Re-reading Tolkien: Free to choose
Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like to read the Lord of the Rings trilogy when it came out in the mid-fifties. First of all, we'd all be wearing sweater sets and poodle skirts and bras as heavily engineered as a cantilever bridge. (Yes, even the men: Tolkien fans are a funny lot.) But apart from the appalling burden of fifties fashion, we'd have the even more appalling burden of waiting. We'd finish Fellowship in 1954, and then . . . holy crap. There wouldn't even be a fandom to turn to. We could read W.H. Auden's glowing review, and that would be that in the way of fannish stimulus until 1955, when The Two Towers was published.
I don't know about you, but I don't think I could have stood the strain. Waiting has never been my strong suit. When it comes to finding out what will happen next, I have all the patience of a five-year old on a long car trip. Waiting out the January hiatus in Battlestar Galactica nearly made me gnaw off my fingernails. Waiting for the final Harry Potter book is so nerve-wracking that it might drive me back to my veela!Draco/vampire!Harry business school AU (Profit of Doom) if I don't find some more useful way to occupy my time, like petty larceny or gumwrapper chains. Waiting for another LotR book? That probably would have killed me.
Since I don't have to wait, though, I have the luxury of considering just where Tolkien decided to make his readers stop and wait. Why did he end FotR where he did? Why suspend the action in this particular place?
In part, the ending was an accident of publishing economics. LotR was conceived and written as one story, and was divided internally into six books. It was not Tolkien, but Tolkien's publishers who decided to publish LotR in three volumes (of two books each) rather than in one prohibitively expensive mega-volume. There are some signs that Tolkien wasn't too thrilled with this three-volume structure. He complained particularly about The Two Towers : "There is, of course," he wrote to his publisher, "actually no real connecting link between Books III and IV, when cut off and presented separately as a volume."
So the three-volume structure was about money and convenience, but the internal six-book structure was not. Tolkien did choose to end the second book of FotR in exactly the place where readers would have been left -- panting, eager, and abandoned -- in 1954. Why there? We know the choice was a very deliberate one because Tolkien carefully revised his draft to end where he did. In the first draft (which you can read in HOME), Tolkien sketched out a single unified episode including everything we now have in the last chapter of Book II and the first chapter of Book III. But in the final draft, he ends the last chapter of Book II (and thus FotR) with Frodo and Sam's decision to go to Mordor alone.
It's a quiet sort of a place for a major pause. There's no battle, no heroic death, no terrible captivity, no daring rescue. Instead we have two hobbits getting into a boat. Why?
We can't read Tolkien's mind, of course, but we can talk about what effect this stopping-point has on readers. For me, it focuses our attention on internal struggles rather than external battles.
Hamlet goes to Mordor
With this structure, Frodo and Sam's choice doesn't get lost in the middle of a chapter, nor is it presented as the mildly anticlimactic consequence of the Fellowship's battle with the orcs. The battle is deferred to the next book, and becomes a prelude to the Rohan/Ent/Saruman material. What brings the Fellowship's journey to its conclusion is Frodo and Sam's choice to leave it.
At first glance this emphasis on choice may seem unnecessary. Hasn't Frodo had plenty of opportunities to choose? It seems as if he must grapple with this choice at least once every five or six chapters: in Bag End, in the Barrow, in Rivendell, in Lórien. Can't he make up his mind already?
Well, he can't, and that's the point, or at least one of the points. Serious choices don't just happen once, but many times, and one of the things that makes LotR so psychologically insightful is that it acknowledges this. Maybe in third-rate adventure stories a bold hero will decide ONCE AND FOR ALL that he will leave his comfortable, secure existence as an insurance salesman in a cubicle farm and go out and kill a dragon. But if the bold hero is going to come across as a human being, rather than as a wad of muscle and flowing hair, he's going to feel some doubts once in a while. Maybe he'll get a little nostalgic for his cubicle. Maybe he'll wonder whether he really should have brought his friends with him. Maybe he'll wonder if he's capable of doing this at all.
That, at least, is how Frodo approaches his decision: a little bit like Hamlet, maybe. Ever since LotR has been published, there have been readers who have been driven batty by this to-be-or-not-to-be-omg quality of its protagonist. Some readers have opined, with the bashful reticence and placid equanimity for which Tolkien fans are famous, that Frodo is a wuss unfit to tie his own shoes (I know hobbits have no shoes: that's the point). Maybe it's my own Inner Wuss speaking here, but I've always found Frodo's Inner Hamlet to be a point in his favor. Frodo's smart enough to understand that this quest will almost certainly kill him -- if he's lucky. He's also smart enough to understand that the consequences of failure -- not just for himself, but for everyone -- are far worse than death: so terrible that they scarcely bear thinking about. No wonder, as Sam says, Frodo knows what he must do, but is "just plain terrified."
