by Adam Roberts
To put this another way: where later poetry sometimes reads as too polished, too (we might say) machine-tooled, Beowulf with its rough-edges and burly awkwardnesses, its inconsistencies and narrative jolts, feels like something hand-made. Its appeal was therefore always likely to increase after the cultural aesthetic shifted from admiring finish, polish and regularity as the eighteenth and nineteenth century tended to do, towards admiring individual craftwork the way we do today. Hand-made is now a term of approbation, after all; and all the little niggles and glitches in the product are things in which we symbolical invest our admiration, precisely because they represent the craftsman’s touch. No longer to be explained away as ‘not silk’, the Hessian-cloth-texture of the poem is presented as the very ground of its appeal.
But this is the irony of the piece, of course. Because of all the works admitted to the canon of English literature Beowulf is the only one that was not hand-made, not produced cum manis onto manuscript. It was not written. Oral composition is the work of the spoken word and the memory, not the processes of hand-writing or hand-typing than nowadays characterise composition. But Grendl’s glove, the magical and threatening hand-covering, is exactly the right emblem for the strong-manual, dextrous-manual and above all the intimate, connective, hands-on quality that the poem exhibits.
This brings us back to The Hobbit, the work of Tolkien’s hand. Bilbo’s pocket is a kind of glove. What it contains is a ring—an adornment for the finger of a hand. It used to puzzle me why Tolkien, a devout Catholic who regarded marriage as a holy sacrament and a source of profound, sacred joy for humanity, should have chosen a wedding band as the type of the greatest evil in the world. In the following chapter I attempt to answer that riddle.
7
The Riddle of the Ring
From the pocket to what is in the pocket. This riddle can be cast in the form of a straightforward question, although its answer is not so straightforward. Why a ring?
To unpack the question a little: why might Tolkien light upon a finger-ring to embody the central force of his symbolic conception, making it the most powerful and most dangerous artefact in his imaginary world? More: although each of the other magic rings (the three elven, the seven dwarvish and the nine mannish) carries a precious stone, the one ruling ring is a plain gold circle. Which is to say: it takes the form of a wedding band. We might want to argue that there is something strange in Tolkien, a devout Catholic with strong views on the sanctity and importance of marriage, himself happily married, taking a wedding ring as his supreme symbol of the corruptive power of evil in the world.
This statement needs immediate qualification. Of course the one ring is not a wedding band in any literal sense. Its resemblance is figurative and symbolic rather than literal. But to explore the way the ring, and rings in general, signify in The Lord of the Rings is to open up some intriguing aspects of what I take to be Tolkien’s fundamentally sacramental imagination, which in turn illuminate the way this book works, as a great Catholic as well as a great Fantasy novel.
Immediate objections suggest themselves. Perhaps there is nothing especially remarkable about the use of a ring as the trigger or accelerant of Tolkien’s large narrative. Some sort of item or treasure is frequently the focus (the ‘mcguffin’, as such narrative stratagems are dismissively called) of adventures in the Romance tradition. This might be an object over which characters fall out, or after which characters quest. One of Tolkien’s key strategies, as many critics have noted, is to invert the conventions of such tales. The Lord of the Rings is a sort of quest narrative, but with the difference that the quest is to destroy rather than discover an item of precious treasure. Is it fair to ask whether there any deeper significance to the ring beyond its position as narrative facilitator? Perhaps there is nothing essential about the ring apart from this functionality. It is possible that Tolkien could equally well have built his novel around a golden chalice, or a golden torc, or a golden coin, or—for all we know—a golden ankh, dolphin or miniature football boot. But to put it in those sorts of terms (they are ridiculous choices in this context; but why are they ridiculous?) does at least highlight the rightness of Tolkien’s actual choice. There is something intuitively appropriate about the ring. Why might that be?
One way to start answering such a question would be to look at the way the ring functions within the logic of Tolkien’s story, as well as looking at the symbolic and subtextual resonances of his creation, to have some sense of why he placed this particular artefact at the heart of his imaginative conception.
