Master of Middle Earth

by Paul H. Kocher

  These victims not only are morally debased and physically dematerialized but also drag out their days in torment. A mortal who keeps one of the rings of power lives longer, Gandalf tells Frodo at the start, "but he does not grow or obtain more life, he merely continues, until at last every minute is a weariness." One of the most dreadful, most pitiable things about the Nazgûl is their cry of lament: "A long-drawn wail came down the wind, like the cry of some evil and lonely creature." The despair in it is a weapon that Sauron uses to spread hopelessness among the people of Minas Tirith. Angmar especially, the leader of the Nine, is known as the Captain of Despair, who drives even his own troops mad with terror during the siege. He cannot induce it in others unless he first feels it in himself, and in the last analysis it may even come from some corner of Sauron's own withered conscience. When Angmar threatens Éowyn on the battlefield it is not with death: Sauron "will not slay thee in thy turn. He will bear thee away to the houses of lamentation, beyond all darkness, where thy flesh shall be devoured, and thy shrivelled mind left naked to the Lidless Eye." The Nazgûl chief is no stranger to these places of physical and spiritual torture, nor to Sauron's delight in them, somewhere at the heart of the darkness which cloaks him. Gollum too has become acquainted with them when captured in Mordor.

  The Ring has rendered Gollum vile, but so miserable that he is pitied by all who encounter him in the long course of the Quest: "Bilbo, Gandalf, Aragorn, the Mirkwood elves, Frodo, and eventually even Sam, who despises him most. Gollum's private torment actually stems from the fact that the Ring's conquest of his will is incomplete, leaving intact sufficient impulses toward good to breed an unending inner conflict. Out of this arise the two selves whom Frodo and Sam call Gollum and Smeagol, and whom they hear debating each other while he guides them south into Mordor. Critics generally agree that when Gollum uses the pronoun I in speaking about himself the better Sm6agol-self is prevailing, whereas when he uses we he is submitting to Ring-Gollum. On the latter occasions he is sinking his own identity in the Ring, allowing his free personality to be swallowed up by it, as is the case with the Nazgûl. To quote Gandalf again, during the ages when Gollum hid the Ring under the mountains ". . . the thing was eating up his mind, of course, and the torment had become almost unbearable . . . He hated the dark, and he hated light more: he hated everything, and the Ring most of all." Frodo protests that Gollum could never have hated "his precious," the term by which Gollum always refers to the Ring, but the answer comes that "He hated it and loved it, as he hated and loved himself. He could not get rid of it." Without the inner war Gollum would never have hated the Ring or himself.

  The reason why Gollum has not succumbed completely is that as a hobbit he originally has lacked the lust to dominate others, deriving from Sauron himself, which the Ring is specially potent to implant and amplify. This is the same hobbit trait that makes Bilbo and Frodo so toughly resistant to its lure. Nobody who handles the Ring, however, escapes the greed to possess it, which fastens upon him ever after. Tolkien indicates this avidity by the device of having each of its wearers describe it as "precious." Gollum, of course, does so in almost every other sentence he speaks. Significantly, by the word precious he means sometimes the Ring, sometimes himself, and sometimes both confusedly. This is Tolkien's brilliant literary method of showing that Gollum often is no longer thinking of the Ring as something separate from himself. He is the Ring; the Ring is Gollum. Apart from it he has no individuality of his own. Likewise, Isildur writes that although the heat of the Ring has burned him badly, "It is precious to me though I buy it with great pain." Bilbo alarms Gandalf greatly by insisting, "It is mine I tell you. My own. My precious. Yes, my precious." And in the last crucial moment when Frodo should be throwing the Ring into the fires of Mount Doom he refuses to do so, in almost the same language of ownership: "I will not do this deed. The Ring is mine!" The irony underlying this, of course, is that anyone who thinks he owns the Ring is in fact owned by it.

