Lord of the Rings: It's the Fight that Matters

🧙🏼‍♂️Lord of the Rings is perhaps the greatest and most epic tale of good vs. evil known to the literary world, and addresses an important question: how do you keep fighting for good when all hope is lost? 

🗡️Tolkien saw a lot in his life. He fought in WWI, and watched his son fight in WWII. It's no surprise, then, that he brought such a poignant perspective to what it means to fight for good, even when hope seems completely gone.  

🧝🏻‍♂️Join us today as we dive into what that fight looks like in Lord of the Rings, and what it means for us today. 

Transcript

Hi, and welcome to the Literary Lamppost Podcast, where we analyze books and see what we can learn from them. I'm Caitlin. I'm a math grad student, but I love English and I love analyzing literature. And I'm Ashleigh, an assistant editor for a magazine and a writer. Welcome to our third and final episode on the Lord of the Rings trilogy. So far, we have covered the way that Tolkien addresses masculinity and how he addresses femininity. If you are new to the Lord of the Rings and haven't listened to any of our other episodes, to give you a very, very brief summary, the Lord of the Rings books follow a hobbit named Frodo, who's tasked by a wizard, Gandalf, with the very important task of taking a powerful but very dangerous ring to the place of its creation, a volcano in the treacherous evil land of Mordor, to be destroyed. Frodo's accompanied by his faithful friend Sam, as well as two other friends, Merry and Pippin, and they join up with an elf, a dwarf, and a ranger, and they also encounter lots of very cool characters and some badass women. We have spent a fair bit of time talking about Sam, Aragorn, Legolas, Gimli, Boromir, Faramir, and then Galadriel, Eowyn, Rosie, Arwen, and Shelob. But you may have noticed we actually haven't spent very much time talking about the main character, Frodo, and we haven't mentioned at all Gollum, or really Gandalf or Sauron. And of course, we haven't spoken at all about the ring. And so that's what we're going to do today. These characters are locked in this struggle of good versus evil, and in these books, Tolkien actually represents a really thoughtful analysis of this. He was writing Lord of the Rings during and after World War II, and he was also writing from the perspective of someone who'd seen someone like Hitler rise to power. You know, he'd seen young people dying in the trenches or returning home forever changed. He saw the aftermath and discovery of the Holocaust. And, you know, there was so much grimness and horror, and he wrote this series about persistence in the face of death all around. I feel like, though, to truly understand this whole concept of good versus evil, we have to give a little bit of background on the ring. There were 19 rings created by Sauron, who is- The evil lord the, yeah, the main antagonist. They were created with evil intent, but unknown to the elves who forged them. And there's this kinda little poem that explains the purpose of these rings. I'm gonna read that. "Three rings for the elven kings under the sky. Seven for the dwarf lords in their halls of stone. Nine for mortal men doomed to die. One for the dark lord on his dark throne." In the land of Mordor where the shadows lie, one ring to rule them all, one ring to find them. One ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them. In the land of Mordor where the shadows lie. You were not nearly ominous enough when you read the one ring lines. You need to say that again. One- I can't. One ring to rule them all. One ring to rule them all. One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them, one ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them. That might have been a bit too much. If the One was destroyed, the power of the others would fade. So the rings could be used for good, but under the control of someone evil, they could be used for so much evil. And that One Ring corrupted anybody who used it. When Sauron put the Ruling Ring on, the elves figured out what it was, and they took off their rings. This led to a war and a lot of things happening, and eventually Sauron lost the ring. 2,500 years later, it was found by- A variety A variety of hobbit named Déagol. And his cousin Sméagol, who, you know, is known and loved to everyone by the name of Gollum, wanted it and murdered his cousin, naturally. And so Sméagol then disappeared and lived in a mountain, poisoned, you know, by his ring, his precious. His precious. After 500 years, because you know the ring naturally makes you live longer, Sméagol was found by Bilbo, who took the ring. That's the storyline of The Hobbit. And he kept it until passing it down to Frodo, which is where the first Lord of the Rings book starts. Gandalf and Frodo realize how dangerous it is, and Frodo starts off on this journey to destroy it. Because that's the only way that it can be dealt with forever and to keep it out of the hands of Sauron, who is alive. The ring has this massive power over anybody who puts it on. It corrupts the one who bears it, and the more that they wear it, the more they become corrupted by it. Wearing it also makes the wearer visible to the Eye of Sauron, but invisible to everybody else. I think there have been stories about good versus evil, you know, in dif- different representations, different media across all time. In Lord of the Rings, you can really see Tolkien's Catholicism and the Christian depiction of good versus evil coming through. That being said, I think it's safe to say that most human beings of all cultures and religions do have that sense of right and wrong. That being said, Western worldviews do tend to cast good and evil as this black-and-white dichotomy, and I think it's all too easy to assume that you're on the good side and not recognize the capacity for evil within