Actually, when one starts to look at The Lord of the Rings ‘through the ring’, as it were, it starts to assume a degree of ubiquity. The ‘fellowship of the ring’, the nine companions who take the ring south, echo an Arthurian circle of knights (a round table). Mordor, the birth- and death-place of the ring, itself externalises a ring shape, surrounded on all sides by forbidding mountains. Actually this is only partly true: according to the map the ring of mountains protecting the land of shadow falls away to the East; although there are no indications of this in the novel—no suggestion that Frodo and Sam should trek East to enter Mordor through Eastern foothills, rather than clamber up the forbidding mountain ranges. In the Silmarillion the council place of the Valar is called ‘the Ring of Doom’. In an earlier draft of the Silmarillion material, collected after Tolkien’s death in the volume Morgoth’s Ring, the ring of the title is the whole of Middle Earth, through which (and especially through the gold ore threaded within it) Morgoth’s malignancy circulates. Only water is immune from his evil.
As architectural or geographical features, rings are interestingly ambiguous. A surrounding wall might figure as protection against a hostile exterior world; or it might equally well figure as confinement, a prison wall to prevent escape. Something of this semiological doubleness inflects Tolkien’s treatment of ‘rings’ in his work, focused of course on the One Ring, with an almost uncanny balance. Arguably it also functions as a Tolkienian gloss upon the institution of marriage.
It is tempting, although rather fruitless, to list his possible sources, the many occurrences of magic rings in previous cultures of which Tolkien was certainly aware. For some commentators the parallels with Wagner’s cycle of opera Der Ring des Nibelungen are striking, although Tolkien repudiated them.1 Of course, Tolkien’s denial does not mean that Wagner can be dismissed entirely out of hand. John Louis DiGaetani has argued that Wagner’s influence is pervasive in early twentieth-century British literature, citing in particular Conrad, Lawrence, E. M. Forster, Woolf and Joyce. But as DiGaetani points out:
Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen is most basically about the relationship between love and power. The ring itself, which will give infinite wealth and power to the person who possesses it, can achieve its power only if its bearer renounces love forever.2
This is not the dichotomy presented in The Lord of the Rings. Indeed, something of the reverse is true. The ring achieves some of its sinister, uncanny effect in the novel precisely by creating a weirdly intense parody of the love relationship. Gollum loves his ring as he might, under other circumstances, have loved a fellow being: he calls it his ‘precious’, he talks to it and so on. Of course, this ‘love’ is not presented as a positive force. It is too claustrophobically exclusive, too much a version of unhealthy narcissism, and it overrides all other duties of care, love and honour.
More relevant to Tolkien’s purposes (we might assume) are the many references to rings as precious objects and tokens of trust and fidelity in Old English literature. From this perspective the ring is interesting primarily because it represents, as the phrase goes, ‘portable property’: valuable, displayable and easily transported. Gold rings are a good way for a Lord to reward his loyal followers. But there are problems here as well. A gold ring with an inset precious jewel would be a more valuable piece of portable property than a plain gold band; and yet, of course, in Lord of the Rings the reverse is the case—the plainer ring is the most powerful.
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There are, as critics have noted, certain inconsistencies in the way the One Ring is portrayed in The Lord of the Rings. Sometimes it is inert; sometimes it seems to possess will and even agency. It can be ‘wielded’ only by someone with a strong will; but some of the strongest wills (Boromir’s for instance) are overwhelmed without even direct contact. There is also a, presumably deliberate, vagueness as to what the ring might actually do in the wrong hands. Gollum possesses it for a very long time and does nothing more with it than use it as a means of becoming invisible. Yet the implication is that, on a properly skilled hand, it can wreak terrible damage. How? we wonder—does lightning lance forth from the beringed finger? Does it summon down atomic-bomb-like death on armies? Tolkien does not spell it out.
