A wild light came into Frodo’s eyes. ‘Stand away! Don’t touch me!’ he cried. ‘It is mine, I say. Be off!’ His hand strayed to his sword-hilt. But then quickly his voice changed. ‘No, no, Sam,’ he said sadly. ‘But you must understand. It is my burden, and no one else can bear it. It is too late now, Sam dear. You can’t help me in that way again. I am almost in its power now. I could not give it up, and if you tried to take it I should go mad.’

Frodo to Sam in Mount Doom from The Return of the King

And so we come to the end of the first part of my return to JRR Tolkien’s work. For those not following along with my earlier essays (links at the bottom), inspired by a hate watch of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies, I picked up The Fellowship of the Ring and quickly succumbed to a complete reread of the trilogy. As I set out to write an article about Fellowship, I instead, found myself realizing I’ve been reading the professor’s books for fifty years and how much they’d meant to me.

Last time, I wrote that when I was young, I tended to struggle through bits of The Two Towers. That was never the case with The Return of the King, something that I found to remain so on this reading. It’s got wilder and bigger battles than the previous book, incredible scenes (including one of the greatest in all three books and that Jackson insanely cut omitted from the theatrical release!), and Frodo’s and Sam’s journey becomes more desperate and its evocation of Christ-like self-sacrifice more potent. The penultimate chapter, The Scouring of the Shire, portrays the transformation wrought on the four hobbits by their undertakings. Finally, the book ends with one of my favorite closing lines of any book.

As usual, here’s let me give a brief synopsis for those who’ve yet to read The Lord of the Rings. The first half of the book, The War of the Ring, contains three narratives. Gandalf and Pippin set off for Minas Tirith while Merry rides with the Rohirrim, again, for Minas Tirith, but by a different route. Meanwhile, Legolas and Gimli follow Aragorn along the Paths of the Dead in search of supernatural allies.

Everyone comes together at Minas Tirith at various stages in the great siege of the city and the ensuant battle outside its wall. When Mordor’s forces are broken and scattered, under Aragorn’s command, an army is sent north to the Gates of Mordor with hopes of distracting Sauron’s unblinking eye from Frodo and Sam.

The End of the Third Age, the book’s second half, can be broken into several parts; the final leg of Frodo’s and Sam’s march to Mount Doom, the reunion of the surviving members of the Fellowship and Aragorn’s coronation, the scouring of the Shire, and a final farewell to Middle-earth. As with The Two Towers, this part of the trilogy evokes Tolkien’s wartime service, if not as in a direct way. On the one hand, both Merry and Pippin are transformed into hobbits of action and steel. There is nothing left that scares them. On the other, Frodo, never fully recovered from his wound on Weathertop, has been left drained and tired in the deepest parts of his soul by bearing the One Ring for so long, straight into the Enemy’s domain.

Each time around with LotR, I find myself noticing something new or being drawn with greater interest to a different part than previously. This time it was The Scouring of the Shire. I think, partially, it’s the better understanding that the fight against evil is never ending, and just as likely to happen in your own town as on some distant fields. More significantly, it was Frodo’s place in it. I remembered him as instrumental in the routing of Sharkey’s forces, but that is not the case at all.

When Frodo and Sam decide to lighten their load and ditch the orc gear weighing them down, Frodo makes an emphatic statement that “I’ll bear no weapon, fair or foul.” When it becomes clear that there are hobbits working for Sharkey and his ruffians, he issues an order:

“‘Fight?’ said Frodo. ‘Well, I suppose it may come to that. But remember: there is to be no slaying of hobbits, not even if they have gone over to the other side. Really gone over, I mean; not just obeying ruffians’ orders because they are frightened. No hobbit has ever killed another on purpose in the Shire, and it is not to begin now. And nobody is to be killed at all, if it can be helped. Keep your tempers and hold your hands to the last possible moment!’”

Pippin and Merry are ready to fight and do so when the time comes. Merry himself kills the leader of the ruffians. Frodo, though, doesn’t draw his sword and remains out of the battle. When it’s over, he steps in “to prevent the hobbits in their wrath at their losses, from slaying those of their enemies who threw down their weapons.”

Merry and Pippin prove themselves the highborn leaders they were always destined to be in the battle against the ruffians. It’s Frodo, though, after having suffered mightily and seen his share of death and destruction, who will have no more of it. I simply didn’t remember this aspect of Frodo. When we read that even the normally mild-mannered citizens of the Shire are pressing to kill their prisoners, it’s clear how different from them Frodo has become.

I understand Jackson omitting the scouring from his films. He’s had his big beat climax and the last chapter, wherein Frodo and several others exit the stage for good works well enough for a movie. What we lose, though, is the impact of learning that even the innocents of the Shire have been damaged by the war, and that even they can be driven to killing and murderous rage. In a land where presumably there’s never a murder, they suddenly have nearly a hundred corpses on their hands.

