Meditations on Middle-Earth (7 page)

Okay, I was an English major. I know what a
bildungsroman
is. The coming-of-age novel has a venerable and well-known structure, and initially Frodo looks to be fulfilling it. He starts out cheerful, brave, resolute, and more than a little naive. When his duty is made clear to him, he stands up and, though with shrinking heart, unflinchingly accepts it.

But then, as he travels deeper into the heart of the matter, headed for Mordor, that perpetual dark night of the soul, he grows more and more passive, falls more and more silent. The business, for good and ill, of being the protagonist is perforce shouldered by his two talkative (they are needed to distract from his silence) companions, Sam and Gollum.

Sam and Gollum are interesting characters. But they are not completely comprehensible unless you realize that they are both aspects of Frodo. Taken in isolation, Sam is simply too good to be believed. He never shirks, never sulks, never gives a single thought to himself, unless it’s of reproach for not having done well enough. His every action is motivated by love. He is (or becomes) the externalization of all that is best in Frodo. He fulfills the arc of growth a
bildungsroman
requires. Samwise Gamgee, the child who ran away from home hoping to see an oliphaunt, returns to the Shire as a man with the strength and decency needed to take his place in the community, and raise a family.

Where Sam is the Good Boy, Gollum is the Bad. It is not mere coincidence that Gollum is himself a fallen hobbit, nor that he and Sam unfalteringly hate each other. He has the Ring-bearer’s determination, resourcefulness, and perseverence, though in a misguided cause. He is what Frodo would become, were he to surrender to the lure of the Ring. But since he is really a part of Frodo, he is not entirely evil, but only as evil as such a hero can be.

My son’s young heart mourned Gollum’s fall into the fires of Mount Doom. So do the hearts of all who truly love this book.

With his two companions acting out the twin plots of growth and failure, Frodo is freed to follow a third path, one that is, though Tolkien labored hard to disguise the fact, essentially mystic. It begins with Frodo’s wounding by the Nazgûl in the wood below Weathertop (this is the Fisher King’s wound, and the reason he leaves no offspring behind), ennobles him through adversity, and reaches its climax in Mount Doom, when he dons the One Ring and claims its power for his own.

Of Frodo’s inner journey, we know very little. Tolkien provided hints and mutters, and very little else, for the good and sufficient reason that he lacked the literary powers their explication would require. “That of which we cannot speak,” as Wittgenstein put it, “we must pass over in silence.” We know only that he suffers; and that his journey ultimately leads him to the Cracks of Doom.

The time of judgment is come at last. Frodo has failed the test. But no fair-minded person can believe he ever had a chance of passing it. Rather, he has been, as an engineer would put it, “tested to destruction.” And, because he is judged for all his life rather than the weakness of an instant, he is spared from the damnation he has seemingly brought upon himself. Gollum, marked by all as a tool of Fate from the very beginning, steps in to save him.

Frodo is given mercy, rather than victory. This, too, marks the insight of age.

Mystics, however, cannot live in the real world. When the adventure is done, Frodo knows too much to ever find peace. He has leapfrogged over all his middle years, and carries the burden of age. There is no place left for him in all of Middle-earth save the Grey Havens . . . the Grey Havens and death. Sam follows Frodo partway on that journey, and then turns back. He sits down in a great chair before a roaring fire, his wife places his infant daughter on his knee, and he speaks the most heartbreaking line in all of modern fantasy:

“Well, I’m back,” he said.

“No!”
Sean cried, when I read those last words. I will bear the guilt of that forever. Reading, I was swept away by the words, by the momentum of the plot, and completely forgot about where they were heading, toward that terrible, beautiful eucatastrophic ending. I should have warned him it was coming. I should have prepared him for it. Possibly, I should even have lied and made up a different ending altogether, one in which “they all lived happily ever after.”

But maybe not. What makes that moment hurt so much is how absolutely, undeniably
true
it is. It would be a mistake to tack a moral onto The Lord of the Rings as if it were merely a Brobdingnagian version of one of Aesop’s fables. But Tolkien was writing about the world as he understood it, and in that world he had learned certain lessons: That pity is sometimes better than justice. That the best leaders are often filled with doubt. Most importantly, that life has consequences.

How could I deprive my son of the very point of the book?

Here is something that may sound terribly sentimental, but which nevertheless is absolutely true: I was present when my son was born. The midwife handed him first to his mother, and then, after a time, to me. He was placed in my arms. I looked down at that sweet little goblin face (he was born purple, for lack of oxygen, and only slowly turned pink). Someday, I thought, this child will grow up and become a man, and by so doing, turn me into an old man, and then I’ll die. But that’s all right. I don’t mind. It’s a small price to pay for him.

We live in a reflexively cynical age, and yet cynicism, though it encompasses a great deal of the truth, does not cover everything. That moment, looked at from the outside, comes perilously close to the saccharine. Yet, looked at as something experienced yourself, it is a glad and terrible thing to embrace the necessity of one’s own death. It touches the soul like the first breath of autumn. It sounds a bell whose ultimate message is
goodbye
.

Such a moment requires books that can help us comprehend it.

As of this writing, my son is seventeen. In less than a year—about the time this essay reaches print—he will leave for college.

A young man is like a falcon. When you remove the hood and untie the jesses, he leaps from your arm and launches himself into the sky. You look at him dwindling, so proud and so free, and you wonder if he’ll ever return to you.

