Tolkien Reread 2: ‘The Ring Goes South’

[Part 1 of this reread is here]

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Rereading Book 2, and with it completing The Fellowship of the Ring, it occurs to me that ‘the Fellowship of the Ring’ actually only describes part of this second book (so less than one sixth of the whole Lord of the Rings). There’s no fellowship in Book 1, and even when we get to Book 2 there’s no fellowship in the first two, lengthy chapters — nor, arguably, in the final chapter, ‘The Breaking of the Fellowship’. It’s really not a very large portion of the whole thing. Elrond assembles the fellowship, nine people, more-or-less randomly chosen (it has to be nine because there are nine Nazgûl. But why? It’s not like the two bands are going to go mano-a-mano with one another. So: just for reasons of symmetry I suppose). And in fact the fellowship breaks even earlier than the final chapter, with the death (the ‘death’) of Gandalf in Moria — although here, rereading, I noticed that it is after the survivors escape Moria and are making their way east that they first become properly aware that Gollum is tracking them: as if Gollum arrives in some shadowy Jungian way as the new ninth member of the group. The mission could not, we who have read to the end know, be accomplished without him, after all. So perhaps there’s a stranger logic at work here.

Anyway: Book 2 opens with two lengthy chapters of conversation and storytelling. The main ‘event’ of the whole is the attempt to pass over the Misty Mountains at Caradhras, and the subsequent ill-starred journey through Moria — still brilliantly, thrillingly written, all this. I stand by my contention that the seed for the Caradhras episode was planted in Tolkien’s mind by his youthful reading of Scott’s Anne of Geierstein (1829), which contains a very similar scene: travellers and their mule trying and failing to cross a cursed snowy mountain, a pool containing a monster (I discuss the particularities here, if you’re interested). But that doesn’t diminish what Tolkien does here.

Then Lothlorien, meeting Galadriel, downriver in boats and fellowship’s end. Tolkien’s division of the story is interesting here: in Jackson’s movie, Boromir betrays Frodo and then immediately redeems himself by fighting the suddenly swarming orcs, sacrificing his life. The movie ends with Boromir’s funerary boat washing over the falls. But in the novel Boromir attempts to sieze the ring, and Frodo and Sam slip away. It’s not until the opening of Two Towers that Boromir sounds his horn, and Aragorn discovers him dying, pincushioned with orc arrows. That means that the original audience (who has to wait from July 1954 until mid-November for their next installment) must have assumed a now-evil Boromir was out there, roaming the land, up to no good. I suspect Jackson’s storytelling instincts were better, here.

Another thing that struck me, on this reread, is just how depopulated the countryside is. Oddly so, really. The fellowship walk hundreds of miles south from Rivendell, through various landscapes across what must clearly be fertile, attractive land: lots of irrigation run-offs from the mountains to the east, lots of land, wood, resources, rivers for passage and trade. Yet the travellers meet literally nobody but birds and wild animals. Why isn’t this place jam-packed with farms, homesteads, villages, castles, towns? Once upon a time, we’re told, elves and men did live here; but — the implication is — the rise of evil somehow drove out, or picked clean, this territory. Is this a post-genocide wilderness, do we think? Perhaps we’re to take this as a signal of how dangerous the forces of darkness are: given a chance they will extirpate all life from the world. But I don’t know: men, elves and dwarfs manage to populate other portions of Middle Earth that are, surely, just as under-threat from orcish and other evils. The men of Dale lived right underneath a huge dragon for generations.

I wonder if something else isn’t going on here. I have elsewhere discussed how strange the landscape of Middle Earth is when we ‘read’ it, as we might read a book or a picture (where are all the sheep? I ask). There are villages and homesteads and towns in the Shire and its environs of course — but we are repeatedly told that this is an out-of-the-way backwater, an irrelevance in the large scheme, a place of which Sauron has only just now become aware. What about everywhere else? Rivendell is ‘the last homely house’, in fact more like a palace, guarded by magic. The elves of Lothlorien live in the trees, but also a fortified castle of large extent. The Rohirrim live in a motte-and-bailey, Gondor has its castellated city. But where are the smaller-scale settlements? Were are the farms? (who is growing all the food that people eat?) Everywhere outside these few cities and pallisades is wholly empty of folk.

