_____________________
1 Isaac Asimov, “Concerning Tolkien,” in Magic: The Final Fantasy Collection (New York: HarperPrism, 1996), p. 155.
2 Bill Joy, “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us,” Wired (April 2000).
3 Eric Drexler, The Engines of Creation (Garden City: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1986).
4 Joy, “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us,” op. cit.
5 Thomas Theis, “Information Technology Based on a Mature Nanotechnology: Some Societal Implications.” Societal Implications of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology. National Science Foundation (March 2001), p. 60.
6 Drexler, Engines of Creation, p. 14.
7 Ibid., p. 145.
8 Ken Campbell, “Army Selects MIT for $50 million Institute to Use Nanomaterials to Clothe, Equip Soldiers,” MIT News (March 14, 2002).
9 Ibid.
10 Eugenie Samuel, “U.S. Army Seeks Nanotech Suits.” New Scientist (March 4, 2002).
11 Drexler, Engines of Creation, p. 172.
12 Ibid., pp. 182–87
13 Joy, “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us,” op. cit.
3
“My Precious”: Tolkien’s Fetishized Ring
ALISON MILBANK
One of the most dramatic scenes in the first Lord of the Rings film, The Fellowship of the Ring, is the Council at Rivendell at which elf and dwarf nearly come to blows, while in a golden glow worthy of a Glassner jewelry advertisement, the Ring shines serenely on, untouched and untouchable. The focus shifts so that the combatants fade to soft-focus, and the Ring in close-up fills the whole screen. We are all drawn to the Ring: readers, filmmakers, and a number of contributors to this volume. Although the Ring is a feature borrowed from ancient Germanic and Nordic myth, I shall argue that we are all in thrall to the Ring because of its contemporary relevance to the way we perceive, lust after, and use the “rings” or commodities of our own society. For me Tolkien’s text is not an escapist fantasy but a challenging work that “reads” us as fetishists and offers us an alternative model for our relations with the world of things by means of sacrifice and gift.
Stockings, Rings, and Erotic Control
To explain what I mean by fetishism let us return to that cinematic frame of the chastely glowing Ring. Like any close-up shot the effect is to separate the object from its context, so that it seems to exist alone. In that sense, every photographic or filmic close-up operates fetishistically in the sense employed by the psychologist Sigmund Freud. For the fetishist the stocking, the glove, the fur or the individual body part becomes the focus of sexual desire in so far as it is fixed and separated off from any relation with the whole person or body. In his 1927 essay, “Fetishism,” Freud attributes this desire for fixity to a refusal to fully accept that one’s mother is not all-powerful—or, in Freudian terms, does not have the phallus. In pursuing and possessing an object that stands for his mother, the fetishist is able to own and control this maternal sexual power he both fears and loves. For a deep terror of the female genitals underlies such behavior and the fetish provides a safe substitute for the risky self-giving of the sexual act.1
It is interesting that the One Ring of Power, which I want to suggest is viewed fetishistically, is twice gained as a result of literal separation from the owner’s body, once by Isildur hacking off Sauron’s finger, and again by Gollum biting off Frodo’s finger. Separation marks the Ring from its creation, since it is forged by Sauron in secret, and is deliberately hidden from the makers of the other nineteen Rings of Power. Even the three Elvish Rings, however, have something fetishistic about them because they were made in order to prevent the loss and decay of beautiful things. In aiming to create preventatives against loss, the elves share the fetishist’s desire to fix the object of sexual arousal, so that it is untouched by age, decay, or mortality. We are told explicitly in Tolkien’s myth collection, The Silmarillion, that the Noldor elves won’t give up living in Middle-earth and yet they want also to have the bliss of those across the Sea in the Blessed Realm (S, p. 287).
There is, of course, an element of fetishism in much sexual behavior, but usually the stocking merely articulates a boundary of difference and is a means to arousal because it creates a distinction between flesh and clothing that draws attention to the naked leg above the stocking-top. For the lover, the stocking recapitulates the pursuit and uncovering of the desired body; for the fetishist, possession of the stocking is an end in itself. In the same manner we see the Ring’s owners becoming transfixed by the Ring, rather than using it as a means to their desires. Chillingly, each owner, from the great Isildur to the hobbit Bilbo Baggins, comes to find it “Precious,” and impossible to give up. They become as Smaug the dragon, hoarding treasure for its own sake and meeting threat of its removal with violence. Once Gollum becomes the Ring’s possessor he finds himself drawn to underground places, and it is deep in the Misty Mountains that he loses it to Bilbo.
