1. Consolation and Dwelling in the Land
I think that one of the saddest things about the modern world... is that people live in a tiny time-slice of the present moment which they carry forward with them, but nothing remains... and there’s nothing in their experience which reverberates down the centuries, because the centuries to them are completely dark—just unillumined corridors from which they stagger with just a single sliver of light.
It was with these words that Sir Roger Scruton began an interview, conducted by Journalist Wim Kayzer for the Dutch public access television program “Beauty and Consolation.” The whole interview is beautifully conducted, and somehow deeply humane in a way rarely encountered in American programming. My favorite part is the first 20-30 minutes, in which we encounter Scruton playing the piano, smoking a cigar in his study, and most delightfully of all, getting ready for and participating in a traditional English country fox hunt. Kayzer seems partially curious, partially baffled by the ritual of the fox hunt, and Scruton extemporaneously answers his questions about it from the back of a beautiful dun mare, dressed in full hunting regalia (coat, boots, and all):
The consolation [of the hunt] for me is... a return to some kind of natural condition of a sort which civilized man has detached himself from. My theory is that the search for beauty is actually an attempt to rediscover that condition which we were in, once, before separating ourselves from the natural order, and hunting for me is part of... being part of one’s species, and not existing as an individual only. All of our unhappiness and alienation comes as a part of attempting to be an individual above everything else, whereas consolation comes when man relaxes into a sense of something greater than oneself, that is, one’s species’ life, and the whole history and eternity that represents. And you do that in conjunction with animals, because they exist in that species’ life.
Scruton goes on to explain that by consolation, he means something beyond “physical comfort,” an experience of “transcendental homecoming” that validates our experiences of suffering and alienation in the world, of “being at peace with the world and with each other.” This, he argues, has become increasingly difficult to find in the nomadic civilization in which many of us find ourselves:
Modern people have been “nomadized” by their civilization. They’ve been set in motion by, first of all, the ease of movement from place to place, the ease of movement from one emotional relationship to the next, the ease of movement simply from room to room and thought to thought, from entertainment to entertainment—nothing stills them or keeps them in place for long enough. Yet all the time this movement is occurring, the hunger is growing more and more urgently within them to bring it to a stop, to stand back, to be one with things, to be where they are, resting, to be “dwelling in the land” as Heidegger would have put it, attached to the place which is theirs and at peace with the people who are theirs. This is something absolutely essential to us, and it goes deep into our species’ being.
This sense of home—which Scruton would later term “oikophilia, the love and feeling of home” in his book
How to Think Seriously About the Planet: A Case for Environmental Conservatism—is something which we cannot make for ourselves: it must be given to us, passed down to us, I might dare to say,
traditioned to us. At least twice during this interview, Scruton ties this back to Heidegger’s concept of “dwelling in the land.” And while Scruton is no great fan of Heidegger, he believes this to be “one of the few things he got right”: That we can only dwell in the land if we build, and only if we build can we truly live with each other. It is on these grounds that Scruton finds modern architecture largely hideous “because it is an architecture for nomads, who sweep through it as though blown on the wind.”
Home is not just any place. It is the place that contains the ones you love and need; it is the place that you share, the place that you defend, the place for which you might still be commanded to fight and die.
Oikophilia is the source of many of our most generous and self-sacrificing gestures. It helps soldiers in battle to give their lives for the benefit of their “homeland”; it animates the place where children are raised, and in which parents make a gift of what they have been given; and it enables neighbors to overlook differences of religion and culture for the sake of their common home
[1]. Things seen in the light of
oikophilia are not to be exploited, surrendered or exchanged
[2].
At several points during this portion of the interview, Scruton identifies the animals involved in the hunt—the horses, the hounds, and even the foxes—as already possessing the “consolation” or sense of “dwelling in the land,” because they lack the alienation which comes from an over-emphasis upon one’s own individuality. Repeatedly, Scruton mentions “closeness to the land,” appealing to man’s primordial, even animal, impulses. The problem with this of course—as Scruton well knows—is that man’s lower desires, what we might call the “passions,” are extremely unreliable, and do not lead us to the life of virtue, peace, and beauty which Scruton idealizes.
