Ursula Le Guin - The Wave in the Mind

A song begins—a kind of limping, sick reversal of Tom Bombadil’s jolly caroling—and he sees, unforgettably, “a long arm groping, walking on its fingers towards Sam… and towards the hilt of the sword that lay upon him.”

He stops thinking, loses his hold on himself, forgets. In panic terror, he considers putting on the Ring, which has lain so far, all through the chapter, unmentioned in his pocket. The Ring, of course, is the central image of the whole book. Its influence is utterly baneful. Even to think of putting it on is to imagine himself abandoning his friends and justifying his cowardice—“Gandalf would admit that there had been nothing else he could do.”

His courage and his love for his friends are stung awake by this imagination: he escapes temptation by immediate, violent (re)action: he seizes the sword and strikes at the crawling arm. A shriek, darkness, he falls forward over Merry’s cold body.

With that touch, his memory, stolen from him by the fog-spell, returns fully: he remembers the house under the Hill—Tom’s house. He remembers Tom, who is the earth’s memory. With that he recollects himself.

Now he can remember the spell that Tom gave him in case of need, and he speaks it, calling at first “in a small desperate voice,” and then, with Tom’s name, loud and clear.

And Tom answers: the immediate, right answer. The spell is broken. “Light streamed in, the plain light of day.”

Imprisonment, fear, cold, and solitude reverse to freedom, joy, warmth, and companionship… with one final, fine touch of horror: “As Frodo left the barrow for the last time he thought he saw a severed hand wriggling still, like a wounded spider, in a heap of fallen earth.” (Yang always has a spot of yin in it. And Tolkien seems to have had no warm spot for spiders.)

This episode is the climax of the chapter, the maximum of stress, Frodo’s first real test. Everything before it led towards it with increasing tension. It is followed by a couple of pages of relief and release. That the hobbits feel hungry is an excellent sign. After well-being has been restored, Tom gives the hobbits weapons, knives forged, he tells them rather somberly, by the Men of Westernesse, foes of the Dark Lord in dark years long ago. Frodo and his companions, though they don’t know it yet, are of course themselves the foes of that lord in this age of the world. Tom speaks—riddlingly, and not by name—of Aragorn, who has not yet entered the story. Aragorn is a bridge figure between the past and the present time, and as Tom speaks, the hobbits have a momentary, huge, strange vision of the depths of time, and heroic figures, “one with a star on his brow”—a foreshadowing of their saga, and of the whole immense history of Middle Earth. “Then the vision faded, and they were back in the sunlit world.”

Now the story proceeds with decreased immediate plot tension or suspense, but undecreased narrative pace and complexity. We are going back towards the rest of the book, as it were. Towards the end of the chapter the larger plot, the greater suspense, the stress they are all under, begin again to loom in the characters’ minds. The hobbits have fallen into a frying pan and managed to get out of it, as they have done before and will do again, but the fire in Mount Doom still burns.

They travel on. They walk, they ride. Step by step. Tom is with them and the journey is uneventful, comfortable enough. As the sun is setting they reach the Road again at last, “running from South-west to North-east, and on their right it fell quickly down into a wide hollow.” The portents are not too good. And Frodo mentions—not by name—the Black Riders, to avoid whom they left the Road in the first place. The chill of fear creeps back. Tom cannot reassure them: “Out east my knowledge fails.” His dactyls, even, are subdued.

He rides off into the dusk, singing, and the hobbits go on, just the four of them, conversing a little. Frodo reminds them not to call him by his name. The shadow of menace is inescapable. The chapter that began with a hopeful daybreak vision of brightness ends in a tired evening gloom. These are the final sentences:

Darkness came down quickly, as they plodded slowly downhill and up again, until at last they saw lights twinkling some distance ahead.

Before them rose Bree-hill barring the way, a dark mass against misty stars; and under its western flank nestled a large village. Towards it they now hurried, desiring only to find a fire, and a door between them and the night.

These few lines of straightforward narrative description are full of rapid reversals: darkness/lights twinkling—downhill/up again—the rise of Bree-hill/the village under it ( west of it)—a dark mass/misty stars—a fire/the night. They are like drumbeats. Reading the lines aloud I can’t help thinking of a Beethoven finale, as in the Ninth Symphony: the absolute certainty and definition of crashing chord and silence, repeated, repeated again. Yet the tone is quiet, the language simple, and the emotions evoked are quiet, simple, common: a longing to end the day’s journey, to be inside by the fire, out of the night.

After all, the whole Trilogy ends on much the same note. From darkness into the firelight. “Well,” Sam says, “I’m back.”

There and back again…. In this single chapter, certain of the great themes of the book, such as the Ring, the Riders, the Kings of the West, the Dark Lord, are struck once only, or only obliquely. Yet this small part of the great journey is integrally part of the whole in event and imagery: the barrow-wight, once a servant of the Dark Lord, appears even as Sauron himself will appear at the climax of the tale, looming, “a tall dark figure against the stars.” And Frodo defeats him, through memory, imagination, and unexpected act.

The chapter itself is one “beat” in the immense rhythm of the book. Each of its events and scenes, however vivid, particular, and local, echoes or recollects or foreshadows other events and images, relating all the parts of the book by repeating or suggesting parts of the pattern of the whole.

I think it is a mistake to think of story as simply moving forward. The rhythmic structure of narrative is both journeylike and architectural. Great novels offer us not only a series of events, but a place , a landscape of the imagination which we can inhabit and return to. This may be particularly clear in the “secondary universe” of fantasy, where not only the action but the setting is avowedly invented by the author. Relying on the irreducible simplicity of the trochaic beat, stress/unstress, Tolkien constructs an inexhaustibly complex, stable rhythmic pattern in imagined space and time. The tremendous landscape of Middle Earth, the psychological and moral universe of The Lord of the Rings , is built up by repetition, semirepetition, suggestion, foreshadowing, recollection, echo, and reversal. Through it the story goes forward at its steady, human gait. There, and back again.

Note (2002): I enjoyed the film of The Fellowship of the Ring immensely, and feel an awed admiration for the scriptwriters who got so much of the story and the feeling of the story into the brevity of a movie. I was sorry not to see the barrow-wight’s hand crawling towards Frodo, but they were very wise to leave out Tom—wise in all their omissions. Nothing was disappointing but the orcs, standard-issue slimy monsters with bad teeth, bah. I expected that the greatest difference between the book and the film might be a difference of pace; and it is. The film begins at a proper footpace, an old man jogging along in a pony cart… but soon it’s off at a dead run, galloping, rushing, leaping through landscapes, adventures, marvels, and perils, with barely a pause at Rivendell to discuss what to do next. Instead of the steady rhythm of breathing, you can’t even catch your breath.