Going it alone
So yes, realistically speaking, this choice is the sort of decision that one revisits again and again. The question is not why Frodo is choosing yet again, but why this particular iteration of his choice is important enough to conclude a book. What makes this choice different from all other choices? Two things, in my opinion. First, for the first time Frodo doesn't have a mentor helping him -- or rather he does, but the mentor's advice must at all costs be rejected. Second, Frodo finally decides how many of the Fellowship are going to Mordor: not one, as he'd always dreaded, but two.
Let's deal with the mentor question first. All the superior powers that have helped Frodo in the past are now gone: Gandalf, Tom Bombadil, Elrond, Galadriel. Aragorn is there, but Aragorn is torn. His heart is with Gondor. Aragorn has other commitments, and besides, he knows that this choice is one that only Frodo can make. This, I think, is why Aragorn makes the pragmatically appalling decision of allowing Frodo to wander off alone at a time when the Company is being tracked. Pragmatically, Aragorn's thinking was questionable; ethically, it was crucial. Frodo must choose freely, without being unduly influenced by the others. By giving Frodo the solitude he needs, Aragorn is being a true leader who understands the spirit of Gandalf's plan better than anyone.
His attitude contrasts markedly with Boromir's, who makes the pragmatically sensible suggestion that "none of us should wander alone, least of all you." Frodo has not asked for another mentor, but Boromir offers himself as one. He proceeds to give practical advice that insidiously morphs into a panoramic survey of The World According To Boromir: "he drew plans for great victories and alliances to be; and he cast down Mordor, and he himself became a mighty King, benevolent and wise." At the end of this glorious Boromiriad comes the anticlimactic conclusion: the inconvenient fact that Frodo has the Ring: "The only plan that is proposed to us is that a Halfling should walk blindly into Mordor and offer the Enemy every chance of recapturing it for himself! Folly!"
Poor Boromir! No argument could have been more effective, no mentor more persuasive: the Ring works by introducing a subtle change in perception, one that takes a person's best qualities -- Boromir's valor and love for his country -- and insidiously twists them in the service of self-glorification.
Frodo flees, of course. But what interests me about his choice to go to Mordor is that even this encounter with Boromir doesn't clinch the deal. Boromir was a false mentor, but he was still a mentor, and Frodo makes his final choice alone, in a scene that has some bizarre structural resemblances to the encounter he just had with Boromir. On the Seat of Seeing at Amon Hen, Frodo (perhaps assisted by a power boost from the Ring) is presented with yet another panoramic vision of Middle Earth on the brink of war, only this time not filtered through Boromir's Ring-addled, self-glorifying consciousness -- or through anyone's consciousness. It's pure information, unmediated by any mentor whatsoever.
And again, like Boromir's vision, this one ends by focusing on Frodo: Frodo becomes horribly aware of the Eye of Sauron looking for him. LotR is full of this dynamic, in which the act of looking makes someone visible, and the quest for knowledge about evil makes someone vulnerable TO evil. Knowledge of evil has the power to change you in Tolkien, and if you're not careful it will destroy you. Saruman and Denethor were apparently both entrapped in this way. Frodo, however, is both stronger and luckier than they. He has not a mentor, but an ally: a Voice that is almost certainly Gandalf that urges him to take off the Ring. The two powers balance each other out, and Frodo experiences a moment of perfect freedom:
Suddenly he was aware of himself again. Frodo, neither the Voice nor the Eye: free to choose, and with one remaining instant in which to do so. He took the Ring off his finger.
That's it. Immediately after this Frodo articulates his decision to go to Mordor alone, but really the decision happened already, in this one moment of being simultaneously aware of himself and informed about the world. Frodo has looked into the abyss and retained his selfhood. He is no longer an innocent or a child; he has the information and experience, at last, to turn what has always been a free choice into a meaningful one: a choice made in full knowledge of what the Ring can do, both to a noble heart like Boromir's and to all of Middle-earth.
"Of course you are, Mr. Frodo. And I'm coming with you."
