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

by Tom Shippey

  Even though it comes from Gollum, this is good advice. For of course Aragorn and the others, including Frodo, are in their feelings of confusion and meaninglessness absolutely wrong – ‘infatuated’, ‘bewildered’, drowning in a bog of mere events, caught in a strangler’s net of wyrd. They have good apparent grounds for despair. But as it turns out (as it happens, as ‘chance’ or ‘luck’ would have it) there are things in the web of story to refute those grounds. As Gandalf points out, all Sauron and Saruman and the orcs have done between them is ‘bring Pippin and Merry with marvellous speed, and in the nick of time, to Fangorn, where otherwise they would never have come at all!’ – and so, one might say, though it is beyond Gandalf’s knowledge at the time, to rouse the Ents, overthrow Saruman, save Rohan, and free Théoden to make his decisive intervention at Minas Tirith. There are still several things one can not say: for instance, that Saruman’s treachery was accordingly a Good Thing, or that the rescue of Minas Tirith is a reward for Aragorn’s persistence. After all, if Saruman had stayed loyal things might have ended better; if Aragorn had abandoned the chase Merry and Pippin would have stirred up Fangorn just the same. What one can be absolutely sure about is that giving up does the other side’s work for them, and ruins all your own possible futures and other people’s as well. The despair of Denethor killed Théoden, as predicted by Gandalf on p. 832.18 While persistence offers no guarantees, it does give ‘luck’ a chance to operate, through unknown allies or unknown weaknesses in the opposition.

  As a working theory this is impregnable, whether considered sceptically or superstitiously. To it the entrelacements contribute a recognisable attitude towards reality. Events in the world, they say, appear chaotic and unplanned, appear so all but unmistakably. But however strong that impression is, it is a subjective one founded on the inevitably limited view of any individual. If individuals could see more widely – as we can, by virtue of the narrative structure of The Lord of the Rings – they would realise that events have a cause-and-effect logic, though there are so many causes that perhaps no one but God can ever see them all at once. The world is a Persian carpet, then, and we are ants lumbering from one thread to the other and observing that there is no pattern in the colours. That is why one of Gandalf’s favourite sayings is ‘Even the wise cannot see all ends’, and why he often demonstrates its truth himself. Thus it is ironic that he more than once offers a cold-hearted appraisal of the junior hobbits’ utility. ‘If these hobbits understood the danger’, he says to Elrond, ‘they would not dare to go.’ But they would still want to, he concludes, and their wish should outweigh their ignorance. He says to Pippin later, ‘Generous deed should not be outweighed by cold counsel’. In the end he is proved both right and wrong: Merry and Pippin between them rouse the Ents, save Faramir, kill the Ringwraith. The last deed is caused by the sheer chance of finding a dagger ‘bound round with spells for the destruction of Mordor’ in the wight’s barrow. ‘Glad would he have been to know its fate who wrought it slowly long ago’, comments the narrator; and his comment shows that the ancient smith was not glad, did not know, was condemned to defeat and death and oblivion in the barrows. Still, even after thousands of years hope should not be lost: nor relied on.

  It is Pippin too who looks in the palantír and so misleads Sauron into thinking Saruman may have the Ring. This may have helped draw on the Enemy’s hasty stroke, thinks Gandalf on p. 797. More important is the fact that Aragorn has the stone available to him, and that Sauron (having seen a hobbit in the same stone) thinks Aragorn also has the Ring: it is because Aragorn showed himself to Sauron in the palantír that Sauron neglects his guard. ‘The Eye turned inward, pondering tidings of doubt and danger: a bright sword, and a stern and kingly face it saw’ (p. 902). But once more ironically, it is what the Eye does not see that matters. The bright sword and kingly face turn out not to be critical. It is the two ants creeping along the Ephel Dúath who are going to change reality. Indeed Frodo and Sam provide perhaps the strongest effects of the entrelacement. Their bewilderments, infatuations, sense of being lost and abandoned, are much stronger than those of Aragorn or Gimli or anyone else in the more active half of the story. But by the time we come to following their strand along we know that these are not true. ‘All my choices have proved ill’, says Frodo within a couple of pages of the start of his quest. But his words echo unmistakably those of Aragorn nearly two hundred pages earlier; and we know Aragorn was wrong. What counts, then, is that Frodo should go on choosing. We perceive his doubt and weariness simultaneously as a natural reaction to circumstances, and as a temptation, even a phantasm or illusion of the Dark Tower. Evil works, we realise, by sapping the will with over-complication. Like ‘the Shadow’, this is in fiction an external force with physical effects of which sensitive characters like Legolas can be aware; it appeals to a recognition of truth outside fiction, however, in its buried statements that clouds have silver linings, that fortune favours the brave, that even in reality things are not always as they seem.

