Master of Middle Earth (9 page)

In the Nazgûl, who
are victims of the Ring's power carried to its last degree, the fullness of
that power is most clearly visible. Not only are they its slaves, no longer
having any wills of their own, but through it they have suffered far-reaching
physical changes. The process of lengthening life which has kept Bilbo and
Frodo young for some scores of years has prolonged theirs for tens of centuries
since the rings were forged in the Second Age. They seem never to have died in
the usual sense. They still inhabit their original bodies, but these have faded
and thinned in their component matter until they can no longer be said to exist
in the dimension of the living. Their flesh is not alive, not dead, but
"undead." They have moved into a half-world of shadows, not lighted
by our sun but not given over to complete darkness and nothingness either. In
consequence their senses have altered so that normal perceptions have dulled or
disappeared, while other nameless ones have sharpened. Aragorn describes them
to the hobbits on Weathertop: "They themselves do not see the world of
light as we do, but our shapes cast shadows in their minds, which only the noon
sun destroys; and in the dark they perceive many signs and forms that are
hidden from us . . . And at all times they smell the blood of living things,
desiring and hating it. Senses, too, there are other than sight or smell."
Just as men can feel their presence near, "they feel ours more keenly.
Also ... the Ring draws them."

By putting on the
Ring when the ringwraiths attack the camp, Frodo foolishly throws himself into
their world. He is able to see for the first time the bodies under their
cloaks, and their eyes can see him. Aided by this vision, Angmar succeeds in
wounding Frodo with the Morgul knife, and until he is healed at Rivendell Frodo
drifts in and out of their land of shades. A shadow seems to him to lie between
him and the faces of his friends. The woods and meadows recede as if into a
mist. At the Ford the Black Riders look solid and he can suddenly hear their voices
and dreadful laughter calling him to Mordor. Gandalf tells Frodo as he recovers
in Rivendell what he has escaped: "If they had succeeded you would have
become as they are, only weaker and under their command. You would have become
a wraith in the dominion of the Dark Lord; and he would have tormented you for
trying to keep his Ring . . ." Frodo's peril was gravest when he was
wearing the Ring, moreover, "for then you were half in the wraith-world
yourself, and they might have seized you." In the last stages of his
journey across Mordor to Mount Doom Frodo is sinking rapidly into his world as
his resistance to the Ring wanes and its strength waxes in the land where it
was forged. "The Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie" blends
imperceptibly into the wraith world of the Ring. Why should it not? The Ring,
being only an extension of Sauron's personality and power, makes a world like
its master's. Sauron is literally as well as figuratively the Dark Lord of a
region which he has created (or uncreated) hospitably dark to house himself and
those he has made like him. But, like Marlowe's Hell, Mordor has no
geographical limits and is wherever its victims are.

These victims not
only are morally debased and physically dematerialized but also drag out their
days in torment. A mortal who keeps one of the rings of power lives longer,
Gandalf tells Frodo at the start, "but he does not grow or obtain more
life, he merely continues, until at last every minute is a weariness." One
of the most dreadful, most pitiable things about the Nazgûl is their cry of
lament: "A long-drawn wail came down the wind, like the cry of some evil
and lonely creature." The despair in it is a weapon that Sauron uses to
spread hopelessness among the people of Minas Tirith. Angmar especially, the
leader of the Nine, is known as the Captain of Despair, who drives even his own
troops mad with terror during the siege. He cannot induce it in others unless
he first feels it in himself, and in the last analysis it may even come from
some corner of Sauron's own withered conscience. When Angmar threatens Éowyn on
the battlefield it is not with death: Sauron "will not slay thee in thy
turn. He will bear thee away to the houses of lamentation, beyond all darkness,
where thy flesh shall be devoured, and thy shrivelled mind left naked to the
Lidless Eye." The Nazgûl chief is no stranger to these places of physical
and spiritual torture, nor to Sauron's delight in them, somewhere at the heart
of the darkness which cloaks him. Gollum too has become acquainted with them
when captured in Mordor.