  That the desire to reduce things and people to possessions is all wrong is an article of Tolkien's personal creed. In his essay "On Fairy-stories" he holds it up as the cause of the triteness which our self-induced weariness too often makes us see in our world. Things look trite to us when we have "appropriated" them, legally or mentally, ". . . then locked them in our hoard, acquired them, and acquiring ceased to look at them."2 The remedy is Recovery of a clear view, "seeing things as we are (or were) meant to see them —as things apart from ourselves ... so that the things seen clearly may be freed from the drab blur of triteness or familiarity—from possessiveness." Here Tolkien is not speaking of the immorality of possessiveness, to be sure, but he is singling it out as the source of an overweening blindness in not seeing the world as we should—separate, free, and independent from ourselves —really the same blindness that underlies Sauron's lust for domination. The idea that "appropriation" is imprisonment of what is not ours is developed even more clearly in the essay's next paragraph, which describes how Recovery through creative fantasy "may open your hoard and let all the locked things fly away like cage-birds . . . and you will be warned that all you had (or knew) was dangerous and potent, not really effectively chained, free and wild; no more yours than they were you."3

  These passages are packed with meaning for Tolkien's social philosophy in general, as well as specifically for his philosophy of evil in The Lord of the Rings. We are not to be like dragons hoarding in our dens as treasure whatever we can snatch from the living world around us. People and things are not meant to be our property; they belong to themselves. These are laws of our nature and theirs. The penalty for violation is a tormented exhaustion like Gollum's, a failure of perception like Sauron's, an exile from the healthy world of fact like the ringwraiths'. Urging Bilbo to give up the Ring, Gandalf pleads: "Let it go! And then you can go yourself, and be free . . . Stop possessing it." We are possessed, captured, by what we think we possess, says Tolkien. And if we believe we can wholly possess anything we delude ourselves. We, and Sauron, find our "precious" slipping out of our fingers. Under our jaded eyes it turns into something different, which we no longer want; our appetite burns for fresh treasures, which we will discard in their turn. The people we master become denatured of their humanity; and the process of enslaving them denatures us. In this way, as in others, evil is self-defeating. A Sauron who succeeded in making himself tyrant over all of Middle-earth would only be the slave of the slaves over whom he ruled.

  Such are the main features of evil as they emerge so far in Tolkien's portrait of Sauron and of those influenced to greater or lesser degree by the spell of the ruling Ring. But his kingdom consists also of many others who come there voluntarily or under the direct compulsion of his will, without the Ring. These do not fade into the physical half-world to which the Ring reduces its victims. The Lieutenant of the Tower of Barad-dûr, for instance, is firmly material. But he hideously resembles those other followers of Sauron in the extent to which he has become absorbed into his master's aims and methods. Beginning long ago as a renegade Black Númenorian, he became a student of Sauron's from whom he "learned great sorcery and knew much of the mind of Sauron; and he was more cruel than any ore." He ends by being transformed into a replica of his teacher. "Mouth of Sauron" he calls himself, a man without any name of his own, "for he himself had forgotten it." Considering the high value placed in Tolkien's Middle-earth upon real names as indices of identity—Treebeard and the whole race of dwarves refuse to reveal their names to anybody, and virtually nobody will even pronounce Sauron aloud in the Black Speech—such namelessness is the acme of total surrender. And this Mouth is the man who is Sauron's choice to be viceroy over Isengard and masticate the conquered folk after the West is won.

  Saruman is more like Sauron than he realizes. They believe in the same thing, supremacy through absolute power, but since the supremacy Saruman works for is his own he is a rival, not an ally. Also, he is a pupil of Sauron's, but at a distance, through studying his crafts in the libraries of
Gondor. Great and good at first, Saruman intended to learn them only in order to counteract them. But his fate bears out Elrond's warning: "It is perilous to study too deeply the arts of the enemy, for good or ill." Initiation graduates insensibly into imitation. Saruman's "deep and subtle" knowledge and "power over the minds of others" are appealed to and perverted by the similar qualities he finds in the mind of the enemy he studies. Before long he is trying to forge another ruling ring. After that come hypocrisy and treason. In Tolkien's estimate, the desire for knowledge can be a dangerous thing. Sauron seduces by this same Faustian thirst the elven smiths who forged the rings, and seek unsuccessfully to corrupt all the Eldar. Knowledge is not a good in itself. It is not allowed to remain neutral on Middle-earth, but is good or ill depending on the use to which it is put.

