Course Overview

Course Creator(s): Leslie Ellen Jones

Description
This course provides an overview of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien. We'll look
first at Tolkien's biography, his writing life, the origins of the stories, and their publication history. We'll
continue with lessons on each book, concentrating on Tolkien's construction of a mythological world and
its peoples and languages, his characters and their development, and his thematic concerns. Finally, we'll
look at Tolkien's lasting influence on 20th-century fantasy literature, as well as on cultural movements
such as neo-paganism and environmentalism.

Prerequisites

ƒ Have read or have a desire to read The Hobbit and the trilogy, The Lord of the Rings.

Objectives

ƒ Read J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy and follow the adventures
of Bilbo, Frodo, and their friends in a war against evil.

ƒ See how Tolkien's background as a professor of languages at Oxford influenced his construction
of a complete mythology of Middle Earth.

ƒ Explore Tolkien's influence, not only on 20th-century fantasy literature, but also on the
development of neo-pagan religions and environmental activism.

Faculty
Course Creator and Instructor: Leslie Ellen Jones

Leslie Ellen Jones earned a Ph.D. in Folklore and Mythology Studies at UCLA, and has taught at UCLA
and Harvard. She is the author of Druid Shaman Priest: Metaphors of Celtic Paganism, and currently
works in academic publishing.
 Lesson 1: J. R. R. Tolkien: The Man Back to Syllabus
Who was the author of The Lord of the Rings?

Life and Education Lord of The Rings

Glossary
J.R.R. Tolkien was notorious for believing that knowledge of an author's
life was completely irrelevant to understanding his work. This is a
reasonable belief for a scholar who devoted most of his professional life to
the analysis of the works of the great Anonymous. But when it is possible
to know something of an author, it is almost irresistible to take a peek at
his life and times, and ponder the ways in which his circumstances
influenced his writing. Although studying Tolkien's life will never completely
explain his creative genius, it can give us a sense of the raw materials he
worked from and make us even more amazed at the sheen of the final
product.

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born on January 3, 1892, in Bloemfontein,

South Africa. His father, Arthur, was a bank manager who had left England
to seek his fortune, and to wait out the weary days until he would be
allowed to marry his sweetheart, Mabel Suffield. Mabel came out to South
Africa in 1891; their eldest son, usually called Ronald, was born the next
year, and their younger son, Hilary, followed two years after that. Although
life was good in Africa, Mabel disliked its extremes of heat and cold, and
Ronald's health was poor. In 1895, she took the two boys back to England
for a visit to their grandparents in Birmingham, with the understanding that
Arthur would follow as soon as business allowed. But Arthur died of
rheumatic fever early in 1896, leaving his family stranded.

Mabel rented a cottage in Sarehole Mill, near Birmingham, a rural village

with plenty of fresh air and countryside for two young boys to explore.
Mabel taught the boys herself: Latin, French, German, drawing, painting,
and piano. Even at this young age, Ronald had a facility for languages,
although he never cared for French, which evidently just never sounded
good to him. The plan was that the boys would be home schooled until
they were ready to take the entrance exams for King Edward's School, the
best school in Birmingham and the one their father had attended.

But in 1900, Mabel converted to Catholicism. Both the Tolkiens and the
Suffields, belonging variously to the Anglican, Methodist, Unitarian, and
Baptist churches, considered Catholicism completely beyond the pale. Her
conversion cut off all hope of financial assistance from her family and
appears to have exacerbated the illness she developed over the next few
years, which turned out to be diabetes (this in the days before the
discovery of insulin treatment). She died of its complications in 1904.
Fortunately, her sons were left in the care of Father Francis Morgan, a
priest of Spanish and Welsh descent with a private income from his
family's sherry importing business that he was happy to use easing the
way for the Tolkien brothers.
The boys initially were sent to live with their aunt Beatrice Suffield, one of
the few relatives who did not regard Catholicism as a form of spiritual
leprosy, but after four years the situation became unworkable and the boys
moved to rented rooms in the house of a Mrs. Faulkener. Here Ronald, at
the age of 16, met Edith Bratt, three years his elder, another boarder with
a small income of her own. Soon the two were in love, but when Father
Francis discovered this, he forbade all contact between the two until
Ronald was 21, no doubt believing that the whole thing would blow over.
Instead he created a classic case of thwarted, almost chivalric romance.
Although Ronald threw himself into his studies and earned himself a small
scholarship to Oxford, he kept his intention firm.

From Oxford to the Front Lord of The Rings Glossary

In the meantime, there were languages to learn. The early fascination with
Latin and German developed into a fondness for Greek, a love for Old and
Middle English, and a fascination with Welsh -- in contrast to the distasteful
sound of French, Tolkien adored the sound and look of Welsh long before
he learned what the words actually meant. He even taught himself Gothic,
an extinct Germanic language, from an old grammar one of his
schoolmates had picked up by accident. He began fooling around with
inventing his own languages, a game he had played ever since his
childhood but which he took increasingly seriously as his understanding of
the workings and structures of language grew.

He also made firm friends at King Edward's, chiefly Christopher Wiseman,

R. Q. Gilson, and Geoffrey Bache Smith. The four formed the core of a
group calling themselves the Tea Club and Barrovian Society (TCBS),
after their habit of taking tea at the tearoom in Barrow's Stores in
Birmingham. The ties continued after they had finished school and moved
on to University, although Tolkien also continued his sociable ways at
Exeter College, spending far more time in talk and pranks than in study.
Although theoretically he was reading (majoring in) Classics, the class that
really spoke to him -- quite literally -- was philology, taught by Joe Wright,
the author of the Gothic grammar that had so enchanted Ronald as a
schoolboy. He began to learn Welsh properly and also dabbled in Finnish.
At his second-year exams ("mods"), Tolkien received respectable but not
stellar grades in Classics, but aced Comparative Philology. He changed
over to reading English (the department in which philology was taught) and
his academic career was set.

His personal life was also falling into place. As soon as he turned 21 he
wrote to Edith, only to discover that she was unofficially engaged to
someone else. He visited her as soon as possible, and the romance was
rekindled. Plans were progressing for the two to marry. In the midst of it all,
World War I broke out. Tolkien entered a program that would allow him to
complete his degree while training for the officer corps, and learned
signaling (yet another language). He and Edith were married on March 22,
1916, just before he was shipped off to France.

Tolkien managed to escape the War to End All Wars with little more than
trench fever, but he witnessed the carnage and irrationality of war
firsthand. Furthermore, two of his TCBS comrades, Smith and Gilson,
were killed. Although many have thought that the wastelands created by
Sauron and Saruman in The Lord of the Rings are reflections of the
nuclear wastes revealed by the second world war, it seems likely that
Tolkien's vision of the waste of war was formed in his experiences and
losses in the first

With the end of the war, Tolkien returned to his wife and his career.
Tolkien was hired to work on the New Oxford English Dictionary, a job that
expanded even further his understanding of the development of the
English language and its Germanic roots (when editors in later years
protested his spelling of the plural "dwarves," pointing out that the OED
preferred spelling was "dwarfs," Tolkien grandly responded, "I wrote the
OED!"). After two years on the OED staff, as well as the birth of his first
son, John, Tolkien was hired as Reader, and then as Professor in English
at the University of Leeds. For the next five years, from 1920 to 1925, the
family lived in Leeds, and two more sons, Michael and Christopher, were
born. Tolkien also embarked on an edition and translation of the Middle
English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, with his colleague E. V.
Gordon. In 1925, Tolkien was named Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor
of Anglo Saxon at Oxford; the Tolkiens returned to Oxford, and the final
member of the family, daughter Priscilla, was born soon after. Humphrey
Carpenter, in his biography of Tolkien, comments, "And after this, you
might say, nothing else really happened." Except for all that writing.
The Tolkien Family Lord of The Rings Glossary

The roots of Tolkien's literary vision were laid early in his life. His father's
family, the Tolkiens, had emigrated from Germany to England in the
eighteenth century, and there were numerous romantic stories about how
they had obtained their name (one aunt said that it was originally Tollkühn,
"foolhardy," after an ancestor's bravery in the Siege of Vienna in 1529) and
other exploits. His instinctive affinity for "Northernness" and Germanic
mythology seems to have grown from this seed. His mother's family, the
Suffields, were an old West Midlands family from the area of Evesham,
and similarly, Tolkien regarded the Middle English dialect of the West
Midlands (the language of Sir Gawain) as somehow innate in him; he
wrote to the poet W.H. Auden that "I am a West-midlander by blood, and
took to early West-midland Middle English as to a known tongue as soon
as I set eyes on it." Tolkien appears to have regarded his intellectual
interests as growing from seeds dropped by his own family tree.

There is li ttle doubt that the circumstances and events of Tolkien's

relationship with his wife, Edith, also influenced his writing. The inspiration
for his Silmarillion tale of Beren and Lúthien was the sight of his wife
dancing beneath the trees on a picnic shortly after the birth of their first
son, and the names "Beren" and "Lúthien" were inscribed on the Tolkiens'
tombstones. The circumstance of their enforced separation before
marriage -- a separation that echoed the separation of Tolkien's parents
before their own marriage -- clearly underlies the separation between
Aragorn and Arwen in The Lord of the Rings. Father Morgan refused to
allow Tolkien to see or communicate with Edith until he came of age and
took his place as an adult in the world. Aragorn, on a far grander scale,
must also "come of age" and claim his place before he can marry his love.
But the very gender-segregated nature of the life of an Oxford professor in
the 1930s, a survival from the university's foundation as a monastic
institution, also has its influence on the structure of Tolkien's writing,
reflecting, as it does, a world in which men go out and do things and
women stay at home and are supportive. Edith was by all accounts
dissatisfied with life as an Oxford professor's wife, and it may not be
stretching things to see some of this underlying Tolkien's depiction of the
restless, dissatisfied Eowyn.

But in addition to the roots stretching back into the past and the trunk of
the present, Tolkien was inspired by the new growth on his family tree. As
the father of four children, many bedtime stories needed to be told. The
languages that Tolkien the Boy had constructed for his own amusement
were turned to the entertainment of the children of Tolkien the Father.
Every year he composed letters for his children from Father Christmas (for
if children write to Santa, shouldn't Santa write back?). He told them
stories about Bill Stickers, constantly pursued by Major Road, taking his
inspiration from road signs saying "Bill Stickers Will Be Prosecuted" and
"Major Road Ahead." A Dutch doll owned by the children was dubbed Tom
Bombadil, and his adventures were also related. From a stream-of-
consciousness scribble on a blank exam book page, "In a hole in the
ground there lived a hobbit," grew a story first read to his sons, then
shared with his colleague C. S. Lewis.

The Inklings Lord of The Rings Glossary

The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were, artistically speaking,

the Age of Realism. A good novel, a good play, a good painting showed
what Life was really like, sitting right there in front of you, warts and all,
"like a patient etherized upon a table," T. S. Eliot said. The invention of
photography and then of film and television made Realism even more
achievable -- although Realism never intended to actually be Reality, but
merely to mimic it with such skill that the more stupid members of the The Lord of the Rings and
audience would take it for the real thing, while the cognoscenti would Plate Tectonics
marvel at the artist's skill in arranging the elements of Reality into Realism.
Tolkien was also interested in
There were some, however, who would have nothing of this Realism and geology -- another aspect of
modernism. C. S. Lewis was famous for his antipathy to T. S. Eliot. Lewis his love of the countryside
often complained that, try as he might and as many sunsets as he looked and attention to the
at, none of them looked like patients etherized on tables. Lewis was the landscape. His descriptions
Fellow and Tutor in English Language and Literature at Magdalen College, in the mythology of The
Oxford, and a medievalist like Tolkien. Although he and Tolkien initially Silmarillion of the rising and
found themselves on opposite sides of the "lang. vs. lit." division in the sinking of continents and the
English department, they soon became close friends as a result of their shifting of land masses bears
shared love of "Northernness." Lewis began to participate in Tolkien's a mythological (rather than a
informal Old Norse reading group, the Coalbiters, who gathered together scientific) relationship to the
to work their way through the Icelandic sagas in the original. theories of plate tectonics,
which was being formulated
Oxford was a university of special-interest groups -- the purpose of the
during the time he was
university was as much for scholars, graduates, and dons to share their
writing. In fact, much of the
knowledge with each other as to teach undergraduates. Gradually another
early work on Gondwanaland
group formed around Lewis and Tolkien that came to be known as the
-- one of the hypothetical
Inklings. The core of the group included as well Lewis's brother Warren, a
early landmasses -- was
retired soldier with an interest in seventeenth-century France, R. E.
being carried out in the
Havard, a medical doctor, Owen Barfield, a London lawyer and literary
Oxford department of Earth
theorist, and Hugo Dyson, an English lecturer at Reading, and later at
Sciences, which was located
Oxford. The group actually functioned much like an informal writers'
very near The Bird and Baby,
critique group, where members would show up with works in progress to
the pub where Tolkien and
read aloud and receive feedback. During World War II, the group added
the other Inklings met on
Charles Williams, an editor at the Oxford University Press who was
Tuesdays, and it is likely that
relocated to the home office from London for the duration.
Tolkien picked up some of
One of the characteristics that the Inklings shared was a fervent the theory that was floating in
Christianity in an age when religion was going out of fashion. Tolkien, of the air at the time.
course, was Catholic. Lewis, after an agnostic young adulthood, was a
devout convert (or reconvert) to the Anglican church, largely through the
influences of Hugo Dyson (a fellow Inkling, at that time Lecturer in English
at Reading University) and of Tolkien. Williams was a mystical Anglican
with an almost morbid interest in the occult and ceremonial magic. Barfield
was an Anthroposophist, a follower of the religious philosophy of Rudolf
Steiner.

As a result of their religious faith, these men had an instinctive bent

towards myth -- myth as truth, rather than the common notion of myth as
lies. In fact, Dyson and Tolkien had given Lewis the final push to his
conversion by explaining to him how the central myths of Christianity are
myths, but are at the same time true, indeed truer than fact., Tolkien
argued that since God had created Man, God has also created Man's
thoughts and creations. In The Inklings, Humphrey Carpenter's book about
this circle of friends, Tolkien's reasoning is described as follows:
Therefore, not merely the abstract thoughts of man but also his
imaginative inventions must originate with God, and must in consequence
reflect something of eternal truth. In making a myth, in practicing
"mythopoeia" and peopling the world with Elves and dragons and goblins,
a storyteller, or "subcreator" as Tolkien liked to call such a person, is
actually fulfilling God's purpose, and reflecting a splintered fragment of the
true light. Pagan myths are therefore never just "lies": there is always
something of truth in them.
-- Humphrey Carpenter, The Inklings

This argument seems not only to have convinced C. S. Lewis to become a

Christian; it also outlines Tolkien's approach to myth and literature.

Moving Forward

In the next lesson, we will look at Tolkien's work as a linguist, a translator,

and a mythologist in greater depth. The external events of the man's life
were grist for his creative mill, to be sure, but what was going on inside his
head?

Lesson 2: J. R. R. Tolkien: The Scholar

How did Tolkien's academic interests influence his writing?

Tolkien the Linguist

Look at the very first page of The Hobbit -- not where the story begins, but at the Preface. What is so
important that Tolkien the novelist has to get it clearly understood before he sets his hero off on his
adventure? In Dwarfish runes, we first see

THE HOBBIT

OR

THERE AND BACK AGAIN

And then, in English language and Roman letters:

This is a story of long ago. At that time, the languages and letters were quite different from ours of today.
English is used to represent the languages....
From the very first, Tolkien wants us to understand that this is a story told in another language, and he
provides prefatory linguistic notes that are so perfectly academic as to seem almost a parody of the kind
of notes any scholar provides with his translation of an ancient text. Yet at the same time, Tolkien's
preface announces that he wants his readers to read this text as if it were not fiction in the modern sense
but legend, which folklorists define as a story told as if it were true. Tolkien accomplishes this by initially
alienating his readers from the text, presenting it in runes that can only be deciphered by the initiate, by
the trained linguist; in other words, a tale that must be true because it is written in a language and an
alphabet that cannot originate in modern times.

It is impossible to understand Tolkien's writing without some understanding of his skills as a linguist. In
fact, it can be argued that Tolkien's literary achievements grow directly out of his linguistic obsessions --
he himself said that he wrote his stories in order to create an environment where his self-invented
languages could live.

The Languages of Tolkien's Middle Earth

Tolkien's experiments with language are one of the most fascinating elements of his
fiction. This indispensable resource will guide you through all the strange tongues
you’ll encounter through your reading.

More Info

Even as a child, when his mother was his only teacher, the young Tolkien enjoyed learning languages
(except French) and showed a remarkable facility with them. Language acquisition is now known to be
easiest for prepubescent children, whose brains are wired for it, but it is also true that some children show
an exceptional talent for learning languages -- it is, like music and mathematics, a common area of
precociousness. In contrast, the ability to use language, to write and speak with insight and brilliance,
develops more slowly. Tolkien recalled writing a story about "a green great dragon" when he was seven
years old. According to Humphrey Carpenter's biography, Tolkien said, "My mother said nothing about the
dragon, but pointed out that one could not say 'a green great dragon,' but had to say 'a great green
dragon.' I wondered why, and still do." Incidents such as this sparked his early interest in the structure and
form of languages.

Tolkien was also lucky in having schoolteachers who had their own passion for language and encouraged
it in their students. One read The Canterbury Tales to his students in the original Middle English; Tolkien
was enchanted. The same man noticed Tolkien's linguistic interests and loaned him an Old English
grammar so that he could learn Anglo-Saxon in addition to his regular school topics of Latin, Greek,
French, and German. By the time he was sixteen, Tolkien had a thorough understanding of the history of
the English language and was beginning to explore the relationships among the other European
languages. He was becoming a philologist.
Philology: The Ultimate Arcane Academic Discipline

The word "philology" means "love of words," and the curiosity to find out what the word means and to tell
other people about it is the underlying motivation of a philologist. Linguistics as a discipline can be roughly
divided into two approaches, descriptive and comparative (or historical).

Descriptive linguistics looks at how people use words at a specific point in time, whereas comparative
linguistics -- philology -- looks at how words and languages change over time. Nineteenth century
philology grew out of the earliest recognition of a common, underlying source for the languages spoken by
peoples living from India to Ireland. This commonality was first identified in 1796 by Sir William Jones,
who noted in a lecture on Indian culture that it seemed likely that Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Gothic, Celtic and
probably Persian all "sprang from a common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists." Jones based this
observation on structural as well as lexical similarities between the languages, which was a pleasant
change from those who were apt to argue that Welsh and the American Indian languages were obviously
derived from Hebrew. This belief was apparently based on the fact that, to English ears, both were
guttural, incomprehensible languages spoken by people who were irrefutably primitive, and thus,
presumably, closer to God.
Over the ensuing century, scholars of language set themselves to analyzing the languages of Europe and
the Near East. After outlining the history of sound shifts that occurred within documented languages, they
extrapolated from these shifts "laws" of linguistic change. Once these laws were devised, scholars could
reconstruct now-lost forms of these languages until they converged in a postulated original Indo-European
tongue -- with somewhat more accuracy than the mere guesswork, wishful thinking, and Tower of Babel
theories that had characterized previous linguistic theory.

The reconstruction of these fading or lost language forms required much poring over ancient manuscripts.
In the course of analyzing words, grammar and structure, many scholars could not help paying attention to
the stories they told as well. One of the giants of nineteenth-century philology was in fact Jakob Grimm,
whose vast folktale-collecting project undertaken with his brother Wilhelm was inspired partly out of
national and ethnic pride and partly out of an interest in the language these stories were told in. For
languages are always used by real people to communicate something. You cannot have a language
without a social context. Thus philology, literature, and anthropology are inextricably intertwined -- the first
narrative genres that tend to get written down (after a society gets beyond using writing merely to keep
business accounts) are mythology, legends of origin, and ancient history. All of this explains how, in their
quest to trace the histories of words and their meanings, philologists tend to spend a lot of time with
myths.

For Tolkien, philology was also a branch of genealogy -- the Germanic languages and the historical
forebears of English spoke to his ancestral roots. He regarded Middle English as the ancestral language
of his mother's family, while Gothic, an early Germanic language, seems to have resonated with his
paternal family's Germanic background. The languages that sang to him, however, were Welsh and
Finnish, both of which he felt had an intrinsic beauty of sound and rhythm that transcended any blood tie.
From a young age, Tolkien had played with his growing understanding of linguistic structures by creating
languages of his own. The earliest were little more than idiosyncratic versions of Pig Latin, but as his
intellectual sophistication increased, so did the sophistication of his languages.

However, as Tolkien became trained in philology, he also came to believe that languages had to have
people to speak them, stories to be told in them, and histories not only of the people, but of the words
themselves. Thus, as he developed his two most complex languages, the Elvish languages of Sindarin
(based on Welsh) and Quenya (based on Finnish), he created not only a "present" vocabulary and
grammar; he also constructed their historical linguistic roots. He was apt to refer to his invention of names
and words in his fiction as "discovering" them, and was not happy with a new word until he had
reconstructed its history to his academic satisfaction.

Tolkien the Translator and Mythologist Lord of The Rings Glossary

While Tolkien was teaching at Leeds, he became acquainted with another

medievalist, E. V. Gordon. Together they produced an edition of the Middle
English poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which was published in
1925. This is probably his most important piece of work as an academic.
Gawain and the poems Pearl, Patience, and Cleanness are believed to
have been written by the same fourteenth-century poet, roughly of the
same era as Chaucer but writing in a Midlands dialect that did not become
the direct progenitor of Modern English (as Chaucer's dialect did). For this The Fairy-Folk of Sir Orfeo
edition, Tolkien created an authoritative printed text from the single, often
hard-to-decipher original, handwritten text, compiled a glossary translating The description of Orfeo's
each word in the text into Modern English, and wrote commentary on glimpses of the fairy folk is
interesting linguistic and narrative aspects of the text, Furthermore, Tolkien very similar to the tantalizing
spent almost half a century, from the edition's publication in 1925 until his Elvish troops that lure Bilbo
death in 1973, working on translations of Gawain, Pearl, and the Middle and the dwarves from the
English poem Sir Orfeo, which were finally published posthumously. Aside path in Mirkwood:
from his epics of Middle Earth, these can be said to be the literary works
Knights and ladies in joyous
that lived with him longest, were constantly in his head, and provided a
wise, in quaint attire, as of
subtextual backdrop to his fiction writing.
days gone by, pacing a
measure soberly, To sound
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: The Meeting of Middle English and of tabor and pipe they pass,
Celtic Legendry making sweet music, across
the grass. Again it chanced
that he saw one day sixty
ladies, who rode their way,
gracious and gay as the bird
on the tree, and never a
 knight in that company.
Falcon on hand those ladies
ride, on hawking bent, by the
river side; full well they know
it as right good haunt of
mallard, of heron, and
cormorant. But now hath the
waterfowl taken flight, and
each falcon chooseth his
prey aright, and never a one
but hath slain its bird . . .