We also miss out that the once mighty Saruman, now reduced to a pitiful state, has become petty and spiteful. When finally confronted by the hobbits he revels in what he’s done to the Shire.

I have already done much that you will find it hard to mend or undo in your lives. And it will be pleasant to think of that and set it against my injuries.’

Despite many hobbits calling out to kill Saruman, Frodo only dismisses him with a sense of pity, largely for the noble being he once was. He even offers temporary sanctuary to Grima and the chance to escape his master’s control. From the beginning, Frodo is portrayed as a good person, but surviving the burden of the Ring seems to have turned into an outright noble one, something I don’t think I’ve tracked as closely before.

In the last few years, especially, it seemed, after the movies came out, there was a lot of talk that Sam Gamgee was the real hero of LotR. After this read, I think I’ve come around to that. Frodo sets out to take the Ring to Mount Doom, always with a sense of fatalism. His ownership of the Ring makes him feel obligated to take it to the end and he never has any doubts about what needs to be done.

Sam, however, chooses to go out of loyalty to Frodo, not for any sense of obligation to destroy the Ring. That does come upon him later when he thinks Frodo dead. He is the one tempted along the way, first by the visions in the Mirror of Galadriel and later by the Ring itself. He hesitates for a moment each time, but doesn’t falter. In fact, he is the only person we ever read of in the books or the appendices who gives up the Ring willingly. In a scene Jackson left out, Sam is tested and proved strong.

His thought turned to the Ring, but there was no comfort there, only dread and danger. No sooner had he come in sight of Mount Doom, burning far away, than he was aware of a change in his burden. As it drew near the great furnaces where, in the deeps of time, it had been shaped and forged, the Ring’s power grew, and it became more fell, untameable save by some mighty will. As Sam stood there, even though the Ring was not on him but hanging by its chain about his neck, he felt himself enlarged, as if he were robed in a huge distorted shadow of himself, a vast and ominous threat halted upon the walls of Mordor. He felt that he had from now on only two choices: to forbear the Ring, though it would torment him; or to claim it, and challenge the Power that sat in its dark hold beyond the valley of shadows. Already the Ring tempted him, gnawing at his will and reason. Wild fantasies arose in his mind; and he saw Samwise the Strong, Hero of the Age, striding with a flaming sword across the darkened land, and armies flocking to his call as he marched to the overthrow of Barad-dûr. And then all the clouds rolled away, and the white sun shone, and at his command the vale of Gorgoroth became a garden of flowers and trees and brought forth fruit. He had only to put on the Ring and claim it for his own, and all this could be.

In that hour of trial it was the love of his master that helped most to hold him firm; but also deep down in him lived still unconquered his plain hobbit-sense: he knew in the core of his heart that he was not large enough to bear such a burden, even if such visions were not a mere cheat to betray him. The one small garden of a free gardener was all his need and due, not a garden swollen to a realm; his own hands to use, not the hands of others to command.

Sam is the reason Frodo succeeds in reaching the furnace at Mount Doom. He rescues him from Cirith Ungol and later he carries him up the slopes of the volcano. He also matures along the journey. Several times in The Two Towers he is set to kill Smeagol. When given the chance to kill him again in this book, Sam finds himself unable to. Even though his time with the Ring was short, it has taught him much.

‘Now!’ said Sam. ‘At last I can deal with you!’ He leaped forward with drawn blade ready for battle. But Gollum did not spring. He fell flat upon the ground and whimpered.

‘Don’t kill us,’ he wept. ‘Don’t hurt us with nassty cruel steel! Let us live, yes, live just a little longer. Lost lost! We’re lost. And when Precious goes we’ll die, yes, die into the dust.’ He clawed up the ashes of the path with his long fleshless fingers. ‘Dusst!’ he hissed.

Sam’s hand wavered. His mind was hot with wrath and the memory of evil. It would be just to slay this treacherous, murderous creature, just and many times deserved; and also it seemed the only safe thing to do. But deep in his heart there was something that restrained him: he could not strike this thing lying in the dust, forlorn, ruinous, utterly wretched. He himself, though only for a little while, had borne the Ring, and now dimly he guessed the agony of Gollum’s shrivelled mind and body, enslaved to that Ring, unable to find peace or relief ever in life again. But Sam had no words to express what he felt.

‘Oh, curse you, you stinking thing!’ he said. ‘Go away! Be off! I don’t trust you, not as far as I could kick you; but be off. Or I shall hurt you, yes, with nasty cruel steel.’

Could Sam have carried the Ring himself to Mount Doom himself, probably not. But Frodo, for all his spiritual resilience, fails in the end. Only with Sam’s help could he have even made it to that point. Tolkien himself referred to Sam as the “chief hero,” so I guess I’ll have to go along with that.

