Lord of the Rings

Frodo and Sam represent different sides of Tolkien's ideals of goodness. (Aragorn is another, of course.)

Frodo is an All-Loving Hero, but without the saccharine nature that usually accompanies that trope. He views violence as a last resort and mercy/kindness as a primary tool. During the Scouring, he never lifts a hand himself, but instead helps to ensure that the hobbits do not lose themselves in savagery.

Sam is a down-to-earth hero who sees fighting for his own as the only valid kind of battle, but one for which he pulls no punches. He's the one who rouses the folk of the Shire and provides the firm determination that forms the backbone of their defense of their homeland. He's grounded, realistic, yet absolutely unmoving when it comes to what matters.

Both are portrayed as necessary and valuable. You need someone like Sam to stir people to their own defense, and someone like Frodo to keep them morally centered.

It doesn't matter that Saruman rejects Frodo's mercy, because he was never going to accept it from anyone. It matters that mercy is offered in the first place: as Frodo says, it is not for hobbits to raise their hands against emissaries of the West, no matter how fallen they may be.

Edited by Fighteer on Oct 15th 2018 at 11:09:00 AM

Tolkien's changing ideas make me wonder how he'd have handled the Ecthelion v Gothmog fight in the later version of the story. Stabbing it in the chest and drowning it in the fountain seems a bit too easy. He could just make it some non-Balrog general but I feel like that detracts too much from the story and would be changing it too much. If I was him I'd probably make it a bit more of a team effort with Ecthelion getting the killing blow.

Gandalf offered Saruman mercy as well, even though he was pretty certain that Saruman would not accept. "Dangerous, and probably useless; but it must be done." He also makes it clear that this is Saruman's last chance to be of any service to the powers of good, and when Saruman refuses Gandalf breaks his power by casting him from the order, and literally breaking his staff.

Interestingly, it seems to have been a final test for Theoden as well. Gandalf sits silently and lets Saruman do his best to bring Theoden under his power one last time. I think it might have been to break any remaining power Saruman had over him or anyone in his retinue.

Yes, it's made quite clear that for Good to win, it must not only reject the temptation of Evil, but must also choose not to kill a defeated foe in cold blood, lest it fall to Evil itself. Anyway, all of the villains manage to be self-disposing in this regard.

Though I think Grima and Saruman's fate is also reflective of where they met their final fate.

Morgoth, Sauron, the Witch-King, they can all die in epic moments orchestrated by our heroes, because they were the villains of ancient style epics where everything is larger than life. However, the Shire was always meant to be a bit closer to reality than that; despite being populated by a fantasy race and being a bit idealized, the people and society there are meant to be recognizable as the kind of folks you might meet in Real Life rural England. Most of them would laugh in your face if you started telling them about dragons, magic rings, and ancient swords of kings. So when Saruman and Grima leave the grand, epic world outside the Shire, and become villains for the hobbits, the conventions of epic narratives no longer apply to them, and their fate becomes as mundane and unceremonious as any Real Life criminal brought to heel.

An interesting idea.

I'm reading the fifth volume of The History of Middle-earth. Interestingly enough it seems Tolkien had already invented the legend of Numenor and the concept of the Second Age and Last Alliance before he even began writing The Lord of the Rings. I had always thought they came about while that work was in progress.

Yeah. LOTR was going to be an unrelated project; a sequel to The Hobbit that was even shorter than the original. That expanded so much that Tolkien found himself in need of a good backstory and expansive world and simply migrated it into his existing Middle Earth.

He had already half-migrated The Hobbit into his pre-existing works when he wrote it, with mentions of Elrond and the Necromancer. Later revisions made it even more so. But yes, the back story of Lord of the Rings is a story of its own that was written before there was any idea of it being the background to another story.

What do you mean by pre-existing work? The Hobbit was his first work, if I remember correctly.

The Hobbit was the first major work he managed to get published, but he had masses of other material at that point, some of which had been submitted to and turned down by publishers.

The first thing he actually wrote in the whole setting I think would be the earliest draft of Fall of Gondolin, which he started sketching during his stay at the barracks after contracting trench fever in 1917-1918. Early drafts of Beren and Luthien follows shortly thereafter.

Speaking of the Fall of Gondolin, apparently in one of the early drafts (the second draft, according to Christopher Tolkien) Tuor was part of a Easterling clan that arrived too late at the Battle of Unnumbered Tears (and thus took no part in Ulfang's treachery, but were allies to Bór the Faithful and his faithful Easterlings). That would have been a Hell of a thing, to have one of the greatest heroes of Middle Earth be part of the Middle East Fantasy Counterpart Culture. I wish Tolkien had kept it, and if they ever adapt The Fall of Gondolin in some way, to keep that aspect so we can have some solid Middle Eastern representation in Tuor (and presumably, Eärendil subsequently).

