A Reader of Else

And now, it ends. We finish our close reading of The Fellowship of the Ring with chapters VIII – Farewell to Lórien, IX – The Great River and X – The Breaking of the Fellowship, moving from a last little bit of elven sorrow into the next part of the quest.

For this part, as a little celebration, we had our own hobbity snack feast while discussing the chapters, enjoying potato and rosemary sourdough with a variety of cheeses, chutneys, meats and cake, and a large pot of tea. It felt appropriate, and more importantly an entirely delightful way to spend an afternoon. I would highly recommend.

The content of these chapters was somewhat less cheery than our snacking, though.

I don’t want to linger too much on elven sadness here, because I covered that plentifully previously, but there is a reprise of it, and there are some proper banger lines that come with it. I noted before about the uncomfortable conclusions I draw from all the elven sadness and Tolkien’s conservatism. Even knowing that, even having those thoughts so recently in my mind, I could not escape in the moment of reading nonetheless being pulled into feeling the sorrow of the passing of the elves from the world by the power of Tolkien’s prose. When it comes to the things he cares deeply about – and I think at this point it’s obvious that the elves being lost to the world is very much one of them – he’s good at mashing the emotions button with how he chooses to put it down on the page. We get a number of examples here, but I think the one that worked best on me was this, on Galadriel herself:

She seemed no longer perilous or terrible, nor filled with hidden power. Already she seemed to him, as by men of later days Elves still at times are seen: present and yet remote, a living vision of that which has already been left far behind by the flowing streams of Time.

What also hit me about this, and the other pieces in this chapter on the passing out of the world of beautiful things, was a connection I had never explicitly drawn before in my mind – how clear this line is between Tolkien and Guy Gavriel Kay’s return in his work to the passage of time and the loss of beauty. I was struck, reading that quote above, with a thought of the mosaic in a chapel we see in two of his books. The first when new, and the second, many years later, of that same mosaic left untended to crumble into ruin, but still with its faded beauty there for someone to see, and to wonder at what once was. This is hardly a stunning or new revelation, by any means, but I am interested that I never quite connected these two particular dots before, especially given that that theme of Kay’s is one of the things I find most effective and evocative in his work. Sometimes things need to be held up to the light in just the right way to catch the brain, I suppose, and this was that particular illumination for me.

The other key thing this chapter highlighted – as Galadriel gives her gifts to the fellowship – is something that has been cropping up in places throughout the book so far, but which is emphasised particularly here and in the next two chapters: the extent to which Aragorn has been picking up kingship by slow degrees through the story.

Galadriel gives him first the gift of a scabbard, but asks if he wants anything more, knowing that they will not meet again in the living world. Though she cannot give him his earnest desire – unnamed, but unsubtly Arwen – what she does do is pass him a a set gem which was left here for Aragorn should he ever pass. Along with it, and more crucially, she says:

‘This stone I gave to Celebrian my daughter, and she to hers; and now it comes to you as a token of hope. In this hour take the name that was foretold for you, Elessar, the Elfstone of the House of Elendil!’

Following which:

Then Aragorn took the stone and pinned the brooch upon his breast, and those who saw him wondered; for they had not marked before how tall and kingly he stood, and it seemed to them that many years of toil had fallen from his shoulders.

With brooch and name, he has shown himself a little more the thing he is fated to be. Just as when he took Andúril, the acquisition of a signifier of his future role makes plain to those around him that he is becoming something else than he has been accustomed to be, and to be seen as. This is kingship as performance – he takes on the mantle and stands, decides, speaks as one who has come into his power – but also as a status that requires physical manifestations, tokens that show his power in the world, but also demonstrate that he has taken the steps and been legitimised in that role by the right powers. In a section rich in nods to Anglo-Saxon historical practices (there’s mead, weaving, cups being shared and the act of gift giving here), it does not seem particularly out of kilter to think that Aragorn’s progression into the role of king also echoes history somewhat.

Which is particularly interesting in a book so clearly fixated on blood and identity¹. Aragorn is king by right because of his unbroken lineage to Elendil. He is of the men of Númenor. These are both incredibly important, and often mark him out as special, even aside from his claim to the throne of Gondor. But, these moments of ritual seem to say, that bloodright alone is insufficient. That bloodright has sat with every ancestor before him back through the line. Aragorn, however, is the one who is doing all these steps and actively taking up the mantle of the kingship – because king is a thing you do, not just a thing you are. So Galadriel’s gift to him – this bestowing of a name that marks him as having reached a step in his fated journey – is part of that performance, a part of collecting about himself the signifiers that mark him, outwardly, as the king he both is and will be.

A little later, having made their way down the river, the Fellowship find themselves at the Argonath, and this comes to the fore as Aragorn marks the connection, and that this is the first time he goes into the land of his birthright under his own, true name:

Frodo turned and saw Strider, and yet not Strider; for the weatherworn Ranger was no longer there. 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.

‘Fear not!’ he said. ‘Long have I desired to look upon the likenesses of Isildur and Anárion, my sires of old. Under their shadow Elessar, the Elfstone son of Arathorn of the House of Valandil Isildur’s son, heir of Elendil, has naught to dread!’

And so he has taken up not just the physical tokens of kingship and his name, but his lineage too. Here, in his land, he names his connection and his role, and takes up the pieces of his identity that are past, as well as future.

I had the perhaps fanciful notion – with which Ed was not entirely on board, I will admit – that this progression through the book of his collection of unique, valuable and symbolic items, and now the bestowal of a name and declaration of heritage as he comes into his kingdom, perhaps represents a slow coronation ritual that he undergoes all the way from Rivendell to Minas Tirith. Are the sword and the stone truly so different from the sceptre and the orb? I like this reading, so I shall keep it, even if it might be a little silly.

Regardless of what quite it signifies, it threads through this last piece of the book that the character we met as Strider is Strider no more. Or not only. Frodo is not the only one who has undergone change through this journey.