Which leads me to Peter Jackson’s version. Instead of Frodo overwhelming Smeagol and dominating him by the power of the Ring. Which means we miss this:

‘Down, down!’ he gasped, clutching his hand to his breast, so that beneath the cover of his leather shirt he clasped the Ring. ‘Down, you creeping thing, and out of my path! Your time is at an end. You cannot betray me or slay me now.’

Then suddenly, as before under the eaves of the Emyn Muil, Sam saw these two rivals with other vision. A crouching shape, scarcely more than the shadow of a living thing, a creature now wholly ruined and defeated, yet filled with a hideous lust and rage; and before it stood stern, untouchable now by pity, a figure robed in white, but at its breast it held a wheel of fire. Out of the fire there spoke a commanding voice.

‘Begone, and trouble me no more! If you touch me ever again, you shall be cast yourself into the Fire of Doom.’

Instead of Sam refraining from killing him as described above, there’s a short, vicious encounter that ends with Sam cutting Smeagol in the belly. It continues Jackson’s rejection of nuance and complication for action every time.

There are so many problems I have with the movie. Two-trunked titanic oliphaunts that Legolas parkours on, well, they’re bad. Worst of all is the denigration of Denethor. Tolkien’s character is a man of great learning who has been lured into despair by his contact with Sauron. A once noble man has fallen into such hopelessness that he can’t even imagine there’s any chance of survival. Instead, Jackson gives us a snide, snarling man who makes Pippin sing for him while he devours food like an animal, juices dribbling down his face. Again, nuance of character has no place.

One thing that particularly stands out is the elimination of, what’s for me, one of the most iconic moments in The Return of the King. When the great gate of Minas Tirith is broken down, Gandalf confronts the Witch King. That Jackson chose to make up his own scenes and dialogue for the movies but excised this one, well, it’s inexcusable.

Thrice he cried. Thrice the great ram boomed. And suddenly upon the last stroke the Gate of Gondor broke. As if stricken by some blasting spell it burst asunder: there was a flash of searing lightning, and the doors tumbled in riven fragments to the ground.

In rode the Lord of the Nazgûl. A great black shape against the fires beyond he loomed up, grown to a vast menace of despair. In rode the Lord of the Nazgûl, under the archway that no enemy ever yet had passed, and all fled before his face.

All save one. There waiting, silent and still in the space before the Gate, sat Gandalf upon Shadowfax: Shadowfax who alone among the free horses of the earth endured the terror, unmoving, steadfast as a graven image in Rath Dínen.

‘You cannot enter here,’ said Gandalf, and the huge shadow halted. ‘Go back to the abyss prepared for you! Go back! Fall into the nothingness that awaits you and your Master. Go!’

The Black Rider flung back his hood, and behold! he had a kingly crown; and yet upon no head visible was it set. The red fires shone between it and the mantled shoulders vast and dark. From a mouth unseen there came a deadly laughter.

‘Old fool!’ he said. ‘Old fool! This is my hour. Do you not know Death when you see it? Die now and curse in vain!’ And with that he lifted high his sword and flames ran down the blade.

Gandalf did not move. And in that very moment, away behind in some courtyard of the City, a cock crowed. Shrill and clear he crowed, recking nothing of wizardry or war, welcoming only the morning that in the sky far above the shadows of death was coming with the dawn.

How do you decide to introduce those ridiculous looking oliphaunts but leave this out? Who the heck knows. To me, it seems like a terrible appreciation for what’s really cool and awesome. That said, the charge of the Rohirrim and the death of the Witch King are pretty solid.

In the beginning, I came to The Lord of the Rings just as the sequels to The Hobbit. Gradually, I understood they had something to say, artistically and thematically. Gradually, the complex architecture of the books and the characters became clearer. This time around, I think the tragic elements have resonated the most — the fallen state of Middle-earth, Boromir’s and his father’s fates, Smeagol’s, too, of course, and, ultimately, Frodo’s. By the last pages, all the magic has flowed out of Middle-earth and its fate is in the hands of men.

I really don’t know how many times I’ve read these books. There was a period where I read them every year or two. Nonetheless, each time I come back to them, it’s almost like I’m reading them for the first time.  I’ve read my share of ridiculously big epic fantasies, but none of them have really earned their length in the way these books have. I can’t say when, but I will be rereading them sooner rather than later.

So, what’s next? I’m not sure. My plans include reading The Hobbit, The Silmarillion, and definitely Bored of the Rings. I might finally crack open my copies of  The Fall of Gondolin and Beren and Luthien, too. I hope you’re willing to follow me along.

 

Half a Century of Reading Tolkien: Part One

Half a Century of Reading Tolkien: Part Two – The Fellowship of the Ring by JRR Tolkien

Half a Century of Reading Tolkien: Part Three — The Two Towers by JRR Tolkien

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Fletcher Vredenburgh writes a column each first Sunday of the month at Black Gate, mostly about older books he hasn’t read before. He also posts at his own site, Stuff I Like when his muse hits him