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

by Tom Shippey

  Less easy to explain are scenes which add complexity to a plot which (as the script doctor no doubt said) has quite enough movement in it already. The first substantial one of these occurs near the middle of the film of The Two Towers. Aragorn and Théoden are withdrawing towards Helm’s Deep, when their column is attached by Orc Warg-riders. This is itself an addition to the original text, but one has to admit that for Tolkien to mention Warg-riders and then never foreground them was an intolerable provocation to any movie-maker. But as the attack is beaten off, Aragorn falls over a cliff and into a river, where he lies as if dead. He is then called back from death, seemingly, by a vision of Arwen and by the attentions of his horse, Brego (see JTT 34, ‘The Wolves of Isengard’, and 37, ‘The Grace of the Valar’), after which he returns to Helm’s Deep and the action continues as before. Why build in what seems to be a narrative digression, a zig-zag? One motive must be to find, once more, a role for Arwen. Just as he is brought back to life by love of her, so she turns back to share his fate and that of Middle-earth – and that means, to die – for love of him (JTT 38, ‘Arwen’s Fate’). Her decision furthermore is echoed by the decision of her father Elrond to abandon his fainéant role and dispatch a surprisingly well-drilled Elvish army to the rescue of Helm’s Deep, another addition to the original. I would suggest that a second motivation for this set of changes lies in the different politico-military expectations of a 21st century audience. Tolkien’s English contemporaries could accept without trouble the idea that the forces of evil might just be stronger than those of good: it was part of their real-world experience. After sixty years of almost unchallenged military superiority, 21st century American viewers need another and less matter-of-fact explanation for failure, and it is given as disunity and despair. Jackson presents Théoden, not making a tactical withdrawal, but refusing to fight out of a kind of disillusionment. ‘The old alliances are dead’, he says, ‘we are alone’ (JTT 43, ‘Aragorn’s Return’). No help will come from Gondor (Tolkien’s Théoden had not expected any), no help from the Elves (in Tolkien, the Riders do not even know quite what Elves are). There is indeed a slightly Churchillian suggestion in all this, with Théoden saying in the same scene, ‘If there is to be an end, I would have them make such an end as is worthy of remembrance’, much like Churchill’s famous ‘finest hour’ speech of 1940. But the sense of having been abandoned is set up, of course, only to be reversed, as the Elvish army turns up to honour the Old Alliance and man the walls of the Hornburg. Jackson’s version insists that the source of weakness is disunity, and Aragorn and Arwen are given an expanded role as the focus of union, reinforcing Elrond’s words much earlier, ‘You will unite, or you will fall’ (JFR 27, ‘The Council of Elrond’). This, perhaps, is the main justification for the whole Aragorn-revival digression. It is there to show that ‘there is always hope’ (Aragorn to the boy Haleth son of Háma, JTT 48, ‘The Host of the Eldar’), that Théoden is wrong to think he has been abandoned5. The movie has been affected, one might say, by close on sixty years of NATO.

  An even more marked plot-shift centres on Faramir. As everyone who has read Tolkien will remember, Faramir has every opportunity to strip Frodo of the Ring, about which he knows a great deal even before Sam’s blundering admission, but rejects the temptation. Jackson has him succumb to it, declare ‘the Ring will go to Gondor’, and march Frodo, Sam and Gollum off to Gondor as prisoners. In Jackson’s version, Faramir intends to hand the Ring over to his father as ‘a mighty gift’ (JTT 57, ‘The Nazgûl Attack’) – and the phrase is indeed Tolkien’s, but in Tolkien it is said not by Faramir deciding to seize the Ring but by Denethor, rebuking him for letting it go (LOTR, p. 795). This digression too makes no real difference in the end, as Faramir is persuaded, seemingly by Sam, into letting the Ring and the hobbits go back into Mordor (and indeed anything else would have altered the plot terminally). So why introduce this second apparently unnecessary complication? One reason may well be to form a connection with the refashioning of Denethor in the third movie, which turns him into a thoroughly unpleasant character. It is true that even in Tolkien Denethor is cold, proud, ambitious, and misguided. It is his decision to defend the Rammas Echor, the wall which Gandalf thinks to be wasted labour, and this decision all but costs Faramir his life. It was his decision also to send Boromir to Rivendell rather than his brother, although the prophetic dream was clearly meant for the latter. It was this decision which meant that Faramir was the one to encounter the hobbits in Ithilien, as Faramir angrily reminds his father, but Denethor refuses to take responsibility. Nevertheless, and in spite of his other disastrous errors, it is possible to feel a certain sympathy for Tolkien’s Denethor: he makes his mistakes for Gondor. One cannot say the same of Jackson’s Denethor. One of the more blatant uses of cinematic suggestion is the scene in the third movie in which Denethor, having sent his son out to fight, sits in his hall and gobbles a meal, tearing meat apart with his hands and munching till juice runs down his chin. He is made to look greedy, self-indulgent, the epitome of the ‘château general’ who sends men to their deaths while living himself in style and comfort. And in a repeat of the ‘disunion’ motif, he refuses to light the beacons to summon Rohan, till Pippin does so at Gandalf’s direction – Tolkien’s Denethor had lit the beacons and sent out the errand-riders before ever they arrived, see LOTR, p. 748.