The Ring has
rendered Gollum vile, but so miserable that he is pitied by all who encounter
him in the long course of the Quest: "Bilbo, Gandalf, Aragorn, the
Mirkwood elves, Frodo, and eventually even Sam, who despises him most. Gollum's
private torment actually stems from the fact that the Ring's conquest of his
will is incomplete, leaving intact sufficient impulses toward good to breed an
unending inner conflict. Out of this arise the two selves whom Frodo and Sam
call Gollum and Smeagol, and whom they hear debating each other while he guides
them south into Mordor. Critics generally agree that when Gollum uses the
pronoun I in speaking about himself the better Sm6agol-self is prevailing,
whereas when he uses
we
he is submitting to Ring-Gollum. On the latter
occasions he is sinking his own identity in the Ring, allowing his free
personality to be swallowed up by it, as is the case with the Nazgûl. To quote
Gandalf again, during the ages when Gollum hid the Ring under the mountains
". . . the thing was eating up his mind, of course, and the torment had
become almost unbearable . . . He hated the dark, and he hated light more: he
hated everything, and the Ring most of all." Frodo protests that Gollum
could never have hated "his precious," the term by which Gollum
always refers to the Ring, but the answer comes that "He hated it and
loved it, as he hated and loved himself. He could not get rid of it."
Without the inner war Gollum would never have hated the Ring or himself.

The reason why
Gollum has not succumbed completely is that as a hobbit he originally has
lacked the lust to dominate others, deriving from Sauron himself, which the
Ring is specially potent to implant and amplify. This is the same hobbit trait
that makes Bilbo and Frodo so toughly resistant to its lure. Nobody who handles
the Ring, however, escapes the greed to possess it, which fastens upon him ever
after. Tolkien indicates this avidity by the device of having each of its
wearers describe it as "precious." Gollum, of course, does so in
almost every other sentence he speaks. Significantly, by the word
precious
he means sometimes the Ring, sometimes himself, and sometimes both confusedly.
This is Tolkien's brilliant literary method of showing that Gollum often is no
longer thinking of the Ring as something separate from himself. He is the Ring;
the Ring is Gollum. Apart from it he has no individuality of his own. Likewise,
Isildur writes that although the heat of the Ring has burned him badly,
"It is precious to me though I buy it with great pain." Bilbo alarms
Gandalf greatly by insisting, "It is mine I tell you. My own. My precious.
Yes, my precious." And in the last crucial moment when Frodo should be
throwing the Ring into the fires of Mount Doom he refuses to do so, in almost
the same language of ownership: "I will not do this deed. The Ring is
mine!" The irony underlying this, of course, is that anyone who thinks he
owns the Ring is in fact owned by it.

That the desire to
reduce things and people to possessions is all wrong is an article of Tolkien's
personal creed. In his essay "On Fairy-stories" he holds it up as the
cause of the triteness which our self-induced weariness too often makes us see
in our world. Things look trite to us when we have "appropriated" them,
legally or mentally, ". . . then locked them in our hoard, acquired them,
and acquiring ceased to look at them."
²
The remedy is Recovery
of a clear view, "seeing things as we are (or were) meant to see them —as
things apart from ourselves ... so that the things seen clearly may be freed
from the drab blur of triteness or familiarity—from possessiveness." Here
Tolkien is not speaking of the immorality of possessiveness, to be sure, but he
is singling it out as the source of an overweening blindness in not seeing the
world as we should—separate, free, and independent from ourselves —really the
same blindness that underlies Sauron's lust for domination. The idea that
"appropriation" is imprisonment of what is not ours is developed even
more clearly in the essay's next paragraph, which describes how Recovery
through creative fantasy "may open your hoard and let all the locked
things fly away like cage-birds . . . and you will be warned that all you had
(or knew) was dangerous and potent, not really effectively chained, free and
wild; no more yours than they were you."
³

