Re-reading Tolkien: time to ponder riddles
At the beginning of The Two Towers, Tolkien takes the huge artistic risk of dividing his narrative in two, or rather in three. For quite some time, he abandons Frodo and Sam to follow Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli, with the occasional interspersed chapter on Merry and Pippin. Does this divided structure work?
It would have been possible, I suppose, for Tolkien to have alternated among plots chapter by chapter or even scene by scene. That kind of structure might have done more to make the relationships among some of the subplots clear. From the perspective of Gandalf's grand strategy, the war in Rohan and Minas Tirith is a giant feint, and faster switching among the subplots might have made that more obvious. Tolkien might have written a story full of last-minute rescues in which events in one plot clearly intervene in another. Frodo and Sam might be about to get caught by a Huge Evil Thing, but wait! Pippin looks in the palantir! Sauron is distracted, and the plucky heroes live to walk another mile!
Tolkien didn't take this route, and in my more whiny moments I'm a bit sorry about that. Those long, languorous pauses on one. plot. at. a. time. demand a great deal of patience from readers who may be dying -- dying! -- of suspense about the one of the other plots. The first time I read The Two Towers, I was shocked when I realized that Tolkien wasn't going to say anything about Frodo and Sam for a long time. OMG!1!!1!!1! (I would have said, had that abbreviation been current in 1976). But then I would have said OMG!!1!!1 again when, in the middle of The Two Towers, we abandon poor Pippin! and Merry! and Aragorn! and Eowyn! to go back to Frodo and Sam.
So. If a reader is even slightly vulnerable to the lure of Tolkien's narrative, she's in for a reading process that involves a great deal of shrieking and nail-biting, and possibly even baldness, if in her agony she tears out too much of her hair. If this is the case, why are the long pauses there? What does Tolkien get out of them that makes them worth the pain?
I've got two answers. The first has to do with character. I think that the long pauses allow Tolkien to emphasize character development rather than the intricacies of the overall grand strategy. That strategy becomes evident if you step back from the moment-to-moment narrative and reconstruct the chronology very carefully. But strategy is not where Tolkien invests most of his narrative energies. The focus is on EACH character, not on the tangled web of relationships that distant characters unknowingly have with each other. And that focus makes for a more human epic. The time we spend on each character's story is the time we spend learning to care about their struggles.
My second answer has to do with character too, or rather with the way the narrative persuades us to feel for these characters in particular. By immersing us in the experience of a few characters at a time, Tolkien forces us share their perspective, and this perspective is limited. No one, not even Gandalf, knows the whole story. As readers, we don't occupy a privileged position, where we know more than the characters and look down on their struggles. Instead we're there with them, on the front lines. We're soldiers struggling through the smoke and mud of one tiny section of the battlefield, not generals pushing toy cannons around on a map.
So the suspense we suffer as readers is, I think, an analogue to the suspense that the characters have to endure. And that shared suspense helps us not just to identify with the characters, but to admire them. These are people who have agreed to play tiny roles in an immense struggle, and a huge part of their bravery rests in the fact that they have to do this blind. They have to do their part and trust that other people are doing theirs. They have to be willing to die without knowing whether their deaths will be in vain. They have to be ready to lay down their lives for a possibility.
Riddles in the dark
We're plunged into this disorienting world of limited perspectives right away, in the first couple of chapters of The Two Towers. It always amazes me how much of the characters' time in these chapters is devoted to figuring out what has already happened to other people. And the clues they get to help them out are painfully limited. The tone is set in the first paragraphs, when Aragorn seeks the panoramic view from Amon Hen that Frodo had in the last book. But he can't see anything: the world seems "dim and remote" -- and that's it. Frodo's vast perspective, we're invited to believe, was a special dispensation powered partly by the Ring; Aragorn can't rely on magical assistance. Whatever moment of transcendent vision he expected to receive on this lonely artefact of Numenorean power, it doesn't happen. Instead he's distracted by the distant sounds of battle. He can't see the battle -- most of the important events in these chapters are things that Aragorn can't see. He has to struggle to reconstruct events from distant hints, like the sound of Boromir's horn.