-- Translated by Jessie L.
Weston in The Chief Middle
English Poets

The Gawain-poet (as he is called) was one of the main focuses of

Tolkien's academic work. Tolkien felt a kinship with him, literally, as his
mother's family came from the same part of the country as where the
Gawain-poet is believed to have lived. It is probably also significant that,
although the Gawain-poet wrote very definitely in the English language, his
work shows an intimate acquaintance with the legends and tales of the
nearby Welsh. Cheshire, the area where the Gawain-poet is believed to
have lived, is on the border of north Wales and shows a very "Celtic"
aspect in its native folklore.

The story of Gawain and the Green Knight is an Arthurian tale. Briefly,
Arthur and his knights are at dinner on New Year's Day when a gigantic
green knight comes riding into the hall. He challenges any man in the hall
to cut off his head with an axe, as long as he can do the same to his
challenger in one year's time. The knights smell a fish - -logically, if this
man is beheaded, he shouldn't be in any shape to return the favor
afterwards -- but only Gawain is brave enough to take the challenge. Sure
enough, the Green Knight picks up his severed head and rides off, saying
"See you next year!" When the time comes, Gawain, with great trepidation,
makes his way to the knight's castle, where he is entertained by the knight
and his lady. Gawain and the knight agree that each day, each will give the
other what he has "won" during the day, the knight while hunting, Gawain
while staying in the castle. The wife tries her best to seduce Gawain, and
each day Gawain yields to the knight the kisses he had won from the
knight's wife, but on the final day he holds back a green girdle that the lady
gives him, telling him that it will protect him in the beheading game. When
the time comes for Gawain to offer his neck as the knight had done the
year before, the knight stops just short of beheading him in honor of his
bravery, but nicks him just a bit for holding back the girdle. It has all been a
set-up to test his courage.

The motif of the beheading game appears in the Irish tale, Fled Bricrenn,
where the challenger is the quasi-divine Cú Roí and the hero is the Irish
hero par excellence, Cú Chulainn. The motif also appears in the French
Livre de Carados, a continuation of Chrétien de Troyes' Grail romance,
Perceval, where the hero is the Welsh/Breton Caradoc Freichfras. The
motif of the severed head that continues to speak is also extremely
popular in Celtic tales both Welsh and Irish. One of the interesting things
about Gawain, then, is the way it incorporates both very modern (at the
time) interests in its Arthurian setting and themes of courtly love, and very
ancient, verging on mythic, motifs and semi-divine characters, a narrative
mixture that also echoes its linguistic mixture of Middle English language
and Welsh narrative.

Pearl, Sir Orfeo, and The Ancrene Wisse: Interlace, Otherworlds, and
the Deep History of Language

Pearl is an example of medieval dream literature, in which a father,

mourning his dead infant daughter, falls asleep with his head on the
mound of earth over her grave. In his dream he sees her, grown up,
standing on the other side of a river. She rebukes him for his grief, for she
is now in Heaven; the river that separates them is Death. One of the
reasons the translation was never finished to Tolkien's satisfaction is that
the original is in an extremely complex meter and rhyme scheme. The
structure of the whole poem can be visualized as one large circle
composed of twenty smaller circles interlocked by the echoing of specific
words, while each of these circles is composed of twelve even smaller
circles interlocked by rhyme and alliteration.

Sir Orfeo is a Middle English retelling of the story of Orpheus and

Eurydice. In this version the harper is a king (Orfeo) whose wife (Heurodis)
does not die but is taken by the King of the Fairies. Orfeo wanders the
wilderness, gradually degenerating into a naked wild man who charms the
animals with his harping. Eventually he becomes capable of seeing the
fairy troupe hunting the wilderness and is able to follow them back to
Fairyland. There he plays his harp so beautifully that the King of the
Fairies grants him whatever he may ask as reward. Naturally, Orfeo asks
for his wife. The lovers return safely together to the mortal world (unlike the
Greek original, where Orpheus looks back too soon and loses Eurydice to
Hades forever), but on their return to Orfeo's land they discover that ten
years have passed and no one recognizes the king (a motif similar to
another famous Greek myth, the Odyssey). Orfeo proves his identity
through, again, his harping, and his faithful steward, who has been ruling
in his stead, returns the throne to him.

Tolkien's final major translation was of the Ancrene Wisse, a Middle

English book of instruction for female anchorites, or hermits. His work on
this text was one of his seminal contributions to the field of Middle English
studies; by proving that the surviving texts, although few in number now,
show evidence of belonging to a long literary (as opposed to a primarily
oral) tradition dating back to before the Norman Conquest, Tolkien
demonstrated the continuity between Old and Middle English.

It seems ironic that the publications of the Professor of Anglo-Saxon

should have been so concentrated on the later phase of Middle English.
Tolkien apparently had plans to produce translations of the Old English
poems of Exodus, The Wanderer, and The Seafarer. He was, however,
intimately involved in translating these and other Old English poems --
including his beloved Beowulf -- as part of his duties in teaching Old
English to his students. His informal translation group at Oxford, the
Coalbiters, worked their way through the Icelandic sagas.

Translation and Creation

It is important to keep these translation projects in mind when looking at

Tolkien's own fiction, because translation, even more than literary criticism,
requires the scholar to enter deeply into the mind and process of the
writer. What words has the writer chosen to use? What are the possible
meanings of these words? How does each word connect to the others
around it? To translate a text from one language into another is,
essentially, to rewrite it completely, while at the same time, at some level,
to become the original writer. There is no one-to-one mathematical
equivalent for words between languages. (Which is why sounds have
different values in different languages, but numbers remain constant.)
Where meanings coincide in one context, they diverge in others.

Fiction writers learn to write first by reading, and then by getting in there
and writing; and they generally end up writing the kind of thing that they
read. Although Tolkien appears to have had little time for reading
contemporary fiction, and certainly never wrote the kind of thing that was
mainstream fiction in his time, he spent his days reading and (re)writing
Old and Middle English fiction, with substantial infusions of medieval
Germanic, Norse, Icelandic, and Welsh to boot. These were largely stories
of masculine adventure, where the supernatural is a fact of life and
multiple species of sentient beings inhabit the world, coexisting in the
manner that nations of men coexist today. These stories are told through
an elaborate formal structure that was constructed for oral performance
rather than silent reading, and the "message" is conveyed as much in the
structure and form of the tale as in the explicit plot. And this is the kind of
thing Tolkien learned how to write.

Moving Forward

In the next lesson, we will start looking in depth at Tolkien's fiction, starting
with The Hobbit, the children's bedtime story that became an unexpected
literary success.

Lesson 3: The Hobbit: There and Back Again

The Hobbit introduces us to Tolkien's Middle Earth and lays the groundwork for the
adventures of The Lord of the Rings.

Of Hobbits and Dwarves Lord of The Rings Glossary

The Hobbit is a story of Hobbits and Dwarves, with brief interludes for
Men, Elves, Orcs, wargs, and, of course, wizards. In pattern it is a rather
simple Quest tale: Thorin Oakenshield, a dwarf, wants to recover the
homeland and treasure stolen from his people by Smaug the Dragon. To
this end, he and twelve companions prepare to journey to the Lonely Who Are Those Dwarves?
Mountain, but in order to avoid setting out with an unpropitious thirteen in
the party, and in order to have a professional in matters of the "recovery" Tolkien took the names of the
of goods, they want to take along a burglar. The wizard Gandalf dwarves from a section of the
undertakes to find them one, and for reasons of his own settles upon Bilbo Icelandic edda, the Voluspa.
Baggins, a most respectable and highly adventure-aversive Hobbit. The This section is known as the
staid, stay-at-home side of Bilbo is appalled at the idea, but his deeply Dvergatal, or "List of
hidden adventurous side (the Took in him) is secretly excited at the Dwarves."
prospect.
Thorin Oakenshield -- great-
Bilbo finds himself, willy-nilly, on an adventure. The first part of the journey grandson of Thrain (last king
takes the band from the Shire, home of the Hobbits, to Mirkwood. On this under the Lonely Mountain)
leg they are accompanied sporadically by Gandalf, and Bilbo must prove
Kíli and Fíli -- brothers,
himself. Their first encounter is with a trio of lumpen-trolls, who capture the
nephews of Thorin
Hobbit and Dwarves. They are rescued by Gandalf, who tricks the trolls
into fighting amongst themselves (by means of trick voices) until they are Dwalin and Balin -- brothers,
caught by the rising sun, which turns them to stone. cousins of ÿin and Glóin
This episode sets up one pattern of dwarfish behavior that recurs ÿin and Glóin -- brothers,
throughout the story. Dwarves never turn up en masse. We first see this cousins of Balin and Dwalin
when the Dwarves show up at Bilbo's doorstep. First Dwalin arrives, alone.
He is followed by Balin. Kíli and Fíli arrive together, followed by Dori, Nori, Dori, Ori, Nori, Bifur, Bofur,
Ori, ÿin, and Glóin. They are followed by Bifur, Bofur, Bombur, and Thorin. Bombur -- no information on
(Notice that even in naming patterns, Dwarves tend to come in sets of genealogy
twos or threes, except for the leader who, of course, stands alone.)
Likewise, in the troll episode, the Dwarves first send off their burglar to
check things out, and then follow one by one -- though as they are
captured, they are tied up in sets. Likewise, later, when Gandalf is
attempting to sway Beorn to host the tired band, he has the Dwarves show
up in trickles rather than a large troupe.

This episode is Bilbo's first venture as a burglar, and he fails miserably by

trying to purloin a talking purse. Gandalf has disappeared just before this,
and reappears just in time to save them by means of the kind of quick-
thinking trickery that Bilbo lacked in his pickpocketing attempt. The
providential ossification of the trolls gives the Dwarves their first taste of
hoarded treasure, as well; they take swords and arms for their journey and
bury the rest for later recovery. This first adventure, then, is a microcosm
that sets the pattern for the final confrontation with Smaug, and illustrates
the qualities that Bilbo will have to acquire in order to fulfill his task.

The band makes their way to Rivendell, the Last Homely House presided
over by Elrond the Half-Elven, for rest and recuperation. Here Elrond
discovers the moon letter runes that reveal that at sunset on Durin's Day, a
secret keyhole to the secret door is revealed. Here, again, a pattern is
established of a period of rest in a safe haven -- whether aimed for or
fallen upon by accident -- after a harrowing experience. This is a significant
contrast to the patterns of contemporary action-adventure movies, for
instance, where the heroes are faced with an ever-escalating series of
threats with no break for rest between.

Riddles in the Dark Lord of The Rings Glossary

Although Tolkien did not realize it when he first wrote of the encounter
between Bilbo and Gollum in the depths of the Orcs' mountain, this
seemingly minor plot twist held the key to the entire edifice that is The Lord
of the Rings. Just as Smaug is, in many ways, a monstrous extreme of the
Dwarves' desire for gold, so Gollum is, from the very beginning, a Sidebar: Old English
monstrous distortion of a Hobbit. Indeed, he later turns out to be a kind of Riddles
ancestral Hobbit, a Ur-hobbit. And while normal Hobbits live in holes,
burrows, or warrens in the ground, Gollum lives in the deepest, darkest The richest collection of Old
hole of all. Yet normal Hobbits are leery of the water (except for English riddles appears in the
Brandybucks), and Gollum is a water creature, so he is disturbingly the tenth century manuscript
same as a Hobbit, yet disturbingly different as well. called The Exeter Book.
Here's a translation of a
In terms of patterning, Bilbo's encounter with Gollum prepares him for his riddle about the moon:
encounter with Smaug, which is, after all, the real purpose of the journey.
I saw a wonderful creature,
Bilbo has been hired as a burglar to go down inside a mountain, match carrying plunder between her
wits with a monster, and recover a treasure. This is exactly what happens horns, a shining vessel of the
when he inadvertently meets Gollum. The difference is that the Dwarves air elegantly adorned,
have hired him to take care of a monster whose monstrosity is a corruption plunder to her home from the
of their own natures, not of Bilbo's, and thus, in a way, they are attempting raid. In that fortified town she
to circumvent or deny the possibility of corruption and monstrosity in wished to build for herself,
themselves; naturally (by fairy-tale logic), this means that they fall prey to it skillfully to set up, if it might
instantly when they see the treasure hoard. The gold-lust aroused in them,
be so, a bower.
especially in Thorin, makes them refuse to even consider any kind of
compensation for the Lake Men, who have suffered from the effects of -- translated by Andrew
their quest and who, as the descendants of the Dale Men, are entitled to Welsh, "Riddles," in Medieval
the recovery of their dragon-stolen treasure as much as the Dwarves are. Folklore

The adventures Bilbo has on his way to the Lonely Mountain serve to Where Do Hobbits Come
prepare him for his task (which, incidentally, is why we don't need to hear From?
about his adventures on the way home), and the encounter with Gollum
truly tests and tempers him, though he doesn't realize it at the time. While dwarves, elves,
Tolkien based the riddle contest on good mythological footing: riddle wizards, even orcs and
contests figure in texts as diverse as the German Der Ring des wargs have their roots in
Nibelungen, the Norse Elder Edda and King Heidrek's Saga, and the Old northern European
English poem Solomon and Saturn II. It is a contest of wits, pure and mythology and folklore,
simple, but Tolkien calls it "sacred." How can a riddle be sacred? Let's hobbits are the one people
consider what a riddle is: a piece of deliberate ambiguity. In a way, the that Tolkien made up himself.
person who poses the riddle takes something that is whole (for he knows So where did he get the
the answer) and unmakes it; his opponent's task is to remake it. But in the name hobbit? Tolkien himself
time between the posing of the riddle and its answer, there is a state of suggested that he may have
Chaos, the intellectual equivalent of the time before a Creator gave form to been subconsciously
the universe. What are the answers to the riddles, after all? Mountain, influenced by Sinclair Lewis'
Babbitt, the eponymous hero
teeth (eating), wind, sun, dark, eggs, fish, time: the substance of existence.
of a classic story of
Thus, answering a riddle is, in a very small way, taking on a kind of bourgeois mentality.
cosmogonic role; likewise, posing a riddle is taking on a somewhat However, in 1979 a former
annihilative one. While the contest continues the participants trade the editor of the OED announced
powers of creation and destruction back and forth, but when there is a final that he had tracked the word
stumping, one person has both powers for himself. "hobbit" to an early
nineteenth-century collection
The contest takes place in the bowels of the earth -- not just underground of Yorkshire folklore known
in a safe, Hobbity way, but underneath a very mountain. This is another as The Denham Tracts,
pattern we will see repeated over and over in Tolkien's fiction: passing where hobbits appear in a list
under the earth as a rite of passage. Rites of passage are cultural rituals of supernatural creatures that
that mark the passing from one life stage to another -- the popular ones includes more famous bogies
are birth, marriage, death, and various forms of coming of age, whether a such as barguests,
bar mitzvah, college graduation, or just turning twenty-one -- and while the lubberkins, cauld-lads, and
details differ enormously, the basic pattern is remarkably stable. The more. The character of
individuals undergoing the rite of passage -- the initiates -- are removed Hobbits as developed by
from their usual place in society, isolated, often taught secrets, undergo Tolkien, however, has
some kind of test (whether formulaic, like answering questions you've
been studying for years, or physical, like getting circumcised), often nothing to do with these
receive gifts and tools for their new lives, and then reincorporated into sinister sprites -- as Tolkien
society in their new role. In some rites of passage, people actually get a the linguist understood, the
new name and a new identity, like a woman who marries and takes her word and the thing are not
husband's name or a nun who takes a religious name along with her vows; identical.
in some cultures, when boys undergo coming-of-age ceremonies, their
mothers pretend to not even recognize them when they return to the
village, because they're Men now.

When Bilbo meets Gollum, he undergoes a rite of passage. He is isolated

from his companions, in a liminal zone (a place neither Here nor There, on
the boundaries, the typical place for rites of passage). He is tested by an
elder (for Gollum is both ancient and related to the Hobbits) with a threat of
death. He acquires a Present. And when he returns to his companions, he
is, well, unrecognizable because he is invisible. But more seriously, the
Ring he acquires will be a useful tool in his new life; it will give him power,
but it also introduces him, as we later discover, to moral questions and
quests that are far beyond his "childlike" imagination as a simple Hobbit.
Under the mountain, Bilbo grows up.

No sooner has he obtained the Ring than he is tested once again, the first
test of his new life that will set the pattern anew. Will he take advantage of
his invisibility to kill Gollum? It is the logical thing to do, but it is not the fair
thing, the right thing. But even more than making a decision based on
expediency or morality, Bilbo makes his decision based on compassion,
on his "sudden understanding, a pity mixed with horror" of Gollum's life.
With that, he makes a leap in the dark that will eventually make him a
hero.

The Quest Pattern Lord of The Rings Glossary

The Quest is one of the oldest narrative patterns known. The Epic of
Gilgamesh has two quests: Gilgamesh's quest for a friend, which results in
his friendship with Enkidu, and then, after Enkidu's death, his quest for
immortality, which fails. The pattern is pretty simple: something is missing
or needed, someone goes to get it, and has adventures along the way. Or
as folklorist Alan Dundes summarized the basic plot of all folktales: "Lack--
>lack liquidated."

The Epic of Gilgamesh: A New Translation

Read the oldest adventure ever recorded. The Epic of

Gilgamesh is a captivating tale that is the earliest
example of man's search for meaning.

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One might legitimately ask, however, why Bilbo is the hero of this
particular quest tale. It is the Dwarves, after all, who are lacking
something, namely, their homeland and their treasure. Why do they really
need a burglar, why do they need a Hobbit rather than recruiting another
dwarf, why does Gandalf pick on Bilbo, of all people, to accompany them?
What is Bilbo lacking, and what does he ultimately provide?

It's fairly obvious that what Bilbo is lacking is the spark of adventure that
lies dormant in him, an inheritance from his Took side. He needs to
expand beyond the provincial boundaries and mindset of bourgeois
Hobbitdom. As a member of a questing band, he provides help in getting
out of scrapes, to the (increasing) extent of his ability. When the band
arrives at the Lonely Mountain, he is the one who, by trickery, gets the
dragon to reveal his soft spot.

In a conventional quest plot, however, Bilbo would be the one who, having
discovered the soft spot, slays the dragon. That's what quest heroes do. In
folklore circles, that is a standard archetypal folk tale: "The Dragon-
Slayer." But Smaug is in fact killed by Bard, the descendent of the King of
the Dales, who is told of the soft spot by that ever-inquisitive thrush.

Furthermore, the slaying of the dragon should be the culmination of the

quest, after which the hero gets his reward and "happily ever after" looms
close on the horizon. Instead, Smaug's death merely attracts a horde of
armies anxious to pick over the loot, more like the greedy relatives who
descend upon the death of a wealthy man in some Victorian novel than the
protagonists of a heroic legend.

Given that Tolkien has followed the conventions of the quest tale so
faithfully up to this point -- granted, with humor and a certain irony in his
choice of hero -- and given that, with his background, he certainly knew the
conventions inside and out, we must assume that he took this unexpected
turn into left field for a reason. After Bilbo has discovered the soft spot in
Smaug, his real function is to resolve the high emotions and impasse that
the release of all that treasure arouses. He does it with a certain amount of
trickery, pocketing the Arkenstone by luck and using it to engineer a truce,
and he carries out his negotiations in his most businesslike Hobbit manner.
Although he does not act like an epic, or even a folktale hero, he gets the
job done. In so doing, not only does he make it possible for the squabbling
good guys -- the dwarf, elf, and human armies -- to join forces against the
real evil forces of Orcs and wargs, but Bilbo also, in a way, engineers the
redemption of the Dwarves from their gold lust, the taint that has infected
them from the dragon treasure.

In subverting the conventional pattern of the quest tale and confounding

our expectations of heroism, Tolkien firmly points our attention on the
value of the mundane, nonheroic qualities that Bilbo embodies. As noted
before, for all his conventional and bourgeois ethics, Bilbo is remarkable in
his disinterest in money and his lack of desire for power. His idea of a
happy life is a very moderate middle course between austerity and luxury.
Although he has undergone a rite of passage and become a hero, he has
retained a clear sense of practicality and common sense. These, Tolkien
seems to be saying, are the real attributes of a hero.

Yet, although Bilbo may not slay the real dragon, he does have his chance
to route the dragon-greedy in his own home when he finally returns to Bag
End and discovers his possessions up for auction and the Sackville-
Bagginses about to take possession of his lovely hole. All the dangers out
there in the macrocosm of the wider world are lurking, microcosmically, at
home.

Moving Forward

As we turn to Tolkien's masterwork, The Lord of the Rings, we will see

how patterns established in The Hobbit recur throughout the longer work.

Lesson 4: The Fellowship of the Ring: From Shire to Rivendell Back to Syllabus
The true nature of the Ring is revealed, and Frodo and his friends begin their
journey.

Our Story Thus Far Lord of The Rings Glossary

The Fellowship of the Ring begins with the transition from Bilbo to Frodo,
his nephew and adopted heir, as bearer of the Ring. The nature of the
Ring's evil is slowly revealed, not only through Gandalf's story of how he
learned its missing history from Gollum, or Sméagol, but also as we see its
effects on Bilbo. The first book takes Frodo and his companions, Meriadoc
Brandybuck, Peregrin Took, and Samwise Gamgee, from the Shire to
Rivendell. Along the way they encounter one helper who shelters them,
Tom Bombadil, and one who accompanies them, Strider.

The journey is made in stages of increasing danger. From Bag End to

Crickhollow, the party is shadowed by unnamed but menacing Black
Riders. Twice, assistance is found where least expected, with the chance-
met band of Elves, whose leader gives Frodo more of a sense of what he's
getting in for, and from Farmer Maggot, of whom Frodo has a completely
irrational fear based on his childhood misdeeds.