But Frodo's choice is not simple as that; he is NOT supposed to back away from other people entirely. Going it alone isn't really an option. The paradox of moral action in Tolkien is that everyone must decide alone, for the decision to be truly free, but no one can act alone. To decide alone is to take responsibility. To act alone is pragmatically stupid and ethically, well, prideful. The only two characters I can think of in Tolkien who consistently try to reject the companionship of others are Gollum and Shelob, and they're both tragic in their way (and fail to isolate themselves as they wish to, besides).
So the second aspect of Frodo's climactic choice does involve finding a companion. Sam, too, chooses freely to go in this chapter, but his choice is a different one from Frodo's: he's choosing not to bear the Ring to Mordor, but to help Frodo. Like Frodo, Sam needs knowledge to make his choice, but knowledge of a different kind: people knowledge. Of all the company, only Sam can predict what's going in Frodo's head. Sam has no doubt whatever that Frodo will decide to leave alone. I have to admit that I just love Sam here. He doesn't interest himself in Rings or other metaphysical questions, but in Frodo. Sam won't take no for an answer, and to get his way, he uses his very considerable knowledge of how Frodo thinks.
Some people see Sam's fidelity as servile, but I don't think so. Every time I read this passage I have this vision of a much older Sam, the Mayor in the Shire. He'd be the kind of canny local politician who knows absolutely everyone, and who never seems to do all that much in a city that mysteriously works exactly the way he wants it to. Servile? Dear me, no. You might suppose that, in Sam's Shire, but you'd find yourself, before long, to be dreadfully mistaken. I don't mean to suggest that Sam's fidelity to his own people is tactical. Power of the kind Sam wields is so devastating precisely because it isn't tactical at all. It's pure, stubborn, bull-headed love, as subtle as a fire alarm and five times as obnoxious. (Sam fans: I say this with love; this is my favorite character ever, anywhere.) Against the spectacular simplicity of Sam's power, the most Machiavellian of tacticians would have no chance at all. Nor does Frodo, who, presented with someone willing to drown in an effort to get to him, accepts Sam's companionship gladly.
It's at this moment, I think, that Frodo passes his last and most important test. His encounter with Boromir has not made him so mistrustful of others that he's ready to withdraw into Gollum-like solipsism or Denethor-like pride. "So all my plan is spoilt!" he says, and he's right. But the fact that he accepts this so happily can only be a good omen. The Ring thrives on people's plans, on their fantasies of domination and control, and Frodo doesn't wallow in this fantasy. The very first thing he has to do, once he's chosen his course of splendid isolation, is drag a sopping, spluttering hobbit out of the water. It's beautiful and heartbreaking and even a little silly, and this relentlessly unheroic fellowship is the only thing that will give them a fighting chance.
I don't know about you, but I don't think I could have stood the strain. Waiting has never been my strong suit. When it comes to finding out what will happen next, I have all the patience of a five-year old on a long car trip. Waiting out the January hiatus in Battlestar Galactica nearly made me gnaw off my fingernails. Waiting for the final Harry Potter book is so nerve-wracking that it might drive me back to my veela!Draco/vampire!Harry business school AU (Profit of Doom) if I don't find some more useful way to occupy my time, like petty larceny or gumwrapper chains. Waiting for another LotR book? That probably would have killed me.
Since I don't have to wait, though, I have the luxury of considering just where Tolkien decided to make his readers stop and wait. Why did he end FotR where he did? Why suspend the action in this particular place?
In part, the ending was an accident of publishing economics. LotR was conceived and written as one story, and was divided internally into six books. It was not Tolkien, but Tolkien's publishers who decided to publish LotR in three volumes (of two books each) rather than in one prohibitively expensive mega-volume. There are some signs that Tolkien wasn't too thrilled with this three-volume structure. He complained particularly about The Two Towers : "There is, of course," he wrote to his publisher, "actually no real connecting link between Books III and IV, when cut off and presented separately as a volume."
So the three-volume structure was about money and convenience, but the internal six-book structure was not. Tolkien did choose to end the second book of FotR in exactly the place where readers would have been left -- panting, eager, and abandoned -- in 1954. Why there? We know the choice was a very deliberate one because Tolkien carefully revised his draft to end where he did. In the first draft (which you can read in HOME), Tolkien sketched out a single unified episode including everything we now have in the last chapter of Book II and the first chapter of Book III. But in the final draft, he ends the last chapter of Book II (and thus FotR) with Frodo and Sam's decision to go to Mordor alone.
It's a quiet sort of a place for a major pause. There's no battle, no heroic death, no terrible captivity, no daring rescue. Instead we have two hobbits getting into a boat. Why?