To answer this, Scruton suggests that there are three basic ways people try to “relate to the animal in us”: 1) the Way of the Ascetic, which Scruton sees as a renunciation of the animal in us and therefore of our environment and of “dwelling in the land”; 2) the Way of Indulgence, allowing our animal passions to swamp and dominate us (which Scruton sees as being the predominating form today, especially in young people), which leads ultimately to pain and what Scruton calls “nomadization,” as we—like animals—become incapable of building and therefore “dwelling in the land” with each other. The solution, as Scruton sees it, is 3) the Way of the Architect: to use “the animal in us” to give added poignancy to our existence as a self-conscious being, and to build it up into something more
architectural than it would otherwise be. As an example, Scruton cites the elevation of erotic love in the late Middle Ages into the literature and culture of courtly love and romantic poetry.
This basic tension here, one which has been articulated in various ways by theologians, philosophers, and ascetics in various ways could be summarized for our own day and age thus: Having a body—and living in that body—is an essential part of what it means to be a human being, necessary for any sense of “home” which we may then love. Our culture of internet use, entertainment, philosophy, and even (these days) medical practice seems largely concerned with a crypto-Gnostic effort to get our minds out of our bodies, leading to the tragedy of nomadic minds, constantly in motion, as described by Scruton. The problem is that the obvious solution—living more for our appetites and so pleasing our bodies—paradoxically increases our dissipation and dis-integration, and leads exactly to those things which war against the home:
oikophobia (the repudiation of the home), from
technophilia (the urge to obliterate the home with functional appliances), [and] consumerism (the triumph of instrumental reasoning that turns somewhere into anywhere), [as well as] the desire to spoil and desecrate that is one of the permanent diseases of human nature
[3].
It is a paradox present in an oft-quoted line from
The Hobbit, one which used to be painted on the wall of one of my favorite restaurants in my home town (though it has since been replaced by a ghastly mural): “If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.” It’s a wonderful quote, especially for those of us who like Tolkien (and Scruton) feel that the pursuit of greed, and the constant busy-ness of our society (all of which amounts to a love of hoarded gold) has led to the alienation, and ultimately to the destruction, of something vital about our humanity. This quote carries within it the idea that a return to nature, to wholesome food, to fox hunting, to folk songs, and a Wendell Berry-esque vision of country living holds the solution to our pain, that these things will bring about the “merrier world” for which we long.
Or does it? Nobody ever quotes the rest of Thorin’s declaration. The exchange between Bilbo and Thorin, which takes place at Thorin’s death bed, goes like this:
Bilbo knelt on one knee filled with sorrow. "Farewell, King under the Mountain!" he said. "This is a bitter adventure, if it must end so; and not a mountain of gold can amend it. Yet I am glad that I have shared in your perils—that has been more than any Baggins deserves."
"No!" said Thorin. "There is more in you of good than you know, child of the kindly West. Some courage and some wisdom, blended in measure. If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.
But sad or merry, I must leave it now. Farewell!"
In the time that remains to me this evening, I would like to suggest to you two things: the first is that since almost the day of the publication of
The Hobbit, we have misunderstood what this quote means. The second is that Scruton is right about architecture but wrong about asceticism: it not only remains available as a tool to modern people, but it is the
necessary tool
if we are to cultivate any sense of
oikophilia which can be communicated to future generations, if we are in fact to build, to “dwell in the land.” And I believe Tolkien shows us the way.
