A Close Reading of LotR – Episode 8 – Echoing Eyes
Dec. 7th, 2025 08:31 pm![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
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And now, it ends. We finish our close reading of The Fellowship of the Ring with chapters VIII – Farewell to Lórien, IX – The Great River and X – The Breaking of the Fellowship, moving from a last little bit of elven sorrow into the next part of the quest.
For this part, as a little celebration, we had our own hobbity snack feast while discussing the chapters, enjoying potato and rosemary sourdough with a variety of cheeses, chutneys, meats and cake, and a large pot of tea. It felt appropriate, and more importantly an entirely delightful way to spend an afternoon. I would highly recommend.
The content of these chapters was somewhat less cheery than our snacking, though.
I don’t want to linger too much on elven sadness here, because I covered that plentifully previously, but there is a reprise of it, and there are some proper banger lines that come with it. I noted before about the uncomfortable conclusions I draw from all the elven sadness and Tolkien’s conservatism. Even knowing that, even having those thoughts so recently in my mind, I could not escape in the moment of reading nonetheless being pulled into feeling the sorrow of the passing of the elves from the world by the power of Tolkien’s prose. When it comes to the things he cares deeply about – and I think at this point it’s obvious that the elves being lost to the world is very much one of them – he’s good at mashing the emotions button with how he chooses to put it down on the page. We get a number of examples here, but I think the one that worked best on me was this, on Galadriel herself:
She seemed no longer perilous or terrible, nor filled with hidden power. Already she seemed to him, as by men of later days Elves still at times are seen: present and yet remote, a living vision of that which has already been left far behind by the flowing streams of Time.
What also hit me about this, and the other pieces in this chapter on the passing out of the world of beautiful things, was a connection I had never explicitly drawn before in my mind – how clear this line is between Tolkien and Guy Gavriel Kay’s return in his work to the passage of time and the loss of beauty. I was struck, reading that quote above, with a thought of the mosaic in a chapel we see in two of his books. The first when new, and the second, many years later, of that same mosaic left untended to crumble into ruin, but still with its faded beauty there for someone to see, and to wonder at what once was. This is hardly a stunning or new revelation, by any means, but I am interested that I never quite connected these two particular dots before, especially given that that theme of Kay’s is one of the things I find most effective and evocative in his work. Sometimes things need to be held up to the light in just the right way to catch the brain, I suppose, and this was that particular illumination for me.
The other key thing this chapter highlighted – as Galadriel gives her gifts to the fellowship – is something that has been cropping up in places throughout the book so far, but which is emphasised particularly here and in the next two chapters: the extent to which Aragorn has been picking up kingship by slow degrees through the story.
Galadriel gives him first the gift of a scabbard, but asks if he wants anything more, knowing that they will not meet again in the living world. Though she cannot give him his earnest desire – unnamed, but unsubtly Arwen – what she does do is pass him a a set gem which was left here for Aragorn should he ever pass. Along with it, and more crucially, she says:
‘This stone I gave to Celebrian my daughter, and she to hers; and now it comes to you as a token of hope. In this hour take the name that was foretold for you, Elessar, the Elfstone of the House of Elendil!’
Following which:
Then Aragorn took the stone and pinned the brooch upon his breast, and those who saw him wondered; for they had not marked before how tall and kingly he stood, and it seemed to them that many years of toil had fallen from his shoulders.
With brooch and name, he has shown himself a little more the thing he is fated to be. Just as when he took Andúril, the acquisition of a signifier of his future role makes plain to those around him that he is becoming something else than he has been accustomed to be, and to be seen as. This is kingship as performance – he takes on the mantle and stands, decides, speaks as one who has come into his power – but also as a status that requires physical manifestations, tokens that show his power in the world, but also demonstrate that he has taken the steps and been legitimised in that role by the right powers. In a section rich in nods to Anglo-Saxon historical practices (there’s mead, weaving, cups being shared and the act of gift giving here), it does not seem particularly out of kilter to think that Aragorn’s progression into the role of king also echoes history somewhat.
