Monday, March 14, 2016

"The Choices of Master Samwise" - Jacob's Thoughts

So why does Sam succeed against Shelob when none ever has, as the Orcs inform us?  The answer maybe gets straight to the heart of Tolkien's entire Hobbit-centric series--for despite all his grandiose and sprawling mythologies and the great acts of elves and dwarves and wizards and dark lords and demi-gods and men, all mapped out with appendixes and concordances, remember that this is nonetheless a Hobbit-focused tale, and it's worth asking just why that is.

As for this Hobbit's victory over Shelob: the first factor is the shear fact that Shelob severely underestimated Sam--she would in all likelihood have been all on guard against a genuine Elf-warrior, or Strider-like Ranger, or some other Orc chieftan, but Sam she scarcely considers worth her attention.  Only when he proves a pest does she deign to crush his "impudence" under her tremendous weight--which is precisely her undoing, impaling herself more savagely than Sam ever could have contrived to do on his own.  This utter disregard for Hobbits will also prove Sauron's undoing, as he remains so fixated upon the troop movement of men and elves that he does not even bother to note the doddering halflings wandering right under his nose.

That sense of doddering duty that proves a decisive asset is a key part of the English self-identity, I think: Napoleon and Hitler alike dismissed England as a mere "nation of shopkeepers," and both paid dearly for their mistake.  One gets a sense that the English prefer it that way, that even when they had a world-spanning empire they liked to constantly be overshadowed by their flashier rivals--the French, the Russians, the Germans and Italians--such that they could then all the more easily sneak away with the victory from right under their noses.  Tolkien is, of course, a thorough-going product of his country.

But there is another aspect to Tolkien's thought that influences Sam's improbable victory here, the religious one, which, given the Professor's own devout Catholicism and his role in converting CS Lewis to Christianity, is one that we have not spent enough time thinking about--and that is the fact that within Christian theology, heavy emphasis is placed on the small and lowly things of this world that are favored of the Lord: David is considered the least of the sons of Jesse, but God warns the Prophet Samuel, "Look not on his countenance, or on the height of his stature; because I have refused him: for the LORD seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the LORD looketh on the heart"; according to Isaiah, the Messiah grows "like a root out of dry ground...there is no beauty that we should desire him"; Christ himself is a carpenter, who chooses fishermen to be his Apostles; and St. Paul to the Corinthians declares that God chooses the weak things of the world to shame the strong.

Hobbits, then, can be read as a sort of Christian archetype, the weak things of the world that the Gods express themselves through in order to humble the proud, all so that God's own power may be made manifest.  The vanquishing of Shelob is but the first expression of that ethos, before the main event with Sauron.

Except, of course, it won't be the Hobbits themselves that defeat Sauron, will it--at least not exactly, which complicates the picture immeasurably in really interesting ways, all of which we shall surely get into more depth with in Return of the King.  Until then, so ends The Two Towers.  To quote Whitman, I stop somewhere waiting for you.

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