What follows is an overwhelming insistence on what these chapter calls "riddles" and "tokens." Riddles have been important for hobbits, too, but in a very hobbity way: they're essentially social, both a cooperative game and a form of communication. Even Gollum used riddles as a social strategy, a way to signal friendly intent (even though he doesn't mean to be particularly friendly). Later Pippin will act on this social understanding of what a riddle is; he'll use his dropped brooch as a way to communicate the fact that he's still alive.
But the word riddle is used differently in these chapters, more in the sense of a sign or clue than a game. Aragorn has to work like Sherlock Holmes in a way, reconstructing actions from the traces they've left behind in the material world. His riddles are not about maintaining communication, but about struggling to get information in a situation where no communication exists.
Gimi gets impatient with this obsession at one point, when Aragorn spends too long puzzling over why the dead orcs at Boromir's feet have an "S" on their armor. Ever the practical dwarf alert to the inconveniences of an unburied body, Gimli calls for action: 'Well, we have no time to ponder riddles,' he says. 'Let us bear Boromir away!' Aragorn responds with the line that might as well be his personal motto for the mid-section of the epic: 'But after that we must guess the riddles, if we are to choose our course rightly.'
I think it's important to realize that Gimli challenges Aragorn here because the riddles do look, well, stupid. Somehow they just don't seem kingly or magnificent at all. At first glance they're all about minutiae: a broken blade of grass, a loose stone. They might seem like a sort of demotion for Aragorn. At the beginning of these chapters he aspired to the long view from Amon Hen, but by the end of them he's crouched on the ground, scrabbling through the dirt for clues, listening for the sound of hoofbeats or marching Orcs.
Aragorn's skill here lies in his ability to understand physical objects as signs. His is world may be limited to what he can see and hear, but it's is a world in which the humblest objects are full of meaning. As a result, even though these chapters ostensibly focus on the grueling hunt of Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas, we also get another story told entirely through riddles and tokens. It's a shadow-story, if you will, that is considerably more terrifying than the main narrative:
Riddle or token (what Aragorn sees)Story (what Aragorn learns)
The horn of Boromir echoes through the woods.A battle is going on. That, or Boromir is a band geek gone wild.
The knives of Merry and Pippin amid the spoils of battle
Merry and Pippin have been captured and disarmed.
The armor of the Orcs that Boromir killed There are several different kinds of Orcs in the group, which means some are far from home and their loyalties may be split.
The missing boat and packsFrodo and Sam have escaped and crossed the Anduin to Mordor.
The trampled grass of the orc trail. The Orcs direction is known, and Orcs (unlike Elves who leave no trail) will never belong to Greenpeace.
More dead Orcs along the trail.The Orcs are fighting among themselves for reasons unknown, and Saruman's Orcs won. The Orcs are probably bound for Isengard.
Along the Orc trail, cast-away food bags, crusts of grey bread, a torn black cloak, and a broken iron-nailed shoe.The Orcs are in a hurry, privileging speed over stealth. Also, they do not have access to a Dunkin Donuts, and their fashion sense leaves much to be desired.
Hobbit footprints and an elven brooch.At least one of the hobbits was still alive, able to walk, and able to think; he was also desperate enough to give up a token of Lorien.
More dead orcs along the trail, shot in the back.The Orcs were being pursued and obviously knew it. They would have to be very dense NOT to know it.
A burning pile of bones with a great goblin head impaled on a spear.At least one of the Orcs has been kicked off American Idol. The Rohirrim slew all the Orcs, and the hobbit captives are most likely dead.