  What the revised Faramir and Denethor interplay does is generate a theme particularly popular in recent (American) film, that of the son trying desperately to gain the love of his father, and of the father rejecting (till too late) the love of his son. It also appeals to American taste by making Denethor stand for old-world arrogance and hierarchy, while Faramir is converted from his obedience to his father by the intervention of the lower-class figure of Sam. What happens is that Sam, having dragged Frodo back from the winged Nazgûl, is given a long speech, transposed from its original place on the Stairs of Cirith Ungol, on ‘the great stories’ and the heroes of old. ‘They kept going because they were holding on to something’, he tells Frodo, because ‘there’s some good in this world, and it’s worth fighting for’ (JTT 60, ‘The Tales that Really Mattered’). His words are given total authority by being presented as a voice-over to images of victory at Helm’s Deep and at Isengard, of which Sam at that moment knows nothing. For all his rustic accent, he has become a prophet, a spokesman for the movie’s philosophic core, and Faramir, having overheard Sam talking to Frodo, is made to recognise this by giving way and changing his mind about the Ring.

  The sequence indeed shows two general tendencies in the Jackson films, which I would label rather clumsily as ‘democratisation’ and ‘emotionalisation’. One sees the former in the liking for enlarging the roles of relatively minor characters: just as Sam’s stout heart converts Faramir, so Pippin’s cunning diversion of Treebeard through the wasted groves near Orthanc converts Treebeard, in Jackson’s version only, from neutrality to decision (JTT 54, ‘Master Peregrin’s Plan’ and 56, ‘The Last March of the Ents’). Meanwhile, the best example of the latter must be the way in which Jackson turns the journey of Gollum, Frodo, and Sam into a ‘triangle’ situation, in which Gollum (or rather Sméagol) competes with Sam for Frodo’s love – a sequence which includes Gollum’s trickery over the lembas and leads to Frodo actually dismissing Sam on the Stairs of Cirith Ungol. The Jackson handling of Gollum/Sméagol is masterful all through, with an especially good and original scene in which Sméagol argues with and exorcises his alter ego Gollum (JTT 29, ‘Gollum and Sméagol', only for Gollum to come back after the seeming betrayal at Henneth Annûn (JTT 42, ‘The Forbidden Pool'). Jackson has a countervailing tendency, one might note, to iron out merely tactical complications, like the conflicting motives of the three groups of Orcs who capture Merry and Pippin, Uglúk’s Isengarders, Gríshnakh’s Mordor-orcs, and the ‘mountain-maggots’ from Moria. He makes motivation more understandable (for a 21st-century audience) in terms of love given and love refused, faint-heartedness and mistaken loyalty.

/>   One might say that there are no neutrals in Jackson’s vision, or that those who wish to remain neutral, like Théoden, or the Ents, or the Elves turning their backs on Middle-earth, are made to see the error of their ways. Jackson is also quicker than Tolkien to identify evil without qualification, and as a purely outside force (a failing of which Tolkien has often, but wrongly, been accused). In the opening voice-over we are told that after the battle of Dagorlad, Isildur had ‘this one chance to destroy evil for ever’ (JFR 1, ‘Prologue: One Ring to Rule Them All’). For ever? When Tolkien uses the phrase, it is marked immediately as mistaken. Elrond says he remembers the day ‘when Thangorodrim was broken, and the Elves deemed that evil was ended for ever, and it was not so’ (LOTR, p. 237, my emphasis), but there is no such qualification from Jackson. Jackson also has Elrond say to Gandalf that because of Isildur’s error ‘evil was allowed to endure’ (JFR 24, ‘The Fate of the Ring'), but Tolkien’s wise ones, I am sure, would be conscious that evil is always latent, and will exist whether humans and Elves allow it to or not. There is the kernel here of a serious challenge to Tolkien’s view of the world, with its insistence on the fallen nature even of the best, and its conviction that while victories are always worthwhile, they are also always temporary. And this could, at last, be a problem not created by any failure to perceive ‘the core of the original', but a grave and genuine difference between two different media, and their respective ‘canons of narrative art'.

