Essays On The Lord of The Rings - 6 by 9
Essays On The Lord of The Rings - 6 by 9
Essays On The Lord of The Rings - 6 by 9
the Rings
Patrick McEvoy-Halston
Copyright © 2017 Patrick McEvoy-Halston
ISBN: 9781521032213
TO EVERYONE WHO EVER THOUGHT THAT
MAYBE THE RING SHOULD HAVE BEEN
BROUGHT TO GONDOR
For after all, it was even Gandalf’s intention to do so, if only Denethor
could have been more trusted.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments i
i
Lord of the Rings: the anti-adventure
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for the adolescent to cast away the nursery and feast on their
own self-mission.
If a malevolent, jealous, angry party — the party being
dismissed — wanted to nip this type of self-actualization in
the bud, it would beset upon the young adolescent a kind of
desperate need to cling back to what they had known for a
sense of safety. I think that’s what a lot of the Lord of the Rings
is, under cover of being an adventure into the outside world
where people surely must grow and discover new aspects of
themselves they had hardly known were there. Frodo and the
other hobbits are barely out the door when they are beset
upon by Middle Earth’s most dangerous and terrifying
predators — members of the nine Nazgul. Frodo, in
betraying an insufficient lack of will to not comply with that
of their own, is just about to humiliate himself, when
suddenly a whole host of Elves appear — a race that is the
oldest of the old in Middle Earth — and the Nazgul flee their
might.
The Elves accept them and surround them with joyous
cheer. But they serve pretty much as if when just out the
door, “mommy” had called the neighbourhood watch to keep
an eye out for them, at the cost of the “children” thinking this
outside world cannot be thought through on their own. They
are encouraged to learn this lesson: if you further rebel against
things you have been instructed to requit to, they might not
receive you so kindly when next time you are required to
retreat for their support — and then where will you be? Whatever
the Elves might want of you in future, you will heed it. If you
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It’s also grating that much of the growth they are allowed
to participate in is thin and sometimes wholly false. Frodo is
ostensibly the wisest hobbit, and he is wise, in that he, for
example, knows to apply caution to what he says so that it
can be shaped for best reception — as Captain Faramir says
of him, when deciding what ultimately to make of him and
Sam. But the wisest thing he says and does is actually
something inverse to this, for it’s in knowing to trust Aragorn
when he meets him because what firmly trusts that it is good
can lapse in its effort to always appear good. But this turns out
to be a shallowly learned lesson, for the ugliest thing is
shameful action, and it is to avoid that — shame; how others
would see him — that he decides not to retreat back to
Rivendale when further progress seemed blocked (Fellowship,
387), and it is to avoid that that he does not give Boromir a
fair listen to when alone with him at the end of Fellowship. To
be beholden to others’ opinion of you is the ugliest thing
imaginable, for it means you are not self-ruled, that you are a
slave, but he is everywhere so obsequent to its stirrings. For
him it is forever, what would Gandalf think of me if I decided thus?,
followed by capitulation to Gandalf’s anticipated preferences.
When Boromir encourages Frodo to choose to go his way, to
take the Ring to Gondor and make use of it, Boromir quickly
shifts from being friendly to being insulting and aggressive.
With his vulgar urgency, even if there is some at first, there is
no long-sustained suavity in how he makes his case. He
argues that all of Frodo’s heroes are timid, are frauds —
which is the best way to automatically make yourself ugly to
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But how now this mature man wishes for the young
adolescent me, the stirring young adult in me, reading Lord of
the Rings when he was newly factoring how much venturing
he should do away from home, that he had. I would have
loved to have some voice sink into my head early, sink into
me then, telling me, with an alien and exciting power, a power
outside one I’d known, that the true way to growth might
mean having to bear the shame of appearing ugly to those
you’ve thus far depended on. Not just “the Shire” but an “old
world” representative as grand as Gandalf may well think
you’re slime for what you’ve done, and you’ll be documented
thereafter as akin in disappointment to Gollum or to
Wormtongue. But nevertheless you’ll be happier in being able
to bear it, for there are other, more worthy friends, to match
your arising self.
