Master of Middle Earth (17 page)

Waking or asleep,
Frodo is afflicted by a second life of memory, much as elves are. As an elfin
princess married to a mortal, Arwen will have to endure a double life of the
past superimposed upon the present all the rest of her days. Since her tragedy
parallels Frodo's, she alone understands his case and tries to help him with
the gift of a jewel conferring hope, "when the memory of the fear and the
darkness troubles you . . ." Foreseeing also that there will be no cure
for him on Middle-earth, she presents him with the place in the Undying Lands
which she forfeits by wedding Aragorn. She could hardly make such a transfer
unless Frodo has grown enough like an elf to be capable of the impress of
immortality.

5. Men

In our world Man
is without rival in intelligence and general culture. On Tolkien's Middle-earth
he is only one of half a dozen highly developed species, each with its own
genius, which are at least his equals and in some respects perhaps his
superiors. How would we behave under similar circumstances? Tolkien does not,
of course, try to answer that question. But he does set himself the fascinating
task of imagining human reaction to the kinds of other intelligent beings who
live side by side with man under the kinds of conditions he chooses to
visualize for his epic and its historical backgrounds.

Man is not the
earliest civilized creature to arise on Middle-earth. He is preceded by elves
and ents. We cannot be sure where dwarves and hobbits stand in the order of
chronological succession, but they seem later than man; wizards, ores, and
trolls, are definitely later. At some time early in the First Age the three
tribes of the Edain drift westward from somewhere in the east and encounter the
elves, some of whom have never left the mainland while others, having sailed to
the Uttermost West to be tutored by the Valar, have already sailed back in
pursuit of Morgoth. These latter, especially, have been educated to a state of
wisdom and achievement far above that of barbaric man. Moreover, all elves are
immortal, whereas man is mortal. He does not realize how mortal he is until he
meets others who are not so. There is nothing in our experience to parallel the
shock of such a meeting. Its effects never cease throughout the three Ages in
which elves and men inhabit the same Middle-earth.

The first fruits
are an alliance in which the human tribes array themselves unreservedly on the
side of these apparently superior beings in their war against Morgoth. The fact
that both species are soon soundly beaten is not enough to break Man's loyalty.
The difference between mortal and immortal is a natural barrier to
intermarriage between the two races which neither seems anxious to breach.
Besides, the barrier is strengthened by an edict of the Valar, who manage such
matters, that any elf who marries a human being must become mortal. In all the
long centuries of the First and Second Ages only two elf maidens, Lúthien and
Idril, are willing to make the sacrifice for love, and no male elves. The
appearance of several generations of their offspring, part-elf, part-human,
poses a new difficulty that the Valar resolve with another ruling, that each of
these offspring must choose categorically between mortality and immortality.
Elrond chooses to be elf but his brother Elros elects to be Man.

That there is
something to be said on each side Tolkien has observed before in his essay
"On Fairy-stories." Human tales about elves, he says, often depict
the tedium of escape from mortality: "Few lessons are taught more clearly
in them than the burden of that kind of immortality, or rather endless serial
living, to which the fugitive would fly." And if elves tell corresponding
stories about men they "are doubtless full of the Escape from
Deathlessness." Each species yearns to have the gift of the other, but
would not like it if once achieved.
The Lord of the Rings
has moments of
hesitation in deciding whether death may not be a greater boon than
"endless serial living." For example the Edain, who are given the
island of Númenor as a reward for their fight against Morgoth, are granted life
spans thrice that of ordinary men, but "they must remain mortal, since the
Valar were not permitted to take from them the Gift of Men (or the Doom of Men,
as it was afterwards called)." Here death can be called a gift or a doom
depending on who you are. Arwen, for one, comes to look upon it as a bitter
doom. The higher authority of God forbids even the Valar to change the ordained
composition of the races. Men must be men and die; elves must be elves and live
on and on. There is no ambiguity about the preferences of either men or elves
in the epic, however. The "Ban of the Valar" operates only in one
direction. It prevents the Númenoreans from sailing to the Undying Lands of the
elves, where presumably they might try to steal undying life, but does not
prohibit elves from sailing to Númenor, for no danger exists of their trying to
seize death.