This shadow-story is important for two reasons: it's both preparation for events to come and a crucial source of suspense for these chapters. You might even say that for very long stretches, the suspense of the shadow-story is the engine that runs the narrative -- deliberately so. There few other sources of tension. The hunt is difficult, but Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli are more than up to it. There can be no tension derived from conflict among the characters, because there is no conflict. When they're not searching for clues, they're admiring each other's coolness: at one point Aragorn gently swoons over Legolas' keen eye-sight, and everyone admires Aragorn's mad tracking skilz. Though they discuss their course of action, they don't exactly debate it; everyone agrees that Aragorn is the boss (I keep expecting Legolas to say "yes, Socrates," during one of the brief dialogue scenes). They are united in their purpose and dedicated to their task, which makes them heroic, efficient, and perhaps just the teeniest, tiniest bit dull.
The green earth in daylight
But in a way, this dullness is the point. The shadow-story about the captives is remarkably prominent relative to the main narrative about the heroes, but I think this prominence tells us something crucial about the kinds of heroes these are supposed to be. Quite simply, they serve. They muck around with Orc-trails because their lives are defined by obligations to other people. Aragorn is obliged to help Merry and Pippin because they are his friends, and because they share the secret of the Ring that he has sworn to protect. Aragorn also takes on two new obligations in these chapters. He's obliged -- even more than before -- to help Minas Tirith, because Boromir asked him to while he was dying. He's also obliged to help Eomer, because Eomer helps him and very nearly begs him for his help in return. Both the House of Stewards and the House of Eorl are bound to Aragorn's family by long ties. When they ask for his aid, they have a claim on him. That's what kingship is.
Aragorn is richly aware of this humility of human majesty in his world. At one point a Rider of Rohan laughs at the idea that hobbits might be real, and asks, "Do we walk in legends or on the green earth in the daylight?" Aragorn's response is telling: "A man may do both," he says. "For not we but those who come after will make the legends of our time." Legends, in other words, are an effect produced in stories told about the real world after the fact. They are events seen from a distant perspective. Unfortunately the people living the legends do not have that distant, ennobling perspective on themselves. They're too busy kneeling on the earth and listening for hoofbeats. They will be legends, someday, in a story told by someone else. But for now they're stuck with the green earth in daylight.
They will look for him from the White Tower
To me, this acceptance of a limited human perspective explains what might otherwise be seen as an artistic failure in these chapters: Tolkien's choice to have Boromir's final battle happen "off-screen," outside the main narrative. We don't see it; we only realize that it has happened from its effects. I have to say that I loved -- adored -- the movie version of this scene, where we actually see Boromir fight. But I think I can understand why Tolkien was so restrained in comparison. He wasn't just being randomly annoying or giving Boromir short shrift. He was being grimly realistic about heroism in the real world.
For all that he was writing about an epic society, Tolkien was in this strangely modern: he sometimes refuses us those glorious, perfect moments when heroism is recognized and admired as it is happening. That makes sense. Heroism usually happens when no one else is around to pay attention. That's what happened to Boromir. Aragorn was just too late to help him or even see him fight. So Boromir's last desperate struggle becomes one more riddle to interpret: not an action, but an inference written on his dying body and the bodies of his enemies.
Only Boromir is more than that, because Aragorn makes him be more. If legends are made by those who come after, Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli take their obligation to create legends incredibly seriously when they themselves are the ones remaining behind to mourn and celebrate a fallen hero. This is why, when Merry and Pippin have been captured and time is of the essence, they nevertheless take the time to give Boromir to the River with all due ceremony and to sing in his honor.
This long, deliberate pause in the action can feel just as infuriating to the impatient reader as Tolkien's long, deliberate sections, when some characters disappear for dozens of chapters at time. But I think both kinds of pauses serve a similar purpose: they make meaning in a world that threatens to have none. For readers, the long pauses for each plot force us to value all the characters as meaningful in themselves. For the characters, the pause of mourning is an attempt to make something transcendent out of the unpromising materials of daily life.
Now that Tolkien's epic has left behind the glories of the Elven-kingdoms and we are firmly in the world of men, the act of storytelling takes on a new significance. It's a resting-place in a world of flux and change, a pause to take the long view in lives bound to a short-term mortal perspective. This, in a world of grey bread and trampled grass, is the only way that legends can come to be.
