When I started re-reading The Lord of the Rings recently I thought I might get a blog post out of it, or maybe even two. Now, nine posts later, we finally draw near to the Grey Havens. If you have been, thanks for reading...
So Sauron has been defeated, the War of the Ring is ended, the might of Mordor is destroyed, and Aragorn has taken his rightful place as king of Gondor with Arwen as his queen. Yay! And yet the the tone of The Return of the King becomes tinged with melancholy almost as soon as the Ring is destroyed. For its destruction doesn't just mean the end of the Dark Lord: it also heralds the end of the age of the Elves and the Ents, the age of magic.
John Boorman, moving on from his abortive 1970s Lord of the Rings adaptation to direct the Arthurian epic Excalibur, gave Merlin a line which Gandalf or Galadriel might have said (and perhaps would have, if his version of Middle-earth had reached the screen). 'Our days are numbered. The old ways are passing. The spirits of wood and stream fall silent. It is a time for men, and their ways.' It sums up the feeling that echoes all through these final chapters. I wonder if one of the reasons the hobbits spend so long on their journey home is partly so that Tolkien can have them reach the Shire in autumn, the season matching the mood.
As they journey north, the language shifts. The Lord of the Rings is written in two registers, although there are many gradations between them. (I suppose they are partly intended to suggest the different languages the characters are speaking.) The celebrations on the Field of Cormallen and at Minas Tirith are told in Tolkien's faux-mediaeval, Idylls of the King, King James Bible voice - 'And all the host laughed and wept, and in the midst of their merriment and tears the clear voice of the minstrel rose like silver and gold, and all men were hushed.' So is the rather touching love story of Faramir and Éowyn (which reminds me a little of Marcus and Cottia in my other childhood favourite, The Eagle of the Ninth) - they call each other 'thee' and 'thou'. But as the hobbits ride homeward, shedding their grander companions along the way, the language shifts back to a more hobbity, less high-falutin' demotic English. 'So it was near the end of a wild and wet evening in the last days of October the... travellers rode up the climbing road and came to the South-gate of Bree.' (The contrast between these two registers is one of the pleasures of the book: The Silmarillion, if I'm remembering it correctly, is all told in the former style, and is far harder to love.)
Eventually we reach the Shire, about a year after the hobbits left it. The Shire-folk are as comically parochial as ever, barely caring about whatever outlandish things Frodo and his friends have been doing 'down south-away', and far more concerned with their own affairs. For this they can be forgiven, though, for trouble has come to the Shire. In the space of a year it's been dragged into something alarmingly like the Twentieth Century. '...while you've been off in foreign parts,' says the Gaffer, '...they've been and dug up Bagshot Row and ruined my taters!' Lotho Sackville-Baggins has set himself up as a sort of dictator, and gangs of outsiders are acting as 'gatherers' and 'sharers' - 'going round counting and measuring and taking off to storage. They do more gathering than sharing, and we never see most of the stuff again.' There's a vastly expanded force of shirrifs to stamp out dissent and to enforce a curfew and a mile-long list of new rules and regulations.
Saruman is behind it all, of course - we learned at Isengard that he had some connection with the Shire, and by the time the hobbits return he's installed himself at Bag End and is turning Hobbiton and Bywater into a mini-Isengard: the Old Mill has been knocked down and replaced by a new, mechanised version 'full o' wheels and outlandish contraptions' with 'a tall chimney of brick... pouring out black smoke into the evening air.' Its only purpose seems to be to befoul the river. The changes are Saruman's bitter revenge on the hobbits, and after his run-in with the Ents he's got it in for trees too - his thugs fell them for no reason.
It's a shock to find the lovely landscapes of the story's long opening spoiled in this way just when we were expecting a happy ending, but without it The Lord of the Rings would be a different book, and a lesser one. This is Tolkien setting aside fantasy for a moment and acknowledging that evil can't be destroyed, in Terry Pratchett's words, 'by throwing a piece of expensive costume jewellery into a volcano': it will continue to exist, even in the Shire, and it's more likely to be the work of the greedy and the power-hungry than of a Dark Lord.
'This is worse than Mordor!' said Sam. 'Much worse in a way. It comes home to you, as they say; because it is home, and you remember it before it was all ruined.'
