"The Great River" - Ben's Thoughts

I always loved this chapter when I read it growing up. The Fellowship on a road trip! What could be better! Road trips were always my favorite when I was young, because I got to lay down in the back seat without a seat belt and take off my shoes (something that was usually forbidden in the car) and the warm sun would be shining in through the windows and often we would stop at a Dairy Queen and get Blizzards, and I would lay down back there and get to read for something like 5 hours straight… Believe me, it was heaven for the little bibliophile that I was. When I got to college and my love of books was partially translated into a love for music, and I got my own car -- well, you can imagine that trips from Dallas to Provo were no burden but rather a sheer joy. (Of course, after 10 or so of those 22-hour road trips, the joy of it tends to eke away a little bit. But no matter.) I think something of that joy translated into my perception of "The Great River." The Fellowship finds itself in a very liminal state, neither here nor there, neither committing to the dangers and dread of the east bank of the river, nor the uncomfortable finality of the west bank and its final destination of Minas Tirith.

Quite a large chunk of this chapter is description of scenery, and I found myself enraptured this time around. Descriptions like this are marvelously evocative:

"Soon the River broadened and grew more shallow; long stony beaches lay upon the east, and there were gravel-shoals in the water, so that careful steering was needed. The Brown Lands rose into bleak wolds, over which flowed a chill air from the East. On the other side the meads had become rolling downs of withered grass amidst a land of fen and tussock." [A wold is an elevated stand of trees, in case you were wondering.]

Although the scenery is bleak, it's a vista that I would love to experience firsthand. The trip down the river, culminating in the breathtaking float-by of the Argonath, that culminates in the beautiful expanse of the river bisected by the island, with the three majestic mountains in the distance and the sound of the falls dominating everything… wow. That sounds magnificent. You have to hand it to Tolkien -- he really visualized his locales and this one especially sprung to life for me as a place that I'd want to visit. No man has set foot upon (what I assume is the peak) of Tol Brandir? Sign me up. I'll be the first. I'd take it as a challenge.

I cannot identify at all with Sam's terror at the sight of the Argonath and the dark chasm leading to the lake. I'm much more in line with Aragorn, standing tall with eyes shining, just drinking it all in. (More on Aragorn's dilemma in a minute.) Tolkien seems to me very much divided between a hopeless homebody (not quite an agoraphobe), like Sam, and someone who was desperate to get out and see things that awed and inspired in the natural world in which we live, like Bilbo at the beginning of The Hobbit when the Dwarves' song awakens within him a seed of excitement and a desire to see the mountains and the gold and the dragon. I think something of this duality exists in us all; I myself love comfortable evenings relaxing on the couch, reading to myself or aloud to my wife, but at the same time there is within me a fierce longing for the mountains or the sea. For years I believed that this longing was for the mountains and the mountains alone, but I've been to the ocean twice in the last two years, on beaches on two oceans on practically opposite ends of the United States, and something of that longing and wonder at the majesty of the fathomless depths of the sea, with the waves crashing against one's legs and the birds wheeling overhead, has wormed its way inside me as well. O the restrictions of the modern life! (The great comfort, and the great restrictions.) It's unfortunate that responsibility and routine cannot be abandoned at a moment's notice to go haring off into the Wild, and then lay there until such time that a person wishes to return to the comfort of routine! The freedom to do that comes, unfortunately, only with money -- which I have in short supply at the moment, not sure about everyone else. One day, perhaps, I'll be able to visit the equivalent of the Falls of Rauros, or the Argonath, or the hills of Amon Hen and Amon Lhaw. Mark my words.

Jacob's already written very eloquently on the complexity of Gollum's character, and I'm sure I'll be diving into it a bit more as well in Book IV. One of the things I wished to muse about was the Nazgûl -- what exactly is it trying to do here? It seems clear that the orcs have set something of a trap for the Fellowship on the east bank, just before the rapids of Sarn Gebir, and that their hope was that the peril of the rapids would push the Company onto the east bank and into their waiting arms. First, how did they know that the Company was going to pass that way? Did Gollum really tell them? I find that hard to believe -- no matter what Aragorn thinks, I don't believe that Gollum would willingly rat on the Fellowship, because he wants the Ring for himself, not for Sauron. Neither do I think that the orcs (and heaven forbid, Sauron through the Nazgûl) would just let Gollum waltz back to his little log in the river after getting his hands on him again. Sauron tends to overlook the little things, but I doubt he'd miss a detail like that this late in the game. So perhaps these were just patrolling orcs who happened to be at the right place at the right time?