It would have been possible, I suppose, for Tolkien to have alternated among plots chapter by chapter or even scene by scene. That kind of structure might have done more to make the relationships among some of the subplots clear. From the perspective of Gandalf's grand strategy, the war in Rohan and Minas Tirith is a giant feint, and faster switching among the subplots might have made that more obvious. Tolkien might have written a story full of last-minute rescues in which events in one plot clearly intervene in another. Frodo and Sam might be about to get caught by a Huge Evil Thing, but wait! Pippin looks in the palantir! Sauron is distracted, and the plucky heroes live to walk another mile!
Tolkien didn't take this route, and in my more whiny moments I'm a bit sorry about that. Those long, languorous pauses on one. plot. at. a. time. demand a great deal of patience from readers who may be dying -- dying! -- of suspense about the one of the other plots. The first time I read The Two Towers, I was shocked when I realized that Tolkien wasn't going to say anything about Frodo and Sam for a long time. OMG!1!!1!!1! (I would have said, had that abbreviation been current in 1976). But then I would have said OMG!!1!!1 again when, in the middle of The Two Towers, we abandon poor Pippin! and Merry! and Aragorn! and Eowyn! to go back to Frodo and Sam.
So. If a reader is even slightly vulnerable to the lure of Tolkien's narrative, she's in for a reading process that involves a great deal of shrieking and nail-biting, and possibly even baldness, if in her agony she tears out too much of her hair. If this is the case, why are the long pauses there? What does Tolkien get out of them that makes them worth the pain?
I've got two answers. The first has to do with character. I think that the long pauses allow Tolkien to emphasize character development rather than the intricacies of the overall grand strategy. That strategy becomes evident if you step back from the moment-to-moment narrative and reconstruct the chronology very carefully. But strategy is not where Tolkien invests most of his narrative energies. The focus is on EACH character, not on the tangled web of relationships that distant characters unknowingly have with each other. And that focus makes for a more human epic. The time we spend on each character's story is the time we spend learning to care about their struggles.
My second answer has to do with character too, or rather with the way the narrative persuades us to feel for these characters in particular. By immersing us in the experience of a few characters at a time, Tolkien forces us share their perspective, and this perspective is limited. No one, not even Gandalf, knows the whole story. As readers, we don't occupy a privileged position, where we know more than the characters and look down on their struggles. Instead we're there with them, on the front lines. We're soldiers struggling through the smoke and mud of one tiny section of the battlefield, not generals pushing toy cannons around on a map.
So the suspense we suffer as readers is, I think, an analogue to the suspense that the characters have to endure. And that shared suspense helps us not just to identify with the characters, but to admire them. These are people who have agreed to play tiny roles in an immense struggle, and a huge part of their bravery rests in the fact that they have to do this blind. They have to do their part and trust that other people are doing theirs. They have to be willing to die without knowing whether their deaths will be in vain. They have to be ready to lay down their lives for a possibility.
Riddles in the dark
We're plunged into this disorienting world of limited perspectives right away, in the first couple of chapters of The Two Towers. It always amazes me how much of the characters' time in these chapters is devoted to figuring out what has already happened to other people. And the clues they get to help them out are painfully limited. The tone is set in the first paragraphs, when Aragorn seeks the panoramic view from Amon Hen that Frodo had in the last book. But he can't see anything: the world seems "dim and remote" -- and that's it. Frodo's vast perspective, we're invited to believe, was a special dispensation powered partly by the Ring; Aragorn can't rely on magical assistance. Whatever moment of transcendent vision he expected to receive on this lonely artefact of Numenorean power, it doesn't happen. Instead he's distracted by the distant sounds of battle. He can't see the battle -- most of the important events in these chapters are things that Aragorn can't see. He has to struggle to reconstruct events from distant hints, like the sound of Boromir's horn.
