The Ring Versus Free Will

In The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien drives his narrative forward through the crucial decisions which his characters have to make. This style, which Shippey calls entrelacement, intertwines each individual’s will in the culminating fate of Middle-Earth. Throughout the course of the tale, no decisions prove more crucial than those regarding the fate, or the ownership, of the One Ring. From Gandalf and Galadriel’s refusal to accept it to Frodo’s failure to destroy it, the Ring is consistently portrayed as a symbol of temptation itself: something which corrupts through its evil nature. While seemingly simple, a more interesting question arises when we consider what exactly makes the Ring evil in itself.

Shippey offers us one word: addiction. This interpretation is most evident in the movie adaptations and the character of Gollum, but falls short when considering what the Ring does more functionally. The addictive quality of the Ring lies in the feeling of righteous power which it grants its user: Gandalf desires it to fight Sauron, Boromir to save Gondor, and Smeagol justifies murdering for it simply because it was his birthday. Far more tempting than the euphoria of a drug addiction, the Ring’s allure lies in the power to impose your will on others. This is why Tolkien writes in Letter 246 that Gandalf would be “far worse than Sauron” if he obtained the Ring. His desire to do good would make him self-righteous, a convincing form of evil which masks itself in good intentions. Despite wanting to change Middle-Earth for the better, Gandalf still would have been evil with the Ring because he would have assumed a position of absolute power. This revelation clues us in on why the Ring is inherently evil: it was made to control.

When analyzing the powers of the Ring, it is easy to forget why it was forged in the first place. Crafted by Sauron, its original purpose was to control the people of Middle-Earth—particularly the owners of the lesser Rings of Power. Fittingly, the temptation of total control awakens a lustful desire for the Ring itself, undermining the free will of both the wearer and his victims. The desire for control literally creates the Ring and underlies its usage throughout the tale. Tolkien portrays this kind of temptation as a force of evil but stops short of categorizing individuals as inherently evil themselves. This interpretation of sin reveals the influence of The Lord’s Prayer on Tolkien’s work, as Shippey notes. The lines “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil” imply a responsibility for men to resist temptation, but ultimately leaves deliverance from evil up to God’s will. In other words, the prayer leaves open-ended the question of how much temptation man can reasonably be expected to resist. For example, Frodo fails to destroy the Ring at the Crack of Doom despite his overall innocent characterization throughout the tale. While Tolkien admits that this is a failure, he specifies in Letter 246 how it was not a moral failure: “At the last moment the pressure of the Ring would reach its maximum — impossible… for anyone to resist.” The impossible circumstance which Frodo faces explains his decision, not his nature. In fact, fate saves his morality when the Ring is finally destroyed by Gollum, a character which Frodo takes pity on throughout his journey. The Ring’s final moments therefore reveal how succumbing to God’s will redeems man from the temptation of evil.

The flip side of Tolkien’s conception of evil is portrayed earlier in The Lord’s Prayer: “Thy will be done.” Contrary to the temptation of the Ring, Tolkien’s Christianity asks man to pledge total obedience to God’s will. That task, however, is easier said than done. As Tolkien points out—not even Sauron intended to fall, but sometimes people are mistaken by what constitutes God’s will. To understand how to make decisions in light of temptation, one can look to the character of Samwise Gamgee. In the company of Frodo, Sam and Gollum serve as opposing figures. Both seemingly abide by Frodo’s will before their own, and both are exceedingly passionate about their loyalty to their master. They differ, however, in the essence of their obedience. Gollum is ultimately loyal to Frodo as Ring-bearer, the current owner of his “Precious,” while Sam genuinely sacrifices for Frodo out of love. This difference is clearest in the chapter “Choices of Master Samwise,” where Sam takes the Ring but is too distraught by losing Frodo to feel tempted by its power. His obedience to Frodo fundamentally opposes Gollum’s infatuation with the Ring because it is founded on love, not a self-serving desire for power. Gollum, constantly conflicted between “Slinker” and “Stinker,” is a slave to the Ring while Sam remains free.