Likewise, the Nazgûl's M.O. at this point confuses me. I know Sauron was waiting to unleash the Ringwraiths on their new flying mounts until later; indeed, the next time we will encounter a flying Nazgûl will be weeks later in LOTR-time, at the very end of Book III. So what is this one doing, soaring over the river in range of Legolas' Elven-bow? (I can just see the orcs snickering behind their hands at the sodden Ringwraith dragging itself out of the river after getting shot down, too.) Somehow I have to believe this was an attempt at a northern incursion into Rohan, rather than a concerted effort to snare the Ring-bearer. Although -- the orcs of the Eye that pop up at the end of the book and kidnap Pippin and Merry, along with Saruman's Uruk-hai, were searching for hobbits, so maybe I'm way off base. It just seems like shoddy planning, with little hope of success on the bad guys' part.

Finally, Aragorn. The narrator has not referred to him as "Strider" in some time, since the beginning of Book II if I remember correctly, but here it tosses off all pretense that this figure is anything but a kingly one. "In the stern sat Aragorn son of Arathorn, proud and erect, guiding the boat with skilful strokes; his hood was cast back, and his dark hair was blowing in the wind, a light was in his eyes: a king returning from exile to his own land." But this very transformation intensifies Aragorn's dilemma -- as a returning king, he now feels obligated to return to "Minas Anor" (even more tellingly, he calls the city by its ancient name, "The Tower of the Sun," signifying its beauty and power, rather than by its current name, "The Tower of Guard," reflecting its current status as capitol of a nation at war. Aragorn is really reaching to evoke the past glories of Gondor, for when he served Ecthelion in years past, the city was already titled "Minas Tirith." Long parenthetical ended.) You can feel the narrative building towards something powerful with Aragorn's choice -- whether or not Tolkien delivers on what is simmering in the pot here is a question I'll leave for the next chapter.

"The Breaking of the Fellowship" - Jacob's Thoughts

Once again, I find myself at an impasse--and like Frodo momentarily trapped in indecision between letting the awful eye of Sauron fall upon him or taking off the Ring at once (a wonderful bit of foreshadowing of Return of the King, by the way), I hesitate between waiting for my friends Ben and Eric to catch up with me so that we can finish the The Fellowship of the Ring together, or give into temptation and finish the novel now, then wait for you both to catch up before starting The Two Towers.

I give into temptation--I post my review now.  May Frodo have stronger will-power than me.

It's just that it's taken us so long to finish this book--and as real life (bar exams and new jobs, new babies, grad school, ex-girlfriends and family drama) has persistently disrupted our respective readings, it's almost as though this months-long journey of the Fellowship has occurred in real time.  I almost prefer it that way, as though we have felt the full weight of these travails, both on the pages and in our own lives.

But enough with the melodramatics--now that I stand at the precipice overlooking Minus Tirith and Mordor, where do I even start?  For starters I suppose, I'd forgotten that the action-packed ending of the first film doesn't actually occur until chapter 1 of The Two Towers.  On the one hand, this rendered the finale a bit anti-climactic; but on the other hand, that narrative understatement bewrays a quiet confidence on Tolkien's part, one that goes right back to that most innocuous of first lines "When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday..."

Tolkien knows (as Peter Jackson didn't) that he does not need to beat you over the head with a hammer of massive set pieces, that the scope and stakes of this story are sufficiently epic enough to over-awe you in even in its most intimate moments.  Indeed, simply sending these two little "half-lings" alone into the Land of Shadows--particularly two as comically-unprepared as we've repeatedly seen throughout this novel--is more than enough of an edge-of-your-seat cliffhanger.  "No, you fools, don't go alone!" we almost want to shout at Sam and Frodo, "You two schmucks were almost killed by the Old Forest for crying out loud!"  Oh, Sam and Frodo splitting off from the actual competent travelers just multiplied the danger by full degrees of magnitude!  Clever move, Tolkien.