  I come now to a matter which I have tried to elucidate before, in the section on ‘The ethics of interlace’, and again in my later book Author of the Century, pp. 172–73. Tolkien, however, is an author one can never quite get to the bottom of, and viewing the Jackson films has once again generated a thought that had previously escaped me. This is that just as the complex structure of the middle sections of The Lord of the Rings is there to demonstrate the characters’ natural feelings of ‘bewilderment', in two senses, the old, literal, and perfectly true sense of being ‘lost in the Wild', and the modern, metaphorical, and avoidable sense of being ‘mentally confused', so there is also a demonstration in them of another danger, which can also be summed up by one ambiguous word. The word is ‘speculation', and this is something to be avoided at all costs. ‘Speculation’ furthermore has two meanings, just as one might expect from Tolkien. Its modern and metaphorical sense is something like ‘allowing one’s actions to be guided by hypotheses about what will happen, or what is happening, or what other people are likely to do’. Its ancient and literal sense is, however, the practice of looking in a speculum – a mirror, a glass, a crystal ball. Frodo and Sam ‘speculate’ when they look in the Mirror of Galadriel, and it is a temptation to them. It tempts Sam to abandon his duty to Frodo and go home to rescue the Gaffer: this would be disastrous for the whole of Middle-earth. Fortunately Galadriel is there to counsel him and to point out ‘the Mirror is dangerous as a guide of deeds’ (LOTR, p. 354). It is that kind of reasoning from the mirror the witches show him that destroys Macbeth.6 But the major source of dangerous ‘speculation’ in The Lord of the Rings is the palantíri, the Seeing Stones.

  These are used four times in Tolkien’s work, with a very consistent pattern. The first occasion is when Pippin picks up the palantír thrown from Orthanc by Gríma, and later sneaks a look at it when Gandalf is asleep. In the Stone, he sees Sauron, and Sauron sees him. But though Sauron sees Pippin, he draws from this a wrong conclusion, namely that Pippin is the Ring-bearer, and has been captured by Saruman, who now has the Ring (LOTR, pp. 578–9). The next day Aragorn, who has been given the Stone by Gandalf, deliberately shows himself in it to Sauron, and once again Sauron draws the wrong conclusion: namely, that Aragorn has overpowered Saruman and that he is now the owner of the Ring. It is fear of this new power arising which makes Sauron launch his premature attack, and Gandalf indeed realises that this was all along Aragorn’s intention (LOTR, p. 797). Gandalf further surmises that it was the palantír which was Saruman’s downfall. As he looked in it, he saw only what Sauron allowed him to see, and once more drew the wrong conclusion, losing heart and deciding that resistance would be futile (LOTR, p. 584). Both Sauron and Saruman have allowed what they see in the Stones to guide their decisions, and what they have seen is true; but they have seen only fractions of the truth.