2. In a Hole in the Ground
“In a hole in the ground, there lived a Hobbit.” Here at the very beginning of
The Hobbit we see the identification between the titular character and his home, the Hobbit hole (which we are quickly told is neither nasty, nor dirty, nor wet, but is in fact a hobbit-hole—and that means comfort). It is important to understand that at the beginning of the Hobbit-stories (by which I mean
The Hobbit and
The Lord of the Rings; there were earlier Middle-earth stories, but most people’s exposure began when the hobbits came in) there is no Shire, no Hobbits-as-Shire-folk. There is really just
The Hobbit, and that Hobbit does not have a homeland, just a home. Thus all Bilbo’s home-longing, all of his
oikophilia, is in relation to the physical location of the hobbit-hole and the physical sensations associated with it, such as the smell of eggs and bacon (mentioned at least seven times throughout the text of
The Hobbit: there apparently seems to be something iconic about that particular meal in relation to Bilbo’s home life).
Our story begins with Bilbo already living the pre-industrial, “close to the land” existence that many of us long for, not a nomad at all, but someone who has the kind of leisure to spend his morning standing in front of his newly painted front door smoking a long-stemmed pipe. We might here ask the question: is Bilbo “dwelling in the land” at the beginning of the story? Does he really have a cultivated sense of “love of home?” The answer seems to be no, for at the beginning of the story Bilbo is not yet a whole person, only two halves of a person: on his father’s side, he is the son of a respectable Hobbit from a respectable family of hobbits, the Baggins, who “never had any adventures.” On his mother’s side, he is the son of the fabulous Belladonna Took, one of the three remarkable daughters of the Old Took:
It was often said (in other families) that long ago one of the Took ancestors must have taken a fairy wife. That was, of course, absurd, but certainly there was still something not entirely hobbit-like about them,—and once in a while members of the Took-clan would go and have adventures. They discreetly disappeared, and the family hushed it up; but the fact remained that the Tooks were not as respectable as the Bagginses...
But the Took side in Bilbo is presented as being deeply atrophied, if not altogether absent, a completion of his character and personhood just waiting for a chance to come out. “The chance never arrived,” we are told,
until Bilbo Baggins was grown up, being about fifty years old or so, and living in the beautiful hobbit-hole built by his father... until he had in fact apparently settled down immovably.
Bilbo is, in other words, alienated from himself. Oh, perhaps not as severely as we experience now in the dissipation of our modern world, but the cozy hobbit-hole and the comforts of his life stop short of making him into what we might call a “whole person.”
Here, if architecture were the real solution (as Scruton suggests), there would be no need for what happens next, no need for any quest. After all, Bilbo is already leading the idyllic life for which so many of us pine. The hobbit-hole is built, and all that remains is for Bilbo to inhabit it. But, as the resulting conversation with the mysterious and even dangerous
character of Gandalf shows, there are problems associated with this sedentary life which prevent it from being a real source of consolation for Bilbo: his perspective is too short, too parochial, such that even the relatively minor inconveniences (compared to what he will later experience) of unexpected party guests and life without pocket handkerchiefs are enough to fill him with consternation. To put it another way: if what you have built cannot weather even very minor storms, the character you have developed is not restful, but only sheltered.
Thorin’s aphorism begins with food and song and ends with hoarded gold; the main narrative arc of the Hobbit begins with food and song and ends with hoarded gold. But the food and song of The Unexpected Party is not, after all, aimed primarily at Bilbo’s comfort, but rather has the opposite effect. It makes the Baggins part of his nature deeply uncomfortable, while simultaneously stirring up the Tookish half with a desire for adventure:
As they sang the hobbit felt the love of beautiful things made by hands and by cunning and by magic moving through him, a fierce and jealous love, the desire of the hearts of dwarves. Then something Tookish woke up inside him, and he wished to go and see the great mountains, and hear the pine-trees and the waterfalls, and explore the caves, and wear a sword instead of a walking-stick...
What we see here is an interruption
of Bilbo’s life by Gandalf, one which brings him through the early stages of ascetic renunciation: the emptying of his larders through hospitality (which, if it is not an ascetic act, it is not really hospitality), the leaving home “without hat or pocket handkerchief,” and the many little things without which he will have to do before he reaches his journey’s end. In fact, the narrator as much tells us that this interruption and its accompanying “losses” constitute the whole theme of the story:
This is a story of how a Baggins had an adventure, found himself doing and saying things altogether unexpected. He may have lost the neighbors' respect, but he gained-well, you will see whether he gained anything in the end.