Critics have often noticed the lack of sexual activity in The Lord of the Rings. This, I believe, can be explained through the corrosive power of the Ring, which takes the focus away from the romantic quest and subsumes to itself the power of the erotic. Only with the destruction of the Ring can the characters truly love, marry and have children. And those who have borne the Ring for any length of time do not marry at all. While not wishing to send readers off on a genital-spotting expedition through Middle-earth, it is noticeable that Tolkien offers a most convincing Freudian vagina dentata (teethed vagina) in the ancient and disgustingly gustatory spider Shelob. She represents an ancient maternal power that swallows up masculine identity and autonomy. According to Freud, her castrating hold is precisely what the sexual fetishist fears, and seeks to control by his possession of the fetishized object. She must be faced up to and outwitted before the Ring can be restored to the true maternal source of the fiery “Cracks of Doom.” Appropriately, it is the equally ancient and yet empowering woman, Galadriel, who earlier renounced the temptation to be the all-powerful female principle, a “She-who-must-be-obeyed,” who provides the light by which Shelob may be overcome. If men in the novel must give up fetishism, women must stand down from their frozen idealization, as Arwen does when she renounces immortality to marry Aragorn.
Paradoxically, although the fetish is intended as a means of erotic control—and a means of warding off the castrating female—its importance as the only possible means to erotic pleasure and the self-identity of the fetishist renders him in its thrall as if it were a god, in the manner of the totemic religious practice from which Freud took his original concept. This process is most graphically exemplified in the transmutation of the river-hobbit Sméagol into the craven Gollum. Possession of the Ring by murder of his friend leads to his self-division and alienation, so that he now speaks of himself in the third person, in babytalk—“Don’t hurt us! Don’t let them hurt us, precious!”—while the Ring is now personified and looked to as a source of aid and protection. Like early Native American totemists, Gollum has figuratively placed his soul inside the fetish for safe-keeping. Without the Ring, therefore, he is literally torn in two, and, as he replies to Faramir, “no name, no business, no Precious, nothing. Only empty” (TT, p. 335).
In his enthrallment Gollum gives the reader insight into the secret of the mighty Sauron himself. When he forged the Ring, Sauron actually placed some of his power inside, to his great cost when it was lost. Now having lost his physical body he lives a wraithlike existence, akin to that of his slaves, the Nazgûl, with his power transferred to the Ring. Indeed, he is now present mainly as an agent of unceasing surveillance, as a giant and lidless eye, which Frodo glimpses in Galadriel’s mirror: “the Eye was rimmed with fire, but was itself glazed, yellow as a cat’s, watchful and intent, and the black slit of its pupil opened on a pit, a window into nothing”
(FR, p. 409). Like Gollum, Sauron is empty and there is no purpose in his will for power apart from the desire for the Ring itself. Rather, Sauron is completely nihilistic and seeks to reduce Middle-earth to ashes, to render everything as null as himself.
Rings and Things
It is central to Tolkien’s conception that it is not just the depraved who fetishize the Ring but anyone who has to do with it, and even those who, like Boromir, merely see it occasionally. One can infer from this that Middle-earth is already a fallen world, enmeshed in evil. That this evil makes its effect through fetishism, however, marks the onset of a relatively recent form of alienation, particular to a modern capitalist economy. Fifty years before Freud’s essay on fetishism the term was employed as a central concept in German philosopher Karl Marx’s great critique of industrial capitalist economy. His groundbreaking book Capital describes the disconnected and phantasmal nature of our relations with the things we produce. As Marx observes, once a piece of wood is made into a table, it is still just a table, but once in the market “as soon as it steps forth as a commodity it is changed into something transcendent. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas.”2 Any television advertisement showing a nubile woman caressing a car’s bodywork provides evidence of our tendency to treat commodities as if they had a life of their own.
Marx went on to argue that in the modern market economy we lose relations between makers and consumers, and are estranged even from the objects of our own labor. Relationships between things are substituted for those between people, and these commodities acquire an idolatrous character as fetishes: they are totally of our own creation but we fail to recognize this. In our own lives this can take the form of a lifestyle constructed by means of designer labels, and of the near impossibility of finding out information about the producers of our clothes and our food.