'Yes, this is Mordor,' said Frodo. 'Just one of its works. Saruman was doing its work all the time, even when he thought he was working for himself. And the same with those that Saruman tricked, like Lotho.'
Luckily the new masters of the Shire are more easily defeated than the might of Sauron. The message is serious, but the tone is still semi-comic, and there's never much doubt that Frodo, Sam, Merry and Pippin will be able to straighten things out. As the four hobbits mosey into town to sort out the bad guys 'The Scouring of the Shire' starts to resemble nothing so much as a Western, and I'm pretty sure the resemblance is deliberate. Confronted by a band of ruffians, Pippin flicks back his cloak to draw his sword like the hero of a Hollywood oater reaching for his six-gun. Things move swiftly after that. Emboldened by the return of the travellers in the same way that put-upon pioneers in the Wild West perk up when Alan Ladd or Clint Eastwood arrives, a posse of Shire-folk defeat Saruman's men at the Battle of Bywater, and Saruman himself is done in by his pathetic servant Wormtongue.
And so, at last, a proper happy ending looms. The Shire blooms again, and a Mallorn tree sprouts on the spot where Bilbo made his birthday speech back at the book's beginning. Sam marries Rosie Cotton, and has a daughter - the first of many children, we discover, if we read on past the story's end into the Appendices. I'm not intending to deal with those - this blog has gone on quite long enough, I think - but in passing I do have to acknowledge them, and remark on just how strange a book this is, whose story overflows out into maps, family trees, pronunciation guides to invented languages, and odd historical asides like the story of King Arvedui among the Snowmen of Forochel. (I looked up The Silmarillion on a bookseller's website to check something earlier and one of the customer reviews asks in awe-struck tones, 'How could one man have had all of this in his head?') If you read through Appendix B you can learn what becomes of all the main characters over the next one hundred and twenty years.
But the main text concerns itself with Frodo's fate, and here again it is touched with a deep melancholy. For Frodo never recovers from the wounds and traumas he has suffered on his quest: he remains haunted by the loss of the Ring, ('It is gone for ever... and now all is dark and empty') and troubled by the wound he received from the Ringwraith's knife on Weathertop.
'But,' said Sam... 'I thought you were going to enjoy the Shire too, for years and years, after all you have done.'
'So I thought too, once. But I have been too deeply hurt, Sam. I tried to save the Shire, and it has been saved, but not for me. It must often be so, Sam, when things are in danger: some one has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them.'
Two years on from the liberation of the Shire, on Bilbo's birthday, he meets up with Gandalf, Galadriel, Bilbo and others in the woods of the Shire and, with Sam, they ride over the skirts of the White Downs to the sea.
The sea haunts The Lord of the Rings, and yet remains unseen until the very end, when 'they came to the far Downs, and to the Towers, and looked down upon the distant Sea; and so they rode down at last to Mithlond, to the Grey Havens, in the long gulf of Lune.' Beyond the sea lies Elvenhome, the Undying Lands, and that is where Frodo and the rest are going, never to return to Middle-earth. Sam, left watching with Merry and Pippin as the elven ship sails away, hears 'the sigh and murmur of the waves on the shores of Middle-earth', which reminds me of that lovely line in Le Morte D'Arthur where Sir Bedivere, asked what he saw when he bunged Excalibur into the mere and busking desperately because he's chickened out of his sword-bunging duties, says, 'I saw nothing but the waters wap and waves wane'. The echo is probably deliberate. Things get very Arthurian here at the end
And the ship went out onto the High Sea and passed on into the West, until at last on a night of rain Frodo smelled a sweet fragrance on the air and heard the sound of singing that came over the water. And then it seemed to him that as in his dream in the house of Bombadil, the grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise.
I've lost track of how many times I've read this story now: over and over as a child and about once a decade since. Would my time have been better spent reading all those great works of world literature I've never got round to, rather than heading off down the familiar roads of Middle-earth again? Probably. But it's my time, and it's nice to use some of it now and then to go back and re-read a book that got me reading (and writing) in the first place and helped to keep me at it through my teens.