I wonder if the truth is that Tolkien likes the landscape empty. At the beginning of The Prelude, Wordsworth walks with relief and joy away from the crowded streets of the city into the empty purity of Nature. Morris’s massive Earthly Paradise (1868–70)— a more direct influence on Tolkien — opens with an exhortation for us to turn our backs on overpopulated, bustling, industrial modernity and return to an uncluttered, ‘cleaner’ past:

Forget six counties overhung with smoke,
Forget the snorting steam and piston stroke,
Forget the spreading of the hideous town;
Think rather of the pack-horse on the down,
And dream of London, small, and white, and clean.

That’s an eminently Tolkienian sentiment, I’d say. And it was widely shared amongst the more conservative writers and artists of the Modernist and mid-century period. But it’s problematic too. ‘Clean’, there, means, amongst other things, cleansed of people — ethnically cleansed, we might say. The Nazis also saw the landscapes of Eastern Europe and Russia as empty, clean, waiting to be appropriated (the only problem was that there were folk living there; but, you know: not really — only varous infestations of untermenschen who could be wiped away, in as efficient and hygienic a manner as possible). It’s Ursula and Birkin’s conversation in Women in Love (1920). ‘Humanity itself is dry-rotten, really,’ insists Birkin. People might look nice enough, on the ourside, some of them, but ‘their insides are full of bitter, corrupt ash.’

“So you’d like everybody in the world destroyed?” said Ursula.

“I should indeed.”

“And the world empty of people?”

“Yes truly. You yourself, don’t you find it a beautiful clean thought, a world empty of people, just uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting up?”

The pleasant sincerity of his voice made Ursula pause to consider her own proposition. And really it was attractive: a clean, lovely, humanless world. It was the really desirable. Her heart hesitated, and exulted. [Lawrence, Women in Love, ch. 11]

When I was an undergraduate at Aberdeen University in the 1980s, one of my teachers, George Watson (the Ulsterman, not the Cambridge George Watson) — the best lecturer I have ever known, actually — read that passage out to us in the lecture hall, then closed his Penguin Women in Love and hurled it across the room. He was right: it’s noisome. People are not an uncleanness. The belief that they are, in whole or in part, is the moral abyss so catastrophically literalised in the genocides of the twentieth-century.

Now, this may seem unfair on Tolkien, who was certainly no advocate of genocide. How far his medievalism, his love for pre-conquest England, was a harmless nostalgia — an aestheticised preference for solitude, peace, quiet, uninterrupted countryside rambles — and how far it partook of this dangerous larger ethos is the question. Uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting up. This hasn’t, I think, gone away. On the one hand we have Ruskin’s superb truth: that there is no wealth but life. On the other we have people, still, who see humanity not as a richness, but as a kind of infestation of Mother Earth, a plague upon Gaia, a ‘problem’ to be solved, by managed or if needful by catastrophic depopulation. But I’m straying from the purpose of this blog, which is to notate my read-through of Book 2 of The Fellowship of the Ring. *clears throat* On.

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One thing that came to mind as I reread this book was the place of writing in Middle Earth. My thoughts were focalised by the presence of two splendid inset text images in the Moria chapter. First, this one:

The ‘speak friend and enter’ inscription on the gate. And then this one:

BALIN SON OF FUNDIN LORD OF MORIA. They’re lovely; and the book’s appendices stand testament to Tolkien’s interest in fine calligraphy. But they got me wondering. One thing I wondered was: why are there so few written texts in the world of the Lord of the Rings? Lots of oral texts; the novel is littered with interpolated songs and verses and riddles. But tabulating all the written texts mentioned doesn’t give us very much.