Furthermore, this understated ending keeps the focus of the narrative squarely not on empty and bombastic action sequences, but upon the characters, upon interpersonal connection, as we see Frodo and Sam's relationship become something more than mere Master/Servant, but something approximating true friendship.  That way, we feel real investment in these people, so that there is a stronger sense of stakes when the action actually begins.

But with all due respect to Frodo and Sam, you know who actually touched me the most in this chapter?  Borimor.  Poor Borimor.  Not gonna lie, I honestly felt for him.

We hardly even knew him--and I'm willing to assume that that opacity was intentional on Tolkien's part, so that Borimor's sudden temptations hit the reader as abruptly as they did Frodo.  But this isn't merely The Temptation of the Frodo, no--in just a couple pages, we learn more about Borimor's character than we did the whole rest of Book II combined--we learn both his pride and his pitifulness, of both his deceptive kindness and his true belief in his cause, of both his thirst for power and the sad vulnerability that fuels it. Honest to goodness, though I felt for Frodo and his horrid Sophie's Choice made all the harder by Borimor's temptations, I actually felt all the worse for Borimor when he broke down in tears and begged forgiveness of the empty air.  Nearly wept myself.  For reals.

For it would be easy to classify Borimor as a sort of tempter-figure, a Satan testing our Christ-Frodo in the desert.  But Tolkien's master-stroke is that he reminds us that we already have a Satan-figure in Sauron; Borimor, poor Borimor, is not a tempter, but just a man, one with hopes and dreams and doubts and fears, who nonetheless almost ruined everything in one moment of passion and weakness.

Just like the rest of us often do.

May we never be like Borimor, poor Borimor, even as we recall all the times we have been.  It is with genuine sadness that I realize I will hardly get to know him more.

Until The Two Towers, gentlemen.

"The Great River" - Jacob's Thoughts

[Properly, those mega-statues should be holding axes, not swords.]

Is there a creature more forlorn in fiction than Gollum?

Milton's Satan at least got the dignity of deserving his own Fall, and legions of loyal fallen angels to boot; Dickensian orphans are at least unambiguous objects of pity and motivators to social action; same with Faulkner and Caldwells' desperately poor Southerners; Poe's various grotesques at least encounter passionate sublimity in their madness; Joyce's cockulded Leopold Bloom suffers mere mediocrity and still gets a rich interior life; Hemingway's Jake Barnes still has his stoic pride; Vonnegut's Billy Pilgrim gets to travel with space aliens and sleep with models; the drug-addled lowlifes of Burroughs' The Naked Lunch still become objects of fascination in their repulsion; Marvin the paranoid android gets some funny lines at least; and Gil from the Simpsons is at least harmless.

But Gollum, poor Gollum!  The more I read and the more I experience, the more I appreciate Tolkien's most pathetic of characters.  When I was in Puerto Rico, you see, I passed by the heroin addicts lurking under bridges at night, with the holed-spoons and cut soda-can lids scattered about to testify of their self-destruction.  In the broad daylight, they stumbled about half-wake, half-dead, in the closest approximation of a zombie we have in reality.  They subsisted mainly on the mangos that fell to the sidewalk.  Once I was passing one on my bike, when he suddenly veered left such that his head collided directly into my shoulder at full speed.  I stopped immediately to apologize and see if he was hurt, but he kept stumbling away, oblivious.  In the thrall of their precious, they had been deadened to all else save the spell of their addiction.  What more potent analog can Gollum have?  That is, Gollum is so incredible precisely because he is so real.

Oh, but Gollum's affliction is so much worse than the addict's!  At least in heroin, you eventually die from it, and are thus liberated from it, sooner than later.  I don't write that flippantly: I recently learned a former roommate of mine was killed a year ago by his alcoholism.  He was only 30-something.  The question can be legitimately asked, what could possibly be worse than a drug that kills someone so young and strong?  The answer is just that much more horrifying: how about a drug that never lets you die, never lets you find freedom even in death, one that makes you outlive all your friends and never win new ones, one that keeps you hopelessly dependent on it from ages to ages, forever filled with self-loathing and shame, pitiless and un-pitiable?