yourself. I remember learning at university about how- On the other hand, in Eastern culture, the, quote-unquote, "bad guys" aren't totally bad, and good and bad tend to shift. And this is really evident in Studio Ghibli movies like Spirited Away and Howl's Moving Castle, where the bad guy ends up not being so bad after all. Yeah, like the Witch of the Waste, she's this horrible, evil antagonist in the beginning, but then she ends up this cozy old lady with a dog in her lap kind of thing. Yeah. But we don't get that in Lord of the Rings. We do get a much more clear division of you pick a side, and that's the side that you're on. You're on the side of good versus the side of evil. Though our heroes are flawed, and we will talk about that a little bit later. Throughout the books, Gandalf is, I think, the main symbol of goodness and the antithesis of Sauron. He's a wizard, but unlike his counterpart Saruman, he does not sell out for the sake of power, and he sacrifices himself to protect the company from the Balrog and is reborn, essentially coming back to life. You gotta remember, Tolkien is a Catholic, so Gandalf is a Christ-like figure. Although Tolkien is famous for not liking direct allegory, and that was one of his issues with C.S. Lewis' writing. He thought it was too obvious of an allegory. Mm. So that's interesting. So Gandalf is very clearly on the side of good, and he doesn't really waver from that. But other characters, there is a bit of this back-and-forth tension between the good and the evil in them. Yeah, like Gollum. He's a really interesting character because in the beginning, Gollum is painted as a villain. He follows the company after his precious ring. But when he catches up to them, Frodo makes him swear that he'll lead him and Sam to Mordor, and then Gollum starts calling Frodo master, and he starts being good and acting like he's just been wounded, and he's poor old Gollum who's hungry all the time. But sometimes this other personality overtakes him. It- it's like he's got this split personality, one side that, you know, is willing to help Frodo and be good, but then the other side is, like, wanting to murder him and steal the ring. Sam actually calls his two sides Slinker and Stinker. Which is pretty funny. And yeah, y- you can just really see how much the ring has corrupted him. Frodo also ultimately really struggles with the ring. Frodo comes at this journey really wanting to do the right thing. He really wants to destroy the ring. He doesn't want to let it affect him. He knows it's gonna be hard. It's this... You know, he's, he's our hero, right? And he tries so hard, and he wants to do the right thing. He really does. But- In moments of fear or desperation, he uses the ring to hide or because he finds himself tempted to put it on because that's just the nature of the ring, and it ends up affecting him. In the end, Sam, Frodo, and Gollum make it to the fires of Mount Doom, the, the volcano where the ring can be destroyed. But Frodo finds, in the last moment, he cannot throw the ring into the fire. He's carried it for too long. He's used it one too many times. Gollum attacks him and takes it. But in his glee, he falls over the edge and is destroyed and the ring with him in the fires. There's a great Tumblr quote that I think put it really well. It says, "It puzzles me when people cite Lord of the Rings as the standard of simple or predictable or black-and-white fantasy. Because in my copy, the hero fails. Frodo chooses the ring, and it's only Gollum's own desperation for it that inadvertently saves the day. The fate of the world, this whole blood-soaked war, all the millennia-old machinations of elves and gods comes down to two addicts squabbling over their precious. And that is precisely and powerfully Tolkien's point." There's not a lot of stories that let the hero fail like that. Hmm. And I think that Tolkien has done a good job of examining what it means to be a hero as a human. And you know what? Frodo failed, but in the end, he managed to save the world, too. I also think that Tolkien did a really good job in showing how it was that people fall into evil and what it is that draws them to that side. And really, at the end of the day, it's power. Yeah. And his whole point is that seeking power can corrupt you. You know, the ring, the bearer of the ring is granted great power, and it always ends up corrupting the person who wields it. For example, Saruman, which is ... I know Saro- Sauron and Saruman are- I know, they're so similar it's so similar. It really annoys me that those names are so similar. Um, anyway, Saruman, friend of Gandalf and the same order of wizard as him. Originally, Gandalf thinks that Saruman is a friend and an ally, but turns out Saruman has joined Sauron. And the reason he did that is for the sake of power and protecting his own interests. Good people sell out in the presence of power, whether out of fear or out of desire for power themselves, or their desire to align themselves with someone powerful who they think will serve their interests. Sauron was able to control leaders in different parts of the country through the Palantir stones, which are these crystal stones which allow you to communicate with somebody on the other end. You look into one of them, and you can talk to somebody on the other end with another one And with these, he is able to turn both Saruman and Denethor. And Denethor is the steward of Gondor and father of Boromir and Faramir. Sauron convinces Saruman that resistance is futile, and it's much better to just join him and maintain power. And he convinced Denethor that there was no point in even trying to fight by showing him all of these awful things that were happening, which basically puts him into this state of psychosis where he's just so convinced that the evil is too powerful, and there's nothing that can be done to stop