The other character who stands out in the gift-giving, for rather different reasons, is Gimli. While the others have gifts prepared for them, Galadriel is unsure what a dwarf could possibly want of her. What proceeds comes straight out of Arthurian romance – the request for a strand of her hair to treasure, and to pass down as an heirloom, and a “pledge of good will between the Mountain and the Wood until the end of days”. This hair he describes as surpassing “the gold of the earth as the stars surpass the gems of the mine” – twice over highlighting the signifiers of both dwarves and elves. This whole section – several paragraphs of dialogue – is particularly formal in tone, rich in symbol, and seemingly out of keeping with much of the text. And that is its strength. Tolkien is consciously harking back to a certain type of story, a certain type of request, and his language slips a little into the mode of the thing to better evoke it.

While it does not escape the unpleasant characterisation of the dwarves entirely – Galadriel’s hope for Gimli’s future is “your hands shall flow with gold, and yet over you gold shall have no dominion” – it is an interesting contrast to their portrayal in The Hobbit, where the gold sickness is far more prominent a characteristic. Gimli acting as the romantic hero, the knight errant with his formal courtesy and careful flattery of the high lady, offers another angle on his character, and on the people he represents. Does this assuage the previous racism? Of course not. But it suggests perhaps that Tolkien’s approach in the intervening years may have gained a modicum of nuance.

This connects, unfortunately, to Celeborn’s speech here. As they ready to leave, he offers them boats to take, and indicates that there are those among them who can handle them. He does this by linking them to their people – Legolas can boat because the elves of Mirkwood know their river, Boromir because he is of Gondor, Aragorn because he is of the Rangers. Alone, this feels neither here nor there (and perhaps can be taken as a way of giving the reader some insight into their peoples through them, rather than purely their own skillsets, a little hand gesture of wider worldbuilding), but it is not alone throughout the book, and exists within a lingering tradition (looking at you D&D) of fantasy racial essentialism, where one’s skills, abilities and preferences are determined by one’s race or one’s people. It suggests that, if Legolas can handle boats because he is and elf of Mirkwood, that being an elf of Mirkwood has a homogeneity to its legacy and imprint on its people that seems out of keeping with my experience of the world.

And yet, as Tolkien often does, he goes on to undercut this immediately. After Celeborn speaks, Merry pipes up immediately to say that he, too, knows how to handle boats. Which we, the readers, already know – not all hobbits are wary of water, as we learned before we left the Shire. As above, does this entirely resolve the sense that often comes through in the story that heritage is destiny? No. But it goes some little way to saying that Tolkien allows complexity to exist within it. A complexity that a lot of the works that exist in the fantasy lineage after him entirely fail to incorporate.

So far I’ve been quite heavily focussed on the first of the three chapters, and indeed I think there is a lot in that one worth lingering on. The following two are a return to travelling through the landscape, about which I’ve talked plenty. It is possibly interesting to note that this may be the first truly unpeopled land they go through – even the empty places previously bear witness to those who have lived there before – and also a land they travel past rather than through. They float along the river seeing this wild place, but do not interact with it directly until they reach the borders of Gondor’s hold, and the ruins of a place that once was worked by human hands. The true wilderness, the one that has never borne the touch of people, is a place not worth daring the visit, perhaps.

But while there’s less to discuss, there’s not nothing. One of the key things that crops up again and again through this chapters is the idea that the fellowship are avoiding making a critical decision, and that they are taking an easier way out for as long as possible, and may choose to continue to do so. The decision to go east or west, to journey to Mordor or Minas Tirith, has been and is posed repeatedly. Boromir makes clear his position. But Aragorn and Frodo seem undecided, and reluctant to make the choice at all.

That Tolkien characterises Minas Tirith as the easy path – and he lingers on the idea that they could find respite there for a time to emphasise this – feels like an interesting choice. We’ve been with these people long enough now to start thinking of at least some of them as heroes. But that does not mean they are infallible, and cannot be tempted into avoiding the harder and more dangerous things before them. There’s no sense of blame in it, and Minas Tirith has been proferred as a legitimate and reasonable option throughout. But it now starts to build that this isn’t the right path, foreshadowing a choice to come.

And, of course, foreshadowing Boromir’s part in Frodo’s choice. His determination to go to Minas Tirith has been peppered through the last few chapters, and arises more and more here. But what now builds with it is his belief that the Ring, and its bearer perhaps, ought to be going with him. This culminates in a slow and, to my mind very well crafted, scene in which he first attempts to persuade Frodo and then eventually snaps, and tries to take the Ring from him, before awakening from his madness to regret.

That he will be overtaken by his wanting in spite of reason or wisdom has been well foreshadowed, and his arguments become sinister as he makes them. But one line stands out to me against the backdrop of these:

‘And they tell us to throw it away!’ he cried. ‘I do not say destroy it. That might be well, if reason could show any hope of doing so. It does not. The only plan that is proposed to us is that a halfling should walk blindly into Mordor and offer the Enemy every chance of recapturing it for himself. Folly!’

And… well… is he wrong? What has he seen so far of Frodo that would lead him to believe that he could undertake this monumentally dangerous journey? It is absolutely clear that he has been overcome by desire for the power of the Ring, it’s true. But there is a seed of reason at the heart of it, just as there is a seed of good aims, a drive to do the right thing, that has been twisted into this rapacious wanting.

There are two mirrored scenes that this connects to. The first is Galadriel a few chapters back, when Frodo offers the Ring up to her. Like Boromir, she is motivated by pure desires, wanting to take down their enemy, drive him and his power from the land. But unlike Boromir, she knows that the Ring will take this desire and twist it, and that if she used its power, it will end with her twisted too, a dark queen, rotted out by the use of a power that cannot be trusted. And so she refuses and passes the test. Boromir, who has repeatedly been shown to be very set in his beliefs about how the world works, how the Enemy can be defeated, what is worth doing and by whom, cannot see himself out of those trammelled views and so is captured in the Ring’s siren song, and seeing Aragorn, or himself, as the wielder it needs to call up the Men of Gondor to ride against Sauron.

