Tolkien Reread 6: ‘The End of the Third Age’

[Previously: 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5]

At the end of The Two Towers, Frodo has been stung and silk-wrapped by Shelob and his body has been carried off by orcs into the well-guarded tower of Cirith Ungol. Sam, fortuitously, has taken up the ring himself, so it has not fallen into Orcish hands; but otherwise the situation looks comprehensively hopeless. There was quite a delay between the publication of vols 2 and 3 of The Lord of the Rings — pretty much a whole year, which left the original readers in agony. Here’s the publisher Stanley Unwin’s account:

When we published the first two volumes, we confidently anticipated following them up immediately with Volume 3, of which we had the complete text of the story. But the author was not ready with all the supplementary material, and there was what seemed to all an interminable delay. Volume 2 [published 11 November 1954] had left readers in agonizing suspense, and never in over fifty years of publishing have I received so many letters from the public — some intensely humorous, more resentful, but all complaining that they could endure the suspense no longer, and complaining of our cruelty in delaying the publication of Volume 3. The burden of answering all these letters was such that we were as thankful as our correspondents when the production of Volume 3 was finally completed [20th October 1955]. [Stanley Unwin, The Truth about a Publisher (George Allen & Unwin 1960) 300–301]

After that long break, and that tormenting cliffhanger, the first half of Return of the King is concerned only with the siege of Gondor and the battle of Pelennor fields. Then we turn, in Book 6, to the dangling storyline.

What struck me in this reread is how rapidly Tolkien wraps that story up. The haste is almost indecent: three chapters is all we get — ‘The Tower of Cirith Ungol’ unhangs the hung-cliff of story, as the many orcs manning the tower, with extraordinary convenience for the plot, all fall-out with one another and slaughter themselves. This allows Sam to rescue Frodo, and for the two to dress in orc-gear, leave the tower and push on with their quest. The next chapter ‘The Land of Shadow’ sees them trek across the wasteland between Cirith Ungol and Mount Doom (roughly thirty miles, according to Tolkien’s own map) — parched, exhausted, desperate, almost at the end of their tethers. Then it’s the chapter ‘Mount Doom’: Sam helping Frodo up the slope of the volcano, Frodo refusing his task, Gollum leaping unexpectedly upon him. It’s still superb, thrilling, the whole bulk of this lengthy novel pressing down upon this climactic moment. This time round I was particularly struck by how well Tolkien writes the actual instant of Frodo’s failure.

‘I have come,’ he said. ‘But I do not choose now to do what I came to do. I will not do this deed. The Ring is mine!’ And suddenly, as he set it on his finger, he vanished from Sam’s sight. Sam gasped, but he had no chance to cry out, for at that moment many things happened.

Jackson’s movie handles this much less effectively:

SAM: Destroy it!

[Frodo holds the ring on its chain over the edge of the pit]

SAM: Go on! Now! Throw it in the fire!

[Frodo stares at the ring, the ring whispers to him]

SAM: What are you waiting for? Just let it go!

[Frodo turns and looks at Sam]

FRODO: The ring is mine.

[He snaps the chain and moves the ring towards his finger]

SAM: No… no…

[Frodo slips the ring on and vanishes]

SAM: NO!

This is more melodramatic, but it misses a key beat in the moral dynamic of the story — Frodo’s ‘But I do not choose now to do what I came to do’. As phrased this is expressively balanced between ‘I choose not to do this thing’ and ‘I have lost the ability to choose: I am become perfectly passive in the face of the power the ring has over me.’ Choice is the salient in the larger story, of course, and here, at this crucial juncture, rendered into a dramatic climax and double-take. Sam’s exhausted, helpless gasp is much more dramatically effective than the moviepicture’s shrieking and posing.

