Re-reading Tolkien: goodness as a thief in the night
The Lord of the Rings is a book that plays its cards pretty close to its chest; although both readers and the hero may very well suspect what the hero's task will be -- to go to Mordor and destroy the Ring -- this is not actually confirmed until page 350. That's enough space for most stories to get at least three-quarters of their main business done and throw in some gratuitous sex on the side (unless we're talking about Robert Jordan, in which case that's enough space for the story to cough and clear its throat and ask if the microphone is turned on yet). Still, if we bracket cases like Jordan's narrative kudzu, compared to other stories, Tolkien does take an awfully long time to get to his point.
Yet once he gets to the point, he sticks to it. You do get the feeling, in "The Council of Elrond" and "The Ring Goes South," that something has irrevocably changed: in these chapters both the hero and the story develop at last a whole-hearted commitment to get off their respective tails and do something. Remarkably, as late as the beginning of "The Council of Elrond," Frodo is thinking about taking a recreational hike in some pine woods he can see from his balcony. By the end of the chapter he's volunteered to go to Mordor, alone if need be. By the end of the next chapter he's very nearly died (that moment when he starts drifting into a dream in the snow is just as life-threatening as a Morgul blade) and is grimly committed to continuing anyway, even though the obvious road seems to be blocked. What happened?
The answer is that the Council of Elrond happened, and at that council Frodo makes a choice. But why? What is it about the Council that makes everything fall into place for Frodo, that changes him from a tourist to a hero ready to die?
I think there are two answers to this question. The first is what I'd call procedural: the Council of Elrond offers Frodo, at last, an example of the way that good characters in Tolkien make irrevocable decisions. The second involves information. Much of what Frodo hears in the council isn't entirely new to him, but one thing is: Saruman's treachery. Obviously the loss of such an important ally makes the situation truly dire, but what really makes Frodo's decision necessary, in my opinion, is that as early as these two chapters, Boromir is established as a character all too ready to follow in Saruman's footsteps.
Elrond's rules of order: how good people deliberate
Let's take the procedural reasons for Frodo's decision first, because they help us understand just why and how Saruman and Boromir fall. The most obvious procedural quality of the Council is that it is a free and open exchange of information in which no one is forced to do anything: Frodo gets enough data at last to make a meaningful choice, and he makes it, independently and on his own. That's consistent with the way Gandalf treated Frodo in The Shadow of the Past; the good guys don't use conscripts. They rely on informed volunteers.
But another procedural aspect of the Council tells us even more about how goodness works. It's important, I think, that the Council is more or less unplanned: Elrond doesn't summon anyone, but people do all show up at the same time anyway. This mysterious confluence of exactly the right people may stretch credibility -- what are the odds that Boromir would turn up just in time? -- but I think the lack of a plan is philosophically so important to Tolkien that he's is willing to stretch credibility like taffy and tie it up in knots if necessary. The Council is unplanned because in Tolkien's universe, good people don't actively plot; they don't grasp at things. They do what the universe seems to be calling on them to do, but they don't deliberately grapple for power or influence. It's this fundamental property of goodness that makes the Elvish rings, for example, useless as weapons: "Those who made them," Elrond tells us, "did not desire strength or domination or hoarded wealth, but understanding, making, and healing, to preserve all things unstained."
Zen and the art of Middle-earth maintenance
To preserve all things unstained. That's terribly Elvish, isn't it? As an ideal, it's oddly passive, for one thing: you come into the world, you admire the beauty of what you find there, you celebrate this beauty -- and then you watch it die, because that's what happens when you are immortal and you are celebrating the beauty of things that are not. Also the ideal is strangely at odds with itself: for the goal is not just to preserve things, but to preserve them unstained: if the only way to preserve them is through strength and domination, then you just don't preserve them. You accept change and death if the price of preservation is too high. For those of you just tuning in, this is what The Silmarillion is about: the Elves learning this terrible lesson; and they learn it again in the Council of Elrond, when they accept that destroying the One will most likely destroy the Three elven-rings and all the beauty that they have preserved -- Rivendell, Lorien, and eventually the Havens.