Which brings us to the other mirror – Aragorn. When the rest of the party realise Frodo is missing, they determine that they must stop him leaving, they must find him, they musn’t let him go. But Aragorn alone pauses to wonder, maybe the decision should be left to Frodo, maybe they should just let him make it and go.

On the face of it, this seems slightly mad. To let a hobbit, someone who doesn’t have particular training or experience alone in the wilds, make such a vital and dangerous journey alone seems bonkers. But it sits in opposition to Boromir’s rational concern that turns to trying to exert his own will on the situation. His concern may be a reasoned one, but his actions are ill. Aragorn’s willingness to let Frodo go alone seems out of kilter with the facts as we know them, but demonstrates a quality he shares with the others we have been shown are wise so far in the story: openness to possibility. Maybe this situation isn’t one for big armies and men with swords. Maybe a hobbit can be the thing they need. Maybe something else, something different, something new.

And we have seen in previous chapters that, like Frodo and Gandalf, Aragorn too sometimes can connect to the knowledge of the world outside of himself, gain wisdom and feelings of the shape of the narrative that are beyond him. He was the one, when they went into Moria, who felt something about Gandalf’s impending fate. Perhaps his connection to that sense of fate drives him here.

Boromir is not open – not to possibilities outside of his experience, nor to the touch of that Unseen World and its knowledge. His is constrained by his worldview, and that is his undoing. He progresses from gentle persuasion, to bullying, to physical threat, and fails in the ideal of himself he holds to be true. The Ring has driven him to it, yes, but as we see through the story up to this point, it works on what was already there at least in part. And so the conversation between them feels all the more real because it draws so heavily on character work done on Boromir throughout the story so far.

It also makes plain that, as has been hinted before, Frodo already had made the decision to head to Mordor. Looping back to that theme of avoidance, he knew his desire to go to Minas Tirith was “the way that seems easier” and “refusal of the burden that is laid on [him]”. The conversation with Boromir serves then not only as his character journey, but an externalising of Frodo’s decision-making, where the decision is not go or stay, but to bring himself to actually do the thing he knows he needs to do. The threat Boromir suddenly presents forces him to make the decision he had fully made, to act on his instinct to do the right thing.

Which brings him, in his flight while wearing the ring, up the hill of Amon Hen, the Hill of the Eye of the Men of Númenor. Whether because of some innate power of the hill or his access to the Unseen World as ringbearer, this position gives Frodo a sudden escape from his singular viewpoint and a grasp of the wider scope of the story – out to many of the other players in the game like Isengard, Rohan, and Minas Tirith, and out further to Mirkwood and the land of the Beornings and Harad. Right here, at the end of the story, he grasps the full scale of what’s at stake and what turns towards this great problem. And as he does so, as he stands on the Hill of the Eye, his is matched and mirrored himself by the Eye of Sauron, who becomes aware of his gaze looking out across the world, and reaches out power and focus to find him. At this point, he feels conflicting voices within himself, whether the seduction of the Ring and his own wisdom and will, or perhaps the influence of Sauron and some other, more kindly force (my read on this is that perhaps it is Gandalf), and chooses to take off the Ring and step out of sight just in time. And then, finally, he is resolved to do what he must.

This ending, with two powers looking out from their respective high places, I can’t help but think of as a little foreshadow of what’s to come in the next book, as well as an effective (if not awfully subtle) demonstration of the good and evil working in the world and in the story. All that is left is for Sam to find him and resolve to accompany him, and the story is ended.

But because this is the last session for the book, this is not where my thoughts end – I have some general wrap ups to do as well².

In no particular order, the things that linger with me from rereading The Fellowship of the Ring with such a close focus are:

How much the fandom conception of it, the way it is generally talked about in discussions I see, differs from the reality of my experience of it as a text, in many ways. The one that stands out most strongly is the criticism often thrown that there is SO MUCH poetry to be skipping, for the people who don’t like it. Now that I’ve finished, I’m struck by the opposite – how little there seems to be in comparison to all the grumbling. Like many big touchstones, the version of the text that lives in the popular imagination does not always resemble the thing itself. I’ve been watching some Star Trek recently, and the comparison that seems apt is how fandom’s view of Captain Kirk, iterated over and over into a caricatured version of whatever consensus was once reached, no longer seems to map to the character as one experiences him in his context. Likewise, this text, especially in light of the effect of the films, does not entirely map onto the thing I see discussed frequently, and I think I need to hold that thought in mind, to remember the text as the complex, textured, often beautiful thing it is to my mind.

This is especially true for how open, fluid and slippery the story is willing to be, and how open to metaphorical readings rather than literal. These are both things I deeply appreciate in texts, and both things that are often missing from Tolkien’s subsequent imitators. I must not judge the book by what came after it, and must remember that not all those later works took the same key things I found in the books away with them. Where I value that complexity, fluidity and abstractness, they may have lingered on perhaps the arc of the epic, or the worldbuilding.

Which is another big thing I hold onto now I’ve finished. There is the common view that Tolkien is a worldbuilder before all else, that he wrote a story to give people to speak his made up languages and live in his made up world. That… is not my experience of him reading now. As I said in one of the previous sessions, I think instead the heart of his work is the recreation of something in the region of… not quite theme. Perhaps the sense, the feeling of a certain type of ancient story, evocation of the spirit of a type of myth. The worldbuilding, the language, the maps, all of those concrete pieces feel to me as tools that bend to this ultimate goal, rather than ends unto themselves, and I think that is what makes the story what it is. The worldbuilding is indeed rich and dense and beautiful, but it is purposeful, and it needs that purpose to be as good as it is. This is my belief now, and one I shall hold close, and fight for.

My last thought, the one that stuck out to me today as we were discussing our final thoughts, is a wider one. Reading Tolkien of course prompts wider thoughts about Fantasy as a genre, because of its position within the canon and the megatext. One of the things I’ve been thinking about recently is the idea of SFF as being defined as a genre in conversation with itself – the texts that draw upon one another to form a corpus. Reading The Fellowship of the Ring now, seventy years after its original publication, makes clear to me how little of that genre is in direct conversation with this specific text anymore. Maybe in dialogue with the works several iterations down the chain of conversation. Maybe in conversation with Tolkien and his work as a set of ideas. But the work on the page, here, feels no longer close to the fantasy I read published now. And if that’s so, if that gap has widened out, how much does that definition of SFF hold true? We’ve marched on, into new places. The lens of the now has shifted away from the things this one guy cared about, his love of walking, his obsession with landscape, the way he thinks about good and evil, the way he uses language. The legacies are still there, of course, but this text and its legacies no longer feel so close as they once might.

