Master of Middle Earth (6 page)

Frodo himself
raises the question whether his rescue by Bombadil from Old Man Willow was only
happenstance: "Did you hear me calling, Master, or was it just chance that
brought you at that moment?" Tom's answer is both yea and nay, but the yea
is louder. He did not hear Frodo calling for help, and he was on an errand that
afternoon which took him to that part of the Old Forest to gather waterlilies.
On the other hand, he had been alerted by Gildor that the hobbits were in need
and he was watching the danger spots. In sum, says Tom, "Just chance
brought me then, if chance you call it. It was no plan of mine, though I was
waiting for you." The incredulous "if chance you call it" tends
to deny that the rescue was really chance, however mortals may commonly define
the concept. "It was no plan of mine" invites the thought that there
was a plan, though it was not his. Questions of this sort are meant to live on
in the back of the reader's mind and to make him doubt that Aragorn's very
opportune appearance later on at a time of maximum danger in the inn at Bree is
as fortuitous as it seems.

Tolkien is here
facing a joint literary-philosophical imperative. Literarily, he wants to keep
an atmosphere of wonder at the mysterous hand which is guiding events, but he
must not let this theme become so strong or definite as to persuade his readers
that the hobbits are certain to reach Rivendell safely. To do so would be fatal
to the suspense, and therefore to the story as story. Philosophically, if the
guiding hand is really to guide effectively, it must have power to control
events, yet not so much as to take away from the people acting them out the
capacity for moral choice. The latter, being fundamental to Tolkien's
conception of man (and other rational beings), must be preserved at all costs.
So Tolkien cannot allow his cosmic order to be a fixed, mechanistic,
unchangeable chain of causes and effects. The order must be built flexibly
around creaturely free will and possible personal providential interventions
from on high.

Tolkien uses
several techniques to attain the desired balances. For one thing he never
speaks about these matters as author, and thereby avoids authorial certitudes.
His characters may be certain, or virtually so, that a providential order is at
work but they are never sure of its final outcome, or exactly how it operates.
Witness Gandalf, who is positive that the Ring was "meant" to fall
into the hands of the West but not what its future is to be after that, and who
guesses that Gollum has a part yet to play but knows not whether it is for good
or ill. Witness also Gildor, who intuits a supervening purpose in his meeting
with the hobbits but confesses his ignorance of its aims. And Bombadil, who,
while intimating that his rescue of Frodo was not coincidence, regards himself
as ultimately outside the contending forces in the War of the Ring.

Another technique
Tolkien finds handy is to couple every incident anyone calls foreordained with
some no-table exercise of free will by one of the characters involved in it.
For example, as noted, Bilbo and Frodo arc said to be chosen as Ring-bearers,
but Bilbo is given the option to spare or kill Gollum, and Frodo can always
decline to serve. This duality is repeated again and again straight through to
the end of the epic. Yet another device is to let most of the major characters
voice premonitions or prophecies, seeming to entail a definite foreseeable
future, yet to keep these either misty in content or tentative in tone, so
loosening their fixity and hinting that the routes are various by which they
may come true.

All these devices
Tolkien handles with persuasive tact. But they are successful also because they
create for life on Middle-earth a kind of atmosphere that our own existential
experience of living accepts as genuine. Very common for us is the sense that
our lives are bound in with larger patterns that we cannot change. Yet tomorrow
seems never sure, and at every new crossroads nothing is stronger than the
feeling inside us that we are the masters of our alternatives.

Because Elrond's
Council is a turning point in the history of Middle-earth and because he
himself, with Gandalf and Galadriel, is the wisest of the assembled leaders of
the West, his solemn opening statement to them that some force greater than
themselves has brought them together at this crisis carries special weight. To
decide what to do with the Ring, he says, "That is the purpose for which
you are called hither. Called, I say, though I have not called you to me,
strangers from distant lands. You have come and are here met, in this very nick
of time, by chance as it may seem. Yet it is not so. Believe rather that it is
so ordered that we who sit here, and none others, must now find counsel for the
perils of the world." Nothing could be plainer than Elrond's rejection
here of chance as the cause of the Council, however much on the surface it may
seem to be so. Almost as plain is his language pointing to the personal nature
of the summoner.