It’s worth thinking about the various peoples that Bilbo meets along the way: the Elves of Rivendell, Beorn, and the Wood-elves are all strange from Bilbo’s perspective (one could say they are on the margins of his experience), but they are themselves centered, rooted, and have a profound sense of belonging to the place where Bilbo finds them. Even Beorn, who comes from somewhere else, has an almost Bombadil-like authority to name the things in his domain. The Carrock [etymologically this means rock + stone, a portmanteau of two equivalent words from Old English and Welsh] is called the Carrock because that is what Beorn calls it. The Wood Elves too have a profound sense of belonging
to Mirkwood, and even if they are antagonistic towards Thorin & Company, Bilbo is keenly aware that this is because he and the dwarves are the interlopers, intruding into the environment to which the Elves naturally belong. This seems to have something to do with his decision to stand with the Elvenking in the Battle of Five Armies in the second-to-last chapter of the book. The elves, after all, are “good people,” which is never synonymous with “nice” in Tolkien’s legendarium.
It is with this in mind that we must look closely at the character of Gollum. Even before The Lord of the Rings, when Gollum’s backstory was retconned to share his origin with the hobbits, he functions within the pages of The Hobbit
very much as an anti-Bilbo. Like Bilbo, Gollum likes a good meal (though he prefers fish and the occasional young “squeaker” goblin to bacon and eggs). Like Bilbo, Gollum has a home (though his is an island in the middle of a subterranean lake, and almost certainly full of worms). And like Bilbo, Gollum’s relative isolation and quiet (I won’t say peace
and quiet) is interrupted by an unexpected guest—in this case Bilbo himself. The relationship between the two of them runs deep, so that Bilbo was named “burglar” by Gandalf but “thief” by Gollum, a title which both Smaug and Thorin will later apply to Bilbo as well. And, most relevant for our purposes, Golum has a home, but it is one in which he is not really at home.
Gollum does not even belong beneath the mountain to the same degree that the goblins belong beneath the mountain. I’m not saying that Bilbo and Gollum’s experiences were strictly equivalent—practically the first thing we learn about Bilbo’s hobbit-hole is that it has none of the things which define Gollum’s dwelling. But there is acquisitiveness and inhospitality in Gollum—a greedy hunger, a deadly suspicion of visitors—which are exaggerations of Bilbo’s natural passions, which fortunately for everyone involved give way to his good manners. There is a “tunnel-vision” (if you will pardon the pun) in Gollum that is an exaggeration of Bilbo’s shortsightedness and parochial tendencies. Tolkien will develop all of these themes, as well as the close parallels between the Bagginses (in this case Frodo) and Gollum.
Is Gollum “dwelling in the land?” He has a space he calls his own, one which he has built for himself despite some tremendous difficulties, notably the fact that he shares a cave system with an entire city of goblins. But it is clear enough—at least in the post-Lord of the Rings
version of the story, in which Tolkien retconned the entire "Riddles in the Dark"
chapter to increase the importance of the One Ring to the story—it is clear enough that Gollum’s own obsession with the ring, his inability to relinquish it, has led to his being mastered by his passions (represented by his murderous tendencies and unabating hunger, two things which for Gollum are often the same thing). In Gollum, then, we find the most extreme version of what Scruton has called the “nomad,” the double-minded man of St. James’ epistle, who is driven here and there by his passions (and the double-mindedness of Gollum/Smeagol will in fact be one of the defining aspects of his betrayal in The Lord of the Rings). The sedentary “Baggins” part of Bilbo’s hobbit-nature is not enough to correct this, because Gollum represents an excess, a disease, of hobbit-nature.
