Meditations on Middle-Earth (20 page)

Oddly, it is in the reading of fiction that we come closest to achieving communication—true harmony of worldview. When you and I both read The Lord of the Rings (or any other story), we have the chance to share memories that were shaped by a single consciousness—in this case, Tolkien’s. To the degree that we both take joy in his world and believe in it, to the degree that our worldview is transformed by Tolkien’s, then to that degree we approach the possibility of understanding, the possibility of being, however momentarily, of one mind. We never actually achieve it, but the mere approach, like the approach to lightspeed, has wild and powerful effects. Where “serious” readings result in scholarly papers and learned lectures, “escapist” readings plunge us into experiences that cannot be codified, even though we understand that, having read this story, nothing will ever be the same for us.

Now, I must be fair about this: “serious” readers guiltily admit, when pressed, that along with their “serious” reading, “escapist” experiences sometimes slip in by accident—and they enjoy them, too. Perhaps even more than they relish the pleasures of successful decipherment. Is what the lovers of
Ulysses
love that which must be decoded, or is it that which does not need decoding, but which must instead be (“escapistly”) experienced?

Fiction is valued in every human society precisely because it makes us who read it temporarily, approximately, One. We have memories in common—memories more complex and powerful than any but a few shared rituals can provide. And when a society embraces stories that create or reinforce worldviews that lead people to behave in valuable ways—nobly giving their lives for their country, for instance, or responsibly taking care of their children’s needs no matter how inconvenient or difficult that may be—then that society is more likely to survive than one whose stories create worldviews that celebrate a refusal to sacrifice for the good of others. And certainly it is worth-while to examine just what the worldview is that the writer has (probably unconsciously, perhaps inevitably so) offered to the readers who embrace the tale.

But we must remember that such an examination does not decode a story, but rather concentrates only on the meanings-within-the-tale. We do not look for what Shelob “symbolizes.” We look for what it means within the story’s
own
terms that Shelob tries to kill Frodo and, ultimately, fails; what it means
in the story
that Sam wears the ring repeatedly in order to search for Frodo and free him; what it means when Frodo snatches the ring back from Sam. Our judgment is not aesthetic, ultimately, but rather moral. (It can be argued, of course, that aesthetic judgments are all, ultimately, moral judgments, for reasons that should suggest themselves in what I have already said here.)

And we must also remember that honest, careful readers can still disagree about the same, beloved story. For instance, the denouement of The Lord of the Rings is extraordinarily complex. The ring has been destroyed, Aragorn enthroned, the Shire scoured. But Frodo is not happy in the Shire. He wore the ring too long. It scarred him. For him, joy can only come by leaving what used to be his home and sailing into the West with the elves, to a land of heroes and myths. His is a bittersweet parting, very much like death, very much like going to heaven. No, I am not retreating into decipherment. But Tolkien was a convert to Catholicism, and the deep story of Catholicism was a part of his worldview. It is bound to show up in his stories, not in an allegorical, conscious, encoded way, but rather as the-way-things-work. When you have borne such a deep, soulscarring burden, it cannot be healed in Middle-earth. Frodo has stared into hell as no other living soul has done; he can only be healed and become whole in the West. This is not allegory, it is honesty—it is Tolkien telling the truth, not by plan, but because this is what felt right and true to him as he was making the thousand unconscious decisions that a writer makes on every page of every story.

We are meant to shed tears (or to wish to shed tears), as believers would at the deathbed or funeral of a good soul of whose eternal happiness we have no doubt.

And if that had been the only ending of The Lord of the Rings, I don’t know if I would love this story the way I do. Because of course there is another ending, one that Tolkien no doubt thought of as “second prize”: Sam’s return to the Shire, and
his
happiness there.

Most readers of The Lord of the Rings I have talked to, you see, regard Frodo as the great hero of the book, and certainly that is what the text would lead any rational person to believe. But I, and a certain subset of readers of The Lord of the Rings, don’t see it that way. When I read the story, with the great climactic scene at the Cracks of Doom, I saw Frodo as a failure. When he reached the moment of choice,
he could not do it
. He did not walk on his own legs to that place, he was carried there; and when it was time to let go of the ring and see it fall to its destruction, he instead declared himself the ringmaster and put the damned thing on. The ring won. It was stronger than Frodo. He failed.

Most people accept this as Tolkien clearly intended—after all, he has told us more than once that, without naming God,
someone
was planning these events, and had a role for Gollum to play, and that role was to bite off the finger and its ring from the hand of the failed ringbearer, and then die along with the ring he loved so much. In other words, no man, not even Frodo, had the power to do what had to be done, and only because it was
meant
to happen did the ring end up being destroyed.

Here’s my eccentric reading (which is also justified in the text, but with different emphasis): There was one ringbearer who voluntarily, willingly surrendered the ring after having worn it repeatedly: Samwise Gamgee. It was Sam, not Frodo, who actually carried the ring those last miles to the Cracks of Doom, by carrying Frodo who carried the ring. There is no analogue to Sam in the Christ story (which is one reason why allegorical readings of The Lord of the Rings fall apart). Nobody picked Christ up and carried him to his sacrifice. Yet something in Tolkien knew that the ring was too terrible for Frodo to carry it himself, right to the end. Maybe it was, in Tolkien’s mind, something as trivial as the necessity of the plot—having written that Frodo was carried off from Shelob’s lair by the Ores, the only way he could think of for Frodo to get free was for Sam to put on the ring. Whatever Tolkien’s conscious reasoning was, however, the fact remains that Sam was also a ringbearer. But because he was of a humbler social class, he never once conceived himself as being truly worthy to bear it. Oh, the ring worked its magic on him, and he had his moments of imagining what such power in his hands might accomplish. But he knew that even these wild dreams were humble and silly (in the ancient meaning of the word), and his humility made him laugh at his own ambitions.

