this up as evidence that Frodo can tell the difference between his will and that of the Ring. This of course assumes that the Ring is conscious and has a will, and at the very least that assumption needs to be questioned, which the scholar never does at any point. If, however, the Ring is calling out to the Witch-king as the text suggests it may be, does that not support the scholar's contention that it is the Ring commanding Frodo to reveal himself? If so, why not include it? Of course, that would mean the Witch-king actually knows the Ring is present, and it beggars belief that he and the other Ringwraiths would have marched on if they had known that. Surely, merely grasping the phial cannot have communicated that 'These are not the hobbits you're looking for. Move along.' The suggestion is absurd, and is meant to be. But assuming that the Ring is conscious and calling out raises questions here that should not be skirted.

There is also more going on here than the selections chosen by this scholar disclose, none of which is irrelevant to Frodo's experience. What of Frodo's assumption that he may not yet be ready to face the Witch-king, but that, as the words 'not yet' make clear, one day he will be? One does not think what Frodo thinks otherwise. What of his having forgotten that he had the phial? What of the spell his own thoughts and dread of the Witch-king impose upon him? Is there no connection between the movement of his thoughts from his foe to the Ring? Is he really saying that the Ring is responsible for the 'command' he feels while, though pinned like a bird fascinated by a snake, he contemplates not flight but fight? All of the descriptions of Frodo's reaction to seeing the Witch-king -- his dread, the chill throbbing of his old wound, his inability to move, and his realistic understanding that the Ring would only betray him by revealing him and that he could not defeat the Witch-king -- make it much harder to see Frodo's slow struggle to force his hand away from the Ring as something he accomplished with anything approaching self-assurance. 

What I think the answers to these questions may be is a matter for another day. What I find myself wondering is just what degree of engagement with a scholar is needed when that scholar's engagement with the text they are writing about raises questions of its own. The identity of this scholar is not my concern here. I have no interest in savaging someone as if I were the great and terrible Housman. I am not the guardian of truth I thought I was when a young man. If in the course of making an argument of my own about this text I discover a need to engage with this scholar, I shall. However, I think the text is what I should be engaging with. The evidence I need to make my case is there, not in any other scholar's opinion, whether weighty or slight.

'So that they are its life and it is theirs' (Silm. 20)

Many readers will no doubt recall this fascinating passage in The Silmarillion (20) which draws an equivalency between the life of the Valar and the life of Arda. I have always wanted more of an explanation than we find here.

Thus it came to pass that of the Ainur some abode still with Ilúvatar beyond the confines of the World; but others, and among them many of the greatest and most fair, took the leave of Ilúvatar and descended into it. But this condition Ilúvatar made, or it is the necessity of their love, that their power should thenceforward be contained and bounded in the World, to be within it for ever, until it is complete, so that they are its life and it is theirs. And therefore they are named the Valar, the Powers of the World.

A comment in the recently published The Nature of Middle-earth (2021: 14) presents an even more interesting comment along similar lines, suggesting a likeness (parallel? analogy?) between the spirits and bodies of Incarnates and between the Valar and Arda itself:

The Valar having entered Arda, and being therein confined within its life, must also suffer (while therein and being as it were its spirit, as the fëa is to the hröa of the Incarnate) its slow ageing.

I am sure there's more to think about and say here, and I want to take a look at the other versions of the Ainulindalë. For now, though, I just wanted to toss the two passages into the cauldron and let them simmer. 

Chaucer's Troilus and Tolkien's Fool of a Took: Troilus and Criseyde V.1800-25 and The Return of the King 5.x.892-93

 Almost five years back (2 March 2017) I wrote a post about what I took -- and still take -- to be Tolkien having a bit of fun with Chaucer and everyone's favorite fool of a Took. Recently I came across another bit of evidence that convinces me even further that Tolkien had medievalist mischief in mind when he wrote the scene quoted below. The new evidence comes from a summary of The Lord of the Rings Tolkien included in the well-known 1951 letter to Milton Waldman, but which Humphrey Carpenter left out when he published many of Tolkien' s letters in 1981 (Letters, no. 131). Fortunately Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull have made this summary available in an appendix to their The Lord of the Rings: a Reader's Companion (2014: 747). I shall insert the relevant part of the letter directly after the passage from The Return of the King upon which it comments. 

First RK 5.x.892-93:

Then Pippin stabbed upwards, and the written blade of Westernesse pierced through the hide and went deep into the vitals of the troll, and his black blood came gushing out. He toppled forward and came crashing down like a falling rock, burying those beneath him. Blackness and stench and crushing pain came upon Pippin and his mind fell away into a great darkness.  