1: Moria-writing. The two texts already mentioned, together with the written record the fellowship discover inside Moria. They attract our readerly attention by virtue of being so splendidly, visually rendered. (Tolkien also took great pains created a facsimile of the Book of Moria, writing out the story in runes and then carefully scorching and distressing the pages to blot out the bits that Gandalf cannot read: he was disappointed when Allen & Unwin told him it would be too expensive to reproduce these in the published book)

2: Bilbo’s book. But this exists in the novel largely (until the very end) as unwritten; something Bilbo will get around to at some point. More, it exists in some complicated metatextual relationship with the novel we are reading, so I’ll put it on one side for a moment.

3: The odd single rune: Gandalf marks his fireworks with a G-rune, for instance; and scratches ‘3’ on a stone at Weathertop.

4: One ‘scroll’ mentioned and quoted in the ‘Council of Elrond’ chapter, in which Isildur writes down what the ring looks like, records its inscription, and declares it is ‘precious’ to him. Which leads me, of course, to:

5: This:

That’s, obviously, writing of the profoundest and most penetrating significance for the novel. More, it is evil. It precedes, and determines, all the (actual) writing that constitutes Tolkien’s novel. Can we say, taking things a little further, that that this writing in some sense stains written text as such with some malign mark or quality? The ring-writing itself, and Isildur’s scroll, are permanent records of the wickedness of the ring in action, after all.

So I started thinking of the way written marks can be misinterpreted: Strider and the hobbits don’t understand Gandalf’s ‘3’ rune at Weathertop; Gandalf himself misses the true meaning of the Moria-Gate inscription. But then I thought: actually, the opposite is closer to the truth of it.

Gandalf’s problem with the Moria-gate inscription is that he over-reads; he assumes a level of complexity that isn’t there. When he sees how straightforward the instruction is he laughs. Something similar is the case with ‘the remains of a book’ they find at the beginning of II:5. Initially it looks as though this, with an almost facetious literalness, is going to be ‘difficult to decode’, in this case because it is so materially damaged.

‘We drove the orcs from the great gate and guard — I think; the next word is blurred and burned: probably room — we slew many in the bright — I think sun in the dale.’

And so on. But in fact, the reading of this text reveals a near-fatal facility, a slippage between text and world. They read the words ‘We cannot get out. The end comes, drums drums in the deep …. they are coming’’ and without intermission these words becomes their reality.

There was a hurrying sound of many feet.
‘They are coming!’ cried Legolas.
‘We cannot get out,’ said Gimli.

In other words, the thing with written language is not that it is too obscure, or ambiguous, or slippery; but on the contrary, that it is too plain. It does exactly what it says (you speak ‘friend’ and enter). It bridges the gap between text and world too immediately, and renders itself real with a dangerous completion. This is at the heart of the power of the ring. The whole novel is a written-textual articulation of that fact.

Writing in this sense is prior; foundational (were were old-school deconstructivists, we could say: Lord of the Rings is a logocentric text). Writing is what you find when you excavate down, below the surface logic of the represented, past the oral traditions and remembered songs. Which is why subterranean Moria is the precisely the right place for these two fine calligraphic interpolations, and why no such writing (inserted into the text) is found anywhere else in the novel, the ring excepted. The symbolic logic of Moria is: dig down deep enough, and you free a terrible, destructive evil. This evil is literalised as ‘Balrog’, a fiery agent of destruction. But the novel has already established the crucial fiery agent of destruction in the literal letters of the One Ring (‘“I cannot read the fiery letters,” said Frodo, in a quavery voice.’) Oral literature connects you with a living tradition of other people; but written literature short-circuits community and conducts a spark of terrible danger directly into reality.

At this point, I could launch into an involuted meta-textual discussion about how this potential-for-evil danger of written language inflects a text that is itself embodied in written language. And there is something interesting, and important, there: it explains, for instance, why Tolkien gives over quite so much of the Return of the King’s appendices to alphabets. But such a section would, really, write itself; and I can safely leave it as an exercise for the reader.