So the Elvish ideal of preservation is inherently tragic: to the extent that it involves action at all, it's a long rearguard action against inevitable loss. It commits you to simply accepting loss at some point, to throwing up your hands and saying, well, no, that I won't do. And that's hard. If understanding and preservation are your goal in a world where all things change, you'll be particularly prone to the temptation of over-interference: to respond to inevitable change by seeking to dominate it, to impose your own goals on a universe that has other plans.
It's this temptation that the Council of Elrond resists and that Saruman (and eventually Boromir) succumb to. The outcome of the Council is rather zen in its way: a choice to act by NOT acting, by not grasping, not clinging to what they have, not seeking power. Saruman obviously makes a series of very different choices. He, too, has a council in this chapter, and it differs from the Council of Elrond point by point. For one thing, it's very much planned; Saruman not only summons Gandalf, but summons him deceptively, using a less wary wizard as bait. In a radical contrast to Frodo and the other participants at Elrond's council, neither Radagast nor Gandalf is a volunteer, and neither is given enough information to make an informed decision. And when Saruman finally reveals his goal to Gandalf, it becomes obvious that he's succumbed to the lure of domination: "we must have power, power to order all things as we will."
Showing off: the clothes make the overlord
Two things about Saruman's fall make it more than just a single pragmatic loss, but a harbinger of things to come. First, Saruman does still believe in the purity of his own intentions: he tells Gandalf they won't be changing their goals, just the means by which these goals with be achieved. Saruman is a problem not because he is evil, but because his is to some extent still good. What happened to him can happen to anyone.
But the other thing that makes Saruman's fall obviously dangerous is that once he commits himself to a course of grasping and self-preservation, his entire character is corrupted. He doesn't just make one bad decision ("hey! how about that Ring?"): self-assertion reveals itself in every action. He first reveals his change of heart, for example, in something so trivial as a fashion statement: his new multi-colored look, which Gandalf, in a moment that could have been borrowed from What Not To Wear, says he doesn't like. Saruman is obdurate: "The white page can be overwritten," Saruman intones, "and the white light can be broken."
The imagery is interestingly intrusive -- so much for preserving things unstained. And I don't think it's an accident that the resulting robes aren't just different from what they were, but tacky. They're flashy. If they look like a traffic signal, that's because Saruman is trying to attract attention. Bad fashion comes with the evil overlord territory, precisely because the clothes are now making a statement, a statement that goes something like this: ME ME ME ME ME!! The Kewl Clothes the hobbits get in Lorien, interestingly enough, work in just the opposite way: they make people blend into the background. Lorien robes are about respecting the integrity of your surroundings so much that you are not even visible. Other good characters are similarly wary of bad fashion: Bilbo's last gift to Frodo, for instance, is a coat of mail that Frodo wears under his normal clothes: Frodo is well protected by his fancy shirt, but he's not showing off. He's being a hobbit: his strength, such as it is, rests in being quiet, in being secret, and in the fundamental humility and self-abnegation that quiet and secrecy require.
The warning of Boromir
It's the tendency for self-assertion to rear its ugly head on every possible occasion -- even in clothes -- that makes the Ring so dangerous: once people get started on the path of domination, they tend to stick to it. Saruman has gone down this path: that's warning number one. And Boromir might: that's warning number two. Boromir's fall will be crucial to Frodo's eventual decision to leave the Fellowship: Frodo will eventually conclude that the temptation to use the Ring is so great that he can't impose this temptation on anyone else. But Tolkien helps us understand this eventual decision by cleverly providing the groundwork for it from the moment Boromir first appears in these early chapters.
For Boromir is all about self-assertion. Yes, Boromir is the person at the Council who dares to ask directly why the Wise can't use the Ring themselves, and that's a very bad sign. But the other signs that he's ripe for a fall are more subtle, and appear almost at once. Boromir's first speech is taken out of turn for the purpose of clamoring for credit. He interrupts Elrond because Elrond has mentioned Gondor, and Gondor, once mentioned, needs to be praised: " By our valour the wild folk of the East are still restrained, and the terror of Morgul kept at bay; and thus alone are peace and freedom maintained in the lands behind us, bulwark of the West."