Words like
purpose, called
(thrice spoken),
ordered, believe
look to some
living will and even have a distantly Christian aura. Moreover, whoever did the
calling was concerned for the West's welfare in the struggle against Sauron.
Yet the whole purpose of assembling its leaders was not to force any course of
action upon them but to have them freely debate it for themselves. The
conclusions of the Council are not predetermined in any way, though its
summoning was. Noteworthy also is the care with which Elrond avoids giving the
supreme being any of the traditional names for God.

The Council having
agreed at length that the Ring must be carried back to Mordor to be destroyed,
a silence ensues until Frodo, overcoming "a great dread," speaks up
with an effort to offer himself as carrier. This is the vocabulary of free
choice. Elrond accepts it as such while at the same time believing that the
same power that convoked the Council has also appointed Frodo to undertake the
task. He sees no clash between the two ideas: "If I understand aright all
that I have heard ... I think that this task is appointed for you, Frodo; and
that if you do not find a way, no one will. . . But it is a heavy burden ... I
do not lay it on you. But if you take it freely, I will say that your choice is
right . . ." Though Frodo is a chosen instrument most likely to succeed,
it is not a foregone conclusion that he will succeed. Providence, for its own
reasons which finite minds cannot understand, may perhaps intend Sauron to win
this bout in the never-ceasing war between good and evil. Elrond leaves the end
open. Frodo has the right to accept or refuse the office as he wills, and no
other person should tell him what to do. Yet refusal may bring unspoken
penalties, since all acts have their consequences. If Frodo's acceptance would
be "right," would not refusal be, if not "wrong," at least
an abdication of duty, diminishing him morally? Much is implicit here. Among
the natural inferences also is that Frodo's appointment to carry the Ring is of
like kind with the selection of Bilbo and Frodo to find and receive it earlier,
and was made by the same all-seeing mind, in which Gandalf and Elrond, both
pupils of the Valar, firmly believe.

Elrond here has
ventured only a very generalized and conditional forecast of possible coming
events. Gandalf's death in combat with the Balrog in Moria, however, is one of
those main forks in the plot of which Aragorn as well as Gandalf has rather
clear knowledge in advance. Aragorn is so sure beforehand of personal disaster
to Gandalf that he insists on trying the alternate route over the Redhorn Gate
first, and when they are forced by storm toward the old dwarf kingdom utters
the strongest possible alarm to him: "I will follow your lead now—if his
last warning does not move you . . . And I say to you: if you pass the doors of
Moria, beware!" Aragorn does not say precisely what he fears, but the
severity of his agitation can be for nothing less than Gandalf's death, and he
accurately fears for no one else in the Company, since all the rest are saved
by Gandalf's sacrifice of himself. Gandalf, too, knows what awaits him.
Rebuking Gimli weeks later for saying that the wizard's "foresight failed
him" in entering Moria, Aragorn implies that Gandalf foreknew and accepted
the result: "The counsel of Gandalf was not founded on foreknowledge of
safety, for himself or others . . . There are some things that it is better to
begin than to refuse, even though the end may be dark." But the inference
also is that Gandalf could have chosen not to accept death, as Frodo could have
chosen not to accept the Ring. The foreseen event will occur only
if
a
creaturely will freely consents first. In this way Tolkien keeps his
providential plan personalized, nonmechanistic, and not rigidly determined yet
quite potent enough, withholds advance details about the precise shape and
manner of the event foreknown, and, not incidentally, enhances the suspense of
his tale.

Arrived at Lórien
without Gandalf, the Company seeks the advice of Queen Galadriel,
"greatest of Elven women" in Tolkien's phrase, whose life span
extends back to the start of the First Age and whose wisdom is unexcelled among
her race. But she is unexpectedly chary of making any predictions for them, or
for the success of the West in general. She knows what is to come only "in
part," she insists, and her mirror reveals not what shall be but only what
"may be." Indeed she warns Frodo and Sam that what they see in its
waters "is dangerous as a guide to deeds." It mixes up past, present,
and future so indistingusihably that the gazer cannot be sure which is which,
and in striving to avert a danger he thinks he sees lying ahead he may take the
very measures which are necessary to bring it about. All finite knowledge about
the future is cursed by this Oedipean paradox. Necessarily so, because it is
incomplete and therefore blind in its information about the means which must
precede any given consequence. What then? Are all flashes of foreknowledge
false? Galadriel does not say so. But it is noticeable that she prefers to rely
mostly on rational inferences from what she already knows about the past and
present: "I will not give you counsel, saying do this, or do that. For not
in doing or contriving, nor in chosing between this course and another, can I
avail; but only in knowing what was and is, and in part also what shall be . .
. Your Quest stands upon the edge of a knife ... Yet hope remains while the
Company is true."

