No Orc Would Say That

When Sam needs a password to announce his return to Frodo in the orc tower, he does not call upon a Westron word or a hobbit phrase but the name of Elbereth. “Elbereth I'll call,” is what he tells himself. “What the Elves say. No orc would say that.” His logic in this moment is tactical, not spiritual. The name works as a ward because evil cannot bear to say it. Sam is not choosing to use the most sacred name in the book in a moment of devotion or to reach for anything beyond himself but for security and confirmation of identity.

This is stranger than it first looks. The Lord of the Rings contains several explicit invocations of Elbereth, and they often seem to be Tolkien’s version of prayer or a call for protection. The name of Elbereth most commonly occurs when characters have been pushed to their limits and are reaching for something transcendent. The password scene goes against that reading by removing the act of reaching for a power beyond oneself. Sam’s relationship with Elbereth is marginal at best. He is a gardener from the Shire using sacred language the way a soldier uses a countersign during war to confirm their identity. And yet it still serves its purpose and works for what Sam is trying to accomplish. The name carries some power that does not depend on the faith, intention, or even understanding of the person speaking it. That pattern is not unique to this scene. The moments where the sacred actually does something in the book are not the moments where someone is most explicitly trying to worship. Tracing those moments shows where Tolkien actually located the sacred in his world

Faramir is the opposite case of Sam’s use of Elbereth as a password. In Henneth Annûn, before the meal, Faramir and his men turn west and stand for a moment in silence, looking, as Faramir explains, toward Númenor, beyond it to Elvenhome, and to “that which is beyond Elvenhome and will ever be.” Frodo, hearing this, feels “strangely rustic and untutored,” as though he has no practice of worship beside these men who have a form and discipline to their practices. There is a lot of irony here as Frodo has already cried Elbereth’s name against the Witch-king at Weathertop, and he will do it again at the Ford. He has more contact with the sacred than almost anyone in the book, but Faramir’s habits and practices make him feel like a beginner. This version of saying grace before the meal is beautiful and it does nothing in the narrative. The invocations that do seem to work by repelling Nazgûl, breaking Shelob’s assault, shattering the will of the Watchers at the gate are those that arise without intention or form.

The most interesting of these to me is Sam at Shelob’s lair, where Tolkien writes that his voice cried out “in a language which he did not know.” In his “Meditation in a Toolshed,” C.S. Lewis argues that there are two ways of knowing an experience. One can look at it from the outside, as an anthropologist would observe a ritual, or look at it from within, as a person experiences it. His point is that modernity often wrongly dismisses the view from within which can help us understand the importance of the worshiper’s knowledge of what their own worship means. But the Shelob scene goes somewhere Lewis does not. Sam does not seem to be looking externally or internally. The words surface in him from somewhere he cannot name or access. The question of which perspective is more valid does not arise, because there is no perspective. There is only the language breaking through Sam.

This is what Tolkien means, in his letter to Robert Murray, when he writes that the religious element in The Lord of the Rings has been “absorbed into the story and the symbolism.” His characters, he notes elsewhere, have “little or no ‘religion’ in the sense of worship,” and invoking Elbereth is, at best, like what a Catholic does when calling on a saint. But the password scene pushes past that analogy. Prayer to a saint implies some form of a relationship because the person praying most often knows the name of the saint and has an intention for the appeal they are making. Sam brings neither. In a letter responding to W.H. Auden, Tolkien writes that the book is “about God, and His sole right to divine honour.” The password implies that divine honour is not produced by devotion but exists in the name the way light exists in the phial. An orc cannot say Elbereth’s name for the same reason it cannot face the phial. Not because it chooses not to, but because the name and the corrupt are ontologically incompatible.

Mount Doom tests this idea and somewhat clarifies its limits. Inside the Sammath Naur, Sam draws out the phial of Galadriel and it is “pale and cold” in his hand, casting no light into the dark. He does not call on Elbereth. The text seems to say this is because “all other powers were here subdued.” Her reach, which is real everywhere else in Middle-earth, does not extend to the heart of Sauron’s domain. But the Ring is destroyed anyway, and not by her name or her light. It is destroyed by the long chain of mercy that runs through the story from Bilbo sparing Gollum, to Frodo sparing him at Emyn Muil, to Sam sparing him on the slopes of the mountain. In his letters Tolkien describes this as Providence working through what looks like accident. Elbereth is a Vala, powerful within the world’s structure but not its deepest foundation. Underneath her, something else moves. Providence. Not a name one can speak but a current running through choices so small they look like accidents at the time.

I find that the password scene contains this whole theology within it. What Sam grasps instinctively, that no orc would say that, works because the name does not require him to mean anything by it. The same principle runs through the book. Frodo cries the name at Weathertop before he has time to think. Sam at Shelob speaks a language he cannot understand. At Mount Doom, the Ring is destroyed not by name or light but by mercies whose givers could not have known what they were giving. The sacred in Middle-earth is not something the worshiper produces. It is already there, woven into what names can be spoken, what light can be carried, and what survives at the Cracks of Doom when every other power has been subdued. When Tolkien writes that the religious element has been absorbed into the story, this is what he means. It does not arrive through the believer. It is the structure the believer is moving through.

- Z.S.K.