Here Be Dragons (20 page)

The
final
stage is the walk from the edge of the polder to where its distinct reality comes to full expression. The Company walks along blindfolded from the edge, and although Frodo experiences, more and more strongly, that the group has entered a different place—or rather, a different time—he has not yet fully experienced how much the heartland of Lothlórien differs from the world outside. At some indefinite point during the long walk, however, the Fellowship enters a forest where the power of the elves dominates completely. When Frodo removes his blindfold at Cerin Amroth, the place Aragorn calls “the heart of Elvendom on earth” (FR, II, vi, 343), his experience of the land is radically different from what he felt when they had crossed the river:

It seemed to him that he had stepped through a high window that looked on a vanished world. A light was upon it for which his language had no name. All that he saw was shapely, but the shapes seemed at once clear-cut, as if they had been first conceived and drawn at the uncovering of his eyes, and ancient as if they had endured for ever. He saw no color but those he knew, gold and white and blue and green, but they were fresh and poignant, as if he had at that moment first perceived them and made for them names new and wonderful. In winter here no heart could mourn for summer or for spring. No blemish
or sickness or deformity could be seen in anything that grew upon the earth. On the land of Lórien there was no stain. (FR, II, vi, 341)

This impression is far stronger than when he first entered the forest, or even when he first set foot in the Naith. Although he has the time-bridge experience when he crosses the Silverlode, the breathtaking beauty of Cerin Amroth is clearly absent. Instead of being awed by their surroundings, the members of the Company bicker about whom to blindfold. Once the particular reality of the Golden Wood is revealed at Cerin Amroth, Frodo is lost in wonder. Here, he has finally arrived in the land without a stain that requires those who enter to have been cleansed.

It is at Cerin Amroth that Frodo becomes aware of the force that protects the forest, and the reader understands that the polder is maintained by someone. Haldir first bids that Frodo look toward the capital: “Out of it, it seemed to [Frodo] that the power and light came that held all the land in sway” (FR, II, vi, 342), a power he later learns comes from the elven Ring of Power held by Galadriel. As he looks the other way, across the river, the light goes out; he sees “the world he knew” (an expression that brings to mind Dunsany's “fields we know,” again suggesting the association between Lothlórien and Faerie), and, farther off, Mirkwood and the darkness surrounding Dol Goldur. Haldir tells him how the two opposing powers of Galadriel and Sauron “strive now in thought” (FR, II, vi, 342–43). While the borders have so far seemed to be defended by elven guards, a new kind of defense is thus revealed: the power of Galadriel and her Ring that maintains and protects Lothlórien from the hostile world beyond. As foretold by the Lady of Lothlórien, the land fades once the power of the Rings is broken; and when, after Aragorn's death, Arwen returns to the empty land, she “dwelt there alone under the fading trees” (Appx A, I, 1038).

A polder not only defends its inhabitants from attack or invasion, it also defends and maintains a reality that differs from its surroundings. In Lothlórien, two main aspects of reality need protecting: the physical environment and the temporal situation. Physically, the forest of Lothlórien is little more than a park. Treebeard's assertion that the old woodlands that stretched from Fangorn Forest to the Mountains of Lune west of the Shire “were like the woods of Lothlórien, only thicker, stronger, younger” (TT, III, iv, 458) comes across as somewhat peculiar. Fangorn Forest is clearly wildwood, tangled and dark. Looking at the lichenencrusted trees, Pippin succinctly summarizes his impression of the forest:
“Untidy” (TT, III, iv, 450). Lothlórien, on the other hand, appears to consist of nothing but the mallorn trees, with their smooth, silver boles. The ground is level enough for the Company to wander freely without any fear of stubbing toes or falling over (FR, II, vi, 340). The old woodlands are, in fact, nothing like Lothlórien, because rather than being a forest, the Golden Wood is carefully maintained parkland, a monoculture as unnatural as any orchard or tree plantation. In “Taking the Part of Trees: Eco-Conflict in Middle-earth,” Verlyn Flieger discusses how Tolkien seems to come down in favor of both wildwood and carefully cultivated nature. Lothlórien, she suggests, is a vision of “nature transcended.” It is “a faery forest that is unlikely to be found in a natural state on earth,” “an enchanted and enchanting correlative of the Entwives and their ordered, tended gardens.”
⁶⁰
In her book on Tolkien's treatment of time and time travel,
A Question of Time
, Flieger cites a letter from Tolkien in which he describes the elves as “embalmers” who wanted “to live in the mortal historical Middle-earth [and so] stop its growth, keep it as a pleasaunce.”
⁶¹
Despite its enchantment, or perhaps because of it, Lothlórien is more pleasance (a magically created version of those ancient but well-tended parks found around some old country houses) than nature transcended. It is a perfect example of elven embalming.

