Master of Middle Earth (16 page)

"Our ways
have parted since." These are words which might have come from the lips of
any one of the free peoples of Middle-earth in speaking of any or all of the
others. Through natural preoccupation with its own needs or through discord
sown by Sauron each has become an island unto itself. Treebeard tells Merry and
Pippin that he has not troubled himself about wars heretofore. They mostly
concern elves and men. Let wizards, whose business it is, worry about the
future. "I am not altogether on anybody's
side,
because nobody is
altogether on my
side . .
. nobody cares for the woods as I care for
them, not even Elves nowadays." But as Aragorn brings to Rohan the doom of
choice, so do the hobbits bring it to Fangorn with their news of the crisis in
the outside world. "Young Saruman" has been irritating Treebeard for
some time by cutting down trees for his factories. The understanding that the
wizard is on one side of the coming struggle finally pushes the ent leader into
action on the other.

His destruction of
Isengard saves Rohan so that it in turn may help save Gondor. Aragorn's
gratitude after he ascends the throne leads him to open wide areas west of the
Misty Mountains to reforestation, and grants Isengard to the ents in fee. The
king encourages new search for the entwives in the eastern lands, but we know
they will never be found, and had better never be, since the sexes have become
unsexed. Repeatedly there come ominous hints that the wild-wood will not
prosper in the expanding Age of Man.

4. Hobbits

Treebeard hits the
mark when he describes the distinguishing traits of hobbits as a race:
"hungry as hunters, the Hobbit children,/the laughing-folk, the little
people." Created first for a child audience, they are a combination, on
the one hand, of human children living in a society where the desires of
children are ideally institutionalized because there are no grownups and, on
the other hand, of some of the qualities traditionally ascribed to the
"little people" of folklore. To fill out the child side of the
combination they are about half the size of an adult, they eat six meals a day
with snacks at will in between, life is one long round of birthday parties at which
presents are given and received, games are played, no serious work seems to
need doing, no living need be earned, nobody gets sick or dies, people may
fight and quarrel but nobody bleeds, chatter is endlessly gay and trivial if
sometimes a bit cruel, and tobacco does not have to be smoked in secret behind
the barn. Perhaps even the living in comfortable holes in the ground appeals to
the child's love of hiding in small enclosed spaces. Of course the hobbit is
also a furry creature who does not have to wear shoes, rather like a rabbit,
which likewise lives in burrows. An eagle in
The Hobbit,
who has never
seen a hobbit, thinks Bilbo looks like a frightened rabbit, and Beorn in like
case says of him, "Little bunny is getting nice and fat again on bread and
honey." Children easily identify with small animals, especially bunnies.

Perhaps Edmund
Wilson was half-right when he suggested in his now notorious book review that
Rabbit
was one component of the name
hobbit.
¹⁹
Hobbs,
however,
was a bad guess at the other component. If we are to disregard Tolkien's own
etymology,
holbytla
("hole-dweller"), as an afterthought
appearing only late in
The Lord of the Rings,
the more likely candidate
for the other component is Middle English
Hob,
for which the
Oxford
English Dictionary
off-fers two pertinent meanings: (1) "rustic,
clown"; (2) "Robin Goodfellow, hobgoblin." Robin is the English
version of the "little people" of Celtic tradition. These were often
thought of as silent, unseen little beings sometimes good-naturedly helping,
sometimes mischievously hindering, the work of the house. The disappearance of
household articles, the souring of cream, and other sorts of unexpected tricks
could be traced back to them. This body of lore supplies to hobbits their
silent tread and ability to disappear in an instant without being seen by other
races. It also seems to give Bilbo his job with Thorin's expedition as an
"expert burglar" and spy to help recover the treasure from Smaug. At
first he is home-oriented and reluctant to go, but once started he uses a
considerable bag of tricks and thieving skill on Gollum, on the Silvan elves,
on the spiders, on Smaug, and on his own employer, Thorin, in stealing the
Arkenstone.