Samwise Gamgee was, in fact, the quintessential servant, and no doubt there was something in Tolkien that resonated with the idea that “whoever would be greatest among you, let him be the servant of all.” By such reckoning, it is Sam, not Frodo, who was the greatest of the heroes—and all the greater, I felt at least, because it never crosses Sam’s mind or anyone else’s that this might be the case. Indeed, Sam is so purely focused on the greatness of his master that it is almost impossible actually to consider him for himself; he exists only in relation to Frodo. It is not until Frodo sails to the West and Sam returns home that at last he is freely and fully himself. Now at last the servant is master in his own home, able to take joy in the company of his wife and children, to labor happily in his garden, and watch and take part in the blossoming of his beloved land and his beloved neighbors.

In my reading of the story—and remember, this was my original, natural reading, not analyzed, simply the way I took the story—Sam was the great hero; and The Lord of the Rings had a perfect ending because he was, finally, the only ringbearer who had no regrets. He had borne the ring but had done nothing wrong with it; and despite temptation, he had surrendered it more freely than anyone who had ever worn it. So it was fitting that he received, not the contemplative life of Frodo’s apotheosis, but rather the idea of heaven that I had grown up with in my definitely non-Catholic religion: to live in a garden made by his own hands, surrounded by his family, and able to watch and help his family and his garden improve and increase.

Certainly everything I saw in the story is there. But over the years I have found that most people receive the story as Frodo’s, and his passage into the West as the ending, with Sam’s return to the Shire as simply a way of putting period to the tale. Still, a significant number of readers do agree with me in my admittedly eccentric reading, in which Frodo’s passage west is sad, a melancholy end to an injured soul, while the true ending of the story is Sam’s return home as a man at last unsubservient (and yet still serving), who deserves his true happiness because he is the only one who obeyed and acted nobly in all cases, even when his first desire was otherwise.

This is not some coded meaning, it is how I experienced the meaning of these events within the world of the tale. These events did not “stand for” anything in the real world. But my own worldview caused me to receive the story with different emphasis, different moral weight, different values from the way many others received it. It is not even terribly interesting what Tolkien “meant” as he wrote it; to the degree that his choices were unconscious, they can be trusted to reflect what he truly believed; and to the degree that his choices were conscious, they can be trusted only to show us what he believed that he believed.

In this case, as with most elements of The Lord of the Rings, I assume Tolkien to have been writing “escapistly,” without encryption, deciding what happened and why, solely on the basis of what felt important and true to him at the time he was writing or revising. I may well be projecting my own process of storytelling onto Tolkien because, inevitably, I always view the world through my own lens, having no other, no matter how I try to polish it and focus it clearly. But he said there was no allegory here, and I take him at his word, with the broadest reading of the term allegory, to include all methods of encryption and decipherment of extraneous “meaning.”

The Lord of the Rings, like all of Tolkien’s fiction and, I believe, all truly great tales, is a wild tale, untamable. It is the mark of the depth of this great river that sweeps us along when we step into it that there can be variant readings, which are nevertheless consonant with the text. It is as ragged as a river, with sandbars here and there that fetch us up and leave us dry for a moment or two (I’ve never cared about the barrow-wights; and others have their sections or characters that bore or irritate them). But the river flows on, and when we leap back in we are caught up again; and if, in its broad delta, some of us end up in a different place when the story’s over, well, that’s what happens in such wild streams. In fact, that’s what we hope for, that this author’s world is so real that when we immerse ourselves in it, we can never be sure, from one reading to the next, where it will take us, or what we will see along the way.

We have run this river, you and I—more than once, in my case, and quite probably in yours. I keep returning to it precisely because it has never been tamed, and cannot be tamed. It is wild every time, and so the “meanings” of the story, while boundaried by the words on the page and the mind that envisioned the tale, are nevertheless many, each one a current that can tug me here this time, there the next, to see different meanings every time.

Forget the river metaphor. No analogizing now. There is a man’s whole soul in the pages of this tale, a man’s whole life, each stage of it, represented in the elements of its creation. The great storytellers are the ones whose characters become as real in our memories as our friends and family. As ourselves. I have lived in Middle-earth, and so have you; and it matters to us, or you would not be reading this book, and I would not be writing this essay. All these years since Tolkien died, and yet he still reveals the world, the wide and wild world, to us.

THE TALE
GOES EVER
ON

CHARLES DE LINT

M
y first encounter with Tolkien was through my older sister, Kame, when I was around twelve or thirteen. I’d temporarily put aside the fairy tales and books on myth and folk tales that I’d been reading (not to mention Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan and John Carter books borrowed from my father’s bookshelf) and had been seduced, hook, line and sinker, by mysteries and spy thrillers. Instead of Donkeyskins and cats in boots and Taliesins, my head was filled with the exploits of the Saint and Modesty Blaise, Shell Scott and Mike Hammer, Nick Carter and James Bond.

What can I say? I was young, I was impressionable.

The day in question was probably on a weekend. A Saturday or Sunday. I came into my sister’s bedroom (without knocking, I’m sure) and was hanging around being a pest when I noticed this book lying on her bed.
The Hobbit
. I asked her what it was about, and she proceeded, with great enthusiasm, to tell me about Bilbo Baggins and Gandalf, about dwarves and elves and Rivendell and all.