'So it ends as I guessed it would,' his thought said, even as it fluttered away, and it laughed a little within him ere it fled, almost gay it seemed to be casting off at last all doubt and care and fear. And even then as it winged away into forgetfulness it heard voices, and they seemed to be crying in some forgotten world far above: 

'The Eagles are coming! The Eagles are coming!' 

For one moment more Pippin's thought hovered. 'Bilbo!' it said. 'But no! That came in his tale, long, long ago. This is my tale, and it is ended now. Good-bye!' And his thought fled far away and his eyes saw no more. 

And now Tolkien's letter to Milton Waldman as quoted in Hammond and Scull:

In the last pages of this Book [i.e., Book 5] we see the hopeless defeat of the forlorn hope. The hobbit among them (Peregrin) falls under the weight of the slain, and as consciousness fails and he passes into forgetfulness, he seems to hear the cry of 'The Eagles'. But he knows that was the turning point of Bilbo's story, which he knew well, and laughing at his fancy his spirit flies away, and he remembers no more.

What first drew my attention in this scene of The Return of the King is the peculiar use of 'thought' in the second and fourth paragraphs, which is quite similar to its use in the famous scene in which Gollum's two 'thoughts' struggle with each other while Sam listens, fascinated and appalled (TT 4.ii.632-34). While there 'thought' seems very close to what we would call 'personality,' here 'consciousness' is a better fit, which is fact what Tolkien calls it in his letter. The word 'consciousness', however, did not enter English before the 17th Century, and the meaning in question here -- 'the totality of the impressions, thoughts, and feelings, which make up a person's conscious being. In pl. = conscious personalities' (OED sv. 5, emphasis original) -- seems to have awaited the invention of Locke. Given Tolkien's linguistic predilections, it is not hard to see why he would have preferred 'thought', since MED þoht (3c, d) offered the requisite meanings.  

I am as yet, however, unaware of any use of þoht to describe situations similar to those we see in these two passages of Tolkien.  (If any reader knows of one, please, do let me know.)  So I began to think that perhaps I should look for passages with similar elements.  Almost immediately Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde came into my mind, specifically the scene in which Troilus dies:

1800   The wraththe, as I began yow for to seye,
       Of Troilus, the Grekes boughten dere;
       For thousandes his hondes maden deye,
       As he that was with-outen any pere,
       Save Ector, in his tyme, as I can here.
1805   But weylawey, save only goddes wille,
       Dispitously him slough the fiers Achille.

       And whan that he was slayn in this manere,
       His lighte goost ful blisfully is went
       Up to the holownesse of the seventh spere,
1810   In convers letinge every element;
       And ther he saugh, with ful avysement,
       The erratik sterres, herkeninge armonye
       With sownes fulle of hevenish melodye.

       And doun from thennes faste he gan* avyse
1815   This litel spot of erthe, that with the see
       Embraced is, and fully gan* despyse
       This wrecched world, and held al vanitee
       To respect of the pleyn felicitee
       That is in hevene above; and at the laste,
1820   Ther he was slayn, his loking doun he caste;

       And in him-self he lough right at the wo
       Of hem that wepten for his deeth so faste;
       And dampned al our werk that folweth so
       The blinde lust, the which that may not laste,
1825   And sholden al our herte on hevene caste.
       

(Troilus and Criseyde, V.1800-1825)

(*gon (11a) = 'proceed to', 'set about', 'go to', as in 'go to sleep'.)

Now clearly Pippin's experience here is meant to remind us first of all of Bilbo's at the Battle of Five Armies, when the Eagles came and Bilbo was knocked unconscious, but woke to find himself 'not yet one of the fallen heroes' (Hobbit 298-99). But there's more to it than that. Bilbo has no 'thought' as he loses consciousness. His reflections come after he revives. 

What happens to Pippin's 'thought' is far more like the experience of Troilus' 'goost': both of them laugh and undergo a profound change in attitude towards the troubles of the world of which they are letting go. Each of them believes his tale is over. True, Pippin is not in fact dying, but he thinks he is. So, the contrast between him and Troilus is also noteworthy. His 'thought' flies 'away', but Troilus' 'goost' rises heavenward. Troilus looks back down at the 'woe / of hem that wepten for his deeth so faste' and dismisses it; Pippin hears the 'voices...crying from some forgotten world above' (emphasis added) and dismisses them and the hope the coming of the Eagles should offer. These directions reflect the differences in worldview in each work. Chaucer's Troy is Medieval and Christian, whereas Tolkien's Middle-earth is pre-Christian and without any concept of a heaven above. Hence also Tolkien drew on a word like þoht rather than 'goost'. What notion Hobbits have may have of their continued existence after death is uncertain beyond their awareness of the existence of ghosts. As an offshoot of Men, however, they are doomed to leave the world after death, and go no one knows where. So it makes sense that Pippin's 'thought' has no expressed destination. And perhaps as a final bit of the absurdity that has often attended this once 'fool of a Took', Pippin is ignominiously squashed by a troll he has killed himself, while Troilus, a great warrior, is killed by the greatest of all warriors. In both cases, however, the dignified serenity both Troilus and Pippin attain with their last thoughts is remarkable. For neither of them could be said to have possessed that before. 

