The Road to Middle-Earth: How J. R. R. Tolkien Created a New Mythology

by Tom Shippey

  Actually all the doubts just mentioned can be cleared up by the use of one word, though it is a word never used in The Lord of the Rings. The Ring is ‘addictive’. All readers probably assimilate Gollum early on to the now-familiar image of a ‘drug-addict’, craving desperately for a ‘fix’ even though he knows it will kill him. For the same reason they understand why Gandalf tells Frodo not to use the Ring (use always causes addiction); why Sam, Bilbo and Frodo nevertheless survive their use of it (addiction in early stages is curable); why Boromir succumbs to the Ring without handling it (use has to be preceded by desire); and why Faramir can shrug it off (a wise person is capable of stifling the desire to become addicted, though no wisdom will stifle addiction once contracted). As for the scene in the Sammath Naur, it is even more Providential than it looks. What Gandalf said to Frodo at the start, we should realise, was that he might be able to give the Ring away or destroy it, though only with a struggle; he could not however be made to want to do so (except by some kind of dangerous thought-control). In the end Frodo does want to destroy the Ring but has not the strength. Gollum is accordingly necessary after all – a striking irony. Extending the parallel with heroin one may say that addicts can be cured by the use of external force, and often they have to be, though their co-operation certainly helps. To expect them to break their syringes and throw away their drugs by will-power alone, though, is to confuse an addiction, which is physical, with a habit, which is moral. In this aspect of the Ring as in others Tolkien is totally consistent.

  He is, however, once again being distinctively modern. The phrase ‘drug addict’ is not recorded by the OED till 1920; probably the concept was created by the synthesis of heroin in 1898. As for the term ‘addictive’, by some oversight the full OED did not recognise its existence till after Tolkien’s death. Still, during Tolkien’s lifetime the words and the realities behind them were becoming more and more familiar, bringing with them, one should note, entirely new ideas about the nature and limitations of human will. As with ‘power corrupting’, Tolkien was during the 1930s and 1940s reacting quite evidently to the issues of his time. These deliberate modernities should clear him of any charge of merely insulated ‘ivory tower’ escapism. They ought to suggest also that he thought more deeply than his critics have ever recognised about just those issues he is commonly alleged to ignore: the processes of temptation, the complex nature of good and evil, the relationship between reality and our fallible perception of it. Nothing can prevent people from saying that the answers he gave were not ‘adult’ or ‘fundamental’, but it should be obvious that such adjectives are as culture-biased as Saruman’s ‘real’: by themselves they express only the prejudices of the user. Tolkien was, in short, trying to make Middle-earth say something, as well as conducting his readers on a tour of it. Decision on whether the message is right or wrong should at least come after working out what the message is. But proper understanding of that, as often, depends on comparing ancient things and modern ones, checking old texts against new understandings, and against timeless realities.

  Views of evil: Boethian and Manichaean

  A good way to understand The Lord of the Rings in its full complexity is to see it as an attempt to reconcile two views of evil, both old, both authoritative, both living, each seemingly contradicted by the other. One of these is in essence the orthodox Christian one, expounded by St Augustine and then by Catholic and Protestant teaching alike, but finding its clearest expression in a book which does not mention Christ at all: Boethius’s De Consolatione Philosophiae, a short tract written c. AD 522–5 by a Roman senator shortly before his execution by *Thiudoreiks (or Theodoric), king of the Goths. This says that there is no such thing as evil: ‘evil is nothing’, is the absence of good, is possibly even an unappreciated good – Omnem bonam prorsus esse fortunam, wrote Boethius, ‘all fortune is certainly good’. Corollaries of this belief are, that evil cannot itself create, that it was not in itself created (but sprang from a voluntary exercise of free will by Satan, Adam and Eve, to separate themselves from God), that it will in the long run be annulled or eliminated, as the Fall of Man was redressed by the Incarnation and Death of Christ. Views like these are strongly present in The Lord of the Rings. Even in Mordor Frodo asserts that ‘the Shadow … can only mock, it cannot make: not real new things of its own’ (p. 893), and Fangorn has already corroborated him, ‘Trolls are only counterfeits, made by the Enemy in the Great Darkness, in mockery of Ents, as Orcs were of Elves’ (p. 474). What the difference is between a real thing and a ‘counterfeit’, one cannot tell, but anyway the idea of perversion as opposed to creation comes over. It goes with Elrond’s firm statement even earlier that ‘nothing is evil in the beginning. Even Sauron was not so’ (p. 261). On these ultimate points Tolkien was not prepared to compromise.

