Master of Middle Earth (10 page)

In an article
written for the
Tolkien Journal
⁴
W. H.

Auden expresses
discomfort at Tolkien's portrayal of of ores as by nature a wholly evil race.
The objection is well worth raising. If true it imperils the doctrine that
underpins the moral structure of the epic, that every intelligent being has a
will capable of choosing between good and evil. At first sight Auden's point
seems well taken. Tolkien shows us ores as always cruel, quarrelsome, vile in
thought and language, enemies of all the civilized races who live around them.
More, he explicitly describes them as "being filled with malice, hating
even their own kind" to such an extent that they developed no racial
language of their own "but took what they could of other tongues and
perverted it to their own liking; yet they made only brutal jargons"
scarcely intelligible from one ore community to another. Nevertheless, in several
places Tolkien makes it very clear that no ore, no individual of any species,
and certainly no species as a whole is created evil.

"Nothing is
evil in the beginning. Even Sauron was not so," affirms Gandalf at
Elrond's Council. The opposite view would be Manichaean, accepting the
existence of a creative force in evil equal in power to that of the good.
Tolkien firmly rejects it. When Sauron turns to evil he does so by choice, and
is diminished in consequence. Evil is a diminution. The ruling Ring cannot give
its wearer "more life," merely a longer continuation of the life he
already has, but without its vital zest. Ores are not original creations by
Morgoth. He bred them in the First Age "in mockery . . . of elves,"
by genetic experiments with existing creatures, says Treebeard. The creatures
used are not specified. Frodo is sure that no act of genuine creation took
place: "The Shadow that bred them can only mock, it cannot make: not real
new things of its own. I don't think it gave life to the ores, it only ruined
them and twisted them . . ." Saruman is continuing these genetic
experiments and has produced a new variation (not a new species), Ores of the
White Hand, larger, better fighters and able to bear the light of the sun as
ordinary ores are not. Treebeard wonders: "Are they Men he has ruined, or
has he blended the races of Ores and Men? That would be a black evil!"
Gamling at Helm's Deep calls them "these half-ores and goblin-men that the
foul craft of Saruman has bred . . ." But genetics cannot breed innately evil
wills, or good ones either—only wills which can develop into one or the other
as they are employed.

The explanation of
ore behavior, then, seems to be that Sauron (and Saruman) has carefully trained
them to be what they are, continuing the training begun by Morgoth. Close under
his thumb in Mordor, they have been educated to brutality and their social
patterns set in a mold which will perpetuate it and its cognate qualities in
the generations to come. They have acquired the same delight in torture that Sauron
feels, and he has added a nice taste in cannibalism. Yet he seems also to have
inculcated in these coarse combative creatures a firm loyalty to himself that
they never question, a loyalty that would be reckoned a virtue if turned in a
better direction. They have evidently been taught also that the elves are
rebels— against Sauron as their rightful lord, of course. The Uruk-hai at
Helm's Deep are courageous fighters, and even have achieved considerable esprit
de corps. In short, there is an ore point of view about things which it is
possible to understand, even to pity. The poor brutes are so plainly the toys
of a mightier will than theirs. They have been conditioned to will whatever
Sauron wills. "And for me," exclaims Gandalf, "I pity even his
slaves." Aragorn at Helm's Deep includes them in his warning against the
Fangorn huorns, which are marching to crush them, but the ores do not listen.
Never in Tolkien's tale are any ores redeemed, but it would go against the
grain of the whole to dismiss them as ultimately irredeemable.

Throughout the
hierarchy of life on Middle-earth consciousness extends higher, deeper, broader
than it does in our world today, and with consciousness goes the power to work
for good or for evil. Eagles are allies of Gandalf, whereas crows spy for
Sauron and wolves are as fierce as ores on his behalf. The hearts of many trees
in Mirkwood, as well as a few in Fangorn, have turned bad under his influence.
Others remain healthy. Whether the malice of the Grey Willow who stupefies the
hobbits in the Old Forest derives from Sauron or from natural hatred for
destructive mankind is not certain, but it embraces all travelers, innocent and
guilty alike. The mountain Caradhras has long been known to the dwarves as
purposefully "cruel" in trying to kill wayfarers with storms and
falling rocks. Aragorn comments that "many evil and unfriendly things in
the world . . . yet are not in league with Sauron, but have purposes of their
own. Some have been in the world longer than he." Similarly independent of
the Dark Lord are the "nameless things" gnawing at the roots of the
world, whom Gandalf meets far underground in his fight with the Balrog. Tolkien
obviously wants to leave us with a vague sense, all the more potent because it
remains vague, of the almost limitless penetration of evil into the farthest
crevices of conscious life.