Is The Lord of the Rings itself a great work of world literature? I'm clearly not qualified to judge, but it's obviously been hugely popular, and hugely important in terms of its influence. Many of the big media franchises of today (Star Wars and Harry Potter for instance) are unashamedly riffing on it, and it has hordes of imitators - the goofy Sword of Shannara books, the cynical and prurient Game of Thrones, Lloyd Alexander's excellent Chronicles of Prydain, Willow, The Dark Crystal... I've even had a tongue-in-cheek go myself.
But if you know The Lord of the Rings only by its adaptations and imitators, it must seem like just another pulp fantasy blockbuster, and that is exactly what it isn't. It's a crystallisation of the life's work of a strange, brilliant, and sensitive artist, at once deeply personal and universal. I suspect Tolkien himself regarded his invented languages and the cosmology and deep history he explored in The Silmarillion as more important, but personally I need a story, and The Lord of the Rings provides a gripping one, in which all the more elevated stuff - the Valar and the Fall of Númenor and so on - hover intriguingly in the background, half-glimpsed and half-understood. Tolkien's Romantic conservatism and profound Christian faith were rather out-of-fashion when he was writing and would mark him out for immediate cancellation by the Red Guards of the internet were he still around today, but they are the foundations on which The Lord of the Rings is built and they add considerably to its power - it really does feel like a story that has come to us out of a different world. But it's a world which is made accessible and understandable to us by its deep humanity, and by the hobbits and their Shire, which anchors Middle-earth to our own world.
It's important that the book doesn't end with Frodo arriving at the green hills of the Undying Lands. We return to Sam, who stands on the shores of Middle-earth until the departing ship is just 'a shadow on the waters', then rides home in company Merry and Pippin and comes at last to Bag End:
...and there was yellow light, and fire within; and the evening meal was ready, and he was expected. And Rose drew him in, and set him in his chair, and put little Elanor upon his lap.
He drew a deep breath. 'Well, I'm back,' he said.
 |
| Alan Lee |
John Boorman, moving on from his abortive 1970s Lord of the Rings adaptation to direct the Arthurian epic Excalibur, gave Merlin a line which Gandalf or Galadriel might have said (and perhaps would have, if his version of Middle-earth had reached the screen). 'Our days are numbered. The old ways are passing. The spirits of wood and stream fall silent. It is a time for men, and their ways.' It sums up the feeling that echoes all through these final chapters. I wonder if one of the reasons the hobbits spend so long on their journey home is partly so that Tolkien can have them reach the Shire in autumn, the season matching the mood.
As they journey north, the language shifts. The Lord of the Rings is written in two registers, although there are many gradations between them. (I suppose they are partly intended to suggest the different languages the characters are speaking.) The celebrations on the Field of Cormallen and at Minas Tirith are told in Tolkien's faux-mediaeval, Idylls of the King, King James Bible voice - 'And all the host laughed and wept, and in the midst of their merriment and tears the clear voice of the minstrel rose like silver and gold, and all men were hushed.' So is the rather touching love story of Faramir and Éowyn (which reminds me a little of Marcus and Cottia in my other childhood favourite, The Eagle of the Ninth) - they call each other 'thee' and 'thou'. But as the hobbits ride homeward, shedding their grander companions along the way, the language shifts back to a more hobbity, less high-falutin' demotic English. 'So it was near the end of a wild and wet evening in the last days of October the... travellers rode up the climbing road and came to the South-gate of Bree.' (The contrast between these two registers is one of the pleasures of the book: The Silmarillion, if I'm remembering it correctly, is all told in the former style, and is far harder to love.)
Eventually we reach the Shire, about a year after the hobbits left it. The Shire-folk are as comically parochial as ever, barely caring about whatever outlandish things Frodo and his friends have been doing 'down south-away', and far more concerned with their own affairs. For this they can be forgiven, though, for trouble has come to the Shire. In the space of a year it's been dragged into something alarmingly like the Twentieth Century. '...while you've been off in foreign parts,' says the Gaffer, '...they've been and dug up Bagshot Row and ruined my taters!' Lotho Sackville-Baggins has set himself up as a sort of dictator, and gangs of outsiders are acting as 'gatherers' and 'sharers' - 'going round counting and measuring and taking off to storage. They do more gathering than sharing, and we never see most of the stuff again.' There's a vastly expanded force of shirrifs to stamp out dissent and to enforce a curfew and a mile-long list of new rules and regulations.