From Crickhollow to Bree, the Black Riders are eluded but the party falls
into older dangers, first from Old Man Willow and the trees of the Old
Forest, and then from the Barrow Wight. They are saved in both instances
by Tom Bombadil, Master of the Forest, and are sheltered by him and his
wife Goldberry, the Riverwoman's Daughter. After escaping the Barrow
Wight, the Hobbits acquire weaponry that will, in Merry's case, prove to be
of vital importance later on.

In Bree, the present dangers return to the fore; the Black Riders are back
in evidence, the Ring slips onto Frodo's finger at a most inopportune
moment, and the hobbits' ponies are scattered. On the plus side, however,
they meet up with Strider, the Ranger, who will be their guide to Rivendell.
Bree is a place where both men and Hobbits live together, a mixing place
between the two spheres.

From Bree to Rivendell, the dangers increase, for they are now in
wastelands where it is hard to hide. They find evidence that Gandalf has
preceded them, but they also are being closely followed by the Black
Riders. Once again Frodo is compelled to put the Ring on, and he finally
sees the Riders for what they really are, the Nazgûl, the Ringwraiths.
Though he is wounded by their swords, he manages to strike them back to
the best of his ability. Strider manages to find some athelas, a healing
herb, to apply to Frodo's wound, and they make their way to the ford that
leads to Rivendell. The Nazgûl return to attempt to capture Frodo again,
but are overwhelmed by the torrent of the river, let loose by Gandalf and
Elrond.

Tom Bombadil: The Master of the Forest Lord of The Rings Glossary

Although the overall scope of The Lord of the Rings concerns the very
specific war against Sauron and the end of the Third Age of the World, the
first adventure that the Hobbits encounter upon leaving the Shire has
nothing at all to do with these current affairs. Instead, they enter the Old
Forest and fall prey to Old Man Willow, whose evil has nothing to do with
the evil of Sauron; in fact it is, as we later realize, the very opposite of
Sauron and Saruman's industrial wasteland vision of evil.
The History of Tom
The Hobbit had many talking animals -- spiders, wolves, eagles, birds,
Bombadil
dragons. This kind of magic is largely absent from The Lord of the Rings,
but is replaced by an even deeper kind of animism: walking and talking Tom Bombadil is a character
trees. The Ents are the tree people that most people think of in relation to that not only predated the
The Lord of the Rings, but the first encounter with animate trees occurs writing of The Lord of the
here in the Old Forest, right on the doorstep of the Shire. The trees of the Rings but also is the only
Old Forest move, as Merry realizes when they find the clearing moved as character that Tolkien
soon as they enter the forest. Old Man Willow doesn't have any particular revisited in his later writings.
agenda, and he isn't evil in the infectious way that Sauron and Saruman As can be seen in references
later prove to be. He seems to represent simply the absolute alienness of throughout Tolkien's Letters,
Nature, its opposition -- both literally and metaphorically -- to Culture. Yet when Allen & Unwin first
he is balanced by Tom Bombadil, who can command him to release the floated the idea of a sequel to
Hobbits like a man tells his dog to put down the ball and stop harassing the The Hobbit, in 1937, Tolkien
nice people. submitted a collection of
poem about this "spirit of the
Tom is the Master of the Forest, more than a genius loci but not quite a (vanishing) Oxford and
god. Or is he? Goldberry says that "he is, as you have seen him." His Berkshire countryside"
power is geographically limited, although it is uncertain whether or not this (Letters, p. 26) and
is of his own choosing. He is impervious to the Ring's tricks, too, for he can suggested making him the
see Frodo when he puts it on. Tom and Goldberry are reminiscent of the hero of a new story. Some
consort deities of the Iron Age Celts that are found all over Britain and twenty-five years later,
northern Europe. These pairs are generally composed of a goddess of a Tolkien finally published the
river or other body of water (the Riverwoman's Daughter) and a god who is poems at the urging of his
associated with a craft or with nature. For instance, there is the pairing of 90-year-old aunt, Jane
Nantosuelta (whose name means "winding river") and Sucellos ("the good Neave -- affection for his
striker," probably a thunder-and-lightning god). Another popular pair was mother's last surviving sister
Sirona ("star goddess") and Apollo Grannus (the deity of a healing spring, overcoming his usual
assimilated in the Roman era to Apollo). tendency to procrastination.
The Celts believe that the good marriage of these divine couples was
echoed in fertile land, seasonable weather, and the balance of nature in
general, but that these gifts were always specific to a locale, to the land,
rather than to a nation or a whole race. Tolkien himself described Tom
Bombadil as a kind of local deity of the Oxfordshire countryside. When
Tom gives a name -- as he does to Merry's ponies -- it sticks. He is a
force, let's say, rather than a god (for there are no gods to speak of in The
Lord of the Rings) -- a force of the balance of nature. But what we really
see here is that nature is not just alive in the sense of growing, living, and
dying. It is intelligent.

Old Man Willow is one kind of danger in the natural world: the indifference
of nature to human life. The Barrow Wight is another natural danger, the
natural danger: the personification of death. The Barrow Wight is never
seen directly -- we only see his hand, inching towards the sword that lies
across the necks of Merry, Pippin, and Sam -- but the image of the
anonymous hand about to strike with a metal edge is reminiscent of the
stereotypical image of Death with his scythe. Old Man Willow wants to
swallow up the Hobbits, eat them to nourish himself and prolong his own
life, but the Barrow Wight wants to spread death like a paralysis: "Cold be
hand and heart and bone,/ and cold be sleep under stone:/ never more to
wake on stony bed,/ never, till the Sun fails and the Moon is dead" (FR I,
Chapter 8). These are the two poles of death. On the one hand, death
leads to a recycling of the organic body to create more life; on the other
hand, death is a dead end, a cessation of all movement. The postmortem
options are to become either mulch, or stone. In terms of the dangers that
the Hobbits will face on their quest, note that it's the Barrow Wight who
invokes the "dark lord ... dead sea and withered land." (Also, compare
Merry's disorientation on wakening from the Wight's spell with Frodo's
persistent nightmares after he is wounded by the Nazgûl's sword.)

Yet Tom Bombadil has the power to rout both extremes of death, because
he is, as the spirit of nature, Eternal Life in its most basic form. There is a
significant comparison between Tom and Beorn from The Hobbit. Beorn is
also a Master of the Forest, although he is closely associated with animals
alone, whereas Tom is more generally influential over all aspects of
nature. Beorn lives alone, although we do hear in The Lord of the Rings
that he has children, so presumably there is a Mrs. Beorn lurking
somewhere in the underbrush (perhaps quite literally). Tom is very visibly
married, and in fact, he and Goldberry are as close to a mature, sexual
couple as Tolkien comes in his writing. Other couples seem to be more like
ceremonial consorts (Galadriel and Celeborn) or chivalrously separated
lovers (Aragorn and Arwen). The loving and fruitful unions of the Ents and
the Entwives have tragically drifted apart due to complacency. (Tom is
always anxious to get back home to Goldberry.)

The episodes of Old Man Willow, the Barrow Wight, and Tom Bombadil,
then, serve to outline the very broadest scope of the task that lies before
the Hobbits, showing the dangers that face them and the strengths and
powers that will aid them. It's significant that these forces are painted at
the outset, as being outside the scope of the larger War of the Ring -- they
are the forces that transcend the Third Age, the eternal forces of Life and
Death.

The Nazgûl Lord of The Rings Glossary

After leaving the timeless realm of Tom Bombadil, the Hobbits return to the
realm of current events in Bree. Here they acquire a guide, Strider, but
also begin to gain a real understanding of the forces against them: the
Nazgûl, or Ringwraiths.
The Etymology of Nazgûl
The Nazgûl grow in threat and horror throughout the first book of The Lord
of the Rings. At first they are merely creepy Men(?) in Black, hooded and In a letter to a fan who had
horsed, asking superficially innocuous questions about the whereabouts of asked him about the sources
"Bagginsss." Furthermore, dark as they may be, they appear to be of his names for various
somewhat in the dark themselves, for they are uncertain which Baggins peoples and places in The
they seek, Bilbo or Frodo. Lord of the Rings, Tolkien
noted that the root of
Tolkien reveals the nature of the Nazgûl slowly. They are first mentioned "Nazgûl" was nazg, meaning
only as possibilities by Gandalf in his explanation of the history of the "ring" (as in the inscription on
Rings: "It is many years since the Nine walked abroad. Yet who knows? the One Ring, "Ash nazg
As the Shadow grows once more, so they too may walk again" (FR I, durbatulûk," "One Ring to
Chapter 2). The first appearance of a Black Rider is when Frodo overhears rule them all . . ." Tolkien was
Gaffer Gamgee talking to one, but he only hears Gaffer's side of the surprised to discover years
exchange clearly; the Rider is only a strange and unpleasant sound. When after the fact that Irish Gaelic
the Rider is finally seen, he is a vaguely alarming figure who appears to be nasc (in Scots Gaelic nasg)
tracking the Hobbits by smell, the most nonhuman of the senses. For the means "ring" and also has
first time, Frodo feels the compulsion to put on the Ring against his will. the sense of "bond" or
Next we hear Farmer Maggot's tale of actually speaking with a Rider: the "obligation." (Letters, p. 385).
Rider scares off Maggot's dog, he is unnaturally still on his horse and Tolkien attributed this
moves stiffly, his voice is queer and sibilant, and his hood falls so that his
correspondence to a long-
face (or lack thereof) cannot be seen. forgotten echo in his
unconscious from his
The Hobbits realize that these Black Riders are up to no good, but the sporadic dabblings in Old
connection between these Black Riders and the Nine of whom Gandalf Irish, but pointed out that for
spoke is not yet evident. The Riders do not take action until Bree, when all the influences in sound
Merry sees one himself, and the Hobbits' room at the inn is vandalized and that showed up in his
their ponies driven off. The same night, Fatty Bolger is attacked by another invented languages, the
band of Nazgûl in Frodo's house at Crickhollow back in the Shire. The meanings of the words were
Riders' true nature is not explained until the group reaches Weathertop, only consistent within their
shortly before they actually meet the Nine face to face; Frodo succumbs to own universe, and to go
the temptation to put on the Ring and finally perceives the true nature of trolling for cognates in the
the Riders with his own, Ring-enhanced senses. languages of our world is
wasted energy.
As we discover, the Nazgûl are indeed men, kings who accepted Rings of
Power from Sauron and became corrupted. The Nazgûl are literally
"stretched thin," as Bilbo describes his feeling from merely carrying the
Ring, so thin that they no longer appear to have any physical presence at
all. They are not quite ghosts, but certainly no longer mortal men.

In fact, the figure the Nazgûl most strongly resemble is Dracula, as

portrayed in Bram Stoker's novel (to distinguish him from the innumerable
subsequent representations of vampires in general and Dracula in
particular). The Nazgûl have the power to compel people's thoughts and
actions through a kind of mental telepathy, although their power is stronger
over someone carrying a Ring, just as Dracula's power is stronger over
someone whose blood he has already tasted. They are creatures of the
dark and the night. Animals instinctively fear them and flee their presence.
They have lived far beyond the normal lifespan of men. Their "Black
Breath" causes death.

In addition to being enemies and sources of danger, then, the Nazgûl are
also a warning example of what happens to someone who accepts the
power of a Ring -- and if this is what a lesser Ring can do, claiming the
power of the One Ring is sure to have even more dire consequences. After
Frodo is wounded by the Nazgûl's dagger at Weathertop, he is even more
closely and dangerously linked to them by the dagger tip in his shoulder.
This wound, indeed, casts its shadow over the rest of Frodo's life, for he
falls ill every year on the anniversary of receiving it. At the same time,
Frodo's slash at the Rider's cloak with his barrow sword foreshadows
Merry's later stroke that breaks the power of the Lord of the Nazgûl at the
battle of Pelennor Fields.

A Bigger World Lord of The Rings Glossary

The first book of The Fellowship of the Ring takes the Hobbits from the
comfort and homeliness of the Shire out into the dangerous world. They
are harried by the Nazgûl to the Ford of Bruinen, where it appears that the
Nazgûl have been destroyed, or at least overcome, by the release of the
waters, but Frodo is also at the point of death from his wound and the
exertion of the journey.

For all the adventure of The Hobbit, it is still a very "small" story, merely a
journey "there and back again." The destruction of Smaug has some effect
on the world at large, as it allows the Dwarves to return to their ancestral
home in the Lonely Mountain, and it also causes the end of the lake town
of Esgaroth and the rise of Bard and his family. But Bilbo's adventure as a
dragon-hunter does not change the course of the world's history; his truly
significant encounter is with Gollum, and his world-shaking act is to pick up
a small ring in the dark.

Tolkien's drafts of The Lord of the Rings show that it took him a long time
to get the story off the ground. His problem was how to connect the
children's story of The Hobbit with his "high" history of The Silmarillion.
This was a problem not only of scale but of diction. The mythology Tolkien
had been evolving in The Silmarillion was written in a very formal and
elegant style; for all of Tolkien's love of the rough-and-ready early
medieval tales such as Beowulf, the literary style of his Silmarillion tales
and poems is closer to that of the high medieval prose tales such as the
French Perlesvaus and Malory's Morte D'Arthur. The Hobbit had been
written in a familiar and fairly humorous style.

The first book of The Fellowship of the Ring not only moves the Hobbits
physically from the Shire to Rivendell, but also moves the reader mentally
from the world of dragons and Dwarves to the world of Rings and
Ringwraiths. The scope of the task facing Frodo and the powers ranged
against him are revealed slowly, acclimating both heroes and readers to
the higher literary altitude that the rest of the story will occupy.

Moving Forward

In the next lesson, we will watch the formation -- and dissolution -- of the
Fellowship, as Frodo takes on his quest with a full understanding of what is
at stake.

Lesson 5: The Fellowship of the Ring: The Onward Journey

The first leg of the Ring's journey, through Moria to Lothlórien.

Our Story Thus Far Lord of The Rings Glossary

Frodo awakes at Elrond's house, where he is reunited with Bilbo and

Gandalf. The Hobbits also encounter Gimli the dwarf, Legolas the elf, and
Boromir of Minas Tirith. It is decided in Elrond's council that these three,
along with Gandalf and Aragorn, will accompany Frodo and his three
Hobbit companions in the attempt to destroy the Ring in the Cracks of
Doom in Mordor.

The party heads south, planning to cross the pass over the mountain
Caradhras, but are defeated by the intensity of the snow in the pass. This,
again, appears to be an instance of a living landscape -- the mountain
itself seems to have thwarted them, since the snow has only fallen to such
depths exactly where the party has traveled, and is light everywhere else.
They have no option now but to travel under the mountain, through the
gates of Moria, where Balin the dwarf had founded a colony that has
disappeared. After solving the puzzle of finding the proper magic password
to open the gates, the Fellowship passes into the mountain.

The Fellowship is trapped in the tunnel to Moria when a lake monster,

awakened by incautious stone tossing, blocks the gate. There is nowhere
to go but onward. This scene echoes the Dwarves' entrapment inside the
Lonely Mountain when Smaug blocks the entrance they have opened, and
also has resonances with the Dwarves' capture by the Orcs. Here they
discover that Balin's colony has been wiped out after inadvertently
uncovering a demonic Balrog, and they are themselves attacked by a force
of Orcs and the Balrog himself. Gandalf manages to save the others, but
himself is dragged into the abyss by the Balrog.

After this dreadful loss, the remaining eight of the Fellowship make their
way to Lothlórien, the forest stronghold of the Elves, presided over by
Galadriel and her husband, Celeborn. Here they all undergo a kind of
spiritual testing by Galadriel, who appears to offer to each the thing he
most desires if he will only leave the Fellowship. All stick to their resolve,
but it is evident that there is some desire festering in Boromir's heart: a
superficially noble wish to use the power of the Ring for good without an
understanding of the way that the Ring turns all good intentions to its
corrupt ends. Galadriel herself refuses the Ring when Frodo offers it to her
(as he had offered it to Gandalf previously), but from her we first realize
that the destruction of the One Ring will mean the destruction of all the
rings, including the three Elvish rings, and that thus the Elves as a people
will fade from Middle Earth if the quest is successful.

The reduced Fellowship leaves Lothlórien by canoe, making for Amon

Llaw and Amon Hen, the Hills of Hearing and Sight. As they travel on,
however, Frodo and Aragorn realize that they are being tailed by Gollum.
Once they reach Amon Hen, Aragorn will have to decide whether to take
over Gandalf's role as protector of the Ringbearer and accompany the
Hobbits to Mordor, or to travel on to Minas Tirith with Boromir, where the
forces of Mordor are threatening attack. All considered plans become
moot, however, when Boromir falls victim to the lure of power and attempts
to take the Ring from Frodo, who flees. The Fellowship is attacked by
Orcs, who capture Merry and Pippin and kill Boromir. Frodo decides that
he must finish his journey alone; but Sam manages to intercept him and
accompanies him on the last leg of his quest.

The Gates of Moria: Death and Rebirth I Lord of The Rings Glossary

Tolkien's illustration of the gate of Moria gives us our first look at

Feänorian Elvish script and a short Sindarin inscription: "Ennyn Durin
Atan Moria: pedo mellon a minno. Im Narvi hain echant: Celebrimboro
Eregion teithant i thiw hin." This translates as "The Doors of Durin Lord
of Moria. Speak friend and enter. I Narvi made them. Celebrimbor of
Hollin drew these signs."

The language of this inscription is very similar to Middle Welsh. We can

see that the imperative verbal ending is -o and both the first and third
person past tense ending is -ant; in Middle Welsh these are the same in
the imperative and the third person past. The word for "them" is hain and
"these" is hin, comparable with Middle Welsh hwn (pronounced "hoon").
Similarly, the conjunctions a, "and" and o, "of" as well as the article i,
"the" are the same as Middle Welsh. Quite frankly, if you know Middle
Welsh, it is very difficult to read Sindarin and not try to translate it as
such. Sometimes it's close to enough to make some kind of sense,
though not in the narrative context. For instance, Glorfindel's greeting to
Aragorn on the road to the ford, "Ai na vedui Dúnadan! Mae govannen!"
looks disturbingly like, "It's not a drunken Dúnadan! It's a blacksmith!"

Tolkien presumably knew the grammars of his constructed languages

without having ever written them down in a coherent form; therefore, the
rules of their grammar must be derived from the examples he gives us
(just as real historical linguists reconstruct ancient languages from the
fragments of inscriptions that remain). Ruth S. Noel's analysis of the
grammars of Quenya and Sindarin, The Languages of Tolkien's Middle
Earth, shows that Tolkien was very consistent and "regular" in his
invention of verb forms -- one of the ways in which an invented language
differs from the messy development of a spoken language.

Furthermore, the trick to opening the gates -- not "Speak, friend, and
enter," but "Say (the word): 'Friend,' and enter" -- depends on the kind of
textual problem that constantly faces those who deal with medieval
manuscripts, in which punctuation is notoriously thin on the ground.

It is ironic that Gandalf, the one who says "friend" to enter Moria (himself
commenting that the password is "too simple for a learned loremaster in
these suspicious days"), is the one who falls into the abyss in the act of
saving his friends. The passage through Moria accomplishes the first of
the personal quests of the Fellowship, as Gimli had come to Rivendell to
seek counsel about the disappearance of Balin and his colony; they
discover that the dwarf colony has perished.
When the Fellowship is attacked by Orcs, Frodo receives a spear thrust
from an Orc that is turned aside by the mithril mail coat given him by
Bilbo. The Orcs have set much of Moria on fire. Gandalf manages to
keep back the Orc forces while the others escape, but the Balrog, falling
into the abyss, wraps his whip around Gandalf's legs and pulls him down
with him.

Gandalf survives his fall, but is changed -- reforged, as it were, in the

bowels of the mountain, home of the master metal-workers, the
Dwarves. When Gandalf reappears, he says that he was first burned by
the fire of the Balrog as they fell, then plunged into cold water at the
bottom of the abyss. He battled the Balrog in the depths below the
mountains, even deeper than where Bilbo met Gollum, where nameless
creatures gnaw the roots of the earth (an image that recalls the Norse
conception of the universe as the World Tree Yggdrasil, whose roots are
gnawed by serpents). Eventually Gandalf followed the Balrog to the
Endless Stair that leads up above the surface of the earth as far as the
abyss led below it, and there Gandalf managed to throw the Balrog down
and finally destroy him.

After defeating the Balrog, Gandalf appears to enter an altered state of

consciousness. He returns naked and abandoned on the peak of
Celebdil, until finally he is rescued by Gwaihir the Eagle and brought to
Lothlórien. He has now become Mithrandir, and his color is changed
from Grey to White, for he is now everything that Saruman had been and
abandoned when he turned to Sauron. This is a significant
transformation, for Saruman had been the most powerful and wise of the
wizards of Middle Earth -- and the wizards themselves are emissaries
from Ilúvatar, Tolkien's equivalent of angels sent from God -- so
Gandalf's transformation involves more than an increase in power; it is
an increase in spiritual authority, as marked by Gandalf's new role as the
chief of the White Council.

In The Hobbit, Bilbo's encounter with Gollum underneath the mountain

was a rite of passage on a ritual level. Here, Gandalf undergoes a very
literal rite of passage, metamorphosing from Gandalf the Grey to
Mithrandir the White the way a caterpillar turns into a butterfly. Notice
again that the metamorphosis is a process of moving from very deep in
the earth to very high in the sky. Throughout Tolkien's writings, going into
a mountain or underground is invariably the harbinger of a rite of
passage, and the extent of the dichotomy between low and high that is
traveled is a measure of the degree of change experienced by the
initiate.