Tom Shippey identifies some other difficulties. Gandalf’s conversation with Frodo in the second chapter of the first book, says Shippey, contains assertions concerning the ring which are ‘at the heart of The Lord of the Rings’ adding ‘if they are not accepted, then the whole point of the story collapses’. He picks out three: firstly that ‘the Ring is immensely powerful, in the right or the wrong hands’; secondly the ring is ‘deadly dangerous to all its possessors: it will take them over, “devour” them, “possess” them’; thirdly, ‘the Ring cannot simply be left unused, put aside, thrown away: it has to be destroyed’.3 And some characters (Gollum, Boromir) are indeed corrupted, devoured and destroyed by the ring, consistent with these premises. But as Shippey notes there are many characters whom are untouched: including Sam (who hands the ring back to Frodo without demur); Aragon, Legolas, Gimli, Merry and Pippin who all appear indifferent to it. At the beginning of the story Gandalf tells Frodo that he ‘could not “make” you’ relinquish the ring ‘except by force, which would break your mind’ (LotR, 74). Yet at the very end of the book Gollum wrenches the ring from Frodo precisely by force, assaulting him and biting his finger off, and yet Frodo’s mind remains unbroken. Shippey’s solution to this is that ‘all the doubts just mentioned can be cleared up by the use of one word, though it is a word never used in Lord of the Rings. The Ring is “addictive”.’ Like a drug to a contemporary drug-addict, the ring overwhelms the individual’s power to ‘just say no’.
There are problems, however, with the ‘addictive’ explanation. It seems, for instance, that Bilbo does not become ‘addicted’ to the Ring, even though he possesses it for decades, using it often. Boromir, on the other hand, does become ‘addicted’ despite never possessing it. Moreover, addiction does not address the notion that the forceable removal of the ring is described as something that will break Frodo’s mind, and the later contradiction of this assertion. Rather, the imaginative logic of the novel suggests that a person with ‘great Will’ might master the Ring and wield it (although his or her intents would be perverted to evil); whereas a ‘little’ person would be unable to master it, and would instead become mastered by it (like Gollum). It is hard to reconcile this with the idea of an ‘addictive’ Ring; on the contrary, it tends to play up the idea of the Ring as an agent itself, with its own will against which the human characters must pitch their own.
The Ring is clearly ‘to do’ with Power. But more important than this rather nebulous fact is the point that the Ring is a binding agent, tying together all the other Rings of Power: a locus of connection (‘One ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them’). ‘Bind’ is an interesting word. It means several things. Most obviously it means to tie-together or tie-up, literally or metaphorically. It can also refer to marriage. It is etymologically connected with ‘band’: a ‘wedding band’ is so called precisely because it binds. The Ring binds itself to its bearer. It binds together, by magic charm and as a form of marriage, all the other rings. In other words the resemblance between this ‘binding’ Ring and the ordinary marriage band is more than mere superficial appearance. There is a form of marriage—binding, exclusive, life-devouring—at the heart of Tolkien’s conception of the ring.
Nor is marriage an arbitrarily chosen trope. It is for Tolkien something more than just a contract of cohabitation between two people. It is a magical bond—magical in the strong, Catholic sense of the word. In other words, it is a sacrament. To be clear: I am suggesting that one answer to the question posed at the beginning of this chapter is that Tolkien chooses a Ring that resembles a marriage band precisely because, for a Catholic, the marriage ring is a sacramental icon. This is a crucial point, I think: because Tolkien conceives of his subcreated world in sacramental terms. I mentioned this briefly at the beginning of the present study; now is the time to go into it in a little more detail.4
The Latin ‘sacramenta’ is the translation used of the New Testament Greek µυστηριον (musterion, ‘mystery’); and in Christian theology a sacrament is ‘a visible sign of an invisible grace’. Catholics recognise seven sacraments: baptism, confirmation, penance, the Eucharist, priestly ordination, marriage and extreme unction (or ‘the anointing of the sick’ as the latter has, since Tolkien’s time, been renamed). These rituals are symbolic of divine grace entering into the material realm, but in a crucial sense they are more than symbolic. According to Aquinas ‘the Christian sacraments are ways in which God lives in us and in which we, in this life, live in God’.5 The mystery of the sacraments is bound in with the mystery of the Incarnation. God, says Aquinas, was not obliged to incarnate himself in material form in order to confer his grace on humanity; but by choosing to do this he connected the spiritual world with the material world. St Augustine saw sacraments as a physical ‘signum’, or sign, of non-physical (which is to say, spiritual) truth—so, for instance, that the water of baptism symbolises the non-material spirit of God. Aquinas agreed that the sacraments were symbolic rites, but insisted that they were at the same time more than just symbolic.