Time in Lothlórien is markedly different from time in the world outside. It is quite clearly “an anachronism
consciously
opposed to [the] wrong time”
⁶²
of Middle-earth outside. The gap between outside and polder time recalls the vast history that underlies Middle-earth, and the fact that the power of Galadriel's Ring is required to maintain that gap heralds the end of the elves. To Frodo, crossing the Silverlode is like walking across time into the Elder Days and “a world that was no more.” This world is different even from Rivendell, where “there was memory of ancient things; in Lórien the ancient things still lived on in the waking world” (FR, II, vi, 340). A time abyss, “a gap between the present of the tale and some point deep in the past,”
⁶³
opens up in Rivendell when Frodo learns that Elrond not only knows of the Elder Days more than six millennia ago, but can remember them (FR, II, ii, 236–37; cf. Appx B). In Lothlórien, he suddenly finds himself at the bottom of that abyss, in “a corner of the Elder Days,” together with elves far older than Elrond. Sam tries to express his impression of the land: “I feel as if I was
inside
a song, if you take my meaning” (FR, II, vi, 342). There is no doubt that he does not mean Pippin's bath song or his own Troll song but rather songs
such as Aragorn's about Beren and Lúthien, or Bilbo's about Eärendil, or
The Fall of Gil-galad
, which Sam has learned from Bilbo—songs about events that took place thousands of years earlier. Haldir explains that it is the power of Galadriel that he feels, something that she confirms. Lothlórien's boundary is maintained by the power of her Ring, and as such, it will fail if the One Ring is destroyed. “[T]hen our power is diminished,” Galadriel explains to Frodo, “and Lothlórien will fade, and the tides of Time will sweep it away. We must depart into the West, or dwindle to a rustic folk of dell and cave, slowly to forget and to be forgotten” (FR, II, vii, 356). The time of the outside world will rush into the polder if Frodo succeeds in his quest, and not only the beauty of Lothlórien will be ruined. Galadriel's words forebode the loss inherent in triumph: by the defeat of Sauron and destruction of the One Ring, the power of the elves is also forced out of the world. The “sudden joyous ‘turn'” that Tolkien calls
eucatastrophe
or “good catastrophe” might bring joy, but it is joy mingled with grief, deliverance mingled with loss.
⁶⁴

Time in the polder has not stopped, but it passes differently from time in the world outside.
⁶⁵
“Elves and Men will live in the world at different speeds, as it were, and their intersecting paths must involve a shift, on some level, from time to timelessness,” Flieger observes.
⁶⁶
Paul H. Kocher draws attention to the relation between passage of time and elven psychology: how, for the deathless elves, time passes both swiftly and slowly.
⁶⁷
Although the temporal aspect is only called attention to when the Company has left the elves and Sam is puzzled by the new moon (FR, II, ix, 379), a vagueness about the passage of time pervades the entire Lothlórien episode. Flieger discusses in detail how time flows in Lothlórien as compared to the outside world.
⁶⁸
Having examined Tolkien's musings on time in Lothlórien from
The Treason of Isengard
,
⁶⁹
she concludes that after an “interior argument,” Tolkien appears to have decided that it is “[b]etter to have
no
time difference” between Lothlórien and the outside world. Nevertheless, time in Lothlórien remains vague and imprecise because “Tolkien's theme, if not his plot, needed two kinds of time.”
⁷⁰