And worse still: a drug you can never quit, but which can quit you?  It's one thing for a heroin addict to run out of heroin; it's quite another for the heroin to cold-shoulder you and leave you for another.  I, like most folks, have some experience in spurned love, in the intense hatred and love one can feel for the once-beloved.  But even I have never had it near as bad as Gollum, poor Gollum, who spends years--nay decades--suffering the unspeakable tortures of Mordor and the deprivations of the wilderness, without friend or consolation in the world, all to get one more sweet, sweet hit from that Precious that willfully scorned him, one that he does not deserve nor does it deserve him. 

We'd feel for him, we really would, we'd almost make a Heathcliffe or some Byronic hero out of him, if he wasn't so absolutely pitiful and petty and pathetic--but even then, we would care for him if he wasn't so filled with murderous rage.  Aragorn says he would like to get his hands on Gollum's throat, and we are not made to feel like he was out of line to say that. 

This is all a long-winded, roundabout way of emphasizing what a fascinating character Tolkien has fashioned in Gollum.  I likewise admire Tolkien's restraint in taking this long to finally bring him and Frodo face to face!  This is the first moment, I think, that the reader begins to get a sense of the full scope that Gollum will play in The Two Towers.  Such is Tolkien's careful craft that we hadn't even realized that Tolkien had been building up to this moment!  So distracted had we been by Sauron, Dark Riders, orcs and Balrogs, that we kept forgetting that there was a whole different shark, independent of the machinations of Mordor, that had been circling in on them. 

I think what I admire most about Gollum is how Tolkien so willingly throws a wrench into his own narrative!  Sans Gollum, this quest is a pretty straightforward account of good vs evil, of Evil Empires and Rebel Alliances and so forth.  But with Gollum, there is an X-factor, the unpredictable extra variable, that keeps everything so delightfully off-kilter. If he threatens to throw off-balance our heroes, well, he threatens the same to Mordor (as we well know from Return of the King)!  With Gollum around, we can no longer just keep displacing our own potential for evil onto some distant, abstract Sauron, but must confront that same capacity for sin within ourselves--as well as both his and our capacity for redemption, and how difficult redemption can actually be. In Gollum, Tolkien will force us to confront the fact that even someone so utterly devoid of any virtue as Gollum still has value, still deserves our love and care--not for his utility, no, but simply because he is alive, a fellow living being!

Now our reductive  good-vs-evil binary has been upset; now our simplistic morality tale has been complicated in genuinely interesting ways.  It wasn't until "The Great River" that I really considered the brilliance of Gollum, who really just might be the most completely forlorn character in fiction.

I've already written too much, so I'll leave all the other wonderful elements in this chapter--the Elves' sense of rippling time, the haunting winter atmosphere, the striking vista of Argonath in the mists, the sudden transformation of our affable Strider into Aragorn, the once and future King--to Ben and Eric.  I'll just finish on one more moment of admiration: I appreciate how Tolkien doesn't hold our hands with the re-introduction of the Nazgul.  Legolas shoots down some dark thing that "stains" the night sky (Tolkien says the sky was "clean" again once it fell), and Frodo only needs to feel a familiar pain in his shoulder, and Gimli mutter something about Mordor, for us to know exactly what it was.  In a sense, Legolas's arrow-shot doubles as Tolkien's warning shot: far larger things are afoot now, and if you thought the darkness was dangerous in this book, well, just you wait till The Two Towers!  It is a wonderful (if overly literal) bit of foreshadowing.

And now, onward to the final chapter!  Gentlemen, we are almost done with The Fellowship of the Ring, and then to The Two Towers!

"The Mirror of Galadriel" - Eric's Thoughts

This is a chapter about temptation. In this chapter, the Lady Galadriel is offered a choice between preservation and destruction. The only price? That she claims a magical artifact that she knows will corrupt her and turn her into the very evil she is fighting. Galadriel knows that if she accepts this boon, she will fall.

I wonder if anyone considers considers themselves evil. I wonder if even Sauron does. Certainly people can admit they've done evil things. But I wonder if, in the real world, there's a single stereotypical James Bond villain who rubs his hands maniacally and cackles when the hero is cast into a tank of sharks. I suspect the truth is more complicated. In the real world, the Saurons think they're okay guys, not James Bond villains.

