LotR -- Book 3 - Chapter 02 - The Riders of Rohan

[Lalwendë]

The Elves seek not to go into the West, but to return into the West - they seem to think in terms not of going forward but of going back, as though their foray into the 'outer' world has been a 'circular' movement. Yet they take the 'straight' road to get back to where they started. They are constantly driven to 'return' is the West for them as much a symbol of the 'beginning' to which they are drawn as it is 'Home'?

If indeed time in Arda was circular in some way, then I don't see any reason why Elves, being immortal, would not experience Time in that way. Perhaps this explains the do not/need not argument? (sorry ) Using my own words:

if the Elves do not count the running years, not for themselves, this is emphatic. They simply do not count those years in their own reckoning. But if the Elves need not count the running years, not for themselves, then it's something that by dint of being immortal, it's not necessary for them to do.

If they need not count the years, if they know to where they are going and from whence they came, what would be the purpose in counting years at all? Perhaps this difference between Men and Elves explains something of the nature of mortality - that mortals can never know this.

Still, this theory would only 'fit' for the Eldar.

I am not so sure that Elven time can be speeded up or slowed down, I think that they perceive time at an entirely different pace to mortals, one outside our easy comprehension. They see the world as Swift, because they themselves change little, and all else fleets by as mortal creatures are born, live and die in the mere blink of an eye to them; they see the world as Slow, because they do not count the running years, not for themselves as the great expanse of eternity is infinite.

Yet beneath the Sun all things must wear to an end at last

Does this refer to the eventual contraction and inevitable expansion or rebuilding of the universe? Do the Elves experience every universe and hence know what fate will bring? Or will some other creation experience 'the next' universe?

[davem]

Originally Posted by Lalwende

I am not so sure that Elven time can be speeded up or slowed down, I think that they perceive time at an entirely different pace to mortals, one outside our easy comprehension. They see the world as Swift, because they themselves change little, and all else fleets by as mortal creatures are born, live and die in the mere blink of an eye to them; they see the world as Slow, because they do not count the running years, not for themselves as the great expanse of eternity is infinite.

Yet the purpose of the Elven Rings was to slow the physical effects of time - obviously they couldn't completely halt it, yet they could apparently manipulate it, & wouldn't that desire have arisen because they had the concept of it, & possibly that was due to some innate ability to manipulate their experience of it. Aren't they really trying to make the external world reflect their mental world, match the 'inner' & the 'outer'?

Does this refer to the eventual contraction and inevitable expansion or rebuilding of the universe? Do the Elves experience every universe and hence know what fate will bring? Or will some other creation experience 'the next' universe?

Only if there is a Universe subsequent to this one - why not simply an endless loop, an eternal return?

[Lalwendë]

Only if there is a Universe subsequent to this one - why not simply an endless loop, an eternal return?

It would happen in this way, the beginning and end of the universe; it would endlessly rebuild, but the crucial point is if it would be the same each time? Imagine an elastic band. You draw it out, flick it across the room, and it has returned to it's original, shape, but not entirely. In the very act of strecthing it, you will have altered some aspects of its fundamental structure, even if its compnenet parts are the same. And in addition, in doing this, you have released energy, which will have gone somewhere else (as energy cannot be destroyed, only changed) - so where would the energy go from the continual expansion and contraction of the universe? And the consequences which have to combine in order to produce a certain type of life, they are far too infinite to comprehend.

Back to Tolkien.

Yet the purpose of the Elven Rings was to slow the physical effects of time - obviously they couldn't completely halt it, yet they could apparently manipulate it, & wouldn't that desire have arisen because they had the concept of it, & possibly that was due to some innate ability to manipulate their experience of it. Aren't they really trying to make the external world reflect their mental world, match the 'inner' & the 'outer'?

This is true - so perhaps the Elven rings contain some kind of secret of Time or indeed Light? If so, then what was the dark nature of the One Ring? If Sauron was one of the Maiar, he may have known some of these secrets, as may have the Istari, thus explaining why Saruman wanted the One Ring so much.

Another train of thought - perhaps the reason that the rings of power turned mortals into wraiths was that they contained some power of Time or Light which disspipated the very substance of mortals? Would they turn mortals into Dark Matter? I am speculating now, as Tolkien would surely not have known of Dark Matter?

[davem]

Too rushed......

Originally Posted by Lalwende

it would endlessly rebuild, but the crucial point is if it would be the same each time?

