At The Crossroads
Reflecting on the Election with Tolkien
I’ve been struggling with what to write this week. I imagine you can understand why that is, based on my writings here over the past few weeks. Tuesday was not unexpected and shocking like 2016, but it was dispiriting and ushers in a time of fear and danger for a lot of people I love. Already, I’ve heard stories from some of them, of unpleasant encounters in grocery stores and on the street, and especially online. Some folks, it seems fair to say, feel empowered after Tuesday to let their worst instincts guide their interactions with others. Its sad, and scary, and unacceptable, but not unexpected. Not at all.
So, I’ve been trying to decide what to write this week, or whether to even write at all. I didn’t want to sit down and let my anger and my hurt take over, and write an angry screed alienating myself from a lot of people in my life who I am angry with, and lashing out in blame towards those I think are responsible for this moment, and all those over the next four years when my friends and family will be affected by this Administration.
Nor did I want to lean into a kind of naïve optimism, promising that things will be ok if we just work hard enough, if we just are kind enough and thoughtful enough. I do, for the record, think we have a lot of opportunity over the coming days and months to put in the work to hinder the best attempts of this administration to do harm to our democracy and our people, but right now, that’s not the message I need, nor I imagine is it the one many of you are interested in just yet. We’ll have lots of time to plan and fight and win. Allowing folks to mourn first is important.
So, what to write, I keep asking myself this week? Because I knew beyond a doubt I want to write, I want to get some thoughts out and see if I can provide some words that are useful to someone, somewhere. And as I have thought about what to say, my mind keeps coming back, as it does so often this time of year, to The Lord of the Rings. Every year, in the fall, I reread LOTR and The Hobbit, and sometimes, other Tolkien texts. This year, I am about midway into The Two Towers, just catching up last night with Frodo and Sam as they pick their way across the Emyn Muil just days after the Breaking of the Fellowship.
The Lord of the Rings is one of my great passions in life. I love the stories Tolkien told, the themes of hope, and courage, and small acts, and pity, and adventure to be found in these books. Every year, I come back to them, and every year I find something new and exciting to animate my spirit and lift my heart. So, as we emerge from the rubble of Tuesday, it feels right to me to turn to Tolkien, to find some comfort in his story of a long-running, and at times seemingly hopeless battle against the darkness.
*****
To be honest, Tolkien is where my mind went first thing Wednesday morning, as I woke up and drank some coffee and sat out in the morning sun and crisp fall air. Besides my annual read, I had been thinking about the place of Tolkien in our culture, coming off what I felt was an excellent second season of The Rings of Power, and because of stories like this one, about the affinity among the billionaire techbros that will be wielding power in the Trump presidency for all things Tolkien and LOTR. Vice-President Elect Vance is a Tolkien reader, as is billionaire Peter Thiel, who has named several business ventures after objects and moments from LOTR. And, of course, the polarized moment we find ourselves in means that this has caused some of the worst people on the left to declare Tolkien verboten, the cultural property of incels and misogynists.
As a Tolkien enthusiast, I find this equal parts depressing and hilarious. Tolkien’s stories, at their core, are about the victory of the small, the simple, and the unexceptional over the powerful and the Machine that power seeks to wield. At the center of the story is the conflict about using a great Power to defeat evil, whether to wield it in favor of a short-term victory or to deny ourselves the power and the might of such a tool, trusting that victory can only come through a refusal to dominate. Violence, far from being valorized, is viewed as a great evil, even when wielded in the pursuit of a good end. In the end, it is not a great battle and victory at the point of a sword that defeats the darkness, but the conflict in the heart of three of the smallest people – Frodo, Sam, and Gollum – that seals the fate of Sauron. Its depressing that so many have seemingly missed what it is Tolkien is doing in his great tale. If you want powerful knights and bloody battles and the Will to Power, go read George R.R. Martin. Tolkien is not that.[1]
So, I find it quite hilarious, in a dark and depressing way, that folks like Musk and Thiel and Vance find Tolkien such a fertile ground for their ideological projects. These men, and the man they stand behind in this new presidency, do not realize they are not the heroes of Tolkien’s story. They think, perhaps, that they are allied with Gondor and King Elessar, that they are like the scrappy little hobbits eking out an existence in the face of the Great Evil, or perhaps they view themselves like the dwarves under the mountain, mining greater and greater treasure for the benefit of the Free Peoples of Middle-Earth. But, while Tolkien was clear that he eschewed allegory in his tales, his priorities are clear in his stories: against Machines and Technology, for the good and green things of the world, especially the unspoiled forests and seas; against the use of power by the great and mighty to dictate the course of history, and for the small, everyday actions of little folks that really shape the world. Thiel and Vance don’t realize who they are in the story. I’m not saying they are Sauron; they certainly are not. What they are is more akin to are the late kings of Numenor. Nor is this me saying Democrats are like the Fellowship or even the Elves; no, Democrats are more like Denethor’s Gondor at best, although perhaps that is giving them still too much credit.
