The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings (66 page)

Years earlier, commenting on the slow progress of his friend’s
Hobbit
sequel, Lewis had observed that Tolkien “works like a coral insect.” It was a stock image: the Victorians likened missionaries to coral insects building up the majestic reefs by their ceaseless, unseen, and unrewarded labor,
soli Deo gloria
. The divine drudgery of this coral-insect labor was rewarded by moments of serendipitous discovery: “I met a lot of things on the way that astonished me,” Tolkien told Auden. “Tom Bombadil I knew already; but I had never been to Bree. Strider sitting in the corner at the inn was a shock, and I had no more idea who he was than had Frodo. The Mines of Moria had been a mere name; and of Lothl
ó
rien no word had reached my mortal ears till I came there. Far away I knew there were the Horse-lords on the confines of an ancient Kingdom of Men, but Fangorn Forest was an unforeseen adventure. I had never heard of the House of Eorl nor of the Stewards of Gondor. Most disquieting of all, Saruman had never been revealed to me, and I was as mystified as Frodo at Gandalf’s failure to appear on September 22.”

It had been clear from the outset that the settled happiness of
The Hobbit
’s conclusion would have to be overturned and Bilbo would have to step aside—the sequel demanded an heir, and the heir would need a new rationale for venturing beyond the secure confines of the Shire. “Make return of ring a motive” occurred early on to Tolkien, as we have seen, but the nature of this ring was still unclear to him; in the original version of
The Hobbit
, Bilbo had stumbled upon a magic ring that conferred invisibility and helped him through various scrapes, but initially Tolkien thought of this ring as “not very dangerous, when used for good purpose.”

As Tolkien labored on, however, the story turned more ominous as well as more profound. Figures familiar from
The Hobbit
become much stranger in the sequel. The Dwarves disclose their character as a people apart—like the Jews, Tolkien thought, “at once native and alien in their habitations, speaking the languages of the country, but with an accent due to their own private tongue…” The Necromancer from
The Hobbit
becomes the Dark Lord Sauron (so named, Tolkien told a correspondent, from an Elvish word for “detestable”), Morgoth’s lieutenant, maker of the Rings of Power, and intent upon conquering Middle-earth by means of the master Ring into which he poured his
libido dominandi
. And with Morgoth and Sauron come a vast procession of beings from Tolkien’s master myth: the longeval High Elves, survivors of the epic wars of the past, who linger in Middle-earth, conscious that their glory is fading; the dreadful Orcs (tortured and corrupted beings, akin to goblins) and Uruk-hai (warrior Orcs crossbred with Men); the langorous Ents (“giants” in Old English), tree-shepherds assigned by the godlike Valar to protect the primeval forests; and the Istari (“wise ones”) clad in the bodies of aged Men, among them Saruman (his name means “Craft-Man”), chief of the Order and bent on domination, and Gandalf (“Staff-Elf”) the Grey Pilgrim, who wanders Middle-earth giving aid and counsel, now unveiled as the keeper of the primordial Secret Fire (“his joy, and his swift wrath, were veiled in garments grey as ash, so that only those that knew him well glimpsed the flame that was within.”)

While the Men of Bree regularly mingle with Hobbits, Men are for the most part strange, aloof, oversized; their motivations and values—the medieval Germanic shame/honor culture of the Rohirrim, the Byzantine grandeur of Gondor, the clandestine fellowship of the D
ú
nedain—inscrutable, even alien, when seen through ordinary Hobbit eyes. Clearly the reader is meant to identify with small Hobbits rather than with great Men. Tolkien’s deeply Catholic understanding of the Magnificat theme—the exaltation of the humble, already present in
The Hobbit
, as we have seen, and adumbrated in all his writing—would be fully realized here.

How to frame the story, now that it was so much more complex than
The Hobbit
, was a real puzzle. Tolkien was torn between different authorial registers. In a foreword to the first edition, he begins by speaking as the (fictional) chronicler of the history of Middle-earth, but ends by speaking as the real-world author, dedicating
The Lord of the Rings
to his children and fellow Inklings. But it didn’t work; the two voices clashed. For the second edition, published in 1965, he produced a new foreword in his real-world voice, explaining why it had taken so long to write the book (and, incidentally, dropping the dedication to the Inklings); this was followed by a prologue by the unnamed scholar who, within Tolkien’s secondary world, is responsible for the book known in English translation as
The Lord of the Rings
.