The clearest example of how time in the elven forest flows according to its own rules is provided during the Company's final day there. To summarize their itinerary: they rise and walk with Haldir to the boats, a distance of about ten miles. When “noon [is] at hand,” they reach the tongue of land where the Silverlode passes into the river Anduin. They pack the
boats and go for a test-drive up the river, run into Celeborn and Galadriel, and have a parting feast. After the feast, Celeborn informs them of the lay of the land along the river and Galadriel imparts her gifts. Then the Company leaves, as a “yellow noon [lies] on the green land” (FR, II, viii, 360–67). Unless the Company and the elves are remarkably efficient with their packing, partying, and presents, something must have happened to time here. It seems almost to have ceased inside Lothlórien, allowing for a greater number of actions than usual to be performed in a briefer (outside) time. The simplest explanation would be to ascribe this temporal anomaly to textual mistakes. According to “The Tale of Years,” Frodo and Sam are taken to Galadriel's Mirror on February 14 and the Company departs from Lothlórien on February 16 (RK, Appx B, 1067). Because the hobbits look into the Mirror on what is obviously the Company's last evening in Caras Galadhon (FR, II, viii, 358–60), the critics Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull suggest that a mistake has been made and that the correct date for the Mirror of Galadriel in “The Tale of Years” should be February 15.
⁷¹

The question is, would “a writer known for scrupulous attention to the calendar”
⁷²
make not one but two mistakes for two consecutive dates? An alternative interpretation is possible. February 16, the day of departure, is the day with two noons. Does one noon, in fact, belong to the fifteenth and one to the sixteenth? Does the parting feast take them through the night and out on the other side without anyone noticing? Do Lothlórien days and nights, up to the very last, pass faster than on the outside? This would not only explain what seem like inconsistencies, it would also fit Sam's bewildered attempt to recall more than a handful of days of an entire month. The two noons thus suggest both a moment stretched into hours and hours folded into a moment, ultimately indicating how time in Lothlórien, as in
Stardust
's Faerie, does not simply pass faster or more slowly than in the mortal world but follows completely different rules.

The process of gaining entrance to Lothlórien not only emphasizes the diligence with which this polder is defended, it also displays the gradual nature of the boundary. Gradual, but not that of a crosshatch: despite the stages that the Company passes, it is not until they have crossed the Silverlode that they find themselves in a different reality. The parts of the elven realm that reach beyond the river are clearly part of the land but
follow the rules of the outside world. Lothlórien is a Faerie realm that strives to maintain ancient times when the surrounding world moves on, providing a sanctuary for its elven population. That its existence is connected to the One Ring must surely count as the second great tragedy encountered by the reader in the story; but unlike Gandalf's fall into the chasm in Moria, Lothlórien's doom is never negated. Yet this park imparts an eerie vision of time as well as nature: both are constant in the elven realm, ultimately providing sterile beauty and time without change. Tolkien called his elves embalmers, and this polder provides an example of their embalming art.

The Forest of Twisting Paths: Holdstock's Mythago Wood
⁷³

Ryhope Wood is a patch of wildwood, some six miles in circumference, in rural Herefordshire. Even though a large proportion of Robert Holdstock's Mythago Wood cycle is set in the surrounding countryside, the forest provides a gravitational center for the stories. Within the impenetrable boundaries of this small forest unfold seemingly limitless woodlands where inherited memories from our collective unconscious come to life as so-called mythagos. The novels of the cycle—
Mythago Wood
,
Lavondyss
,
The Hollowing
,
Gate of Ivory
, and
Avilion
—all tell the stories of their protagonists' journeys into, and in, the woods, journeys during which the forest acts upon the characters while allowing them to act in the forest.

Whereas the Lothlórien polder provides stability and constancy, Ryhope Wood, similarly an actively defended anachronism, is a locus of change. Each of the five novels in the series describes a place where space and time are fluid and mutable; and the polder also evolves over the novels into increasingly complex settings for the characters' journeys.

The force that maintains the polder is a nebulous presence in the forest rather than a clearly identifiable entity. The direct action it takes to keep the woodland's secrets bears witness to its power, though. Unable to penetrate the woodland defenses,
Mythago Wood
's first-person narrator, Steven, seeks to fly over the woodlands to get an overview of their interior. He and the pilot, Harry Keeton, set out to take pictures of the mysterious forest from above, but fail; the plane is tossed by heavy winds, a golden light enshrouds it, and a loud, ghostly wail is heard, forcing them to turn back (
Mythago Wood
100–101). This powerful display is the only instance when the force that protects the polder takes direct
physical action, but it leaves little doubt that there
is
a force that actively maintains the boundaries. George Huxley, Steven's father, believes that the small stand of primordial wildwood