I think Tolkien's early Eärendil poems were written in 1914 so those are probably first. Fall of Gondolin is the first prose work though. In the 1930s Tolkien began work on The Lost Road which contained the original story of Numenor's destruction and the Last Alliance. There's no mention of the ring but that's because The Hobbit wasn't formally integrated until a few years later.

That's fascinating! It would be fantastic to have one of the great heroes of the First Age (and the chosen messenger of Ulmo) be a non-Edain Man.

I agree, we rarely get to see the eastern culture of Middle-Earth. It's all lands of the West, men of the West and so on.

On a different note, Is there any work that expands upon the Easterlings? Such as the ones introduced in The Children of Hurin.

Well, from an authorial perspective, Tolkien was an expert on Western, and more specifically English literature, so his literary perspective naturally leans towards a Western viewpoint. Also, he lived in a somewhat less enlightened time, which comes back in how the peoples of the East and South are depicted in his works. He doesn't explicitly say that the heroes are Europeans, Eastern people are Asians, and Southern people are Africans, but they are definitely coded that way.

Are the Easterlings Middle Eastern? I thought they were East Asian or South Asian.

Edited by Kostya on Oct 16th 2018 at 8:10:56 AM

I think they were modeled after Indian people, specifically, what with the war elephants. Fitting, of course, since India was still part of the British Empire at the time.

The Elephants are a Haradrim thing. They're more analogous to Africans. I believe certain Mediterranean civilizations used war elephants as well.

edit: I'm not the biggest fan of Tolkien's depiction of the Easterlings and Haradrim but I don't think they're meant to be entirely unsympathetic. I always liked this passage.

Edited by Kostya on Oct 16th 2018 at 9:31:01 AM

Yeah, I figured the Haradrim are more like a take on Carthage with the war elephants. The Easterlings, given they're described as "swarthy" and seem to wield curved swords not too dissimilar from scimitars, I get a Middle Eastern vibe but I could also see them as being a Mongol equivalent (particularly given they have "Emperors" not too dissimilar from Khans I suppose).

Tolkien never expands on the Easterlings but from what we hear they are definitely meant to be sympathetic to an extent. Besides Sam humanizing a random dead soldier, the appendices alludes to a event (during one of the Gondor-Easterling wars, can't remember which) where the Easterling women fought for their homes after being ambushed by Gondorians while the soldiers were out and Tolkien seems to treat that as a highly valiant deed. During the War of the Ring the main thing seems to be the Haradrim and the Easterlings were just misguided, not malicious, and once Aragorn becomes King the appendices note he was a very merciful king and welcomed them back to the fold after they realized their mistake. Even during the first age when they're on Morgoth's side the narration frequently notes how they don't really like that set-up, but are driven by fear.

Probably the greatest microcosm for Easterlings in Tolkien's work is during the Battle of the Unnumbered Tears, where they are on the side of the angels, but then we have Ulfang the Black (and his sons, Uldor, Ulfast and Ulwarth) with his treacherous Easterlings (who side with Morgoth) and Bór the Faithful (alongside his sons Borlach, Borlad and Borthand) with his faithful easterlings (who side with the forces of good). Bor, his house and his followers remain heroic and die as heroes alongside the other untold martyrs of the Battle of Unnumbered Tears while Ulfang and his house are some evil shites and die as cowards (most of them by the hands of Bor and his sons).

Tolkien also gives the Easterlings a excellent reason to despise the Men of the West, after Númenor lost its collective shit and decided to enslave/sacrifice Easterlings to Morgoth.

Tolkien's stated goal with his Legendarium was to create a mythology for England, having found existing English folklore disappointing compared to stuff like the Norse Eddas. Despite the vast differences in geography, Middle-Earth is basically supposed to be Ancient England, and if you found an ancient manuscript of English Mythology, you'd hardly expect the writer to have much knowledge (if any) about lands as remote as India or Ethiopia.

True, although that’s not a get out of jail free card either.

That depiction of Easterlings may be a little more positive, but they are still a people ruled by fear, easily swayed by the dark side, while the Westerners are the brave, fearless heroes standing up to evil. There is still a sense that those Other people are less capable of resisting evil.

Part of the reasons for somewhat problematic portrayal of the Easterlings is the very black-and-white nature of the conflict(s). When there is a literal God of Evil at the head of your army waging war against the existence (or his second-in-command, whose explicit aim is to Take Over the World) it's kinda hard to keep a presentable profile.

All things considered, Tolkien handled the Eastern peoples well enough.

Edited by Millership on Oct 17th 2018 at 3:14:06 PM

Indeed, and he was clearly struggling with the question, as many people in the Empire were at that time. He regretted making the Orcs so uniformly evil, because it had rather unfortunate racial implications.