The unnamed scholar, we are given to believe, is a compiler, redactor, and translator of prodigious text-critical skills who has mined the Matter of Middle-earth from
The Red Book of Westmarch
and other documentary sources, reconciling manuscript variants, transcribing runic and alphabetic scripts, and rendering in various shades of modern English the idioms, accents, musicality, and poetic diction of the languages of Elves, Men, Dwarves, Ents, Orcs, and Valar. To take just one example: Sam’s real name, transliterated from the Mannish vernacular called Westron, is Banaz
î
r (“halfwise”) Galbasi (
galab
is “game” and
bas
is a suffix used in place names), for which Samwise Gamwich is an English approximation, devolving into Samwise Gammidgy, or Gamgee. Shire place-names, similarly, are represented by English place-names, most of which have recognizably Midlands roots. Tolkien’s invented nomenclature thus enabled him to locate the Shire in a region replete with nostalgic significance—the region of his lost childhood home, which was also, as he argued in his study of the
Ancrene Wisse
, a sanctuary for Anglo-Saxon language and culture during the centuries after the catastrophe of 1066.

*   *   *

A translator must perforce be an interpreter of cultures; hence a good deal of the fictional prologue is taken up with Hobbit ethnography, much of it tongue in cheek. The Hobbits are “an unobtrusive but very ancient people” who “love peace and quiet and good tilled earth” and enjoy their six meals a day, though they are capable of enduring extraordinary privation at need. Like most traditional peoples, they have a keen interest in genealogies and family histories. Though on better terms with the natural world than we moderns, their preference is for nature cultivated rather than wild, for the products of small-scale farming and artisanship and for civilized pleasures like the smoking of pipe-weed. The Shire is not a medieval town so much as a nineteenth-century hamlet (“more or less a Warwickshire village of about the period of the Diamond Jubilee,” Tolkien told Allen & Unwin), a gossipy, provincial, preindustrial little world, rather like Cure Hardy in
That Hideous Strength
, which is attractive “in spite of all its obvious absurdities” and deserves to be saved. As Gandalf will say, “It would be a grievous blow to the world, if the Dark Power overcame the Shire; if all your kind, jolly, stupid Bolgers, Hornblowers, Boffins, Bracegirdles, and the rest, not to mention the ridiculous Bagginses, became enslaved.” Even more so than in
The Hobbit
, the very anachronisms in the tale—like Bilbo’s pocket handkerchiefs and Sam’s fish and chips—can be understood most profitably as acts of translation meant to convey the homely goodness of the Shire, and all that deserves to be saved, by means of quintessentially English comforts.

The story opens with a comic explosion in the form of an antic “long-expected party”—an ironic inversion of the “unexpected party” with which
The Hobbit
begins. The occasion is Bilbo’s “eleventy-first” and Frodo’s thirty-third birthday, and Gandalf has arrived with fireworks to crown the occasion. A last gasp of
Hobbit
silliness and facetiousness (regretted by Tolkien and his critics alike) marks the moment of transition from a children’s story to the tremendous narrative that is about to unfold. Bilbo makes a mocking valedictory speech, puts on the Ring that he had obtained during the adventures of
The Hobbit
, and abruptly vanishes, leaving Frodo to distribute the gifts and preside as heir in his place. Bilbo returns to Bag End and prepares to take to the open road again; yet when it comes to surrendering the Ring—the hidden purpose of the whole affair—he shows an unwillingness that arouses Gandalf’s suspicion.

Seventeen years later, amid rumors of dark stirrings outside the Shire, Gandalf returns to give Frodo the true story of Bilbo’s finding of the Ring, saying just enough to make Frodo thoroughly alarmed. From now on, the reader is in the hands of an omniscient narrator who folds into a third-person, real-time account—by means of a great deal of talking—an array of first-person voices recalling past or offstage events. With Frodo, we find out that the prize Bilbo took from Gollum was the One Ring, chief among the Great Rings of Power forged by Sauron during the Second Age as a means of enslaving all of Middle-earth.

