Master of Middle Earth (8 page)

As the Fourth Age
begins, no successor of Sauron is in sight to rally the forces of evil against
civilization. But signs are not lacking that sooner or later one will arise
again on Middle-earth or out of the Undying Lands—another Morgoth, a more
vicious Fëanor, a Denethor more wholly lost to good. Gandalf has said as much
in the Last Debate: "Other evils there are that may come; for Sauron is
himself but a servant or emissary. Yet it is not our part to master all the
tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years in
which we are set, uprooting the evils in the fields that we know, so that those
who live after may have clear earth to till. What weather they shall have is
not ours to rule."
⁴
To judge by the history of the past three
Ages evil will not be long in reviving. With brief respites Middle-earth has
always been under siege by some Dark Lord or other. There seems to be something
in the nature of things, or in the nature of the One who devises them,
⁵
that requires it. Sauron is Morgoth's servant, but whose emissary is Morgoth?
In one sense, nobody's. Since like everybody else, he has a will free to
choose, he is self-corrupted. In another sense, his master can only be the One,
who, while not creating evil, permits it to exist and uses it in ruling his
word—who, in truth,
needs
evil in order to bring on times of peril that
test his creatures to the uttermost, morally and physically, as in Sauron's
war.

If men and their
colleagues of other races are to prove the stoutness of their fiber, such times
must come again and again in the Fourth Age and future ages of whatever number.
Evil has built-in weaknesses that make for self-defeat, and the One, with his
smiling ironies, will sometimes manipulate it to that end. But the burden of
The Lord of the Rings
is that victory for the good is never automatic. It
must be earned anew each time by every individual taking part. In this effort,
says Aragorn to Éomer, man has the natural ability and the obligation to
"discern" the difference between right and wrong. These are
opposites, absolutes that do not vary from year to year or place to place or
people to people. Those rational beings who would act well on Tolkien's
Middle-earth do not have to stand on the shifting sands of historical relativism.
The good is as unchanging above the tides of time as the beauty of Sam's star
over Mordor, and derives ultimately from the character of the One who placed it
there.

But does death end
all for those who have not the unending lives of elves? The epic abounds with
hints of some kind of afterlife for them, but these are faint. For example, the
dying Aragorn, when taking leave of Arwen, encourages her to believe that they
will meet again: "Behold! we are not bound for ever to the circles of the
world, and beyond them is more than memory." But neither he nor anyone
else speculates on the question of whether the rewards of virtue extend beyond
death. There is plenty of natural religion in
The Lord of the Rings
but
the epic tends to stand back from transcendence on this point, as some of
Tolkien's shorter tales do not.

The farthest look
into the future of mankind on earth is taken by Legolas and Gimli when they
first enter Minas Tirith and see the marks of decay around them. The dwarf
comments that all the works of men, however promising at first, "fail of
their promise." Legolas counters that, even so, "seldom do they fail
of their seed," which springs up afresh in unlooked-for times and places
to outlast both elves and dwarves. Gimli is unconvinced. Human deeds, he still
thinks, "come to naught in the end but might-have-beens." The elf
takes refuge in a plea of ignorance: "To that the Elves know not the
answer"—and presumably if not the elves, then nobody.

This sad little
fugue about the outlook for humanity by representatives of two neighbor races
is uncharacteristic in its sadness of the epic as a whole.
The Lord of the
Rings
is at bottom a hopeful tale. The whole venture of the Ring always
looks desperate. So does combat after combat against wildly superior armies.
Yet against all persuasions to despair, Gandalf, Aragorn, Elrond, Faramir, and
those who fight beside them hope on and keep on acting upon their hope. Without
that, Sauron would have won a dozen times over. Tolkien himself is pessimistic
about many aspects of our present age, but he is personally too robust to give
up on man. I find the same stoutheartedness in the epic in the teeth of tragedy
acknowledged and faced down. It strikes me rather as being a paean to hope.

