Master of Middle Earth (11 page)

The question
remains how far Tolkien wishes his treatment of evil to be considered not only
moral but metaphysical. As remarked in Chapter III, Tolkien does not write in
the technical language of philosophy. In one passage of his essay "On
Fairy-stories" he deliberately sidesteps the epistemological problem of
whether and in what form a physical world exists apart from man's perceptions.
Recovery
he defines as "a regaining of a clear view" of things,
and adds, "I do not say 'seeing things as they are' and involve myself
with the philosophers, though I might venture to say 'seeing things as we are
(or were) meant to see them'—as things apart from ourselves."
⁶
The philosophers with whom he prefers not to involve himself are probably those
of the idealist school from Berkeley down to our modem phenomenologists who,
each in his own way, echo Coleridge's dejection, ". . . we receive but
what we give/And in our life alone does Nature live." Yet of course
Tolkien cannot escape metaphysics. By introducing the word
meant
he
implies intention, and only a person of some kind can have an intent for
mankind. He is merely turning an epistemological problem into a theological one.
Without using blatantly theological terms his ideas are often clearly
theological nonetheless, and are best understood when viewed in the context of
the natural theology of Thomas Aquinas, whom it is reasonable to suppose that
Tolkien, as a medievalist and a Catholic, knows well. The same is true in the
area of metaphysics. Some of Thomas' less specifically Christian propositions
about the nature of evil seem highly congruent with those which Tolkien
expresses or implies in laymen's terms in
The Lord of the Rings.
We must
be very tentative, of course, and alert not to force a literary masterpiece
into any tight philosophical mold, Thomistic or otherwise. Middle-earth is
avowedly pre-Christian.

"Nothing is
evil in the beginning. Even Sauron was not so." It is well to repeat often
Tolkien's basic moral and ontological dictum. Before he succumbed to the
promptings of Morgoth, Sauron had the excellence native to the species into
which he was born, whatever that species was. So did Saruman; so did Gollum; so
did the Nazgûl, and all the rest. Grima Wormtongue, even, did Théoden honest
service before he sold himself to Saruman. Sauron may have been a valar, as
Auden suggests,
⁷
or he may have belonged to some other powerful
race. It is not very important. What matters is that he had great gifts of
mind, a full range of perceptions, a handsome body, and a sense of fellowship
that made him welcome to everyone. After his fall, his moral vision narrowed
down to what could serve his ambitions. This is a grievous loss of perceptive
faculties, resulting in the blindness and lack of imaginative insight we have
so often noted. It is also monomania. After a time his body became black and burning
hot, so ugly that he had to hide himself away in Mirkwood and Mordor. This
process describes not merely an almost Platonic loss of personal beauty but a
diminution of physical existence. It is also a loss of normal intercourse with
others, a retreat into a loneliness cut off from equals. Literally and
figuratively, light is exchanged for darkness. Sauron's every change is a
deterioration from those good and healthy norms with which he began. Aquinas
would call them all losses of Being. Evil is not a thing in itself but a
lessening of the Being inherent in the created order.

Tolkien does not
write in so many words about
Being,
any more than he does about
form,
substance, essence, existence,
and other metaphysical concepts. But as his
evildoers suffer loss after heartbreaking loss from origins which he holds up
as admirable these losses cry out for ontological interpretation. One of the
few detailed descriptions we get of Sauron's omnipresent Eye overtly pulls us
along in that direction: "The Eye was rimmed with fire, but was itself
glazed, yellow as a cat's, watchful and intent, and the black slit of its pupil
opened on a pit, a window into nothing." To see into Sauron's Eye is to
look into nothingness. Sauron is getting as close as a subsisting creature can
get to absolute non-Being. His watchtower on Minas Morgul is built in the same
image. Its searchlight is "like a noisome exhalation of decay, a
corpse-light, a light that illuminated nothing. In the walls and towers windows
showed, like countless black holes looking inward into emptiness . . ."
The emptiness, be it noted, is "inward." Resemblance to Sauron's
restless Eye is enhanced by the revolving tower, "first one way and then
another, a large ghostly head leering into the night." And here again (for
the symbolism pursues us through the epic) the light of Mordor is no light but
the flicker of darkness over the dead. Add Gandalf's stern command to Angmar
when he confronts the Nazgûl at the gates of Gondor: "Go back to the abyss
prepared for you! Go back! Fall into the nothingness that awaits you and your
Master." Over and over Tolkien's own words connect Sauron and his servants
with a nothingness that is the philosophical opposite of Being.