  There is indeed a corpus of proverbs scattered through The Lord of the Rings, which add weight to the implications of interlace. ‘Oft the unbidden guest proves the best company’, says Éomer, and later ‘Twice blessed is hope unlooked-for’. ‘Where will wants not, a way opens’, says his sister, more solemnly but also more familiarly. ‘Oft hope is born, when all is forlorn’, says Legolas. He, Aragorn and Théoden also state proverbs about freshness, with respectively ‘Rede oft is found at the rising of the sun’, ‘None knows what the new day shall bring him’, and ‘In the morning counsels are best …’ Legolas adds a spatial metaphor with his ‘Few can foresee whither their road will lead them …’ It should be noted that most of these are neutral on the optimism / pessimism scale, while some of the characters’ proverbs approach the meaningless. ‘Strange are the turns of fortune’, says Gandalf (which could be good or bad depending on context), and ‘Hope oft deceives’, says Éomer (also so true as to be non-predictive). Still, most of those quoted so far are real proverbs as the place-names of the Shire are real place-names, and they have a similar function: to draw us in, to make connections between experience inside and outside the story. Within this continuum, however, other proverbs are planted, sounding much the same as the others but more original and so closer to Tolkien’s own intention. ‘Often does hatred hurt itself, says Gandalf; ‘Oft evil will shall evil mar’, says Théoden; ‘The hasty stroke goes oft astray’, says Aragorn; ‘A traitor may betray himself, Gandalf again. It takes the action of the whole of The Lord of the Rings to make these ring true and there is a vein of proverbial wisdom (about God being on the side of the big battalions) which would utterly deny them. These invented sayings show in miniature the ‘contrivance’ of which the trilogy has often been accused. Only a fool, though, would deny that the contrivances have a point; only a very careless reader would think that the entrelacements of this romance are purely for variety, and have nothing to say about ‘the fundamental character of reality’ at all.

  Just allegory and large symbolism

  Tolkien’s proverbs edge, on the whole, towards the archaic. So does his use of omens and prophecies – a feature of The Lord of the Rings which may furthermore seem to deny the idea of free will being left intact by the forces of providence. Galadriel seems to know in advance that Aragorn will take the Paths of the Dead, Aragorn to know that he and Éomer will meet again, ‘though all the hosts of Mordor should stand between’. Someone (or something) foreknew that the Ringwraith would not fall ‘by the hand of man’. These cross-temporal flashes suggest, perhaps, that some things are bound to happen regardless of what people do or choose. Yet that would clearly be a false conclusion. The words of prophecies could be fulfilled after all in many different ways. We are left always at liberty to suppose that Aragorn and Éomer could have met once more as prisoners, say, that the Grey Company could have quailed and turned back. If Merry had failed to stab the Ringwraith, it might have died aeons later at the hands of some other woman, hobbit,
elf-hero. As Galadriel says of her Mirror (p. 354): it ‘shows many things, and not all have yet come to pass. Some never come to be, unless those that behold the visions turn aside from their path to prevent them.’ She articulates a theory of compromise between fate and free will once more at least a millennium old: in the Solomon and Saturn poem Saturn asks which will be the stronger, wyrd ge warnung, ‘fated events or foresight’, and Solomon tells him that ‘Fate is hard to alter … And nevertheless an intelligent man can moderate all the things that fate causes, as long as he is clear in his mind’. It is important to realise though, that antiquarian as Tolkien’s motives often were,19 and ‘pre-scientific’ as the opinions of Galadriel and Solomon seem, what Tolkien was writing about is still in a way a live issue. ‘Every bullet has his billet’ is a distinctively modern saying, first recorded in that form in 1765, and in use up to the present day to indicate that sometimes no precautions work; yet saying the proverb, and believing it, probably never stopped anyone taking cover. ‘God helps those who help themselves’, to repeat a proverb mentioned earlier. Tolkien in other words never lost his belief in the reality and continuity, not only of language and of history, but of human nature and of some intellectual problems.