We can't read Tolkien's mind, of course, but we can talk about what effect this stopping-point has on readers. For me, it focuses our attention on internal struggles rather than external battles.
Hamlet goes to Mordor
With this structure, Frodo and Sam's choice doesn't get lost in the middle of a chapter, nor is it presented as the mildly anticlimactic consequence of the Fellowship's battle with the orcs. The battle is deferred to the next book, and becomes a prelude to the Rohan/Ent/Saruman material. What brings the Fellowship's journey to its conclusion is Frodo and Sam's choice to leave it.
At first glance this emphasis on choice may seem unnecessary. Hasn't Frodo had plenty of opportunities to choose? It seems as if he must grapple with this choice at least once every five or six chapters: in Bag End, in the Barrow, in Rivendell, in Lórien. Can't he make up his mind already?
Well, he can't, and that's the point, or at least one of the points. Serious choices don't just happen once, but many times, and one of the things that makes LotR so psychologically insightful is that it acknowledges this. Maybe in third-rate adventure stories a bold hero will decide ONCE AND FOR ALL that he will leave his comfortable, secure existence as an insurance salesman in a cubicle farm and go out and kill a dragon. But if the bold hero is going to come across as a human being, rather than as a wad of muscle and flowing hair, he's going to feel some doubts once in a while. Maybe he'll get a little nostalgic for his cubicle. Maybe he'll wonder whether he really should have brought his friends with him. Maybe he'll wonder if he's capable of doing this at all.
That, at least, is how Frodo approaches his decision: a little bit like Hamlet, maybe. Ever since LotR has been published, there have been readers who have been driven batty by this to-be-or-not-to-be-omg quality of its protagonist. Some readers have opined, with the bashful reticence and placid equanimity for which Tolkien fans are famous, that Frodo is a wuss unfit to tie his own shoes (I know hobbits have no shoes: that's the point). Maybe it's my own Inner Wuss speaking here, but I've always found Frodo's Inner Hamlet to be a point in his favor. Frodo's smart enough to understand that this quest will almost certainly kill him -- if he's lucky. He's also smart enough to understand that the consequences of failure -- not just for himself, but for everyone -- are far worse than death: so terrible that they scarcely bear thinking about. No wonder, as Sam says, Frodo knows what he must do, but is "just plain terrified."
Going it alone
So yes, realistically speaking, this choice is the sort of decision that one revisits again and again. The question is not why Frodo is choosing yet again, but why this particular iteration of his choice is important enough to conclude a book. What makes this choice different from all other choices? Two things, in my opinion. First, for the first time Frodo doesn't have a mentor helping him -- or rather he does, but the mentor's advice must at all costs be rejected. Second, Frodo finally decides how many of the Fellowship are going to Mordor: not one, as he'd always dreaded, but two.
Let's deal with the mentor question first. All the superior powers that have helped Frodo in the past are now gone: Gandalf, Tom Bombadil, Elrond, Galadriel. Aragorn is there, but Aragorn is torn. His heart is with Gondor. Aragorn has other commitments, and besides, he knows that this choice is one that only Frodo can make. This, I think, is why Aragorn makes the pragmatically appalling decision of allowing Frodo to wander off alone at a time when the Company is being tracked. Pragmatically, Aragorn's thinking was questionable; ethically, it was crucial. Frodo must choose freely, without being unduly influenced by the others. By giving Frodo the solitude he needs, Aragorn is being a true leader who understands the spirit of Gandalf's plan better than anyone.
His attitude contrasts markedly with Boromir's, who makes the pragmatically sensible suggestion that "none of us should wander alone, least of all you." Frodo has not asked for another mentor, but Boromir offers himself as one. He proceeds to give practical advice that insidiously morphs into a panoramic survey of The World According To Boromir: "he drew plans for great victories and alliances to be; and he cast down Mordor, and he himself became a mighty King, benevolent and wise." At the end of this glorious Boromiriad comes the anticlimactic conclusion: the inconvenient fact that Frodo has the Ring: "The only plan that is proposed to us is that a Halfling should walk blindly into Mordor and offer the Enemy every chance of recapturing it for himself! Folly!"
Poor Boromir! No argument could have been more effective, no mentor more persuasive: the Ring works by introducing a subtle change in perception, one that takes a person's best qualities -- Boromir's valor and love for his country -- and insidiously twists them in the service of self-glorification.