Perhaps this glosses the point I make above, about how underpopulated Middle Earth is. Perhaps these huge empty spaces are not post-genocide ghastlinesses, but actualisations of the empty page, what every writer, Tolkien not excepted, must face as the first step in the process of writing (of writing, for instance, the story of how nine brave people crossed the empty wilderness). Or perhaps not.

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There is, perhaps, more to say about writing, and about the ring. This takes me back to my meanderings in Part 1 of this read-through, about how the One Ring works, exactly.

Put it this way: the One Ring is charmed—it is a charm. Now, this is a word whose semantic field shifted quite a long way as we moved into modernity. Teaching Comus to undergrads today, it can be hard for them to grasp the force of Milton’s line: ‘How charming is divine philosophy!’ He doesn’t mean that divine philosophy is pleasant, suave (persuasive), well-mannered, dishy, or any of those things. He means it bewitches you; it places you under powerful charm. That it uses its magic to bind you (as the lady is stuck to her chair in that poem). In this sense, rather than in the lucky-rabbit-foot sense, Tolkien’s ring is a charm—a profoundly unlucky rabbit-foot, we would have to say.

I mention this because it seems to me it gets overlooked: the One Ring is a charm. And its power, its magic, works through its particular styling. The other rings of power are set with one or other jewel, and the whole legend of the Silmarils makes it plain that, for Tolkien (as for, in a rather different context, Ballard) jewels are magic. But the plain gold band of the One Ring is different. Here it seems that the magic depends upon certain letters inscribed upon the body of the ring itself—letters, moreover, in a particular language. We could speculate that the magic is not just, as it were, ‘in’ the metal of the ring, or rather that it is in the ring but is also actualised by the writing. The ‘charm’, or magic, of the ring depends upon the language written upon it.

We know this, because this is how ‘charms’ worked in Anglo-Saxon and medieval culture, and how they continued to work into early Modernity, in the seventeen- and eighteenth-centuries. It was not enough to have a particular object (as, in my facetious example above, a rabbit’s foot—or a four-leaf clover, a pair of silver dice on a chain, or whatever). Writing was also needful. Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971) records many such examples, usually healing charms, but sometimes charms designed to achieve other ends. For example, if you suffered toothache you should write:

Jesus Christ
For mercy sake
Take away
This toothache

three times on a piece of paper, and then burn it. You’ll note that the charm rhymes: that’s important too, for poetry is more magical than prose. [What does Matthew Arnold say in Essays in Criticism? ‘Poetry interprets in two ways; it interprets by expressing with magical felicity the physiognomy and movement of the outward world, and it interprets by expressing, with inspired conviction, the ideas and laws of the inward world of man’s moral and spiritual nature. In other words, poetry is interpretative, both by having natural magic in it and by having moral profundity’].

Some charms involved writing in English, but older languages had more potency—that the spells in Harry Potter are all in Latin (often mangled Latin, but what the hey) speaks to the way this belief still clings-on. Here’s another toothache charm, from the 16th century. First find a wizard or ‘cunning man’. Then:

In a little paper he sets down these words, In verbis et in herbis, et in lapidibus, sunt virtutes. Underneath he writes in capital letters, AAB ILLA HYRS GIBELLA. This paper must likewise be burned.

‘The very impenetrability of the formula helped to give it its power,’ Thomas notes. For fever:

Write these words: “Arataly, Rataly, Ataly, taly, aly, ly,” and bind these words about the sick man’s arm nine days and every day say three Pater Nosters in worship of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, and then take off that and burn it and the sick shall be whole.