Tolkien contrasts Gollum and Sam in this way to demonstrate the real nature of free will. Faced with endless decisions, mankind constantly wrestles with the issue of purpose in the world. By whose will should we act? What distinguishes right from wrong? Selfishness and hedonism tempt man into believing that he is his own master, creating Gollums who endlessly chase the promise of the Ring. This temptation, as Tolkien conveys, subjects them to their own unconstrained desire. On the other hand, Sams find a master to obey before themselves, combating base temptation with love. Sam realizes his free will through his ability to distinguish temptation from loving desire, an existential challenge at the heart of The Lord of the Rings.

- MJS

Sharing Silent Speech

Not super relevant to my post, but I thought this mural near my apartment looked similar to the illustrations of the Silmarils.

“The Palantíri could not themselves survey men’s minds, at unawares or unwilling, for the transference of thoughts depended on the wills of the user on either side, and thought (received as speech) was only transmittable by one stone to another in accord.” (Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth, 411)

This is the final paragraph of Tolkien’s chapter on the Palantíri in the Unfinished Tales. The mention of “wills” sparked something in me, especially in relation to the discussion we had in class on Tuesday about whether the Palantíri were good or evil. Rereading this paragraph, I noticed that there was a footnote attached to it. A few pages later, I was reading Footnote 21, an elaboration by Tolkien on the nature of transferring thoughts via the Palantíri. It reads: “Two persons, each using a stone ‘in accord’ with the other, could converse, but not by sound, which the stones did not transmit. Looking one at the other they would exchange ‘thought’ – not their full or true thought, or their intentions, but ‘silent speech,’ the thoughts they wished to transmit (already formalized in linguistic form in their minds or actually spoken aloud), which would be received by their respondents and of course immediately transformed into ‘speech,’ and only reportable as such.” (Unfinished Tales, 415)

This footnote both illuminates the process of transferring thought via the Palantíri and muddies it. Jumping off the page is the oxymoron “silent speech,” which in its description seems more like thought because “silent speech” is not voiced. But Tolkien uses the term “silent speech” to differentiate this kind of communication from sharing thoughts, even writing that “silent speech” might have been spoken aloud before being communicated via the Palantíri. Silent speech is “already formalized in linguistic form in their minds or actually spoken aloud,” and so is differentiated from “full or true thought” which is not “formalized in linguistic form.” This characterizes silent speech as something more intentionally shaped (dare I say created) than thought. Where else do we see speech as a creative act? Well, Genesis.

This differentiation of silent speech from thought suggests that, in his description of the Palantíri, Tolkien figures the mind and its multitude of thoughts as a kind of nothingness out of which somethingness, or speech, arises. The mind, then, mimics the nothingness of the cosmos before creation, which Dorothy Sayers says only became nothingness when God spoke. “What I want to suggest is that Being (simply by being) creates Not-Being, not merely contemporaneously in the world of Space, but also in the whole extent of Time behind it…Or, to use the most familiar of all metaphors, ‘before’ light, there was neither light nor darkness; darkness is not darkness until light has made the concept of darkness possible” (Sayers 101). So thought is the darkness that is only darkness when the light of silent speech comes into being, and the Palantíri are the plain upon which silent speech is expressed. The instrumental role of the wills of each communicator then makes sense. Communicating through the Palantíri is only possible through an act of creation that establishes both being, the “silent speech,” and not-being, thought.

The Seven Palantíri - Art by Peter Pracownik, via tolkiengateway.net

What nags is that this suggests that thought, as a kind of not-being, is evil, or has the potential to become evil. Even the suggestion that thought is a form of not-being bothers me, a frequent woolgatherer. My thoughts feel very much like “being” to me, even if I do not always verbalize them. This reminds me of what Sayers says about writers sharing their creations: “his creation is safe from the interference of other wills only as long as it remains in his head” (Sayers 104). Perhaps my thoughts are neutral objects inside my head, and only by sharing them do they gain the potential for good and evil.

