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Habits and Hobbits: Message from the Director

In contrast to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, with its relatively innocent portrayal of white magic, the first film of J.R.R. Tolkien’s trilogy, The Lord of the Rings, rises to a different level of complexity. It involves us in a host of perplexing issues and experiences. The harmless hobbits, little people with their underground homes and agrarian life, seem peaceful enough.

Gandalf, the elder sorcerer, early gives us reason to trust his apparent integrity and kindliness. Bilbo Baggins, the prosperous senior hobbit, from all we can tell has been a good father figure to his nephew, Frodo Baggins. He seems to be a respected, if distant, member of his community. He gives a great birthday party for himself, which all the villagers enjoy. Then, at the party’s climax, he bids the community goodbye, and disappears. Literally, disappears before their very eyes.

Bilbo has secrets. He is going to leave the village and not return. And, he has a ring that, when placed on one’s finger, makes one invisible. Gradually we learn that Bilbo found the ring, as if by accident, in a deep cave as he was being pursued by a band of goblins. With the ring on his finger Bilbo became invisible, enabling him to exit the cave undetected. This was many years ago. As Bilbo leaves the village he gives the ring to Frodo. He instructs him to keep the ring in his pocket, on a secure chain, but not to wear it. The great drama begins when Gandalf returns from a time away to let Frodo know that the mysterious gold ring is terribly powerful and destructive. It gives its wearer power to do evil.

But the ring also corrupts its wearer. A good person, wearing the ring, gradually becomes morally weak and treacherous, and loses his weight and strength as a moral person. Gandalf urges Frodo to carry the ring, on a long, dangerous journey, to the one place where he can cast the ring into volcanic fire and destroy it and its strange power. Frodo accepts the mission and begins his anti-quest: instead of searching for the Grail, he is on a dangerous mission carrying the powerful ring to Mount Doom, in dangerous Mordor, to rid the world of its curse.

In the pilgrimage to carry the ring to Mount Doom, Frodo and his assorted band of fellow hobbits, an elf, a dwarf and two humans—the Fellowship of the Ring—are constantly under attack by the most graphically terrifying of creatures. There are the “Ringwraiths”—a band of nine shadowy knights on horseback, who received rings, not knowing that they would be emptied of their strength and come under the control of the master ring of the terrible wizard Sauron. In their lust to claim the power of the rings, these kings become corrupt and lose their moral substance. Then there are the Uruk-Hai, archetypal figures, dark, hairy, grimacing semi-humans—the offspring of humans bred with Orcs. Clearly they are unmitigatedly evil, bred to be killers.

The Fellowship of the Ring culminates with Frodo’s band bravely engaged in hand-to-hand fighting with the Uruk-Hai. Frodo withdraws from the battle and slips into a boat to cross the river and to continue his mission alone. But his friend and faithful hobbit servant, Sam Gamgee, seeing him leaving, loyally swims after him, calling him to wait. When Frodo sees that his friend is about to drown, he reverses and helps Sam into the boat. They leave their comrades to the dreadful mercy of the Uruk-Hai and begin to cross the river. Back on shore, traumatized survivors of the Fellowship of the Ring realize that their part in Frodo’s mission is over. In sadness, and relief, they recognize that the fellowship is broken and that, in some real sense, they are too.

It helps to know that J.R.R. Tolkien, as a twenty-year-old youth, spent months in bloody trench warfare on the Somme in World War I. Tolkien’s stories, faithfully brought to life in Peter Jackson’s film, portray the battle scenes with Orcs, the Uruk-Hai, and the Ringwraiths in ways that depict the traumas of men and boys caught in the midst of a monstrous battlefield. Perhaps there are some parallels here with the traumatic experiences of people working in the World Trade Center on September 11, and their survivors. And with the plane crash victims and theirs. And yes, no doubt these patterns of trauma can be matched in the experiences of our enemies, and of some civilians, under our retaliatory bombings and burnings in Afghanistan.

The relevance for ethics of Tolkien’s work lies in the symbolism of the ring as representing those objects of human longing and obsession that can corrupt and weaken moral personhood. The “Ringwraiths” illustrate the damage to moral substance that results from unchecked lust for power, for wealth, or for notoriety. We are weakened morally by the shortcuts we take in striving for control and self-advancement. The Uruk-Hai suggest the madness that results when life is centered on collective hatred and the drive to wreak devastating destruction on those who are other. Tolkien’s complex, disturbing gift helps us see the dynamics of resentment, self-deception and corrupted power. He depicts the moral horror that can result, both from evil intent, and from our responses to it.

These are not bad issues for us to reflect upon in our daily lives and responsibilities, or as we try, as a nation, to move forward from our military victory in Afghanistan in the difficult, long term struggle to defuse terrorism, heal wounds and achieve a lasting peace. And as the world looks for a peaceful resolution of Israeli-Palestinian conflicts.

[ Posted by James Fowler at March 1, 2002 07:31 AM | More Book & Film Reviews articles ]

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