I am not trying to suggest that The Lord of the Rings is a Marxist text and that Tolkien hoped for the Peoples’ Republic of the Shire, but certainly by means of the Ring the novel provides a thoroughgoing critique of our dragonish tendencies to hoarding, idolatry, and alienation, the radicalism of which is revealed when put alongside these psychological and economic analyses. Moreover, Tolkien was a devout Catholic and the papal encyclicals on social teaching in the twentieth century were as critical of capitalism as they were of state socialism. And while secular writers may offer insight into Tolkien’s critique, it can be claimed that for an adequate response to the problem of fetishism a religious dimension is important.
For Tolkien, all created things are good, as he states in the myth of creation that opens his Silmarillion. And it is evident from Tolkien’s various Indexes to the third volume of The Lord of the Rings that the world of objects is important to him, for he gives an entire section to the category, “Things” (RK, pp. 488–490). Looking down the list of items one finds an unusual combination of those one would expect, such as rings, weapons, flowers, and books, and the unexpected, such as a postal system, battles, meetings, dates, and languages. The reason for the inclusion of such immaterial concepts lies in Tolkien’s adoption of a much more ancient usage of the word, “thing.” The Oxford English Dictionary gives as its earliest example of the usual modern meaning of “thing” as inanimate object, a reference from 1689.3 Prior to that, a thing meant a matter, an event, even, in Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse and German, a Parliament, as Heidegger emphasizes in his essay on the Thing, “a gathering, and specifically a gathering to deliberate on a matter under discussion, a contested matter.”4 It is from a matter brought forward for important deliberation, an event or experience, that our modern understanding of “thing” evolves as something separate from ourselves, and an object of our perception. In origin, however, there is something inherently communal in a thing as a matter between people in a meeting-place. “Thinging gathers,” as Heidegger puts it.5 Today, when we are not in thrall to fetishized objects, we go to the opposite extreme and treat things as inert and of no account. Indeed, the object of desire in the December shop-window quickly loses all aura on the January sale rack.
Tolkien’s theology so validates making and creativity that the most important objects in his fictional world are good. The relatively rare bad objects are inevitably dominatory or destructive in character, as, for instance, the Grond, the nasty battering ram named from Morgoth’s mace, with an iron wolf-shaped head. Furthermore, there are not very many things in The Lord of the Rings, and the “Things” appendix is much shorter than that for people/creatures or places. After leaving the relatively thing-filled Shire, there are few objects, and most of these are “things” in the Middle English sense of the equipment one takes on a journey. The items taken by the Fellowship are few: food, cooking utensils, water bottles, pipes and pipe-weed, gray elven cloaks, and weapons. The world has been pared down to the few things necessary for sustenance and protection. Thus, the paucity of items renders them doubly precious, as, for example, the rope Sam suddenly remembers he brought from the Lórien boat:
“Rope!” cried Sam, talking wildly to himself in his excitement and relief. “Well, if I don’t deserve to be hung on the end of one as a warning to numbskulls! You’re nowt but a ninnyhammer, Sam Gamgee: that’s what the Gaffer said to me often enough, it being a word of his. Rope!”
“Stop chattering!” cried Frodo, now recovered enough to feel both amused and annoyed. “Never mind your Gaffer! Are you trying to tell yourself you’ve got some rope in your pocket? If so, out with it!”
“Yes, Mr. Frodo, in my pack and all. Carried it hundreds of miles, and I’d clean forgotten it!” (TT, p. 237)
There is a distinctly comic tone to this scene with Sam dancing with delight over the rope while Frodo clings to a cliff-face, and the homely language contrasting with the extremity of the situation. This in no way detracts from the magical quality of the rope, indicated by its silken texture and silvery sheen. As it dangles down it evokes other salvific ropes, such as the line let down by the Biblical Rahab for Joshua’s spies that then became the sign to spare her when Jericho was attacked.6
With or without literary parallels, the rope has a fullness of presence in this scene. It is prompt when needed, beautiful and useful. Sam accords the rope full appreciation: “It looks a bit thin, but it’s tough; and soft as milk to the hand. Packs close too, and as light as light. Wonderful folk to be sure!” (TT, p. 238) Sam refers here to the elvish makers of his rope and he begins to undo the fetishism of things by restoring the relation of object to maker, and the fixed object to potency and use.