This brings to my mind a quote from Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando regarding the poet’s duty: “We must shape our words till they are the thinnest integument for our thoughts” (173). What a naïve and romantic thought, that a poet should craft their words to most accurately depict their thoughts! Throwing other important aspects of poetics aside, such as rhyme or meter, Woolf’s narrator takes the position that poetry’s value lies in how accurately it expresses thoughts. On the opposing side, we have the Palantíri, which appear as battlegrounds for two wills and what they wish to reveal and conceal (at least when we encounter them in The Lord of the Rings). Even our hardy hero, Aragorn, returns exhausted following his battle of wills with Sauron through the Orthanc stone. Like poetry, “secret speech” is a medium for conveying thoughts, but unlike poetry in Orlando, it seeks to conceal thoughts rather than reveal their full nature. I use the word “conceal” because that is how I envision the interaction between Aragorn and Sauron going. That said, I do not think that the secret speech is meant to conceal thought so much as it is meant to refine it. After all, who would want to reveal the entire messy contents of their mind to another (even if to spare the other person from all that disorganization)?

What increasingly emerges to me is the essential communal nature of secret speech, and the relationship between communality and good and evil. Secret speech is only necessary when one person wants to share something with another. This is also when artistic mediums like painting, writing, or music become necessary. Sayers writes that “we may redeem the Fall by a creative act” (107). In his writings about exchanging thoughts via the Palantíri, the value of the stones is not only in translating one’s disordered thoughts into secret speech, but also in sharing this secret speech with another. Sayers does not emphasize community too much in “Maker of All Things—Maker of Ill Things,” but I think it underlies this statement about the anti-Hamlets: “That is to say, it is possible to take its evil Power and turn it into active good. We can, for example, enjoy a good laugh at David Garrick” (106). Key here is the “we.” Collectively, we can laugh at David Garrick, and this turns the evil into a new form of Good. We can all detest the Amazon adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, but in discussing it with each other, we have made it Good. To further disrupt Amazon’s attempt to profit off Tolkien’s creation, we are doing so in a very low-tech way: in the classroom, and simultaneously persuading anyone who was thinking of watching it to avoid that at all costs. A clever transformation of evil indeed.

-ACB

My edition of Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle Earth is the following: 

Tolkien, J. R. R. Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. Houghton Mifflin, 1980. 

The Shadow with no Source

There is something that reading Augustine, Sayers, and the description of Numenor share that remains hard to articulate. The impression, after working through all three, is not simply that they are making the same argument but that they are making it defined by absence, by what is deliberately withheld, and by the theological weight that absence is made to carry.

Augustine's privation theory in Book 12 of the City of God shows that evil has no positive ontological status but is a deficiency, a falling away from being rather than a rival force. This is illustrated most precisely in Chapter 7, where seeking the cause of evil will is compared to trying to see darkness or hear silence. Darkness is known by the eye only where it ceases to see, and one does not encounter it as a thing but notices it through the failure of the faculty that requires light. Evil is structured identically: not something encountered but something registered through the absence of what ought to be present.

 

Sayers’ Hamlet analogy in Chapter VII of The Mind of the Maker explains something Augustine leaves underdeveloped; namely why passive privation becomes active depravity. When Shakespeare writes Hamlet, everything outside the poem acquires retroactively the character of exclusion, and the category of the wrong word does not exist before the right word is chosen. Not-Being, once a conscious will make it a centre of opposition, draws its power from the Being it negates, which is shown most clearly when Garrick rewrote Hamlet with good intentions and commercial success, producing a worse corruption than a malicious alteration would have, since the stronger the will behind a distortion the more power it draws back into contact with the original.

 

What both texts leave unresolved is whether the agent is culpable if the defection of will was constituted rather than caused. Augustine's two-men thought experiment argues that only the will itself can explain why one falls and the other does not, but a will whose defection has no efficient cause is also a will whose defection has no prior condition, and Sayers's Hamlet analogy sidesteps rather than answers this, since poems do not have free will and misquoters are not fallen creatures in the theological sense.