Boromir is having a little fit of proto-imperialist chest-thumping here that wouldn't be out of place coming from certain politicians who spring to my painfully liberal mind. He doesn't just want to do good: in his very first speech, he wants to be seen to do good. He's dubious about Aragorn, furthermore, precisely because Aragorn doesn't seek to display himself in this way, and thus and doesn't look like Boromir's idea of a King, prompting Bilbo to recite the "all that is gold does not glitter" poem that he wrote long ago to capture Aragorn's deliberately self-effacing mystique.
Many of Boromir's actions are, of course, heroic: Boromir is brave, and physically strong, and willing to put this physical strength at the disposal of his friends when they need it. And there's something admirable about his openness, about his refusal to engage in hypocrisy of any kind. But at some point Boromir crosses a line between openness as honesty and openness as self-display. And the step from self-display to power-seeking is very small.
The results can be fatally dangerous, both physically and morally. On setting out from Rivendell on their super-secret mission, Boromir insists on blowing his horn. "I will not go forth as a thief in the night," he says when Elrond reproves him. An admirable sentiment? Perhaps. But one radically at odds, in its way, with the self-effacing behavior every other good character. "Thief," for example, is a curiously loaded word in this book, and not one that Boromir should be throwing around lightly: the word has accumulated so many complex associations that it's hard to process it as evil. Many years before, Gandalf started these adventures by selecting Bilbo as a burglar, and Gollum calls both Bilbo and Frodo thieves. It is painful to accept such a label, and Bilbo says in the Council that he originally lied about the finding of the Ring because he "wished to be rid of the name of thief that was put on me."
But Bilbo has long since made his peace with the part he had to play: to steal away quietly, secretly, under cover of night, with something that is not his and that he knows perfectly well he has no valid claim to. Accepting ugly names and ugly appearances that are to some extent true -- like Strider, like Stormcrow -- is something the real heroes do, and Frodo is ready to make his choice when he sees that all other, showier forms of heroism inevitably lead to disaster. You become a hero in Tolkien's cosmos by abandoning all efforts to seem like one.
Yet once he gets to the point, he sticks to it. You do get the feeling, in "The Council of Elrond" and "The Ring Goes South," that something has irrevocably changed: in these chapters both the hero and the story develop at last a whole-hearted commitment to get off their respective tails and do something. Remarkably, as late as the beginning of "The Council of Elrond," Frodo is thinking about taking a recreational hike in some pine woods he can see from his balcony. By the end of the chapter he's volunteered to go to Mordor, alone if need be. By the end of the next chapter he's very nearly died (that moment when he starts drifting into a dream in the snow is just as life-threatening as a Morgul blade) and is grimly committed to continuing anyway, even though the obvious road seems to be blocked. What happened?
The answer is that the Council of Elrond happened, and at that council Frodo makes a choice. But why? What is it about the Council that makes everything fall into place for Frodo, that changes him from a tourist to a hero ready to die?
I think there are two answers to this question. The first is what I'd call procedural: the Council of Elrond offers Frodo, at last, an example of the way that good characters in Tolkien make irrevocable decisions. The second involves information. Much of what Frodo hears in the council isn't entirely new to him, but one thing is: Saruman's treachery. Obviously the loss of such an important ally makes the situation truly dire, but what really makes Frodo's decision necessary, in my opinion, is that as early as these two chapters, Boromir is established as a character all too ready to follow in Saruman's footsteps.
Elrond's rules of order: how good people deliberate
Let's take the procedural reasons for Frodo's decision first, because they help us understand just why and how Saruman and Boromir fall. The most obvious procedural quality of the Council is that it is a free and open exchange of information in which no one is forced to do anything: Frodo gets enough data at last to make a meaningful choice, and he makes it, independently and on his own. That's consistent with the way Gandalf treated Frodo in The Shadow of the Past; the good guys don't use conscripts. They rely on informed volunteers.