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just to have killed outright when chance allowed, and it wasn’t just
the Ring that did it. The Ring made him extraordinarily bothersome,
a sort of town nuisance writ large, but it did not change him into
something that disparate from his normal, after all, “most inquisitive
and curious-minded” (69) self. Rather, it was his expulsion from his
home by the leading matriarch — by his grandmother —which did it.
That’s what drove him away from all light and into the caves; that’s
what made him so forlorn. Exasperating her beyond all tolerance, he
had finally overwhelmed her patience, and paid one hell of a price for
it. When Frodo provides Lobelia with the home she covets, it is done
ostensibly only for expediency: the house needed to be sold quickly,
and she was the most interested buyer. But given the foreboding tale
of what happened to Gollum when he had exhausted an ostensibly
benign matriarch’s patience, in addition, of course, to our own never
lost knowledge that nothing scared us more than what may have
happened to us in the way we were handled in the “nursery,” in
retrospect it can feel like it was sold to her almost out of relief: the
adventure-garnered prowess of Bilbo had kept the home safe to
himself for over ninety years, his adventure and might-backed
“queerness” intimidated neighbours, not just irked or intrigued them,
but with him gone and it left only to young, inexperienced Frodo to
forestall the accumulating anger of Lobelia’s having being denied,
decade after accumulating decade, her inheritance, he took the last
avenue he had to stop her from annihilating him with her fury. He
threw her, this “dragon,” accumulating fury and strength as the ages
passed, a house-sized “steak”— everything, that is, that she wanted
— and snuck quickly out through the door. Possible?
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for example, Sauron might be brought down. The person who figures
out how the seemingly invulnerable threat on this adventure can be
made to actually prove vulnerable, in this narrative, is Gandalf only.
The flaw he points out is that though he is beyond brilliant, Sauron
can’t imagine anyone possessing the Ring not wanting to use its
power: to him, it’s beyond consideration that the Ring-bearer would
seek to destroy an artifact that grants such great power, and this
means he maintains no heavily fortified defence against this tactic.
And so Gandalf loads it onto a member of the one race that seems
capable of resisting its draw more than any other, and, as well, just as
remarkably capable of bearing its incurring despondency, and ships
him off — and that’s what Frodo’s own usefulness basically amounts to.
Question, then: Which of the two is actually great, and which does
well only for being a reasonably good representative of his kind?
Further question: Which one goes on adventures where he would
seem to have earned the kind of bearing that would have him
confidently counter Gandalf if ever he disagrees with him, as for
example, Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas readily do, and which one
seems as if he’s being granted it only for being a plaguing source of
guilt — like a soldier sent just at the arrival of his adulthood to die on
a foreign battlefield, his voice gets heeded because unconsciously he
remains understood as someone sacrificed for the fact that his
immediate circumstances argued for his deserving better?
There’s a bit in Return of the King where Merry thinks on the
effect that all the places he has seen in his adventures have had on
him, and decides they didn’t provide him with what he thought they
would. He surmised that it was perhaps mostly just onslaught,
something he didn’t so much explore and to some extent “master,”
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was meeting them, but not just owing to their charm but also surely
to having met them right after their arrival daunted Black Riders set
to kill and/or capture them — with Tom Bombadil’s — Frodo gives
him the Ring when he requests it because he has become just that
compliant after Bombadil rescued them all from Old Man Willow —
and finally, the rest of the way, with Gandalf’s. And Gandalf becomes
someone, not whom one might want to heed advice from (87), but
someone whom the others are compelled to, without question,
regardless of course or counsel advanced. If the real risk to Gandalf’s
plans was ever the hobbits’ independent judgment — would Frodo
perhaps actually give someone who represented dissent a listen, a
fairer listen, where if the two could find time alone the “two together
[might actually find] […] wisdom” (522)? — this would have been the
very course he would have plotted for them to undertake in order to
scare away any sense of themselves as feeling safe doing anything
other than clinging back when caught outside familiar support.