By and large,
though, Sauron has been able to enlist most of the evil consciousness of
Middle-earth under his banner in one way or another. Tolkien's ability to
invent such beings in new combinations of body and spirit seems endless. The
Balrog, a "fiery shadow" sprung from the "flame of Udûn"
(hell), is barely physical and can shift its shape at will. Inherited from
Morgoth after the fall of Thangorodrim in the First Age, he has been used by
Sauron to drive the dwarves out of Moria, and now is loosed upon Gandalf, his
spiritual opposite. This Balrog (referred to by all as
a
Balrog)
evidently is not the only one of his kind. He seems akin to Sauron himself,
who, when forced out of his body by the destruction of the Ring, appears as
"a vast soaring darkness . . . flickering with fire" before he is
dissipated by the wind. By contrast, the Watchers of Cirith Ungol are well-nigh
unliving statues of stone designed by Sauron to keep out enemies.

He has given them,
however, radarlike senses that detect Frodo and Sam, and powerful wills that
the hobbits are able to break only by prayer to Elbereth before they can
escape.

Still different is
the great spider Shelob, who cares nothing about either party in the War of the
Ring but only about getting enough food for her insatiable paunch, whether it
consist of elves, men, ores, hobbits, or her own innumerable brood. Grossly
physical though she is, "alone, swollen till the mountains could no longer
hold her up and the darkness could not contain her" she is more "an
evil thing in spider form" than a mere spider. She hungers to devour the
minds as well as the bodies of her prey. Gollum's worship she has accepted long
ago and "the darkness of her evil will" accompanies him on all his
journeys thereafter, "cutting him off from light and from regret."
Tolkien's language about her often takes on a symbolic tone: ". . .
weaving webs of shadow, for all living things were her food, and her vomit
darkness." Though Shelob is a solitary hunter, her lust to feed on the
whole world differs from Sauron's only in the manner of its accomplishment. So,
like the other monsters of the tale, in her particular form of unchecked
appetite she is one of the many variations on the theme of evil of which Sauron
is the generic type.

Finally there are
the barrow-wights. These are the spirits of dead men, unable to rest, who haunt
the burial mounds of the kings and queens of the old North Kingdom. They entrap
passersby and kill them. The reader may. be excused for assuming that they are
the ghosts of the people whose graves they trouble, but the evidence in the
text is otherwise. While Merry lies senseless on the burial slab decked out in
the clothes and jewels of the king entombed there, he dreams that he is that
king, who was slain by "the men of Carn Dûm" in a night attack.
Bombadil reveals after his rescue of the hobbits that this attack was led by
"the evil king of Carn Dûm in the Land of Angmar"—that is, by the
chief of the ring-wraiths. Tom also takes for Goldberry a brooch belonging to
the fair and good queen buried there whom he knew ages ago in life.
Accordingly, the dead are innocent victims of treachery and are not the right
ones to be barred from a place of rest or to do harm to chance travelers on the
Downs. No, the wights must be the ghosts of the evil attackers from Carn
Dûm—not Angmar himself, who is still alive and busy elsewhere as a ringwraith,
but his followers. Their resemblance is to the dead oath-breakers whose spirits
Aragorn summons at the stone of Erech to keep their broken promise of aid to
Isildur and his heirs. In the latter case Tolkien is relying on the Norse
warrior code, which branded an oath-breaker as the worst of criminals,
foredoomed to wander after death. In the case of the barrow-wights Tolkien
seems to be invoking the same punishment upon treachery under the same code.