What follows is an overwhelming insistence on what these chapter calls "riddles" and "tokens." Riddles have been important for hobbits, too, but in a very hobbity way: they're essentially social, both a cooperative game and a form of communication. Even Gollum used riddles as a social strategy, a way to signal friendly intent (even though he doesn't mean to be particularly friendly). Later Pippin will act on this social understanding of what a riddle is; he'll use his dropped brooch as a way to communicate the fact that he's still alive.
But the word riddle is used differently in these chapters, more in the sense of a sign or clue than a game. Aragorn has to work like Sherlock Holmes in a way, reconstructing actions from the traces they've left behind in the material world. His riddles are not about maintaining communication, but about struggling to get information in a situation where no communication exists.
Gimi gets impatient with this obsession at one point, when Aragorn spends too long puzzling over why the dead orcs at Boromir's feet have an "S" on their armor. Ever the practical dwarf alert to the inconveniences of an unburied body, Gimli calls for action: 'Well, we have no time to ponder riddles,' he says. 'Let us bear Boromir away!' Aragorn responds with the line that might as well be his personal motto for the mid-section of the epic: 'But after that we must guess the riddles, if we are to choose our course rightly.'
I think it's important to realize that Gimli challenges Aragorn here because the riddles do look, well, stupid. Somehow they just don't seem kingly or magnificent at all. At first glance they're all about minutiae: a broken blade of grass, a loose stone. They might seem like a sort of demotion for Aragorn. At the beginning of these chapters he aspired to the long view from Amon Hen, but by the end of them he's crouched on the ground, scrabbling through the dirt for clues, listening for the sound of hoofbeats or marching Orcs.
Aragorn's skill here lies in his ability to understand physical objects as signs. His is world may be limited to what he can see and hear, but it's is a world in which the humblest objects are full of meaning. As a result, even though these chapters ostensibly focus on the grueling hunt of Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas, we also get another story told entirely through riddles and tokens. It's a shadow-story, if you will, that is considerably more terrifying than the main narrative:
Riddle or token (what Aragorn sees)Story (what Aragorn learns)
The horn of Boromir echoes through the woods.A battle is going on. That, or Boromir is a band geek gone wild.
The knives of Merry and Pippin amid the spoils of battle
Merry and Pippin have been captured and disarmed.
The armor of the Orcs that Boromir killed There are several different kinds of Orcs in the group, which means some are far from home and their loyalties may be split.
The missing boat and packsFrodo and Sam have escaped and crossed the Anduin to Mordor.
The trampled grass of the orc trail. The Orcs direction is known, and Orcs (unlike Elves who leave no trail) will never belong to Greenpeace.
More dead Orcs along the trail.The Orcs are fighting among themselves for reasons unknown, and Saruman's Orcs won. The Orcs are probably bound for Isengard.
Along the Orc trail, cast-away food bags, crusts of grey bread, a torn black cloak, and a broken iron-nailed shoe.The Orcs are in a hurry, privileging speed over stealth. Also, they do not have access to a Dunkin Donuts, and their fashion sense leaves much to be desired.
Hobbit footprints and an elven brooch.At least one of the hobbits was still alive, able to walk, and able to think; he was also desperate enough to give up a token of Lorien.
More dead orcs along the trail, shot in the back.The Orcs were being pursued and obviously knew it. They would have to be very dense NOT to know it.
A burning pile of bones with a great goblin head impaled on a spear.At least one of the Orcs has been kicked off American Idol. The Rohirrim slew all the Orcs, and the hobbit captives are most likely dead.