Like Greek drama
or Miltonic epic which
begin late along their plot lines,
The Lord of the Rings
begins just
before the climax of Sauron's efforts to subdue the West, which have extended
far back through the Second and Third Ages. Indeed, when Tolkien comes to write
his account of the War of the Ring he has so much that is important to
summarize about the events leading up to it that he criticizes the work in the
Foreword, for all its three volumes, as "too short."

To see Sauron in
full stature we had best attend carefully to the long tale of his past guile,
ambition, and triumph told in snatches by Gandalf, Elrond, and others, and by
Tolkien in the Appendices. All the more so because Sauron, never personally
appearing in any scene of the epic, is in some danger of becoming a shadowy
impersonality who does not seem real in himself but fades into a symbol of
evil. Yet his was the seductive charm of body and mind that tempted the
Númenorean king Ar-Pharazon to defy the Ban of the Valar by arms, provoking the
One to an anger that drowned all Númenor under the sea at the end of the Second
Age—a signal victory. In the same Age he had already sown the first seeds of
the War of the Ring by deceiving the elven smiths of Eregion into forging the
rings of power, by which he designed to gain dominion over elves, dwarves, and
men. This bold scheme of Sauron's, boundless in its ambitious reach, is the
true beginning of Tolkien's epic.

Sauron perpetrated
deception of the elven smiths by appealing to what he knew to be the ruling
passion of the elves: "their eagerness for knowledge, by which Sauron
ensnared them. For at that time he was not yet evil to behold, and they
received his aid and grew mighty in craft, whereas he learned all their
secrets, and betrayed them, and forged secretly in the Mountain of Fire the One
Ring to be their master." As a result, the elves made three rings for
themselves, seven that they gave to the dwarf leaders, and nine that they
turned over to Sauron for the use of the chiefs of men. All were rings of
power, but they reflected the characteristics peculiar to the races for which
they were intended. The elf rings, for instance, increased "understanding,
making, and healing, to preserve all things unstained." The dwarf rings,
appealing to the treasure hunger that was the besetting sin of that race,
served "to inflame their hearts with a greed of gold and precious things,
so that if they lacked them all other good things seemed profitless, and they
were filled with wrath and desire for vengeance on all who deprived them."
The rings directed at men stimulated and implemented their ambition for power.
Sauron gave these to chiefs of the Dúnedain, especially Angmar, who had not
gone to Númenor: "Nine he gave to Mortal Men, proud and great, and so ensnared
them. Long ago they fell under the dominion of the One, and they became Ringwraiths,
shadows under his great Shadow, his most terrible servants."

But this plot of
Sauron's demands a price. He can forge a ruling Ring strong enough to control
all these subordinate rings only by pouring into it a large portion of his own
native vigor, as Gandalf explains: ". . . he made that Ring himself, it is
his, and he let a great part of his own former power pass into it, so that he
could rule all the others." The price is greater than he realizes. As long
as his vigor is undivided Sauron's spirit can survive death after death, living
to fight another day by incarnating itself each time in a new body, as he has
done twice before—after the drowning of Númenor and after his defeat by Elendil
and Gilgalad, in both of which he perished. But once he infuses part of his
strength into a Ring that can be lost he is weakened even while the lost Ring
is intact, and he becomes vulnerable to permanent loss of the power to occupy any
physical body if the Ring is ever destroyed. This, of course, is the one
capital flaw that the West is finally able to exploit.

Why does Sauron
ever embark on the forging of the rings in the first place under conditions of
such peril? He need not have. The immediate answer must lie somewhere in his
character. In his customary arrogance and blind contempt he never takes
seriously, perhaps never sees at all, the possibility that he may one day lose
the ruling Ring. Besides, he is an obsessed being, driven by his fever to
dominate everything and everybody. He cannot rest. He is always on the
offensive, always reaching out to draw all life to himself in order to subdue
it. As W. H. Auden well remarks, this kind of lust of domination "is not
satisfied if another does what it wants; he must be made to do it against his
will."
¹
It would be a mistake, moreover, to generalize Sauron
into a conscious champion of the cause of abstract evil. He is quite simply a
champion of Sauron, so far as his intent goes. That he is being used
unwittingly by a higher power as one protagonist in a conflict between good and
evil has been suggested in the previous chapter.