That definition of genre is one that doesn’t quite work for me. Finishing this close reading is just giving me another angle to pick at it from, another way it does not fit the nebulous shape of how I want to think about genre that is, slowly, forming. It’s not there yet. Maybe it never will be fully. But the process of thinking about it is a productive one, just as the process of coming back to this text, this strange, beautiful, uncomfortable, difficult, fascinating text, is.

There is an awful lot here to linger on, to pick at, word by word, between two people who want to dig into the depths of it. Reading a text like this, one that has the richness and complexity to support that unpicking, is a joy, even when not all to be found is good. I think the process is making me a better reader, and it has brought me closer to a text I once found impenetrable. I have finally, with help, in wonderful ongoing conversation, got under its skin. Even if I’m not sure about SFF as a genre in conversation with itself, it is within conversation about and within it that I find myself most enriched by its works and its ideas. That conversation is, for me, the best of reading.

1. Discussed previously, still uncomfortable. ↩︎
2. This is turning into a long one, and I apologise, but I think it was clearly inevitable that this was going to happen. ↩︎

The penultimate episode of our close reading brings us out of Moria, and into Lothlórien, with Chapter VI – Lothlórien and Chapter VII – The Mirror of Galadriel, with a sharp contrast against the preceding Dwarf Time^TM, with Tolkien going two-footed into elves elves elves.

These two chapters are full of some really quite beautiful, evocative descriptive prose, and also not really a whole lot of goings on, when compared with the previous section. Starting with a brief detour for Gimli and Frodo to look into the Mirrormere outside Moria, the events of the chapter are just the journey into Lothlórien, some chats with elves, hiding from some orcs, meeting the Lord and Lady of the wood, and then looking into Galadriel’s mirror. But what it may lack in Happenings, this section more than makes up for in things to think about. Especially if you want to be sad about elves¹.

I, it turns out, do want to be sad about elves. Call me a basic bitch all you want, but elves are just cool! They look good, they lean all the way into their ridiculous aesthetic, they get to mope about lamenting their immortality and dispensing wisdom, drop banger poems and, if we’re lucky, turn up to save the day on their jingle jangle horse². And, beating the same drum again as I have all book, they’re kind of fairies. And I fucking love fairies in literature. So two chapters of pretty elven tree houses and Portentous Bangers are kind of my happy place.

It’s nice that we got All Dwarf All the Time and then immediately got our elfy chaser. Nice little bit of balance. But Tolkien does a lot of mirroring between those sections, beyond the obvious (though the Mirrormere and the Mirror of Galadriel are right there as a pair). There are a lot of small, paired moments throughout, where Legolas’ romanticism and love for his people and this, the heart of their culture in Middle Earth, echoes Gimli’s sadness at the remnant’s of a once-great dwarven stronghold. Both of them come from a people diminished by time, for whom the great deeds of the past hang heavy over the present. There’s a ramping up, though, from Moria to Lothlórien – Gandalf hints that the time for the dwarves to reclaim their mines was not yet, but every single moment of speech with the elves in these chapters make clear just how inevitable their decline is.

But it is equally clear that Tolkien just… really loves his elves. There’s so much dwelling in these two chapters, so much lingering description of place and nature and the magic of a location that has been deeply infused with elven magic and just the very feeling of it³.

Which unfortunately brings me to my first less-than-ideal moment in these two chapters: the interweaving between people and places. On the surface, it feels easy to embrace Tolkien’s love of connecting his particular peoples with the lands they have been shaped by and shaped in turn. But there’s a specific phrase used in The Mirror of Galadriel:

“Now these folk aren’t wanderers or homeless, and seem a bit nearer to the likes of us: they seem to belong here, more even than Hobbits do in the Shire.”

I find it hard to read this and not read a little into that sense of “belonging” in opposition to those who are wanderers. For all that Tolkien has a relatively complex view of displaced peoples, and definitely not a universally negative one, he also very clearly does value and hold up as some of the most emotively charged pieces of the narrative those who are so thoroughly settled in their homeland that their relationship develops something magical. And it just… does not sit quite as happily for me.

That being said, that magical relationship gets a little lost in the sea of quite a lot of other magical and fey-adjacent content, as happens when you have the concentrated force of sheer elven bullshit going on on the page. When turned up to eleven, the elves really do let show their fairy roots – what is Lothlórien but the fairy lands? The river sings in the voice of a lady long lost, the denizens move silently amid the trees, and the laws of nature are suspended, the seasons upended. Time passes strangely and without measure for the fellowship. The trees remain in leaf through the winter, and a carpet of grass and flowers remains despite being in the full dark of the year. Where, in the rest of the book, the elves seem to be in tune with nature, enhancing it and being enhanced by it, here instead their relationship with it stretches it beyond its natural bounds into something deeply strange. No wonder Boromir is discomfited by being in the woods, even if the rest of the company aren’t.

And this is intensified yet more by the portrayal of Lothlórien – quite explicitly on the page – as an island amid the darkness and power of the enemy (and, less explicitly but I think still fairly obviously, that island in time, a land where the power of the elves has not diminished as it has in the rest of Middle Earth). Now where have we had a description like that before? Yep, it’s Rivendell; Elrond likewise casts it as an island in the darkness of the enemy’s power. Which brings us another of those echoes that seem to be everywhere in these two chapters – Rivendell, the most elvenly elven place we have encountered so far in the story, is being held up in conversation with Lothlórien and being shown as the pale shadow of this, the fiery heart of elvendom.