Lothlórien: The Nature of Elves Lord of The Rings Glossary

As usual, after a harrowing experience, there is a respite. From Moria, the

remains of the Fellowship make their way to Lothlórien, the abode of
Galadriel and Celeborn. The Elves of Lórien are the "highest" of the
peoples of Middle Earth, the wisest and most benevolent, but at the same
time, the most removed from the activities of the other races and of those
Fairies and Fallen Angels
races, the most waning. Their age will end with the destruction of the Ring,
and their promotion of the quest to destroy it is an act of self-sacrifice. In 1871, Ruaraidh mac
Dohmnuil of the isle of Barra
In his book, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century, T. A. Shippey has told this version of the origin
suggested that the basis of Tolkien's conception of the Elves was the
of the fairies:
ballad Sir Orfeo, but the Elves in that work are very much in the tradition of
the Gaelic Fair Folk, the Tuatha Dé Danann, who proliferate in the The Proud Angel fomented a
medieval and early modern legendry of Ireland and Scotland. The Tuatha rebellion among the angels of
Dé were the inhabitants of Ireland before the coming of Men, known as the heaven, where he had been
Sons of Míl. They live within the sídhe, or fairy mounds (places identified a leading light. He declared
as sídhe in Irish tradition are often Neolithic burial mounds), where they that he would go and found a
exist in a kind of parallel universe to the world of humans, but they often kingdom for himself. When
require the assistance of men in their feuds, and they can intermarry with going out the door of heaven
humans. the Proud Angel brought
prickly lightning and biting
lightning out of the doorstep
with his heels. Many angels
J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century
followed him -- so many that
at last the Son called out,
Tom Shippey has written the essential companion
"Father! Father! the city is
to Tolkien's work: offering penetrating insights into
being emptied!" whereupon
its mythic structure and resonant themes. A must-
the Father ordered that the
have for a deeper understanding of the series.
gates of heaven and the
gates of hell should be
More Info
closed. This was instantly
done. And those who were in
were in, and those who were
The Relation of Middle Earth Elves to Celtic Fairies out were out; while the hosts
who had left heaven and had
One of Tolkien's quandaries in concocting his mythology of Middle Earth not reached hell flew into the
was how to reconcile what he conceived as the deeply ancient history of holes of the earth like the
the very Earth he lived on as a twentieth-century Catholic with the stormy petrels. These are the
Christian mythology of an Earth created by Jehovah, and how to deal with Fairy Folk -- ever since
the problem of Original Sin amongst the peoples he had created in his own doomed to live under the
mythology. Men, of course, were subject to Original Sin, and for the ground and only allowed to
legions of Sauron, the Original was the least of their sins. Dwarves and emerge where and when the
Hobbits also seem subject to it, but Elves, as Tolkien conceived them, King permits."
were not.
-- W. Y. Evans-Wentz, The
A popular Irish folk explanation of the source of the fairies is that when Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries
Lucifer and his followers were expelled from Heaven, there were some
angels who were only half-hearted in their rebellion, and so while Lucifer
and the truly rebellious angels fell all the way down to Hell, there were
others who only landed on Earth, stuck in a state of betwixt-and-between,
no longer angels but neither demons. Shippey notes that this tale is
recounted of angels in a thirteenth-century legend of St. Michael in the
Early South English Legendary, which Tolkien may have read, but here the
legend is not associated with fairies. However, the idea of the Tuatha Dé
being outside the realm of human sin is expressed in the seventh- or
eighth-century Imram Brain, the "Voyage of Bran mac Febhal," who is
called to an Otherworld over the sea by a fairy woman.

On the voyage to the fairy woman's island, Bran and his men encounter
Manannán mac Lir, a one of the Tuatha Dé, who rides over the ocean in
his chariot as though the water were land, and indeed he tells Bran that to
him, the ocean is "a pleasant plain and an abundance of flowers." He also
describes the land where his own people (the Tuatha Dé, i.e., the fairies)
live, where "A gentle pleasant game they play in fair contentment, men
and gentle women under a bush, without sin, without transgression . . . we
do not expect lack of strength through decay, (original) sin has not reached
us." In other words, Manannán's people engage in sexual relations without
sin, and their bodies do not age, because they are not subject to Original
Sin.

In the same year that Tolkien published the last volume of The Lord of the
Rings, he also published a poem called "Imram" or "The Death of St.
Brendan," which mixes the Irish legend of the voyage of St. Brendan the
Navigator with his own vision of the drowning of Númenor. The Navigatio
Brendani is a poem that is in many ways an explicitly Christian version of
the Voyage of Bran, and indeed the two poems are invariably discussed
together. Therefore, it seems highly likely that Tolkien was familiar with the
Irish explanation of the Tuatha Dé's position outside the realm of Original
Sin, and that this offered to him a usable hypothesis for the placement of
his Elves within the Christian framework of Creation.

The Heroic Ethos: Boromir's Fall Lord of The Rings Glossary

Boromir, the son of Denethor, of the stewards of Gondor, is one of the

most ambivalent characters in The Lord of the Rings. He is a brave man
with good intentions, but from the very first his words are tinged with pride
and arrogance. He is hyper-aware of the fact that his city has borne the
brunt of holding back the forces of Mordor for peoples who do not know
that their peace is purchased at the price of his soldiers' lives. This is
immediately compared with Aragorn's acceptance of thankless attitudes
towards his own and the Rangers' role in holding Mordor at bay. But more
worrying, it appears that although Boromir's brother is the one who has
had a repeated prophetic dream of the return of the Sword that was
Broken (which is carried by Aragorn, the rightful king of Gondor), Boromir
is the one who has come to discover its meaning, although he only had the
dream once. From the very start, then, he has a bias, even if well-
intentioned, towards usurpation, which bodes ill for his long-term
acceptance of Aragorn as the rightful king.
Boromir represents the heroic ethos at its most extreme. He perceives his
role as that of a protector and a leader; he has faith in his own powers and
he trusts the evidence of his own senses. He is loyal to his own people
and will do everything in his power to defeat his enemies. He is physically
strong. Yet the extreme of his heroic stature is the source of his downfall.
He protects and leads because he considers his followers to be incapable
of protecting themselves; he trusts his own experience but is unwilling to
accept anyone else's word for things outside his experience; he divides the
world into Us and Them without any consideration of Their point of view;
his physical prowess is unquestioned, but his mental strength, as Frodo
learns to his dismay, is dubious. In short, he is a man to be depended
upon in matters of practicality, but who cannot cope with anything
smacking of magic. And magic is Sauron's most potent weapon.

As soon as Boromir has learned of the Ring's power, his reaction is that
the Good Guys, i.e., his own allies, should use the Ring to destroy Sauron
and take its power for themselves: "Let the Ring be your weapon, if it has
such power as you say. Take it, and go forth to victory!" He only sees
Good versus Evil as Us versus Them, a warning against the dangers of
relativism. Although Elrond and Gandalf tell him that the Ring will corrupt
the heart of anyone who wields it, Boromir accepts their warning only
doubtfully. He cannot believe what he has not himself experienced. Yet
already he is experiencing it, for the desire to use the Ring is planted in his
heart, and since Elrond, Gandalf, and Aragorn have repudiated using it
themselves, it is a very short step, once Frodo has refused to use it, for
Boromir to convince himself that he has the right to try to take it, for he, of
course, would only use it for good.

Yet although Boromir falls victim to the Ring's lures, he is not wholly evil,
indeed not even mostly evil. He is good-natured about using his strength to
help the smaller members of the Fellowship when they are snowed in on
Caradhras, he fights valiantly against the Orcs in Moria, and he dies
attempting to protect Merry and Pippin from yet another onslaught of Orcs.
Yet he is the one who throws the stone in the pool at the gates of Moria
that wakes the sleeping lake monster (foreshadowing the danger he will
bring to the party at Amon Hen), he is leery of Lothlórien, and does not
trust Galadriel, being suspiciously quick to protest that he, of course,
refused to listen to the temptation offered in her test. It is from this point,
however, that he appears to begin wondering about the possibility of using
the Ring himself, and the intensity of his regard begins to bother Frodo.

Boromir's madness, however, is the impetus that Frodo needs to separate

himself from the Fellowship. Seeing the corruption that even the
knowledge of the Ring's existence can bring, he realizes that he must bear
his burden alone. Although Boromir's blindness to the limitations of his
heroic ethos finally betrays him, it kindles a truer heroism in Frodo, who
carries on his quest in full knowledge of his own frailties. The Nazgûl
showed him what happens to those who accept a ring from Sauron;
Boromir shows him the process in action. Fortunately, Frodo has Sam with
him to provide the support that he will so desperately need. Frodo also has
Gollum on his tail. Furthermore, by leaving his companions, Frodo forces
Aragorn to follow his destiny to Gondor, thus fulfilling the second quest of
the Fellowship, Boromir's quest for aid for his people (albeit with the loss of
Boromir's life along the way).

Moving Forward

With the breaking of the Fellowship, Tolkien leaves a relatively

straightforward narration of the events of the War of the Ring for a more
complicated interlaced narrative that switches back and forth between
threads following the various characters. However, the narrative as it
exists to this point already shows an interlacing tendency with its repetition
of plot patterns. In the next lesson, we will begin to trace how Tolkien
elaborates his patterns -- we'll discover that the repetition of a pattern is
not a mere rehash but an elaboration and deepening of his thematic
concerns. As Claude Lévi-Strauss said, the function of repetition in myth is
to make sure the message is received.

Lesson 6: The Two Towers: Breaking Saruman

With the dissolution of the Fellowship, Tolkien's plot begins to take on the format of
a medieval interlaced romance, where the adventures of separate characters
alternate.

Our Story Thus Far

Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas give Boromir a version of a Viking ship burial,
sending his body down the river to Rauros Falls in one of the Elvish
canoes, and then they set out to track Merry and Pippin, who have been
abducted by a particularly vicious band of Orcs, the Uruk-Hai. They
encounter riders of the Rohirrim, led by Eomer, who have just destroyed
the Orc band but saw no evidence of Hobbits.

Meanwhile, Merry and Pippin have managed to leaves traces of

themselves for the others to follow, and Pippin has freed his hands. In the
chaos of the battle between Orcs and Rohirrim, they make a break for it
and find themselves in the forest of Fangorn, where they encounter
Treebeard the Ent. After due consideration of the story they tell him of the
danger posed by Saruman, Treebeard calls a council of the Ents, an
Entmoot, and the Ents decide to march on Isengard.

Meanwhile, Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas have found the remains of the
Orcs and tracks of the fleeing Hobbits. At the edge of Fangorn, where
Merry and Pippin had encountered Treebeard, they meet Gandalf, reborn
as Mithrandir. He relates the story of his metamorphosis in the abyss of
Moria, and leads them to the halls of Théoden, king of Rohan. The king, an
elderly man, has been further crippled by grief over the death of his son
and the whisperings of his counselor, Gríma Wormtongue, who is in
league with Saruman to undermine the kingdom. Wormtongue has also
been undermining the self-esteem of Eowyn, Théoden's niece. Gandalf
persuades Théoden to throw off his infirmities and ride once more, expels
Wormtongue, and he and the army of Rohan set off for Helm's Deep,
where the Orcs besiege an outpost of Rohirrim. They win the ensuing
battle, but at the same time a mysterious forest appears outside of Helm's
Gate, which swallows up (literally) the fleeing Orcs and devours the bodies
of those slain.

Marching onward to Isengard, Saruman's stronghold, they find it

overthrown, and Merry and Pippin sitting calmly at its ruined gate, smoking
their pipes. While Théoden and Gandalf retire to deal with Saruman, the
remains of the Fellowship reunite to hear the tale of Merry and Pippin's
adventures and the Ents' overthrow of Isengard. The companions take
advantage of the discovery of a barrel of Shire tobacco in Saruman's
stronghold to smoke, as well -- the first, disturbing intimation that there is
some connection between Saruman and the Shire.

Gandalf and Théoden parlay with Saruman, who attempts to use the
power of his voice to persuade them to his side. But his powers are
waning, and although he can charm, he cannot sustain his spell. Gandalf
offers to let him go free where he will, but Saruman, who cannot believe
that anyone would not behave as treacherously as he himself behaves,
insists on staying put in Orthanc with Wormtongue. As Gandalf turns to
leave, a crystal ball is flung at him from the tower, presumably by
Wormtongue. It is a Palantír, a seeing-stone governed by Sauron, and
Pipping picks it up and momentarily sees into it. It casts such a spell over
him that in the night he is compelled to sneak to Gandalf's side and pick it
up again, but this time he sees Sauron face to face and is almost
overcome by his power. The party splits up, then: Théoden and his men,
with Merry, return to Edoras, and Gandalf and Pippin go on to Minas Tirith.

With the splitting of the Fellowship, Tolkien is compelled to follow the

threads of plot in turn, as they weave in and out of the tapestry of time.
Already The Two Towers is divided in two, one book essentially following
Aragorn while the other follows Frodo, as the two prongs of the offensive
against Sauron. Or, perhaps, one book follows Merry and Pippin while the
other follows Frodo and Sam, if we are focusing on the effects of Hobbits
on the wider world. Or, perhaps, one book heads towards the tower of
Orthanc while the other heads towards the tower of Cirith Ungol. The
structure of the plot of The Lord of the Rings begins to resemble the rhyme
scheme of Pearl, the Middle English poem that Tolkien spent so much of
his life translating, with multiple levels of meaning and of focus winding in
and out amongst themselves.

Ents and Animism: The Battle of the Trees

The kind of magic that pervades The Lord of the Rings is not the kind of Cad Goddeu
ceremonial magic that was popular in fantasy novels of the early twentieth
century -- the kind of thing that fascinated Tolkien's fellow Inkling Charles I was in Caer Nefenhir where
Williams, or the occult novelist Dennis Wheatley. That magic was inspired the trees and grasses
by the esoteric societies of the late nineteenth century, such as the Order attacked, Poets sang,
of the Golden Dawn, which had many members who were writers, poets, warriors rushed forth Alder,
and other artists. (W. B. Yeats, for instance, was a member of the Golden pre-eminent in lineage,
Dawn.) attacked in the beginning;
Willow and rowan were late
It was also a magic that relied on spells and occult trappings in the attempt to the army; Thorny plum
to cause events to happen in the outside world -- the metaphysical was greedy for slaughter;
manipulation of power. Tolkien conceived of his magic in a very different Powerful dogwood, resisting
way; in a letter to a potential publisher outlining the world of The Lord of prince; Rose-trees went
the Rings, he said, "[The Elves'] 'magic' is Art, delivered from many of its against a host in wrath. . . .
human limitations; more effortless, more quick, more complete (product
and vision in unflawed correspondence). And its object is Art not Power..." Gwydion raised his staff of
(Carpenter, The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien). In another letter Tolkien says, enchantment, Called upon
"... 'magic' in this story is ... not to be come by by 'lore' or spells; but is in the Lord, upon Christ, making
an inherent power not possessed or obtainable by Men as such." pleas, So that he, the Lord
who made him, might deliver
The "magic" of The Lord of the Rings lies not so much in the control of him. The Lord replied in
supernatural powers as in its animated landscape. Animism is one of the languages and in the land:
most archaic forms of religion, consisting of a belief that the entire world, "Transform stalwart trees into
not just the humans in it, is sentient -- that it has anima, or soul. Animals, armies with him and obstruct
rocks, trees, rivers, winds, all have consciousness, volition, will. Certain Peblig the powerful from
things -- an impressive rock, an ancient tree -- are so alive that it is a good giving battle.
thing to give them gifts to stay on their good side; likewise, while humans
must kill animals to eat, they must do so in acknowledgment of the life they -- translated by Patrick Ford
are taking, asking the animal's permission to take its life and honoring its in The Mabinogi and Other
sacrifice. Medieval Welsh Stories

The are hints of the animated world in the early pages of The Lord of the
Rings: a walking tree seen in the distance by Sam's cousin Hal (FR I,
chap. 2), Old Man Willow, the deliberate will of the mountain Caradhras in
repelling unwanted visitors. The fullest expression of Middle Earth's
animism, however, is the Ents.

The Ents are the guardians of the trees, and are themselves a kind of
sentient tree, a cross between animal and vegetable. They are among the
oldest of the inhabitants of Middle Earth, not immortal but immeasurably
long-lived. In company with Tom Bombadil and Beorn, they are another
example of the Master of the Forest, but whereas Beorn is biased toward
animals, the Ents are biased toward plants (while Tom Bombadil stands in
the middle, equally allied with flora and fauna).

When Merry and Pippin escape the Orcs and, completely by accident,
encounter Treebeard in Fangorn, they begin to come into their own as
characters in the epic. Throughout The Fellowship of the Ring, the other
Hobbits form a sort of Greek chorus behind the figure of Frodo as the
Ringbearer. They seem in many ways just to be along for the ride. When
the Fellowship fragments, however, they begin to act and instigate action
by themselves, and their main function turns out to be as catalysts,
causing chain-reactions of events that eventually turn the tide of the war
against Sauron. Their meeting with Treebeard is the first of these catalytic
conversions, leading to the Ents and their tree herds marching on, and
destroying, Isengard.

The image of a marching forest is familiar to anyone who has read

Macbeth, where it derives from the same kind of riddle image as the riddle
game in The Hobbit. (Similar as well is the paradox of Macduff's cesarean
birth allowing him to circumvent the prophecy that Macbeth would not be
killed by anyone "by woman born," and Dernhelm/Eowyn circumventing
the Lord of the Nazgûl's imperviousness to "the hand of Man.") It is
expressed more literally in the Old Welsh poem, Cad Goddeu or "The
Battle (or Army) of the Trees," attributed to the sixth-century poet Taliesin.
In this poem, a forest of trees is marching to war, and each tree is
elliptically described.

Cad Goddeu is most famous as the inspiration of Robert Graves' The

White Goddess, where he holds that the poem is a coded reference to the
old Irish ogham writing system (where the names of the letters were tree
names) and that the poem itself is the handbook to an ancient system of
religious and poetic philosophy. Tolkien, it should be noted, thought
Graves "entertaining, likeable, odd, bonnet full of bees ... but an Ass."
(Carpenter, Letters). In any case, the translation of Cad Goddeu that
Graves worked from, although one of the few available at the time, was
extremely unreliable, and the poem itself is almost incomprehensible even
in later, more reliable translations.

The image that the reader is left with, however, is very similar to the march
of the Ents on Isengard, and made for a similar purpose: In situations of
great crisis, even the trees must fight against tyranny.

In northern European medieval literature there is a notion that "good

kingship" is visible in the fruitfulness of the earth and the mildness of the
weather during the reign of the proper king. When a king breaks his faith, it
is reflected immediately in natural disasters and portents, in which the
"natural" behaves "unnaturally": blood falls from the sky instead of rain,
there are earthquakes and eclipses, animals give birth to monstrosities,
trees bloom out of season. The link between social order and cosmic order
is believed to be so close that disruption of one disrupts the other. There is
still a shadow of this kind of thinking even in Macbeth, where Macbeth's
bad faith as a king results in "Birnam Wood" attacking Dunsinane. The
Ents marching on Isengard marks the turning of the tide against Saruman
and Sauron, when the land itself revolts and begins to move to set the
cosmic balance back in order.
Gandalf's Return and Théoden's Cure: Death and Rebirth II

Tolkien offers two examples of elderly leaders in The Lord of the Rings:
Théoden of Rohan and Denethor of Minas Tirith. Both are in the process of
being undermined -- sapped -- by the Enemy. Théoden is being worn
down by the poisonous words of his counselor, Gríma Wormtongue, and
Denethor is deceived by the images Sauron allows him to see in his
Palantír.

Gandalf's return from the abyss of Moria marks his own spiritual rebirth,
but one of his first acts on his return to the world of Men is to pass that
spiritual healing on to Théoden. When Théoden is first seen, he is bent
and dependent on a staff to support himself; he spends his days sitting
indoors, in a dark hall only intermittently pierced by beams of sunlight,
brooding. Gandalf's first move is to force Théoden out into the light and air
of the day, where Théoden's first comment is, "It is not so dark here." His
truly transforming act, however, is taking a sword once more in his hand
and crying the battle call of the Rohirrim.

Théoden is suffering from a fairly straightforward depression, and his cure

lies in throwing off the lethargy of depression for action, fresh air, and
straight talk. Gandalf's healing magic -- aside from his trademark
pyrotechnics inside the hall -- is little more than common sense. Théoden's
strength is already there, forced inward and downward by Wormtongue's
deceptive counsel, and all he has to do to regain it is stand up straight,
stop slouching, and get some air in his lungs. As soon as Théoden's head
clears, he sees for himself the sense of Gandalf's advice, which is only
what all of his friends and family have been urging him to do as well -- and
he's back in the saddle again. This mere act of walking from inside to
outside in the act of healing is reversed, later, when Denethor in his
madness moves from outside to inside, where he attempts to burn not only
himself but his ailing son on a funeral pyre.

If it seems that there is something too simplistic about Théoden's cure --

just get up and walk outside (and yes, there is something a little too
simplistic about it) -- it is important that this cure through contact with light
and air comes fairly simultaneously with Merry and Pippin rousing the
Ents. The Fellowship, no longer committed to accompanying Frodo to
Mordor, is instead acting to rouse up the older generation, which has fallen
into complacency and senile depression, under the common delusion of
the elderly that the world is really no longer of their concern. The Hobbits
get the trees on the move; the wizard works on the men. But also,
Théoden's cure is to regain contact with the natural world. As king, his role
is to maintain that cosmic balance. His sickness and his cure, then, are
another manifestation of Tolkien's presentation of an animate world.

Saruman: The Power of the Voice

So far we have seen one half of the equation, good = nature (or organic Tolkien and Machines
creation). In Saruman, we get the other half: bad = machine (or
mechanical creation). Tolkien draws a distinction between "art" and Tolkien had an ambivalent
"machine;" for him, art is creation for the sake of constructive beauty, while attitude towards machinery.
machinery is creation for the sake of destructive power. Throughout The He certainly was not a
Lord of the Rings, Saruman is referred to as being interested in machines, tinkerer -- for him, the desire
in mechanical doodads, "metals and wheels," as Treebeard says to take things apart and see
disapprovingly. His very name derives from Old English searu, which how they work was wholly
means "device, contrivance, design, art (in the sense of making things)." focused on languages rather
He is also disturbingly "modern;" as T.A. Shippey points out in , he talks than engines. He enjoyed
like a policeman or politician, whose idols are Law, Order, and Rule, which driving in the early days of
means "You do what I tell you to do." motorcars, and took his
young family on day trips to
And Saruman tells you what to do with such persuasion that following his the countryside in the 1920s
orders is a pleasure. The very sound of his voice casts such a and 1930s. However, he
reasonableness over his words that analyzing their meaning is beside the quickly became aware of the
point. In this he is very like the seductive voice of Smaug, the voice that damage that the combustion
lures the little fishes in with gently smiling jaws. This power of creation -- engine was inflicting on that
creation of desire to please, of willingness to carry out orders -- is the countryside, and when it
closest thing to a spell we find in The Lord of the Rings, and it is truly an became difficult to obtain
en-chant-ment, a creation of a false consciousness through the sound of gasoline during World War II,
the voice. Saruman's modus operandi seems to be: Take care of the he gladly gave up his car and
sounds and the sense will take care of itself. never bought another.