Lacking a concrete villain, it's difficult to know what Sauron has become, and why. (Perhaps you can fill the gaps with backstory, Ben. I don't remember how/why Sauron became evil, because if I remember he was a good guy too once.) What exactly does the Ring do to someone? For Sauron, it was an extension of himself -- he poured his own power into the Ring when forging it. That means that he had to become evil before making evil, right? Couldn't the good guys, then, have been able to craft another Ring of Power to defend against the One Ring? One that wasn't evil?

The real question is why is corruption inevitable from this Ring. The classic explanations of the Ring theme is that absolute power corrupts absolutely, and that power is a form of drug addiction. The ring is described as a tool for the domination of others. This means that thematically we are dealing with a James Bond villain -- one that merely wants to conquer the world for the sake of conquering it. Maybe Sauron was just insecure and wanted to prove something to himself -- and everyone else?? Maybe he was a psychopath???

Again, all of this is just speculation because at this point we don't really know what Sauron is, other than an Eye. Sauron himself is merely an idea, while the fruits of the idea are manifested in grotesque orcs and goblins, his servants.

Galadriel -- at this point we only know she is pretty, and counsels Celeborn to take back fast spoken words of critique against the Dwarf. She admits that she considered taking the Ring by force from Frodo.

Sauron, then, as long as the ring lasts, exists as the ultimate extension of evil -- one that turns friends against each other. Yet when the Ring is destroyed at the end of the book, assuredly evil is not destroyed. Saruman and his orcs are still chopping up the Shire, and assuredly more evil will follow in the years to come in Middle Earth. The Ring is not the root of all evil, clearly.

So then what is this Ring?

Unfortunately the answer evades me. Except to say that perhaps it is merely a storytelling device, a McGuffin, that allows the characters to have a quest. Perhaps all of the prior analyses of what the Ring is are wrong, and it is what it is -- a Ring created by an evil spirit that wreaks mischief does as the spirit does. I know it's not as poetic, but perhaps the Ring doesn't bring out the worst in us? Perhaps the Ring isn't a metaphor for power at all, but is -- dum dum dum -- just a Ring?

What's interesting is that Galadriel says that in order for Frodo to read her mind is that he will have to grow in power, and train himself in the domination of others. That means that Frodo has a choice, in a sense, to avoid the Ring's power. But then why does he fall under it's spell in the end? Does that mean that no one can escape from the Ring? If cute little Frodo can't, surely very few (if any) of us can.

And for Galadriel, she passes the test of the Ring, and decides to leave it all behind, hopefully for better things in the life to come. And yet in her choice she does not sound certain that it is the right choice, and that is not a comforting thought.

This is not a happy chapter.

"Farewell to Lórien" - Ben's Thoughts

There's not too much to be said about this chapter that Jacob hasn't already said. It's certainly a chapter of transition. You can almost feel Tolkien trying to consolidate Lórien into two chapters, and failing miserably as he simply had too much worldbuilding and important details to throw in that wouldn't fit in a smaller space. Tolkien, like so many Tolkien fanboys and girls, is all about the Elves, and here the Professor relishes spending a little longer in the Elvish kingdom than might be strictly necessary from a narrative standpoint.

Nevertheless, there are some real gems in this chapter. I particularly like the theme of Aragorn's indecision coming to the forefront. I know this plot thread ends with a whimper, not a bang, at the beginning of "Two Towers," but it's fascinating while it lives with us and I'll be talking about it a lot more in "The Breaking of the Fellowship" still to come. But I can just relate so completely to Aragorn's dilemma here -- torn between two paths, and confronted with a choice between what he wants and what he feels is right. On the one hand, he wants to go to Minas Tirith, to help his people in their hour of greatest need. But on the other hand, he believes it to be his duty, as leader of the Fellowship, to go to Mordor with Frodo -- a path that, I believe, Aragorn thinks is doomed to failure and destruction. "We must go on without hope" -- the line from "Lothlórien" -- very much still embodies Aragorn's mentality at this point. He still doesn't believe that Sauron can be defeated, especially after the fall of Gandalf; instead he wants to make the most of a hopeless situation and be with his people as they fall under the shadow.