  The most disastrous use of a palantír is however made by Denethor. The sequence of events is here made especially clear by Tolkien, though it is disguised by his own ‘leapfrogging’ style of narrative, see above. Aragorn shows himself to Sauron in the Orthanc Stone on 6th March. On the 7th and 8th Frodo and Sam are with Faramir in Ithilien. On the 9th Gandalf and Pippin reach Minas Tirith. On the 10th Faramir returns to Minas Tirith and reports to his father that he has met, and released, two hobbits, whom both he and his father know were carrying the Ring. The next day Denethor sends Faramir to defend Osgiliath, clearly a tactical error. On the 13th Faramir is brought back badly wounded, and Denethor retires to his secret chamber, from which people see ‘a pale light that gleamed and flickered … and then flashed and went out’. When he comes down, ‘the face of the Lord was grey, more deathlike than his son’s’ (LOTR, p. 803). Clearly Denethor has been using his palantír, but what has he seen in it? Much later on, close to suicide, he will tell Gandalf that he has seen the Black Fleet approaching (as it is), though he does not know (though at that moment the reader does) that the Fleet now bears Aragorn and rescue, not a new army of enemies (LOTR, p. 835). However, this does not seem quite enough to trigger Denethor’s total despair. Surely we are meant to realise that what he has seen in the palantír is Frodo, whom he knows to be the Ring-bearer, in the hands of Sauron. Both Frodo’s capture and Faramir’s wounding take place on March 13th; and one may recall that Sauron plays a similar trick by showing Gandalf and the leaders of the West Frodo’s mithril-coat and Sam’s sword in the parley outside the Black Gate. The matter is put beyond doubt, however, by what Denethor says to Pippin as he prepares for suicide. ‘Comfort me not with wizards! … The fool’s hope has failed. The Enemy has found it, and now his power waxes’ (LOTR, p. 805). ‘The fool’s hope’ is Gandalf’s plan to destroy the Ring (see LOTR, p. 795), and ‘it’ must be the Ring. Once again, then, Denethor has seen something true in a palantír, and has drawn from it a wrong conclusion.

  What all these scenes do collectively is to indicate the dangers of ‘speculating’. Speculating in the old sense (looking into crystal balls) is invariably disastrous in Tolkien’s fictional world. Warning against the dangers of speculation in the modern sense, the way in which too much looking into the future can erode the will to action in the present, is however very much part of Tolkien’s analysis of the real world.7 The answer to speculation lies in the repeated scenes when we are made to realise that the fate of one character or group of characters depends on assistance coming from a direction of which they are quite unaware. Sam and Frodo cross Gorgoroth unseen because Sauron is distracted, quite deliberately, by Aragorn. Théoden King is saved at Helm’s Deep by the Huorns brought by Gandalf, but also by Merry and Pippin alerting Treebeard. Saruman is destroyed in a way by his own actions. For all Aragorn’s doubts about his own decisions, Gandalf reminds him, ‘between them our enemies have contrived only to bring Merry and Pippin with marvellous speed, and in the nick of time, to Fangorn, where otherwise they would never have come at all’ (LOTR, p. 486). The palantíri mislead careless users by filling them with unjustified fear, but the whole structure of The Lord of the Rings indicates that decision and perseverance – not speculating on what is happening elsewhere, but doing your job and getting on with it, ‘looking to your front’ like a Lancashire Fusilier – this mental attitude may be rewarded beyond hope. This, I would suggest, is Tolkien’s philosophic core. He believes in the workings of Providence – the Providence which ‘sent’ Gandalf back, and which ‘meant’ Frodo to have the Ring (LOTR, pp. 491, 55). But that Providence does not overrule free will, because it works only through the actions and decisions of the characters. In To
lkien there is no chance, no coincidence. What his ‘bewildered’ characters perceive as chance or coincidence is a result only of their inability to see how actions connect.

  The structure of The Lord of the Rings, then, does very much what John Milton said he was going to in Paradise Lost (Book I, 25–26): both authors, the arch-Protestant and the committed Catholic, mean to ‘assert eternal Providence, / And justify the ways of God to men’. But to follow that structure one needs a very sure grasp both of the chronology of events, and the way in which events in one plot-strand (like the capture of Frodo) affect those in another (like the suicide of Denethor). It seems to me that the medium of film does not lend itself to this kind of intellectual connection. As noted above, Jackson diminishes the theme of ‘bewilderment’ from the start by explaining the history of the Ring start to finish, and by eliminating flashbacks: ‘putting the viewer in the picture’ is achieved at the cost of reducing the characters’ (and the reader/viewer’s) sense of uncertainty. Jackson furthermore does not use the palantíri much. In the first film we do indeed see Saruman looking into one (JFR 18, ‘The Spoiling of Isengard'), but he uses it only to report and receive orders: there is no hint that he is being misled. Pippin later picks it up in the flotsam of Isengard (the explanation of how it comes there is rather different, a result of the early elimination of Saruman in Jackson’s version) and as in Tolkien sneaks a look at it. But the important thing in Jackson’s third film is not Sauron seeing Pippin, and drawing the wrong conclusion, but Pippin seeing Sauron, and being able, quite correctly, to guess some part of his plan – to assault Minas Tirith. Aragorn uses the Stone later on in the film, but not as indicated by Tolkien. The theme of mistaken ‘speculation’ has been all but entirely removed.