Far from being a conventional magical device, however, the Ring proved to be an active and intelligent power. After lying hidden in the mud for more than two thousand years, it found Gollum, used him, and abandoned him. Nor was Bilbo immune to its addictive power; he would undoubtedly have been consumed by the Ring had he kept it much longer. Gandalf admits that he had initially failed to recognize the extent of the danger; now he means to terrify Frodo for his own good, warning him that the possessor of the Ring “does not grow or obtain more life, he merely continues, until at last every minute is a weariness. And if he often uses the Ring to make himself invisible, he
fades
: he becomes in the end invisible permanently, and walks in the twilight under the eye of the Dark Power that rules the Rings.”

Though Tolkien indignantly rejected the comparison, there is more than a passing resemblance to the ring of power in Wagner’s
Ring of the Nibelung
, cursed by its maker, the dwarf Alberich, to destroy its possessor, “des Ringes Herr als des Ringes Knecht” (the lord of the ring as the ring’s slave). Tolkien’s Ring cannot be hidden for long; nor can it be destroyed except by casting it into the fires in which it was forged, in the volcanic heart of Mount Doom, at the center of Mordor. “Doom”—Tolkien uses the Old English word a hundred times in
The Lord of the Rings
, registering its full range of meanings: a fate decreed, a judgment pronounced, a world destroyed.

But the most terrifying news Gandalf brings is his discovery that Gollum has revealed to Sauron the existence of Hobbits and the probable location of the Ring. The news prompts Frodo to cry out, “What a pity that Bilbo did not stab that vile creature, when he had a chance!” to which Gandalf responds, “Pity? It was Pity that stayed his hand. Pity, and Mercy: not to strike without need. And he has been well rewarded, Frodo. Be sure that he took so little hurt from the evil, and escaped in the end, because he began his ownership of the Ring so.” It is one of Gandalf’s many prophetic statements, and signals a major underlying Christian theme: “Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.”

Frodo resolves to take the Ring and leave his beloved home—his first sacrificial act—thereby saving the Shire from attack. The gardener Samwise Gamgee, caught eavesdropping, is drafted to accompany him as his servant and helper; Tolkien would liken Sam to “the privates and my batmen I knew in the 1914 War, and recognized as so far superior to myself.” The growing mutual dependence of Frodo and Sam does not erase this class difference, but Sam is ennobled by his perseverance, humility, love for Frodo, and inveterate delight in Elvish marvels. Frodo, Sam, and a few Hobbit friends set out on their journey, with the terrifying Black Riders (the “Nazg
û
l,” once-powerful mortals, now deathless “ring-wraiths” enslaved to Sauron) close on their heels.

And so the pattern is established for the rest of the book. From here on it is all recapitulation: a dedicated company hastily formed and soon divided; a desperate flight “from deadly peril into deadly peril” followed by a temporary sanctuary and fleeting taste of domestic comfort. As the pattern recurs, the gravity of the danger and the solemnity of the mission become more evident and sharply focused, though the joys of table and bath are not diminished.

Such recapitulation of actions and themes is typical of epic narratives—think of Homer or Gilgamesh. For Tolkien, it was a way to link
The Hobbit
to its sequel, to govern the otherwise ungovernable tale he had worked on for so long and to express, in terms suited to a pre-Christian world, a distinctively Christian vision of history as a movement from types and figures toward fulfillment in the incarnate Redeemer who recapitulates all things past and future in his own Person. To the Greeks and Romans, recapitulation (Greek
anakephalaiosis
, Latin
recapitulatio
) was a rhetorical device, but for Christian writers beginning with Irenaeus, the second-century bishop and martyr, it was an essential key, revealing the Bible’s narrative of redemption. It is the pattern of recapitulation that makes the Book of Revelation (Greek: Apocalypse) an intelligible vision rather than a mad tumult of avenging angels, dragons, and worlds unmade. It serves the same function in Tolkien’s tale.

Perhaps Tolkien came upon his recapitulation design by accident, for he was initially sailing without coordinates. It is a measure of the difficulty he experienced in finding momentum for his plot, Tom Shippey suggests, “that Frodo has to be dug out of no less than five ‘Homely Houses’ before his quest is properly launched: first Bag End, then the little house at Crickhollow with its redundant guardian Fredegar Bolger, then the house of Tom Bombadil, then the
Prancing Pony
, and finally Rivendell, with its ‘last Homely House east of the Sea.’” It is a mark of Tolkien’s genius that he makes a virtue out of successive literary defeats.