The elves did come
to Númenor with their advanced teachings, to the high profit of the Edain
there, but the denial of immortality rankled the Edain. Their discontent
festered, and finally they organized a naval expedition to seize the Uttermost
West. Man's hunger for more and more life gave Sauron a fatal argument with
which to drive Númenor into disobedience, but its people were obviously ripe
for rebellion anyway. Even the drowning of the island and all its rebels did
not still the same hunger among Númenoreans settled on mainland shores. The
dwellings of the elves and the Valar, removed from "the circles of the
world," were now beyond their reach. But "many" of these
shore-dwellers looked for an alternative in the Black Arts and so "fell
into evils and follies," as Faramir tells Frodo. In Gondor itself the
frantic search for more life took varying forms, all morbid: old men compounded
elixirs to lengthen their years, or cast horoscopes to calculate how many years
of life remained to them; kings built tombs more splendid than the palaces they
lived in; men mused about their ancestors instead of having children. The
thought of death "was ever present" to the exclusion of the life that
was legitimately theirs. So, immersed in death, they forgot that Sauron might
come alive again.

This is the
situation in Gondor during the early centuries of the Third Age. The Stewards
alleviate the decay by mixing their Númenorean stock with that of sturdy
sailors and mountaineers who, having had no dealings with elves, are not
consumed by the contrasts of deathlessness. Nevertheless, a grievous aftermath
remains. The people of Gondor now deeply distrust and fear elves. The attitude
held toward them by even so wise and tolerant a man as Faramir is curiously
ambivalent. He regrets that "Men now fear and misdoubt the Elves, and yet
know little of them. And we of Gondor grow like other Men, like the men of
Rohan; for even they, who are foes of the Dark Lord, shim the Elves . .
."; yet he censures those few men who visit Lórien, "For I deem it
perilous now for mortal man wilfully to seek out the Elder People." But in
the next breath he adds, "Yet I envy you that have spoken with the White
Lady." Boromir, Denethor and others in Minas Tirith hold the same
prejudice. The Rohirrim feel it in virulent form. The desire for immortality by
Man goes underground during the latter part of the Third Age, when the elves
become fewer and more withdrawn. But the problem in another guise is painfully
resurrected in Aragorn's wooing of Arwen, and in their eventual parting at his
death. "If this is indeed, as the Eldar say, the gift of the One to Men,
it is bitter to receive," she says, she who has known what it is to be
immortal. She never really reconciles herself to death. From varying angles
Tolkien keeps studying the probable consequences to both immortal elves and
mortal men of living together on the same planet.

Faramir, one of
the most high-souled and thoughtful men in the whole epic, divides the
civilizations of men into three classes: the High, or pure Númenorean; the
Middle, the Men of the Twilight, like the Rohirrim and their kin the Bardings;
the Wild, the Men of Darkness, such as the woses of Druadan Forest, and perhaps
the more primitive of the hill tribes. No doubt several factors enter into the
classification, but the primary one for Faramir is the "love of war and
valour as things good in themselves, both a sport and an end," which has
lowered Gondor from the High, where it used to be, to the level of the
Rohirrim, a young people whose values all reflect a zest for battle. Gondor, too,
now esteems a warrior above men of other crafts. "Such is the need of our
days." It was otherwise in happier times when Minas Tirith cherished the
original Númenorean virtues of "gentleness and arts." These were the
teachings of the elves. To them Faramir remains nostalgically loyal, though the
safety of his city has forced him to take up the sword in defense against
Sauron: "I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow
for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they
defend: the city of the Men of Númenor; and I would have her loved for her
memory, her ancientry, her beauty, and her present wisdom." Herein lies
the real breach between him and his elder brother Boromir, whom he laments.
Boromir was totally the "man of prowess," a great captain, ambitious
to be king. Faramir, by contrast, has no personal ambitions and would be glad
to see the line of Elendil restored. Knowing his brother only too well, he is
completely able to understand why the trial of the Ring was too sore for
Boromir, while he himself would not pick it up even if he found it lying in the
highway.