*****
So, Wednesday morning, as I sat and reflected on this new world we were entering, my mind went to a passage from near the end of The Two Towers. Let me set the scene for you. Frodo and Sam are journeying in Ithilien, on the border between the kingdom of Gondor and Mountains of Shadow that hem in Mordor. Ithilien was once a beautiful and bountiful land, the so-called Garden of Gondor. But, the return of the darkness to Mordor has made it a dangerous borderland, subject to orc raids and full of evil forces trekking north to join Sauron’s army in Mordor. It has been largely abandoned, with a small force of Gondorian troops performing a rear-guard action against the forces of Mordor to prevent them from maintaining a foothold there from which to launch raids against Minas Tirith, the capital of Gondor.
Let’s talk about Gondor for a moment, because understanding its forgotten glory and power is key to understanding the impact of the passage I want to share. Gondor is the last inheritor of the once-great kingdoms of men that rose in Middle-Earth early in the Third Age after the fall of Numenor, that most great of kingdoms. Ruled by a series of great kinds descended from Isildur, who defeated Sauron in battle, it extended across much of southern Middle Earth, bordered to the north by its sister-kingdom, Arnor, ruled by the heirs of Isildur’s brother Anarion. But, over the course of thousands of years, the greatness of Gondor waned. The line of kings ended in defeat and capture, and a line of stewards took over, holding power in the name of the kings, who were destined to one day return to the throne and restore Gondor to its former glory. Arnor fell and ceased to exist, further isolating Gondor. The borders shrank on all sides, until Gondor was a small rump kingdom centered on the cities of Minas Tirith, Pelargir, and Osgiliath, the last if which was destroyed in the years before the events of LOTR.
Thus, for many people in Middle Earth, and throughout the story Tolkien told, Gondor functioned as a kingdom with this great history, evidence of which can be seen in the ruins spread across Middle Earth, and in the fleeting glimpses of glory found in figures like Denethor, the Steward of Gondor, and his two sons, Boromir and Faramir. These three characters act as three potential paths forward for Gondor. And Aragorn, portrayed by Viggo Mortensen in the movies, is the ultimate hope of Gondor, himself the lost heir of the Kings of Gondor, the titular king who returns in the third book and takes the throne after the final victory over Sauron. Perhaps the most striking imagery of the past glory of Gondor found in the tale is the images of the Argonath, the twin statues of Isildur and Anarion flanking the great river Anduin that the Fellowship sail under the shadow of in the first book. These great monuments were built long ago to honor those great sires of the two kingdoms of men, and are the most lasting evidence of their past glory that the modern kingdom of Gondor provides such a pale reflection of.
So, as Frodo and Sam journey south into Ithilien towards Minas Morgul, they are passing ruins and evidence of the kingdom of Gondor in the woodlands and foothills they traverse. Finally, they come to the great cross roads, where the north-south road meets the east-west road running from Osgiliath to the Morgul vale. This is where we pick up Tolkien:
Standing there for a moment filled with dread Frodo became aware that a light was shining; he saw it glowing on Sam’s face beside him. Turning towards it, he saw, beyond an arch of boughs, the road to Osgiliath running almost straight as a stretched ribbon down, down, into the West. There, far away, beyond sad Gondor now overwhelmed in shade, the Sun was sinking, finding at last the hem of the great slow-rolling pall of cloud, and falling in an ominous fire towards the yet unsullied Sea. The brief glow fell upon a huge sitting figure, still and solemn as the great stone kings of Argonath. The years had gnawed it, and violent hands had maimed it. Its head was gone, and in its place was set in mockery a round rough-hewn stone, rudely painted by savage hands in the likeness of a grinning face with one large red eye in the midst of its forehead. Upon its knees and mighty chair, and all about the pedestal, were idle scrawls mixed with foul symbols that the maggot-folk of Mordor used.
Suddenly, caught in the level beams, Frodo saw the old king’s head: it was lying rolled away by the roadside. ‘Look, Sam!’ he cried, startled into speech. ‘Look! The king has got a crown again!’
The eyes were hollow and the carven head was broken, but about the high stern forehead there was a coronal of silver and gold. A trailing plant with flowers like small white stars had bound itself across the brows as if in reverence for the fallen king, and in the crevices of his stony hair yellow stonecrop gleamed.
‘They cannot conquer for ever!’ said Frodo.
This image, of the ancient king, briefly recrowned by the creeping vines and blooms of the wild, illuminated by the final rays of the sun before it sinks below the Westering Sea and disappears behind the gloom and clouds of Mordor, is one of my favorite scenes in all of Tolkien, not least because of Frodo’s cry. Up until this point, Frodo has been dour and quiet, increasingly weighed down by the burden of the Ring and the final steps of the journey before him as he gets closer and closer to Mordor. But here, he comes alive again for a moment, as he gazes upon this small scene of hope, before it vanishes into shadow again.