And again, Tolkien is pretty clear putting this on the page. Throughout the story, elven things have been described with moonlight and starlight, soft, gentle, and welcoming descriptions, pretty, aloof and distantly chill. Even when they are powerful, they feel safe. But those descriptions are upended in the woods, and this is a land described in gold and in sunlight. The leaves, the hair of the lady Galadriel, the warmth and the brightness, they all exceed the gentle descriptors we’ve had up until this point. Is this just an intensifier of those, proving that they are pale shadows of what they once were? I think not. Or not just. I think the key comes back to those aesthetics of good and evil I’ve talked about before, where the cold, pale, white lights sit wholly on the side of goodness. Because the crescendo of these two chapters is the testing of Galadriel, as Frodo freely offers her the One Ring, and she grapples with her desire to wield it, and the knowledge that no matter what good she may start and may intend with it, that good would ultimately be turned to evil. By switching up his aesthetics of goodness here, and centring that switch on Galadriel herself, Tolkien is foreshadowing and intensifying her potential to wield this great and terrible power and to be a force to reckon with upon Middle Earth. She is not, herself, evil. And so her aesthetics remain tied to white, to light and to much of those trappings of good we’ve seen so far. But some of it and her realm turns a little, just a little, to the others side of his duality, reflecting her capacity to do the same.

And Galadriel herself is a great centre of another duality – that of the nature of elves themselves. Throughout the story, they have shown the capacity to be both the merry fey of myth, and beings of great power and import (though mostly each elf as portrayed sticks to one or the other). Galadriel then gives us both. She is the fey queen, the mistress of a land outside time, the embodiment of its sunlight and beauty, one who likes to test travellers in her realm. But she is also the wielder of Nenya, the ring of Adamant, and we get a glimpse – one she tells us she is showing us directly – that the power she wields is something fiercer and harder⁴. As she says to Frodo:

“But do not think that only by singing amid the trees, nor even by the slender arrows of elven-bows, is this land of Lothlórien maintained and defended against its Enemy.”

But just as her chapter ends on her own lessening – physically seeming smaller, as well as her declaration that she will diminish and go into the west – the whole chapter has been here to tell us that the elves as a whole are doing likewise. Have been doing likewise – the “long defeat”, as she calls it.

It’s hard to distance myself as a reader from my knowledge of these stories in a context that includes the films, and also in a context where I just know what’s coming, but I wish I could remember what reading this was like for the first time, and how I would have felt on grasping this idea of the extended but inevitable doom of elf-kind. It’s too laden down with other things for me now, and beyond reach, but I wonder perhaps that I might have come to it differently without a soundtrack and a knowledge of the ending.

In any case, with all these elves and elfy places, we are wholeheartedly back to one of my favourite Tolkien modes – descriptions of place and nature. It’s just a good fucking time, especially when so intense as it is here. And here again, as with both Caradhras and, way back early on, Old Man Willow, he’s dipping into ensouling that place, giving it a sense of… if not quite personhood then at least will. Lothlórien quiets when the orcs move through it, and responds to the presence of those it welcomes. It is deeply imbued with power, and with the stories of the elves who have lived there. There’s a sense of almost apotheosis of place, where something about it becomes so intense that it begins to enact back on the world that shapes it. I can’t quite form that into any kind of meaning, but it’s something I very much enjoy reading, and there’s just something kind of appealing in the idea of a land that can take on a character of its own after a while (even if that character is just “mountain mad at you”).

Unfortunately, there’s another thing that comes to the fore in these two chapters (though it has been laced throughout the book so far) and that is the comedy stylings of Master Samwise Gamgee. They’ve always been there as sort of… tonal punctuation (and I have commented positively previously about how Tolkien uses tonal variation to good effect). But here… I don’t know if I’ve got a little worn out on them through the course of the book, or if there were just a few too many in one place, or if the whole class aspect of who is the joker/butt of the joke is getting a little tired, but I was somewhat impatient with his lines at several points here. I should probably add that the films have never left me particularly sympathetic to Sam⁵, so I’m coming in with some bias, but I tried to keep an open mind while reading because I knew that over-simplicity of character is something the films do suffer from. And equally, I know – I can see very clearly – that a lot of what’s gone into Sam is a bunch of class feelings and background assumptions baked into Tolkien and the time he lived and wrote. But the character that is the output of all of that… I just don’t like him very much. And 366 pages in, I think I can say I did my best to try to be a bit more generous with him but it’s not really bearing fruit.

The moment we dwelled on in discussion was Sam’s own vision of the Shire in the mirror, before Frodo looks. Where Frodo’s visions are more abstract, metaphorical and wide-reaching, Sam’s are very grounded in the material realities of the Shire, and accordingly are very clear and literal in how they come across. He’s seeing events that may be happening at the time he looks, or are in the close future⁶, but this is foreshadowing on Tolkien’s part of story we have yet to see. And that’s fine, I get that part. But I think the differentiation between him and Frodo here is interesting and telling. Tolkien is highlighting that Sam’s concerns turn inward and homeward, and concern events on a personally-applicable level – the felling of a tree, the building of a factory, the ousting of the Gaffer. His concerns are small. Frodo, meanwhile, gets the wide view.

We talked a little about why this might be. Ed offered that, perhaps any of the non-Frodo hobbits might have been portrayed likewise, and that it is Frodo’s distinction of being the ring-bearer that is being made plain here. Or that Tolkien is highlighting how tied Sam is to home, and that his test forces him to grapple with this thing he holds very dear being under threat, but chooses nonetheless to remain with Frodo, in spite of what he has been shown. But I can’t help but linger on the fact that to illustrate this distinction, this focus back and in, away from the grand narrative, it was Sam specifically that Tolkien chose. Why not Merry, whom Elrond threatened to send home in a sack? Why not linger on that connection? Is it class shit again? I am inclined towards this reading of it, because, if in doubt, I am always inclined towards class readings. Tolkien then gives us the respective reactions of the two characters to their visions, with Sam somewhat overcome and Frodo responding stoically and… c’mon, surely you can see a class reading in that too?