Gift-giving and Ring-bearing
It is also important for the full presence of Sam’s rope that it was given to him as a gift by the elves of Lórien. Indeed, practically every good object in the whole novel turns out to be a gift, beginning in the very first chapter with Bilbo’s birthday party at which, according to hobbit custom, he gives rather than receives birthday presents. Gandalf too provides a gift in the form of fireworks, which in their spectacular self-destruction are a very pure form of gift-giving. Many of the company’s weapons are gifts, the very food they eat comes from Rivendell, or Gollum’s rabbit hunting (in the closest he gets to human community), or from the lembas of the Lórien elves. Galadriel and Celeborn are primarily gift-givers, whether by sight of the seeing-pool of prophecy or in the magic objects they give Sam and Frodo—the box of super-potent fertilizer and seed and the phial of light.
In granting gifts, Galadriel and Celeborn imitate the actions of the kings in the Norse and Anglo-Saxon sources from which Tolkien derived his Rings of Power. In one such source, the poem Beowulf, on which Tolkien was an important authority, the king, Hrothgar, is called a “ring giver” and he showers Beowulf with presents after Beowulf has killed the monster Grendel.7 Rings are gifts that bind the wearer to the giver in these ancient tales. And if one receives gold objects as gifts from the true owner, no harm ensues to the wearer.
&
nbsp; A prominent example in Norse mythology is the ring, Draupnir, made by the dwarves Brokk and Eitri for the god Odin, which produced eight new rings every ninth night. It was this ring that the desolated Odin placed on the pyre of his son, Baldur, after the latter’s death from the mistletoe dart, and which the son returned to his father as a keepsake via Hermod, who visited him in Hel.8 This enriching ring, marked by gift and sacrifice, is not usually mentioned as an influence on The Lord of the Rings, even though it is the only ring in the early sources that is voluntarily renounced. More frequently discussed by Tolkien critics is the dragon Fafnir’s ring that was taken by his slayer, Sigurd, which led to his downfall and that of the whole house of the Volsungs.9
What these Northern stories of rings show is that a ring stolen curses its possessor, whereas a ring given cements relationships, even beyond the grave. Both positive and negative connotations can be found in Beowulf, in which the hero first receives rings from Hrothgar, later becomes a ring-giver himself, and only dies when he seeks gold rings for his people from a dragon’s lair. Similarly, the elven Rings in Tolkien are beneficent, concentrating the powers and unity of their bearers, Galadriel, Elrond and Gandalf, all of whom were given the Rings by others, which frees them from the trace of fetishism involved in the original forging, as does their willingness to sacrifice the power of their Rings for the common good.
Letting Things Go
In order to benefit from these gifts, the protagonists of The Lord of the Rings have first to give up their possessions, their homes and families. The Quest of the Fellowship charts an attempt to deal with the fetishism of the object, and to restore relations with people and with things. The only way this may be secured is through acts of self-sacrifice, and by the destruction of the fetishized Ring. Unlike most quests, in which a beloved object is gained, the Fellowship is inaugurated to return the Ring to its place of origin, and thereby to reverse the fetishizing process that cuts it off from context, origin and materiality. The whole process is presented in comic mode in the opening of the novel when Bilbo, who had not been candid in his account of how he acquired the Ring from Gollum, sets about a potlatch scale sacrifice of everything and every object in his life. He throws a lavish party and gives away what remains of his dragon gold to make up for his Sigurd-like possession of it; he gives away his home and its contents, his hobbit existence itself, and goes off like some Indian holy man. Frodo then follows the same path and makes the sacrifice of giving up his happy life in the Shire to bear the Ring. Like the Ring he becomes separate, and is unable to return and be accepted by his own community. He is also badly wounded by the Morgul-knife of the Black Rider. So Frodo does not merely sacrifice the Ring but himself, as he indicates to Sam as they leave for the Grey Havens, “When things are in danger: someone has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them” (RK, p. 338). Note that it is not just people that are in danger but “things,” the whole phenomenal cosmos, and it is all that that he must give up.
The Lord of the Rings and Philosophy Page 5