I’m in the middle of re-reading The Lord of the Rings: behold my half-baked thoughts and unconfirmed speculations.
There was once a young man from Birmingham who, dismayed by the ugliness and industrialisation of the modern age, fell in love with fairy tales and legends. In later life he would devote himself to the creation of a distinctive imaginary world, where noble and beautiful characters inhabited dream-like landscapes. His name was Edward Burne-Jones, and he was the star of the second wave of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. His paintings are what I think of whenever The Lord of the Rings starts to get a bit Elfy.
I don’t know if Burne-Jones's pictures were what Tolkien was thinking of, but I’m pretty sure they’re in the mix somewhere. The Pre-Raphaelites sold well to the newly wealthy merchants and industrialists of the midlands and the north country, so there would have been plenty of examples of their work in Birmingham when Tolkien was growing up there. And Burne-Jones had worked closely with William Morris, whose fantasy stories and book on Iceland Tolkien would certainly have read. Like the other Pre-Raphs, Burne-Jones had fallen seriously out of fashion by the time Tolkien was writing The Lord of the Rings, but like them he was rediscovered in the late sixties and seventies, perhaps by the generation who had grown up on Tolkien’s books and recognised in these mediaeval dreamscapes something of Middle-earth. His paintings spoke powerfully to me when I discovered them for myself as a teenager, and I’m sure that was why. Their stillness, their subdued colours, and their strange airlessness all seem relevant as the story brings us to Lothlórien.
When I first encountered The Lord of the Rings I was very relieved that our heroes had arrived somewhere nice and safe after the terrors of Khazad-dûm. But I’ve always found Lorien and its denizens slightly harder to fix in my imagination that the other places and people of Middle Earth. Re-reading it now, I find there’s a whole city there that I’d completely forgotten - Caras Galadhon. It has a deep fosse and a high white wall around it, but inside the wall it seems to be mainly trees. In other parts of Middle-earth the trees are the trees of our world, oak and beech, birch and hornbeam, with pines in the high country. The trees of Lóthlorien are trees which grow only in Tolkien's imagination: 'mallorns', with smooth silvery trunks and leaves that turn gold in winter but do not fall. Even the flowers which grow between them are unearthly; elanor and niphredil.
This calls for a different type of imagining from the reader, one with fewer anchors to the real world. Lóthlorien is a vestige of an older and loftier Middle-earth. Even time flows differently here - the companions spend what seems a few days among the mallorns, but a whole month passes in the world outside - that’s a feature of lots of legends and folktales about visits to fairyland, of course, but it also emphasises Lorien as a zone divorced from the rest of Middle-earth. Its queen, Galadriel, has the calm beauty of the women in Burne-Jones’s paintings, but like them, she seems rather distant, like a figure in a dream. It’s only in the ‘mirror of Galadriel’ passage, where Frodo offers her the ring and she declines, that I get much sense of her as a person.
Wistfully remembering past ages, and preparing to leave Middle-earth and go into the West, there’s a very Victorian, last-rose-of-summer melancholy about Tolkien’s immortal Elves. "They themselves change little," explains Legolas, "and all else fleets by: it is a grief to them." If Frodo succeeds in destroying the Ring and defeating Sauron, it will also mean the end of the Elves' time in Middle-earth. They are clearly important to Tolkien, perhaps the most important part of his invented mythology, and it’s probably a failing on my part that I can’t quite see them, and am always faintly relieved to get out of Lóthlorien and on with the journey. (That said, Galadriel’s last song before they leave, which Tolkien translates as a sort of prose-poem, is startlingly odd and beautiful.)
Equipped with Elvish boats, cloaks, and supplies, the Fellowship head on down the great river Anduin, where dangers soon press in on them again. They are being followed now by Gollum, whose footsteps Frodo heard padding behind them through Moria, and orcs shoot arrows at them from the riverbank. Worryingly, the orcs now seem to have air-support:
...a dark shape, like a cloud and yet not a cloud, for it moved far more swiftly, came out of the the blackness in the South and sped toward the Company, blotting out all light as it approached. Soon it appeared as a great winged creature, blacker than the pits in the night.
(It reminds me a bit of a moment at the half-way point in H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds where 'Something rushed up into the sky out of the greyness - rushed slantingly upward and very swiftly into the luminous clearness above the clouds in the western sky, something flat and broad and very large... And as it flew it rained down darkness upon the land.' ) Like Wells's Martians, the Enemy can attack our heroes now not just on the ground but from the air. Tolkien was part of the first generation to grow up with aeroplanes, and the first generation of soldiers to be menaced by them. When we see one of the Ringwraiths’ aerial steeds up close in a later book it will turn out to resemble a pterosaur, but as they wheel above Middle-earth’s war zones they also call to mind the linen-and-wood aircraft which added to the general unpleasantness of life on the Western Front. Legolas shoots an arrow at this one and it crashes out of sight in the darkness on the far side of the river, like an Albatros D.1 coming down in no-man’s land.