Anyway, between that and the jokes, I do find I struggle with the portrayal of Sam, and consequently with my enjoyment of time spent with him as a character. The Return of the King will, I expect, be a struggle in this regard⁷.

And yet again in contrast to all this, these are some chapters where Tolkien gives us some of the most metal lines we’ve had in the whole book so far. My particular favourite is, of course, a portentous Galadriel banger, which runs thus:

“The love of the elves for their land and their works is deeper than the deeps of the Sea, and their regret is undying and cannot ever wholly be assuaged.⁸“

Just… fuuuuck. He knows how to drop lines when he needs to.

This is, then, a pair of chapters full of contrasts and dualities, between elves and dwarves, elves and other elves, good and evil, Frodo and Sam, and plenty else besides. It is a section that gives absolutely gorgeous descriptive prose, and the deep love Tolkien has for living places, and very clearly has for the elves and their sorrows as he has drawn them. But the intertwining of people and place, and indeed a lot about the elves themselves reveals a deep conservatism about the work, embodied in the elves as the last vestiges of a glorious past that dips below the horizon, falling ever further beyond reach of the lesser beings of the present. He sells his vision of them as inherently romantic and sad, and he sells it hard, and it is so, so easy to buy into that (god knows I find myself doing it) by the power of his writing. But I cannot ever quite forget (nor should I) what it all implies when put together and thought through to its end point. Especially when taken in conversation with the characters he gives us and how he chooses to portray them, this section has that biggest duality of all, twinning the best and most compelling of what he can do with language, description and the crafting of atmosphere – there’s a reason so much of Galadriel’s scenes are lifted wholesale into the films – with some of the worst that underlies it, when thought through.

Up next… the closing chapters of the book! Heading out of Lothlórien, to the river and the breaking of the fellowship. As it’ll be our last session, we’re planning to have some hobbity snacks to eat with the session, hopefully with some home baked bread, and then we’ll be done with Tolkien close reading until at the very least after Christmas.

1. If you don’t want to be sad about elves, why are you even reading Tolkien, bro? ↩︎
2. Not today though. I think we’ve seen the last of Glorfindel and I’m kinda sad about it. Haldir, who is here, is MA BOI in the films, but book-Haldir lacks the panache of his horse-riding kindred. ↩︎
3. And flets. He got a lot of use out of that word in a very short time. ↩︎
4. Being slightly fanciful, the thing I wrote in my notes was “adamant wrapped in silk”. ↩︎
5. I have a long-held “Sam would have voted for Brexit” take that I do not recant. ↩︎
6. I’m sure chronology for this exists, I can’t be bothered to look it up. ↩︎
7. Certainly that was the one I struggled with when first reading the trilogy before the films came out, and I have hazy memories of being about 2/3 in and just glazing over as I turned the pages. I would like to hope I’ve grown a little past that but we’ll have to see. ↩︎
8. I haven’t even gone into my half formed thoughts about how absolutely Catholic this section is, and all this stuff about guilt and grief. There is only so much time in the world. ↩︎

Episode six of our close reading takes us through chapters III – The Ring Goes South, IV – A Journey in the Dark and V – The Bridge of Khazad-dûm. In contrast to the last section, a whole lot of doing gets done, and we cover a lot of ground both in geography and plot. We’re also straight back into a number of the themes remarked upon in previous chapters, sometimes with the subtlety of a thrown brick.

As alluded to in the title of this post, the main thing which stood out to me in this section is foresight and an awareness of the world that extends beyond the boundaries of the senses. At various points, all of Elrond, Gandalf, Frodo and Aragorn have a feeling about what is to come, or powers in the world, and voice or act upon it, or in spite of it. More critically, at several points, this foresight is forestalled, and that feels like a bigger insight into its function for Tolkien within the text than its presence ever does.

There are two key pieces for this. The first, from Elrond as they are readying to leave Rivendell:

‘Then I cannot help you much, not even with counsel,’ said Elrond. ‘I can foresee very little of your road; and how your task is to be achieved I do not know. The Shadow has crept now to the feet of the Mountains, and draws nigh even to the borders of the Greyflood; and under the Shadow all is dark to me.’

And the second from Gandalf, as they come to the mountains:

‘We must go down the Silverlode into the secret woods, and so to the Great River, and then —-‘
He paused.
‘Yes, and where then?’ asked Merry.
‘To the end of the journey – in the end,’ said Gandalf. ‘We cannot look too far ahead.’

Both come from characters whom we have seen access knowledge about the world and its nature – and the future, in some ways – beyond the reaches of themself. But it is in the edges of that knowledge that we see what bounds it. For Elrond, it is the power of the enemy, the rise of a force that challenges the dying light of the elves. Rivendell has been described as an island in a sea of rising evil, and this is the evidence of that tide coming in. Where once there might have been certainty, the encroachment of the power of Sauron robs Elrond of that, leaving the errand of the ringbearer up to chance he cannot know. For Gandalf, meanwhile, the boundary is a far more personal one. Whether he knows it or not (I am not certain my belief on this either way¹), his knowledge does not reach beyond the borders of his imminent fall in conflict with the Balrog. Unlike Elrond, his knowledge of the world isn’t in conflict with a specific power that actively obscures, but with his own experience of the upcoming future. I think this says some interesting things about how we are supposed to envisage both of them as pieces of the wider Middle Earth, and their connections to the Unseen World.

But as the two with the greater access to knowledge of the world in this way suffer its limitation, we also see a continued growth of Frodo’s awareness. En route to Moria, he senses the evil of the Watcher in the Water, though cannot quite name what he fears. And then within the mine, he begins to sense the greater evil, both behind them and ahead, as well as having sharper sight within the darkness. As he bears the Ring – whose weight he likewise is beginning to feel with a sense beyond senses – he is being pulled into this realm of awareness that is usually the province of those far more magical than he is.

What seemed clear to me, across all of these, as well as the more third person description of the Balrog as we first encounter it:

What it was could not be seen: it was like a great shadow, in the middle of which was a dark form, of a man-shape maybe, yet greater; and a power and terror seemed to be in it and to go before it.

