Love is Walking, Talking, and Refusing

“So much of the action isn't in fighting, it's the stamina of the relationships they need to be faithful to,” said RFB. This was the conclusion of a discussion on what love is and how it is demonstrated. As we have humorously noted in class, Tolkien doesn’t write battle scenes. It’s true: the substance of The Lord of the Rings is walking, talking, and refusing. So, why is this series a love story, and why do fathers pass it down?

On Walking

Boromir’s meme of “one does not simply walk into Mordor” got more than just laughs. Just as the Eagles are not a plothole, the story Tolkien chose to tell, vocalized by Boromir’s line, puts meaning into walking. The Fellowship walks from Rivendell to Lothlórien to the Anduin. Sam and Frodo walk across the Dead Marshes to Mount Doom. Even travel modes more profound, like horseback riding, are at a walking pace: Theoden’s march to Helms Deep. Tolkien gave us pages of terrain, hunger, and yet another day of walking.

Importantly, no one walks alone– in landslides, in deathly pursuits and retreats, in one-slip-and-you’re-in-the-Dead-Marshes. This reaches one of its highest expressions in the ascent of Mount Doom. At the end, Frodo claims that he cannot continue. Sam responds that while he can’t carry the Ring, he can carry Frodo. The readers do not automatically feel Sam’s love for Frodo through a vow, kiss, or even his carrying him. We feel Sam’s love for Frodo because we have read every mile of it.

On Talking

Aragorn's speech is an example of Tolkien demonstrating love through language. The following was said in class: "For magic consists in this, the true naming of a thing," which is a valuable teaser that sets up the discussion of Tolkien’s dialogue writing. His characters neither sound the same nor do the same characters always sound the same. Aragorn, in particular, is a master of code switching. When he first meets the hobbits at the Prancing Pony as Strider, he speaks plainly. With Théoden, he shifts into a high, formal address, the diction of a king meeting a king. In the Houses of Healing, he speaks softly, calling the wounded by name. Aragorn’s list continues, but even more so, he is just one character demonstrating fluency in multiple registers. It is the same man knowing, each time, who he is talking to and what that person needs to hear.

To address someone in their register is to recognize who they truly are, and that recognition is itself a form of love. This is what Dana Gioia’s poem describes. The world doesn’t need words to articulate itself. Gioia says that the world does not need our language to be real just as “the daylight needs no praise.”  The kiss is fully itself, though no words are spoken. Yet, "we praise it always." In accordance with Aragorn and his fluent code switching, the hobbits would still be hobbits without his warmth in tone, just as Theoden would still be a king without his formal address. But the words honor what and who already is. To name is to know, and to name correctly is to honor the thing or person being named. Aragorn's code-switching is the magic of genuine naming, and the magic is love.

On Refusing

Aragorn refuses the Ring and Eowyn's love. Sam, when Frodo tries to slip away to Mordor, refuses to leave him. Pippin refuses to abandon Denethor as he unravels. Tolkien's characters are baited by temptation; some say no, some say yes. Boromir is tempted by the Ring and tries to take it by force from Frodo; he repents only after he has failed. Saruman, sent to refuse Sauron, failed to do so. Almost everyone is offered power, affection, or status, which makes the refusals matter even more. Tolkien writes to his son in Letter 43 that “No man, however truly he loved his betrothed and bride as a young man, has lived faithful to her as a wife in mind and body without deliberate conscious exercise of the will, without self-denial.” There are three ideas to highlight. First, it denies that love is enough to sustain love at the start. Second, it claims that fidelity is not a feeling but a deliberate, repeated exercise of the will. Third, this exercise of will is a form of self-denial. The aforementioned refusals line up exactly with this structure. Aragorn refuses the Ring from the Council of Elrond onward and continues the quest without ever attempting to claim it. Sam refuses to leave Frodo not only at the end of The Fellowship, but every step of the way. Just as Aragorn could have attempted the Ring like Boromir, he did not. For all of these characters, the idea that they could have it— whether “it” was power, affection, status– and that they chose otherwise, not once, but consciously every time, is what Tolkien describes as love to his son and through this series.

On Why

This series spends more pages on walking than fighting. Walking, talking, and refusing are not three arguments but one, repeated in three forms: love is what is sustained, not what is declared. Love in Middle Earth is not a kiss, sex, or marriage, but rather the continued right choice in testing circumstances. It certainly has romantic love: Aragorn and Arwen, Faramir and Eowyn, Sam and Rosie. This is not an argument that renders these relationships moot, but rather a demonstration of how they are only part of the greater love story that is The Lord of the Rings.

At the start of this course, the students were asked how they came to read The Lord of the Rings. Most students who spoke in class mentioned their father, and most discussion posts did as well. Why this series, and why from fathers particularly? The story is not just an adventure to Mordor. It is a long, patient demonstration of what love is. To give a child this book is to give them a curriculum in stamina, in the kind of love that does not announce itself but shows up every day, in the unspectacular work of keeping faith. Letter 43 was Tolkien’s advice to his son, and Lord of the Rings is a letter for each father to pass down. This series tells an impressionable child that the love they will feel is not the achievement, the love they sustain is the achievement, and that the sustaining love comes from walking, talking, and refusing.

—EGA