These passages are
packed with meaning for Tolkien's social philosophy in general, as well as
specifically for his philosophy of evil in
The Lord of the Rings.
We are
not to be like dragons hoarding in our dens as treasure whatever we can snatch
from the living world around us. People and things are not meant to be our
property; they belong to themselves. These are laws of our nature and theirs.
The penalty for violation is a tormented exhaustion like Gollum's, a failure of
perception like Sauron's, an exile from the healthy world of fact like the
ringwraiths'. Urging Bilbo to give up the Ring, Gandalf pleads: "Let it
go! And then you can go yourself, and be free . . . Stop possessing it."
We are possessed, captured, by what we think we possess, says Tolkien. And if
we believe we can wholly possess anything we delude ourselves. We, and Sauron,
find our "precious" slipping out of our fingers. Under our jaded eyes
it turns into something different, which we no longer want; our appetite burns
for fresh treasures, which we will discard in their turn. The people we master
become denatured of their humanity; and the process of enslaving them denatures
us. In this way, as in others, evil is self-defeating. A Sauron who succeeded
in making himself tyrant over all of Middle-earth would only be the slave of
the slaves over whom he ruled.

Such are the main
features of evil as they emerge so far in Tolkien's portrait of Sauron and of
those influenced to greater or lesser degree by the spell of the ruling Ring.
But his kingdom consists also of many others who come there voluntarily or
under the direct compulsion of his will, without the Ring. These do not fade
into the physical half-world to which the Ring reduces its victims. The
Lieutenant of the Tower of Barad-dûr, for instance, is firmly material. But he
hideously resembles those other followers of Sauron in the extent to which he
has become absorbed into his master's aims and methods. Beginning long ago as a
renegade Black Númenorian, he became a student of Sauron's from whom he
"learned great sorcery and knew much of the mind of Sauron; and he was
more cruel than any ore." He ends by being transformed into a replica of
his teacher. "Mouth of Sauron" he calls himself, a man without any
name of his own, "for he himself had forgotten it." Considering the
high value placed in Tolkien's Middle-earth upon real names as indices of
identity—Treebeard and the whole race of dwarves refuse to reveal their names
to anybody, and virtually nobody will even pronounce Sauron aloud in the Black
Speech—such namelessness is the acme of total surrender. And this Mouth is the
man who is Sauron's choice to be viceroy over Isengard and masticate the
conquered folk after the West is won.

Saruman is more
like Sauron than he realizes. They believe in the same thing, supremacy through
absolute power, but since the supremacy Saruman works for is his own he is a
rival, not an ally. Also, he is a pupil of Sauron's, but at a distance, through
studying his crafts in the libraries of Gondor. Great and good at first,
Saruman intended to learn them only in order to counteract them. But his fate
bears out Elrond's warning: "It is perilous to study too deeply the arts
of the enemy, for good or ill." Initiation graduates insensibly into
imitation. Saruman's "deep and subtle" knowledge and "power over
the minds of others" are appealed to and perverted by the similar
qualities he finds in the mind of the enemy he studies. Before long he is
trying to forge another ruling ring. After that come hypocrisy and treason. In
Tolkien's estimate, the desire for knowledge can be a dangerous thing. Sauron
seduces by this same Faustian thirst the elven smiths who forged the rings, and
seek unsuccessfully to corrupt all the Eldar. Knowledge is not a good in
itself. It is not allowed to remain neutral on Middle-earth, but is good or ill
depending on the use to which it is put.

Denethor is
another wise man who is not quite wise enough. To start with, he understands
that if he looks into the
palantír
which he secretly opens he may lose
control of it to Sauron, who is the stronger. As danger closes in on Minas
Tirith, however, he takes the plunge in order to spy out the enemy's plans.
Even then, had he been a humbler man, he might have been saved, for Sauron
cannot deal with humility. But he is one of these proud, superior mortals vain
about his deep learning. With these qualities Sauron is quite at home. In the
struggle of wills that ensues Denethor is overcome, but not openly, and is
tricked into thinking he has won. Through editing the information he is allowed
to gather, Sauron leads him to overpessimistic conclusions, despair, and
eventual suicide. Gandalf divines the technique: "The knowledge which he
obtained was, doubtless, often of service to him; yet the vision of the great
might of Mordor that was shown to him fed the despair of his heart until it
overthrew his mind." False knowledge was worse for him than none.
Moreover, it was unseasoned by love. Boromir he cherished only as an image of
himself. A purer brand of devotion to Faramir and to his people might have been
his salvation.