  Still, there is an alternative tradition in Western thought, one which has never become ‘official’ but which nevertheless arises spontaneously from experience. This says that while it may be all very well to make philosophical statements about evil, evil nevertheless is real, and not merely an absence; and what’s more it can be resisted, and what’s more still, not resisting it (in the belief that one day Omnipotence will cure all ills) is a dereliction of duty. The danger of this opinion is that it tends towards Manichaeanism, the heresy which says that Good and Evil are equal and opposite and the universe is a battlefield; however the Inklings may have had a certain tolerance for that (see C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, Book 2, section 2). Furthermore one can imagine statements about the nature of evil which would go past Boethius but stop short of Manichaeus. Tolkien perhaps found such opinions in a work he knew well, King Alfred the Great’s personal translation of Boethius into Old English.

  This is a remarkable book, mainly because while King Alfred showed a decent regard for the philosopher he was translating, he was not too modest to add bits of his own. He had moreover, unlike Boethius, had the experience of seeing what Viking pirates did to his defenceless subjects; and again unlike Boethius had taken such drastic measures against evil as hanging Viking prisoners, and rebellious monks, and in all probability cutting the throats of any wounded pirates so unlucky as to be left on the battlefield. All this did not stop Alfred from being a Christian king; indeed some of his recorded behaviour seems almost Quixotically forgiving. Nevertheless his career reveals the strong point of a ‘heroic’ view of evil, the weak point of a Boethian one: if you regard evil as something internal, to be pitied, more harmful to the malefactor than the victim, you may be philosophically consistent but you may also be exposing others to sacrifices to which they have not consented (like being murdered by Viking ravagers or, as The Lord of the Rings was being written, being herded into gas-chambers). In the 1930s and 1940s Boethius was especially hard to believe. Still, his view could not just be set aside.

  Tolkien’s way of presenting this philosophical duality was through the Ring. It seems in several ways inconsistent. For one thing it is notoriously elastic, and not entirely passive. It ‘betrayed’ Isildur to the arrows of the orcs; it ‘abandoned’ Gollum, says Gandalf, in response to the ‘dark thought from Mirkwood’ of its master; it all but betrays Frodo in the Prancing Pony when it slips on to his finger and proves his invisibility to the spies for the Nazgûl then present. ‘Perhaps it had tried to reveal itself in response to some wish or command that was felt in the room’, thinks Frodo, and he is clearly right. For all that it remains an object which cannot move itself or save itself from destruction. It has to work through the agency of its possessors, and especially by picking out the weak points of their characters – possessiveness in Bilbo, fear in Frodo, patriotism in Boromir, pity in Gandalf. When Frodo passes it to Gandalf so that its identity can be confirmed, ‘It felt suddenly very heavy, as if either it or Frodo himself was in some way reluctant for Gandalf to touch it’ (p. 48, my italics). Maybe the Ring is magically conscious of Gandalf’s power: maybe, though, Frodo is already afraid that he will lose it. These two possible views of the Ri
ng are kept up throughout the three volumes: sentient creature, or psychic amplifier. They correspond respectively to the ‘heroic’ view of evil as something external to be resisted and the Boethian opinion that evil is essentially internal, psychological, negative.

