"Strider" - Jacob's Thoughts

     'Excellent!' exclaimed Strider … 'You seem to be coming to your senses again, and that is all to the good.  You have been much too careless so far.  Very well!  I will tell you what I know, and leave the reward to you.  You may be glad to grant it, when you have heard me.'

     'Go on then!' said Frodo, 'What do you know?'

     'Too much; too many dark things.'           

              -Strider to Frodo

     'Not all those who wander are lost.'

              -Gandalf on Strider

Part of me really wants to give Eric a longer chance to catch up; but another part of me wants even more to get on with the story, now that we're to the good stuff!  And like Frodo waiting for Gandalf, although I worry for him, I fear that if I wait till the end of July, it will almost be too late!  So I start from Rivendell now, and trust that I can meet up with him later.  (And for the first time ever, I wonder if that old Low song is Tolkien allusion.)

I love hearing original context of famous quotes; David Foster Wallace's "This Is Water", for example, gets passed around a lot as some sort of empowering pep-talk on the importance of positive thinking, as exactly the sort of "banal platitude" that the address is explicitly trying to avoid--which, while fine, ignores the original's much darker context of suicidal depression (especially troubling, given Wallace's own end game).  Likewise, "Not all those who wander are lost," that most renowned of Tolkien quotes, the one on all the bumper stickers and buttons and Tolkien paraphernalia across the globe, is situated in a far more ominous and foreboding context than the t-shirts might imply.

For Strider is a person who's seen things, maaaan! (to put it reductively).  He is our Han Solo, our Hagrid, etc.  He is older than he looks, and he doesn't exactly look great to begin with.  "Weeks, months, even years" of ceaseless travel, ranging, fighting, and hiding has left our man Strider weary and hardened; he has seen "too much, too many dark things"; he has not been "looking for himself," so to speak.  "Not all those who wander are lost" is a true axiom, and while I still like that quote a lot, it is hardly a clarion call to adventure and introspection and self-discovery, as the out-of-context window-decals seem to suggest.

Concerning the "too many dark things," I couldn't help but think of all of Ben and Erics' critiques of the previous chapters, of how our Hobbits repeatedly lacked basic common sense and intelligence concerning their predicament; shoot, I remember being annoyed by how long it took them to finally leave the Shire in the first place, as though there was nothing more pressing!  Well, apparently this Hobbit ditziness was intentional on the part of Tolkien, for I heard all of Ben and Erics' criticisms echoed out of Strider's own mouth in this chapter.  It's a wonder the Hobbits even made it this far, for they have already made so many dumb mistakes.  This acknowledgment is effective at raising the stakes, as it makes the Hobbits' predicament feel far more dire due to their unforced errors.

Meanwhile, what makes this exposition-dump of a chapter work for me is the small moments of character development everyone here still gets, despite Strider being the titular focus.  For starters, we learn Frodo is very discerning, as he says to Strider after reading Gandalf's far-too-belated letter, "I believed that you were a friend before the letter came...or at least I wished to.  You have frightened me several times tonight, but never in the way that servants of the Enemy would, or so I imagine.  I think one of his spies would--well, seem fairer and feel fouler, if you understand."  It is important to me that Frodo can read people effectively, which will be even more important once he starts his dealings with Gollum in The Two Towers.

As for Sam, we learn that he hardly a rustic old rube, but clear-headed and head-strong in how rightfully suspicious he is at first of Strider--for indeed, until Gandalf's letter arrives, how do we know that Strider isn't just tricking them away to their own destruction?  Pippin continues to be the same sort of non-self-aware comic relief, as he yawns in the middle of this intense info-dump about how they might scarcely survive the night. I even like how quickly fleshed-out the innkeeper is, as a man fundamentally good-hearted but absent-minded, and the detail that the innkeeper "prided himself on being a lettered man," is an excellent reminder that we are very much in a medieval context, where literacy is by no means universal or a guarantee.  As for Merry, we finally get to see his Sherlock Holmes-esque investigative abilities at work once more, as he tracks down the Black Riders within Bree.

We even finally learn some new things about the Black Riders themselves, namely that they only attack in broad daylight "if they are desperate," for again, as dark as the darkness may be, the light is still more powerful, and that is also important to remember going forward.  Moreover, these Black Riders apparently rely much more on terror and shadows than on their power--indeed, that is how most tyrants maintain their control, for the truth is that the mass of people secretly frightens them, which is also an important thing to remember, in our own lives.

Also: I love the throw-away detail of how, when the Black Riders first arrived in Bree, all the animals started making a commotion at them, for that shows how unnatural the Black Riders are.  Maybe it's just that my graduate seminar on Ecocriticism this semester is once again infecting me too much, but I love the implication that there is something fundamentally hostile about Sauron not only towards the people of Middle-Earth, but against the natural environment in general!  For the powerful do not just want to control people, but everything, and they will willingly destroy the ecosystem and leave a scorched earth in their quest for power if they have to--and often do.

We see that in the Three Rivers Gorges Damn that drowns out dozens of ancient villages; in man-made global warming that leaves most the American Southwest and all of Australia vulnerable to massive drought; in the wanton destruction of the Amazon Rain Forest (the lung of the world) for coffee plantations; in the oil fires floating down the Nigerian river basin; in the smog over LA, Beijing, Guangzhou, Salt Lake City (and now Paris, most recently!); in the escalating rate of extinction among endangered species; in the destructive process of fracking that poisons our water sheds; in our increasing the acidity of the oceans, the melting of the polar ice caps, the Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Pile that's bigger than Texas; in our oil drilling in the Gulf that not only causes catastrophic eco-disasters, but disappears the marshes that had helped shield New Orleans from hurricanes, etc and etc and etc.

Sauron is described as a "Shadow from the East," like some dark thing that blots out the sun, and I can't help but wonder if Tolkien had in mind the black plumes from the smoke-stacks of Industrial Revolution England when he wrote that.

In all cases, it is a relentless pursuit of profit, explicitly for power and gain over all else, that has caused Mankind to turn on the environment--and the environment to turn on us!  In Lord of the Rings, we see this first manifested in the animals that instinctively bark at the Black Riders--much later, we will see it in the Ents.  All these need not even be metaphorical: For as changes in global climate patterns cause more and more polar vortexes to break off the Arctic Circle and rampage across the eastern United States (which I had to put up with no less than 3 times this past winter in the Midwest), and as drought afflicts the southwest U.S., and as greater and more powerful hurricanes and typhoons ravage our seaboards, it becomes clear: Nature is pushing back against us.  The animals are wiser in intuiting the threat of the Black Riders, to warn us against the darkness that we allow among ourselves that will destroy us as well as them, for we are not separate from nature.

For one more world building moment: the final footnote of the chapter mentions that "The Sickle" is the Hobbit term for the Plough or Great Bear.  That is, Middle-Earth has the same constellations as us, because we are on Middle-Earth.  This is our world Tolkien is telling us about--and it is our world that Tolkien is warning us to protect!  Remember that, for all the Medieval touches in this novel, there is still a one peculiarly modern twist to it: the quest is not to attain something of great power--an Excalibur or a Holy Grail or what have you--but to destroy it!  The question is clear: will we be as wise as our most distant ancestors, to destroy our desire for power and control that the Ring represents, or succumb to its temptation of power and allow it to destroy us, as all the natural world warns us against?