 

Ultimately, Tolkien combines both the doctrine and the tension in the Meneltarma. The sacred mountain is defined by absences so systematic they read as some form of theological argument: no building, no altar, no tool, no weapon, no word except the king's at three prescribed occasions. The silence on the summit, so profound that a stranger ignorant of all Numenorean history would not have dared to speak aloud, renders Augustine's darkness analogy in spatial form, where the sacred is felt through the complete withdrawal of everything that would ordinarily mark a place as significant. Sauron's temple introduces not a different religion but the wrong relationship to the same reality, what Augustine in Chapter 8 describes as inordinate love, and the will that places itself at the centre of worship rather than its object is precisely the Anti-Hamlet figure Sayers identifies, constituting itself through active opposition. 

 

Although Sayers argues that the act of recovery is structurally identical to the Incarnation, taking catastrophic material and transmuting it through creative interpretation into a new form of good, and Christopher Tolkien's work assembling fragments into continuity is this act at the philological level. Of all the great heirlooms of Numenor, only the Ring of Barahir survives, passed through the Lords of Andunie to Elendil and eventually to Aragorn. The fall is not undone, but something carried through the catastrophe and arrives in the Third Age still recognisable as what it was, just as the record itself exists against the avoidance of most survivors who refused to study Numenor because it bred only useless regret. 

- RS 

 

Temptation and Technology

         The Akallabeth narrative in The Silmarillion deals with classic mythological themes like fall, temptation, evil, and the fate of mankind. It seems to mirror the Fall from the Garden of Eden in Genesis 3. After reading it for the first time, I was tempted to simply conclude that the Númenóreans disobeyed the one, essential commandment not to sail westward in much the same fashion that Eve ate from the forbidden tree. However, I find that accounting—especially considering our discussion in class today—to be insufficient. Tolkien is offering a much broader meditation on the desire to escape death and the dangers of creation. He warns the modern reader to be wary of false promises and new technologies that claim to set us free from the shackles imposed on us by our own mortality. The Númenóreans drank from that particular poisoned chalice. 

            They darkened their own skies by hungering for “the undying city that they saw from afar, and the desire of everlasting life to escape from death.” (Silmarillion, 396). This is their downfall. Tolkien, through the tale of the Númenóreans, depicts a fallen world in which man has allowed evil to slip through his defenses. If they had only known their place, not bothered themselves with visions of power and glory, and certainly never set out on an adventure that would bring about their undoing, the Númenóreans would have enjoyed the fruits of paradise for their long and prosperous lives. Unfortunately, the human condition is to always shoot for a little more than we ought to, get completely out over our skis and spend the rest of our days trying to get back to the moment right before everything went sideways. Life is a journey back to the place from which we fell. We probably will never get there. But, in my opinion, Tolkien’s lost civilization of Númenór allows his readers to imagine a possible justification, an endpoint for the confusing project we call life. 

            The academics in The Notion Club Papers believe that Númenór is a real and accessible place. Lowdham attempts to provide a way for his fellow club members to get back to Númenór through the restoration of old myths and old tongues. As the narrative breaks off, Lowdham and his compatriots are preparing to embark on a journey through both time and language, bracing themselves for the difficulties that await them. It will be a long and treacherous journey. Nevertheless, it seems to all those involved a worthwhile endeavor. Reading The Notion Club Papers earlier this quarter, I was reminded of the late night, ambitious discussions I often have with my friends that seem fraught with danger and tend toward conclusions we did not anticipate. 

            In lecture today, we discussed the idea that these kinds of arguments and discussions often resemble journeys. An argument does have an endpoint—an ultimate resolution that both parties are aiming towards—but contains within it no guarantee that the participants of the argument will arrive at a destination. It’s easy to get sidetracked. It’s fairly common to hear someone refer to “the turns of the argument” or ask that certain points be made more clear for those listening. This understanding of what an argument is invites the interpretation that all arguments, and perhaps stories, lives, and many other such things, rest on a proper ordering of their component parts. Language enables this ordering, allowing us to describe different elements of our lives and imbue them with meaning. A shadow is but a shadow, unless we start enumerating its component parts. Then, by carefully selecting a few appropriate adjectives, we can turn it into an evil, sinister shadow—one that heralds approaching evil and the eternal destruction of mankind. Those few words are themselves instruments of creation, used to bring structure to something that otherwise would remain a shapeless, nameless blob…well actually that is just as much as an act of creation as describing it as evil is but I hope I am making myself clear. 