I said a moment ago that Bilbo passes through a series of ascetic renunciations: these seem to be involuntary right until he loses the buttons off of his waistcoat, which seems nicely (I do not say intentionally) symbolic of all of the missed meals and general denial of his appetites which he has had to undergo up to that point in the quest. From that point forward, the Tookishness seems to take over for Bilbo, so that by the time Thorn and Company get out of Mirkwood they have all come to rely on Bilbo for the solution to most of their problems. Bilbo robs the spiders of their dinner and learns burglary in the halls of the Elvenking, before finally going on to face Smaug. And this brings us to what I believe to be the defining moment in Bilbo’s character:
Then the hobbit slipped on his ring, and warned by the echoes to take more than hobbit's care to make no sound, he crept noiselessly down, down, down into the dark. He was trembling with fear, but his little face was set and grim. Already he was a very different hobbit from the one that had run out without a pocket-handkerchief from Bag-End long ago. He had not had a pocket-handkerchief for ages. He loosened his dagger in its sheath, tightened his belt, and went on.
"Now you are in for it at last, Bilbo Baggins," he said to himself. "You went and put your foot right in it that night of the party, and now you have got to pull it out and pay for it! Dear me, what a fool I was and am!" said the least Tookish part of him. "I have absolutely no use for dragon-guarded treasures, and the whole lot could stay here for ever, if only I could wake up and find this beastly tunnel was my own front-hall at home!"
...
It was at this point that Bilbo stopped. Going on from there was the bravest thing he ever did. The tremendous things that happened afterward were as nothing compared to it. He fought the real battle in the tunnel alone, before he ever saw the vast danger that lay in wait. At any rate after a short halt go on he did; and you can picture him coming to the end of the tunnel, an opening of much the same size and shape as the door above. Through it peeps the hobbit's little head. Before him lies the great bottommost cellar or dungeon-hall of the ancient dwarves right at the Mountain's root. It is almost dark so that its vastness can only be dimly guessed, but rising from the near side of the rocky floor there is a great glow. The glow of Smaug!
Bilbo’s various struggles and increasing acts of courage since he lost the buttons off his waistcoat culminate in his decision to go forward into the dragon’s lair. This is not only the “Took” side that loves adventure, but the steady, stolid, “Baggins” side. With the various acts of asceticism the Baggins side has undergone, we see what was once merely sedentary transformed into something solid. This final transformation makes possible what is perhaps Bilbo’s greatest feat as a burglar: stealing the Arkenstone of Thrain, only to immediately relinquish it to Bard and the Elvenking in order to bring an end to a bloody dispute over treasure. Note that this act earns once and for all not just the title of “burglar” but “honest burglar.” And it is what ultimately allows Bilbo to return home. It is in this context that we must again revisit the dying words of Thorin Oakenshield, King Under the Mountain:
Bilbo knelt on one knee filled with sorrow. "Farewell, King under the Mountain!" he said. "This is a bitter adventure, if it must end so; and not a mountain of gold can amend it. Yet I am glad that I have shared in your perils—that has been more than any Baggins deserves."
"No!" said Thorin. "There is more in you of good than you know, child of the kindly West. Some courage and some wisdom, blended in measure. If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world. But sad or merry, I must leave it now. Farewell!"
Note that it is not the Took side of Bilbo which is glad to have shared in Thorin’s perils—it is “more than any Baggins deserves.” Bilbo has courage (the mature form of Tookish curiosity and love of adventure) and wisdom (the mature form of Baggins earthiness and practicality), both now blended in measure. And this brings us, finally, to what I hope may be a more insightful understanding of Thorin’s aphorism: If more of use valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world. The quest began with Bilbo leaving food, cheer, and song behind specifically for the purpose of reclaiming hoarded gold. Now, any medievalist can tell you that gold occupies a higher rung on the symbolic ladder than food and drink. In that sense, leaving the comforts of home for the treasures at the end of the journey could be read as symbolic of the ascetic journey. I suspect that if the story had been written in the Middle Ages (unless it was written by an Icelander), that is how it would have ended.