  This should be kept in mind when considering the much vexed question of allegory, or symbolism, in The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien’s opinions here are clear only up to a point. As is well known, he wrote in the ‘Foreword’ to the second edition: ‘I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence.’ He went on, though: ‘I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse “applicability” with “allegory”; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.’ Some relation between fiction and fact might be perceived, then; and ‘The Scouring of the Shire’ had ‘some basis in experience’ though no ‘contemporary political reference whatsoever’, not even to Britain’s Socialist ‘austerity’ government of 1945–50. As Tolkien wrote of Beowulf, it was important to preserve a balance, to see that the ‘large symbolism is near the surface, but … does not break through, nor become allegory’. ‘Allegory’ would after all imply, to Tolkien (see above here and here), that The Lord of the Rings had only one meaning, which would have to remain constant all the way through; he toyed contemptuously with the notion in the ‘Foreword’ as he sketched out a plan for his work as a real allegory with the Ring itself as President Truman’s atomic bomb.20 ‘Large symbolism’, however, should not be a matter of one imposed diagram, but of repeated offered hints. The hints would work only if they were true both in fact and in fiction. History, thought Tolkien, was varied in its applicability. But if you understood it properly, you saw it repeating itself.

  Some of Tolkien’s hints have been glanced at already. The Riders of Rohan, and the Rangers of Gondor, will not offer the excuse that they were ‘Only obeying orders’; one cannot avoid the contrast with the Nazis. When Gandalf tells Frodo about the Ring, Frodo replies ‘I wish it need not have happened in my time’, but Gandalf reproves him: ‘So do I … and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide’ (p. 50). The rebuke is deserved by Frodo, but also by Neville Chamberlain with his now infamous promise that he brought ‘peace in our time’.21 Elrond, on p. 237, has learnt better. He remembers a moment when ‘the Elves deemed that evil was ended for ever’ but knows that ‘it was not so’. Tolkien himself fought in ‘the war to end all wars’, but saw his sons fighting in the one after that. Other ironies are not hard to discover. As Gandalf and Pippin ride from the Anórien towards Minas Tirith, they find their way blocked by men building a wall (p. 732). It is Denethor’s insistence on defending this (p. 798) that nearly kills Faramir, and all it does in practice is to obstruct the arrival of the Rohirrim (p. 819) by which time it is already a ‘ruin’, for all the ‘labour’ wasted on it at the start. Men of Tolkien’s generation could hardly avoid thinking of the Maginot Line. Gandalf’s advice, ‘But leave your trowels and sharpen your swords!’, has more than an immediate relevance. The hint is unmistakable, as are others in the trilogy, of Vichyism and quislings, of puppet governments and demilitarised zones. How well do they hang together, though? Did Tolkien go on from the exploitation of occasional scenes to the manipulation of plot, the creation of recognisably symbolic characters, the thing Alfred Duggan the TLS reviewer asked for so plaintively, ‘a clear message for the modern world’? Of course Tolkien would have scorned ‘message’ as much as ‘modern’. Still, he created two characters in The Lord of the Rings of particular suggestiveness, both of them originally on the right side but seduced or corroded by evil, and so especially likely to have analogues in the real world: these are Denethor and Saruman, each of them seen faintly satirically, almost politically.