For all his honeyed tones, however, it cannot be forgotten that Saruman's However, ambivalent as he
most loyal servant is named Wormtongue. Gríma's verbal power is not as may have been about
strong as Saruman's and his intentions are more clearly understood by automobiles, Tolkien seems
those who overhear him. In Théoden's hall, Gríma accuses Gandalf of to have appreciated
lying, and Gandalf replies, "That word comes too oft and too easy from typewriters (despite his
your lips," (TT I, chap. 6) implying that Gríma accuses others of lying so persistent complaints to his
readily because he himself lies. Likewise, at Orthanc, Saruman tells the publishers and other
assembled men of Rohan that he alone can help them, and Gimli replies, correspondents about the
"The words of this wizard stand on their heads. . . . In the language of amount of time he has spent
Orthanc, help means ruin, and saving means slaying, that is plain" (TT I, typing up his manuscripts all
chap. 10). Saruman's words, again, are the words of a politician making by himself because he's too
campaign promises, of a slick salesman with a dodgy product to unload; poor to employ a typist) -- in
they are the epic equivalent of Orwell's Newspeak. one of his later letters he
comments that his dream is
Saruman also exhibits the moral ambivalence already seen in Boromir, an to have a custom electric
ability to persuade himself and others that neutrality is a virtue, when in typewriter made with special
fact it is nothing -- that's the meaning of neutrality, it's neither good nor fonts for his Tengwar and
bad. An overweening belief in one's own good intentions leads, as the Runic alphabets (Letters, p.
proverb says, to Hell. Sauron's evil is on an epic scale, a peril to the soul, 344). We can only imagine
but Saruman's evil is somehow more familiar to modern readers, because what he might have
it is all around us even now, telling us to despoil the environment because accomplished with a modern
it is expedient, because we need the resources now, and more computer! Certainly it would
seductively, telling us that we are the Masters of the World ourselves and have made the compiling of
have the right to take from it what we will. The danger of his voice is that it his numerous versions of
tells us what we want to hear. tales infinitely easier for him.

In keeping with the themes of this volume of The Lord of the Rings, it is
significant that Saruman's exposure takes place in the open air, in the light
of day. He cannot sustain his seductive voice in competition with that fresh
air and sunshine. The power of the trees has torn apart his war machines
and his battlements. His spell has come to an end. Clarity once again is
achieved by walking from inside to outside, but in this case, the clarity is
an exposure for the one who emerges.

Moving Forward

The first book of The Two Towers has followed one part of the divided
Fellowship, first separated, then reunited, then split in a different
configuration as Gandalf and Pippin head off in one direction while
Aragorn, Gimli, Legolas, and Merry head in another. The next book will
follow the other thread, as Frodo and Sam head for Mordor. Having shown
us the power and life force of nature, Tolkien will lead us next into the
Wasteland.

Lesson 7: The Two Towers: Seeking Sauron

The story switches to Frodo's persistence in his quest, assisted by the loyal Sam
and the unreliable Gollum.

Our Story Thus Far

The second book of The Two Towers switches from the adventures of
Merry, Pippin, Aragorn, Gimli, Legolas, and Gandalf to the journey of
Frodo the Ringbearer ever closer to Mordor, accompanied by the faithful
Sam and the not-so-faithful Gollum. The events of this book take place
simultaneously with those of the first book (the chronology in Appendix B
at the end of The Return of the King shows how these events intermesh).
They are heading into the Wasteland, dead land blasted by Sauron's
poisons, but even as they trudge forward, small sparks of life light their
way.

Frodo and Sam have set off from Amon Hen, moving ever eastward, with
Gollum on their tail. They capture Gollum, and force him to guide them to
Mordor, much as he had agreed to guide Bilbo out of the mountain all
those years ago, and this time his promise is bound by an oath on the
Ring.

First Gollum leads them through the Dead Marshes, but as they get closer
to the Gate of Mordor, Gollum's psychological stresses become more
evident, torn between some latent spark of allegiance to the Hobbits, who
have treated him better than anyone else he has encountered, and his
desire for the Ring, his Precious. On reaching the Gate, however, there is
no way to get in undetected. Gollum offers to show them another way,
more secret and "darker," that only he knows about. Although his good will
is dubious, Frodo and Sam have little option but to take him up on his offer
to guide them through Cirith Ungol.

Sam asks Gollum to catch them some meat, as he and Frodo have been
subsisting on nothing but elvish lembas since leaving Amon Hen. Gollum
provides two rabbits, and Sam prepares a stew -- a feast to the two
Hobbits, but the fire smoulders and draws the attention of Men. They are
captured by Faramir, Boromir's brother, although Gollum has slipped off
before the Men arrive. They witness a battle between the Men of Gondor
and the Men of the South, and Sam sees an oliphaunt, but he also sees
death in battle, which he doesn't much like.

Faramir takes the two Hobbits to the Gondorians' secret refuge, Henneth
Annûn, while he decides what to do with them. Frodo, mindful of Boromir's
betrayal, is mistrustful of Faramir, and Faramir, knowing that Boromir is
dead but not knowing the circumstances, is suspicious of Frodo. They
eventually reach a trust in each other, but Sam inadvertently reveals that
Frodo has the Ring. Faramir is then presented with the same test that has
faced every powerful character in this story: will he or will he not attempt to
wrest the Ring from the Ringbearer? Unlike his brother, however, he
stands by his original claim: "Not if I found it by the highway would I take
it."

Gollum has tracked the Hobbits to Henneth Annûn, and once again there
is a chance to kill him without guilt, but once again, Frodo intervenes to
save him. Faramir warns Frodo that Gollum's secret entrance to Mordor is
dangerous, but Frodo persists in following the only path that is open to
him. They are sent on, however, with provisions -- yet another unexpected
respite and resupplying after an exhausting crisis.

The Hobbits and Gollum trudge onwards. They see the army of Mordor
marching from Minas Morgul to lay siege to Minas Tirith: the War has
begun. Frodo and Sam fall asleep. Gollum, coming upon them, almost has
a moment of redemption, but Sam wakens to see him "pawing" Frodo, and
his harsh words only serve to confirm Gollum in his plans to betray them.
He leads the Hobbits up the stairs of Cirith Ungol and abandons them to
Shelob, daughter of the spider Ungoliant, the chief ally of Melkor, Sauron's
predecessor. Shelob is the mother of the vicious spiders of Mirkwood who
captured Bilbo and the dwarves in The Hobbit -- yet another recurring
pattern. Abandoned in the dark, Frodo uses the gift of Galadriel, the star
glass, to light their way and temporarily blind Shelob, but they cannot
escape -- Gollum grabs Sam to prevent him from calling out a warning,
and Shelob stings Frodo with her venom. Sam drives off the spider, but
Frodo appears to be dead.
Sam feels that he has no choice but to take the Ring and complete the
quest himself. Cornered by the Orcs that guard this minor entrance to
Sauron's realm, Sam puts on the Ring, and, invisible, overhears them talk
about Shelob's poison. He realizes, too late, that Frodo is not dead but
poisoned into a coma. But the Orcs have dragged Frodo into their
stronghold and the gates are barred, with Sam locked outside. And there
the story ended when The Lord of the Rings was first published, for the
third volume did not come out for another year!

Villainous Doubles: Gollum and Sméagol

The Lord of the Rings is a story permeated by doubles and pairs.

Gandalf and Saruman are a pair of opposed wizards, representing the
best and worst that wizards can do. Gimli and Legolas are
representatives of traditionally antagonistic races who form a pair united Mythological Doubles
by their friendly rivalry in battle kills. And Gollum is probably the most
complex character in The Lord of the Rings, certainly the most Twins run rampant
psychologically tortured. Many critics complained that Tolkien's throughout Indo-European
characters were too black-and-white, all good or all bad. Certainly mythology, from the divine
Sauron is unmitigated evil, but Saruman is explicitly portrayed as a fallen Asvins of the Hindus and the
wise man, overcome by the temptations of the mind and its power. Dioscuri of the Greeks
Gollum is even more divided, an evil and dangerous character who (Castor and Polydeuces) to
comes close to redemption, but not close enough. Romulus and Remus, the
founders of Rome, and the
When we first meet Gollum in The Hobbit, he is deceitful and tricky, but nameless Twins of Macha
even then his memories of "days when he had been less lonely and who give their name to the
sneaky and nasty" (H, chap. 5) are kindled by his riddle-contest with ceremonial center of
Bilbo. Those memories of happier times put him out of temper, however, medieval Ulster, Emain
and this pattern recurs with increasing intensity -- the more he is recalled Macha. Many mythologies
to what is good in him and in the world, the more he recoils into evil have creation myths in which
actions. the world is created by the
sacrifice or dismemberment
The originally simple dichotomy within Gollum's character, a
of an individual whose name
remembrance of the past in a far different present, widens until it
means "twin" -- the Vedic
becomes a split personality, Gollum (the personality dominated by the
Yamá or the Germanic Ymir,
Ring) and Sméagol (the remnant of his original personality; not a
for instance. On a smaller
particularly delightful fellow, but merely weak, not corrupt), or as Sam
scale, this pattern can be
calls them, Stinker and Slinker. As Frodo realizes, these two
seen in the story of Romulus
personalities can be distinguished by personal pronouns: Sméagol refers
and Remus, where Remus is
to himself in the singular, while Gollum, the second personality, refers to
himself in the plural (i.e., himself and Sméagol). killed (with varying
explanations) in the process
Gollum's "doubleness" goes back even farther than his psychological of founding the city of Rome.
fragmentation, however. When Gandalf first relates to Frodo the story of Mythological twins and
Sméagol's acquisition of the Ring, we find out that it was actually doubles, therefore, are not
originally discovered by Sméagol's friend, Déagol. This pattern of always united by brotherly
naming, Sméagol/Déagol, is typical of mythological twins and doubles, love -- one often simply
and Tolkien has used the pattern before in the naming of the Dwarves, exists as a shadowy double
where rhyming names indicate that the individuals so named are not of his brother (the real "hero")
entirely individual but part of a set. Sméagol's first corrupt act under the for the sole purpose of dying,
Ring's influence was to kill this "double" and appropriate the Ring for just as Déagol exists for
himself; interestingly, his rationale for the murder was that it was his Sméagol.
birthday, and the Ring should have been his present. In a very real
sense, this was not only Sméagol's birthday, but also the birth-day of
Gollum.

Frodo faces several warning examples of the Ring's power -- the Nazgûl,
examples of what happens to those who accept Rings from Sauron, and
Boromir, an example of the desire for power that the Ring can incite --
but these are both examples of the dangers and results of the Ring on
Men. Gollum is a more disturbing figure because he is so much closer to
being a Hobbit. As Gandalf warned, the kind of power the Ring bestows
is in concordance with the natural power of the one who holds it; Hobbits
are small, provincial, domestic creatures. What does the Ring do to
Gollum, besides kindle in him a willingness to kill in order to possess it?
It makes him shun the sun and burrow as far underground as he can go.
His vision of the power he will hold when he regains his Precious is
pitifully simple: "See, my precious: if we has it, then we can escape, even
from Him, eh? Perhaps we grows very strong, stronger than Wraiths.
Lord Sméagol? Gollum the Great? The Gollum! Eat fish every day, three
times a day, fresh from the Sea." (TT I, chap. 2.) In other words, the
Gollum aspect envisions power as being able to eat well and not being
bullied. (Notice that in naming this powerful creature, he first thinks of
calling himself Sméagol but quickly switches to Gollum names.)

The Sméagol aspect finds this vision attractive, but his desire for the
Ring is tempered by his desire to be helpful to someone who has been
kind to him -- Frodo. Although his Precious holds the promise to assist
the Hobbits, Sméagol's desire to help Frodo (and not Sam) seems to
come as much from the fact that Frodo took the Elf rope off of Sméagol's
leg and speaks nicely to him, as his possession of the Ring. His near
fondness for Frodo as an individual supercedes his distrust of and hatred
for Hobbits in general and Bagginses in particular, and ironically, what
allows Frodo the insight to treat Gollum/Sméagol with such compassion
is his experience as the Ringbearer. Thus, Gollum is not only double in
himself, but he is a form of double for Frodo, as well. He also shows how
Frodo would be split, were he to claim the Ring, with his own, Hobbitish
personality trapped within the corrupt, Ring-born personality.
Gollum and Sméagol represent two competing desires, one for complete
self-reliance, the other for connection with others. Gollum's journey with
Frodo and Sam through the Dead Marshes to the Gate of Mordor, and
then from Henneth Annûn to Cirith Ungol, forces him to experience
connection for the first time since he acquired the Ring, over five
hundred years before. It is important to remember that all of his
interactions with other beings, from Sauron to Aragorn, in the intervening
years have consisted of these people torturing him (from his point of
view) for information about the Ring. It is interesting to note that despite
all these years of loneliness and torture, during which he has been purely
Gollum, the Sméagol side emerges as soon as he is shown even a scrap
of kindness from one of his own kind. This seems to be more proof that,
as Gandalf noted, Hobbits (and their kin) are tougher than the High Ones
would imagine. Yet even though Sméagol stubbornly persists in Gollum's
inner core, like a seed that lies dormant in the earth for centuries waiting
for the right climatic conditions to sprout, he is not strong enough to
overcome the desire for the Ring that leads Gollum to betray Sam and
Frodo to Shelob.

Brotherly Doubles: Boromir and Faramir

While Gollum and Sméagol represent the strengths and weaknesses

inherent in Hobbits, Boromir and Faramir represent the strengths and
weaknesses of Men. Boromir in himself exhibited the limitations of the
heroic ideal of the warrior; Faramir shows how those qualities can be
brought to a higher level with the addition of some wizardly wisdom and
teaching.

We know from the Council of Elrond that Boromir had a brother who
dreamed repeatedly of a voice crying out to seek for the Sword that was
Broken and Isildur's Bane. From this one fragment of information we are
already inclined to believe that Boromir's brother is of a more mystical bent
that Boromir himself. His story of seeing Boromir's funeral boat also has
the air of a vision, though he says it was no dream; nonetheless, he sees
Boromir's corpse surrounded by an unearthly light. Yet Faramir is also an
accomplished warrior, if not as single-mindedly accomplished as his
brother. Boromir, to put it bluntly, is a jock, pure and simple, while Faramir
is more in the mold of the sportsman-scholar (an ideal still alive in
Tolkien's youth, though the relic of a vanished age today).

Faramir, in fact, has long suspected the existence of the Ring as the result
of his own deductions from the kind of questions Gandalf asked in his
researches in the treasury of Minas Tirith, when Faramir was still a youth.
Not only was he able to deduce this, but he also had the wisdom to keep
his deductions to himself. Faramir is also well aware of his brother's
strengths and drawbacks: "Boromir, the proud and fearless, often rash,
ever anxious for the victory of Minas Tirith (and his own glory therein)..."
(TT II, chap. 5.)

The story that Faramir tells of the failure of the kings of Gondor and their
replacement by their stewards is very reminiscent of the decline of the
Merovingian kings of France, whose stewards, known as Mayors of the
Palace, slowly became the de facto governors of the Merovingian's realm.
Eventually one of them, Pepin III, took power into his own hands and
dethroned the last Merovingian king, Childeric III, thereby initiating the
dynasty known later as the Carolingians, named after Pepin's grandson,
Charlemagne. When Boromir asked his father, "How many hundreds of
years needs it to make a steward a king, if the king returns not?"
Denethor's reported response was: "Few years, maybe, in other places of
less royalty. In Gondor ten thousand years would not suffice" (TT II, chap.
5). This places the situation of the Gondorians very much in the mold of
the situation facing the early Carolingians. And once again, it seems to be
more and more merely an accident of circumstances that has kept Boromir
on the straight and narrow all his life, up to the time he encountered the
Ring. He had not yet fallen merely because he had not yet been tempted.

Again following the pattern of crisis and recuperation, Frodo first

encounters danger in Boromir and then friendship in Faramir, who gives
him a chance to rest and eat, and sends him on his way with provisions for
the road ahead. Faramir also provides a double, not only for his own
brother, but for Eomer of the Rohirrim. While Eomer is Théoden's nephew
and Faramir is Denethor's son, both are cast in the role of surviving
younger heir who is at odds with his uncle/father. Eomer is quickly
reconciled to his uncle, but Denethor never truly forgives Faramir for
outliving his brother. Faramir also is a kind of double for Aragorn, both in
replacing Aragorn as the object of Eowyn's love, and in becoming a true
steward to Aragorn when he takes his rightful place as king of Gondor.

Heroic Doubles: Frodo and Sam

At the beginning of The Fellowship of the Ring, Tolkien's narrative point of

view was chiefly located in Frodo; with the breaking of the Fellowship, the
point of view is also shattered, but usually lies with a Hobbit. Sam's point
of view has been presented on occasion, but mostly as a change of pace.
With the second book of The Two Towers, however, Sam comes more and
more to the fore at the expense of Frodo. Tolkien often stated that Sam
was based on the kind of working-class soldier he had known in World
War I, whom he felt had been the true heroes of a mismanaged war, the
men who slogged on no matter what, loyal and persistent. Sam is, in many
ways, the fantasy counterpart of Bunter in Dorothy L. Sayers' Lord Peter
Wimsey mysteries (and Sayers was an acquaintance of both Tolkien and
Lewis -- Tolkien read the Wimsey mysteries with varying degrees of
appreciation, but was certainly familiar with them). Tolkien also conceived
of the story of The Lord of the Rings as an example of the importance of
the small and overlooked, the "ignoble," in the grand scheme of things:
"[W]ithout the high and noble the simple and vulgar is utterly mean; and
without the simple and ordinary the noble and heroic is meaningless."
(Carpenter, The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien). Throughout the story, Tolkien
has presented events from the point of view of the simple and ordinary,
and as Frodo becomes increasingly "noble" as he meets the challenges of
his quest, the point of view shifts from him to the very ordinary Sam.

Frodo's experience as the Ringbearer forces him to sacrifice himself.

Unlike Bilbo, who didn't realize until he reached Smaug's treasure horde
that there was going to be a slight problem in transporting his payment
back home, Frodo has suspected from the beginning of his quest that he
will not survive it, and as he trudges onwards, this suspicion becomes a
conviction. He also becomes reconciled to this fate. In a way, however,
this also makes him a less satisfactory consciousness for the narrative
point of view. It's hard to empathize with a protagonist who has lost all
hope of survival. Therefore, it's Sam's consciousness that becomes our
point of view -- in a large part because Sam is not as wise and saintly as
Frodo, because he is, to a certain extent, too dumb to understand what
he's gotten himself into.

Sam also takes on the less noble emotions and concerns that Frodo will
not allow himself to act upon -- especially, dislike and distrust of Gollum,
but also the practical concerns of food and sleep. Although Sam is the
epitome of the loyal servant, he also shows the limitations of his role. He is
indiscreet; he is mistrustful; he is, quite frankly, a little jealous of the
compassion Frodo shows toward Gollum; and at the crucial moment, he
makes the wrong decision about the Ring.

Once again we see the dangers of the Ring -- even though Sam's
intentions are good, his choice to take the Ring when Frodo appears to be
dead shows how good intentions are particularly deadly where the Ring is
concerned. Sam's loyalty is to Frodo and Frodo alone; he has come on the
quest to care for Frodo, not because he understands the stakes in
anything but the most general way. The Ring, however, has a kind of
sentience that causes beings who come within its orbit to act in ways that
will advance the Ring's agenda at the expense of their own. Gandalf, in
particular, has suggested that it cannot have been coincidence that
brought Bilbo to Gollum's underground lake at precisely the right moment
to pick up the Ring, when it was increasingly clear that Gollum was never
going to leave the mountain. This power insidiously causes Sam to make a
decision in the best interests of the Ring -- taking it from a disabled Bearer
-- instead of sticking by his master, Frodo. After all, Aragorn, Gimli, and
Legolas stop to give Boromir the best funeral they can manage under the
circumstances -- we would expect that without the influence of the Ring,
Sam would never have simply abandoned Frodo's body, even if he were
dead.

This crucial misstep, however, gives Sam his own chance to truly become
heroic. Putting on the Ring -- always a dangerous action -- allows him to
discover his mistake by overhearing the Orcs, and as soon as he knows
that Frodo is alive, all his intention turns back to his loyalty towards his
master and the Ring's power over him fades.

Moving Forward

In order to rescue Frodo, Sam will have to develop the kind of wiliness that
he has left to others up to this point -- something more than his practical,
down-to-earth common sense. But that will have to wait for the final
volume of The Lord of the Rings. First the interlacing adventures of the
rest of the Fellowship must wind to their ends.

Lesson 8: The Return of the King: The Siege of Gondor

The battle of Men against Sauron reaches its climax, with losses along the way.

Our Story Thus Far

The first book of The Return of the King alternates chiefly between Pippin, within the city of Minas Tirith as
the forces of Mordor lay siege, and Merry, in army of Théoden coming to the Gondorians' aid. Once again,
the narrative point of view is focused in the Hobbits; when the scene briefly becomes Hobbitless, as
Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas travel the Paths of the Dead, Gimli's is the main point of view. Throughout the
trilogy, Tolkien not only prefers to narrate from the point of view of the Everyman -- he narrates literally
from the "lowest" perspective.

Gandalf takes Pippin to Minas Tirith, where Pippin meets its steward, Denethor, the father of Boromir and
Faramir. Impulsively, Pippin asks to become one of Denethor's men and swears him an oath of fealty. He
is oriented to Minas Tirith by a soldier, Beregond, and his son Bergil. A darkness spreads over the city that
the sun cannot pierce.

Meanwhile, Merry travels with Aragorn, Gimli, Legolas, and Théoden's army back to Edoras. Merry, for his
part, impulsively takes an oath of fealty to Théoden. Whereas Pippin's allegiance to Denethor arises as
much from a desire to prove that his valor outweighs his stature, Merry's oath arises out of pure love for
an aged man who has transcended his infirmities and is making a final stand for his principles.