A few things to note about the stay at Rivendale: One, why
would Bilbo have wanted to come here, other than for purposes of
reflected narcissism… to bathe in being tangentally accepted into
their greatness? He is living amongst entities who are better than
him… at everything. The most they can grant him when he produces
his highest art is that it could maybe pass as their worst. It is not to
say that one couldn’t take pleasure, nevertheless, mostly in reaching a
personal pinnacle. But since you’ve surrounded yourself by others
who perpetually tempt you more to take adverse pleasure in your
accomplishment through understanding it as allowing you to
participate in their glory, the environment remains one that works
towards self-abasement. It is a very beautiful vision, this Rivendale of
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anything possibly awry about his doing so as well. Frodo has become
so that he heeds, not the wisdom in Gandalf’s actions, in the
particulars of his leadership — for if like that he might have recalled
here Gandalf’s reproof against too readily assuming your heart knows
best, and thought again on the possible wisdom in Boromir’s
preference for the fate of Ring — but his intentions, absent scrutiny,
which is for him to destroy the Ring: and so I think have we become.
Gandalf hasn’t inspired but mastered us, as the text has prompted
such Gandalf-clingers of us all that even an instance where Elrond
himself looks like he might have been caught out in an error of
judgment when the fate of the whole world was at stake, can’t
command respectful recall when one would suppose circumstances
had arisen for its immediately being beckoned back into memory.
Pity the fate of any Boromir, then, who’d hoped to change our mind
— as well as the fate of any goodness that might have arisen if their
course was one that would have actually proved solid.
And finally, when the wizard Saruman tries to manipulate a good
hearing for himself when precariously situated before Gandalf, the
Rohirrim, and the remaining members of the Fellowship, he succeeds
in daunting all but Gandalf by making them feel like those “shut out,
listening at a door to words not meant for them: ill-mannered
children or stupid servants overhearing the elusive discourse of their
elders, and wondering how it would affect their lot. Of loftier mould
these two were made; reverend and wise. It was inevitable that they
should make alliance. Gandalf would ascend into the tower, to
discuss deep things beyond their comprehension in the high
chambers of Orthanc. The door would be closed, and they would be
left outside, dismissed to await allotted work or punishment” (The
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Two Towers, 557). Early memories of being dismissed to the kid’s table
while adults discuss “serious matters,” as a deliberate tactic intended
to depreciate one’s self-worth, apparently remain in everyone, and
thus leave you susceptible to manipulation, is what the text informs
us here. Yet the Council of Elrond, the council of the good, is certainly
“high matters” itself, yet hasn’t integrated that lesson well enough
that it doesn’t not seem to all humorous “cheek” when Sam bursts
amongst them and demands his own say as to who should go on the
journey. And earlier, when actual invited guest Bilbo spoke up,
though he got tribute he remained seen — rightly, we are meant to
have understood — as someone who can’t appreciate that he’s gotten
far too old to go on adventures and swing swords (only truly great
ones like the aged Denethor and Theoden, get to remain still like
that). He speaks up only so that he can with finality be shut out,
however kindly — one lingering bit of old business, satisfyingly now
out of the way.
And when Frodo speaks up, it seems almost as if volunteering so
that others needn’t demand — a response that isn’t so much out of
one’s own initiative, but rather one that betrays slavish high
receptivity to others’ needs, conveyed here from atmospherically
evident deliberate avoidance of the obvious. Elrond replies to his
declaration by stating that “this task is [actually] appointed for you”
(355). Why, we should ask, did he wait for him to volunteer when the
answer to himself and Gandalf, at least, was as obvious as something
already confirmed? Is it because they still nevertheless had to keep
their hands clean because Frodo’s going on what Boromir rightly
estimates as a clear suicide mission, a clear mission into oblivion, so
that the establishment is saved instant death and can at their own
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Fellowship those who can and do cause upset and disquiet in others
— in other good people, that is — by making them feel abandoned
just when they’d been lead to believe rescue had come (the vivid
dismay caused by Aragorn’s unexplained sprinting off from the war-
march to Pelennor Fields, anyone?). It’s a malicious secret intention,
to hopefully grow past. The second, however, is one to expand, for
it’s inner sanity reproofing the author with the fact that it is insane to
be writing a narrative about having claimed an opponent’s most
valuable treasure, his most powerful tool and weapon, and being so
unquestionably inclined to only inscribe it as profound trouble that’s
so unfortunately arrived in one’s midst. In real life that could be a
boat load of German Jews coming to American shores in World War
Two, that would give the Allies the absurd advantage in intellect and
creativity, after all, and we don’t really want to tell a tale that would
have had the Americans in that situation deny themselves just so the
local boys wouldn’t have had to suffer the stress of having to
accommodate, would we?