So the Company go ‘on their long way, down the wide hurrying waters.” The deep gorges of the Anduin feel a little like the Iron Gates of the Danube, which nowadays feature a vast rock-carving of a long-ago king, like a slightly low-rent version of one of the Pillars of the Argonath - but it was carved on the orders of a nationalistically inclined Romanian businessman in the 1990s so, while it may possibly be part-inspired by Tolkien, it wasn't among his inspirations.
At last the travellers arrive at the falls of Rauros, where they must leave the river. As he tries to decide whether to strike east for Mordor or south to Minas Tirith, Frodo pootles off alone, and is followed by Boromir, who wants to take the Ring from him and use it against Sauron. (This isn't just a sudden whim - it was Boromir's suggestion back at the Council of Elrond, and we've seen him brooding on it ever since.) “It might have been mine. It should be mine,” he says, echoing Bilbo’s attempt to keep the Ring for himself back in Chapter One - everyone who falls under the power of the Ring thinks that is theirs by right, and that they will use it only for good. To describe The Lord of the Rings as a story of good versus evil is to do it a slight disservice, because Tolkien is very interested in the spiritual danger zone between the two, and the good intentions which can tempt people into it.
Escaping Boromir by putting on the Ring, Frodo climbs up to the ancient seat on the summit of Amon Hen. From there, since this is ‘the Seat of Seeing, on…the Hill of the Eye of the Men of Númenor’ and he is wearing the Ring, he can look out across all of Middle-earth just as a reader does when they unfold the map from inside the back cover (which is now only a few pages away). But as well as a kind of written map this passage is a summing up of where The Fellowship of the Ring has brought us, and a foreshadowing of what’s to come. Wherever he looks, Frodo sees signs of war:
The Misty Mountains were crawling like anthills: orcs were issuing out of a thousand holes…. Horsemen were galloping on the plains of Rohan; wolves poured from Isengard… All the power of the Dark Lord was in motion.
His gaze is drawn eastward to Mordor, where at last
…wall upon wall, battlement upon battlement, black, immeasurably strong, mountain of iron, gate of steel, tower of adamant, he saw it: Barad-dûr, Fortress of Sauron.
He feels the Dark Lord’s gaze searching for him, and for the Ring. He feels a powerful urge to reveal himself - but he takes the Ring off just in time, and senses Sauron’s gaze as
a black shadow (which) seemed to pass like an arm above him; it missed Amon Hen, and groped out west, and faded.
After all the battles and chases and wild adventures of the previous 500 pages, the climax of the book is this: a hobbit sitting alone in a high place, ‘free to choose and with one remaining instant in which to do so’. By making the right choice, Frodo wins a victory which may be only small and temporary, but is still important at the end of a long book. He also decides what he must do next. Accompanied by the faithful Sam, he leaves the others and sets off for Mordor. The Fellowship of the Ring is at an end, and The Fellowship of the Ring ends with it.
I think it’s now my favourite of the three volumes of The Lord of the Rings. But when I was younger, The Two Towers was my favourite, and in particular the first part of it, which features the splendid Rohirrim, the excellent Ents, the surprise return of Gandalf, and ends with a fantastic battle. And that’s what I’ll be dealing with in my next post...
There was once a young man from Birmingham who, dismayed by the ugliness and industrialisation of the modern age, fell in love with fairy tales and legends. In later life he would devote himself to the creation of a distinctive imaginary world, where noble and beautiful characters inhabited dream-like landscapes. His name was Edward Burne-Jones, and he was the star of the second wave of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. His paintings are what I think of whenever The Lord of the Rings starts to get a bit Elfy.
 |
| The Golden Stair by Sir Edward Burne-Jones |
When I first encountered The Lord of the Rings I was very relieved that our heroes had arrived somewhere nice and safe after the terrors of Khazad-dûm. But I’ve always found Lorien and its denizens slightly harder to fix in my imagination that the other places and people of Middle Earth. Re-reading it now, I find there’s a whole city there that I’d completely forgotten - Caras Galadhon. It has a deep fosse and a high white wall around it, but inside the wall it seems to be mainly trees. In other parts of Middle-earth the trees are the trees of our world, oak and beech, birch and hornbeam, with pines in the high country. The trees of Lóthlorien are trees which grow only in Tolkien's imagination: 'mallorns', with smooth silvery trunks and leaves that turn gold in winter but do not fall. Even the flowers which grow between them are unearthly; elanor and niphredil.
This calls for a different type of imagining from the reader, one with fewer anchors to the real world. Lóthlorien is a vestige of an older and loftier Middle-earth. Even time flows differently here - the companions spend what seems a few days among the mallorns, but a whole month passes in the world outside - that’s a feature of lots of legends and folktales about visits to fairyland, of course, but it also emphasises Lorien as a zone divorced from the rest of Middle-earth. Its queen, Galadriel, has the calm beauty of the women in Burne-Jones’s paintings, but like them, she seems rather distant, like a figure in a dream. It’s only in the ‘mirror of Galadriel’ passage, where Frodo offers her the ring and she declines, that I get much sense of her as a person.