If the quest began this way, it ends in the opposite fashion: with Bilbo handing over something far more valuable than hoarded gold (the Arkenstone of Thrain, the Heart of the Mountain) in exchange for preserving food, cheer, and song—not as luxuries, but as the basic necessities of human existence for the Lake-men and for others, for whom the hoard of Smaug means the chance to rebuild in the face of certain disaster. And it is in this way too, not by finding a treasure, but by giving one away, that Bilbo is able to bring his own quest (almost) to an end, making possible the journey home.
Gold is not the evil, here. Hoarded
gold is. And by relinquishing it in a final act of asceticism, I would argue that Bilbo regains at last the real value of his hobbit-hole. He returns from his quest and comes home to a home that is not only worth building, but actually needs rebuilding, as his acquisitive neighbors have carried almost everything away in his absence. Does Bilbo now “dwell in the land?” I can’t speak for Heidegger, but I think that we can say that by Scruton’s definition, he does. Bilbo has succeeded as both an ascetic and an architect: his journey has disciplined his animal appetites and now he is able to build from them something more than what they were before. We don’t see a lot about his life after the quest, at least in The Hobbit, but what we do see is, I think, telling:
Indeed Bilbo found he had lost more than spoons—he had lost his reputation. It is true that for ever after he remained an elf-friend, and had the honor of dwarves, wizards, and all such folk as ever passed that way; but he was no longer quite respectable... He was quite content; and the sound of the kettle on his hearth was ever after more musical than it had been even in the quiet days before the Unexpected Party... He took to writing poetry and visiting the elves; and though many shook their heads and touched their foreheads and said "Poor old Baggins!" and though few believed any of his tales, he remained very happy to the end of his days, and those were extraordinarily long.
Bilbo has come into his own. He inhabits his home as a member of a species, in relation to other species. And if he is not quite respectable among other people who have not made the kinds of journeys he has, he has forever won the love and friendship of elves, dwarves, wizards, and “all such folk”—not as a celebrity, but as “only quite a little fellow in a wide world after all.”
"Thank goodness!" said Bilbo laughing, and handed him the tobacco-jar.
3. To Save the Shire
Almost every theme which has its genesis in the pages of The Hobbit grows to maturity in the pages of The Lord of the Rings. I will go out on a limb here and say that I consider
The Lord of the Rings to be the most widely read, and probably the most important work of ascetical literature written in the twentieth century. The story itself is self-consciously ascetic, concerned not with finding a treasure, but with losing it.
...where am I to go? And by what shall I steer? What is to be my quest? Bilbo went to find a treasure, there and back again; but I go to lose one, and not return, as far as I can see.
When our story begins, we find the initial picture of the Shire has continued from the last paragraph or so of The Hobbit, and is not really the idyllic pre-industrial paradise we would all like it to be, if by that we mean that industrialism and
technophilia
are the origin of all of our human problems. Without spending too much time on specific examples, within the first few chapters of The Fellowship of the Ring, we learn that the hobbits of the Shire are xenophobic, given to overeating, and capable of a host of minor offences ranging from showing up uninvited to someone else’s party to petty larceny. I’m not saying the Shire isn’t a lovely place—obviously it is and obviously it is beloved enough by the main characters of the book for them to consider it worth saving. But it is exactly in that context that we learn that simply trying the “architectural” approach has led the hobbits of the Shire to stagnation:
I should like to save the Shire, if I could—though there have been times when I thought the inhabitants too stupid and dull for words, and have felt that an earthquake or an invasion of dragons might be good for them. But I don’t feel like that now. I feel that as long as the Shire lies behind, safe and comfortable, I shall find wandering more bearable: I shall know that somewhere there is a firm foothold, even if my feet cannot stand there again... this would mean exile, a flight from danger into danger, drawing it after me. And I suppose I must go alone, if I am to do that and save the Shire. But I feel very small, and very uprooted, and well—desperate. The Enemy is so strong and terrible.
