Meditations on Middle-Earth by Karen Haber Read Free Book Online

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    My son’s young heart mourned Gollum’s fall into the fires of Mount Doom. So do the hearts of all who truly love this book.
    With his two companions acting out the twin plots of growth and failure, Frodo is freed to follow a third path, one that is, though Tolkien labored hard to disguise the fact, essentially mystic. It begins with Frodo’s wounding by the Nazgûl in the wood below Weathertop (this is the Fisher King’s wound, and the reason he leaves no offspring behind), ennobles him through adversity, and reaches its climax in Mount Doom, when he dons the One Ring and claims its power for his own.
    Of Frodo’s inner journey, we know very little. Tolkien provided hints and mutters, and very little else, for the good and sufficient reason that he lacked the literary powers their explication would require. “That of which we cannot speak,” as Wittgenstein put it, “we must pass over in silence.” We know only that he suffers; and that his journey ultimately leads him to the Cracks of Doom.
    The time of judgment is come at last. Frodo has failed the test. But no fair-minded person can believe he ever had a chance of passing it. Rather, he has been, as an engineer would put it, “tested to destruction.” And, because he is judged for all his life rather than the weakness of an instant, he is spared from the damnation he has seemingly brought upon himself. Gollum, marked by all as a tool of Fate from the very beginning, steps in to save him.
    Frodo is given mercy, rather than victory. This, too, marks the insight of age.
    Mystics, however, cannot live in the real world. When the adventure is done, Frodo knows too much to ever find peace. He has leapfrogged over all his middle years, and carries the burden of age. There is no place left for him in all of Middle-earth save the Grey Havens . . . the Grey Havens and death. Sam follows Frodo partway on that journey, and then turns back. He sits down in a great chair before a roaring fire, his wife places his infant daughter on his knee, and he speaks the most heartbreaking line in all of modern fantasy:
    “Well, I’m back,” he said.
    “No!” Sean cried, when I read those last words. I will bear the guilt of that forever. Reading, I was swept away by the words, by the momentum of the plot, and completely forgot about where they were heading, toward that terrible, beautiful eucatastrophic ending. I should have warned him it was coming. I should have prepared him for it. Possibly, I should even have lied and made up a different ending altogether, one in which “they all lived happily ever after.”
    But maybe not. What makes that moment hurt so much is how absolutely, undeniably true it is. It would be a mistake to tack a moral onto The Lord of the Rings as if it were merely a Brobdingnagian version of one of Aesop’s fables. But Tolkien was writing about the world as he understood it, and in that world he had learned certain lessons: That pity is sometimes better than justice. That the best leaders are often filled with doubt. Most importantly, that life has consequences.
    How could I deprive my son of the very point of the book?
    Here is something that may sound terribly sentimental, but which nevertheless is absolutely true: I was present when my son was born. The midwife handed him first to his mother, and then, after a time, to me. He was placed in my arms. I looked down at that sweet little goblin face (he was born purple, for lack of oxygen, and only slowly turned pink). Someday, I thought, this child will grow up and become a man, and by so doing, turn me into an old man, and then I’ll die. But that’s all right. I don’t mind. It’s a small price to pay for him.
    We live in a reflexively cynical age, and yet cynicism, though it encompasses a great deal of the truth, does not cover everything. That moment, looked at from the outside, comes perilously close to the saccharine. Yet, looked at as something experienced yourself, it is a glad and