Finally, that Tolkien saw fit to point out Pippin's seemingly final thought in his letter to Milton Waldman seems quite curious, since in a letter attempting to persuade Collins to publish both The Lord of the Rings and the Silmarillion together the reference to Pippin serves no rhetorical purpose. In the entire letter to Waldman, a letter of over 10,000 words, Tolkien mentions Pippin by name but once, in the paragraph directly preceding this one, and mentions him parenthetically at that: 'The Fifth Book returns to the precise point at which Book Three ended. Gandalf on his great horse (with the Hobbit Peregrin Took) passing along the great "north-road", South to Gondor.' In the hierarchy of this sentence Pippin comes last. He seems just such 'a passenger, a piece of luggage' as he had imagined himself to be in his darkest hour when a prisoner of the Orcs (TT 3.ii.445). And even when Tolkien alludes to that hour in this letter, he denies him a name. One has to have already read The Lord of the Rings to know that he is one of 'the two hobbits that have been captured by Orcs' (Hammond and Scull: 745). 

So for Tolkien to include a detailed description of this hobbit's amused 'final' thoughts at the culmination of Book Five is quite curious indeed. Yet clearly Tolkien felt it worth doing so. I suggest that the hierarchy of the sentence comes to our rescue here. (Dare I say 'The parentheses are coming! The parentheses are coming!) For in the description of this scene, too, Pippin is also named only in a parenthesis. His name is an aside, an afterthought. His identify is less important to Tolkien here than the near-death experience which parallels the experience of Troilus, and the humorous parallel is briefly of greater import than the rhetorical purpose of this letter or even of Pippin himself to the action of the story at this point. Tolkien was simply too pleased with this parallel to omit it. 

_____________________

Works Consulted

_____________________

Ylfig and the Foresight of the Elves

Alaric Hall in his article Elves on the Brain: Chaucer, Old English, and Elvish makes an excellent case for believing that in Chaucer's time and earlier 'elvish' could mean 'prophetic'. To be brief, Hall notes that ylfig

is transparently derived from the late West Saxon form of ælf and the denominative adjectival suffix -ig; as this suffix has been productive from Common Germanic to present day English, ylfig could have been coined at any time. Parallel Old English formations are werig (‘weary, tired, exhausted’ < wor ‘ooze, bog’); sælig (‘happy, prosperous’ < sæl ‘prosperity, happiness’); and gydig (‘possessed (by a god)’ < *γuðaz ‘god’). All these suggest ‘(like) one engaged with noun X’: ‘like one in a bog’, ‘one in good fortune’, ‘one engaged with a god’, and so forth. The etymological meaning of ylfig seems therefore to be ‘(like) one engaged with an ælf or ælfe’. 

Hall then notes a glossator's use of ylfig to clarify further a Latin gloss for the word fanaticus: futura praecinens. Ylfig thus explains futura praecinens, 'foretelling the future'. Elves thus at one point were believed to possess this ability or skill. 

In The Lord of the Rings foresight and foretelling are strongly associated with Wizards, Elves and those with elvish blood in them (Elrond, Galadriel, Aragorn, Gandalf, Saruman, Legolas, Arwen, Gilraen). I haven't the leisure right now to look more fully into this. It may be a coincidence, and it may well be impossible to prove. Yet I wouldn't be surprised if Tolkien, too, had seen this gloss, and that it lies behind the foretellings of Tolkien's Elves.


______________________

I admit I find the derivation Hall gives for 'werig' very amusing, but I am a bit perplexed by it, since I haven't yet found another source that says the same. Admittedly my search has been short and this is far more his patch than mine. I would love to learn better.

Tolkien on what a lot of things an author means

“Good Morning!” said Bilbo, and he meant it. The sun was shining, and the grass was very green. But Gandalf looked at him from under long bushy eyebrows that stuck out further than the brim of his shady hat.