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A Reader’s Guide to The Two Towers
The title “The Two Towers” makes it sound like this part of the
adventure is especially ominous. The adventurers have to contend
with two circumferences of evil influence, both linked. But the reader
soon discovers that the two towers are hardly in union: Saruman
seeks claim of the Ring himself and is not the least bit actually serving
deferentially to Sauron, and Sauron knows this about him but finds
him a useful enough agent nevertheless. Saruman, though of course
as old as the hills as Sauron is, is reasonably new to the “being evil”
game (though Treebeard suspects a longer tenure, passed notice by
everyone for being contrived in hiding), while Sauron is old hat. The
Two Towers ends up being as much about this — the rivalry between
newly rising and long-established order — as it is about the two
different threats imposed in the pathway of the Fellowship, a theme,
a concern, which applies far beyond Saruman’s relationship vis-à-vis
Sauron to include assembling allies of the good and members within
the now disparate venturing parts of the Fellowship. It — that is, a
concern that the old order not by breached; that people not start
thinking things with perhaps destabilizing implications for the social
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order — seems concerned in this sense to protect both evil and good
in this book: it’s an overriding concern, an overarching concern,
making any act of bravery, initiative, or spirited intuition, just as often
something to be dealt with and handled — i.e. subtly or starkly
diminished — immediately, than something worth praise and
support. An outpouring of an eager willingness to praise or to lend
strong support, in fact, is more often to come out of expressions of
doubt and admittance or clear evidence of failure than from
successfully accomplished feat, which is looked to warily if it can’t be
immediately packaged as something as actually as demonstrative of
one’s limitations as one’s potential.
The book begins with Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas full of doubt,
veering toward despondency. “Now the company is all in ruin,”
Aragorn says. “It is I that has failed. Vain was Gandalf's trust in me.
[…] What shall I do now?” (404). He gets his answer to some extent
by the particular direction his heart points him towards, but also
seemingly in deciding for modesty, for the more modest of the two
paths he needs to choose between. Grant the main course to Frodo
and Sam, and take the path that is a “small deed in the great deeds of
this time” (416) — somehow goodness lies therein. This I think is the
last time one ever hears of Aragorn admonishing himself as a limited
figure, and of his seeking to venture away from glory. In retrospect, it
seems almost a ceremonial gesture in that the one who is about to
serve as king over all of Middle-earth, first begs himself as someone
who never forgets that his greatest deeds have been bested by even
greater kings before him, and that he has known doubt, failure, and
even moments of total lack of surety, as much as any man. Hereafter
he never intentionally reduces himself, even if others mistakenly
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believe they’ve caught him out in reduced form — i.e., his wearing a
mere grey cloak into the halls of Medusheld. And the key dramatic
action concerning him is infinitely more his rising — and into some
form of greatness that daunts everyone in terms of stature — “power
and majesty of kings of stone” (423) — and presumed ready
accessibility — “none now of the land of the living can tell his
purpose” (780). Henceforth, outside of being momentarily spell-
caught by Saruman, any change on his part involves making him that
much more evident as a “kingly man of high destiny” (780).
