Tolkien and terror

We hear about these Black Riders before we meet them -- always good practice in presenting a villain ("Hissed at me, he did," reports the Gaffer. "It gave me quite a shudder.") -- and they first appear on horses, pursuing the little hobbits through the woods of the Shire. Part of the terror of the riders comes from their presentation through the eyes of the hobbits, who besides being innocent and ignorant of the evil in the larger world, are only 4 feet tall. When we first glimpse one of these Black Riders we peer up at them from the undergrowth. "Only his boots in the high stirrups showed below," writes Tolkien. "His face was shadowed and invisible."

In later chapters, the Nazgul appear in the air, riding huge flying creatures like pterodactyls. "Ever they circled above the City, like vultures that expect their fill of doomed men's flesh." The potency of these evil messengers comes not from physical strength or acts of violence but from their psychological impact on their foes. They spread paralyzing terror. Ordinary mortals fling themselves to the ground when the Nazgul pass unseen overheard and think "no more of war, but only of hiding and crawling, and of death."

But however scary these creations, evil entirely evil and evil entirely other is ultimately neither nuanced nor very interesting and is of course a staple of melodrama, not great art. What makes "The Lord of the Rings" work now, in this time when villains entirely evil and entirely other are often invoked, is that Tolkien's presentation of evil is deeper than that. Tolkien complicates the over-simple moral scheme and gives evil its due.

For the evil in Middle-earth does not simply reside in Sauron and his emissaries. It enters every character, and indeed infects the hero. The central object in "The Lord of the Rings," the magic ring, stolen from the wretched Gollum by the hobbit Bilbo and given to his nephew Frodo in the books that follow, makes its wearer invisible and confers other powers, but it is ultimately an evil thing, having been created in the first place by Sauron. It must be destroyed, by tossing it into the volcano in which it was forged. This is Frodo's quest.

But all who come in contact with the ring -- high and low, hobbits and men -- are corrupted by it. Under its influence, the wizard Saruman, who once led the Council opposing Sauron, turns traitor to the cause. A member of the Fellowship of the Ring itself, a man of Gondor named Boromir, cannot withstand the temptation to power that the ring offers, and his treachery dissolves the company that undertakes the quest.

So Frodo and his faithful servant Sam must go on alone. But even the hobbits are not immune, and Frodo himself fails, finally, in his quest. He cannot relinquish the ring of power in the ultimate moment. "I will not do this deed," he cries on the brink of the volcano. "The ring is mine." And so there is not finally in Middle-earth an absolute good to counteract its absolute evil. Tolkien writes expressly about this in his letters. "The power of Evil in the world is not finally resistible by incarnate creatures," he notes, "however 'good.'"

Does the irresistible power of evil then make the hero's quest futile? No -- the hero's effort is necessary but not sufficient. Tolkien's other insight is that evil itself will take evil down. For one thing, evil offers no basis on which to organize anything. In Book 5, when Frodo is taken captive by evil Orcs, he is liberated not just by Sam's rescue, but by the Orcs themselves, who fight over the spoils and kill each other off. And evil lacks clarity. The smokes and vapors that the Dark Lord sends out of Mordor, to cloak his armies' movements, are finally the cover that Sam and Frodo need to infiltrate the evil realm.

In the end, it is the greed of Gollum, not the virtue of Frodo, that casts the ring to its destruction. One might even say that the ring annihilates itself, as Gollum's consuming desire is one effect of its evil power over him. On the brink of the volcano, Gollum attacks Frodo, severs his finger and recovers the ring at last, but when he lifts his eyes to gloat on his "precious," he falls into the cauldron, where it and he are destroyed.

So this hobbit book, on the surface an escapist fairy tale, in the end offers some wisdom, and for this reason it has flourished for 50 years and in 50 million copies. "The Lord of the Rings" addresses the ancient crisis that arises in a dire time like this one, when it is not so much what we do to confront evil that wins the day, but what we must refrain from doing.

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