This short speech of Frodo’s is vital to understanding his character in The Lord of the Rings, and for keeping track of the “hobbit” threads which are eventually wound amongst the doings of dwarves, wizards, elves, and the long-lost kings of men whom they encounter. And I would suggest that it is also the measure by which the success or failure of Frodo’s quest may be measured: by Frodo’s own admission, it seems to me, saving the rest of Middle-earth would not really matter to Frodo if the Shire were lost in the process. I think we are right to see in this an ascetical oikophilia, a love of home which is willing to sacrifice everything—even the ability to enjoy the home itself—in order to preserve it. This is a self-forgetting love, something stronger even than the drive that sent Odysseus from the arms of an immortal goddess in search of his own home and his own wife.
Frodo’s goal is to save the Shire—this, in spite of the very real character defects of the Shire-folk, and their indulgence of their animal passions. They need an “earthquake or an invasion of dragons” to wake them from their slumber. But rather than awake and expose them to this danger, Frodo takes the “nomadization” of the Shire upon himself. He is willing to be “small, uprooted, and desperate” in the face of the enemy so that the Shire can continue to remain safe and comfortable. Both Bilbo and Frodo begin with a gift that they do not want: the name of “Burglar” in the former case, and the One Ring, in the latter. Bilbo goes to earn his gift; Frodo goes to lose his.
If you are perhaps on the fence about my argument that The Lord of the Rings
reads as an ascetic journey, consider how Tolkien uses the calendar. Many scholars before me have observed that the Fellowship leaves Rivendell on December 25—Christmas Day—and that the quest is completed when the Ring is destroyed on March 25—the Feast of the Annunciation, but also the traditional date ascribed to the Crucifixion. The quest therefore begins on Christmas and ends on Good Friday. It is not too hard to see what Tolkien is doing there. Exactly 40 days before March 25 (reckoning inclusively) is the day that the Fellowship leaves Lothlorien—when Frodo, having been fortified for his journey and with the blessing of the Lady, and provisioned with the bread of elves (if not angels), begins his journey into the literal desert which will strip away everything he has carried with him up to that point. Frodo’s quest, from Lorien forward, is first and foremost a Lenten journey, and it ends in a seeming defeat.
Of the quest itself, I will say little here. We all know the story (at least, I hope we do), and my focus tonight is on home: on leaving home for the sake of home, and on finding it again at the end of the quest. But as an ascetic manual, it is hard to beat. Frodo’s struggle against the Ring seems real to us, and even down to his eventual defeat under the sheer spiritual weight of the thing. Even in defeat. Especially in defeat.
Does Frodo save the Shire? If we’ve only seen the Peter Jackson films, or if (more likely) we’ve allowed those films to cast a spell on us that has slowly eroded our memory of the books, we might forget that Frodo seemed to fail. He has gone to a great deal of trouble to save the Shire, and yet when he returns, he finds it has been spoiled—not by the Ring at all, as it turns out, but by the selfishness and acquisitiveness of its inhabitants.
Now I know some of you will be thinking “it was Sharky that did it!” and you’d be right. But Sharky (Saruman) was only taking advantage of bad actors in the Shire, people like Ted Sandyman and Lotho Sackville-Baggins, who were willing to sell out their home to all of those traditional enemies of oikophilia
that Scruton identifies: technophilia
(the urge to obliterate the home with functional appliances); the old mill is torn down and replaced with an industrial monstrosity; consumerism (followed very quickly by “sharing” that mostly just steals from the fruits of the hobbits’ labor); and the desire to spoil and desecrate (the Party Tree is torn down just for the sheer spite of it). All of these evils, if they are not being perpetrated by actual hobbits by the time Frodo and his friend return, were at least begun by them, and the rest of the Shire—timid, sedentary, afraid—are powerless to intervene.
At least until Frodo returns to rouse them. Quite literally armed with what they have learned along the way, the four hobbits together are more than enough to raise the Shire and deal with Saruman and his ilk. Curiously, Gandalf seems to view this as the whole point of the Quest of the Ring:
You must settle its affairs yourselves; that is what you have been trained for. Do you not yet understand? My time is over: it is no longer my task to set things to rights, nor to help folk to do so. And as for you, my dear friends, you will need no help. You are grown up now. Grown indeed very high; among the great you are, and I have no longer any fear at all for any of you.