Frodo flees, of course. But what interests me about his choice to go to Mordor is that even this encounter with Boromir doesn't clinch the deal. Boromir was a false mentor, but he was still a mentor, and Frodo makes his final choice alone, in a scene that has some bizarre structural resemblances to the encounter he just had with Boromir. On the Seat of Seeing at Amon Hen, Frodo (perhaps assisted by a power boost from the Ring) is presented with yet another panoramic vision of Middle Earth on the brink of war, only this time not filtered through Boromir's Ring-addled, self-glorifying consciousness -- or through anyone's consciousness. It's pure information, unmediated by any mentor whatsoever.
And again, like Boromir's vision, this one ends by focusing on Frodo: Frodo becomes horribly aware of the Eye of Sauron looking for him. LotR is full of this dynamic, in which the act of looking makes someone visible, and the quest for knowledge about evil makes someone vulnerable TO evil. Knowledge of evil has the power to change you in Tolkien, and if you're not careful it will destroy you. Saruman and Denethor were apparently both entrapped in this way. Frodo, however, is both stronger and luckier than they. He has not a mentor, but an ally: a Voice that is almost certainly Gandalf that urges him to take off the Ring. The two powers balance each other out, and Frodo experiences a moment of perfect freedom:
Suddenly he was aware of himself again. Frodo, neither the Voice nor the Eye: free to choose, and with one remaining instant in which to do so. He took the Ring off his finger.
That's it. Immediately after this Frodo articulates his decision to go to Mordor alone, but really the decision happened already, in this one moment of being simultaneously aware of himself and informed about the world. Frodo has looked into the abyss and retained his selfhood. He is no longer an innocent or a child; he has the information and experience, at last, to turn what has always been a free choice into a meaningful one: a choice made in full knowledge of what the Ring can do, both to a noble heart like Boromir's and to all of Middle-earth.
"Of course you are, Mr. Frodo. And I'm coming with you."
But Frodo's choice is not simple as that; he is NOT supposed to back away from other people entirely. Going it alone isn't really an option. The paradox of moral action in Tolkien is that everyone must decide alone, for the decision to be truly free, but no one can act alone. To decide alone is to take responsibility. To act alone is pragmatically stupid and ethically, well, prideful. The only two characters I can think of in Tolkien who consistently try to reject the companionship of others are Gollum and Shelob, and they're both tragic in their way (and fail to isolate themselves as they wish to, besides).
So the second aspect of Frodo's climactic choice does involve finding a companion. Sam, too, chooses freely to go in this chapter, but his choice is a different one from Frodo's: he's choosing not to bear the Ring to Mordor, but to help Frodo. Like Frodo, Sam needs knowledge to make his choice, but knowledge of a different kind: people knowledge. Of all the company, only Sam can predict what's going in Frodo's head. Sam has no doubt whatever that Frodo will decide to leave alone. I have to admit that I just love Sam here. He doesn't interest himself in Rings or other metaphysical questions, but in Frodo. Sam won't take no for an answer, and to get his way, he uses his very considerable knowledge of how Frodo thinks.
Some people see Sam's fidelity as servile, but I don't think so. Every time I read this passage I have this vision of a much older Sam, the Mayor in the Shire. He'd be the kind of canny local politician who knows absolutely everyone, and who never seems to do all that much in a city that mysteriously works exactly the way he wants it to. Servile? Dear me, no. You might suppose that, in Sam's Shire, but you'd find yourself, before long, to be dreadfully mistaken. I don't mean to suggest that Sam's fidelity to his own people is tactical. Power of the kind Sam wields is so devastating precisely because it isn't tactical at all. It's pure, stubborn, bull-headed love, as subtle as a fire alarm and five times as obnoxious. (Sam fans: I say this with love; this is my favorite character ever, anywhere.) Against the spectacular simplicity of Sam's power, the most Machiavellian of tacticians would have no chance at all. Nor does Frodo, who, presented with someone willing to drown in an effort to get to him, accepts Sam's companionship gladly.
It's at this moment, I think, that Frodo passes his last and most important test. His encounter with Boromir has not made him so mistrustful of others that he's ready to withdraw into Gollum-like solipsism or Denethor-like pride. "So all my plan is spoilt!" he says, and he's right. But the fact that he accepts this so happily can only be a good omen. The Ring thrives on people's plans, on their fantasies of domination and control, and Frodo doesn't wallow in this fantasy. The very first thing he has to do, once he's chosen his course of splendid isolation, is drag a sopping, spluttering hobbit out of the water. It's beautiful and heartbreaking and even a little silly, and this relentlessly unheroic fellowship is the only thing that will give them a fighting chance.