There are six more chapters in the book, but it’s all postclimactic stuff: ‘The Steward and the King’ wraps-up the Gondor storyline and sees Aragorn crowned, and also includes a deal of faffing-about with Faramir and Eowyn which reads like the pay-off to a story (their slowly developing love) Tolkien doesn’t actually tell earlier in the novel. Then there’s some stop-start dallying, and a trip home calling-in on some minor characters (much more from Butterbur than I remembered), with others pointedly not present: ‘they hoped and half-expected to see [Bombadil] standing there to greet them … but there was no sign of him.’ And then, one last set-piece, ‘The Scouring of the Shire’. This shows that Frodo, Sam, Merry and Pippin have learned leadership and war-skills from their adventures, as they rouse the hobbits of the Shire to banish ‘Sharkey’ — Saruman — and his sidekick Wormtongue.

‘Scouring’ is a good, practical word: ‘to clean, polish, or wash something by rubbing and scrubbing it vigorously, frequently with an abrasive or cleaning agent’. It’s what a housewife or househusband does with a dirty pan to get it clean. But Tolkien, philologist and etymologist, knew that the word derives (via Medieval Latin escūrō, excūrō “to clean off”) from ex- + cūrō: “to arrange, see to, take care of”. This last is a version of cūra, “care, concern”; and ‘care’ has a religious as much as a secular meaning — a curate is so-called because this person is invested with the care or cure, cura of souls of a parish. The scouring is a spiritual cleaning as much as a practical matter of reasserting political control.

The name ‘Sharkey’ might make us think of the predatory fish, but Tolkien is thinking of the older meaning ‘someone who exploits others, for example by trickery, lies, usury, extortion’, from the Old German Schurke (“scoundrel”). Tolkien of course provides his own cod-etymology: ‘probably Orkish in origin, sharkû, old man’.

Still, this portion of the book feels rushed. From the first inklings that the shire needs scouring to the end (‘at last all was over; nearly seventy of the ruffians lay dead on the field’) is less than 20 pages. Another 10 pages, and Saruman and Wormtongue are disposed of; all other consequences are hustled of in a single sentence: ‘the clearing up certainly needed a lot of work, but it took less time than Sam had feared’. Then the final chapter, ‘the Grey Havens’, defocalises the narrative tempo markedly; and at 10 pages is one of the shortest in the book. The final line, and Sam’s stoic admixture of desolation and consolation, still has the power to move me, I discover.

He drew a deep breath. ‘Well, I’m back,’ he said.

But overall this book seemed much choppier to me than it has on previous readings.

Choppiness, and a further narrative defocalisation, characterise the appendices too, of course. But reading straight through this time (I’d read the appendices before, in bits and pieces, though never consecutively straight through after finishing the novel like this) a couple of other things struck me. One is that by moving from discursive narrative into Annals mode, they continue a principle of shifting narrative mode or genre that characterises the novel as a whole. LotR starts out as a piece of late 19th century bourgeois narrative, then shifts into an earlier, prose-Romance adventure mode, and then shifts again in the later books into a cod-Biblical elevated Epic mode. This final move to Annals is abrupt, but of a piece with that broader, backward-facing meta-trajectory. One purpose of all this, I suppose, is precisely its density. Umberto Eco’s The Infinity of Lists (2009) valorises the open-ended, ‘infinity’ of lists as against closed-down, limited possibilities of aesthetic form, and, reading through the appendices, I was stuck by the sheer suggestiveness of it all; its fertility of untold, tellable stories, its rhizomatic branching out from ‘narrative’ and ‘character’ into myriad other textual possibilities: language and orthography; history and geography; translation and sociology and horology. And the appendices perform ironizing, destabilising tricks, revealing — for instance — that the character with whom we have grown familiar as Samwise Gamgee is ‘actually’ called ‘Banazîr Galbasi son of Ranugad’. There’s something very interesting in this: the ‘truth’ behind this homely English-sounding name is actually something Persian-sounding, something much more exotic. It gives us the chance to reconfigure the whole book. Once Tolkien comes out of copyright in 2043 it might be interesting to remix the whole novel, replacing the familiar names with the ‘actual’ names, as specified in the appendices. Though the scare-quotes around ‘actual’ there are very much on point.

All that said, that potential fertility is a little hamstrung by the sheer dullness of much of the appendix material.