it. And he ultimately attempts to kill himself and his son, Faramir, to try and escape it rather than attempting to fight. I feel like Tolkien's trying to make a point about how despair can be used as a weapon. And if you present to someone that they're going to be defeated, like there's no other way out. That's a tactic of propaganda. It makes me think of the stuff we see, like how you get stuck in doom scrolling, and you can get to where all you're seeing is the awful things happening, and that makes you feel really overwhelmed and unable to do anything. It makes us feel like there's no point even trying to do anything because the fight is already lost. And I've seen a lot of people online compare the Palantir to our phones. I read a quote on Pinterest, "Denethor succumbed to despair because he was doom scrolling on the Palantir. Sauron tweaked his algorithm so he only saw bad news, and he fell into the trap of thinking the world couldn't be saved." Another really good quote is, "If the situation was hopeless, the propaganda would be unnecessary." But it's not just doom scrolling. It's also our sources of information. Like a news site which seems to just consistently portray a certain group in the absolute worst light. You can be fairly sure that it's manipulating you, and you need to be careful with stuff like that. It's actually crazy how the subset of information that we see shapes our responses to the world so powerfully. And I actually really like how Tolkien handled this. And I think that the way that Tolkien writes about the Palantir is a really good lens through which we can see how we consume information. And I think that the idea of the Palantir and the way that Tolkien uses them as a literary device is actually really useful and applicable in our own world. Sauron himself, the Dark Lord, he was genuinely cruel. And the cruelty was kind of the point. Cruelty for its own sake. And the people in the lands he took over suffered and died. Nothing lived there. I've heard people say that the character of a leader doesn't actually matter. It's the policies that matter. And I don't actually think that that's true I think that the character of a person matters more than anything else in a leader because leadership requires tough choices, and those need to be made with integrity. You need to be able to trust that your leader will do the right thing. If you hire a bully to bully other people for you, there's a good chance that eventually that bully will turn on you. I have come to believe that genuinely kindness is the most important trait that a person can have, and also that the end never justifies the means. I think that the means and how you get something done is actually just as important as the end result. We talked about Aragorn a little in our first episode, but I wanted to bring him up again because I believe he's also kind of an antithesis to Sauron. Aragorn is the heir to the throne of Gondor, yet he's reached, like, 80-something years old, and he hasn't taken his throne. And some people say that he's a coward or he's running from it, but I really think that he understands that power can corrupt, and he doesn't wanna take it until he doesn't have any other choice. You know, most of his life he spends as a ranger, as an ordinary person helping out other ordinary people without a crown, without people knowing his true name, simply doing it to help other people. And there's this really good quote. It's from the movie, not the book, and it's about Saruman, but it still stands. Gandalf says this: "Saruman believes it is only great power that can hold evil in check. But that is not what I have found. It is the small, everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay. Small acts of kindness and love." We mentioned before about how Sauron is able to use the Palantir to take away hope from Denethor and make him think that the battle was already lost. And there's multiple times, not just because of the Palantir, through the story where characters actually completely lose hope. There's this moment when Pippin is talking to Gandalf. I'll read it from the book. "Pippin took Gandalf's hand. 'Tell me,' he said, 'is there any hope? For Frodo, I mean. Or at least mostly for Frodo.' Gandalf put his hand on Pippin's head. 'There was never much hope,' he answered. 'Just a fool's hope.'" So even from the beginning, the characters know that there isn't very much hope. Sam always tends to have a fair amount of hope. But even he, when reaching Mount Doom, um, he's been with Frodo. They're thirsty. They're hungry. They're exhausted. They think they're going to die. They think they're going to fail. And the book says, "Never for long had hope died in his staunch heart, and always until now he had taken some thought for their return. But the bitter truth came home to him at last. At best, the provision would take them to their goal, and when the task was done, they would come to an end, alone, houseless, foodless, in the midst of a terrible desert. There would be no return." So that was the job I felt I had to do when I started, thought Sam. To help Mr. Frodo to the last step and then die with him? Well, if that is the job, then I must do it. But even as hope died in Sam, or seemed to die, he was turned to a new strength. Sam's plain hobbit face grew stern, almost grim, as the will hardened in him, and he felt through all his limbs a thrill, as if he was turning into some creature of stone and steel that neither despair nor weariness nor endless barren miles could subdue. So he's got nothing left but hope. He thinks his hope has died. He thinks that he's going to die. But hope is really what's keeping him going despite thinking that he has no hope. And there's this quote that I've always really loved. People speak of hope as if it is this delicate, ephemeral thing made of whispers and spider's webs. It's