Which is particularly interesting in a book so clearly fixated on blood and identity1. Aragorn is king by right because of his unbroken lineage to Elendil. He is of the men of Númenor. These are both incredibly important, and often mark him out as special, even aside from his claim to the throne of Gondor. But, these moments of ritual seem to say, that bloodright alone is insufficient. That bloodright has sat with every ancestor before him back through the line. Aragorn, however, is the one who is doing all these steps and actively taking up the mantle of the kingship – because king is a thing you do, not just a thing you are. So Galadriel’s gift to him – this bestowing of a name that marks him as having reached a step in his fated journey – is part of that performance, a part of collecting about himself the signifiers that mark him, outwardly, as the king he both is and will be.
A little later, having made their way down the river, the Fellowship find themselves at the Argonath, and this comes to the fore as Aragorn marks the connection, and that this is the first time he goes into the land of his birthright under his own, true name:
Frodo turned and saw Strider, and yet not Strider; for the weatherworn Ranger was no longer there. In the stern sat Aragorn son of Arathorn, proud and erect, guiding the boat with skilful strokes; his hood was cast back, and his dark hair was blowing in the wind, a light was in his eyes: a king returning from exile to his own land.
‘Fear not!’ he said. ‘Long have I desired to look upon the likenesses of Isildur and Anárion, my sires of old. Under their shadow Elessar, the Elfstone son of Arathorn of the House of Valandil Isildur’s son, heir of Elendil, has naught to dread!’
And so he has taken up not just the physical tokens of kingship and his name, but his lineage too. Here, in his land, he names his connection and his role, and takes up the pieces of his identity that are past, as well as future.
I had the perhaps fanciful notion – with which Ed was not entirely on board, I will admit – that this progression through the book of his collection of unique, valuable and symbolic items, and now the bestowal of a name and declaration of heritage as he comes into his kingdom, perhaps represents a slow coronation ritual that he undergoes all the way from Rivendell to Minas Tirith. Are the sword and the stone truly so different from the sceptre and the orb? I like this reading, so I shall keep it, even if it might be a little silly.
Regardless of what quite it signifies, it threads through this last piece of the book that the character we met as Strider is Strider no more. Or not only. Frodo is not the only one who has undergone change through this journey.
The other character who stands out in the gift-giving, for rather different reasons, is Gimli. While the others have gifts prepared for them, Galadriel is unsure what a dwarf could possibly want of her. What proceeds comes straight out of Arthurian romance – the request for a strand of her hair to treasure, and to pass down as an heirloom, and a “pledge of good will between the Mountain and the Wood until the end of days”. This hair he describes as surpassing “the gold of the earth as the stars surpass the gems of the mine” – twice over highlighting the signifiers of both dwarves and elves. This whole section – several paragraphs of dialogue – is particularly formal in tone, rich in symbol, and seemingly out of keeping with much of the text. And that is its strength. Tolkien is consciously harking back to a certain type of story, a certain type of request, and his language slips a little into the mode of the thing to better evoke it.
While it does not escape the unpleasant characterisation of the dwarves entirely – Galadriel’s hope for Gimli’s future is “your hands shall flow with gold, and yet over you gold shall have no dominion” – it is an interesting contrast to their portrayal in The Hobbit, where the gold sickness is far more prominent a characteristic. Gimli acting as the romantic hero, the knight errant with his formal courtesy and careful flattery of the high lady, offers another angle on his character, and on the people he represents. Does this assuage the previous racism? Of course not. But it suggests perhaps that Tolkien’s approach in the intervening years may have gained a modicum of nuance.