Is that Tolkien has given some key characters access to a sense of the essence of things, people and the world, as well as their influence upon the world and moral valence. Watsonian-ly, this feels apiece with what we’ve already been told of the Unseen world. But in a more Doylist sense, I really like this as a way to give the reader a very ready shorthand to understand how key conflicts and entities fit into the wider shape of Middle Earth. He does not need to break out of the flow of text to turn to the reader and tell us – instead we can experience the exposition with the characters, through their access to the fundamental nature of the world. It just feels a very neat way of handling context. It also means this section was absolutely rampant with foreshadowing which, given it’s a pretty ominous couple of chapters that ends with a dramatic(ally bad) moment, seems pretty apt.

Hand in hand with that limitation of power, we’re back with a vengeance into the sense of a world fallen from past glory. Not only are the great powers faltering – and indeed Gandalf himself is just as prone to this, having forgotten some of the words of power – but the story takes us across lands abandoned, whose very stones lament for the elves that passed out of them. Likewise, the inscriptions on the doors of Durin make clear (as does Gandalf) that they were made in a time of openness, trade and movement, in contrast to the darkness, empty landscape and paranoia of the story’s present. We know already about the time of the elves passing, but this is the first sense of a wider idea that events and people have a time. Specifically, Gandalf remarks on the folly of Balin attempting to reclaim Moria, for it is not yet time for that. There is a schedule to these things, and his foolishness was not in his aims, but in contravening the march of fate across the world. Whatever happens in the smaller moments in the story, Tolkien is telling us clear that some things are built into the fundamentals of the system.

But, while the old powers of good seem to be waning, by contrast this section introduces a number of older powers from deep places or past times who are somewhere from malevolent to evil and seem entirely full of the strength to impede the Fellowship. First of these is Caradhras, the mountain, which is determined not to let them pass. There’s a little ambiguity in the text just quite how much this is the actual intent of the mountain, but I quite enjoy reading it as literal – it’s a natural world already plenty embodied, so what’s one more?

This is closely followed by the rather more direct onslaughts of the Watcher in the Water – which is far creepier than the films, if only for the description of one of the tentacles as “fingered”, a deeply cursed adjective in context which I hope never to encounter like that again – and the Balrog at the crescendo of the section. The Balrog scene is obviously a big culmination; I’d forgotten quite how directly the film lifts this section almost word for word and beat for beat. But it’s not hard to see why. Through the encounters with Caradhras, the wargs and then the Watcher, as well as the looming threat inside Moria, Tolkien has steadily been ramping up the tension. When that tension finally crests, and the Balrog in its shadowy, fiery, possibly-wingèd² ferocity looms over the party, we’ve been primed to react to the drama of it, and Tolkien delivers some of his sexiest prose in the shadow, the fire, and Gandalf’s stand against it. He’s allowed himself to go full epic, and he is just good at that.

What also helps to sell this is something that, again, has been running throughout the whole of the book but which has really come to the fore in this section: the aesthetics of evil. This time, it’s laser focused in on a couple of particular aspects of it – light and shadow, hot and cold and colour. Whether it’s the blood-red slopes of Caradhras, the shadow and flame of the Balrog, the exhale of smoke from the door of Moria behind them, or the fiery cleft in the very floor of Durin’s halls, Tolkien has a coherent picture of evil here, a touchstone of darkness and flame to which he keeps returning. And, in opposition to it, an equally coherent view of the power that resists it – light, white and consistently cold. Glamdring, Gandalf’s sword, is described in its cold light multiple times in this chapter, and it is that cold light that opposes the Balrog. Tolkien has, not even particularly subtly, been priming us for this elemental opposition for several chapters. Goodness comes from the cold light of the moon and stars (the stars which the elves love), and it’s a visual he just cannot help but come back to. This is simply the payoff of that obsession.

It is also a moment when those aesthetics most lend themselves to a Christian picture of the world. A creature of evil and flame from the depths you say? It’s giving devil, and is more than helped by the vision of a red star in the sky that made Ed think of Pern, but nudged me somewhat more towards Lucifer. There’s a heaven and hell vibe and a half to the conflict between Gandalf and Balrog, after all. But at the same time, this is a somehow deeply pagan section too – fuller than many with the embodiment and personhood of the natural world. Why choose when you can do both at full throttle, eh JRRT?

But as he’s been doing all along, this isn’t a section that commits to that full throttle in a single tone all the way. Part of why the build up to a dramatic fight works is that he keeps up the tonal variation with some excellent comedy moments: Boromir³ swimming to create a path through the snow, Gandalf and Legolas having a sassy little bitch off, hobbits being hobbits and yearning for a dining room and indeed the habitual class-laden comedy stylings of master Gamgee. But it is also here that it becomes clear how else Tolkien manages tone in dramatic conflict moments: by choosing how much of them to actually write. There are three critical fight scenes in these chapters, and in all three he follows a similar pattern of writing a dramatic opener, which possibly includes the first foray into the fight, and then summarising the rest of the conflict in a shorter piece of text. In the initial fight with the orcs in Moria, this shorter piece is essentially a single paragraph. It means that he manages the tone of the engagement through the opening piece and dictates how we want to view its focus, but never lets the text wallow in a blow by blow account in a way that might let the emotional throughline trail off. As someone who never likes reading fight scenes, I’m extremely here for it, but it’s an interesting contrast to his approach to e.g. walking, where he piles it on and on. But he clearly loves the walking. Maybe he just isn’t interested in writing fights. But if so, his focusing on only what he actually cares about still leaves us with a good pacy text where it could so easily have been bogged down.

And of course, while we’re on walking – we missed out on it in the last two chapters while loafing about in Rivendell, but now we’re back out in the world JRRT is chucking it in in spades. But as per usual, I don’t hate it. Even more than usual, the walking here (and the preparation for walking) are a lingering on the practicalities of traversing an open world. Months are spent in Rivendell as scouts go out and return, which all passes in a couple of passages, and then many miles and days on the road to get to the mountains and the mine. Where it was pleasant before, however, the changing of the season has made a significant impact on the hostility of the environment, and as we’ve headed out into the epic, so too have we headed out into a journey that is more characterised by struggle.