Hope is the theme of this scene, and of so much of Tolkien’s tale. Not optimism; that is a different, but related, attitude. Optimism tells us that we will be ok, that the darkness of passing even now, that good days are ahead. Optimism is agnostic to the moment it finds itself in.
Hope, on the other hand, is cognizant of despair. Hope promises no victory, nor does it tell us the sun will shine again tomorrow. Hope is the promise of a longer victory that follows on a long defeat, a victory perhaps we will not be privy to in this life, but which will come one day, regardless of the work we put in. Optimism gets us up day by day; hope sustains us upon that waking.
In this scene, Frodo experiences hope, but not an assurance of his own victory. We readers of this great tale know that we have an entire book yet to go in this story, in which kings and stewards and thousands of soldiers will die, in which the White Tower will endure great ruin, in which Frodo himself will be poisoned and captured and stripped of all and, in the end, will fail in his own task to cast the Ring away, saved as he and the world is in the end by the ruin of Gollum. None of this is hopeful. Defeat rested upon “the balance of hair”, to quote Gandalf, and victory achieved by the most unlikely of actions and heroes. Yet, hope there was for the world. Sauron perhaps almost won. Had he won, he would have destroyed Gondor, and Rohan, and Dale, and enslaved the Shire, and driven the last of the Elves from Middle Earth. But, he too one day would have fallen, and the sun would go on rising on the flowers and the trees, and life would have crept back in and flourished. They cannot conquer for ever, Frodo cried, and so right he was.
****
Things feel hopeless this week, for those who value decency and kindness and justice and democracy. While the victors may dismiss it, the pain and grief of many millions across America is real this week, and deserves acknowledgement.
But, our hope was never in the victory of Kamala Harris, or the Democrats. They are not the heroes of this story either, but merely another faction fighting to seize the Ring and be undone by it. Oh, certainly, they could have used it for a time, for good and right. But they, too, would be corrupted. Recogniziing that doesn’t ease the hurt of Donald Trump being made president again, of a campaign centered on fear and doom and hate towards those on the margins. We must contend with the evil of today, fighting a rearguard action, doing our best to prevent it from gaining a foothold wherever it raises its head. But the victory we are fighting for is not to, in the words of Lady Galadriel, to set up in the place of the Dark Lord a Queen, beautiful and fair and terrible and dreadful.
No, our victory is found elsewhere in the stories of Tolkien, if we know where to look. Our tools for victory are small and insignificant, at least to those who hold great power and wealth. Our victory is found in the simple acts of tending our garden, opening our shutters to the sun, brewing that afternoon cup of tea, and living our lives every day. The grasping fingers of Power cannot touch any of that, no matter how hard they try to. Our victory looks, perhaps, less like the clash of great powers and figures in battles that will echo through history, and more like, well, Bilbo’s return home after his long journey in The Hobbit:
He was quite content; and the sound of the kettle on the hearth was ever after more musical than it had been even in the quiet days before the Unexpected Party. His sword he hung over the mantelpiece. His coat of mail was arranged on a stand in the hall (until he lent it to a Museum.) His gold and silver was largely spent in presents, both useful and extravagant – which to a certain extent accounts for the affection of his nephews and his nieces. His magic ring he kept a great secret, for he chiefly used it when unpleasant callers came.
He took to writing poetry and visiting the elves; and though many shook their heads and touched their foreheads and said “Poor old Baggins!” and though few believed his tales, he remained very happy to the end of his days, and those were extraordinarily long.
May you be quite content. May your kettle sing on the hearth, your sword and mail be put away, your gold and silver spent extravagantly, your Ring packed away in favor of other goods. May you write poetry and visit the elves, and be thought a poor old fool. May your days be happy, and extraordinarily long. By these signs, you will know you have won.
[1] Let me ruminate a moment on one scene I observed recently that illustrated perfectly the contrast between the two stories, and how so many readers have missed the entire point. Someone in a Tolkien group on Facebook I’m a part of asked a question along the lines of, who is more powerful: Aragorn or Jamie Lannister? Argument then proceeded in the comments, extolling the various martial virtues of the two men. And all the while, I just shook my head, as seemingly everyone in this group that claimed to be dedicated to the works of Tolkien had missed the point of the character of Aragorn. His defining and redeeming features are not his swordplay, his ability to mete out violence, his physical strength. Aragorn consistently practices restraint, showing his dignity and his worth in his regard for the small folks like the hobbit. His most compelling use of his kingly powers is found late in Return of the King, when he wields the “healing hands of a king” after the Battle of Pelennor Fields to heal numerous soldiers of Gondor and Rohan, including Merry, Eowyn and Faramir. That is the Aragorn of Tolkien.