This connects, unfortunately, to Celeborn’s speech here. As they ready to leave, he offers them boats to take, and indicates that there are those among them who can handle them. He does this by linking them to their people – Legolas can boat because the elves of Mirkwood know their river, Boromir because he is of Gondor, Aragorn because he is of the Rangers. Alone, this feels neither here nor there (and perhaps can be taken as a way of giving the reader some insight into their peoples through them, rather than purely their own skillsets, a little hand gesture of wider worldbuilding), but it is not alone throughout the book, and exists within a lingering tradition (looking at you D&D) of fantasy racial essentialism, where one’s skills, abilities and preferences are determined by one’s race or one’s people. It suggests that, if Legolas can handle boats because he is and elf of Mirkwood, that being an elf of Mirkwood has a homogeneity to its legacy and imprint on its people that seems out of keeping with my experience of the world.
And yet, as Tolkien often does, he goes on to undercut this immediately. After Celeborn speaks, Merry pipes up immediately to say that he, too, knows how to handle boats. Which we, the readers, already know – not all hobbits are wary of water, as we learned before we left the Shire. As above, does this entirely resolve the sense that often comes through in the story that heritage is destiny? No. But it goes some little way to saying that Tolkien allows complexity to exist within it. A complexity that a lot of the works that exist in the fantasy lineage after him entirely fail to incorporate.
So far I’ve been quite heavily focussed on the first of the three chapters, and indeed I think there is a lot in that one worth lingering on. The following two are a return to travelling through the landscape, about which I’ve talked plenty. It is possibly interesting to note that this may be the first truly unpeopled land they go through – even the empty places previously bear witness to those who have lived there before – and also a land they travel past rather than through. They float along the river seeing this wild place, but do not interact with it directly until they reach the borders of Gondor’s hold, and the ruins of a place that once was worked by human hands. The true wilderness, the one that has never borne the touch of people, is a place not worth daring the visit, perhaps.
But while there’s less to discuss, there’s not nothing. One of the key things that crops up again and again through this chapters is the idea that the fellowship are avoiding making a critical decision, and that they are taking an easier way out for as long as possible, and may choose to continue to do so. The decision to go east or west, to journey to Mordor or Minas Tirith, has been and is posed repeatedly. Boromir makes clear his position. But Aragorn and Frodo seem undecided, and reluctant to make the choice at all.
That Tolkien characterises Minas Tirith as the easy path – and he lingers on the idea that they could find respite there for a time to emphasise this – feels like an interesting choice. We’ve been with these people long enough now to start thinking of at least some of them as heroes. But that does not mean they are infallible, and cannot be tempted into avoiding the harder and more dangerous things before them. There’s no sense of blame in it, and Minas Tirith has been proferred as a legitimate and reasonable option throughout. But it now starts to build that this isn’t the right path, foreshadowing a choice to come.
And, of course, foreshadowing Boromir’s part in Frodo’s choice. His determination to go to Minas Tirith has been peppered through the last few chapters, and arises more and more here. But what now builds with it is his belief that the Ring, and its bearer perhaps, ought to be going with him. This culminates in a slow and, to my mind very well crafted, scene in which he first attempts to persuade Frodo and then eventually snaps, and tries to take the Ring from him, before awakening from his madness to regret.
That he will be overtaken by his wanting in spite of reason or wisdom has been well foreshadowed, and his arguments become sinister as he makes them. But one line stands out to me against the backdrop of these:
‘And they tell us to throw it away!’ he cried. ‘I do not say destroy it. That might be well, if reason could show any hope of doing so. It does not. The only plan that is proposed to us is that a halfling should walk blindly into Mordor and offer the Enemy every chance of recapturing it for himself. Folly!’
And… well… is he wrong? What has he seen so far of Frodo that would lead him to believe that he could undertake this monumentally dangerous journey? It is absolutely clear that he has been overcome by desire for the power of the Ring, it’s true. But there is a seed of reason at the heart of it, just as there is a seed of good aims, a drive to do the right thing, that has been twisted into this rapacious wanting.