Meanwhile, several Rangers intercept Théoden's army and deliver a message from Elrond: "If thou art in
haste, remember the Paths of the Dead." (RK I, chap. 1.) After looking into the Palantír of Orthanc to
proclaim himself as the Returned King to Sauron, Aragorn proceeds ahead of the army to Edoras with the
Rangers, Gimli, and Legolas, and then heads to the Paths of the Dead. In Edoras, Eowyn attempts to
dissuade Aragorn from his path, assuming that he is going to his death just when he is needed most. His
insistence, necessary for him, reinforces Eowyn's feelings of abandonment and despair. The Dead whom
Aragorn summons are the spirits of Men who had sworn their fealty to Isildur in the first war against
Sauron, but foreswore their oath. They have been waiting since the end of the Second Age to redeem
themselves.

Meanwhile, Théoden and his army rendezvous with the citizenry of Rohan, led by Eowyn, in Dunharrow. A
messenger from Gondor arrives to call Denethor's allies to his side, although the Rohirrim are already
preparing to come to the aid of Minas Tirith. Théoden will not take Merry with him into battle, however.
Nonetheless, a mysterious young warrior who calls himself Dernhelm offers to sneak Merry along with
him.
Meanwhile, Pippin attends upon his new lord, Denethor. Resting with his friend Beregond on the
battlements, they see Faramir attacked by five Black Riders as he races for the gates and is rescued by
Gandalf. When Faramir reports of his encounter with Frodo and Sam, Gandalf is troubled, but Denethor is
enraged, for he wishes that the Ring had come to him -- like Boromir, he is confident that he has the
power to withstand its corrupting influence. Faramir and his troops man the outer defenses of the city as
the Siege of Gondor begins. News comes that Cair Andros has fallen. The outer defenses fall, and
Faramir is wounded not only by weapons but by the Black Breath of the Nazgûl. Denethor now finally
goes mad, abandoning the defense of the city to Gandalf's leadership, while he broods, and finally
commands his men to take Faramir -- unconscious and feverish, but alive -- to the mausoleum of the
kings and stewards of Gondor, where he causes a funeral pyre to be built to burn himself and his son
alive. Pippin tries to find Gandalf, and does find him in the act of defying the Lord of the Nazgûl to try to
enter the city. And the horns of Rohan are heard with the first cockcrow of the unexpected dawn.

Meanwhile, the army of Rohan has been led by secret ways to Gondor by the leader of the Wild Men. At
their arrival, the Battle of the Pelennor Fields begins -- the Lord of the Nazgûl diverts his attention from the
gate of Gondor to face this new assault. The terror induced by his winged steed causes Théoden's horse
to rear in panic and fall, crushing the king beneath him. Dernhelm and Merry are left to face the Nazgûl,
who boasts that he cannot be hindered by any living man. But Dernhelm is not a man -- he is Eowyn in
disguise, and Merry is not a man but a Hobbit. Merry manages to cut the Nazgûl's Achilles tendon and
Eowyn to decapitate him, but both, again, are wounded in body and by the Black Breath.

Meanwhile, ship of the Corsairs of Umbar, allies of Sauron, sail up the river, but just as they reach the city
they unfurl the standard of Aragorn, for it is he and the Rangers, with Gimli and Legolas, and the battle
resumes.

Meanwhile, Denethor has been preparing to burn himself alive. He reveals that he has a palantír through
which he has seen Sauron's plans -- of course, he has just seen what Sauron wanted him to see. Gandalf
manages to save Faramir, but Denethor goes to his death in delusion. Merry and Pippin are reunited in
the Houses of Healing, where Merry, Faramir, and Eowyn all require treatment. Aragorn sets them on the
way to health with the application of athelas, proving thereby that he is the true king. The Hobbits are
reunited with Dwarf and Elf, and Gimli and Legolas tell of the journey down the Paths of the Dead, and
how the Dead redeemed their promise by driving the enemy from their ships at Pelargir, and then Aragorn
and his army sailed to the relief of Minas Tirith.

Meanwhile, the leaders of the respective armies and Aragorn determine to advance on the gates of
Mordor. When they confront the emissary of Sauron, however, he shows them Sam's sword, Frodo's
mithril shirt, and an elven cloak, intimating that they have been captured. Gandalf, however, demands to
see Frodo and Sam themselves, whom Sauron's lieutenant will not produce. The battle begins, and Pippin
finds himself in the thick of it. Buried under the corpse of a troll, he loses consciousness just as he hears
someone calling, "The Eagles are coming!" and his last thought is that this is just like the end of Bilbo's
tale.

This book is the most interlaced of The Lord of the Rings, beginning with its main characters scattered yet
all working towards the same end, so that the action must switch back and forth among them. Tolkien
manages this with the panache almost of a silent-film serial, leaving each strand hanging at the most
precipitous moment -- will Denethor manage to burn Faramir alive? Where have the men of Rohan come
from? Will Aragorn return from the Paths of the Dead? Once the strands of this section are reunited, they
head for Mordor to try to catch up the remaining loose thread: Frodo. And then Tolkien leaves us with the
biggest cliff-hanger of all.
Eowyn's Dilemma: The Role of Women

As many have commented, the female characters are few and far between
in The Lord of the Rings: Lobelia Sackville-Baggins, Rosie Cotton,
Goldberry, Arwen, Galadriel, and Eowyn, and that is about it (except for The Haradrim
the garrulous woman in the Houses of Healing, and, perhaps, Shelob). Of
these, Goldberry, Galadriel, and Eowyn are the only ones who have any The Men who are Sauron's
extended presence, and Eowyn is the only one whose function is to act, allies are referred to as
rather than to explain. "Haradrim," Men of the
South; they are also called
There are doubtless many reasons in Tolkien's own psychological profile "Swertings" and "Southrons."
why he did not have many female characters in his magnum opus -- and it They are described as dark-
should be noted as well that the few here are far more than in The Hobbit, skinned and somewhat
which has precisely none. However, Tolkien's personal interests aside, the opulently dressed. The name
literature on which he based The Lord of the Rings also is very biased "Haradrim" is derived from
towards the male characters, and women appear in these stories -- Sigelhearwan, the Old
Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Sir Orfeo, the Arthurian English name for Ethiopians.
romances, the Norse sagas -- exactly as they appear here, as love objects Tolkien had published a two-
far removed from the mess and stress of war, as wise women who guide part article on
the seeker, as monsters who must be overcome. In this context, Tolkien's "Sigelwaraland" in the
depiction of Eowyn is actually quite unusual, for the heroic sagas never medieval studies journal
consider the psychological damage that could be caused to a brave and Medium Aevum in 1932 and
competent woman who is relegated to tending the home fire. 1934 -- another example of
Tolkien's professional
The figure of a woman warrior was common in Northern mythology, both
philological researches
Germanic and Celtic, although the extent to which she may have existed in
influencing his fiction. The
real life is open to question. (Some recent archaeological finds in northern
element sigel means "sun,"
England and Scotland suggest that the Celtic woman warrior, at least,
but the second element is
might not have been as purely symbolic a figure as has been hitherto
untranslatable, and that is the
assumed.) Norse mythology had its shield-maidens, young women who
element that Tolkien used as
took up swords and fought alongside men, disdaining marriage until,
the basis for his name of
invariably, they meet the one warrior who is their match. And of course
Haradrim, giving it a referent
there are the Valkyries who incited men to battle and welcomed the slain
if not an etymology.
to Valhalla; valkyries, too, however, often ended up married to a warrior
they had taken under their wing.

The Celts had battle goddesses such as the Morrígan and woman warriors
such as Medb, Macha, Bodb, and Nemhain. What is missing in most of
these legends, however, is an explanation of why these women are
warriors -- they just are. The closest we get is the story of Boudicca, the
Iceni queen who with her daughters took up the sword against the Romans
who had overthrown the will of Boudicca's husband, leaving his territory
divided between the Romans and his wife; the Romans took all the land
and governance for themselves, raped her daughters, and publicly flogged
her. This certainly seems to be sufficient reason to take up arms. Another,
similar character is the Irish legendary heroine Nessa, who became the
leader of a fían (an outlaw warrior band) after her foster-fathers were killed
by another fían in order to avenge them. In both these cases, battle is a
kind of madness that descends on women who are violently bereft of their
loved ones and of their social status.

If Tolkien were as anti-woman as some of his critics have claimed, it would

be remarkable that he never suggests that Eowyn should have been a
man. Her abilities as a horsewoman and her command of weapons are not
represented as something extraordinary or perverse. Her abilities as a
leader are highly valued by her uncle and brother and their people -- it is
these talents, ironically, that trap her at home, where she must lead the
civilians while the men ride off to war. And what drives her ultimately to
disguise herself as a man and risk her life in battle is not anger at her own
violation but a deep depression at being unable to take action in any other
context.

The Ring and The Ring

Tolkien once snapped, in response to a question about the relation of The

Lord of the Rings with Wagner's Ring cycle, "Both rings were round, and
there the resemblance ceases" (Carpenter, Letters, p. 306). Yet Tolkien
and Wagner were both drawing on the same mythology to create their
works. Tolkien's insistence that he was not "influenced" by Wagner or any
other modern treatment of mythological stories seems to spring from the
fact that Tolkien regarded himself as doing it right, because he felt that all
the other artists who had grappled with the material got it wrong. This also
seems to underlie his later estrangement from C. S. Lewis, whose
Christian works he felt were misguided, and his irascible attitude towards
modern literature in general.

Eowyn also bears a strong resemblance to Brynhild of the Völsungasaga.

Brynhild was a Valkyrie who disobeyed Odin and as a punishment was
imprisoned within a ring of fire until a hero was brave enough to rescue
her. Gunnar wishes to marry her but is not brave enough to try, so his
friend Sigurd assumes his shape and does it instead. Brynhild thus ends
up married to Gunnar (who looks like the man who rescued her) instead of
Sigurd (the man who has the heroic nature that rescued her). Naturally, no
good can come of this.

Tolkien takes this basic narrative pattern and twists it to his own ends.
Eowyn's imprisonment is psychological, and she, like Brynhild, thinks she
is in love with a hero and ends up married to the supporting player.
However, while the Völsungasaga is a tragedy, in The Lord of the Rings,
Eowyn's love for Aragorn -- the man who "wakes her up" from her
imprisonment -- turns out to be the misguided love, an adolescent crush on
a charismatic leader. The problems in the Völsungasaga arise from the
fact that Sigurd takes on Gunnar's appearance, while it is the difference in
their natures that is the key to Brynhild's love. Aragorn and Faramir are not
identical in appearance, but time after time characters seeing one or the
other notices an identity in their natures -- both have about them the air of
long-lost Númenor -- and this nobility of breeding and of mind is what
Eowyn loves.
The fact of the matter is that in the kind of literature that provided Tolkien's
inspiration for The Lord of the Rings, there are very few role models for
women, and no matter how strong the female characters may be, they
always exist entirely in relationship to men -- they are wives, lovers,
mothers, daughters. No matter how independent they may be for a phase
of their life, these women must end up socialized or dead, as one scholar
put it. Eowyn has status and a certain amount of power as the niece of the
king, but her independence is in the form of responsibility, which ties her to
Théoden's side or in a safe refuge with the civilian population. Eowyn's
dilemma is crystallized in the fact that, as a warrior, she circumvents the
Lord of the Nazgûl's imperviousness to attacks by living men by being a
woman, but she would not have been in the right place the give the fatal
blow if she were not truly a warrior as well.

The Paths of the Dead: Death and Rebirth III

Although Aragorn is the King whose return marks the end of the Third Age,
it sometimes seems that most of his story has taken place offstage, before
this epic began. In a sense, his regaining of his birthright is tangential to
the quest to destroy the Ring. Aragorn and Frodo are both working against
the same Enemy, but Frodo simply needs to destroy the Ring -- one
action, difficult as it may be to achieve -- while Aragorn's task requires not
only prowess, but politics. Once Frodo has destroyed the Ring, his task is
over, but Aragorn's is just beginning.

Gandalf's death and rebirth in the abyss of Moria was extreme and literal,
and he returns with truly changed and amplified powers. Death has power
-- Sauron knows that, and his most terrible lieutenants draw their power
from their Undeadness. But Aragorn has the option of calling on his own
dead power, if he will risk it.

The Paths of the Dead are yet another passage underneath a mountain.
Throughout Tolkien's novels, underneath the mountain is where death
lives -- the undead Gollum, the dead civilization of Moria, the foresworn
dead. Unlike Gandalf, who battles the figure of death -- the Balrog -- and
defeats it, Aragorn offers the dead the chance to redeem themselves and
become truly dead, rather than restless spirits. He has to risk himself and
his men, for these spirits drive men mad and if he has miscalculated, he
loses everything. Furthermore, when Gandalf fell into the abyss, the Balrog
took him against his will in a fight; when Aragorn traverses the Paths of the
Dead, he does it of his own free will, of his own choosing.

The Dead Men of Dunharrow had pledged themselves to support Gondor

in the last War of the Ring, at the end of Second Age, but they had turned
to Sauron instead. Aragorn gives them the chance to redeem themselves
in this war, but also, in so doing he ties up a loose end from the previous
age. The Fourth Age, which Aragorn will initiate, will be the Age of Men,
the age in which Elves and wizards will fade from the world. This will
become the world we live in.

The Battle of the Five Armies that concludes The Hobbit is a battle among
Dwarves, Elves, Men, Orcs, and Wargs. Although the overthrow of
Isengard is achieved by Ents and Huorns, and the Huorns tidy up the
pickings from the battle of Helm's Deep, the War of the Ring is primarily a
war of Men against Men and Orcs. The representatives of the other races
are merely token forces. By giving the Dead Men a chance to redeem
themselves, Aragorn also gets rid of them, beginning the task of clearing
the boards of the hangovers from the previous ages and focusing the
coming age on Men.

At the same time, demonstrating that he has power over the dead -- that
he can summon them and they will come to his aid -- proves that Aragorn
is ready to become king. Although there is no organized religion in The
Lord of the Rings, Tolkien made it clear in his Silmarillion writings that
there had been worship of God in Númenor, and that the kings of Númenor
were priest-kings. (The faint echo of that religion is seen in the Gondorian
practice of facing the west -- where the Númenorian temple had been --
before eating.) Priest-kings generally are believed to echo in their persons
the order of the whole cosmos -- when the king is healthy, wise, and
fruitful, the land is fruitful, too. (This kind of connection between king and
land is also the source of the belief that the true king is a healer -- as he
can harmonize nature and culture by his connection with the land, he can
harmonize the warring influences within an ailing body by his touch.) As
the micro-cosmos, the rightful king also has power over the land and under
the land. By summoning the dead, Aragorn risks becoming one of the
dead himself, but by doing it successfully, he shows that he is the rightful
king.

Théoden and Denethor: Models of Rule

The coming of a new king requires the passing of the old rule. The deaths
of Théoden and Denethor sadly but necessarily clear the ground for the
new regime. The manners of their deaths, however, provide another set of
doubles that illustrate the strengths and weaknesses of the status quo.

Both men have fallen victim to the lies of Sauron -- Théoden being fed
soul-sapping insinuations by Wormtongue, which only lets him hear what
Sauron (through Saruman) wants him to hear; Denethor by peering into
the palantír, which only shows him what Sauron wants him to see.
Théoden is aware that his day is passing and has no more interest in the
world or what happens to it. Denethor believes that he could continue to
have an active role in the new world, were he not surrounded by traitors.

Each man has an heir (Eomer and Faramir, respectively) who is charged
with patrolling their territory and sending any stranger to the capital for the
ruler to pass judgment upon; both Eomer and Faramir, when faced with
part of the Fellowship, makes the decision to let the stranger continue on
his business and indeed gives assistance in the form of horses or food.
(Notice again here that Aragorn and Frodo fulfill the same function as the
leader of the band of strangers who tests the young heir.) In each case,
the younger man has to make a decision on his own that is perceived by
the older man as a usurpation of his privilege, and in truth, these younger
men are making their first steps as rulers in making these decisions.

The first reaction of Théoden is to throw Eomer into prison, but when he
has had his mind cleared by Gandalf, his first action is to release Eomer,
recognizing that he made the right decision. But also, once Théoden is
confident of his own strength as a ruler, he is no longer threatened by his
nephew's independence, and indeed acknowledges that a good ruler is not
one who keeps all power in his own hands and sticks to the letter of the
law, but one who realizes that his own power derives from being able to
delegate to trustworthy lieutenants. Théoden knows that his time may be
short, but once the malice of Wormtongue is dissipated, he also knows
that there is no reason why he should not be active until the very end, and
the transition of power is a natural concomitant of the transition from life to
death.

Denethor's reactions are very different. He berates Faramir for not bringing
him the Ring, and states explicitly that he wished it were Faramir who were
dead rather than Boromir. He does not imprison his son, but immediately
sends him out on yet another dangerous mission. When Faramir is gravely
wounded, Denethor's response is not even to wait until he is dead, but to
try to burn them both alive. Although Denethor lives and sleeps in his
armor, claiming to be ever ready for war, when push comes to shove, he
caves in without even putting up the pretense of a fight. If he cannot have
it his way, he will have none at all, and neither will anyone else.

Théoden's recuperation brings his people together and minimizes their

losses in the War -- the civilians are sent to safety, and the warriors who
die only die in battle. Denethor's actions not only kill himself and nearly his
son, but they also force men like Beregond to commit murder, killing his
own compatriot in order to save Faramir. Arguably as well, the necessity of
Gandalf going to defuse Denethor's self-immolation makes Théoden's
death inevitable, for Gandalf is not there (as he had intended to be) to
draw the Nazgûl's fire.

Although they never meet, Denethor and Théoden are united by their
passing. Once they have gone, their positions pass to the two heirs who
had aroused their wrath, Faramir and Eomer. These two, however, will be
united by ties of kinship with the marriage of Eowyn, Eomer's sister, to
Faramir.

Moving Forward

As the story of The Lord of the Rings draws to its close and the Return of
the King becomes more and more of a possibility, the examples of
Théoden and Denethor offer paradigms of what Aragorn must learn and
must avoid if he is to become a good king. But before that can happen,
Frodo must complete his task.

Lesson 9: The Return of the King: The End of the Third Age
The Ring is destroyed, and the passing of Sauron's evil marks the transition from
the Age of Elves to the Age of Men.

Our Story Thus Far

The last book of The Lord of the Rings begins with Sam locked outside the guard tower of the Orcs where
Frodo is being held. Using the Ring and the light of Galadriel, he makes his way past the tower's stone
guardians, only to discover that the Orcs have mostly killed each other in a fight over Frodo's mithril shirt.
Sam witnesses the end of the quarrel, as the Orc Shagrat escapes with his loot -- the items Sauron's
lieutenant had shown as proof of the Hobbit's "capture" at the end of the previous book. He finds Frodo in
a prison cell, stripped and beaten, and in despair that, as he believes, the Ring has been taken from him.
He initially frames this as concern that the quest has failed, but when Sam reveals that he has the Ring,
Frodo calls Sam a thief and snatches the Ring back. Although he recovers instantly, this is our first
intimation that Frodo may have a difficult time relinquishing the Ring to the Cracks of Doom.

Disguised as Orcs, Frodo and Sam make their way slowly and painfully across the Plateau of Gorgoroth
to Mount Doom. They are briefly forced into an Orc troop, but manage to slip away; they realize that
Gollum is, once again, following them, but after his betrayal in Cirith Ungol, he keeps his distance. The
closer they come to Mount Doom, the harder it is to find water to sustain them. Sam finally realizes that
their journey will end, literally, at Mount Doom -- having pushed themselves to their limits in getting there,
they will have no way to get themselves home.

When they are almost at their destination, Gollum attacks. He and Frodo wrestle over the Ring, but Frodo
throws Gollum off and repels him by the power of authority that the Ring gives him. Sam now could kill
Gollum, but he finally feels the pity for Gollum, driven by a power larger than himself, that Bilbo and Frodo
have both experienced. At the Crack of Doom, however, Frodo at the last moment cannot destroy the
Ring, but claims it for his own. Gollum attacks again, and this time bites off the finger that holds the Ring.
But in his glee at finally recovering his Precious, he falls, with the Ring, into the Crack of Doom. With the
destruction of the Ring, everything that was created by its power -- all the works of Sauron, and Sauron
himself -- are destroyed as well.

Frodo and Sam fall, exhausted, after the Ring is destroyed, but they are rescued by Gandalf riding on
Gwaihir the Eagle. Finally, all the surviving members of the Fellowship -- Aragorn, Gandalf, Gimli,
Legolas, Merry, Pippin, Sam, and Frodo -- are reunited, and the beginnings of a new world age are set in
train. Meanwhile, in the darkest hours before the fall of Mordor, Faramir and Eowyn have been recovering
in Gondor, and Faramir has fallen in love with Eowyn. She is still in the thrall of her crush on Aragorn, but
as the world changes, she sees her heart clearly and agrees to marry Faramir. A lucky thing, as Aragorn
has finally achieved his birthright as King and now is able to marry his true love, Arwen, daughter of
Elrond.

Slowly, the members of the Fellowship make their ways back to their homes. Passing Isengard, they
discover that Treebeard has let Saruman and Wormtongue leave, thinking they are no longer a threat.
The pair is met on the road, making their way like beggars, but Saruman is not repentant. At Rivendell,
they see Bilbo once again, who is beginning to show the signs of age. But when the Hobbits finally arrive
back in the Shire, they discover that Saruman and Wormtongue have taken over, turning the Shire into a
kind of police state. The travelers rally the common Hobbits to their side, and, chiefly under the leadership
of Merry and Pippin (who are, after all, now seasoned soldiers) the Shire overthrows Saruman. Frodo
refuses to allow any Hobbit to kill Saruman, preferring instead to merely send him on the road again, but
Wormtongue stabs Saruman in the back and is himself felled by a Hobbit arrow.

Slowly, the Shire is put back to rights (Sam using his gift from Galadriel to help restore the trees chopped
down at Saruman's orders); Sam marries his sweetheart Rosie Cotton and starts a family; Merry and
Pippin become dashing young Hobbits-about-town. But Frodo only fades, withdrawing ever deeper into
his own kind of Ring hangover. Finally, however, he is brought to the Grey Havens, where the last ship to
the West will take him, with Gandalf, Galadriel, Elrond, and Bilbo, to the Elvish lands.