This is a strange thing for Gandalf to say if we do not read with Home in mind, if we do not, in fact, take Frodo at his word. He desired to save the Shire. All of the pain and loss he and the other hobbits endured on their journey was to that end. You know the story: Saruman is killed (though not by Frodo), and the Shire is saved.
“I shan’t call it the end, till we’ve cleared up the mess,” said Sam gloomily. “And that’ll take a lot of time and work.”
Sam does clean up the mess, and this is where the architecture comes in. From the ruins of what the Shire has become, Sam turns it into a garden—in fact, a much more beautiful garden than the fantasies of power the Ring had given him in Cirith Ungol—and something more beautiful is born. In place of the Party Tree, there is a Mallorn tree—the only one ever to grow West of the Mountains and East of the Sea. We even see the typical hobbit love for food and good living not just renewed, but somehow purified, like the feast that comes after a long fast, so that the following year young hobbits practically bathe in strawberries and cream, and forever after good vintage in the Shire is known as “Proper fourteen-twenty.” “And no one was ill, and everyone was pleased. except those who had to mow the grass.”
And yet at the end of the story, there is still one more renunciation to be made:
I have been too deeply hurt, Sam [to stay in the Shire]. I tried to save the Shire, and it has been saved, but not for me. It must often be so, Sam, when things are in danger: some one has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them.
Frodo has to leave the Shire—to be healed, and ultimately, to die.
What I have been trying to say in a roundabout way is this: Except a seed falls to earth and dies, it will bear no fruit. Or put another way: whoever keeps his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. Or to put it another way: He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. The Gospels are full of such hard sayings, and yet the effect of the Gospels for more than 2,000 years has been to shape men and women who do in fact love their lives, their fathers and mothers, their sons and daughters—who love, in other words, their homes.
This is the strange, most basic paradox of the Gospel which Our Lord models for us when he humbles Himself, and makes Himself of no reputation, and becomes obedient unto death—even the death of the Cross. And yet it is on the basis of this that all the beauty of Christendom has been built. Within that great “cathedral” there is room and enough for “food and song,” just as there is room for romantic love, but these things were built on the bones of the martyrs.
Scruton says that our idea of the sacred is at the heart of our idea of home. Architecture, I would argue, follows asceticism, and if we are going to create a sense of oikophilia
which is worth passing down to our children, it must begin with self-denial. The monk leaves the world for the sake of the world; the Christian fasts for the sake of his body; the Shire is saved, but not for Frodo.
I think it fitting to close this talk with the story of St. Lucian, who was martyred in A.D. 312 and whom the Church commemorated yesterday (October 15):
St. Lucian was in prison with several of his disciples and other Christians. On the eve of Theophany, Lucian longed, on such a great Christian feast, to partake of the Body and Blood of Christ, for he knew that his death was imminent. Seeing this sincere desire, God Almighty arranged that some Christians pass bread and wine into the prison. When the Feast of Theophany dawned, Lucian called all the Christian prisoners to stand in a circle around him and said to them: "Surround me and be the Church." He had no table, chair, stone or wood in the prison upon which to celebrate the Divine Liturgy. "Holy Father, where shall we place the bread and wine?" they asked Lucian. He lay down in their midst and said: "Place them on my chest, let it be a living altar for the Living God!" And thus the Liturgy was celebrated correctly and prayerfully on the chest of the martyr, and all received Holy Communion. (Prolog from Ohrid)
I love this story. In it, sacred suffering gives birth to sacred space, asceticism to architecture. I’m not sure whether this is a vision of home that Frodo would recognize—but I think Frodo would.
[1]
How to Think Seriously, 239
[2]
Ibid., 256
[3]
Ibid., p. 27
*Presented at the sixth annual 2020 Inklings Festival in Wichita, KS.