            All this is to say, language constrains us. Our capacity to describe and interpret our collective experiences is defined by our linguistic capabilities. This cuts two ways. Before taking this course, I might have concluded that these constraints somehow make language less important, deadening the mystical essence that defines our lives and allows us to appreciate fantasy stories. By simply describing something, we drag it through the mud of language and turn it into some disgusting, deformed thing–a laughable imitation of the original, indescribable experience. However, I now believe the opposite may be true. Language, when properly handled, can transport us into new worlds and open ourselves to new civilizations. Words and phrases are like containers, packed with meaning and history. After all, as we discussed in class, Hamlet is just a bunch of words and phrases strung together in a certain order. Yet, as most of us know, it is simultaneously so much more than that. Shakespeare brought those words and phrases to life. That is his creative act.

            Returning to a discussion of themes, I wish to conclude by emphasizing the role that Akallabeth plays in Tolkien’s project. This course has sharpened up my appreciation for the many layers present in Tolkien’s mythology. His work operates on several levels—imaginary, historical, and mythological—that are still relevant for all of us. In the Akallabeth, he engages with the eternal question of what happens when one tries to escape death. It is a cautionary tale. Tolkien is concerned about the growing power of technology and the ways in which it acts upon those who use it, molding and shaping their moral character. Sauron persuades the Númenóreans into committing human sacrifices by convincing them that they can achieve immortality if they only set aside most of their principles. People can do terrible things if they believe it will get them what they want. Tolkien does believe in Goodness but he allows for the possibility that man can be turned away from the path of righteousness. On the one hand, we can choose to exercise our Free Will in damaging ways. Like the Númenóreans, we can disobey sacred commands handed down from on high. Or, and I believe this is the far more informative lesson for today, we can be manipulated and led astray, often without our knowledge. 

            Marshall McLuhan famously argued that the medium is the message, that the information conveyed by some technology is secondary to the effect that it has on the user. He was writing as the introduction of television into the American home upended domestic life, creating a culture in which sitting around watching Gilligan's Island with Grandpa became a way—perhaps the way—to connect with one’s family. In other words, technology transforms how we interface with our world, changing our behavior. Tolkien’s Palantíri—or, for us moderns, our IPhones—crack open brand-new channels of communication, collapsing distances, allowing people to communicate with each other instantaneously, and placing all available information at our fingertips. I can find out, with just a few strokes on the keyboard, when and where Tom Petty was born. Does that make for a better world? Do I really need to know that? As Thoreau put it in Walden, we may be in “great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.” 

            - ES

Lost Identity and Found Myth in The Lost Road

In the opening chapters of The Lost Road, Tolkien centers Alboin, at first a young boy curious about language and the past. He asks his father about his name: is it real? Alboin wants to know if his name means something, if it is meant to be name, and who has had it before. This echoes a few themes common to Tolkien’s work. First, Alboin seems to inherently connect his name, of course a piece of language, to his heritage. Tolkien seems to firmly believe that language has an inextricable link to culture. In the opening chapters, Alboin says just that to his father, making an assertion about ‘language atmosphere,’ and attributing language changes to ‘substratum.’ This, of course, sounds like Tolkien speaking. 