Of course Bilbo
changes as the story unfolds; he acquires constancy, courage, and above all a
sense of moral responsibility. These are adult human traits which Tolkien adds
because the increasing depth of his tale demands them. In short, Bilbo grows up
before our eyes and returns home so matured that Gandalf wryly congratulates
him: "Something is the matter with you! You are not the hobbit that you
were."

Tolkien's Prologue
to
The Lord of the Rings
elaborates the political, historical, and
linguistic dimensions of hobbit society in preparation for the greater role it
is to play, no longer in a child's tale but in an epic on the grandest scale.
Yet at the start of the epic that society is still essentially the same Utopia
of childhood wish fulfillment from which Bilbo long ago set out to steal
treasure. Other races have their sorrows. But before the War of the Ring the
whole problem of the hobbits is that they have no problems. Protected by the
Dúnedain rangers from winds of the outside world, they live their tight little
lives in their tight little Shire, unknowing and unknown. Scarcely anyone on
Middle-earth has any idea what a hobbit is except as a figment in old songs. So
far as the hobbit race is concerned, the main theme of
The Lord of the Rings
is to tell how the unknowing come to know, and the unknown become known and
honored by other races.

Those readers who
find the hobbit atmosphere of the opening episodes tedious do so, I suspect,
because they look at these child-men with purely adult eyes. So regarded, they
do indeed become as tiresome as too many hours spent exclusively among the
antics of the young. But Tolkien manages to see them both with the eyes of the
child, and so to find them charming, and with the eyes of the man, and so to
see what they lack in the larger canvas of the life of Middle-earth. Frodo is
his spokesman on both counts, Frodo who can look at the Shire partly from the
outside because he has been Bilbo's pupil and has talked with elves and
dwarves: "... there have been times when I thought the inhabitants too stupid
and dull for words, and have felt that an earthquake or an invasion of dragons
might be good for them. But I don't feel like that now. I felt that as long as
the Shire lies behind, safe and comfortable, I shall find wandering more
bearable . . ." So Frodo is fully aware of its stifling stagnation, but
values too its warm safety. He can see it both ways. Likewise nobody is a
stauncher champion of hobbits than Gandalf. He knows they are "amazing
creatures" whose toughness of moral fiber suits them uniquely to resist
the temptation of the Ring. But their mixture of follies and virtues inevitably
strikes him as seriocomic: "Ever since Bilbo left I have been deeply
concerned . . . about all these charming, absurd, helpless hobbits. It would be
a grievous blow to the world if the Dark Power overcame the Shire; if all your
kind, jolly, stupid Bolgers, Hornblowers, Boffins, Brace-girdles, and the rest,
not to mention the ridiculous Bagginses, became enslaved." That is the
right way for us to look at the hobbits as a race, if we can.

Indeed they are
very like us. "It is plain," to repeat what Tolkien says in the
Prologue, "that in spite of later estrangements Hobbits are relatives of
ours: far nearer to us than Elves, or even than Dwarves. Of old they spoke the
languages of Men, after their own fashion, and liked and disliked much the same
things as Men did." If, in their original gay innocence, they resemble
human children, hobbits suffering under the tyranny of Sauron and his agents
intensify their resemblance to our sadder and wiser selves as grown men.
Particularly, Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin, who together represent most of the
qualities of their race, grow increasingly human as the epic progresses.
Tolkien's literary method requires them to. His decision to describe from their
point of view every scene in which they are present (very few scenes are
without at least one hobbit) makes it imperative that their point of view
become quite like ours. Otherwise we as readers would not understand what is
happening, or share in the grave trials which the hobbits are singled out to
undergo, especially in Mordor. Consequently, with a few vestigial exceptions,
the differences between hobbit and man are for all practical purposes
extinguished once the pressures on the Fellowship turn severe. And Frodo and
Sam especially are in effect human during the long physical and moral struggle
toward Mount Doom. In conclusion, the Shire after the War is so much like any
other devastated land that even there the actions of the four protagonists on
their return, the responses of the population to their leadership, and the
final cleansing of the place are all too familiar to twentieth-century
experience.