These are the names of the Kings and Queens of Númenor: Elros Tar-Minyatur, Vardamir, Tar-Amandil, Tar-Elendil, Tar-Meneldur, Tar-Aldarion, Tar-Ancalimë (the first Ruling Queen), Tar-Anárion, Tar-Súrion, Tar-Telperiën (the second Queen), Tar-Minastir, Tar-Ciryatan, Tar-Atanamir the Great, Tar-Ancalimon, Tar-Telemmaitë, Tar-Vanimeldë (the third queen), Tar-Alcarin, Tar-Calmacil.

Tar, very much. One response to such density is start to see patterns, or suggestivities, in it. I remember as a kid, browsing the chronological listings, feeling the strange, if distant, thrill of reading about the events of 1974 (Third Age: ‘End of the North-kingdom; the Witch-king overruns Arthedaun and takes Fornost’) actually in 1974! Plus the fact that the events of the novel take place from the year 3018 onwards gave this most old-fashioned of books a nicely sfnal-futurist frisson. And whilst Tolkien would presumably have disowned them, there are little nuggets that look like pokes at pseudo-contemporary relevant here. The timeline of the second age hops directly from ‘c.1800’ to the year ‘2251’, which looks rather like JRRT recording his disdain for contemporary modernity; and, in the third age, the Númenorean line of kings peters out thuswise:

1944. Ondoher and his two sons were slain in battle. After a year in 1945 the crown was given to the victorious general Eärnil, a descendant of Telumehtar Umbardacil.

Hard to see how somebody writing as the Great War of 1945 was ending couldn’t be thinking of the parallel.

It’s not all strictly annalistic. There’s stuff on Aragorn and Arwen’s wooing, and various pretty drily discursive paragraphs on factual matter, leavened by some barebones storytelling: (that said, I found A:III, ‘Durin’s Folk’, rather affecting this time through). But the main effect of appendices A and B is to suggest that temporal chronology provides a grid into which may be fitted the flux of character-based narration. Appendix C, a series of four Shire family trees, provides another grid. Appendix D ‘Shire Calendar’, is yet another (the fact that this one looks like an exercise in regularising our own calendar, such that 365-and-a-fraction days might be disposed into 12 uniformly 30-day months, with two special days — Christmassy Yule, and Midsummery Lithe — added in, only reinforces the procrustean flavour of all this). Appendices E and F, on writing and ‘languages’, provide some lovely invented orthography, although looking at this again I’m surprised I didn’t realise how much this is also a sort of Shavian exercise in regularising the haphazard alphabet anglophone writers like JRRT are lumbered with.

Now, all of has something to do with one of JRRT’s core textual strategies, namely the creation of a sense of ‘deep past’ underlying the detailed present-day action of the novel. Which is well, and fine, and powerful; and which isn’t as dissipated by the density of detail as you might think. But to end with this material counterweights the book in a backward-oriented, small-c conservative sort of way.

+++

One more thing. In my previous rereading blog I said this:

And in the middle (round about the two-thirds point, actually) there is the odd, striking scene of Denethor’s suicide. I wasn’t sure what to make of this, actually. In one sense he has to die, in order for the rule of the Stewards to end and the rule of the King to begin. But suicide is a semiotically tangled and troubled a thing for JRRT’s imagination. He doesn’t want to parse it as a nobly Roman action, and strains it into the straight-jacket of over-coded pseudo-Christian moralising: ‘Authority is not given to you, Steward of Gondor, to order the hour of your death’ snaps Gandalf — perhaps forgetting that he himself effectively threw himself into the chasm at Khazad-Dum in order to save his comrades. Or perhaps it’s one law for wizards, another for Gondor. ‘Only the heathen kings, under the dominion of the Dark Power, did thus, slaying themselves in pride and despair …’

It’s tempting to see this as a double standard. For in point of fact one of the general trajectories of this book is precisely that pseduo-samurai or Horatius-at-the-Bridge sacrifice of self: Frodo and Sam going (as they think) into certain death; the Rohirrim galloping will-nill towards a massively larger army; Gandalf rejecting the truce terms and dooming, it seems, the entire army to destruction. More, Gandalf does not lecture Denethor to prevent him from ending his life, only to stop him from doing so by his own hand: ‘your part,’ he tells the Steward, ‘is to go out to the battle of your City, where maybe death awaits you. This you know in your heart.’ If you want to die, fine: go out into the city and get cut down by an orc. That would be OK! This sees to me a strange logic, as if we might say ‘suicide is wrong, but suicide-by-cop is fine’.

