"The Grey Havens" - Jacob's Thoughts

"I will not say: do not weep; for not all tears are an evil." -Gandalf

So ends our long and unexpected journey.  What do I even say now that I'm here?  I suppose I'll begin by noting one last time that Tolkein's medievalism is ironically what marks him as distinctly Modern.  Jed Esty has argued that as the global rise of industrialization, fascism, dialectical materialism, and laissez-faire capitalism left the modern subject feeling all the more alienated, isolated, and adrift, that the British in particular began to turn inexorably towards their own pre-modern past, to the forgotten lore of their countrysides, mining their own cultural resources in hopes of re-configuring a lost sense of national unity.  J.R.R. Tolkein consciously participated in this same national reclamation project; despite his own devout Catholicism, he considered the disappearance of Britain's ancient pre-Christian mythology to be a tragic and irreparable loss--he arguably wrote Lord of the Rings in no small part as a replacement mythology for Great Britain.
Another more "High Brow" example of this Anglo-Modernist turn towards the pre-modern can be found in T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land.  In his own footnotes to this watershed 1922 poem, Eliot announces that:

"Not only the title, but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem were suggested by Miss Jessie L. Weston’s book on the Grail legend: From Ritual to Romance (Macmillan). Indeed, so deeply am I indebted, Miss Weston’s book will elucidate the difficulties of the poem much better than my notes can do; and I recommend it (apart from the great interest of the book itself) to any who think such elucidation of the poem worth the trouble."

Ancient Arthurian Grail Legend is the chief organizing principle of The Waste Land, which is itself perhaps the single most definitive work of Anglo-Modernism (besides Joyce's Ulysses, which is itself modeled on Greek legend).  Like Tolkien, Eliot turns towards the lore of a pre-modern past in order to somehow recover a lost sense of ontological and epistemological unity--"These fragments I have shored against my ruins" is one of the poem's concluding lines.

I touch on Arthurian legend because I actually once went to the trouble of reading Miss Jessie L. Weston's From Ritual to Romance (in a misbegotten quest to somehow make sense of that impossible poem), which is where I first got introduced to tale of the Fisher-King.  The account survives only in fragments of ancient Welsh manuscripts, dating back to the very earliest sources of the King Arthur mythos.  Briefly: A curse has fallen upon the land.  The crops will not grow, the cattle die, babies are still-born.  In desperation, a Knight of the Round Table is dispatched across the waste-land in search of the Fisher-King, to somehow lift the curse.

Not enough fragments survive to tell us what happens next; what's important is that the land has been wasted, and the quest of the modern subject is to traverse the waste in order to repair that which was irreparably lost.

Which, in broad strokes, is what we find at the outset of "The Grey Havens": The Shire has been wasted--and that in every sense of the word, those grand trees were wastefully felled for no other reason than sheer spite--as Saruman sought to set up a mini-Mordor.  Even after the enemy has been expelled, Sam despairs of ever setting it right again, that it will not be until his great-grandchildren that the Shire will again "look like it ought."  Something has been irrevocably lost.

But then Sam remembers his boon from Galadrial, that choice soil and seeds, and so begins planting a-new.  The ensuing harvest is better than ever--the Shire's best beer is brewed from its hops.  The Hobbits work like bees (which they apparently can when the inclination strikes them) in repairing the home-steads and tearing down that ghastly Mill.  They begin to restore the Shire to its prior Edenic glory.  These Hobbit knights of the round table have fulfilled their mission.  The curse on the land has been lifted.

The destruction of the Mill is of special interest to me, because it feels like a specific representation of industrial Modernity, in all of its diabolical pollutions, inhumanity, and alienation.  It's deconstruction is a symbolic rejection of Modernity generally, a conscious move back to a pre-modern communal unity.  I cannot help but feel that there is a sort of call to arms in Tolkien's destruction of the Mill and restoration of the Shire, for Modern Man to likewise reject Modernity.  The destruction of the Ring was likewise symbolic of the same; for unlike actual medieval texts, this series features not the conquest of a boon of great power, but the rejection of one.

Except that can't ever happen, not really.  Well over a half-century after The Lord of the Ring's publication, we are only all the more entangled and embedded in the worst of Modernity, we are further away from rejecting this treacherous boon than ever.  Our pollutions are off the scale, industrialism is all the more firmly ensconced.  If the One Ring came into our possession today, there would be no hesitation: we would use it to "strengthen our borders," increase "energy independence," bolster our military, expand our surveillance apparatus.  Like Saruman, we are only too willing to cut our deals with the Dark Lord.

So what is there left to do?  Leave.  Withdraw.  Which is what Frodo does, doesn't he.

He is still too marked by the wounds of the Black Riders, by the weight of his time as the Ring-Bearer, by the forces that attempted to swallow the whole of Middle-Earth.  He has helped break the curse upon the Earth, but not upon himself.  So now he takes to the infinite expanse of the ocean, to join with something that is even bigger than all of Middle-Earth.  There is something romantic in his decision to leave behind the Shire.  There is also something tragic.

Eliot's Waste Land finishes with a "Shantih Shantih Shantih", which his own footnote says is "a formal ending to an Upanishad. 'The Peace which passeth understanding' is a feeble translation of the content of this word."  There is likewise a peace which passeth understanding at the finish of Lord of the Rings.  Except I once had to do a research paper on this poem back in undergrad, and I distinctly remember coming across an article that pointed out that a proper ending to an Upanishad would have an "Om" following those "Shantihs" (think the Beatles' "Across the Universe," with its chorus of "jai guru deva om").  In other words, Eliot's poem only invokes that Peace formalistically, without really finishing it.  The Peace is arrested.  It has not quite yet been achieved.  That primordial sense of wholeness still eludes us.  We are still left wondering what to do next.

That peace has not been fully achieved for Frodo yet, either.  He will not be able to fully recuperate his lost sense of self, anymore than will the Modern world.  For that, he must seek elsewhere.  For that he must seek over the seas and beyond the horizons.