IF YOU GIVE
A GIRL A
HOBBIT

ESTHER M. FRIESNER

I
am a writer. I have received money for doing this on several occasions, so the odds are that I will continue on this unfortunate course until someone catches wise. (If you don’t want a writer to come back, don’t feed him. This is a good, practical rule, and applies to cats as well. Writers are a lot like cats in this and many other respects, except for the part about being able to wash ourselves all over with our tongues. Dang.)

Having admitted to the crime of Authoring in the First Degree, with Premeditation and Malice Aforethought, I have no qualms about adding to my scroll of malfeasance by saying that
what
I write is generally fantasy and science fiction. This would be viewed as bad enough, in most respectable venues (i.e., periodicals such as the
Pays-in-Copies Review
or the
Deconstructionist Quarterly)
, but I have piled iniquity upon iniquity (which is easier than it sounds, as long as you remember to lift with the legs, not with the back): I have written
funny
fantasy and science fiction. On purpose.

Up until now, I simply accepted this deep personal failing as something over which I had as little control as the color of my eyes, the girth of my waistline, or the periodic urge to shout “Macaroni!” in a crowded movie theater. Now some well-meaning prats out there may argue that I
do so
have the power to change any or all of the above. I can get tinted contact lenses, I can chew less and eschew more; and as for the whole “Macaroni!” thing, well, there is always Pasta-avoidance Therapy (or a gig on Jerry Springer). They claim that it is all a matter of giving it the Old School Try, of getting off my duff and making a valiant effort, of striving ever onward and upward for the night is coming. They may be right. They may also be British.

But is that the answer I’m seeking? Do I want to learn that I
can
control the unattractive, unhealthy, or socially unacceptable portions of my life? Do I want to have the golden door of Opportunity for Personal Improvement flung wide by the same kindly hands that are equally ready to frog-march me through same? Do I want to accept responsibility for my actions and the results thereof?

Of course I don’t want that! It’s too much like work. I’m an American. What I want is to keep on doing exactly what I’ve been doing all along, bad as it may be, only first I want to be told that it’s okay because it is
not my fault
. Yes, what I need to find is
someone else to blame for it
.

I blame Tolkien.

(No, not for the “Macaroni!”
schtick;
for my having become a writer. Try to keep up with me here, okay?)

It all began back in the good old days, when a woman knew her place and the twin pillars upon which civilization rested were:
Everything will be all right as long as you have a matching set of china/silverware/crystal/linens/luggage
and
Real women don’t read fantasy and/or science fiction; boys will think you’re ooky
. (Of course, nowadays, the only person upholding the first of these principles
is
Martha Stewart, but since she is science fiction, I don’t know where that leaves us as far as the second principle goes.)

Yes, it was a simpler time, and I was a simpler person. I believed with all the ardor of my teenaged heart that as long as I lived my life according to the tenets set forth within the hallowed pages of
Seventeen
magazine, I could not go wrong. (Although I did spend many a fruitless hour cudgeling my brains while trying to figure out what the heck all of those “Modess . . . Because” ads were selling. In case this phenomenon is before your time, in olden days it was considered indelicate to come right out and talk about, er, feminine hygiene products, even when you were trying to sell them. The ads in question always showed a woman dressed entirely in white, and placed in a romantic, usually moonlit setting, with the only text anywhere in the ad being: “Modess . . . Because.” I kept yelling, “Because
what?!
Because
why?!
Dear Lord, tell me, else I shall run stark mad!” at the magazine until Mom made me stop. A friend of mind has since suggested that perhaps all the genteel societal taboos of our past surrounding girlstuff might seem less Neanderthal and more Empowering if we thought of them as contributing to the Women’s Mysteries. “Agatha Christie . . . Because?” I don’t
think
so.)

But I digress.

Then, one fateful day, it all changed. I was reading the new issue of
Seventeen
, and when I reached the book review column, what did my wondering-albeit-myopic eyes see but a paragraph in praise of something called
The Hobbit
by someone (O, vile enchanter!) named J. R. R. Tolkien.

They said it was a good book.

They said it was a fantasy, but they
still
said it was a good book.

They said it was a fantasy, and a good book, and that it would be all right if I actually went out and
read
it!

They implied that it would likewise be all right if I
admitted
to having read it afterward, even if I made said admission out in public where boys could hear me.

At first I was a bit suspicious. For all I knew, the person writing the book review column was some Machiavellian hag who had decided to give her helpless readers a bum steer because she didn’t want us growing up to be her competition in the field of Matrimony. (Serve her right if we did grow up to snaffle up all the good husband material! That would teach the wizened crone to try having a career
and
marriage! The very notion!) Were I to read
The Hobbit
then somehow the boys would
know
that I had dabbled my frilly pink brain in the dark tarn of fantasy/science fiction and rendered it unattractive thereby. Since I was already wearing glasses, buying clothes in what they then referred to as the “Chub” department, and stuffing whole boxes of tissues into the cups of my Who-Do-You-Think-You’re-Kidding training bra, I was not about to do anything else that might handicap me in the Great Husband Nab-a-thon that was life pre-Liberation.

And yet . . . and yet . . . and yet, this was
Seventeen
magazine, my guiding light, my girlie gospel, my glossy guardian angel through the sweltering, noxious, soul-devouring morass of adolescence. (Anyone who thinks I am exaggerating has not been a teenager for a
long
time.) If I couldn’t trust it, well, what could I trust? Besides, the book did sound kind of . . . interesting. I went to the library and checked it out.

Shortly thereafter I was back at the library, clawing at the card catalog like a refugee from a Romero movie, only instead of “Braaaaiiins . . . Braaaaiiins . . .”I was moaning, “Tolkiiiieeeeeen . . . Tolkiiiiieeeeen . . .”