Add, finally, the
outer and inner decay of Saruman who "was great once, of a noble kind that
we should not dare to raise our hands against. He is fallen . . ." —to
repeat what is virtually Frodo's epitaph over him. After the defeat of his
armies he still has at least the spell of his wonderful voice left to him but he
misuses that too and cheapens it by cursing as he rejects chance after chance
to redeem himself to usefulness. In the end he trudges the roads in "rags
of grey or dirty white," an object of sorrow to Gandalf: ". . . alas
for Saruman! ... He has withered altogether." His death finishes the
downward plunge. The spirit rising from his shrunken body is dissipated by a
wind from the West, "and with a sigh dissolved into nothing." That
word
nothing
is a repeated knell for the passing of the lords of
wickedness in
The Lord of the Rings.
Tolkien is careful never to say
anything explicit about the nothingness to which they go, doubly careful never
to call it hell, but it shares with hell the distinguishing feature of total
estrangement from ultimate Being.

Critics like Edmund Wilson
, who
pontificates that "for the most part such characters as Dr. Tolkien is
able to contrive are perfectly stereotyped,"
¹
or Mark Roberts,
to whom
The Lord of the Rings
is "simply an adventure story"
²
are refuted on their own ground, I hope, by chapters prior and subsequent to
this one. My concern here is to demonstrate that these critics, and others, are
taking too narrow a view of what a Tolkien "character" is. As Tolkien
conceives the matter, characters are not limited to the individuals who play
parts in the war against Sauron. They include also, and perhaps even
predominantly, the various races to which each person belongs. Tolkien is at
least as interested in exploring the characteristic traits of elves, hobbits,
dwarves, men, ents, and other intelligent species who swarm Middle-earth as he
is in depicting, say, Frodo, Elrond, Aragorn, and Gimli, or in telling the
events of the War of the Ring. The essay "On Fairy-stories," that
indispensable handbook of Tolkien theory, should have warned the commentators
to look at the epic in that light. The aim of
The Lord of the Rings
is
certainly to tell a story of more than ordinary fascination, but it is also to
satisfy our basic human hungers to hold communion with as wide a range as
possible of creatures like and unlike ourselves.
³
In Tolkien's
analysis, this is one of the imperatives of good fantasy.

The question has
inevitably been raised whether Tolkien wants us to view each of his many
intelligent species as having its niche in some sort of vertical Chain of Being
in which some are "higher" than others.
⁴
If so, by what
principle of classification? Today's spirit of egalitarianism predisposes us
against any such interpretation. Moreover, Tolkien's own wide dissemination of
consciousness, the power of speech, and especially moral freedom among nearly
all the living creatures of his world may seem to blur the distinctions that we
usually regard as existing between species in these particulars. Nevertheless
there are cogent reasons for thinking that he means to set at least one major
grouping of species above all the rest.

This grouping
consists of those whom Treebeard, in reciting his catalogue of "living
creatures" to Merry and Pippin in Fangorn Forest, calls "the free
peoples":

Learn now the lore
of Living Creatures!

First name the
four, the free peoples:

Eldest of all, the
elf-children;

Dwarf the delver,
dark are his houses;

Ent the earthborn,
old as mountains;

Man the mortal,
master of horses:

Having listed
elves, dwarves, ents, and men as free peoples, Treebeard clears his throat and
proceeds to call off the names of a selection of beasts, birds, and reptiles:

Hm, hm, hm.

Beaver the
builder, buck the leaper,

Bear bee-hunter,
boar the fighter;

Hound is hungry,
hare is fearful...

hm, hm.