Journey's End

In contrast with the clash and stress of battle that faces Merry and Pippin, Frodo's completion of his quest
is literally a drag. The weight of the Ring makes simply walking difficult. He and Sam are traveling across
the most desolate Wasteland imaginable -- although Tolkien, like C. S. Lewis, was not fond of T. S. Eliot's
poetry, the imagery from the last section of Eliot's "Wasteland" are not inappropriate:
Here is no water but only rock Rock and no water and the sandy road The road winding above among the
mountains Which are mountains of rock without water . . .
--- T. S. Eliot, "The Wasteland," from Collected Poems 1909-1962
Gollum's role in the final destruction of the Ring is the payback, in a way, for the consistent pity that has
stayed the hands of all the Hobbits who have had the chance and the justification for killing him. Sam's
final insight shows him what a wretched creature Gollum is, how he is driven by a force infinitely more
strong than he is, which will only crush him in the end. The fact that Gollum is pitiable does not, however,
mean that he is guiltless. Tolkien does not subscribe to the philosophy that victimization is a blanket
exculpation for all sins committed in its aftermath.

Gollum's end may be Tolkien's response to the eternal question, particularly troubling for Christians, of the
role of Evil in a world created by an allegedly beneficent God. Gollum is evil -- even before acquiring the
Ring he was a weak and sneaky individual; he murdered to obtain it and is willing to murder again to
recover it; even when the minuscule embers of goodness are rekindled in him, he chooses betrayal
instead. Although Sam's brusqueness may have quelled Gollum's softening, Gollum still had the choice to
ignore Sam and follow his growing love for Frodo's kindness. Gollum's evil is unambiguously a matter of
his own free will, even though his choices put him in the thrall of a much stronger power that makes
subsequent choices for evil increasingly easier to take.

Thus, although Gollum's (inadvertent) destruction of the Ring not only causes the destruction of Sauron
and all his works, and also saves Frodo from the consequences of his claiming of the Ring, Gollum's own
act, as far as he was concerned, grew out of an evil impulse: he wanted the Ring, and he took it. Even if
the only thing he wants from its power is to have fresh fish from the sea three times a day, his lust for that
power causes him to break all the laws of the social contract.

Tolkien's answer to the question of why God allows Evil in the world seems to be twofold: first, it is
necessary for the operation of Free Will, but second -- despite every effort of the Good to battle Evil --
ultimately, Evil is itself self-defeating. The madnesses and lusts that Evil arouses end up at cross
purposes, so that the insane desire of one small, Hobbit-like Gollum confounds the vast, destructive works
of Sauron.

Sharkey's End

The final episode of the War of the Ring occurs just when it would seem that everything is over and our
heroes should be able to return home to peace and contentment. But when the Hobbits reach the Shire,
they discover yet another Wasteland in the making. Yes, just when they thought it was safe . . . Saruman
rears his ugly head again.

What is the purpose of the chapter "The Scouring of the Shire"? Some have seen it as Tolkien's
commentary on the Communists, the Fascists, or the Nazis. Others have seen it as part of Tolkien's
"paternalistic, reactionary, anti-intellectual, racist, fascistic, and, perhaps worst of all in contemporary
terms, irrelevant" world-view, according to Walter Schepsin in his essay, "The Fairy-tale Morality of The
Lord of the Rings."

First of all, it should be noted that this kind of "just when you thought it was safe" final episode, seemingly
irrelevant to the main theme of the main story or somehow out of place to modern literary sensibilities, is
actually quite typical of the longer prose narratives of the High Middle Ages that influenced Tolkien. Until
recently, scholars have been as apt to dismiss these episodes as evidence of either bad construction on
the part of the author or bad transmission on the part of the scribe, but it is now being realized that these
episodes were perceived by medieval audiences as integral parts of the story, although we still don't know
exactly why. One possibility is that the capping episode served as a kind of mini-sequel: "See, the story
doesn't end there -- Our Hero went on to have even more adventures!" Another possibility is that this
somehow tangential episode is meant to be a recognition that life (and God's Universe) is messy and
there are always loose ends that won't tie up. It may be an attempt to incorporate extra elements of oral
tradition associated with legendary heroes that didn't fit into the main story. Finally, the capping episode
may have been a metaphorical restatement of the main themes of the story, just to be sure that the
audience (who, remember, was usually hearing the story being recited rather than reading it silently) got
the message.
Critics have tended to label Tolkien "anti-egalitarian" and have pointed to "The Scouring of the Shire" as
evidence. "Look!" they say. "The Good Guys in The Lord of the Rings are all nobles whose nobility is
explicitly due to their lineage. The only examples of egalitarianism are seen under the rule of Mordor, and
under the influence of Saruman! That must mean that Tolkien thought democracy was evil!"

This is, quite frankly, nonsense. The "egalitarianism" of Sauron and Saruman simply consists of everyone
being equally enslaved -- and of profits and power going to a terrorist elite. There is no real egalitarianism
in the Shire under Saruman, there is simply the rhetoric of egalitarianism, more of Saruman's power of
vocal delusion. Although Tolkien called himself a conservative, he was a real conservative - even
capitalism was too newfangled for him. What he presents as evil is the rape of the land, taking profits from
the land rather than "husbanding" it (with all the implications of a marriage between Man and Earth in that
metaphor).

One of the traditional narrative results of a journey to the Otherworld is that the hero brings back some
kind of "good," whether a literal treasure or some kind of new knowledge, that benefits his society. For the
provincial Hobbits, any journey outside the Shire is a journey to the Otherworld, and a visit to Lothlórien is
such a journey in any sense. The War of the Ring, in the larger world, has brought about the installation of
Aragorn as king as the resolution of its crisis.

On the return to the Shire, the Hobbits fight their own, smaller War, and rather than installing a king, they
plant a garden to return their world to its previous balance. Here, oddly enough, it is Sam who provides
the Hobbit "double" to the King: He uses Galadriel's gift to restore the destruction to the land that Saruman
caused, and he becomes Mayor of the Shire.

The scouring of the Shire also caps the development that Merry and Pippin have undergone. When they
left it, they were carefree young Hobbits, not even yet of age. Not only have they become battle-tested
warriors, but they also served as the catalysts of change for three different peoples: the Ents, the
Rohirrim, and the Gondorians. Together, they incited a very forest to march. Merry helped slay the Lord of
the Nazgûl -- an act he was able to accomplish specifically because he was a Hobbit, not a Man -- and
Pippin managed to mitigate the dreadful effects of Denethor's madness. These two, who return home
literally taller than ever, provide a contrast to Frodo, who is faded, diminished by his efforts. Some quests
may ask just too much of the quester.

The End of the Third Age

The end of The Lord of the Rings also marks the end of the Third Age, with
the passing of the last rings of power -- those held by Galadriel, Elrond, Frodo, the King of Peace
and Gandalf -- and their bearers, along with the surviving Ringbearers,
Frodo and Bilbo. Tom Shippey has pointed out
that linguistically, the name
Tolkien's stated purpose in writing The Lord of the Rings was to provide "Frodo" is identical with the
the English with the kind of national epic that it lacked, something Old Norse king Frothi, father
comparable to the Germanic Nibelung saga, the Greek Homeric epics, or of Ingeld (a warrior
the French Charlemagne legends. (The Arthurian legends, he rightly mentioned in Beowulf). Frothi
believed, were too universally European to be regarded as strictly English, owned a magic mill worked
even though called "The Matter of Britain.") One of the things that myths by giantesses that ground out
"do" is provide a narrative explanation, in symbolic or metaphorical peace, and so his reign,
language, of how the world came to be the way it is. Thus, it is appropriate contemporary with the life of
that the War of the Ring not only ends the rule of Sauron in Mordor, but Christ, was marked by
also ushers in a new age, one that is specifically the Age of Men -- when peace, prosperity, and a law-
the world that we, the readers, live in is shaped. abiding citizenry. However,
the giantesses had to work
Tolkien is very honest, however, that the gains derived from the overthrow
without a break to keep the
of Sauron do not come without their cost. The presence of the Elves, and
mill turning, and eventually
their magic and art, is lost, and their influence only continues in the thin
they rebelled against Frothi
stream of Elvish blood in men, from the few intermarriages between the
and overthrew him. The mill
two races. The discovery of Saruman in the Shire is also a warning that,
itself was lost in the depth of
although Sauron may be gone, other evils persist. Indeed, Saruman's evil,
the ocean, where it still
the destructiveness of industrialization, may have been engendered under
churns endlessly, but now
Sauron's influence, but it is an evil (Tolkien would probably feel, the Evil)
only churns out salt -- the
that would have repercussions into our present age. Pollution always
traditional etiological legend
outlasts politics.
of Why the Sea is Salt.
Although there is little
narrative similarity in the
stories of Frodo and Frothi,
both are characters whose
overwhelming goal is to
create a peaceful,
prosperous society marked
by a lack of violence, and
interestingly, both Frodo and
Frothi are largely forgotten in
their cultures' mythology,
while their more warlike
companions live on in
legend.
Another price of the destruction of the Ring is the destruction of Frodo's
peace of mind. This is another common side effect of journeys to the
Otherworld. While some return bearing treasures, others become trapped,
only rescued at great price, and remain, for the rest of their short lives,
pallid and "not all there." Tolkien commented, in a letter to a fan, that
Frodo initially felt "restored to sanity and peace" after the destruction of the
Ring, but that was when he thought that he was about to die anyway. As
he continued to live, his failure of nerve and his claiming of the Ring for
himself grew on him, in feelings both of guilt at not having destroyed the
Ring himself, and worse, of still-lingering desire for it and regret at its
destruction. (Carpenter, The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien).

Finally, The Lord of the Rings ends with Sam. It seems appropriate that
such a long tale should end with the only character who has thought about
it as a tale. As Sam and Frodo prepare to enter Cirith Ungol, Sam muses:
The brave things in the old tales and songs, Mr. Frodo: adventures, as I
used to call them. I used to think that they were things the wonderful folk of
the stories went out and looked for, because they wanted them, because
they were exciting and life was a bit dull, a kind of sport, as you might say.
But that's not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones
that stay in the mind. Folk seem to have been just landed in them, usually -
- their paths were laid that way, as you put it. But I expect they had lots of
chances, like us, of turning back, only they didn't. And if they had, we
shouldn't know, because they'd have been forgotten. We hear about those
as just went on -- and not all to a good end, mind you; at least not to what
folk inside a story and not outside it call a good end. You know, coming
home, and finding things all right, though not quite the same -- like old Mr.
Bilbo. But those aren't always the best tales to hear, though they may be
the best tales to get landed in! I wonder what sort of a tale we've fallen
into? (TT II, chap. 8).

Moving Forward
Now that The Lord of the Rings has come to an end, let's consider some of
the larger implications of the work -- themes that run throughout the entire
trilogy, as well as its influence on life and letters in the late twentieth
century and beyond.

Lesson 10: Constructing an Epic: The Manuscripts

The History of the Lord of the Rings gives us insight into the way in which Tolkien
wrote his masterpiece.

Struggling Out of the Shire

The form in which The Lord of the Rings finally appeared seems complete and self-evident -- how could
the story have gone otherwise? Yet the publication of Tolkien's numerous manuscript drafts as The
History of the Lord of the Rings reveals that the road to the Crack of Doom was even rockier than we
thought.

The suggestion that Tolkien write a sequel to The Hobbit came within a year of the first book's publication
in 1937. Hobbits were a hit, and the novel, perceived as a children's book that adults could enjoy, too,
seemed a natural (to a publisher's eye, at least) as the beginning of a children's series like the Oz books
(which outlived their creator, L. Frank Baum, by several decades, with new authors taking over and
churning out ever paler imitations of the original).

Tolkien's first attempt at a sequel began in late 1938. For quite a while, he was somewhat stumped how
even to begin. "More Hobbits" was his assignment, so obviously he had to begin with Bilbo. But he had
ended The Hobbit with the assurance that Bilbo lived a long time and had no more adventures -- not a
good set-up for a sequel! Furthermore, what Tolkien really wanted to do was publish his Silmarillion
mythology, at which he had been writing away for twenty years, ever since his convalescence from his
shell shock at the end of World War I. Bilbo's chance-found ring seemed the element in The Hobbit that
most cried out for further explanation, and fairly soon it had become The Ring.

The requirement that Bilbo have no more adventures meant that the Ring would have to be passed on to
another Hobbit who would pick up the adventure where Bilbo left off. From the beginning it was clear this
would have to be an heir of some sort, but as Bilbo seemed to be a confirmed bachelor (despite all of
Tolkien's attempts to marry him off to nice Hobbit girls who never managed to become more than names),
this Hobbit would have to be some adopted young relative, and Bilbo became a kind of jolly uncle to a
coterie of young Hobbits of bewilderingly varied names. Tolkien's first five hundred thousand (or so it
seems) drafts of "A Long-Expected Party" often seem to differ only in their nomenclature. Tolkien appears
to have amused himself with infinite fiddling over Bilbo's bequests, not only who got what, but what exactly
their names were. For a long time, Bilbo's heir was named Bingo Bolger-Baggins, and Frodo was another
character altogether, a Took who had much in common with the character who eventually became
Peregrin.
According to Carpenter's Biography, Tolkien claimed that the name "Bingo" came from a much-loved
family of toy koalas called The Bingos, who belonged to his children (p. 189). Christopher Tolkien
comments that "I find it difficult to believe this, yet if it is not so the coincidence is strange. If Bingo
Baggins did get his name from this source, I can only suppose that the demonic character (composed of
monomaniac religious despotism and a lust for destruction through high explosive) of the chief Bingo (not
to mention that of his appalling wife), by which my sister and I now remember them, must have developed
somewhat later" (Christopher Tolkien in The History of the Lord of the Rings).

It is hard not to wonder whether there was another influence on the name of this Halfling: P. G.
Wodehouse's character Bingo Little, who appears in his Bertie Wooster stories. The names (and some of
the light-hearted characteristics) of many of the younger Hobbits in this era of composition have a
decidedly Drones Club ring to them, and Tolkien's comment in a letter to his grandson many years later
that Smith of Wooton Major was "intended to suggest an early Woodhouse [sic]" (Letters) shows that he
was familiar with and enjoyed the genre.

One of the most interesting revelations of Tolkien's manuscripts, however, is that Strider was originally a
Hobbit called Trotter. He is an unusual Hobbit, however, far from the provincial mindset that characterizes
inhabitants of the Shire. For one thing, he wears shoes, and there is a suggestion that this is the result of
some dire torture in Mordor. He knows much about current events in the wider world, is an associate of
Gandalf and of Elves, and is altogether a more wise and sophisticated being than any Hobbit hitherto
encountered. Trotter the Hobbit provides a narrative link between the Shire and the Silmarillion mythology,
but frankly, he does not work as a Hobbit. Tolkien eventually explains him as a second cousin of
Bingo/Frodo, one Peregrin Boffin, who ran away from the Shire many years ago, inspired by Bilbo's tales
of his adventures.

Part of Tolkien's problem in getting his Hobbit sequel off the ground appears to have been that he felt
compelled to make it Hobbit-centric. First he spent a long time getting Bilbo's party right, and then for
about three years, he kept going back and rewriting the story from the party up to Elrond's council. At this
point, he seems to have had the basic events of the plot more or less laid out, but what they meant and
where they were going (beyond knowing that the Ring had to be destroyed) seemed to elude him. The key
was in the character of Trotter: Once he realized that this character could not be a believable Hobbit and
made him a Man, his role in the overall war against Sauron clicked into place, and general idea of a two-
pronged attack on Sauron seems to have formed, with Frodo taking the Ring to its destruction while
Aragorn (still nicknamed Trotter) attempts to regain his birthright. The story now turns from being a Hobbit
adventure to being a multi-strand epic based on the Silmarillion mythology, told from a Hobbit point of
view.

Tolkien's Literary Habits An Inveterate Recycler

Tolkien's practice in writing seems to have been to just start writing and Tolkien wrote his
take the story as far as it will go, letting the characters and events emerge manuscripts in longhand
as he wrote. When he reached an impasse, however, he would just stop -- (which may explain why he
there were plenty of other claims on his time, between teaching, faculty was constantly complaining
meetings, academic research, and the needs of his family. In order to get about the tedium of
himself going again, he would review what he had written so far, consider transcribing his manuscript
the implications of what had bubbled up from his literary unconscious, and on the typewriter), often
then start re-writing in order to make it all consistent. This technique using the backs of old
worked for him as far as the Mines of Moria, where he became stuck for examination papers,
over a year. especially when paper
became scarce during the
 war. Thus, one of the keys to
At this point, he went back almost to the beginning and started rewriting,
dating his various drafts is
this time with Trotter stepping into his role as Aragorn. Once he had
the date of the text on the
broken his logjam in Moria, Tolkien's notes show that he had the basic
other side -- a draft written on
outline of Frodo and Sam's adventures but what would happen to the rest
someone's qualifying exams
of the Fellowship was much less clear (at this point, for instance, Boromir
can be roughly dated by the
was intended to return to Minas Tirith with Aragorn, where he would turn
year the person received
traitor and defect to Saruman). Tolkien was stopping more frequently and
their degree (i.e., it can't
writing himself plot outlines moving forward, rather than going back and
have been written before that
rewriting.
time), while another set of
One thing that is very clear from these manuscript drafts is that there is a drafts is written on the back
difference between the development of plot and the evolution of meaning of agendas for faculty
in The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien had much of the plot structure of the final meetings.
version of his epic set as he reached each stage of its development --
once he had decided how to write himself out of a plot impasse. What
evolved more slowly were the relationships among characters and the
implications of these relationships. For instance, although the Rohirrim
more or less appeared out of nowhere, with no plans for them in the plot
outlines, Tolkien first planned to have Aragorn and Eowyn ultimately
marry; at this point, Faramir was not even an unnamed brother of Boromir
in his story of the prophetic dream at the Council of Elrond. When he
decided against their marriage, he planned to have Eowyn die in battle.
Not only does this show how late an addition Faramir was, it also shows
that Arwen was a late addition. In fact, the very notion of Arwen does not
appear in the manuscripts until Tolkien was writing the battle of the
Pelennor Fields, at which point he had already decided that Eowyn was to
have a tragic fate. Yet a king must have a queen. This helps explain why
Tolkien constructed the story of the love affair between Aragorn and
Arwen, but ultimately had to put it in an appendix. After so much rewriting
of the early sections, he was simply unable to work it into the story where it
naturally belonged, somewhere during the scenes at Rivendell.

What Tolkien's innumerable rewrites supplied was the shading of

character. Boromir turns from a self-conscious traitor into a victim of the
corrupting power of the Ring. Similarly, Wormtongue does not appear in
the first version of the meeting between Gandalf and Théoden, and the
Rohirrim king is not deluded by the lies of Saruman and his minion, but is
opposed to Gandalf of his own free will. Gollum also becomes more
multifaceted. Although Tolkien seems to have planned fairly early on to
have Gollum fall into the Crack of Doom with the Ring, having wrested it
from either Frodo or Sam, that final fall is made much more poignant by
showing that it might have been possible for Gollum to have been
redeemed.

Another element that developed slowly was Treebeard and the Ents. In
early drafts, Treebeard was a giant in league with Saruman, who held
Gandalf prisoner. When, in a letter to W. H. Auden, Tolkien claimed that "I
did not consciously invent [the Ents} at all. The chapter called 'Treebeard,'
from Treebeard's first remark on p. 66, was written off more or less as it
stands . . ." (Letters), he was referring to the way the story took off on its
own, for the drafts show that Treebeard was already conceived, but as a
very different kind of being. Since the notion of a giant of some sort named
Treebeard occurs fairly early in the drafts (as soon as Tolkien begins
working on an explanation for Gandalf's delay in meeting Frodo), it would
seem that Tolkien was quite accurate in saying that he didn't consciously
invent the Ents -- they were the result of a long incubation in his
unconscious, focused on that name "Treebeard."

Tolkien's final impasse occurred at the end of The Two Towers, once he
had written Frodo into capture within Mordor, with Sam locked out and the
Siege of Gondor about to begin. It took him almost two years to return to
the novel, from 1944 to 1946. By now it was almost ten years since the
epic of Middle-earth had begun percolating. There was too much to keep
going back and rewriting -- Tolkien devoted himself to writing outlines and
figuring out chronologies so that he could keep the activities of the various
threads of the plot in synch.

The writing of the end of the War of the Ring proceeded in a fairly
straightforward fashion, once Tolkien had decided where it was going, but
the return to the Shire took several attempts before he got it right. Initially,
Frodo was much more dominant, and "Sharkey" was just a ruffian. Finally,
Tolkien worked around to the conclusion that Frodo was too beaten by his
quest to take an active part in the scouring of the Shire, and Merry, Pippin,
and Sam took over as the leaders. The realization that Saruman must, of
course, be the evil intelligence behind the industrialization of the Shire also
wrapped up that loose end (although the manner of his dissolution did not
emerge until Tolkien was making corrections in the final proofs). Tolkien
also wrote an epilogue, after Frodo's departure from the Grey Havens,
involving Sam and his children, but this chapter basically served as a
"where are they now?" summary of the main characters, and much of this
information wound up, in other formats, in the Appendices.

It is interesting that, after such a rough start getting The Lord of the Rings
off the ground, Tolkien also had difficulty winding it up. After living with an
evolving story for over a decade, it was hard to let go. This explains in a
large part why, after spending his entire literary career trying to get
someone to publish The Silmarillion, Tolkien was unable to complete a
manuscript once there was an actual market for it. He had lived with the
Silmarillion mythology even longer -- 65 years, by the time he died -- and
there was even more to coordinate and make consistent in a mythology
that reached all the way back to the creation of the world.

Moving Forward

J. R. R. Tolkien has been called one of the most influential writers of the
twentieth century. In the next lessons, we will look at what that influence
was.

Appendix 1: Glossary
Anduin
Largest river in Middle-earth.

Andúril
The sword of Aragon II, forged from the shards of Narsil by elven metalsmiths in Rivendell. Its blade features a
design of seven stars (for Elendil) between the crescent moon (for Isildur) and the sun (for Anárion), as well as many
runes. Also known as the Sword that was Broken.