  Denethor is another wise man who is not quite wise enough. To start with, he understands that if he looks into the palantír which he secretly opens he may lose control of it to Sauron, who is the stronger. As danger closes in on Minas Tirith, however, he takes the plunge in order to spy out the enemy's plans. Even then, had he been a humbler man, he might have been saved, for Sauron cannot deal with humility. But he is one of these proud, superior mortals vain about his deep learning. With these qualities Sauron is quite at home. In the struggle of wills that ensues Denethor is overcome, but not openly, and is tricked into thinking he has won. Through editing the information he is allowed to gather, Sauron leads him to overpessimistic conclusions, despair, and eventual suicide. Gandalf divines the technique: "The knowledge which he obtained was, doubtless, often of service to him; yet the vision of the great might of Mordor that was shown to him fed the despair of his heart until it overthrew his mind." False knowledge was worse for him than none. Moreover, it was unseasoned by love. Boromir he cherished only as an image of himself. A purer brand of devotion to Faramir and to his people might have been his salvation.

  In an article written for the Tolkien Journal4 W. H.

  Auden expresses discomfort at Tolkien's portrayal of of ores as by nature a wholly evil race. The objection is well worth raising. If true it imperils the doctrine that underpins the moral structure of the epic, that every intelligent being has a will capable of choosing between good and evil. At first sight Auden's point seems well taken. Tolkien shows us ores as always cruel, quarrelsome, vile in thought and language, enemies of all the civilized races who live around them. More, he explicitly describes them as "being filled with malice, hating even their own kind" to such an extent that they developed no racial language of their own "but took what they could of other tongues and perverted it to their own liking; yet they made only brutal jargons" scarcely intelligible from one ore community to another. Nevertheless, in several places Tolkien makes it very clear that no ore, no individual of any species, and certainly no species as a whole is created evil.

  "Nothing is evil in the beginning. Even Sauron was not so," affirms Gandalf at Elrond's Council. The opposite view would be Manichaean, accepting the existence of a creative force in evil equal in power to that of the good. Tolkien firmly rejects it. When Sauron turns to evil he does so by choice, and is diminished in consequence. Evil is a diminution. The ruling Ring cannot give its wearer "more life," merely a longer continuation of the life he already has, but without its vital zest. Ores are not original creations by Morgoth. He bred them in the First Age "in mockery . . . of elves," by genetic experiments with existing creatures, says Treebeard. The creatures used are not specified. Frodo is sure that no act of genuine creation took place: "The Shadow that bred them can only mock, it cannot make: not real new things of its own. I don't think it gave life to the ores, it only ruined them and twisted them . . ." Saruman is continuing these genetic experiments and has produced a new variation (not a new species), Ores of the White Hand, larger, better fighters and able to bear the light of the sun as ordinary ores are not. Treebeard wonders: "Are they Men he has ruined, or has he blended the races of Ores and Men? That would be a black evil!" Gamling at Helm's Deep calls them "these half-ores and goblin-men that the foul craft of Saruman has bred . . ." But genetics cannot breed innately evil wills, or good ones either—only wills which can develop into one or the other as they are employed.

  The explanation of ore behavior, then, seems to be that Sauron (and Saruman) has carefully trained them to be what they are, continuing the training begun by Morgoth. Close under his thumb in Mordor, they have been educated to brutality and their social patterns set in a mold which will perpetuate it and its cognate qualities in the generations to come. They have acquired the same delight in torture that Sauron feels, and he has added a nice taste in cannibalism. Yet he seems also to have inculcated in these coarse combative creatures a firm loyalty to himself that they never question, a loyalty that would be reckoned a virtue if turned in a better direction. They have evidently been taught also that the elves are rebels— against Sauron as their rightful lord, of course. The Uruk-hai at Helm's Deep are courageous fighters, and even have achieved considerable esprit de corps. In short, there is an ore point of view about things which it is possible to understand, even to pity. The poor brutes are so plainly the toys of a mightier will than theirs. They have been conditioned to will whatever Sauron wills. "And for me," exclaims Gandalf, "I pity even his slaves." Aragorn at Helm's Deep includes them in his warning against the Fangorn huorns, which are marching to crush them, but the ores do not listen. Never in Tolkien's tale are any ores redeemed, but it would go against the grain of the whole to dismiss them as ultimately irredeemable.