There are two mirrored scenes that this connects to. The first is Galadriel a few chapters back, when Frodo offers the Ring up to her. Like Boromir, she is motivated by pure desires, wanting to take down their enemy, drive him and his power from the land. But unlike Boromir, she knows that the Ring will take this desire and twist it, and that if she used its power, it will end with her twisted too, a dark queen, rotted out by the use of a power that cannot be trusted. And so she refuses and passes the test. Boromir, who has repeatedly been shown to be very set in his beliefs about how the world works, how the Enemy can be defeated, what is worth doing and by whom, cannot see himself out of those trammelled views and so is captured in the Ring’s siren song, and seeing Aragorn, or himself, as the wielder it needs to call up the Men of Gondor to ride against Sauron.
Which brings us to the other mirror – Aragorn. When the rest of the party realise Frodo is missing, they determine that they must stop him leaving, they must find him, they musn’t let him go. But Aragorn alone pauses to wonder, maybe the decision should be left to Frodo, maybe they should just let him make it and go.
On the face of it, this seems slightly mad. To let a hobbit, someone who doesn’t have particular training or experience alone in the wilds, make such a vital and dangerous journey alone seems bonkers. But it sits in opposition to Boromir’s rational concern that turns to trying to exert his own will on the situation. His concern may be a reasoned one, but his actions are ill. Aragorn’s willingness to let Frodo go alone seems out of kilter with the facts as we know them, but demonstrates a quality he shares with the others we have been shown are wise so far in the story: openness to possibility. Maybe this situation isn’t one for big armies and men with swords. Maybe a hobbit can be the thing they need. Maybe something else, something different, something new.
And we have seen in previous chapters that, like Frodo and Gandalf, Aragorn too sometimes can connect to the knowledge of the world outside of himself, gain wisdom and feelings of the shape of the narrative that are beyond him. He was the one, when they went into Moria, who felt something about Gandalf’s impending fate. Perhaps his connection to that sense of fate drives him here.
Boromir is not open – not to possibilities outside of his experience, nor to the touch of that Unseen World and its knowledge. His is constrained by his worldview, and that is his undoing. He progresses from gentle persuasion, to bullying, to physical threat, and fails in the ideal of himself he holds to be true. The Ring has driven him to it, yes, but as we see through the story up to this point, it works on what was already there at least in part. And so the conversation between them feels all the more real because it draws so heavily on character work done on Boromir throughout the story so far.
It also makes plain that, as has been hinted before, Frodo already had made the decision to head to Mordor. Looping back to that theme of avoidance, he knew his desire to go to Minas Tirith was “the way that seems easier” and “refusal of the burden that is laid on [him]”. The conversation with Boromir serves then not only as his character journey, but an externalising of Frodo’s decision-making, where the decision is not go or stay, but to bring himself to actually do the thing he knows he needs to do. The threat Boromir suddenly presents forces him to make the decision he had fully made, to act on his instinct to do the right thing.
Which brings him, in his flight while wearing the ring, up the hill of Amon Hen, the Hill of the Eye of the Men of Númenor. Whether because of some innate power of the hill or his access to the Unseen World as ringbearer, this position gives Frodo a sudden escape from his singular viewpoint and a grasp of the wider scope of the story – out to many of the other players in the game like Isengard, Rohan, and Minas Tirith, and out further to Mirkwood and the land of the Beornings and Harad. Right here, at the end of the story, he grasps the full scale of what’s at stake and what turns towards this great problem. And as he does so, as he stands on the Hill of the Eye, his is matched and mirrored himself by the Eye of Sauron, who becomes aware of his gaze looking out across the world, and reaches out power and focus to find him. At this point, he feels conflicting voices within himself, whether the seduction of the Ring and his own wisdom and will, or perhaps the influence of Sauron and some other, more kindly force (my read on this is that perhaps it is Gandalf), and chooses to take off the Ring and step out of sight just in time. And then, finally, he is resolved to do what he must.
This ending, with two powers looking out from their respective high places, I can’t help but think of as a little foreshadow of what’s to come in the next book, as well as an effective (if not awfully subtle) demonstration of the good and evil working in the world and in the story. All that is left is for Sam to find him and resolve to accompany him, and the story is ended.
But because this is the last session for the book, this is not where my thoughts end – I have some general wrap ups to do as well2.