Their connection
with Sauron is hinted at first in Tom's description of their coming: "A
shadow came out of dark places far away, and the bones were stirred in the
mounds. Barrow-wights walked in the hollow places with a clink of rings on cold
fingers . . ." among the hills. This shadow is Sauron sending the
barrow-wights. The incantation chanted by the wight who is about to kill the
hobbits specifically condemns them to death "till the dark lord lifts his
hand/over dead sea and withered land," after the sun fails and the moon
dies. Here a servant of Sauron (and maybe Sauron himself) is looking forward to
a Black Resurrection at the end of the world, when the dead arise to face
judgment not by Christ but by a triumphant Dark Lord who has taken His place.
It is all nonsense, of course. Tom exorcizes the wight to a prison "darker
than the darkness,/Where gates stand for ever shut, till the world is
mended." This mending of the world seems to refer to a Resurrection quite
different from that anticipated by Sauron and his servants. Meantime Tom's song
frees the minds of the hobbits from whatever limbo the wight's spell has consigned
them to.

The whole episode
is significant as showing the range of Sauron's powers and his hopes. From the
remoteness of Mordor he is able to bend the ghosts of dead men to his purposes
nearly as absolutely as he does the still-living Nazgûl enslaved by the Ring.
And he aspires to be God. If he can rule the races of Middle-earth while Earth
abides, why not the souls of the dead after the world ends? Tolkien springs
upon the reader surprise after surprise in the inexhaustible variety of evil
beings of whom Sauron can dispose. Their powers arc many but their chief weapon
is fear. Gimli points this up in retelling how Aragorn put to flight the
southern wing of Sauron's armies with the shadow host of dead oath-breakers:
"Strange and wonderful I thought it that the designs of Mordor should be
overthrown by such wraiths of fear and darkness. With its own weapons was it
worsted!"

Sauron himself is
not exempt from the same feeling of doubt and dread which he inspires in
others. The finding of his Ring by his enemies rouses him to a fearful
awareness of dangers he had never foreseen. Increasingly as the epic proceeds,
that Eye of his, which needs no lids because it never sleeps, anxiously
searches for the Ring and its bearers, while also surveying the preparations
for war on both sides. With the logic of ambition he expects some one of the
Western leaders to turn the power of the Ring against him. But with the lack of
imagination
⁵
that characterizes the self-involved he cannot conceive
that they may refuse power and decide to destroy the Ring instead. As time goes
on and the Ring still eludes him, his alarm grows. "Indeed he is in great
fear, not knowing what mighty one may suddenly appear, wielding the Ring, and
assailing him with war," Gandalf guesses on meeting Aragorn in Fangorn.
Sauron fumbles his chance to read Pippin's mind in the
palantír
because
he is hurried into the mistake of being "too eager" to torture the
truth out of Pippin in person.

Most drastically
shocking to the Dark Lord is Aragorn's sudden revelation of himself in the
Palantír
as the heir of Isildur. "To know that I lived and walked the
earth was a blow to his heart, I deem; for he knew it not till now . . . Sauron
has not forgotten Isildur and the sword of Elendil," says Aragorn grimly
after a struggle of wills in which he tears control of the Orthanc-stone away
from the enemy. And he is right. The knowledge that Aragorn survives and (as he
thinks) will surely become Lord of the Ring against him creates temporary
tumult in Sauron's hold over Mordor. The warnings that Angmar sends back to
headquarters after meeting Frodo and Sam on the stairs at Cirith Ungol go
unheeded for several days while Sauron broods. The confusion among the ore
guards allows the hobbits to slip into Mordor despite the battle with Shelob.
And, best of all, Sauron is bluffed into launching his attack on Gondor
prematurely. Down in the city Gandalf senses this with joy: "I feel from
afar his haste and fear. He has begun sooner than he would. Something has
happened to stir him."

Thereafter until
the end of the tale signs of the Dark Lord's "doubt" and strained
watching multiply, alternating with times when the Eye is "turned inward,
pondering tidings of doubt and danger," thinking of Aragorn and the sword
of Elendil which once killed Sauron on the slopes of Baraddur. Finally when he
glimpses Frodo near the Cracks of Doom Sauron at last sees the magnitude of his
folly in one flash and blazes with wrath and fear. "Wise fool,"
Gandalf calls him. So he is. But his very folly, his misjudgments, his fears,
his doubts, his memories of past defeat, his hatred of Gondor for humiliations
of old are what keep him a living figure instead of impersonal evil. One can
almost sigh as well as shudder when at the moment of dissolution he still
stretches out over the world "a vast threatening hand, terrible but
impotent," before the wind blows him away.