Though not unrelentingly. There are still the usual plentiful bits of gorgeous descriptive prose, of lights and fires and landscapes, interspersed with the increasingly creepy emptiness of Hollin that walks us up the path into the right emotive state for Moria. The two alternate fantastically, and he never lets us linger too long in one feeling before bringing up the seesaw with the other. Whatever evil there is, in the world and in this place particularly, it cannot erase the beauty fully. I lingered for a little while on the image of the two enormous holly trees that flank Durin’s doors, dwarfed by the enormity of the cliff behind them but imposing once approached.

My favourite visual moment, though, comes inside Moria, when Gandalf briefly illuminates a hall in the darkness thus:

He raised his staff, and for a brief instant there was a blaze like a flash of lightning. Great shadows sprang up and fled, and for a second they saw a vast roof far above their heads upheld by many mighty pillars hewn of stone. Before them and on either side stretched a huge empty hall; its black walls, polished and smooth as glass, flashed and glittered. Three other entrances they saw, dark black arches: one straight before them eastwards, and one on either side. Then the light went out.

It’s not just the capture of a moment of visual – though that’s great too – but the sense of it as fleeting, as the light drives away the shadows, and then they rush to return, that makes this wonderful.

This is, of course, all part of showing the first bit of the dwarven world in the book (the “vastness of the dolven⁴ halls”), and it is by turns beautiful and deeply sad. While the light of the elves may be fading, this is a place not only lost, but recovered, and then lost again to an evil risen from the depths. The brevity of Balin’s time there, as attested in the patchy journal discovered and read, makes it all the sadder likewise, and is crowned by the stunning visual of his tomb illuminated by a single shaft of light from a high window.

The last thought I want to linger on from this section is the one I think was the most moving for me, but also the one I am still most unsure about my thoughts on.

At the start of the section, as they ready to leave Rivendell, Pippin puts himself and Merry forward to accompany Frodo (indeed, insists upon it). Elrond is doubtful of his use in the quest, but is talked round by Gandalf, who muses on the value of loyalty. Yes, he admits, Pippin probably is ignorant of the danger he faces. But so too, he argues, are most of the rest of the Fellowship really, and indeed, perhaps their loyalty and friendship in spite of (or because of) that ignorance are of greater worth than the aid of a great elf-lord like Glorfindel. The mention of Glorfindel particularly, who has in fact already defeated a Balrog in times past, is an interesting one. When discussing it, we had two thoughts. The first, that Gandalf knows this task cannot be achieved by direct means. They will be overwhelmed if they just try to have it out with Sauron. And so someone like Glorfindel, despite his greatness, “could not storm the Dark Tower, nor open the road to the Fire by the power that is in him”. That’s not how they are going to achieve it, and he’s taking unexpected tools for an unexpected job. But equally, I wonder if this is some War Shit^TM coming through as well. Tolkien has seen the bravery of the ordinary. It’s a theme being picked up again and again. Is Gandalf’s certainty in the value of the hobbits not just another evocation of this?

It’s interesting to have this alongside the confrontation with the Balrog too. Gandalf tells the party to flee, and the hobbits do, as do Legolas – who has recognised immediately what the Balrog is – and Gimli – who immediately know it for Durin’s bane. Only the two men, the ones who don’t have a cultural link into knowledge of what this monstrous thing is, that it is beyond them, stay to fight with Gandalf. Bravery born out of ignorance then? But laudable for that.

And then, feeding into this even more, the parting words of Elrond as they leave Rivendell, in which he lays a charge on Frodo as the Ringbearer, but demurs from doing so for the rest of the party. Yes, there is already an intention laid that they should split up, so of course they won’t be bound to follow all the way to Mordor. But no oath at all? Again, I am in two minds about this. My initial thought was again, back to War Shit^TM, and to wonder if this is a kindness embodied in Elrond by a man who has seen people’s bravery in safety come up to face an enemy beyond it and falter. Is this grace being given in the knowledge that even someone with the best intentions may stumble when faced with something monstrous? Or, as Ed suggested, is this a callback to Elrond’s knowledge of the sons of Fëanor, and calamity those oaths wrought? Or both. I’m always willing to buy an argument of both. Although it is becoming clear that Ed likes Watsonian arguments and I prefer Doylist ones. I wonder what that says about us⁵.

Either way, I found it a very touching moment, but one that does feed into the sense in this section that Tolkien has a lot of thoughts about what bravery is, and its limitations. Which feels like quite the thing to admit in an epic fantasy, and one I think is not always handled so well in the stories which have followed on.

Which brings us to the end of this section. And hey look – I managed to do a whole one of these without getting bogged down in the verse⁶. It… probably won’t happen again.

Up next, we were planning to tackle the rest of the book in one big chunk (of around 100 pages in my edition). However, since a) this section took us over two hours of discussion and b) these posts have been running LONG, we decided to split it up into two. As such, our next section will take us two chapters into Lothlórien, shifting back to a less haps happening pace, and leaving us with a final three chapters to finish up hopefully before the end of December.

1. Though Aragorn does give us, in his own piece of foresight, this clue: He will not go astray – if there is any path to find. He has led us in here against our fears, but he will lead us out again, at whatever cost to himself. ↩︎
2. I only learnt today about the Balrog wing discourse. ↩︎
3. Probably not worth spending the time for a whole section on it here, but I do enjoy how much in these chapters Boromir comes off as a himbo. ↩︎
4. This sent me, rather. I think this is a step too far even for Tolkien. ↩︎
5. Ok in part what it says is that Ed knows the wider corpus of Tolkien better than I do. But it might be other things too. ↩︎
6. There are a few pieces in this section. All are fairly standardly iambic, and closer to doggerel than Tolkien normally goes. One of them has the feel of a poem for children to memorise to learn things (which is apt in context). Is it because iambic tetrameter? I can think of a lot of kids’ poems in iambic tetrameter. That being said, the two major ones are still extremely sad. ↩︎