In no particular order, the things that linger with me from rereading The Fellowship of the Ring with such a close focus are:
How much the fandom conception of it, the way it is generally talked about in discussions I see, differs from the reality of my experience of it as a text, in many ways. The one that stands out most strongly is the criticism often thrown that there is SO MUCH poetry to be skipping, for the people who don’t like it. Now that I’ve finished, I’m struck by the opposite – how little there seems to be in comparison to all the grumbling. Like many big touchstones, the version of the text that lives in the popular imagination does not always resemble the thing itself. I’ve been watching some Star Trek recently, and the comparison that seems apt is how fandom’s view of Captain Kirk, iterated over and over into a caricatured version of whatever consensus was once reached, no longer seems to map to the character as one experiences him in his context. Likewise, this text, especially in light of the effect of the films, does not entirely map onto the thing I see discussed frequently, and I think I need to hold that thought in mind, to remember the text as the complex, textured, often beautiful thing it is to my mind.
This is especially true for how open, fluid and slippery the story is willing to be, and how open to metaphorical readings rather than literal. These are both things I deeply appreciate in texts, and both things that are often missing from Tolkien’s subsequent imitators. I must not judge the book by what came after it, and must remember that not all those later works took the same key things I found in the books away with them. Where I value that complexity, fluidity and abstractness, they may have lingered on perhaps the arc of the epic, or the worldbuilding.
Which is another big thing I hold onto now I’ve finished. There is the common view that Tolkien is a worldbuilder before all else, that he wrote a story to give people to speak his made up languages and live in his made up world. That… is not my experience of him reading now. As I said in one of the previous sessions, I think instead the heart of his work is the recreation of something in the region of… not quite theme. Perhaps the sense, the feeling of a certain type of ancient story, evocation of the spirit of a type of myth. The worldbuilding, the language, the maps, all of those concrete pieces feel to me as tools that bend to this ultimate goal, rather than ends unto themselves, and I think that is what makes the story what it is. The worldbuilding is indeed rich and dense and beautiful, but it is purposeful, and it needs that purpose to be as good as it is. This is my belief now, and one I shall hold close, and fight for.
My last thought, the one that stuck out to me today as we were discussing our final thoughts, is a wider one. Reading Tolkien of course prompts wider thoughts about Fantasy as a genre, because of its position within the canon and the megatext. One of the things I’ve been thinking about recently is the idea of SFF as being defined as a genre in conversation with itself – the texts that draw upon one another to form a corpus. Reading The Fellowship of the Ring now, seventy years after its original publication, makes clear to me how little of that genre is in direct conversation with this specific text anymore. Maybe in dialogue with the works several iterations down the chain of conversation. Maybe in conversation with Tolkien and his work as a set of ideas. But the work on the page, here, feels no longer close to the fantasy I read published now. And if that’s so, if that gap has widened out, how much does that definition of SFF hold true? We’ve marched on, into new places. The lens of the now has shifted away from the things this one guy cared about, his love of walking, his obsession with landscape, the way he thinks about good and evil, the way he uses language. The legacies are still there, of course, but this text and its legacies no longer feel so close as they once might.
That definition of genre is one that doesn’t quite work for me. Finishing this close reading is just giving me another angle to pick at it from, another way it does not fit the nebulous shape of how I want to think about genre that is, slowly, forming. It’s not there yet. Maybe it never will be fully. But the process of thinking about it is a productive one, just as the process of coming back to this text, this strange, beautiful, uncomfortable, difficult, fascinating text, is.
There is an awful lot here to linger on, to pick at, word by word, between two people who want to dig into the depths of it. Reading a text like this, one that has the richness and complexity to support that unpicking, is a joy, even when not all to be found is good. I think the process is making me a better reader, and it has brought me closer to a text I once found impenetrable. I have finally, with help, in wonderful ongoing conversation, got under its skin. Even if I’m not sure about SFF as a genre in conversation with itself, it is within conversation about and within it that I find myself most enriched by its works and its ideas. That conversation is, for me, the best of reading.
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