Aragorn is venturing on a path that will not actually have him
rescue Merry and Pippen — Treebeard and the Horse-lords do that
— but rather establishing himself amongst other denizens of Middle-
earth as the great king returned. Ultimately it’s not by any means a
path that simply lends distinction to Frodo and Sam’s own, but his
modestly undertaken journey does work to highlight the outwardly bold
presumption of those next discussed in the text, Saruman and his
servants — of whom one of them is deemed particularly vile. Note
that bold thought and action is by no means always due for criticism
in the text. Much of Two Towers is replete with it, bold action that
goes un-criticized, in fact — or at least by anyone given textual
authority; by anyone who matters. Aragorn, after deciding finally on
which course to take, switches entirely out of being momentarily
fretful to simply announcing himself from out of hiding upon a
whole horde of Horse-lords, and in such a stark and unexpected
manner — “What news from the North, Riders of Rohan?” — that
it’s no surprise the Rohanians consider them possibly sorcerers after
having first thought them, even Orcs. The path Frodo and Sam
chose for themselves is not to be assessed as only a “strange deed,”
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against himself — what a fool you are, Pippin! — the text would have
found no trespass here. But it isn’t. He is arguing to himself that no
company, no matter how high, should ever daunt — that you should
make an assessment of your likely needs, and keep faith with it, even
if others around you are of such stature that, without explicitly stating
it, their presence seems to insist on your suddenly forsaking your
volition. Pippen, informed by this act of self-correction, not self-
reprimand, seems to be the one we meet subsequently while at the
foot Saruman’s tower, when he decides to make claim to a fallen
object — namely, the palantir — even after just being successfully
chastened by a spell-chanting Saruman as but a kid that didn’t
deserve to be present at all, and which persists even after haughty
white Gandalf reprimands him for independently making a grab at an
object he hadn’t yet been instructed to retrieve. “Half” of this was
supposed to be the will of the evil Ring…but really, the text accords
that the half that was Pippin’s was just as suspect. For it’s a recognition
of self-rule — everyone’s intrinsic right not to be intimidated from an
independent judgment they judged justified, an expression of spirit
antithetical to any social order headed by a king. “Fortunately,” the
palantir takes Pippen for a horrid ride, and “fortunately” the palantir
later is used successfully by one of the Fellowship — Aragorn, of
course — who can demonstrate that this is a world, not of those who
erroneously leach themselves of personal responsibility and the
responsible who don’t, but rather one of legitimate claims and of
illegitimate claims. And you don’t act so much to absolve oneself of
passivity but so as to learn which of these two groupings you belong
to — the one that should take act independently and that should
lead, or the one that really ought just sit on its hands when betters are
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beginning of the text by one of Sauron’s agents as the one trait not
even their worst is “cursed with,” is “kindness” (445): Frodo is Sam’s
“rightful master, not just because he is more wise and genteel, which
are traits possessed by the like of Sauron, for instance, but because he
is more intrinsically kind; Aragorn is Eomer’s rightful master, not just
because he is wiser and more mighty than he, not just because he has
better manners — “I spoke only as do all in men in my land, and I
would gladly learn better” (427) — than he, but because he is kinder,
substantially less harsh than he. Kindness is not, however, something
a simple person might mistake it for: it’s not intrinsically connected
with weakness, with blindness to villainy, however much the two can
be connected (read what happens to Theodon’s Rhodan when
Theoden is too open and permissive — i.e., it makes itself fully open
to the machinations of Wormtongue). It’s actually twinned with a
larger degree of foresight than the simple are capable of conceiving
of — as per for example Gandalf instructing Frodo on what pity can
lend in you in surprise — given their being accustomed to associate
too much receptivity to others’ pains only with a peculiar willingness
to self-designate yourself open for plunder. And it requires a
reminder now and then of how it is actually not at all that, that it’s
actually informed out of full knowledge of the guiles of the weak, and
is by no means a capitulation to any of them, so that those properly
due respect not find themselves inadvertently held in poor regard by
their servants.
Even an entity as great and important as Treebeard gets a
hemming-in, a correction, when he advances on a dangerous
conclusion built out of what the text needed to supply, but for
another purpose. The great wizard Saruman must be soundly deflated
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otherwise! And of course he was, for otherwise these other three “great”
individuals might perhaps be themselves revealed as being made of the
same dubious make-up. Seditious thoughts of the highest order, so
even the great saviour Treebeard is made to suffer a burn of a kind
here, by someone the text holds one of the very few worthy of
administering it.