Setting aside its
deadly risk to himself, Sauron's plot with the rings has only partial success.
It works perfectly with the human ringwraiths, but with the dwarves it fails to
do more than exacerbate their greed. By nature dwarves are not easily
digestible. "Though they could be slain or broken, they could not be
reduced to shadows enslaved to another will." From the beginning the
dwarves "were made ... of a kind to resist most steadfastly any
domination." Since Sauron's whole appetite is for command of other wills,
he is balked of his purpose here, though his ability to ruin the lives of
individual leaders like Thráin and his partial perversion of general dwarf
nature might count as success enough for a less exacting gourmet. One remembers
the gloating message he sends after seeing Pippin in the
Palantír:
"Tell Saruman that this dainty is not for him. I will send for it at
once." Pippin, like every other living being, is to Sauron an impersonal
"it" to be devoured.

Sauron's worst
failure, however, is with the elf rings, and the manner of it tells much about
him. After all the rings have been forged he stands triumphantly on Mount Doom,
sets the ruling Ring on his finger, and repeats aloud in the Black Speech the
spell by which it rules the others. He is arrogantly unaware that in Eregion
across the long miles Celebrimbor, king of the elves, is "aware of
him" and hides the elf rings so that no elf will wear one (until after the
ruling Ring is lost). He then launches war against Sauron. Like Galadriel in
Lórien he perceives the Dark Lord and knows his mind, though Sauron gropes for
his thoughts in vain. This basic epistemological superiority of the good over
the evil is symbolized by Lórien's light, which pierces to the heart of the
darkness of Dol Guldur but cannot be pierced by it in return. Other instances
of this blindness of Sauron will appear in due course. Lacking imaginative
sympathy an evil intelligence cannot by understanding penetrate a good one,
which does have that power in reverse. The former is too involved in self.

Sauron being what
he is, that part of himself which he pours into the ruling Ring makes of it a
living will to devour utterly the wills of those who wear the lesser rings. As
has been said in the previous chapter, for Tolkien every intelligent being is
born with a will capable of free choice, and the exercise of it is the
distinguishing mark of his individuality. Nothing can be more precious. So
Gandalf, Elrond, Galadriel, Aragorn, and other leaders of the West are careful
never to put pressure on another's choices, even to the point of reluctance to
give him advice when he asks for it By contrast, Sauron, who hates any freedom
other than his own, focuses his attack in devising the rings against this
ultimate bastion of freedom. His ruling Ring is at once a powerful instrument
of coercion on all who come within its influence, particularly its wearers, and
a carrier of temptation to them to coerce the wills of others. Its method is
the subtle one of gradually capturing the mind by radiating an incessant
inflationary spell over whatever desires are dearest to it, however harmless or
even noble they may seem. So, wearing the ring, Sam sees himself "striding
with a flaming sword" to make all Mordor into a garden, Gollum will become
the
Gollum, Isildur is to shine as the great winner of werglid for the
deaths of his father and brother. Gandalf dares not wear it, knowing that
"the way of the Ring to my heart is by pity, pity for weakness and the
desire of strength to do good." Neither dares Galadriel to accept it, when
offered the Ring by Frodo and urged by Sam to take it "to make some folk
pay for their dirty work." "I would," she replies sadly.
"That is how it would begin. But it would not stop with that, alas!"
The Ring can work only by coercion of the will. Such is its nature. Anyone who
uses coercion in even the best of causes is using an evil means to a good end
and thereby corrupting the end—and himself. By definition, good objects turn
bad when achieved by the absolute power over others' wills which the Ring
confers.

"The very
desire of it corrupts the heart," warns Elrond. That is why any gifted
person who elects to make the Ring his permanent mode of action inevitably
becomes another Dark Lord, and consequently why it cannot be allowed to go on
existing.