My friend Alan Jacobs responded at length to this, exploring the ways in which I was misreading Tolkien here. Read his account and you’ll see. Thinking about it, I’d say Alan is more in the right than I am, on this question. But his thoughts in turn prompted me to think about something else, which is the lack, or apparent lack, of the death penalty in Middle Earth.

It is brought home at the end of this final book, when Sharkey and Wormtongue are defeated. They have ruined the Shire, and many hobbits have died — Lotho Sackville-Baggins, it seems, was not only murdered by Wormtongue, but also eaten by him— and now the hobbits have taken back control. It would be proper, according to one logic of justice, to execute them: and hobbits at the end of this chapter call for exactly this. But this is not what happens. Instead Frodo cautions the angry hobbits: ‘I will not have him slain. It is useless to meet revenge with revenge: it will heal nothing. Go, Saruman, by the speediest way!’

So he exiles Saruman, rather than hanging him by the neck. In return Saruman finds himself on the wrong-end of that New Testament exchange, burning coals heaped upon his head by this unexpected strategy:

Saruman rose to his feet, and stared at Frodo. There was a strange look in his eyes of mingled wonder and respect and hatred. “You have grown, Halfling,” he said. “Yes, you have grown very much. You are wise, and cruel. You have robbed my revenge of sweetness, and now I must go hence in bitterness, in debt to your mercy. I hate it and you! Well, I go and I will trouble you no more.”

This isn’t what happens, of course: instead Wormtongue, taunted one more time by his master, snaps and stabs him to death — and is then shot himself by hobbitish archers.

We could say that Frodo gets to have his cake and eat it too here: he is able to show mercy, and also see that Saruman gets ‘what he deserves’. Capital punishment is at once repudiated and enacted. When I teach Oliver Twist I’m never quite sure what to make of the fact that the novel does not deliver Bill Sikes to the authorities to be hanged by the neck until dead, but instead has him scrabbling over the rooftops to escape a baying mob, slipping, and accidentally hanging himself by the neck until dead. It’s a strange scene. It can’t be that the novel wants to effect a Frodo-style evasion of the grisly necessity of hanging criminals, for the very next chapter is Fagin in the condemned cell. But it is as if there exists a kind of barbaric natural justice, that mimics official justice, and is inescapable. It’s a question, I suppose, of whether one believes in providence, and what forms such a thing might take. A dark kind of providence, I’d say. Saruman’s fate seems a similar case.

I’ve no idea, and can’t seem to find out, what Tolkien’s view on the death penalty was in the real world, but it’s striking that Aragorn as King does not, as part of his kingly duties, preside over courts martial (or, indeed, civil), does not set up gallows and hang malefactors. Such things happen after wars, after all. And this is not because the novel believes that nobody deserves death. On the contrary, as Gandalf says to Frodo, ‘many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement.’ This has always struck me as one of the moral centres of the novel. It pays out providentially when we discover that Gollum being alive is needful to the successful destruction of the ring, but I think it goes deeper than that. It is to ask the question: is Lord of the Rings ‘about’ justice? And if we say yes — as we surely must — then the question becomes: what forms does justice take in this world? What is the shape of justice, where Tolkien is concerned?

Derrida’s The Death Penalty includes this striking observation: ‘never to my knowledge has any philosopher as a philosopher, in his or her own strictly and systematically philosophical discourse, never has any philosophy as such contested the legitimacy of the death penalty.’ Isn’t that strange? (Try to think of a counter-example! It’s hard…) Derrida’s point is that, as he suggests, Western philosophy as such is invested in a particular doctrine of punishment — for the death penalty, he argues, is more than just one punishment amongst others, it is ‘the penalty of penalties’, the transcendental condition of the possibility of justice and punishment as such: it ‘has always been the effect of an alliance between a religious message and the sovereignty of the state,’ since sovereignty is fundamentally the power over the life and death of subjects. Kant believed in it, and believed it should be about disinterested justice and never about revenge. But it is, he thought, essential.