If Sam hadn’t realized that Frodo was so far beyond him in
comprehension that it was really always wise to trust him implicitly in
all matters, if Pippin hadn’t said that subsequently after his own
receiving of a “burning” lesson that a whole platter of tempting
palantirs could be put before him and he couldn’t be made to touch
any of them, if Treebeard hadn’t immediately stopped his
denunciation of Saruman and left it where Aragorn would
comfortably have had it, then their fates would not subsequently have
gone as described, is what one comes to gather from the will at work
in the text. If Sam had decided that Frodo was guilty of not
sufficiently countenancing the extent of Gollum’s threat and
therefore had become himself a threat to the success of their mission
— a conclusion which lead to his judging that he should properly be
the one carrying the Ring — he wouldn’t have been the recipient of
so joyous an accounting of him in his defeat of Sherob that for a
moment he was a triumph over every warrior in Middle-earth, but
rather someone undermined in the text as being just lucky, and
actually in fact probably a battle-incompetent — not worth a tale at
all in anyone’s book, not even the smallest. Or rather, he might just
been victim to a sudden plot change and found himself stabbed by
Sherob and mercilessly eaten — and so Frodo proved capable of deposing of
the Ring, the text would subsequently be amended to read, even without
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his Sam: lesson learned — do take along for insurance purposes, but be prepared
to do without the services of “friends,” especially if they’re fat, stupid, members of
the servile class. If Merry hadn’t accepted that there was any legitimate
difference between his bold dropping of his broach, to inform his
three friendly pursuers of his ongoing health, and his quickly judged
and quickly acted upon retrieval of the dropped artifact that was on
its way to being lost to all, if he hadn’t perhaps understood that his
“rightful” claim to it was as half-baked a formulation as was Gollum’s
claim to the Ring as his “present” was, he wouldn’t have found
himself so kindly received by Gandalf and merely dropped a notch in
a familiar way in being likened to a pawn in the company of greater
pieces, but rather told that that’s what he gets for proclaiming himself
equal to all while actually so undeserving. And rather than being
spared being forced to sing at court, he’d of found himself suffering
ongoing emasculation in serving as a never-ceasing songbird for Lord
Denethor. If Treebeard hadn’t accepted Aragorn’s assessment of
Saruman and instead pursued his logic towards concluding him a
total fraud, he wouldn’t have been as warmly excused by Gandalf for
his eventually letting Saruman go, but informed more of the
consequences of his clumsy mismanagement, including Saruman’s
subsequent ravaging of the tree-loving hobbit population, as well all
the Shire’s trees!, in his pursuit of making the Shire a haven for
polluting factories. Thereby he’d have made Treebeard insane out of
grief and guilt, longing for the Elves to return to numb him back into
stupidity before they left Middle-earth — an act of pity they would of
course would deny him for having recklessly pursued a line of
thought that could have had all the commons doubting how well
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earned every one of their reputations was, and so potentially had their
whole benighted race hoisted on its own petards!
All of them, in short, would have been made subject to the dark
fate viciously inflicted upon Wormtongue. If you’re looking for the
greatest losers in the text, the ones, not who die but who suffer
humiliations no one could bear living with for long, you can skip
both Saruman and Sauron — for Saruman’s preference that he
always remain a master, even as it abandons him of Gandalf’s help
and leaves him having to counter the might of nine Nazgul himself,
is, what, but the typical stubbornness and pride of dignified wizards;
and Sauron is one who is caught off guard but also one whose
weaknesses are heavily qualified so that they are those that always
accompany a certain particular kind of genuine genius. The ones to
look to are Gollum, the Orc Grishnakh — who plays a Wormtongue
to Ugluk’s Gandalf — the Messenger of Mordor, Merry and Pippin
(especially Pippin), and most of all Wormtongue. As a general rule, if
the text starts likening one to a cornered animal or an insolent child,
you can forget all its ostensibly fidelity to the worthiness of “pity”
and be assured it wants you alive only so incurred humiliations have
more time to dig in. So if it described you like this — “His face was
twisted with amazement and anger to the likeness of some wild beast
that, as it crouches on its prey, is smitten not the muzzle with a
stinging rod” (Return of the King, 872) — as it does the Messenger of
Mordor, then if Gandalf has to stop someone from smiting you in
the name of second-chances and pity it’s going to amount to a forced
effort, to say the least. If it begins to describe you as a “greedy child
stooping over a bowl of food” (The Two Towers, 578), as it is applied
to Pippin, you’d better in some way desist in what you’re doing, learn
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a moral lesson from doing it — quick — or you’ll get the same. And
if it describes you as, “In his eyes was the hunted look of a beast
seeking some gap in the ring of his enemies” (The Two Towers, 508),
and as “coming out of a hut [...] almost like a dog” (Return of the King,
995), then you’re screwed no matter what you do, because then
you’re Wormtongue, and then you’re a snake, a kicked dog, and
perhaps even a victim of an assault that verged on rape — what all
does Saruman do to him behind closed doors, after his stupidity costs
him the palantir, to make him so completely snap at the end? — and
the world has to literally stop so that all your poisonous fluids can be
cleared from all paths you might have trodded upon, and the
possibility that you could have mated with a treasured princess,
fumigated out of everyone’s brains.
