The Doom of Choice

Tolkien and the Critics, as I mentioned yesterday. It is an old paperback, but I was suspicious right from the Table of Contents.  There is an essay by CS Lewis, one by WH Auden, and… wait a minute, when did this come out? 1968, and all the essays are from 1959-1966.  As Lord of the Rings came out in 1954-55, these essays are quite early on. One clue is the first essay, which functions as an introduction by Neil D. Isaacs

It would be, then, one function of Tolien criticism to shift the emphasis from extraliterary aspects of the trilogy and its audience to a consideration of the work itself.

You couldn’t do that today. You would have to note Tolkien’s sex, race, era, country, religion, privilege and some other things I’m not remembering at present, and only discuss the work in relation to those things.* Clearly, we are reading criticism from another time. Counter-reactions always seem to be a direct 180 degrees to their revolutionaries, yet in retrospect Romanticism, Formalism, New Criticism were never opposites and often have the similarities of their eras that were invisible to them then.

Tolkien is still new to them, and to their readers. Several of them take time to explain parts of the story that are second-nature to all Tolkien readers now, such as noting that hobbits are short creatures but very much like humans, while ents are an ancient people with the appearance of trees. There is a tone of breathlessness at the sheer freshness of it all.  What kind of work is it?  Is Burton Raffell right when he says it’s not even really literature? Is the fad over, except for the cultish few? It brought me back to my own breathlessness reading Lin Carter’s Tolkien: A look behind the Lord of the Rings in the 1970s. Look! There are the names of his dwarves, right there in the Elder Edda!  Fili, Kili;  Oin and Gloin. Tolkien doesn’t just give this a Norse flavor, he uses the real stuff! He was friends with CS Lewis before either of them wrote fantasies? Far out! The Rohirrim speak Anglo-Saxon!  Those were exciting times.  Alan Garner’s and Lloyd Alexander’s books from the early 1960s were gradually becoming known, but the days when entire sections of bookstores would be devoted to Sword & Sorcery books were still far off.

There is added fun in happening upon the first example of anything that later became conventional, even hackneyed. There are several of these in the volume, where one nods and thinks “Ah, you were the first to see that, then.” Because of her horrible later behavior, I would love to tell you that Marion Zimmer Bradley’s essay “Men, Halflings, and Hero-Worship” was terrible, but it is one of the best. She has a sharp eye for character delineation and what it means, seeing interesting distinctions between Merry and Pippin, for example. She also wonders if Gollum’s plunge into death with the ring might have had some intentionality in his carelessness. He is not pushed. He cares for no danger at the literal brink of danger. He hated and loved the ring, but merely hated his life.  If he cares for anything besides the ring, it is Frodo, just a faint echo of love – and he saves Frodo.

Hugh Keenan has one about a Freudian interpretation of LOTR, contending that the works are not about good vs evil, but death vs. life.  I take the point and it is interesting, but the ideas hold up about as well as other Freudian ideas, which is to say culturally interesting, but wrong. Rose Zimbardo’s essay about Moral Vision remains strong, as does Patricia Meyer Spacks on Power and Meaning. It is from there that I would like to offer a few thoughts of my own.

Lord of the Rings is about moral choices, even more than about good and evil. Good and evil are often mixed in this world, and this makes choices more difficult. There have been times that I wished Tolkien were just a bit more explicit in his Christianity, not beating the drum quite so hard about Fate and Doom. Though those fit well with the Northernness of the whole enterprise, I have thought they undermined the clearly Christian foundations of the adventure. The mix is similar to that of the Beowulf poet, reinterpreting older pagan wyrd into a somewhat-converted newer era. I immediately thought Tolkien got the mood or tone right, but had undersold the content.  After reading the essays, I am rethinking that. Setting moral choices in a more Anglo-Saxon world may highlight their importance and even desperateness.

All the choices have a moral side, even those which seem purely practical. The retreat from Caradhras is a practical matter, because of snow, but Aragorn senses an evil will pushing them to Moria and is willing to endure risk to push back against that, until the thing becomes impossible. As far back as The Hobbit, Bilbo has to navigate a very tricky morality in the standoff between the dwarves and the lake-men, of ownership, fairness, loyalty, alliance, gratitude, greed, and deserved reward. Even in the simpler tale moral choice drives Tolkien’s narratives.

In Christian belief there is sometimes an idea of destiny, stated more mildly as calling. Our freedom within that is thought to be great. Only rarely do we see Biblical personages caught up in assigned roles, and even in those instances, such as Daniel, the person has freedom of movement. Jesus is the great exception, yet even He hopes near the end that some other way might be found. As a consequence, Christians know our actions have effects downstream.  We may be called or even cornered, but Fate is not some steamroller that goes on regardless of whether we stood in front of it or not. What we choose changes the choice of others who come after.

This is far less true in Middle-Earth, where everyone seems aware of being doomed to the era and the role they are in, asking only to perform their assigned role well.  "I am not made for perilous quests," Frodo protests. ""You have been chosen, and you must therefore use such strength and heart and wits as you have." There is a distant God behind it all, referred to only as The One. "The Valar laid down their guardianship and called upon The One, and the world was changed."  Elrond gives the idea of a Person interested in them, not merely an impersonal Fate.

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 peril of the world.

Yet some moral choices have resonated on into later events. Bilbo starts his ownership of the ring with mercy toward Gollum, and gives up the ring willingly, though with a wrench (Sam also gives it up freely), and Gandalf specifically notes that this may have changed fate. Frodo later echoes this with his own mercy toward Gollum, and even Sam, though angrily and threateningly, merely sends Gollum off at the end rather than killing him, even though he is a threat to Frodo, who Sam has given nearly all he has to protect. In the end we find this to be true, and the repeated mercies have each been necessary to avoid ultimate catastrophe.

In Middle-Earth people are less used to their actions having more than local and transitory effects. Even for heroes, what can a man do but die on his dying day?  The “Battle of Maldon,” both poem and actual event, depict the height of heroism against the most terrible odds – yet the Danegeld was paid shortly after anyway. In Christianity, Jesus comes back in the end and sets things right. In Norse legend, the gods are going to ultimately be defeated by the giants, yet we fight on anyway, simply because it is the right thing to do.  No reward is promised.  The moral choices thus have an added layer of temptation.  It doesn’t matter in the long run anyway.  Give up. Frodo, Sam, Gandalf, Aragorn, and Theoden all speak of having little or no hope at some point, and Eowyn declares it defiantly. Yet we, on the outside, never quite believe that.  We sense that this is a world where there is hope and not mere striving. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death...They walk through many valleys of shadows of death.

Tolkien's Middle Earth does have hope at the end of it, almost as if it is a place where Fate and Doom have been redeemed, remaining themselves, yet changed.  Aragorn speaks in the language or wyrd, yet his content is quietly Christian under it all.   The Riders of Rohan ask him what doom he brings out of the north. "The doom of choice" is what he offers. CS Lewis fancied that Nature herself was a creature, destined to be transformed in the new creation, and illustrated that in The Great Divorce and The Last Battle.  Tolkien takes this one step deeper to the cornerstones of being that seem nearly self-existent, deeper than universes. There are many cultures and world-views, and we may not see them destroyed so much as transformed in the end. We have an inkling of that here.

So there is the choice of kindness, and the choice of courage. There is also the choice of humility, and because of it Sam and Gandalf change fate by not taking the ring to use it, Galadriel and Faramir step down from power and change the lives of entire peoples.

*This too shall pass.  A small group of critics in the future - pray it may be soon - will look over the landscape of Intersectional reading and say "We're sick of this.  We're having none of it."