Thomas includes lots of other examples: a seventeenth-century doctor gave one of his patients ‘a bottle of water and a paper with crosses and characters on it for her to wear’, a procedure ‘as matter of fact as the issuing of a modern doctor’s prescription’ [Thomas, 216]. A Somerset doctor in 1617 gave his patient a piece of paper to be worn on the body, warning him ‘it is so powerful that if it were hanged about a cock’s neck no man should have the power to kill the cock.’ It was important that the charm could be worn about the body; and often ‘some item of the patient’s clothing, preferably his belt or girdle’ would be utilised. We’re not far from the idea of a ring: for the item really needs to surround a part of the body.

In fact a charm could be written on anything: the important thing was the writing. In 1601 a Cambridgeshire wizard called Oliver Den would ‘write certain words in a piece of bread which he giveth to dogs bitten with a mad dog, thereby to keep them from it’. Also:

The said Den did take apples and cut them into halves and did take the half parts of these apples and wrote certain letters on them, and gave the same to the said hogs, by which he said he would keep the said hogs from running mad or dying. [Thomas, 216]

Or consider the ‘Heavenly Letter charm’, which ‘circulated in Western Europe from the fourth century onwards’ and ‘was especially popular in the late Middle Ages.’ [Rosanne Hebing, ‘“Allmygti god this lettyr sent”: English Heavenly Letter Charms in Late Medieval Books and Rolls’, Studies in Philology, 114:4 (2017), 722]. The so-called ‘Heavenly Letter’ was an apocryphal epistle supposedly sent by Christ to King Abgar V of Edessa protecting the latter against medical and political problems. Phrases from the letter were written onto parchment and then worn in an amulet about the body, or else written in a book that could then be carried.

We could see the One Ring—which after all grants its wearer unnatural long life—as a kind of dark parody of these kinds of health charm. But charms were not just about health. According to the categories of the time, there were five kinds: Charms for health; Conjurations; Exorcisms; Benedictions and Curses. One Anglo-Saxon charm that has come down to us was used to ward-off dwarfs [see: David E. Gay, ‘Anglo-Saxon Metrical Charm 3 against a Dwarf’ Folklore, 99:2 (1988), 174-177)— seems a bit hard on the dwarf, but there you go. Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale contains, amongst other magical artefacts, a ring that can translate the language of birds.

Many charms were ‘binding spells’, in the sense that they were designed to bind people together. Love charms were one such: a charm to make another person fall in love with you. Theocritus’s second Idyll opens with Simaitha begging Thestylis to provide such a binding charm: ‘Come, Thestylis, where are my love charms?—so that I can enchant that man, being my grievous love’. Other charms might bind men to you in loyalty, or prevent your slaves from running away. Paul Beekman Taylor’s study of Old English searu, or binding charms, argues that not just the writing—on an item that might be worn, an amulet or arm-ring, or perhaps on a piece of armour (the OE searu means ‘a binding’ or ‘chain’, and is etymologically cognate with sarwa, ‘weaponry, armour’)—but also the interlace pattern so distinctively Anglo-Saxon, were all part of the same charm-logic:

The linking image that resides in the word also pertains to other properties of Anglo-Saxon art. I am thinking, for example, of the interlace patterns in both Anglo-Saxon and Nordic art, particularly in animal designs. Both the Oseberg Ship find and the Sutton Hoo find illustrate boar and wolf patterns. The Sutton Hoo great buckle has a serpent motif in such a design. Furthermore, early Germanic charms which are meant to bind or loosen imply the magic residing in searo. [Paul Beekman Taylor, ‘Searonioas: Old Norse Magic and Old English Verse’ Studies in Philology, 80:2 (1983), 122]

The most general purpose of such ‘binding charms’ was ‘to hold in the life of the wearer’: to protect them against harm, injury or death. This is also part of the binding power of the One Ring, although it manifests more like a curse than a blessing for those whose lives are thuswise extended.