  To take the more obvious example first, Saruman shows many signs of being equatable with industrialism, or technology. His very name means something of the sort. Searu in Old English (the West Saxon form of Mercian *saru) means ‘Device, design, contrivance, art’. Bosworth-Toller’s Dictionary says cautiously that often you cannot tell ‘whether the word is used with a good or with a bad meaning’. When Beowulf walks into Hrothgar’s hall the poet says appreciatively that ‘on him his armour shone, the cunning net (searo-net) sewed by the crafts (orþancum) of the smith’. Jewellers are searo-cræftig, and wizards snottor searu-þancum, ‘wise in cunning thoughts’. The word stretches from wisdom to plot and treachery, though. Beowulf denies he ever sought out searo-niþas, ‘cunning malices’, Grendel’s corpse-holding glove is searo-bendum fœst, ‘fixed with cunning bands’. The word implies cleverness, but is nearly always linked with metal: iron in armour and clasps, but also silver and gold. The dragon’s treasure is a searu-gimma geþræc, ‘a heap of cunning jewels’, in the Riming Poem the poet says obscurely sinc searwade, ‘treasure played the traitor’. That means ‘left its possessor’, suggest Messrs Bosworth and Toller. To Tolkien, with his theory of dragonish ‘bewilderment’, it meant more likely ‘stayed with its possessor’, driving him insidiously to greed and cunning.

  These cruxes all form part of Saruman’s character. He is learned, but his learning tends to the practical. ‘He has a mind of metal and wheels’, says Fangorn. His orcs use a kind of gunpowder at Helm’s Deep (p. 525); thirty pages later the Ents meet at Isengard, or ‘Irontown’, a kind of napalm – perhaps one should say with closer reference to Tolkien’s own experience, a Flammenwerfer. The implication is that Saruman has been led from ethically neutral researches into the kind of wanton pollution and love of dirt we see in ‘The Scouring of the Shire’ by something corrupting in the love of machines or in the very desire for control over the natural world. And for this there is a real-world connection, for Tolkien’s own childhood image of industrial ugliness in the midst of natural beauty was Sarehole Mill, with its literally bone-grinding owner ‘the White Ogre’, see Biography p. 36. The Oxford Dictionary of English Place-Names takes the first element of this place to be a personal name Searu, or perhaps the word ‘sere, withered’; Tolkien would automatically have corrected to Mercian Saru, but might well have seen all the proposed meanings as relevant, ‘grey and withered’, but also ‘cunning and mechanical’. It is interesting, too, that Saruman’s Orc-men call him ‘Sharkey’ or ‘Old Man’. To a medievalist the name might well suggest the ‘Old Man of the Mountains’ or leader of the Assassins as described in Mandeville’s Travels. ‘Old Man’ is simply Arabic shaikh (cp. Orkish sharkú). And Mandeville’s Old Man ruled, of course, by feeding his followers hashish and deluding them with dreams of paradise. So, we might think, ‘cunning man’, or ‘machine man’, or ‘technological man’, keeps a Utopian carrot dangling in front of our noses, of a world of leisure and convenience where each new mill grinds faster than the one before. But as Ted Sandyman ought to have realised, ‘you’ve got to have grist before you can grind�
�; machine-masters end up machine-minders, and all for nothing, or rather for an insidious logic of expansion.

  This may not be a totally convincing critique of modern society, but it has clear modern relevance and is more than mere dislike. There is something suggestive also in Saruman’s notorious ‘voice’, which always seems ‘wise and reasonable’, and wakes desire in others ‘by swift agreement to seem wise themselves’. Gandalf’s harshness represents denial of Utopias and insistence that nothing comes free. Even Lotho ‘Pimple’, Frodo’s relative, has a place in the argument because he is such an obvious Gradgrind – greedy and bossy to begin with, but staying within the law till his manipulators take over, to jail his mother, kill him and eat him too (if we can believe the hints about Gríma Wormtongue). Jeremy Bentham to Victorian capitalists? Old Bolshevik to new Stalinist? The progression is familiar enough, and it adds another modern dimension to Middle-earth or rather a timeless one, for though in the modern age we give Saruman a modern ‘applicability’, his name, and the evident uncertainty even in Anglo-Saxon times over mechanical cleverness and ‘machinations’, shows that his meaning was ancient too.