What happens to Wormtongue is what you get in the text if you
breech on someone else’s power when the text hasn’t already
approved you as one qualified to do so — in anti-Semitic lexicon, if
you’re the Jew making advancements within the European court. To
avoid his fate, you go the route of Hana when Gandalf runs off yet
again, doing his thing of “ever [...] going and coming unlooked-for”
(516), and take advantage of someone else’s doubting him to
highlight how henceforth you’re resolved never do so. Thus when
presented with the proclamation, “Wormtongue, were he here, would
not find it hard to explain,” you eagerly reply, “I will wait until I see
Gandalf again” (516). Or of Eomer, after having formerly accosted
Aragorn, admitting his comparative smallness to him and pledging to
“gladly learn better” (427). In short, you have to in effect act pretty
much like Gollum’s “whipped cur whose master has patted it” (604).
It’s quite the grim way to own people, but such is The Two Tower’s
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never knew whether the next villager you met, who had been a baker
or a farmer, and whom you could predict the same for the successive
generations that followed them, would still be involved in this role or
have branched off into some other career, as previously rare inner-
change in these people was actually occurring all the time, in response
to newly arisen possibilities.
As the adventuring hobbits told their adventure stories to
everyone they met, all were delighted to hear the marvelous tales, but
they noticed a distinct lack of envy and awe, for their own lives had
become adventures of their own sorts, which involved constant self-
activation. Indeed, in seeing Frodo’s absolute weariness and
permanent maiming, and the other hobbits’ still-evident — in being
evidently disappointed in not being looked upon in their return as
hobbit princes — ongoing immaturity, those whom they told their
tales to actually wondered if traveling all across the world was in fact
as conducive to change as what proved for themselves by just staying
in place.
The hobbits came to meet the one heralded as mostly
responsible for all this change, and they discovered it was Saruman!
The hobbits were incredulous: how could the villain of villains, have
created all this? Saruman replied that… “it sure wasn’t easy, with
hobbits being so fearful of any kind of change happening in the
Shire, and all. But all that was really required was for someone to
come amongst them who didn’t just want to take amusement in
them, but rather actually wanted something for their benefit, to
challenge them and make them better. This I did, persistently and
over a longish period of time. And eventually more of them were
realizing that they to some extent had been forcing themselves to
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pretend that they had been living the ideal life only because defying
this pretence would have them fearing some great punishment for
breaching Natural Order.”
“I’ll tell you, it all would have been a lot easier if I had not just
my talent to inspire trust even in dubious tasks — the possession of
my ‘sugar tongue,’ as some have called it, in an effort to misshapen
what is indisputably but a legitimate skill and power — but the
power of the Ring, which would have expanded my ability to gain
trust exponentially.”
“Yes, the Ring, the very power you were all told could only be
corrupting, the Ring the very powerful might first put to considerable
good use but which eventually would drown them in egoistic pursuits
and morph them into Saurons. That was always untrue. It wasn’t that
it often didn’t destroy its users this way, but that it needn’t always have
done so. And the reason no one ever discovered this truth is because
too many seized on its first few examples of misuse to proclaim a
universal, for it fit their own fears that anyone’s own massive
expansion in abilities, done without respect for whether or not they
had been granted by a ‘legitimate’ authority, must inherently be a
form of overreach.”
“Recall back: someone in your own troop was uncovering some
of this dissonant truth for himself. Recall, specifically, Sam, who
made use of the Ring for a rather longish periods of time, right
before where the warping influence of the Ring was strongest, right
before the great Mt. Doom, and at a time when Sauron had finally
achieved his full might and in the process of ‘expressing’ it to the
world. He knew he should have had just done something to ever-
reprimand himself of if ever he was fortunate enough to recover
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from falling so deeply under its spell, and that in point of fact it
didn’t happen — all that he was told would surely happen immediately
after making this kind of momentous goof wasn’t much happening at
all! He pulled off the Ring just as much to momentarily try and keep
faith at what proved a false truth, and all those whom he respected
who had upheld it, than from keeping the Ring from possessing him
— for at some level he knew he had just caught out a massive lie.”