Eagle in eyrie, ox
in pasture,

Hart horn-crowned;
hawk is swiftest,

Swan the whitest,
serpent coldest. . . .

Several
observations stand out. Four species are "free peoples" whereas all
the others are not. And these four are named "first," with the
inference that they deserve priority. Hobbits and wizards do not appear on the
list because it is one which Treebeard learned long ago as a young ent before
the ents met either of those races. So far as hobbits are concerned, after inspecting
Merry and Pippin, Treebeard makes a place for them in proper alphabetical order
between ents and men:

Ents the
earthborn, old as mountains,

the wide-walkers,
water drinking;

and hungry as
hunters, the Hobbit children,

the laughing-folk,
the little people ...

Wizards never do
get into Treebeard's catalogue. By his standards, if the five of them can be
called a race at all, they are rank newcomers who did not turn up until the
middle of the Third Age. "I do not know the history of wizards," he
remarks with some disdain.

Elrond also has a
concept of "free peoples" as distinct from other living creatures,
and in choosing members of the Fellowship of the Ring he is politic enough to
include at least one representative of each. In his mind the category embraces
men, wizards, dwarves, elves, and of course hobbits. He omits ents not because
he does not know of them or does not rate them among free peoples but because
of obvious disparities in size, habits, location, and so forth, which would
make their membership in the Company impracticable.

In the phrase
free peoples
both the adjective and the noun are operative words. Ores,
trolls, dragons, and their like do not qualify for the designation because they
are not free any longer. According to Tolkien's basic maxim that "Nothing
is evil in the beginning" they were free once, but they have surrendered
their wills to Sauron and become his slaves. On the other hand the normal
creatures of the wild whom Treebeard classes as "living" but not as "free
peoples" have not attained the level of social organization that would
earn them the title of "peoples." This defect implies also a lower
order of both intelligence and moral perception than that which characterizes
the five or six races to which Elrond and Treebeard assign primacy among the
living beings of Middle-earth. Within these half-dozen, however, neither the
elf nor the ent proposes any ranking of superiority. Elrond makes his
selections in no particular order. Treebeard's roll call is a mnemonic device
and therefore strictly alphabetical and alliterative, with the single exception
of the elves to whom ents historically give the place of honor as the one race
which taught them language. Consequently, the only vestige of a Chain of Being
which Tolkien, through Treebeard and Elrond, is accepting is the dominance of
the free peoples. The gulf between them and all other creatures alive can be
bridged by conscious communication of many kinds, including speech, but never
completely erased.

The Christian root
of this type of dualistic thinking by Tolkien stands revealed in his essay
"On Fairy-stories," in which he formulates the relations between
human and subhuman life in terms of the doctrine of Creation and Fall. Tolkien
accepts the doctrine that at his creation Man was given dominion over all other
creatures. In order that he might rule them justly both he and they were
endowed with understanding of each other's speech. The Fall did not take away
Man's ordained superiority but it did sever the tie of communion through language.
Ever since, "a strange fate and guilt lies on us. Other creatures are like
other realms with which Man has broken off relations, and sees now only from
the outside at a distance . . ." Fantasy tries to satisfy our hunger for
reconciliation by creating many varieties of living creatures with which we can
once more converse. But it does not try to pretend that the breach can ever
really be healed this side of Paradise; it does not gloss over the "sense
of separation" from the subhuman, which must continue to haunt us all our
lives as a result of the Fall.

In Appendix G of
the same essay Tolkien is moved to lay upon modern dogmas of evolution the
blame for improperly blurring this sense of separation "by the hypotheses
(or dogmatic guesses) of scientific writers who classed Man not only as 'an
animal'—that correct classification is ancient—but as 'only an animal.' "
In this view of man as possessing a rational soul, which other creatures do not
have, Tolkien is again, of course, Christian. He is not opposing evolutionary
theories but he is definitely objecting to any interpretation of them that
dogmatically denies that at some point the human being has been given faculties
which transcend the evolutionary process.