  Throughout the hierarchy of life on Middle-earth consciousness extends higher, deeper, broader than it does in our world today, and with consciousness goes the power to work for good or for evil. Eagles are allies of Gandalf, whereas crows spy for Sauron and wolves are as fierce as ores on his behalf. The hearts of many trees in Mirkwood, as well as a few in Fangorn, have turned bad under his influence. Others remain healthy. Whether the malice of the Grey Willow who stupefies the hobbits in the Old Forest derives from Sauron or from natural hatred for destructive mankind is not certain, but it embraces all travelers, innocent and guilty alike. The mountain Caradhras has long been known to the dwarves as purposefully "cruel" in trying to kill wayfarers with storms and falling rocks. Aragorn comments that "many evil and unfriendly things in the world . . . yet are not in league with Sauron, but have purposes of their own. Some have been in the world longer than he." Similarly independent of the Dark Lord are the "nameless things" gnawing at the roots of the world, whom Gandalf meets far underground in his fight with the Balrog. Tolkien obviously wants to leave us with a vague sense, all the more potent because it remains vague, of the almost limitless penetration of evil into the farthest crevices of conscious life.

  By and large, though, Sauron has been able to enlist most of the evil consciousness of Middle-earth under his banner in one way or another. Tolkien's ability to invent such beings in new combinations of body and spirit seems endless. The Balrog, a "fiery shadow" sprung from the "flame of Udûn" (hell), is barely physical and can shift its shape at will. Inherited from Morgoth after the fall of Thangorodrim in the First Age, he has been used by Sauron to drive the dwarves out of Moria, and now is loosed upon Gandalf, his spiritual opposite. This Balrog (referred to by all as a Balrog) evidently is not the only one of his kind. He seems akin to Sauron himself, who, when forced out of his body by the destruction of the Ring, appears as "a vast soaring darkness . . . flickering with fire" before he is dissipated by the wind. By contrast, the Watchers of Cirith Ungol are well-nigh unliving statues of stone designed by Sauron to keep out enemies.

  He has given them, however, radarlike senses that detect Frodo and Sam, and powerful wills that the hobbits are able to break only by prayer to Elbereth before they can escape.

  Still different is the great spider Shelob, who cares nothing about either party in the War of the Ring but only about getting enough food for her insatiable paunch, whether it consist of elves, men, ores, hobbits, or her own
innumerable brood. Grossly physical though she is, "alone, swollen till the mountains could no longer hold her up and the darkness could not contain her" she is more "an evil thing in spider form" than a mere spider. She hungers to devour the minds as well as the bodies of her prey. Gollum's worship she has accepted long ago and "the darkness of her evil will" accompanies him on all his journeys thereafter, "cutting him off from light and from regret." Tolkien's language about her often takes on a symbolic tone: ". . . weaving webs of shadow, for all living things were her food, and her vomit darkness." Though Shelob is a solitary hunter, her lust to feed on the whole world differs from Sauron's only in the manner of its accomplishment. So, like the other monsters of the tale, in her particular form of unchecked appetite she is one of the many variations on the theme of evil of which Sauron is the generic type.

  Finally there are the barrow-wights. These are the spirits of dead men, unable to rest, who haunt the burial mounds of the kings and queens of the old North Kingdom. They entrap passersby and kill them. The reader may. be excused for assuming that they are the ghosts of the people whose graves they trouble, but the evidence in the text is otherwise. While Merry lies senseless on the burial slab decked out in the clothes and jewels of the king entombed there, he dreams that he is that king, who was slain by "the men of Carn Dûm" in a night attack. Bombadil reveals after his rescue of the hobbits that this attack was led by "the evil king of Carn Dûm in the Land of Angmar"—that is, by the chief of the ring-wraiths. Tom also takes for Goldberry a brooch belonging to the fair and good queen buried there whom he knew ages ago in life. Accordingly, the dead are innocent victims of treachery and are not the right ones to be barred from a place of rest or to do harm to chance travelers on the Downs. No, the wights must be the ghosts of the evil attackers from Carn Dûm—not Angmar himself, who is still alive and busy elsewhere as a ringwraith, but his followers. Their resemblance is to the dead oath-breakers whose spirits Aragorn summons at the stone of Erech to keep their broken promise of aid to Isildur and his heirs. In the latter case Tolkien is relying on the Norse warrior code, which branded an oath-breaker as the worst of criminals, foredoomed to wander after death. In the case of the barrow-wights Tolkien seems to be invoking the same punishment upon treachery under the same code.