Wistfully remembering past ages, and preparing to leave Middle-earth and go into the West, there’s a very Victorian, last-rose-of-summer melancholy about Tolkien’s immortal Elves. "They themselves change little," explains Legolas, "and all else fleets by: it is a grief to them." If Frodo succeeds in destroying the Ring and defeating Sauron, it will also mean the end of the Elves' time in Middle-earth. They are clearly important to Tolkien, perhaps the most important part of his invented mythology, and it’s probably a failing on my part that I can’t quite see them, and am always faintly relieved to get out of Lóthlorien and on with the journey. (That said, Galadriel’s last song before they leave, which Tolkien translates as a sort of prose-poem, is startlingly odd and beautiful.)
 |
| The Mill by Sir Edward Burne-Jones |
...a dark shape, like a cloud and yet not a cloud, for it moved far more swiftly, came out of the the blackness in the South and sped toward the Company, blotting out all light as it approached. Soon it appeared as a great winged creature, blacker than the pits in the night.
(It reminds me a bit of a moment at the half-way point in H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds where 'Something rushed up into the sky out of the greyness - rushed slantingly upward and very swiftly into the luminous clearness above the clouds in the western sky, something flat and broad and very large... And as it flew it rained down darkness upon the land.' ) Like Wells's Martians, the Enemy can attack our heroes now not just on the ground but from the air. Tolkien was part of the first generation to grow up with aeroplanes, and the first generation of soldiers to be menaced by them. When we see one of the Ringwraiths’ aerial steeds up close in a later book it will turn out to resemble a pterosaur, but as they wheel above Middle-earth’s war zones they also call to mind the linen-and-wood aircraft which added to the general unpleasantness of life on the Western Front. Legolas shoots an arrow at this one and it crashes out of sight in the darkness on the far side of the river, like an Albatros D.1 coming down in no-man’s land.
 |
| Carving of Decebalus at the Iron Gates (photo from Wikipedia) |
At last the travellers arrive at the falls of Rauros, where they must leave the river. As he tries to decide whether to strike east for Mordor or south to Minas Tirith, Frodo pootles off alone, and is followed by Boromir, who wants to take the Ring from him and use it against Sauron. (This isn't just a sudden whim - it was Boromir's suggestion back at the Council of Elrond, and we've seen him brooding on it ever since.) “It might have been mine. It should be mine,” he says, echoing Bilbo’s attempt to keep the Ring for himself back in Chapter One - everyone who falls under the power of the Ring thinks that is theirs by right, and that they will use it only for good. To describe The Lord of the Rings as a story of good versus evil is to do it a slight disservice, because Tolkien is very interested in the spiritual danger zone between the two, and the good intentions which can tempt people into it.
Escaping Boromir by putting on the Ring, Frodo climbs up to the ancient seat on the summit of Amon Hen. From there, since this is ‘the Seat of Seeing, on…the Hill of the Eye of the Men of Númenor’ and he is wearing the Ring, he can look out across all of Middle-earth just as a reader does when they unfold the map from inside the back cover (which is now only a few pages away). But as well as a kind of written map this passage is a summing up of where The Fellowship of the Ring has brought us, and a foreshadowing of what’s to come. Wherever he looks, Frodo sees signs of war:
The Misty Mountains were crawling like anthills: orcs were issuing out of a thousand holes…. Horsemen were galloping on the plains of Rohan; wolves poured from Isengard… All the power of the Dark Lord was in motion.
His gaze is drawn eastward to Mordor, where at last
…wall upon wall, battlement upon battlement, black, immeasurably strong, mountain of iron, gate of steel, tower of adamant, he saw it: Barad-dûr, Fortress of Sauron.
He feels the Dark Lord’s gaze searching for him, and for the Ring. He feels a powerful urge to reveal himself - but he takes the Ring off just in time, and senses Sauron’s gaze as
a black shadow (which) seemed to pass like an arm above him; it missed Amon Hen, and groped out west, and faded.
After all the battles and chases and wild adventures of the previous 500 pages, the climax of the book is this: a hobbit sitting alone in a high place, ‘free to choose and with one remaining instant in which to do so’. By making the right choice, Frodo wins a victory which may be only small and temporary, but is still important at the end of a long book. He also decides what he must do next. Accompanied by the faithful Sam, he leaves the others and sets off for Mordor. The Fellowship of the Ring is at an end, and The Fellowship of the Ring ends with it.
I think it’s now my favourite of the three volumes of The Lord of the Rings. But when I was younger, The Two Towers was my favourite, and in particular the first part of it, which features the splendid Rohirrim, the excellent Ents, the surprise return of Gandalf, and ends with a fantastic battle. And that’s what I’ll be dealing with in my next post...
Comments
I’m trying to think if there’s any other example in literature of the faerie realm getting such an unambiguously positive press as Tolkien gives Lothlorien? I’m afraid prefer more traditionally amoral elves.