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

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

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

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

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

(Letters no. 163, p. 213)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For further reading, see, e.g, 

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

  

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

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

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

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

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

He heard there oft the flying sound

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_____________________________________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Ah! I am as light as linden!'

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

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

A Reasonable Question about Amazon's Rings of Power Show

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Wheel of Fire: Between Thought and Expression

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

(RK 6.i.919)

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

(RK 6.iii.937-38)

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

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

(RK 6.iii.943-44)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(TT 4.ii.630, emphasis mine)

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

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

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

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

(RK 6.iii.935) 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_____________________

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

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

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

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

The Pity of Théoden (TT 3.vi.519-20)

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

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

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

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

....

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

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

(TT 3.vi.519-20)     

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

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


_____________

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