What a Sophie's choice this is! Aragorn has been preparing, or at least expecting, his whole life to return to Gondor, reveal himself as the heir of Isildur, and assume some kind of leadership role in the defense against Mordor (although, since he knows Denethor personally from years of service to Denethor's father Ecthelion, he probably should expect that coming back to Minas Tirith with Boromir will not be all roses and moonbeams). And here, suddenly, Aragorn is thrust into a position of leadership of the Company that he never expected to have to bear -- a role that he had assumed Gandalf would carry forward.

I think in our lives, very frequently we are presented with situations we never expected ourselves to be in. Often in those moments we lament that such a choice has been placed before us, between what we know to be right and what we want to do. But those are the moments when I feel like we develop true character. Aragorn is lucky that he gets all these weeks in Lórien and on the River to mull over his ultimate decision -- often we don't have that luxury.

Now I'd like to spend a few words on Galadriel and the Elves' obsession and terror of the Sea and their return to Valinor. The two songs that Galadriel sings in this chapter are about Valinor and her thoughts about her inevitable return, which of course takes place at the end of "Return of the King." Of note is that Galadriel was born in Valinor; she decided to accompany Fëanor and her father Finarfin to Middle-Earth even though she did not feel like she was bound to the Fëanor's quest to recover the Silmarils like her kin did. According to The Silmarillion, she swore no oaths about the Silmarils; instead the words of Fëanor about the beauty and wild of Middle-earth kindled a strong desire in her to see those lands and one day rule a kingdom of her own. Tolkien left conflicting accounts of why Galadriel stayed in Middle-earth after Morgoth was defeated; one account says that she was not permitted to return, while another says she was given the opportunity to return but refused, self-exiling herself in Middle-earth.

This by itself hints at Galadriel's conflicted view of Valinor. It is her birthplace, a place where she would be welcomed home by her father Finarfin (who decided to ultimately stay in Valinor). But at the same time, going to Valinor would mean renouncing both the beauty and the power she enjoyed in Middle-earth. I dealt with her choice to give up her power in my thoughts on "Mirror"; here I'll touch on the decision to give up the beauty of Middle-earth, which goes hand in hand with Valinor as an analogue for death and the afterlife.

The rank and file Elf, as Haldir revealed in this chapter, knows little or nothing about Valinor (especially the Elves not of Noldorin descent) -- indeed, it's almost ironic to see everyone describing Lórien as the fairest place on earth when Galadriel has clear knowledge of a place far more enchanting. Galadriel, with her intimate personal knowledge of Valinor, seems full of trepidation at the thought of returning. She is recognizant of its beauty ("I sang of leaves, of leaves of gold, and leaves of gold there grew . . . And by the strand of Ilmarin there grew a golden tree") which surely must be at the very least the equal of the beauty of Lórien ("Too long I have dwelt upon this Hither Shore / And in a fading crown have twined the golden elanor"), and yet she is not anxious to return (the second song refers to "Valimar" as "lost", and Galadriel questions "What ship would bear me ever back across so wide a Sea?") despite the fading treasures of Middle-earth ("While here beyond the Sundering Seas now fall the Elven-tears").

Of course all this closely mirrors our journey through life and our thoughts about the afterlife. This life is full of beauty ("the golden elanor"; "Ah! like gold fall the leaves in the wind, long years numberless as the wings of trees!") and sorrow ("the Elven-tears"), but it's all we know, for the moment. But we can practically feel our life slipping away from us, year by year, day by day ("The leaves are falling in the stream, the River flows away"), despite our best efforts to cling to the past and present ("Who now shall refill the cup for me?") What can we do? Many of us choose to hope for something more beyond this life ("Beyond the Sun, beyond the Moon . . . by the strand of Ilmarin there grew a golden Tree"; ". . . sweet mead in lofty halls beyond the West, beneath the blue vaults of Varda wherein the stars tremble in the song of her voice, holy and queenly") that provides us with a way of living that points us towards an otherworldly goal. That hope is both beautiful ("I sang of leaves, of leaves of gold, and leaves of gold there grew") and terrifying ("what ship would come to me, / What ship would bear me ever back across so wide a Sea?"; "Now lost, lost to those from the East is Valimar! Farewell!").

Such belief is conflicting and wonderful and terrible. Kind of like life… conflicting and wonderful and terrible. Sounds to me like Tolkien uses Galadriel to refer obliquely to this universal human condition.