Saruman is behind it all, of course - we learned at Isengard that he had some connection with the Shire, and by the time the hobbits return he's installed himself at Bag End and is turning Hobbiton and Bywater into a mini-Isengard: the Old Mill has been knocked down and replaced by a new, mechanised version 'full o' wheels and outlandish contraptions' with 'a tall chimney of brick... pouring out black smoke into the evening air.' Its only purpose seems to be to befoul the river. The changes are Saruman's bitter revenge on the hobbits, and after his run-in with the Ents he's got it in for trees too - his thugs fell them for no reason.
It's a shock to find the lovely landscapes of the story's long opening spoiled in this way just when we were expecting a happy ending, but without it The Lord of the Rings would be a different book, and a lesser one. This is Tolkien setting aside fantasy for a moment and acknowledging that evil can't be destroyed, in Terry Pratchett's words, 'by throwing a piece of expensive costume jewellery into a volcano': it will continue to exist, even in the Shire, and it's more likely to be the work of the greedy and the power-hungry than of a Dark Lord.
'This is worse than Mordor!' said Sam. 'Much worse in a way. It comes home to you, as they say; because it is home, and you remember it before it was all ruined.'
'Yes, this is Mordor,' said Frodo. 'Just one of its works. Saruman was doing its work all the time, even when he thought he was working for himself. And the same with those that Saruman tricked, like Lotho.'
Luckily the new masters of the Shire are more easily defeated than the might of Sauron. The message is serious, but the tone is still semi-comic, and there's never much doubt that Frodo, Sam, Merry and Pippin will be able to straighten things out. As the four hobbits mosey into town to sort out the bad guys 'The Scouring of the Shire' starts to resemble nothing so much as a Western, and I'm pretty sure the resemblance is deliberate. Confronted by a band of ruffians, Pippin flicks back his cloak to draw his sword like the hero of a Hollywood oater reaching for his six-gun. Things move swiftly after that. Emboldened by the return of the travellers in the same way that put-upon pioneers in the Wild West perk up when Alan Ladd or Clint Eastwood arrives, a posse of Shire-folk defeat Saruman's men at the Battle of Bywater, and Saruman himself is done in by his pathetic servant Wormtongue.
 |
| Early Morning, by Samuel Palmer, 1825 (Ashmolean Museum) |
But the main text concerns itself with Frodo's fate, and here again it is touched with a deep melancholy. For Frodo never recovers from the wounds and traumas he has suffered on his quest: he remains haunted by the loss of the Ring, ('It is gone for ever... and now all is dark and empty') and troubled by the wound he received from the Ringwraith's knife on Weathertop.
'But,' said Sam... 'I thought you were going to enjoy the Shire too, for years and years, after all you have done.'
'So I thought too, once. But I have been too deeply hurt, Sam. I tried to save the Shire, and it has been saved, but not for me. It must often be so, Sam, when things are in danger: some one has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them.'
Two years on from the liberation of the Shire, on Bilbo's birthday, he meets up with Gandalf, Galadriel, Bilbo and others in the woods of the Shire and, with Sam, they ride over the skirts of the White Downs to the sea.
The sea haunts The Lord of the Rings, and yet remains unseen until the very end, when 'they came to the far Downs, and to the Towers, and looked down upon the distant Sea; and so they rode down at last to Mithlond, to the Grey Havens, in the long gulf of Lune.' Beyond the sea lies Elvenhome, the Undying Lands, and that is where Frodo and the rest are going, never to return to Middle-earth. Sam, left watching with Merry and Pippin as the elven ship sails away, hears 'the sigh and murmur of the waves on the shores of Middle-earth', which reminds me of that lovely line in Le Morte D'Arthur where Sir Bedivere, asked what he saw when he bunged Excalibur into the mere and busking desperately because he's chickened out of his sword-bunging duties, says, 'I saw nothing but the waters wap and waves wane'. The echo is probably deliberate. Things get very Arthurian here at the end
And the ship went out onto the High Sea and passed on into the West, until at last on a night of rain Frodo smelled a sweet fragrance on the air and heard the sound of singing that came over the water. And then it seemed to him that as in his dream in the house of Bombadil, the grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise.
 |
| Arthur sails away to Avalon in the final scene of Excalibur |
Is The Lord of the Rings itself a great work of world literature? I'm clearly not qualified to judge, but it's obviously been hugely popular, and hugely important in terms of its influence. Many of the big media franchises of today (Star Wars and Harry Potter for instance) are unashamedly riffing on it, and it has hordes of imitators - the goofy Sword of Shannara books, the cynical and prurient Game of Thrones, Lloyd Alexander's excellent Chronicles of Prydain, Willow, The Dark Crystal... I've even had a tongue-in-cheek go myself.