“What do you mean?” he said. “Do you wish me a good morning, or mean that it is a good morning whether I want it or not; or that you feel good this morning; or that it is a morning to be good on?”

“All of them at once,” said Bilbo. 

....

“Good morning!” he said at last. “We don’t want any adventures here, thank you. You might try over The Hill or across The Water.” By this he meant that the conversation was at an end.

“What a lot of things you do use Good morning for!” said Gandalf. “Now you mean that you want to get rid of me, and that it won’t be good till I move off.”

“Not at all, not at all, my dear sir! Let me see, I don’t think I know your name?”

“Yes, yes, my dear sir—and I do know your name, Mr. Bilbo Baggins. And you do know my name, though you don’t remember that I belong to it. I am Gandalf, and Gandalf means me! To think that I should have lived to be good-morninged by Belladonna Took’s son, as if I was selling buttons at the door!”

Italics mine. 

A Long-expected Parenthesis -- Part 5

Previously we have noted that parenthetical commentary appears and disappears as the story grows lighter and darker by turns, and that this in general follows the relationship of Bilbo and then Frodo with the Ring. We have also just seen a very similar dynamic occur with Merry and Pippin in Book Three. Though neither of them ever possesses the Ring, it is nevertheless Saruman's lust to acquire it and Sauron's to regain it that motivates their kidnapping by the orcs, thus directly causing the darker and lighter turns the narrative takes in The Uruk-hai and Treebeard. Indeed Merry and Pippin perceive the role the Ring is playing in their captivity, and with desperate audacity play upon Grishnákh's mistaken belief that they have it, wagering their lives for a chance at escape. So here, too, the Ring is intimately connected to the dynamic at work and the parentheses. Since it transfers so smoothly from Bilbo and Frodo to Merry and Pippin, and, as we shall presently see, to Sam, it should also be evident just how closely concerned with the hobbit voice these asides are. 

After the cluster of parentheses in Treebeard a long gap of 155 pages follows (TT 3.iv.483-4.iii.638), empty except for the somewhat knowing comment on the sinister multiple meanings of Orthanc (TT 3.viii.555). An even longer gap of 177 pages before Treebeard (3.iv.465) extends back to The Ring Goes South (FR 2.iii.288), also interrupted only once (2.vi.344). This lack of parenthetical comments elsewhere in Book Three coincides with the general absence of the hobbits from this book despite the crucial role played by Merry and Pippin, a dynamic to be repeated in Book Five. Something similar holds true also in Book Two, where the narrative attends more to the Company as a whole than to the hobbits or Frodo specifically. So darker turns in the narrative connected to the Ring may be the most striking reason for the absence of parentheses, but not the only reason.

In Book 4 parentheses reappear in The Black Gate Is Closed. As I noted in Part 4, in this book Sam begins to carry the burden of the narrative as Frodo becomes increasingly preoccupied by his struggle against the Ring. It is Sam to whom the three parenthesis in The Black Gate Is Closed refer, at least two of which give us Sam's commentary on his own thoughts at the time (TT 4.iii.638, 640), and the third almost certainly does, too (4.iii.647). This last is perhaps the most remarkable since Sam's behavior in the tale here is as lighthearted as his comment on it, recalling Frodo from the darkness of his cares and purpose by this recitation of 'the old fireside rhyme of Oliphaunt' outside the Black Gate of Mordor, and recalling for the reader an earlier such moment where Sam did the same thing in the same way, hands behind his back and all (FR 1.xii.206-208). Consider also the comment in Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit where we learn that Sam is 'a good cook, even by hobbit reckoning' (TT 4.v.653), an art hobbits 'begin to learn before their letters (which many never reach)'. Here we must remember that Sam was called out by name a full chapter and seventeen years before we met him as a hobbit who had learned his letters. As with his pose while 'speaking poetry', the narrator is using the parentheses to remind the reader of how special Sam is. Not only could he cook the cabbages and potatoes which his Gaffer thought he'd be better off minding, but he knew his letters and poetry and great tales, which repeatedly helped to sustain him on the long road into darkness he and Frodo had to walk. His sense of mission comes from his learning his letters. Sam Gamgee had read all the right books.

These parentheses also further mark the shift we saw earlier with Merry and Pippin, a shift away from Frodo as his hobbit comrades step forward and begin to take up the roles they will play until the end of the book. This is not to say that Frodo is becoming less important. Far from it. But his are now not the only small hands that turn the wheels of the world while the eyes of the great are elsewhere. Sam in particular becomes critically important, and increasingly the story of Frodo's journey is seen through his eyes because Frodo's eyes are elsewhere.