not. Hope has dirt on her face, blood on her knuckles, the grit of the cobblestones in her hair, and just spat out a tooth as she rises for another go. Hope isn't going to give you warm fuzzies. Hope is actually the only thing that we have to counterbalance the other negative emotions we feel during dark times. But it's not necessarily always going to feel good. Hope shows up as the need to keep trying just one last time, even though you are fairly sure you're going to fail. And the complete loss of hope, like what happened with Denethor, results in inaction. We actually need hope to survive and get through difficult times. There's a quote, I think it's one of the most famous quotes from Lord of the Rings, and it's definitely one of my favorites. I wish it need not have happened in my time, said Frodo. So do I, said Gandalf, and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us. I feel like that's so relevant for today. Like there's so many terrible things going on in the world. And, you know, this quote actually gives me hope. And I know that Tolkien was writing this, you know, in his context, thinking about World War II. But here we are so many years later, still finding courage from what he wrote, still finding courage from a story about a hobbit in a fantasy land. I don't think they would have succeeded, though, without each other. Yeah, community is so important when trying to hang on to hope. The fact that Sam carried Frodo when Frodo could no longer carry himself is the absolute embodiment of this. Frodo would've failed so many times without Sam, but he also would've failed without all the other people throughout the story working in their corner, in their little lane. There was Aragorn pulling together this long-lost army, the riders of Rohan, the men of Gondor, Merry and Pippin, Eowyn. All of them would have failed if they hadn't had each other. And they chose to fight without knowing if they would win or not, without even believing that they could win. They legitimately thought that they were going to lose. So many times in the face of despair, they just picked themselves up and kept going. And in many of these cases, having hope wasn't even the most reasonable or rational approach to the situation. The most logical approach was to give up, because in the face of these odds, it seemed like there was no way they could win. In the movie, a soldier says, "We cannot defeat the armies of Mordor." And the king of Rohan says in reply, "No, we cannot, but we will meet them in battle nonetheless." And through these actions, you just get this sense of goodness is worth fighting for. No matter whether or not you lose, it's the fight that matters. There's the famous movie quote that Sam says, "There's some good in this world, Mr. Frodo, and it's worth fighting for." It's interesting because in a lot of modern movies, some of the pain of the fight gets lost in all the action and the fighting and the glory of the good guys winning. But in Lord of the Rings, there's real damage done to Frodo, and in the end, he's not the same, and he has to leave the Shire. And part of me wonders whether that was inspired by PTSD and the experience of soldiers coming back from World War II. Probably. It's actually quite a dark story, and there's a lot of sadness and grief and pain all the way through, and I think that's why it took me so long to get through, because it's not a light story by any means. It took emotional weight to process. Yeah, I cried at the end. I wasn't really expecting to. It, you know, it does have a happy ending for some of the characters, but it doesn't really have a happy ending for Frodo. And when he and Bilbo leave, I just had this great sense of sadness. Like, he'd done all of that, but he'd, you know, he'd won, but he'd sort of failed, and, you know, he didn't get any glory and honor. He ended up ill a lot, and he had to leave his home in the end. Yet without him, the world would have been a much worse place. It's quite profound, actually, what Tolkien is saying through this. It's like he's saying, "Yes, the world can be awful. You will experience so much pain. And yes, evil will likely prevail, but you have to try, 'cause that's the only way for you to have any sort of chance of things to be better. And if you do- It might just be enough. We've quoted this before by Rabbi Tarfon. I think it's relevant to this episode, and so we'll quote it again. "Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly now. Love mercy now. Walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to 📍 abandon it." And on that note, thank you so much for joining us for this episode of The Literary Lamppost. Join us on Instagram and share your thoughts with us. We would love to hear what you think. Also, please share this podcast with somebody you think would enjoy it, and stay tuned for our next episode in which we will be talking about The Great Gatsby. Or Throne of Glass. We haven't decided yet. Making quite the pivot. Please leave us a rating or a comment. It lets the algorithm know that you like this show and helps other people find it. We promise we will read every single one because they're hard to miss because of how few we get. We'd also love it if you share this episode with someone you think would enjoy it. Make sure to follow us on Instagram @theliterarylamppost, as well as hitting that subscribe button on Spotify or Apple Podcasts or your preferred podcast platform to make sure that you don't miss any of our new episodes. Thanks for listening and see you next time. This podcast includes brief excerpts from literary works for the purpose of commentary, criticism, and analysis, which we believe constitutes fair use under copyright law. Our theme music was created by Joshua Ibbet for exclusive use by The Literary Lamppost Podcast. Amen. You looked like you were drawing a blank there. I got nothing.