But another procedural aspect of the Council tells us even more about how goodness works. It's important, I think, that the Council is more or less unplanned: Elrond doesn't summon anyone, but people do all show up at the same time anyway. This mysterious confluence of exactly the right people may stretch credibility -- what are the odds that Boromir would turn up just in time? -- but I think the lack of a plan is philosophically so important to Tolkien that he's is willing to stretch credibility like taffy and tie it up in knots if necessary. The Council is unplanned because in Tolkien's universe, good people don't actively plot; they don't grasp at things. They do what the universe seems to be calling on them to do, but they don't deliberately grapple for power or influence. It's this fundamental property of goodness that makes the Elvish rings, for example, useless as weapons: "Those who made them," Elrond tells us, "did not desire strength or domination or hoarded wealth, but understanding, making, and healing, to preserve all things unstained."
Zen and the art of Middle-earth maintenance
To preserve all things unstained. That's terribly Elvish, isn't it? As an ideal, it's oddly passive, for one thing: you come into the world, you admire the beauty of what you find there, you celebrate this beauty -- and then you watch it die, because that's what happens when you are immortal and you are celebrating the beauty of things that are not. Also the ideal is strangely at odds with itself: for the goal is not just to preserve things, but to preserve them unstained: if the only way to preserve them is through strength and domination, then you just don't preserve them. You accept change and death if the price of preservation is too high. For those of you just tuning in, this is what The Silmarillion is about: the Elves learning this terrible lesson; and they learn it again in the Council of Elrond, when they accept that destroying the One will most likely destroy the Three elven-rings and all the beauty that they have preserved -- Rivendell, Lorien, and eventually the Havens.
So the Elvish ideal of preservation is inherently tragic: to the extent that it involves action at all, it's a long rearguard action against inevitable loss. It commits you to simply accepting loss at some point, to throwing up your hands and saying, well, no, that I won't do. And that's hard. If understanding and preservation are your goal in a world where all things change, you'll be particularly prone to the temptation of over-interference: to respond to inevitable change by seeking to dominate it, to impose your own goals on a universe that has other plans.
It's this temptation that the Council of Elrond resists and that Saruman (and eventually Boromir) succumb to. The outcome of the Council is rather zen in its way: a choice to act by NOT acting, by not grasping, not clinging to what they have, not seeking power. Saruman obviously makes a series of very different choices. He, too, has a council in this chapter, and it differs from the Council of Elrond point by point. For one thing, it's very much planned; Saruman not only summons Gandalf, but summons him deceptively, using a less wary wizard as bait. In a radical contrast to Frodo and the other participants at Elrond's council, neither Radagast nor Gandalf is a volunteer, and neither is given enough information to make an informed decision. And when Saruman finally reveals his goal to Gandalf, it becomes obvious that he's succumbed to the lure of domination: "we must have power, power to order all things as we will."
Showing off: the clothes make the overlord
Two things about Saruman's fall make it more than just a single pragmatic loss, but a harbinger of things to come. First, Saruman does still believe in the purity of his own intentions: he tells Gandalf they won't be changing their goals, just the means by which these goals with be achieved. Saruman is a problem not because he is evil, but because his is to some extent still good. What happened to him can happen to anyone.
But the other thing that makes Saruman's fall obviously dangerous is that once he commits himself to a course of grasping and self-preservation, his entire character is corrupted. He doesn't just make one bad decision ("hey! how about that Ring?"): self-assertion reveals itself in every action. He first reveals his change of heart, for example, in something so trivial as a fashion statement: his new multi-colored look, which Gandalf, in a moment that could have been borrowed from What Not To Wear, says he doesn't like. Saruman is obdurate: "The white page can be overwritten," Saruman intones, "and the white light can be broken."
