reader.
The qualities of Middle-earth, finally, are evident. Its inhabitants frequently present a challenge to modern values through their superior dignity, loyalty (Fili and Kili dying for Thorin, their lord and mother’s brother), scrupulosity (Dáin honouring Thorin’s agreement, though Thorin is dead), or all-round competence. On the other hand modern values, as represented by Bilbo, as frequently respond to the challenge by decisions taken internally, without witnesses, prompted by duty or conscience rather than concern for wealth or glory. Bilbo, and through him Tolkien’s readers, can come to realize that they too have a birth-right in Middle-earth, need not be totally cut off from it (even if orthodox literary history has tried to assert that they are).
Meanwhile, if there are two further qualities that may finally be asserted for Tolkien’s version of Middle-earth, they are these: emotional depth, and richness of invention. The former is unusual, though not quite unparalleled, in a children’s book. Few writers for children nowadays would dare to include the scene of Thorin’s death, or have a quest end with such a partial victory: ‘no longer any question of dividing the hoard’, many dead including immortals ‘that should have lived long ages yet merrily in the wood’, the hero weeping ‘until his eyes were red’. Nor would they venture on such themes as the ‘dragon-sickness’ which strikes both Thorin and the Master of Laketown, so that the one is ‘bewildered’ morally, by ‘the bewilderment of the treasure’, the other physically, fleeing with his people’s gold to die of starvation ‘in the Waste, deserted by his companions’. As for the unforgiving ferocity of Beorn, the unyielding both-sides-in-the-right confrontation of Thorin and the Elvenking, the grim punctilio of Bard, even Gandalf’s habitual short temper, all these are far removed from standard presentations of virtue as thought suitable for child readers – no doubt one reason why the book has remained so popular.
Turning to richness of invention, perhaps all one need say here is that in The Hobbit Middle-earth retains a strong sense that there is far more to be said about it than has been. As Bilbo goes home, he has ‘many hardships and adventures…the Wild was still the Wild, and there were many other things in it those days beside goblins’: one would like to know what they were. When Smaug is killed the news spreads far across Mirkwood: ‘Above the borders of the Forest there was whistling, crying and piping…Leaves rustled and startled ears were lifted.’ We never learn whose ears they were, but the sense is there that Middle-earth has many lives and many stories besides the ones that have come momentarily into focus. The trick is an old one, and Tolkien learned it like so much else from his ancient sources, Beowulf and the poem of Sir Gawain, but it continues to work. It may have been a surprise to its publishers that a work as sui generis as The Hobbit should have been a popular success, but once it was a success there can have been no surprise in the clamour for a sequel. Tolkien had opened up a new imaginative continent, and the cry now was to see more of it.
THE LORD OF THE RINGS (1): MAPPING OUT A PLOT
Starting again
One of the most undeniable (and admirable), if least imitated qualities of Tolkien’s eventual sequel, The Lord of the Rings, is the complex neatness of its overall design. It is divided into six ‘Books’ (the three volumes in which it usually appears were a publishing decision based on the cost of paper in post-war Britain). The first Book takes Bilbo’s successor Frodo, with his three hobbit companions and eventually Strider, or Aragorn, to Rivendell. There he is joined by Gandalf and the rest of the ‘fellowship’ of the ring, that is, Boromir, Legolas, and Gimli. Their journey south, during which they lose Gandalf, takes up the second Book. At that point the company of eight splits up. Boromir is killed. Frodo and Sam set off to reach Orodruin and destroy the Ring. Pippin and Merry are captured by the orcs. Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli pursue them. During the third, fourth, fifth and part of the sixth Book these three groups, still further supplemented (by the return of Gandalf) and subdivided (by the separation of Pippin and Merry), weave their paths in and out of each others’ knowledge, the latter often partial or mistaken. (See the diagram on p. 104.)
Symmetry is, however, more than discoverable, it is unmistakable, if you look for it. Thus, it could be an accident that both Books I and II, in The Fellowship of the Ring, contain a second chapter which is largely explanation of the past building up to decisions about the future – and ending with much the same decision, that Frodo has to take the Ring to the Cracks of Doom. It probably is an accident that both Books I and II contain much the same number of scene-shifts and scenes of threat – some three of the latter (Old Forest, Barrow-downs and Weathertop against Caradhras, Moria and the orcs in Lórien), and four or five of the former, with Lórien juxtaposed against the house of Tom Bombadil as an asylum, a place of safety. But thereafter symmetry becomes increasingly detailed. Two groups of the Fellowship meet strangers in the wilderness, and are helped by them: Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli by Éomer the Rider, as they pursue the orcs and their hobbit-captives across the Rohan prairie; Frodo and Sam by Faramir the Ranger, as they struggle towards Mordor through the woods of Ithilien. The decision to free and assist the members of the Fellowship is in both cases disapproved by the helpful strangers’ superiors, Théoden and Denethor. These two last are furthermore strongly parallel to each other: they are both old men who have lost their sons (Théodred, Boromir) and see Éomer and Faramir as doubtful replacements. They die at almost the same time, at or during the Battle of the Pelennor Fields. Each has a hall which is described in close detail, in IV/6 and V/l respectively, and the two descriptions take on special point if compared with each other – as do the scenes of confrontation between Éomer and Aragorn and Faramir and Frodo in III/2 and IV/5. (Page-references are not always helpful in a work as often reprinted and repaginated as The Lord of the Rings. Where reference to the text may be valuable, I use accordingly Book [not volume] and chapter numbers. Here, for instance, IV/6 means chapter 6 of Book IV, ‘The Window on the West’, in The Two Towers, while V/l means chapter 1 of Book V, ‘Minas Tirith’, in The Return of the King.)
Meanwhile Merry and Pippin are clearly set antithetically to each other, with Merry joining the Riders and Pippin the defenders of Gondor, where each rises to much the same rank. All these points tend to set up a detailed cultural contrast between the Riders and the Gondorians, while at the same time there is a running cultural clash between Legolas the elf and Gimli the dwarf, as there is a clash of policies between Gandalf and Saruman (initially similar to and sometimes mistaken for each other). All the way through the later Books there is moreover a deliberate alternation between the sweeping and dramatic movements of the majority of the Fellowship, and the inching, small-scale progress of Frodo, Sam, and Gollum. The irony by which the latter in the end determines the fate of the former is obvious, remarked on by the characters and by the narrator. Tolkien furthermore went to great lengths to build in moments of connection, as when Legolas sees an eagle near the start of III/2, but does not find out that it was ‘Gwaihir the Windlord’ on an errand from Gandalf till three chapters later; or when Sauron is distracted from guarding against Frodo and Sam by the palantír in the hands of Aragorn. Tolkien also very carefully (and laboriously) created an exact day-by-day chronology for all parties, signalled in the text by such things as the changes of the moon. There is no doubt that Tolkien did all this, little doubt that he meant to, and no doubt again that the effects created of variety, contrast, and irony are in major part responsible for the book’s phenomenal and never-equalled success.
Tolkien, however, had no idea of any of this when he began to write, nor indeed for quite unlikely stretches of time once he did get started. He may have felt himself in rather a quandary after the success of The Hobbit. The Hobbit itself had been published almost by accident, with a pupil who knew of its existence recommending it to a publisher’s representative who encouraged him to send it to Stanley Unwin, and Unwin sr. then giving the typescript to his eleven-year-old son Rayner to read and report on (see Bibliography, pp. 7-8). Once it had come out, had been acclaimed, and Unwin had not unreasonably asked for a sequel, Tolkien must have wondered what to do. The texts he had on hand, and on which he had been