Scholars sometimes called these charms Imago Magica, a translation of the Arabic word Ṭilasm—from which we get the word ‘talisman’. Here’s Peter Forshaw:

It is important to emphasise that the Arabic word Ṭilasm, taken from the Greek τέλεσμα, has a wider set of connotations than the English word Talisman … In Arabic works, indeed, a Ṭilasm might be many things, including a monumental statue, an engraved ring, a written tablet or scroll, or even an inscribed shirt.’ [Peter Forshaw, ‘From Occult Ekphrasis to Magical Art Transforming Text into Talismanic Image in the Scriptorium of Alfonso X’ in Sarah Kiyanrad, Christoffer Theis and Laura Willer (eds), Bild und Schrift auf “magischen” Artefakten (De Gruyter 2018), 15]

τέλεσμα is an interesting word: originally it meant ‘payment, toll, taxes’ (from τελέω, teléō, “to pay”), and later came to mean a receipt of money paid, and therefore any kind of certificate or official document. The step from this to ‘magic charm’ is not a large one. Where does the magic reside? In the writing.

What Tolkien does with the One Ring is take the binding logic—a medieval charm, written-upon with a spell, promised to bind health to the body, or bind body and soul together—to an extrapolated extreme. Binding soul and body together with a charm might address a temporary, potentially fatal illness, but beyond that particular moment it runs the rusk of turning the wearer into a Tithonus-like nightmare, dragging on long past his natural term. Binding a lover to you—or binding your followers, or slaves, to you—also works, master-slave-dialectically (not that Tolkien would have any truck with Hegel, of course; but … you know) to bind yourself as slave. And so you become a wraith, incapable of independence life or thought.

This is writing, for Tolkien. It binds. A oral tradition is flexible, living, growing and adapting as tales and poems are passed from mouth to mouth. But once something is written down, it becomes, as it were, contractual. I’ve long thought that the best way to read (let’s say) Scott — and Tolkien — and any writer interested in the dialectic of the pre-modern, feudal, warrior, unbuffered past and the modern, bourgeois, civilised, buffered present would be bring in both Lukacs’ Historical Novel and Henry Sumner Maine’s older ‘from status to contract’ argument. Specifically, I wonder if Tolkien doesn’t hold Maine’s views as a kind of photographic-negative. For Maine, the ancient world was one in which individuals were tightly bound by status within their groups (their families, their tribes, their kingdoms), rigid hierarchies; Maine, a jurist and believer in the levelling and therefore liberatory power of the law, believed that in the modern one individuals become autonomous agents, free to make contracts and form associations with whomever they choose. For Tolkien, I suspect, the reverse is true. That older world, though status-defined (and world of The Lord of the Rings is intensely status-defined) was, as per Carlyle’s Past and Present, whole, healthy, harmonious, freeing. It is the logic of contracts, or writing more broadly, to bind, such that our apparent liberation is actually deracinated misery, a new kind of slavery, all the wholesome life-giving valences of intersubjectivity reduced to the cash-nexus — or (since money is a kind of contract) a contract-nexus.

There’s something else, though. I wonder if we tend to over-determine Sauron, to read him, via that allegory Tolkien so cordially disliked, as a stand-in for Satan himself. He’s not, though: he was only ever Morgoth’s lieutenant, though he has risen to great prominence in the world, a Miltonic dark eminence that relies in part upon magic. How does he novel change if we read Sauron not as godlike supernatural force, irrupting into the world of elves and men, but only as one king among many, a ruler who has by material as well as magical means — that huge Orc army, predominantly — conquered and intimidated much of Middle Earth. It’s true that Sauron is effectively immortal (but then so are the elves, and Gandalf) and it’s true that his opponents characterise him as, in effect, the antichrist. But this is also true of the allied reaction to Hitler, or indeed to Napoleon. The end and appendices of Return of the King, and especially the CGI vastness of disembodied eye-creature Sauron in the Jackson movies, perhaps encourage us to imagine Sauron as fundmanetally supernatural; but in Fellowship of the Ring he does only what any medieval monarch would do: send out heralds, marshall his armies, spy upon the enemies. What if Sauron’s one of us? Just a slob like one of us? etc.

Next up: Book 3, and the first part of The Two Towers: ‘The Treason of Isengard’.