  The point is repeated in several scenes of temptation. Frodo puts on the Ring six times during The Lord of the Rings: once in the house of Tom Bombadil (which does not seem to count), once by accident in the Prancing Pony, once on Weathertop, twice on Amon Hen, once in the final scene in the Sammath Naur. On several other occasions he feels an urge to, most strongly in the valley below Minas Morgul, as the Ringwraith leads out his army. Four of these scenes at least are highly significant. Thus on Amon Hen Frodo puts on the Ring, contrary to Gandalf’s injunction, simply to escape from Boromir, and the narrator ratifies his decision: ‘There was only one thing to do’. He keeps it on, though, goes to the summit of Amon Hen and sits on the Seat of Seeing. There the Eye of Sauron becomes aware of him and leaps towards him like a searchlight:

  Very soon it would nail him down, know just exactly where he was. Amon Lhaw it touched. It glanced upon Tol Brandir – he threw himself from the seat, crouching, covering his head with his grey hood.

  He heard himself crying out: Never, Never! Or was it: Verily I come, I come to you? He could not tell. Then as a flash from some other point of power there came to his mind another thought: Take it off! Take it off! Fool, take it off! Take off the Ring!

  The two powers strove in him. For a moment, perfectly balanced between their piercing points, he writhed, tormented. Suddenly he was aware of himself again. Frodo, neither the Voice nor the Eye: free to choose, and with one remaining instant in which to do so. He took the Ring off his finger. (p. 392)

  This is a scene which has puzzled and irritated critics. Dr C. N. Manlove writes ‘the Voice’ off as ‘providential’, and clearly thinks it one more example of the ‘biased fortune’ which in his opinion makes it impossible to take the story seriously. Actually the Voice is Gandalf’s, as we might have guessed from its asperity, and as is anyway confirmed on p. 484: it may seem fair enough to let a wizard oppose a necromancer. More remarkable is the opposition between Never! and I come to you. Is this a struggle inside Frodo’s soul, between his conscious will and his unconscious wickedness (the sort of wickedness which might earlier have made him reluctant to hand over the Ring to Gandalf)? Or is I come to you the voice of the Ring itself – or even a projection from the voice of the Enemy, saying to Frodo what he wants to hear, putting words in the mouth but not in the heart, creating ugly fictions as he does later with the phantasmal corpses of the Dead Marshes? Either view is possible. Both are suggested. Evil may accordingly be an inner temptation or an external power.

  Similar uncertainty dramatises other scenes when Frodo puts on the Ring, or tries to, or is ordered to. In the valley of Minas Morgul the Ringwraith sends out a command for him to put it on, but Frodo finds no response to it in his own will, feeling only ‘the beating upon him of a great power from outside’. The power moves his hand, as if by magnetism, but he forces it back, to touch the phial of Galadriel and be momentarily relieved. Perhaps the same thing happened to him on Weathertop, where he put the Ring on as the Ringwraiths closed in, but the words used there are ‘temptation’ and ‘desire’ – ‘his terror was swallowed up in a sudden temptation to put on the Ring. The desire to do this laid hold of him, and he could think of nothing else.’ He had felt a similar urge in the Barrow, as the wight’s fingers came towards him, and there the temptation offered was to abandon his friends and use the Ring to escape. On Weathertop we are told he had no such conscious and immoral thought. Nevertheless it seems that there the external power is abetted by some inner weakness, some potentially wicked impulse towards the wrong side. In the chambers of Sammath Naur one’s judgement must also be suspended. Frodo makes a clear and active statement of his own evil intention: ‘I will not do this deed. The Ring is mine!’ But at the same time we have been told that even the phial of Galadriel loses its virtue on Mount Doom, for there Frodo is at ‘the heart of the realm of Sauron … all other powers were here subdued’. Are Frodo’s will, and his virtue, among those powers? To say so would be Manichaean. It would deny that men are responsible for their actions, make evil into a positive force. On the other hand to put the whole blame on Frodo would seem (to use a distinctively English ethical term) ‘unfair’; if he had been an entirely wicked person he would never have reached the Sammath Naur in the first place. There seems to be a mixed judgement on him. Frodo is saved from his sin by his own earlier repeated acts of forgiveness to Gollum, but in a sense punished by the loss of his finger. ‘If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out …’ As it happens the quotation that ran in Tolkien’s mind when he considered this scene very much implies the dual nature of wickedness, but comes from the Lord’s Prayer: ‘And lead us not into temptation; but deliver us from evil.’* Succumbing to temptation is our business, one might paraphrase, but delivering us from evil is God’s. As for the questions of how far responsibility is to be allocated between us and our tempters, how much temptation human beings can ‘reasonably’ be expected to stand – these are obviously not to be answered by mere mortals. Tolkien saw the problem of evil in books as in realities, and he told his story at least in part to dramatise that problem; he did not however claim to know the answer to it.