Faramir, however,
is no pacifist. Unlike Frodo he has not renounced the sword, though he detests
having to use it. Once faced with the dire needs of his city against invading
armies, he becomes a brave and resourceful war leader. Only the entreaties of
Frodo induce him to spare Gollum, whom he is quite ready to kill as a potential
danger. On the other hand his grim performance of duty is at the opposite pole
from the pomp with which Théoden, for instance, invests war. Nor is he like
Aragorn, who neither loves nor hates fighting but accepts it as a fact of his
times, a duty which he must perform in the recovery of his throne and, later,
its protection. Through these figures and others in
The Lord of the Rings,
Tolkien is exploring several possible positions toward war and peace. He speaks
for himself more openly in "The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth" (see
Chapter VII).

Middle-earth at
the end of the Third Age is so embattled a world that few opportunities exist
in the epic for picturing societies wholly at peace. The agriculture of the
Shire and the commerce of Bree are brief exceptions. In the quieter landscape
of
The Hobbit,
though, Tolkien has time to imagine the town of the men
of Esgaroth built out over the waters of Long Lake on wooden pilings for
greater safety. The idea of it may come from his recollection of the lakeside
dwellings of our primitive ancestors which some archeologists postulate. In any
case, Lake-town is pictured as a merchant community trading with the Silvan
elves and with men farther south along the River. But even trade corrupts. The
Master is a merchant prince whose mind is given altogether "to trade and
tolls, to cargoes and gold, to which habit he owed his position." War,
here too, is inescapable. The town has been wrecked before by Smaug and is
presently burned again. But once the dragon is killed and the ore army driven
off in the Battle of the Five Armies, new dwarf and human settlers crowd in,
the valley blossoms, "and much wealth went up and down the Running River;
and there was friendship in those parts between elves and dwarves and
men."

Such a restoration
of peace and friendly commerce between all the free peoples is Tolkien's idea
of what constitutes a happy ending. The whole struggle of the War of the Ring
has this as its ultimate goal. Tolkien, however, does not desiderate any such
mingling of species as will erode the special identity of each.

They are not to
inhabit the same towns and adopt the same modes of life. Dwarves and elves may
help to rebuild Minas Tirith but, after the work is done, dwarves will return
to their smithies in the caves of Aglarond, Erebor, and the Iron Mountains,
elves to their hunting and song in Mirkwood. Hobbits may come as visitors, but
the Shire will remain their home. Ents must herd their trees in Fangorn Forest.
Hobbits and men will continue to live together in Bree, but mark the
conditions: ". . . on friendly terms, minding their own affairs in their
own ways, but both rightly regarding themselves as necessary parts of the
Bree-folk. Nowhere else in the world was this peculiar (but excellent)
arrangement to be found." Bree's arrangement is unique, made possible only
by the fact that hobbit and Man are very close kin. Even there the two species
pretty much go their separate ways, without intermarriage.

The general rule
is that the free peoples do not interbreed. In most cases it is physically
impossible anyway, but where possible it seldom happens. The three lonely
unions between elf maidens and men, with their historic but largely tragic
results, only prove the rule. Sexual matings between free and unfree peoples
are disastrously wrong. The original breeding of ores and trolls by Morgoth, followed
later by the crossing of ores with men by Sauron and Saruman, is regarded with
horror by everyone in the West. Such unions produce not only the Uruk-hai but
"squint-eyed" half-men. Bill Ferny's accomplice in Bree is one of
these.

On quite a
different footing, of course, is intermarriage between members of different
tribes or clans within the same species. The three branches of hobbit folk
freely intermarry, as do the various families of elves. Faramir praises the
Stewards' success of strengthening the failing stock of Númenorean Gondor by
unions with more primitive peoples of mountain and seashore; Faramir himself
happily weds Éowyn of Rohan, and so on.