But if you know The Lord of the Rings only by its adaptations and imitators, it must seem like just another pulp fantasy blockbuster, and that is exactly what it isn't. It's a crystallisation of the life's work of a strange, brilliant, and sensitive artist, at once deeply personal and universal. I suspect Tolkien himself regarded his invented languages and the cosmology and deep history he explored in The Silmarillion as more important, but personally I need a story, and The Lord of the Rings provides a gripping one, in which all the more elevated stuff - the Valar and the Fall of Númenor and so on - hover intriguingly in the background, half-glimpsed and half-understood. Tolkien's Romantic conservatism and profound Christian faith were rather out-of-fashion when he was writing and would mark him out for immediate cancellation by the Red Guards of the internet were he still around today, but they are the foundations on which The Lord of the Rings is built and they add considerably to its power - it really does feel like a story that has come to us out of a different world. But it's a world which is made accessible and understandable to us by its deep humanity, and by the hobbits and their Shire, which anchors Middle-earth to our own world.
It's important that the book doesn't end with Frodo arriving at the green hills of the Undying Lands. We return to Sam, who stands on the shores of Middle-earth until the departing ship is just 'a shadow on the waters', then rides home in company Merry and Pippin and comes at last to Bag End:
...and there was yellow light, and fire within; and the evening meal was ready, and he was expected. And Rose drew him in, and set him in his chair, and put little Elanor upon his lap.
He drew a deep breath. 'Well, I'm back,' he said.
 |
| J.R.R Tolkien. (Photo from the National Portrait Gallery) |
Comments
Thank you.
Is it a great work of world literature? Not only are we not qualified to judge, i don't even think anyone's qualified to ask. To judge something we need to compare it, to the acknowledged Greats and Not-so Greats. But what can you compare it to? There still isn't another book like it. Your 'registers' (good term) are familiar ones, and we've seen them in Hollywood movies of the 1940s, and also in Ealing Comedies of the time. But we've never seen a book in which the styles blend in an out of the narrative the way they do. To my mind the rural Gorblimeyness of the Hobbits, with their gaffers and taters (begging yer pardon Mister Frodo) has dated a lot more than the Romantic mysticism of the journeys through the lands of the High and Mighty. Though the journeys with Strider through the wilderness feel very prescient of the later "coarse history" of Richard Carpenter, Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam, and are probably my favourite parts of the story - it's almost disappointing when they're safe in Rivendell.
Interestingly there are very few characters in the book that can successfully work in both registers. Saruman manages it by playing the part of Cockney East End Villain Sharkey when he's in Hobbiton. Most other characters would (and do) view the Hobbits uncomprehendingly when they get together and go all Hobbity, although Theoden manages to convey mystified but tolerant amusement, the way a grandfather would when watching his grandkids playing on their Oculus Quest. Gandalf is the most successful, managing to be grudgingly tolerated in one world, and regarded with awe and respect in the other, while playing exactly the same person.
Also, uniquely, The Lord of the Rings is almost like an expanding story - there is always more to find out, more to discover, more to learn, the more you read it. But it doesn't matter to what level you go into Tolkien's world, you come away with a complete, satisfying tale. Read it once, you know all you need to know to enjoy it. But then read the Appendixes, and then read the books again. Then every 5 or 10 years or so. The kernel of The Lord of the Rings has grown into a massive sprawling oak, and there's still more branches to be discovered.
Finally, yes, you're spot on. The book must end with Frodo leaving, not arriving. Because the book isn't just about Frodo, it's about everyone else that went on the journey. I notice that the final episode of 'Babylon 5' - 'Sleeping in Light' - has the same structure. I'm sure that's not a deliberate homage, but simply an example of a writer understanding the best way to end a book.