  One can see, then, a philosophical crux in the very nature of the Ring, one that was certainly apparent and deeply interesting to Tolkien, and one which he furthermore expressed with great care and deliberation. This is not important just for Frodo. The uncertainty over evil in a way dominates the entire structure of The Lord of the Rings. All the characters would find decisions much easier if evil were unquestionably either just Boethian or else just Manichaean. If evil were only the absence of good, for instance, then the Ring could never be anything other than a psychic amplifier; it would not ‘betray’ its possessors, and all they would need do is put it aside and think pure thoughts. In Middle-earth we are assured that would be fatal. However if evil were merely a hateful and external power without echo in the hearts of the good, then someone might have to take the Ring to the Cracks of Doom, but it need not be Frodo: Gandalf could be trusted with it, while whoever went would have only to distrust his enemies, not his friends and not himself. As it is the nature of the Ring is integral to the story.

  The story also repeatedly reflects back on the nature of temptation and of the Ring. When Gandalf says to Frodo of his wound on Weathertop, ‘your heart was not touched, and only your shoulder was pierced; and that was because you resisted to the last’, he may be making a moral statement (Frodo was rewarded) or a practical one (he dodged, called out, struck back, put off the Ringwraith’s aim). When he says of Bilbo that he gave up the Ring ‘of his own accord: an important point’, he may be saying only that Bilbo can’t have become too badly addicted, or more moralistically that Bilbo’s good impulse will help his cure. When Glóin describes the dwarves’ urge to revisit Moria we cannot be sure whether this is the prompting of Sauron from outside or dwarvish greed and ambition from inside. All one need say is that this is how things often are. Maybe all sins need some combination of external prompting and inner weakness. At any rate, on the level of narrative one can say that The Lord of the Rings is neither a saint’s life, all about temptation, nor a complicated wargame, all about tactics. It would be a much lesser work if it had swerved towards either extreme.

  Conceptions of evil: shadows and wraiths

  One word which for Tolkien expressed this distinctive image of evil was ‘shadow’. Do shadows exist or not? It is an ancient opinion that they do and they don’t. In the Old English poem Solomon and Saturn II* the pagan Saturn asks the Christian Solomon (he is a Christian in this text) ‘what things were that were not?’ The answer is oblique, but it contains the word besceadeð, ‘shadows’. Shadows are the absence of light and so don’t exist in themselves, but they are still visible and palpable just as if th
ey did. That is exactly Tolkien’s view of evil. Accordingly Mordor is ‘Black-Land’, ‘where the shadows lie’, or even more ominously ‘where the shadows are’ (my italics), Aragorn reports that ‘Gandalf the Grey fell into shadow’, Gandalf himself says that if his side loses ‘many lands will pass under the shadow’. At times ‘the Shadow’ becomes a personification of Sauron, as in Frodo’s remark about mocking and making quoted earlier, at times it seems no more than cloud and mirk, as when the Riders’ hearts ‘quailed under the shadow’. At times one does not know what to think: Balin goes off to Moria and disaster after ‘a shadow of disquiet’ fell upon the dwarves, and when Glóin says this it appears only a metaphor for mundane discontent. It is an ominous metaphor, though. Maybe the ‘shadow’ was a Mordor-spell, maybe Balin simultaneously fell and was pushed. In such phrases one sees a characteristic Tolkienian strength: his ideas were often paradoxical and had deep intellectual roots, but they appealed at the same time to simple things and to everyday experience. Tolkien could be learned and practical at once, a style common enough in Old English but (he probably reflected) less and less so as the Norman Conquest and the Renaissance wore on, seeing to it that ‘education’ meant increasingly ‘education in Latin’ and the creation of a distinctive literary caste.