This insight,
couched in the most general terms, amounts in essence only to a statement of
belief that if the members of the Company remain faithful to their trust they
still have a chance. As in all previous instances, even so mild a prediction is
made to depend upon their free obedience to moral laws. Later, Galadriel
explicitly refuses to forecast whether Sauron will be overthrown: "I do
not foretell, for all foretelling is now vain: on the one hand lies darkness,
and on the other only hope," but she is willing to assure Gimli that if he
survives he will be rich, yet over him gold will not have the dominion it has
over other dwarves. A likely enough conclusion from Gimli's stated preference
for a strand of Galadriel's hair over all the gold and gems on earth. She is
perhaps partly foreseeing, partly only comforting the Company when she urges
them not to worry over their indecision about selection of a destination:
"Maybe the paths that you each shall tread are already laid before your
feet, though you do not see them." Nothing Galadriel says to them during
their stay in Lórien shakes in any way the established doctrine of the epic
that their future course is indeed laid out for them, provided they themselves
choose to tread it. Her function in the story is to warn them, and herself, to
tend to the duty in hand and not rashly to presume that finite minds can
outguess the supreme architect who plans the whole.

Events bear out
Galadriel's distrust of all creaturely foreknowledge, including her own. She
proves to be only partly right in believing that the success of the Quest rests
on the continued loyalty of everyone in the Company. At Parth Galen the evil
desire for the Ring long growing in Boromir explodes into a physical attack on
Frodo that splits the Company into groups, as it needs to be split, since each
group has its own indispensable job to do in the complex compaigns that follow.
Frodo, followed by Sam, is shocked into starting off by himself on the
stealthy, inconspicuous course of slipping into Mordor in which lies his only
possible chance of eluding Sauron's roving eye. Capture of Pippin and Merry by
the ores transports them to Fangorn Forest, where they escape just in time to
rouse the ents to overwhelm Saruman at Isengard and Helm's Deep. Pursuing the
captives, Aragorn meets Éomer, to begin the awakening of Rohan, and meets in
the forest the reincarnated Gandalf, who completes the process by freeing
Théoden from Wormtongue. In consequence, Saruman's threat to Rohan is wiped
out, and the Rohirrim have just enough time to send the army that saves Minas
Tirith from the first onset of Sauron's hosts. Even this would not have been
enough had Aragorn not been released by Saruman's defeat to ride the Paths of
the Dead and so bring the armies of southern Gondor to the aid of the city when
the Rohirrim faltered. None of this would have happened had not Boromir
succumbed for a time to the spell of the Ring. In retrospect that evil hour was
necessary to defeat evil in the long run as nothing else could have.

The momentum built
up by Tolkien earlier for the existence of an unseen design behind all the
episodes of his story carries forward into this long sequence of hairbreadth
successes stemming from Boromir's fall. Even if Tolkien never said a further
word about it we would be inclined to see the finger of Providence in them. But
through various spokesmen, especially Gandalf, he keeps up a running commentary
to that effect. Hearing from Aragorn in Fangorn what happened at Parth Galen,
Gandalf reflects on the unseen significance of the decision, made by Elrond
only at the last moment, to include Merry and Pippin in the Company, which
allowed Boromir to redeem himself by dying to protect them and which brought
the ents into action: "It was not in vain that the young hobbits came with
us, if only for Boromir's sake. But that is not the only part they have to
play. They were brought to Fangorn, and their coming was like the falling of
small stones that starts an avalanche in the mountains." He is using the
same language he used to describe Gollum's "part" in the fate of the
Ring. All are filling roles written for them by the same great playwright. And
Gandalf has to laugh at the irony of the rival ore bands of Saruman and Sauron
which captured the two hobbits, thereby serving to promote a good they never
meant: "So between them our enemies have contrived only to bring Merry and
Pippin with marvelous speed, and in the nick of time, to Fangorn, where
otherwise they would never have come at all!" His own reincarnation he
interprets as one more move in the plan, for he too has a role: "Naked I
was sent back—for a brief time, until my task is done. And naked I lay upon the
mountaintop," until an eagle sent by Galadriel brings him to Lórien for
healing and consultation. The greater strength that the new White possesses as
against the former Grey is needed for his coming labors, and he would never
have had it, had not the Balrog first killed him down in the pit.