The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Volume 3: Reader’s Guide PART 2 - Christina Scull

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B). Saruman falls, and his words as he tempts Gandalf to join him seem to embody the deceits, lies, and corruption of those who will do anything to obtain power or to gain the attention of those who have power:

      A new Power is rising …. We may join with that Power. It would be wise, Gandalf. There is hope that way. Its victory is at hand; and there will be rich reward for those who aided it. As the Power grows, its proved friends will also grow; and the Wise, such as you and I, may with patience come at last to direct its courses, to control it. We can bide our time, we can keep our thoughts in our hearts, deploring maybe evils done by the way, but approving the high and ultimate purpose: Knowledge, Rule, Order; all the things that we have so far striven in vain to accomplish, hindered rather than helped by our weak or idle friends. There need not be, there would not be, any real change in our designs, only in our means. [bk. II, ch. 2]

      In a late work, *Notes on Motives in the Silmarillion, Tolkien commented that Morgoth had ‘a vast demiurgic lust for power and the achievement of his own will and designs, on a great scale’. When ‘confronted by the existence of other inhabitants of Arda, with other wills and intelligences, he was enraged by the mere fact of their existence, and his only notion of dealing with them was by physical force, or the fear of it. His sole ultimate object was their destruction.’ He endeavoured ‘to break wills and subordinate them to or absorb them into his own will and being, before destroying their bodies. This was sheer nihilism, and negation its one ultimate object’ (*Morgoth’s Ring, pp. 395–6). In contrast, ‘Sauron had never reached this stage of nihilistic madness. He did not object to the existence of the world, so long as he could do what he liked with it’ (p. 396). He desired to dominate the ‘minds and wills’ of the ‘creatures of earth’ (p. 395). Sauron’s corruption of the Númenóreans, which led to the destruction of *Númenor, was ‘a particular matter of revenge upon Ar-Pharazôn’, for his humiliation of Sauron. But ‘Sauron (unlike Morgoth) would have been content for the Númenóreans to exist, as his own subjects, and indeed he used a great many of them that he corrupted to his allegiance’ (p. 398).

      In Tolkien: A Cultural Phenomenon (2003) Brian Rosebury comments, regarding the despotism of both Saruman and Sauron, that the ‘keynote’ of evil is ‘aggrandisement of self and negation of not-self’, achieved

      through the enslavement and torture of other persons and the destruction of growing things. There is only one form of political order, a military despotism which terrorises its own soldiery as well as its enemies; sexuality is loveless, either diverted into sadism or confined to the organised breeding of warriors; economic life is based on slavery, and is devoted not to the cultivation, but to the exploitation, and ultimately the destruction of resources. Industrial processes are developed solely for the purposes of warfare and deliberate pollution. [p. 45]

      Katharyn W. Crabbe comments in J.R.R. Tolkien (rev. and expanded edn. 1988) on the power shown by Sauron that it

      goes beyond the simple acquisitiveness of The Hobbit to include the ultimate control – control over being. Sauron’s power, or the power he seeks, is a power that parodies the power of the creator. Rather than create, Sauron will destroy; rather than set free, he will enslave; rather than heal, he will harm. The desire of Sauron to make everything in Middle-earth less than it is capable of being is clear in his repeated threats to ‘break’ captives, in the ruined and desolate lands that were once fertile and productive …. [p. 86]

      Meredith Veldman points out in Fantasy, the Bomb, and the Greening of Britain: Romantic Protest 1945–1980 (1994) that

      Saruman’s faith in ‘a lot of slaves and machines and things’ reflects his failure to see other beings in their wholeness and individuality. The Mordor spirit reduces individuals to an undifferentiated mass in need of regimentation. Saruman’s fall begins with his desire for power in order to do good, but he demands to be able to dictate to others the timing, scope, and scale of this goodness …. Such a desire to dictate, even for the good, stems from the urge to dominate, the ‘will to mere power’ embodied in the Ring and triumphant in Mordor ….

      Because it regards other creatures as slaves rather than allies, the ‘will to mere power’ incarnate in Sauron annihilates individual freedom and choice. Sauron reduces those in his power to mere pawns to satisfy his own insatiable hunger for total domination. In contrast, the good achieve victory by recognizing the importance of individual choice and action. The corrupted Saruman would have ‘the Wise’ determine the course of events, but the unfolding of The Lord of the Rings reveals the significance of the actions of small and weak individuals. [pp. 83–4]

      Anne C. Petty discusses use of innate and external power at length in the chapter ‘The Use and Abuse of Power’ in her Tolkien in the Land of Heroes: Discovering the Human Spirit (2003). She notes that ‘as a talisman of power, the Ring is both actual and symbolic. It represents what happens when concentrated power (especially in a technological sense) takes our imaginations in frightening directions. The inference to weapons and industries of war in our technological age is applicable, although not allegorical. For Tolkien, the Ring served as a symbol of desire for pure power, wielded through deception … and technology …’ (p. 155).

      ‘Pre-Fëanorian Alphabets’ see Writing systems

      SYNOPSIS

      In the first of the essay’s two parts, ‘On Translation and Words’, Tolkien comments that although Clark Hall’s text is a ‘competent translation’ of Beowulf it is no substitute for reading the poem itself – a great poem whose ‘specially poetic qualities’ cannot be caught in prose, and which in Modern English may lose the shades of meaning present in the original Old English. ‘For many Old English poetical words there are (naturally) no precise modern equivalents of the same scope and tone: they come down to us bearing echoes of ancient days beyond the shadowy borders of Northern history.’ Thus, for instance, Old English eacen, rendered by Clark Hall variously as ‘stalwart’, ‘broad’, ‘huge’, and ‘mighty’, originally meant ‘not “large” but “enlarged”, an addition of power, beyond the natural, whether it is applied to the superhuman thirtyfold strength possessed by Beowulf … or to the mysterious magical powers of the giant’s sword and the dragon’s hoard imposed by runes and curses’ (pp. 49, 50). Another difficulty for the translator is Old English descriptive compounds such as sundwudu ‘flood-timber’ (i.e. ‘ship’) and swan-rad ‘swan’s-road’ (‘sea’), which are ‘generally foreign to our present literary and linguistic habits’ (p. 51).

      Tolkien warns the translator against ‘colloquialism and false modernity’. ‘If you wish to translate, not re-write, Beowulf, your language must be literary and traditional: not because it is now a long while since the poem was made, or because it speaks of things that have since become ancient; but because the diction of Beowulf was poetical, archaic, artificial (if you will), in the day that the poem was made.’ But ‘words should not be used merely because they are “old” or obsolete’ (p. 54). (For a related discussion by Tolkien of deliberate ‘archaism’ in *The Lord of the Rings, see his letter to *Hugh Brogan, September 1955, Letters, pp. 225–6.)

      In the second part of the essay, ‘On Metre’, Tolkien discusses metre and alliteration in Old English poetry.

      HISTORY

      Probably in 1935 Tolkien’s B.Litt. student *M.E. Griffiths suggested to George Allen & Unwin (*Publishers) that they issue a

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