“What Sam couldn’t fully admit to himself is that the reason the
Ring didn’t take over him is that it actually responds positively to
people who aren’t narcissistically intent on being big honchos, reified
by the like of all the small peoples of Middle-earth — those it
destroys, always. But those simply self-activating — which is exactly
what Sam was up to while alone in Mordor, with Frodo, with his
ostensible intrinsic ‘master,’ at the time currently senseless — it
assists without blowback. One after another, Sam was making
decisions, and the Ring read that as much as he was trying to
persuade himself he was only doing it for Frodo, some part of him
was admitting he was doing it just as much for himself — that it felt
good.”
“Yes, it felt good, self-activating, making his own impact on
Middle-earth, as worthy as any other, and the Ring knew it has finally
got the right kind of bearer. Not Isildur, who was a narcissist who
aspired to and who became obligatory firmament of everyone’s
“must know” understanding of their world’s origins. Not Gollum,
who had a multiple personality disorder, providing the Ring no clue
as to whom exactly to work its influence on. Not Bilbo, who had the
ill-luck of obtaining the Ring when the powers of the narrative
universe were all bent on making it only an invisibility ring, as notable
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but also as innocuous as any other magical item. Not Boromir, who
saw himself only as a part of the might of Gondor, and thus not
actually truly invested in his own self. And not Frodo, who was such
downcast gloom there was no material there to try to play to and lift
up. But rather Sam, who couldn’t but help notice, as he went along
on his adventures, that he was as capable and as appreciative of self-
leadership as any, and who — unlike any other, other than the
legend, Tom Bombadil — could find himself humming tales and
cheerful songs even in the darkest of places. He was someone the
environment would have to work hardest to draw against himself.
Some part of him would never quail, and turn against what made him
most happy. It thus only supported him, informing him of its ample
abilities, despite its reputation as only a nasty bugger that would drag
you Sauron’s no-good way if ever you put it on so close to its
maker.”
“Now about its maker — Yes, Sauron intended that all wills who
long bore the Ring would turn to him. But sometimes what’s
intended one way ends up veering another — and if this logic sounds
foreign to you, it shouldn’t, for it’s something akin to the wisdom
that that otherwise inane Gandalf is always saying… Remember how
he remarked on how Sauron’s blanket of darkness was actually
working against him, by serving as cover for the force opposed to
him? — Good; there’s that, but the examples are in fact many. Sam at
some level recalled this, as well as his Gaffer saying similar things,
and so stayed in fidelity towards newly awakened truth about the
Ring that contrasted inversely with that previously known. It is owing
to such that your quest was actually accomplished — that is, not as
Bilbo is trying to ascribe it as having happened in his writings, as
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both as pawns in a battle where the rest of the board — the knights,
the bishops, the kings and queens — were at play. That was
something else you ruminated on, fussed over, his labeling you
disagreeably as pawns. And even as you, Merry, were subsequently
called ‘great’ by him for stabbing the Nazgul King, weren’t you
actually doing nothing more than what every other pawn that actually
belonged on the board would do in your place? You displayed no
more than the ability to follow through on an intention, something
the warrior citizens of Gondor deemed as differentiating, not the
great from the ordinary but only the adult from the child. What was
notable about you, then, as someone who still belonged on the board
— if barely — was that you were easier than any other piece present
to pass over in mistake, another compliment which works against
itself in that it points out that in every other situation in combat those
who forsook you for another opponent deemed more dangerous
would have been absolutely right in doing so. You are valiant and
exceptional for a hobbit, but of no more combat prowess than any
Gondor warrior’s ten-year-old son — like Beregond’s son, Birgil,
whom you were bid to hang around with so as not find yourself
awkwardly in the way: another of Gandalf’s revealing ‘kindnesses.’”
“Merry, you helped take down the greatest danger on the
battlefield, and Pippen, you later killed a troll-chieftain — but
wouldn’t you say that these great kills were fairly little more worthy of
brag than a peasant’s shooting an arrow awry into the wind but
scoring a fatal hit on a king at battle, nevertheless? The greatest
drifted into your kill-zone, no more than that — a credit to fate and
luck rather than yourself. It is what everyone who was there would
know as the truth, if you ever tried to hoist your accomplishment to
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
http://patricksjustincasesite.blogspot.ca
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