If Eru willed it. Scientific 'laws' are based on a 'closed' universe.

I am speculating now, as Tolkien would surely not have known of Dark Matter?

Many things are 'known' subconsciously before scientists stick a label on them.

[Aiwendil]

It's been a somewhat crazy week for me, hence the lateness of my appearance. But I cannot let this chapter go by without a comment or two.

To me, this has always been the chapter that opens the book up, as it were - widening both the perspective and the subject matter. Up until now, we have been dealing with the Ring. We have followed the Ring from Bilbo to Frodo, from Bag End to Rivendell, from Rivendell to Rauros. Even the previous chapter was still in a sense dealing with the Ring - at least, it dealt very specifically with the aftermath of the breaking of the fellowship, which had everything to do with the Ring. Not so in this chapter. Of course, the Ring continues to be of primary importance. But this chapter itself does not deal with the Ring, nor with Frodo, at all.

I cannot, for the most part, remember my reactions the first time I read LotR (or rather, the first time my mother read it to me - I was rather young). But I recently succeeded in convincing my father to read it, and his reaction to Book III struck me at first as odd - then as completely natural. His reaction was a kind of impatience with the story (though not dislike) and a desire to return to Sam and Frodo. I found it odd at first because I happen to prefer Book III to Book IV, overall. But then I realized that it is, one might expect, the natural response. Something strange is going on; after spending four hundred pages with Frodo and the Ring we are suddenly thrust aside into a story concerning Saruman and Rohan.

Why did Tolkien do this? One answer is that, of course, the Merry/Pippin/Saruman/Rohan thread connects up with the Ring thread in a critical way. But of course it's only like that because Tolkien wrote it that way. He could, if he had wanted to, have continued with the story of Frodo and brought it to a conclusion by itself. Another answer is that Tolkien didn't have the rest of the story planned out in much detail and was more or less making things up as he went along. This is true to an extent. But we might put the question better: why is it that this division of the story works?

The answer, I think, has to do with Tolkien's idea of a believable or self-consistent world. I noted in the discussion of 'The Old Forest' that the Old Forest/Bombadil/Barrow-downs trilogy has little to do, directly, with the story of the Ring. But:

. . . it would be unrealistic for the Hobbits only to encounter upon their journey servants of Sauron, or people and things relating directly to the central plot. To give them a few unrelated adventures adds a lot to the realism of Middle-earth.

I think something similar, if much, much bigger, is going on in Book III. For the story of the Ring to be concerned exclusively with Frodo might be the more natural choice from a narrative point of view, but it would not be realistic. To put it another way: it is simply a feature of Middle-earth that Rohan is where it is and that Saruman is where he is; for real worlds do have features that do not conveniently arrange themselves for the simplicity of a narrative.

And it works! This chapter really does, I think, make Middle-earth seem real. A new vista, both of plot and of (fictional) space, has opened up. We begin now to enter a world of kingdoms, wars, and politics that was only hinted at before. We got a glimpse of it in I-2 and another in II-2. Now, at the moment when Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli confront Eomer, we actually enter it.

Edit: I wasn't going to comment, but I couldn't restrain myself. Forgive me.

Lalwende wrote:

I am speculating now, as Tolkien would surely not have known of Dark Matter?

And Davem:

Many things are 'known' subconsciously before scientists stick a label on them.

The existence of 'dark matter' is simply not something one can 'know' subconsciously or intuitively. It is not a matter of scientists simply 'sticking a label' on something. Nor, I'm afraid, is there much similarity between a wraith and dark matter in the real universe. 'Dark matter' is not itself a kind of matter. When astronomers look at the motion of galaxies they can see the gravitational effects of more matter than the observed stars account for. 'Dark matter' is a general term for any such matter - matter that, for whatever reason, can't be seen a long way off. We (and all the stuff we come into contact with every day) are in fact dark matter, since we emit very little radiation and could not be seen thousands of parsecs away.

Now, I don't think that invalidates any of the substance of your arguments. I just think that there's no reason to bring dark matter into them.

[Nilpaurion Felagund]

Over here its shepherds rather than sailors who are either delighted or warned, but it is (or was) a common saying. (davem)

I was about to post the shepherd version of the quote (really! I just forgot), and was thinking if, in fact, it had anything to do with Legolas' words.

Just one word kept coming back to me: shepherds. The Ents, the Shepherds of the Trees, may be the ones being warned (or delighted)--after all, it was the same day when Merry and Pippin blundered into Treebeard. A delight and warning to the old Ent the two have been!