Aquinas firmly believes that God brings us to himself as creatures of flesh and blood. He thinks that, in the end, we are drawn into the life of God by someone like ourselves, by someone living a human life in our material world. And he believes this is where sacraments enter into the picture … The sacraments of the Church are physical signs and genuine causes of grace. They are symbols which make real what they symbolize.6
This, I think, helps gloss Tolkien’s repeated insistence of animadversion against allegory. As I argue above, we do, I think, need to take seriously Tolkien’s statement of ‘cordial dislike’ of allegory and acknowledge that The Lord of the Rings is poorly served by that sort of reductive reading. A better way to think of the novel is not as allegory but as a sub-creative materialisation—an incarnation, in a manner of speaking—of what Tolkien took to be certain spiritual realities.7
That The Lord of the Rings is a great work of Catholic literature, as well as a great work in the Fantasy tradition, has been argued by several critics.8 I have already quoted the letter that Tolkien wrote to Father Robert Murray in 1953, describing his own work as ‘fundamentally religious and Catholic’. And even without ‘decoding’ the novel as a religious allegory we can see that, naturally enough, many elements from Christian myth have shaped the imaginary world of Middle-earth. In particular the novels demonstrate a fascination with the Fall that introduces mortality to the world, and with ethical choice. Writing to Milton Waldman in 1951 Tolkien said that ‘all this stuff is mainly concerned with Fall, Mortality and the Machine’.9 It tells the story of self-sacrifice, and a saviour who travels the paths of the dead only to return in triumph; of the tremendous significance of the moral choices people are presented with, particularly of ordinary people caught up in extraordinary times.
Bernard Bergonzi, in his article ‘The Decline and Fall of the Catholic Novel’ argues that ‘the English Catholic novel … did not dramatize Catholic theology tout court, for there is no such single entity, but a particular and extreme theological emphasis, where religious beliefs were caught up with literary attitudes and conventions’.10 Assuming we wish to bracket The Lord of the Rings with the writers about which Bergonzi is here talking (Graham Gr
eene and Evelyn Waugh predominantly) we might wish to go on and explore how ‘particular and extreme’ the theological emphasis of Tolkien’s fantasy is. The particular element that articulates itself through the work is, I am suggesting, precisely this sacramental element.
One such element is the matter of free will. As Colin Manlove points out, one malign effect of the Ring is precisely to compromise Frodo’s free will.
Frodo has been ‘chosen’ for his task; by itself this is reasonable enough, for it would still leave him room to decide whether to take it up. But there are additional determining factors. Bilbo could voluntarily leave the Ring to Frodo because the Ring wanted to go to Frodo: as Gandalf says ‘he would never have just forsaken it, or cast it aside. It was … the Ring itself that decided things. The Ring left him.’ And since the Ring wants to be with Frodo, it is impossible for him to get rid of it as it was not for Bilbo: Gandalf tells him that he could not ‘make’ Frodo give it up ‘except by force, which would break your mind’. Therefore, Frodo has to keep the Ring.11
Later in the novel, Manlove suggests, ‘this core of necessity is hopefully overlain with an apparent act of will’. Frodo, reflecting on his ‘evil fate’ recalls that ‘he had taken it on himself in his own sitting room in the far-off spring of another year’. According to Manlove, however: ‘this is not true to the facts’.
Certain difficulties do indeed present themselves. For example, how is it that Bilbo was able effectively to ‘divorce’ himself from the Ring? Manlove’s answer (that the Ring wanted to leave) addresses the question on the terms of the localised rationalisation provided by the text rather than according to its symbolic logic. But does this mean that Bilbo somehow has more free will than Frodo? That cannot be: Catholicism does not say that free will is distributed amongst human beings like height or wealth, some with more and some less. We all have the freedom to choose good or evil; and it is a choice equally important to all of us.