This shadow-story is important for two reasons: it's both preparation for events to come and a crucial source of suspense for these chapters. You might even say that for very long stretches, the suspense of the shadow-story is the engine that runs the narrative -- deliberately so. There few other sources of tension. The hunt is difficult, but Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli are more than up to it. There can be no tension derived from conflict among the characters, because there is no conflict. When they're not searching for clues, they're admiring each other's coolness: at one point Aragorn gently swoons over Legolas' keen eye-sight, and everyone admires Aragorn's mad tracking skilz. Though they discuss their course of action, they don't exactly debate it; everyone agrees that Aragorn is the boss (I keep expecting Legolas to say "yes, Socrates," during one of the brief dialogue scenes). They are united in their purpose and dedicated to their task, which makes them heroic, efficient, and perhaps just the teeniest, tiniest bit dull.
The green earth in daylight
But in a way, this dullness is the point. The shadow-story about the captives is remarkably prominent relative to the main narrative about the heroes, but I think this prominence tells us something crucial about the kinds of heroes these are supposed to be. Quite simply, they serve. They muck around with Orc-trails because their lives are defined by obligations to other people. Aragorn is obliged to help Merry and Pippin because they are his friends, and because they share the secret of the Ring that he has sworn to protect. Aragorn also takes on two new obligations in these chapters. He's obliged -- even more than before -- to help Minas Tirith, because Boromir asked him to while he was dying. He's also obliged to help Eomer, because Eomer helps him and very nearly begs him for his help in return. Both the House of Stewards and the House of Eorl are bound to Aragorn's family by long ties. When they ask for his aid, they have a claim on him. That's what kingship is.
Aragorn is richly aware of this humility of human majesty in his world. At one point a Rider of Rohan laughs at the idea that hobbits might be real, and asks, "Do we walk in legends or on the green earth in the daylight?" Aragorn's response is telling: "A man may do both," he says. "For not we but those who come after will make the legends of our time." Legends, in other words, are an effect produced in stories told about the real world after the fact. They are events seen from a distant perspective. Unfortunately the people living the legends do not have that distant, ennobling perspective on themselves. They're too busy kneeling on the earth and listening for hoofbeats. They will be legends, someday, in a story told by someone else. But for now they're stuck with the green earth in daylight.
They will look for him from the White Tower
To me, this acceptance of a limited human perspective explains what might otherwise be seen as an artistic failure in these chapters: Tolkien's choice to have Boromir's final battle happen "off-screen," outside the main narrative. We don't see it; we only realize that it has happened from its effects. I have to say that I loved -- adored -- the movie version of this scene, where we actually see Boromir fight. But I think I can understand why Tolkien was so restrained in comparison. He wasn't just being randomly annoying or giving Boromir short shrift. He was being grimly realistic about heroism in the real world.
For all that he was writing about an epic society, Tolkien was in this strangely modern: he sometimes refuses us those glorious, perfect moments when heroism is recognized and admired as it is happening. That makes sense. Heroism usually happens when no one else is around to pay attention. That's what happened to Boromir. Aragorn was just too late to help him or even see him fight. So Boromir's last desperate struggle becomes one more riddle to interpret: not an action, but an inference written on his dying body and the bodies of his enemies.
Only Boromir is more than that, because Aragorn makes him be more. If legends are made by those who come after, Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli take their obligation to create legends incredibly seriously when they themselves are the ones remaining behind to mourn and celebrate a fallen hero. This is why, when Merry and Pippin have been captured and time is of the essence, they nevertheless take the time to give Boromir to the River with all due ceremony and to sing in his honor.
This long, deliberate pause in the action can feel just as infuriating to the impatient reader as Tolkien's long, deliberate sections, when some characters disappear for dozens of chapters at time. But I think both kinds of pauses serve a similar purpose: they make meaning in a world that threatens to have none. For readers, the long pauses for each plot force us to value all the characters as meaningful in themselves. For the characters, the pause of mourning is an attempt to make something transcendent out of the unpromising materials of daily life.
Now that Tolkien's epic has left behind the glories of the Elven-kingdoms and we are firmly in the world of men, the act of storytelling takes on a new significance. It's a resting-place in a world of flux and change, a pause to take the long view in lives bound to a short-term mortal perspective. This, in a world of grey bread and trampled grass, is the only way that legends can come to be.