Perhaps Legolas just saw it and interpreted it as if it was for their own, which it wasn't:

As before Legolas was first afoot, if indeed he had ever slept. "Awake! Awake!" he cried. "It is a red dawn. Strange things await us by the eaves of the forest. Good or evil, I do not know; but we are called. Awake!"

LR III 2 - emphasis mine

Treebeard may have read it himself, and that could explain the fact why he was there on the eaves--well, relatively near to it--of his forest.

But that's already two chapters in advance.

[HerenIstarion]

Originally Posted by Aiwendil

. . it would be unrealistic for the Hobbits only to encounter upon their journey servants of Sauron, or people and things relating directly to the central plot. To give them a few unrelated adventures adds a lot to the realism of Middle-earth.

Total agreement. To back you up (not that you need it much, but still), I'll wallow in self-repeating:

Originally Posted by HerenIstarion

(from Prologue Discussion)

I can’t help remembering A.P.Chekhov, Russian playwright with his saying: “if there is a rifle on the wall in act 1, it should be firing off at least in act 3”. And all the books I’ve read usually follow this scheme up neatly. I.e., there usually are no unneeded things. Tolkien, even apart from prologue, which is the treasury of such 'things unrequired for the development of the plot', is placing them here an there (wait till we reach Bombadil, heh!). Tolkien is hinting to older history of the world he brings us into, and does that not only via ancient and neatly worked out names (which feel solid even for the unconscious), old legends and bits of untranlsated poetry, but by means of those unrequired things, those Hornblowers and Bracegirdles, which are completely unneeded, but form a background, some feeling on the border of one’s consicousness, that there is more to it than the plot we are about to read, that plot is just a tiny friction of the whole world. All of that is forming first in the prologue, where the walls are covered up in rifles and guns of all sorts, which, apart from firing, never make later appearence at all!

Good of you to put thrice as less words around it, too

edit: Dark matter will stand uncommented upon

edit2: Um, but why not. Ok - Nazgul can't be compared to Dark Matter on the basis that Dark Matter is not, as indicated, absence of matter as such (I believe the view that vacuum is 'nothingness' is out of date also), whilst their mode of existence is more or less absence of life and their longevity is due not to an abundance of life, but to lack thereof. So to say, those who can not die can not live either. Etc

cheers

[davem]

Dragging this back up because of something Evisse mentioned in a rep comment about extraversion & introversion.

The first 'book' of Towers is, as I said, extraverted, & the second introverted. This has got me thinking about Boromir & Faramir. Boromir is the extravert - what you see is what you get. He is focussed 'outwards' on the world around him & on his interactions with others. Faramir, on the other hand, seems to be a typical introvert, quiet, thoughtful, only acting when he has considered all possibilities.

I think this is maybe the reason why we respond more quickly to Boromir, & why some people find him a more convincing character. He is 'shallower' than Faramir, & so is easier to get a handle on. We see Boromir's struggle clearly & openly with the lure of the Ring, & so can see how it is affecting him & can sympathise with him. We can believe in his struggle.

Faramir, on the other hand, is an introvert - his 'struggle' goes on under the surface, & all we see is the result of that inner conflict - it seems to just 'appear' out of nowhere, & thus can seem less 'believable'. But the struggle is no doubt of the same intensity.

I think something else we should take into account is that by his nature Boromir would not have gone in for the kind of spiritual & philosophical struggle that Faramir would have done for most of his adult life - which is something we introverts tend to do. Boromir would have simply 'acted' in response to the 'moment'. Faramir would have spent a long time thinking about moral issues, & have found a perspective on things like power & control which Boromir simply would not have. Faramir may not have had any idea about the Ring itself, but he was familiar with what it meant & the issues around such a thing. so, it would have been easier for him to come to a realisation of the right thing to do. His struggle would not have been over [i]what[i/] was the right thing to do with the Ring (which is effectively the dilemma Boromir struggled with) but, knowing what the right thing to do was, how to find the will to do it.

I think this is what's happening in these two complementary books - the first is asking 'what is the Right thing to do?'(see Aragorn's questions to Eomer), the second (following on from what we have learned about power in the first) is asking 'Now we know the right thing to do, how do we find the strength of will to do it.

The 'spirit' of Boromir dominates book 3, that of Faramir book 4. And i think that's why tolkien began book 3 with the Departure of Boromir, rather than ending book 2 with it.