Aragorn II
(Isildur's Heir, the Renewer, Longshanks, Wingfoot, Telcontar, Strider, Elessar, Elfstone, Thorongil)The heir of
Isildur. Aragorn was raised secretly in Rivendell to protect him from Sauron and was known as Estel until he was 20.
He spent long years as the Chieftain of the Dúnedain of the North, protecting all creatures from Sauron. He meets
Frodo and his companions at Bree and helps them get to Rivendell. Aragorn was one of the nine companions, and
leads the Fellowship after Gandalf falls in Khazad-dum.

Anárion
Dúnadan, with Isildur the second King of Gondor. Son of Elendil. Anárion fought in the war of the Last Alliance and
was killed by a stone catapulted from the Barad-dûr

Angmar
Witch-kingdom on both sides of the Misty Mountains.

Arkenstone (The Heart of the Mountain)

A great white jewel found deep beneath Erebor by Thráin I. The Arkenstone was the greatest treasure of the Kings of
Erebor. Bilbo found it when he explored Smaug's hoard while a member of Thorin and company. The Arkenstone
was buried with Thorin.

Arwen
Elven daughter of Elrond and Celebrían; she later weds Aragorn. Noted for her beauty, she is also called Evenstar.

Azog
King of the Orcs of Khazad-dûm. His murder of Thrór in 2790 touched off the War of the Dwarves and Orcs.

Bag End
Hobbit-hole dwelling in Hobbiton in the Shire. Home of Bilbo and Frodo.

Balin
Dwarf of the house of Durin. A member of Thorin and company. After the death of Smaug he re-enters Moria and
set up a colony of dwarves.

Balrog
Huge creatures who are deadly in combat. They fight with magical flaming whips and swords. The Balrog who
fights against Gandalf in Moria is the most famous Balrog. The dwarves' name for this Balrog is Durin´s Bane.

Barad-dûr
The fortress of Sauron, built by him with the power of the One Ring.

Bard I
Killer of Smaug who becomes King of Dale.

Barrow-Wight
Evil spirits from Angmar who haunt the great barrows, hoping to capture and sacrifice victims. The barrow wights
capture Frodo and the other hobbits in LotR but Tom Bombadil helps them escape.

Bilbo Baggins (Elf-friend, Ring-bearer)

Hobbit of the Shire. Gandalf recruits Bilbo to be the burglar for Thorin and company. He takes the One Ring from
Gollum and plays an important part in the death of Smaug. Eventually he leaves the One Ring to Frodo. Bilbo's
sword was the famous Elven-knife, Sting.
Bill
The pony who accompanies the Fellowship from Bree to Moria.

Black Riders
The Nazgûl on horseback.

Black Wings
Airborne Nazgûl.

Bofur
Dwarf and member of Thorin and company. He followed Thorin Oakenshield on his successful return to Erebor.

Bombur
Dwarf and member of Thorin and company. Known for his excessive girth.

Boromir
Eldest son of Denethor II and and one of the nine companions in the Fellowship.

Bree
Principal town in Bree-land. The Prancing Pony, a old and famous inn, is an important source for rumors of distant
lands.

Celeborn
Husband of Galadriel and lord of the Galadrim in Lórien.

Celebrían
Wife of Elrond and daughter of Celeborn and Galadriel. Mother of Arwen.

Dain I
Dwarf, King of Durin's folk

Dain II (Ironfoot)
Dwarf, King of Durin's folk. Killed Azog in 2799.

Dale
Kingdom of Men located on the southern slope of Erebor below the Lonely Mountain.

Déagol
Cousin to Sméagol (Gollum), Déagol found the Ring and was murdered by Sméagol.

Denethor II
Last ruling Steward of Gondor. Denethor was opposed to giving the crown of Gondor to Aragorn. After he looked
into the palantír of Minas Tirith he ages prematurely and loses his reason in pride and despair.

Dol Guldur
Forest Fortress in southwestern Mirkwood. Dol Guldur was Sauron's fortress before he was driven out to Mordor.

Dúnadan
The name Bilbo knew Aragorn by in Rivendell

Durin I
Durin I, popularly known as Durin the Deathless, was the eldest of the legendary Seven Fathers of the Dwarves
created far back in the deeps of time by Aulë, and the first of that race to awaken in the First Age. His line endured
unbroken for several millennia.

Durin's Bane
The Balrog of Khazad-dûm, so called by the Dwarves because of his murder of Durin VI.
Dwalin
Dwarf and member of Thorin and company. He was the first to arrive at Bilbo Baggin's house for the tea party. He
survived the quest, and the Battle of Five Armies, and lived on in Erebor, becoming very old and very rich.

Elbereth Gilthoniel
Figure of highest praise for the Elves, it was thought that she created the stars. Often called upon by Elves, Hobbits,
and Men in time of stress.

Elendil
First King of Arnor and Gondor. Isildur's father. Slain by Sauron.

Elrond
An Elf-Lord who is keeper of Rivendell. Married to Celebrían, daughter of Galadriel and Celeborn. Celebrían and
Elrond had three children: the twin brethren Elladan and Elrohir and a daughter, Arwen Undomiel, Evenstar of her
people. The Third Age is said to have ended with the passing of Elrond into the West.

Eomer
Warrior of Rohan and nephew of Théoden.

Éowyn
Woman warrior of Rohan and niece of Théoden. Fights against the Lord of the Nazgûl during the Battle of the
Pelennor Fields.

Ents
The oldest speaking race in Middle-earth. Ents are 14 feet tall -- they are part Man, part tree and are closely
connected to the trees they protect and guard.

Entwives
Female Ents. They became estranged from the male Ents and moved to the Brown Lands to tend fields and grains;
the male Ents remained in the forests to tend trees. Entwives disappeared from Middle-Earth before the end of the
Second Age and the Ents lament their loss in story and song.

Erebor (the Lonely Mountain)

Mountain east of Mirkwood and west of the Iron Hills. First settled by Dwarves led by Thráin. The treasures of
Erebor grew until Smaug plundered the mountain.

Faramir
Son of Denethor and brother of Boromir. Captain of the Rangers of Ithilien.

Frodo Baggins
A hobbit of the Shire; nephew and heir of Bilbo Baggins. Chosen at Rivendell to be the Ringbearer, Frodo carries the
One Ring of Sauron from Hobbiton in the Shire to Mount Doom in Mordor

Galadriel
Elf-queen and keeper of Lórien. Wife of Celeborn, mother of Celebrían, and grandmother of Arwen. She aids the
Company of the Ring by giving them great gifts, including the Phial of Galadriel, and allowing Frodo and Sam a
glimpse into her Mirror. Among the many names given to here were Lady of Lórien, the Lady of the Wood, the
White Lady, Sorceress of the Golden Wood (Wormtongue), and the Mistress of Magic (Faramir).

Gandalf
A wizard of Middle-Earth. He is called Gandalf the Grey the name in the northeastern regions of Middle-earth by
Men and Hobbits, until his transformation into Gandalf the White. He is called Incanus by men of the South, Olórin
among the Elves of Valinor, and Mithrandir, the Grey Pilgrim, by the Elves of Middle-earth. Láthspell and
Stormcrow were names of insult he also bore.

Gimli
Dwarf of Durin’s line. Son of Glóin. Gimli represented Dwarves in the Fellowship of the Ring and became a
steadfast companion to Legolas and a defender of the beauty of Galadriel. The friendship between the Gimli and
Legolas was rare for Dwarves and Elves.

Glamdring (Beater)
Gandalf's Elven-sword, forged in Gondolin in the First Age but lost until Gandalf found it along with its mate Orcrist
in a Troll cave. Glamdring glowed blue when orcs were near and glittered with an intense white light when Gandalf
fought the Balrog in Moria.

Glóin
Dwarf of Durin’s line. Father of Gimli. A member of Thorin and Company.

Goldberry
Wife of Tom Bombadil and daughter of the Withywindle river.

Gollum (Sméagol)
Key figure in The Lord of the Rings. Born as a hobbit named Sméagol (also referred to as Trahald, Slinker, Stinker,
the Sneak) near the river Anduin, he killed his best friend for a golden ring. He fled with "his precious" and lived
under the mountains feeding on fish and goblins until he loses the Ring to Bilbo Baggins in a riddle contest.

Gondor
Founded by Elendil, Gondor was ruled jointly by Isildur and Anárion. Gondor was a constant target of Sauron and a
strategic stronghold in the War of the Ring.

Gorbag
Orc captain from Minas Morgul. He brings about thirty orc soldiers to the pass of Cirith Ungol to investigate the
noise caused by the battle between Sam and Shelob.

Great Goblin
Highest-ranking Orc in the Misty Mountains. His army captured Thorin and Company.

Great Spiders
Man-eating spiders that range from for larger creatures like Shelob, who is five feet tall, to the smaller spiders of
Mirkwood, who plagued Thorin and Company.

Grima Wormtongue
Counselor to King Théoden of Rohan and servant of Saruman. He works in Rohan under the cloak of friendship as
the king´s advisor but Gandalf unmasks him and he fled to Orthanc.

Grond
Massive battering ram used to break through the Gates of Minas Tirith. Grond is over a hundred feet long and its
steel head was shaped like a wolf.

Haradrim
Dark-skinned humans who are aligned with Sauron and join with him against the people of Gondor. They are
powerful warriors, almost as strong as trolls. Called Swertings by the people of the Shire.

Hill-Men
An evil tribe from the Ettenmoors allied with the Witch-king of Angmar.

Khazad-dum
See Moria.

Imladris
See Rivendell.

Isengard
Orginally built by Gondor, Isengard came to power through the manipulations of Saruman. The tower of Orthanc is
the focal point within a large natural stone wall.
Isildur
Elder son of Elendil. After battle with Sauron in the early days of Men in Middle-earth, Isildur cut off Sauron's finger
and claimed the One Ring for himself. While traveling north along the Anduin River he was attached by Orcs. He
tried to escape by slipping on the Ring and swimming away, but the Ring slipped from his fingers and Isildur was
slain by arrows. The Ring fell to the bottom of the Anduin to be discovered by Déagol long afterwards.

Isildur’s Bane
The One Ring.

Legolas
Elf of the Woodland Realm. Legolas represents Elves in the Fellowship of the Ring and becomes a steadfast
companion to Gimli. The friendship between the Gimli and Legolas is rare for Dwarves and Elves.

Lembas
Fragrant cakes made by the Elves of Lórien.

The Lieutenant of Barad-dûr

A black Númenórean who could not resist the evil knowledge of Sauron. He announce himself as herald and
ambassador, the mouth of Sauron and messenger of Mordor, when he came to meet the approaching army from
Gondor outside the Black Gates.

Lonely Mountain
See Erebor.

Lórien
Stronghold of Elves in Middle-earth, ruled by Galadriel and Celeborn. The Companions tarry there between leaving
Moria and embarking south on the Anduin.

Meriadoc Brandybuck (Merry)

A hobbit of the Shire and member of the Fellowship of the Ring. Merry accompanies Frodo to Rivendell and became
one of the Companions of the Ring. Captured by orcs at Parth Galen. His escape from the orcs, along with his best
friend Pippin, leads him them into contact with Treebeard in Fangorn Forest. Merry fights against the Lord of the
Nazgûl during the Battle of the Pelennor Fields.

Mirkwood
Ancient forest shadowed by Sauron's dark creatures. Thorin and Company travel through Mirkwood on the their
journey.

Mithril
Extremely rare, silver-colored metal found only in Khazad-dûm. In their pursuit of large mithril-veins the Dwarves
unleased the Balrog deep beneath the mountain. Thorin gives Bilbo a mithril corselet, which he passes later to Frodo.

Miruvor
Fragrant liquid that rejuvenates body and mind.

Mordor
Sauron’s realm of evil. The One Ring was forged within Mordor’s Mount Doom, and the only method of the Ring’s
destruction was in the fires beneath Mount Doom.

Moria
The old city of the dwarves beneath the Misty Mountains. Moria is called called Khazad-dûm by the dwarves. In
Sindarin it was called Hadhodrond, or Dwarrowdelf. Once Khazad-dûm was occupied by the Balrog it was called
Moria, which means "The Black Chasm." In the Third Age, the dwarves delved deep in Moria search for mithril. In
later years, Moria became a settlement for many of Sauron's forces. Other creatures not under the control of the Dark
Lord move in Moria, too, including the Watcher in the Water and the Balrog. The Company meets the Watcher at the
western gate. At the Bridge of Khazad-dûm near the eastern gate, the Company encounters the Balrog, whom
Gandalf takes on in a duel.

Morgoth
A force of evil in Middle-earth. In the beginning of the world, he was known as Melkor and was one of the Valar of
Ilúvatar He was given a great deal of power by the creator but he was never satisfied. He started a war against the
other Valar and is considered the creator of all evil. His worst crime was ruining and twisting the people of Middle
Earth and creating the Orcs. Also known as Melegor, Bauglir, Belcha, Belegor, Belegûr and Belegurth.

Mount Doom
The mountain in Mordor where the One Ring was forged, and the only place where the Ring can be destroyed.

Nazgûl
The nine ringwraiths controlled by Sauron. Doomed to run his errands for all time, they are Sauron´s slaves. The
Nazgûl can only be wounded with weapons blessed with Elvish magic; ordinary weapons can't hurt them. The head
Nazgûl is the Witch-king. Tthe second is Khamûl the Easterling, and the rest are unidentified, although it is known
that at least three of the nine Nazgûl were black Númenóreans. Nazg means ring and gûl means wraith.

Old Man Willow

An ancient tree in the old forest east of Hobbiton who spends most of his time sleeping and dreaming. When the
hobbits accidentally disturb the willow on their way to Rivendell, they are lucky to escape alive.

Olog-Hai
A new sort of troll created by Sauron. Larger, stronger and smarter than ordinary trolls, they can endure sunlight
(unlike common trolls).

Orc (Goblin)
Also know as Orch, Yrch, Glamhoth, Gorgûn, Goblin, Hobgoblin. They are born warriors used by Morgoth, Sauron,
the With-king, the Balrog, and Saruman. Orcs are usually short, stout and bow-legged, with long arms, dark faces,
squinty eyes, and long fangs. Except for the Uruk-hai, Orcs are weakened by the sun, and all prefer the dark. Orcs
hate all things of beauty and love to kill and destroy.

Orchrist (Biter, Goblin Cleaver)

Thorin’s Elven-sword, forged in Gondolin in the First Age but lost until Gandalf found it along with its mate
Glamdring in a Troll cave. Orchrist glowed blue when orcs were near.

Ori
A dwarf of Durin's line and member of Thorin and company. He was a distant cousin of Thorin Oakenshield and
brother of Dori and Nori..

Orthanc
500-foot tower of Isengard.

Osgiliath
A city of Gondor.

Palantír
Seven crystal globes that can be used for communication and seeing into the future.

Paths of the Dead

Spirit-filled realm through which Aragorn and his friends travel to reach Gondor. Aragorn tells the Dead that helping
his cause against Sauron will free them from the curse put on them by Aragorn's ancestors.

Peregrin Took (Pippin)

A hobbit of the Shire and member of the Fellowship of the Ring. Pippin is the youngest friend of Frodo Baggins to
join him in the journey to Rivendell. He is captured several times along the way, once by Old Man Willow, then by
the Barrow-Wight and lastly by orcs at Parth Galen. His escape from the orcs, along with his best friend Merry, leads
him them into contact with Treebeard in Fangorn Forest. In Gondor Pippin becomes a member of the Guard of the
Citadel of Minas Tirith.

Phial of Galadriel
Given to Frodo by Galadriel, the Phial contains the light of Eärendil and shines in complete darkness. The Phial is
also said to bring strength with which to combat the powers of Sauron, including the temptation of the One Ring.

Rangers
Dúnedain Men of the North who are protectors of Eriador and the Shire.

Rings of Power (Dwarves)

Noldorin Rings of power given to Dwarves. The Dwarf Rings caused the wearers to seek precious minerals with
intense greed, but did not lengthen their lives or bring them under Sauron’s control. Four rings were lost and Sauron
recovered three.

Rings of Power (Elves)

Three Noldorin Rings of power given to Elves. The Elven Rings were hidden from Sauron and not controlled by
him.

Rings of Power (Men)

Nine Noldorin Rings of power given to Men. The nine men were twisted by the power of the One Ring became the
Nazgûl.

Rivendell
Elven realm founded by Elrond in the Second Age as a refuge against the forces of Sauron, and site of the Council of
Elrond. At the time of the War of the Ring, Rivendell served as one of the last remaining centers of Elven power and
lore in Middle-Earth. The Company of the Ring sets out from Rivendell.

Rohan
Kingdom of the Rohirrim known for its horses, the greatest steeds in Middle-earth. Allied with Gondor.

Rohirrim
The tall, blond Men of Rohan who are devoted to their horses.

Samwise Gamgee (Sam)

A hobbit of the Shire and member of the Fellowship of the Ring. Sam, the gardener at Bag End, accompanies Frodo
from the Shire to Mount Doom and back again. For a brief time Sam himself is a Ringbearer.

Saruman
A wizard of Middle-Earth. Saruman the White (also known as Curumo, Curunír) was sent to Middle Earth to battle
Sauron, but his obsession with the rings of power and led to treachery. In his quest to possess the One Ring for
himself hegathered armies of Orcs, Oruk-hai, and Dunlendings to help him take over Middle-earth. After the War of
the Ring Saruman called himself Sharkey and met his end in the Shire.

Sauron
The Dark Lord of Mordor who was a former servant of Morgoth. After the fall of Morgoth, Sauron began to build his
power in Mordor with the construction of the Barad-dûr. Through lies and deceit he built an alliance with the Noldor
of Eregion and convinced them to forge the Rings of Power. To control the Rings of Power, and thus the Elves,
Dwarves, and Men, Sauron created the One Ring to rule them all. Most of his evil power was placed within the ring.
In the Battle of Dagorland, Isildur cut off Sauron’s finger and took the Ring. After the Nazgûl restore Mordor,
Sauron again came to power and began searching for the Ring.

Shadowfax
Legendary horse of Rohan that permits Gandalf to ride him. Shadowfax is the strongest and fastest steed in Middle-
earth.

Sharkey
See Saruman.

Shelob
A giant Spider who lives in the mountains between Minas Morgul and the Tower of Cirith Ungol. An ancient
creature who guards the entrance to Mordor, she feeds upon orcs and other creatures who get too close to her webs.

Shire
Region of western Eriador lying between the rivers Brandywine and Lhûn, and home of the Hobbits. Well-known
Shire communities include Hobbiton, Bywater, Tuckborough, and Brandy Hall. Some of the most prominent Hobbit
families are the Tooks, Bagginses, and Brandybucks.

Silent Watchers
Three-headed creatures -- living statues seated on thrones -- who bar the way into Cirith Ungol where Frodo is held
captive. Sam Gamgee has to use the phial of Galadriel to get past them.

Smaug
Great dragon that drives the Dwarves from the Kingdom under the Mountain and kept watch over the Dwarf’s hoard.
Angered by the presence of Bilbo, Thorin and Company, Smaug leaves his den and is slain by Bard.

Snowmane
The horse that bears King Théoden of Rohan into battle.

Sting
Found at the same time as Glamdring and Orchrist, the Elven knife was named by Bilbo and eventually passed to
Frodo.

Strider
(see Aragorn II)

Théoden
King of the Rohirrim.

Thorin II (Oakenshield)
Dwarf, King of the line of Durin. Leads the expedition (Thorin and Company) to free the Kingdom under the
Mountain

Thorin and Company

Expedition to free the Kingdom under the Mountain led by Thorin Oakenshield. The Company includes Thorin,
Balin, Dwalin, Fíli, Kíli, Dori, Ori, Nori, óin, Glóin, Bifur, Bofur, Bombur, and Bilbo Baggins.

Thráin I
Dwarf, King of the line of Durin. Founded the Kingdom under the Mountain.

Thrór
A dwarf who was the son of Dáin I and a direct descendant of Durin the Deathless. He was the father of Thráin II
and grandfather of Thorin Oakenshield. Thrór became King Under the Mountain in Erebor. He brought with him the
Arkenstone, an heirloom passed down from his ancestor Thráin I, the original founder of the Dwarven stronghold at
Erebor. Eventually Thrór's treasures were taken by Smaug the dragon. Thrór's map of the secret entrance to the
treasury passed down to Thorin and was used by by Thorin and company in The Hobbit.

The One Ring

Sauron’s Ring of power. Forged in secret by Sauron, the One Ring held the power to control the Three Elven Rings,
the Nine Rings of Men, and the Seven Dwarf Rings. Filled with the power of Sauron, the Ring was evil and enslaved
its bearers. Ring-bearers had extended lives and the power of invisibility, but the Ring consumed the bearer and bred
greed and hate. Unlike the subservient Rings of Power, which each had single set gem, the One Ring was a simple
gold band. The inscription could only be read when the Ring was placed in fire: Ash nazg durbatulûk, ash nazg
gimbatul, ash nazg thrakatulûkAsh burzum-ishi krimpatul.One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One
Ring tobring them all and in the Darkness bind them.

Tom Bombadil
A being who is lord and master of the Old Forest. His race is unknown and his power is absolute; even the One Ring
has no effect on him.

Tree-beard (Fanghorn)
Ent and Guardian of Fanghorn Forest. With the help of Merry and Pippin, Tree-beard arouses the Ents to attack
Isengard.

Trolls
Large, strong, stupid creatures who cannot function in sunlight. The many species of trolls include cave-trolls, snow-
trolls, stone-trolls, hill-trolls, mountain-trolls and Olog-hai.

Uglúk
Uruk-hai Orc of Isengard.

Uruk-hai
A large, strong breed of Orcs created by Sauron. They are aggressive warriors who hate smaller, weaker Orcs.

Wargs
Huge wolf-like creatures wolves who often accompany orcs on their raids and plunderings. Orcs often ride wargs.

Watcher in the Water

An ancient, tentacled, underwater monster who lives in the lake on the western gate of Moria. When Boromir throws
a rock into the water, the Watcher awakes and tries to grab Frodo.

Weathertop
Southern past of the Westher Hills. Site of ancient battles over the palantir of the Tower of Amon Sûl.

Witch-King of Angmar
The most powerful of the Nazgûl. At Weathertop he stabs and almost kills Frodo with a Morgul-knife. He breaks the
Gates of Minias Tirith at Pelennor and is challenged by Gandalf