Derrida goes on to tease out the impossibility of what we might call the ‘actuarial’ logic of dying: that x, by killing y, generated a debt, which he quits by being himself executed. When Gandalf rebuked Denethor for his planned suicide, he told him instead to go out onto the battlefield. ‘I will sell my life on the battlefield, but only for the price of three enemy soldiers’: what kind of exchange rate tabulation is behind such thinking? What marketplace register? An eye for an eye is common-sense, human and comprehensible, but it’s also the logic of the Old Order, and — a Catholic like Tolkien might say — with Christ a new order comes. More than just Gandhi’s ‘an eye for an eye is the way to make the whole world blind’, it is a repudiation of the x = y logic of the death penalty as such, to be replaced by a new logic of forgiveness, of one specific death that means nobody else has to die. I wonder if this is behind the death-logic of Lord of the Rings? Theoden letting Wormtongue go, rather than hanging him. Pity staying Bilbo’s hand. In all this the novel is, I think, remarkable. We could compare the opening of George R R Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire, where Ned Stark beheads a deserter from the Night’s Watch, and the book valorises him for being prepared to administer justice himself, rather than delegating the distasteful business to someone else. But Martin’s books are never in any doubt that such capital punishment is justice, and necessary to the balancing of the social equation (unlike the arbitrary and capricious assassinations by tyrants, such as the act that ends Ned’s own life). Tolkien, I think, is saying something quite other.

Alan’s post challenges my claim (and makes a good job of showing in what ways and how far I am wrong) that Denethor’s suicide is represented in the novel as both a bad, shameful thing and also an iteration of the logic of self-sacrifice that, elsewhere, the novel valorises: Frodo and Sam going, as they think, to their certain doom. A way of framing our difference might be that I’m more persuaded by the whole Freudian death-drive idea than, perhaps, Alan is. It is what Hegel calls ‘the labour of the negative’ — that ‘suttee’ like Denethor’s might be simultaneously sinful and truthful. I’m interested, perhaps fancifully, in the way Freud links the death-drive to the compulsion to repeat, not least because Fantasy as a mode is so very very repetitive: so many cookie-cutter re-pressed Heroic Fantasy novels, thousands all telling basically the same story again, with the same incidents, the same elves and men and orcs, the same narrative beats.

Here’s a quotation from Terry Eagleton, which I came across when poking around this question:

Since the martyr willingly abandons his life, he looks at first sight much like the suicide. The difference is that the suicide relinquishes what has become unbearable to him, whereas the martyr gives up his most precious possession in the hope that good may flow from it. In Christian theology, what determines whether or not you can embrace death in this way is how you have lived. If you have failed in life to divest yourself for the sake of others, you will be trapped like William Golding’s Pincher Martin in a hell which is the inability to die. By the end of Golding’s novel, Martin has dwindled to a pair of huge, lobster-like claws tenaciously protecting his dark centre of selfhood from the ‘black lightning’ of God’s ruthless mercy. Martin refuses to be picked apart: he is one of the damned who regard themselves as too important to undergo anything as squalid as personal extinction. W.B. Yeats may not have landed among that select company, but the hair-raisingly blasphemous epitaph he wrote for himself –

Cast a cold eye
On life, on death.
Horseman, pass by!

– disdains death as a vulgarity fit only for clerks and shopkeepers.

That movement towards questions of class, at the end of the quotation, is interesting too. Tolkien’s ultra-aristocratic Numenoreans had that as their great sin: that they consider death beneath them. Death is for commoners. But Aragorn has the grace to be a commoner (Strider) as well as a king, and does not seek to evade death. When he walks the paths of the dead he actually embraces and becomes the leader of the dead.

All this bears on the novel’s final chapter, and what the ‘Grey Havens’ actually represent. By taking ship from this port Frodo is, in some sense, dying: and Sam’s ‘well, I’m back’ draws its immense poignant sorrow from the fact that he is now bereaved. But in another sense Frodo is still alive, sailing away to a land in which he will be healed and never die. It is his death and it is the negation of his death. It is justice.

[Update: Alan has replied to this post with more fascinating thoughts on mercy, here.]