So much has been
written about Frodo, and much of it so well, that here I shall zero in on only
one strangely revealing aspect of his character, his dreams. No one else in the
whole epic dreams so constantly and so diversely. Faramir is indeed visited
several times by a dream, once shared by Boromir, warning him to seek in
Rivendell the sword that was broken, now that Gondor is in desperate straits.
Faramir also dreams of the drowning of Númenor. But that is all. Frodo's
visions in sleep set him apart as unusual even before he leaves the Shire, and
begin to affect his conduct and personality: ". . . strange visions of
mountains that he had never seen came into his dreams." These would seem
to be the Misty Mountains, for he is influenced to undertake his journey toward
them. About to enter the Old Forest, he hears in a dream the sound of the sea
and catches sight of the white tower at the Grey Havens where departing elves
take ship for the West. He has never in his life been near either but he will
be embarking there himself one day when the mission to Mordor is over. This
dream, then, is a prevision of the future. The elf lords, Aragorn, and others
sometimes have true hunches about coming events but not in dreams. For better
or worse Frodo seems gifted with a power possessed only by the greatest among
other races. While asleep in the house of Tom Bombadil he witnesses from afar
Gandalf's rescue from Saruman's stronghold of Orthanc by the eagle Gwaihir, a
feat which is taking place at about that same time. Frodo has the same sort of
vision of a present event occurring somewhere else when a dream in the inn at
Bree shows him the Black Riders attacking his house at Crickhollow in a vain
attempt to seize him. It is almost as if he were looking into a
Palantír
or viewing Galadriel's mirror. Both these latter dreams are informative and
monitory.

Alone among the
hobbits in Rivendell, Frodo is given visions of Elvenhome in the Uttermost
West: "... seas of foam that sighed upon the margins of the world."
Alone among the Fellowship in Lórien, he receives from Galadriel a gift that
puts him under the protection of Elbereth, the phial of water from her mirror
in which is caught the light of Eärendil's star, a gift most precious to elves.
Although Frodo cannot actually turn into an elf, his innate spiritual kinship
to them is revealed by his physical state after recovery from the wound
inflicted by Angmar on Weathertop. Gandalf sees a transparency about him and
speculates to himself that Frodo "may become like a glass filled with a
clear light for eyes to see that can." Sam had perceived this light
"shining faintly" within his beloved master in Elrond's house, but on
their journey to Mordor when Frodo slept "the light was even clearer and
stronger." His face is "old, old and beautiful." In the
extremity of his travail as they near Mount Doom Frodo casts aside all weapons
and armor. He prefers possible capture to the use of arms, a preference which
he holds to later in refusing to fight in the battle to free the Shire or to
strike back at Saruman when attacked. For him struggles for the right must
hereafter be waged only on the moral plane.

Yet even while he
is taking this lofty moral stance he tells Sam that he is falling more and more
under the evil domination of the Ring and that he has lost the power to give it
away or remain sane if it is taken from him. Evidently he is being torn by
stronger and stronger forces of good and evil pulling his mind in opposite
directions. It is necessary to stress that Frodo does not win his battle
against evil in the climactic moment of choice at the Cracks of Doom. When he
announces there, "I do not choose now to do what I came to do . . . The
Ring-is mine!" and sets it on his finger he becomes the slave of the Ring.
Only its providential destruction by Gollum saves him, and the West, from utter
defeat. He can be hailed by the host in Ithilien afterward not for final
victory, which was not his doing, but only for his heroic stamina in getting
the Ring to the one place where it could be destroyed.

During the rest of
his days on Middle-earth Frodo remains torn between the newly contending
elements of his nature. Had he clearly mastered the Ring he would be whole and
at peace. But since it came close to mastering him, he is still in the power of
its memory. He still loathes it and longs for it after the fashion of Gollum.
Here Frodo's propensity to dream is a curse because he cannot forget the
"precious" even in sleep. In the midst of a Shire restored to
happiness Farmer Cotton finds him one day "half in a dream,"
desperately clutching the white gem Arwen gave him and pining for the Ring.
"It is gone forever," Frodo tells him, "and now all is dark and
empty."
²⁰