Alboin seems to be a parallel to Tolkien, carrying many of his beliefs and interests, as well as later pursuing an academic career at Oxford. Alboin also represents another one of Tolkien’s sentiments: a sense of separation from heritage. Alboin expresses this frustration with his name, and it is one his main motivating factors in his studies. Like Tolkien, he is particularly interested in the seemingly lost culture and language of the British Isles and the ‘north.’ His father mentions how the “old days of north are gone beyond recall, except insofar as they have been worked into the shape of things as we know it, into Christendom” (38). This reminded me of Tolkien’s work on Beowulf as well as Tom Shippey’s recent book on the subject. Shippey writes about how the tale may represent the death of a culture through invasion, with Beowulf’s trials representing an intense period of violence and upheaval. The epic, however, was never interpreted this way until recently, and was rather seen as motivated and catalyzed by Christian interests. This tracks with what Alboin’s father says: we only seem to understand the pre-historic north through the lense of Christianity, which produces an incomplete view. A massive amount of history, language, and culture have seemingly been lost, a mystery that consumes Alboin. Tolkien of course translated Beowulf and had particular affection for the text, and it seems reasonable to say that he was attracted by exactly this mystery. 

Indeed, Tolkien’s purpose in writing was largely to ‘fill in the gaps,’ and create a mythology for England. Unsurprisingly, Alboin has similar goals, and says that he wants “myths, not only bones and stones” (40). Alboin feels a strong pull to a culture that he feels is lost. He seems unsatisfied with Latin and Greek and instead feels a strong compulsion to speak northern languages. This reminds me of certain similar sentiments I’ve heard from Irish people learning Gaelic in recent years. These people often claim that they feel as if Gaelic is the language that they are meant to speak in and are overwhelmed with a feeling of deep cultural connection. This of course supports Tolkien’s idea that language is ingrained within groups of people and is parallel of Alboin’s frustration. He wonders “if there is any Latin in [him],” answering his own question: “not much” (38). He likes western shores, and the real sea, which is nothing like the mediterranean. Just as with Tolkien, this sense of cultural disconnection motivates Alboin to seek out language and mythology that feels more familiar. In Alboin’s case, however, this involves finding out the real history of middle earth, as the rest of Tolkien’s legendarium acts as the history and heritage that has been lost. For Tolkien, of course, his solution is sub-creation, as he is unable to locate a mythology for England. 

This distinction brings up interesting questions about the nature of myth. What is the difference between the ‘real’ myth in Alboin’s world and the imagined in Tolkien. Isn’t myth not supposed to be ‘real’ in the first place? An interesting answer, and perhaps what Tolkien would say, is that a myth is not more or less real based on its historic accuracy, but rather other factors. To make his myths ‘real,’ Tolkien tirelessly researches language in attempt to make his myths sound right. He crafts his narrative around surviving epics like Beowulf and writes prose in the style of a religious text or fable. But can such a myth achieve true authenticity? I don’t think that even Tolkien would think so. Consider language: Tolkien maintains that languages are foundational to societies, and each one is deeply connected with its ancestral speakers. When Tolkien, through an act of sub-creation, invents a new language, no such connection is possible. While Tolkien may borrow Norse and Old English in order to make such a language ‘look more real,’ it will only be attached to an imaginary people. It seems that the same would apply for myth… if Greek myths are only ‘real’ in the sense that they are intrinsically connected to Greek people through ancient Greek culture, then Tolkien’s myths certainly aren’t. England, however, does have an individualized circumstance: it seemingly does not have a national myth to begin with. In this case, does it make sense for Tolkien to create one? Could LOTR and Tolkien’s legendarium really fill that place for England? How long could it take? It seems for language and myth to be ‘real,’ or in other words legitimately connected to a group of people, it could take generations. There seems to be a requirement that both must be adequately ancient… is this necessary? 

At this point, I am somewhat confused as to Tolkien’s goals… does he really believe he is creating England’s national myth? He seems to know better than anyone how such myths are not only tied to ancient, common language, but also to long periods of shared history. In this way, it seems impossible for Tolkien to just create a ‘myth’ by himself. But then what is his purpose? Does he hope his work will last long enough to be ancient? Is he encouraging us to become sub-creators ourselves?

Check out this cool map from reddit that claims Tolkien modeled Middle Earth after Ice Age Europe!!!

—JW