The imagery is interestingly intrusive -- so much for preserving things unstained. And I don't think it's an accident that the resulting robes aren't just different from what they were, but tacky. They're flashy. If they look like a traffic signal, that's because Saruman is trying to attract attention. Bad fashion comes with the evil overlord territory, precisely because the clothes are now making a statement, a statement that goes something like this: ME ME ME ME ME!! The Kewl Clothes the hobbits get in Lorien, interestingly enough, work in just the opposite way: they make people blend into the background. Lorien robes are about respecting the integrity of your surroundings so much that you are not even visible. Other good characters are similarly wary of bad fashion: Bilbo's last gift to Frodo, for instance, is a coat of mail that Frodo wears under his normal clothes: Frodo is well protected by his fancy shirt, but he's not showing off. He's being a hobbit: his strength, such as it is, rests in being quiet, in being secret, and in the fundamental humility and self-abnegation that quiet and secrecy require.
The warning of Boromir
It's the tendency for self-assertion to rear its ugly head on every possible occasion -- even in clothes -- that makes the Ring so dangerous: once people get started on the path of domination, they tend to stick to it. Saruman has gone down this path: that's warning number one. And Boromir might: that's warning number two. Boromir's fall will be crucial to Frodo's eventual decision to leave the Fellowship: Frodo will eventually conclude that the temptation to use the Ring is so great that he can't impose this temptation on anyone else. But Tolkien helps us understand this eventual decision by cleverly providing the groundwork for it from the moment Boromir first appears in these early chapters.
For Boromir is all about self-assertion. Yes, Boromir is the person at the Council who dares to ask directly why the Wise can't use the Ring themselves, and that's a very bad sign. But the other signs that he's ripe for a fall are more subtle, and appear almost at once. Boromir's first speech is taken out of turn for the purpose of clamoring for credit. He interrupts Elrond because Elrond has mentioned Gondor, and Gondor, once mentioned, needs to be praised: " By our valour the wild folk of the East are still restrained, and the terror of Morgul kept at bay; and thus alone are peace and freedom maintained in the lands behind us, bulwark of the West."
Boromir is having a little fit of proto-imperialist chest-thumping here that wouldn't be out of place coming from certain politicians who spring to my painfully liberal mind. He doesn't just want to do good: in his very first speech, he wants to be seen to do good. He's dubious about Aragorn, furthermore, precisely because Aragorn doesn't seek to display himself in this way, and thus and doesn't look like Boromir's idea of a King, prompting Bilbo to recite the "all that is gold does not glitter" poem that he wrote long ago to capture Aragorn's deliberately self-effacing mystique.
Many of Boromir's actions are, of course, heroic: Boromir is brave, and physically strong, and willing to put this physical strength at the disposal of his friends when they need it. And there's something admirable about his openness, about his refusal to engage in hypocrisy of any kind. But at some point Boromir crosses a line between openness as honesty and openness as self-display. And the step from self-display to power-seeking is very small.
The results can be fatally dangerous, both physically and morally. On setting out from Rivendell on their super-secret mission, Boromir insists on blowing his horn. "I will not go forth as a thief in the night," he says when Elrond reproves him. An admirable sentiment? Perhaps. But one radically at odds, in its way, with the self-effacing behavior every other good character. "Thief," for example, is a curiously loaded word in this book, and not one that Boromir should be throwing around lightly: the word has accumulated so many complex associations that it's hard to process it as evil. Many years before, Gandalf started these adventures by selecting Bilbo as a burglar, and Gollum calls both Bilbo and Frodo thieves. It is painful to accept such a label, and Bilbo says in the Council that he originally lied about the finding of the Ring because he "wished to be rid of the name of thief that was put on me."
But Bilbo has long since made his peace with the part he had to play: to steal away quietly, secretly, under cover of night, with something that is not his and that he knows perfectly well he has no valid claim to. Accepting ugly names and ugly appearances that are to some extent true -- like Strider, like Stormcrow -- is something the real heroes do, and Frodo is ready to make his choice when he sees that all other, showier forms of heroism inevitably lead to disaster. You become a hero in Tolkien's cosmos by abandoning all efforts to seem like one.