The Name of the Ring; or, There and Back Again

HE N AME OF THE R ING : O R , T HERE AND B ACK A GAIN J ANET B RENNAN C ROFT “T HE WHOLE OF ‘MIDDLE-EARTH’ WAS MORGOTH’S RING” Morgoth’s Ring [MR] 4 . What did Tolkien mean by this somewhat cryptic statement, which appears in an unpublished essay titled Notes on motives in The Silmarillion and nowhere else, and from which the tenth volume of The History of Middle-earth takes its title? Tolkien goes on to explain that Morgoth s power was disseminated throughout Middle-earth that it was nowhere absent though nowhere absolute, and was a prerequisite for using any sort of matter towards an evil magical end. If “rda is Morgoth s Ring, with his power infusing the whole world, and Sauron s relatively smaller power is, in comparison, concentrated in the Ring of his own making MR , what might this imply if we follow this thread to the tangled knot at its end? In Middle-earth, it seems that evil suffers a steady decline from the cosmic to the petty over the course of the long defeat of “rda, in the same way that Verlyn Flieger demonstrates that Light in the legendarium appears in progressively lessening intensities [, e]ach light […] dimmer than the one before it, splintered by Tolkien s sub-creators Splintered Light, . Taking a cue from ”.S.W. ”arootes s essay on the decline of the power of language through the ages of “rda, this paper will use terms describing phases of language from Northrop Frye s The Great Code—metaphoric, metonymic, demotic, and ricorso—to examine the path of the Ring/evil/power/naming complex through its extended diminution as the Ring moves from mythic-level metaphor, through magic, to degradation and destruction—from Morgoth s Ring of all “rda, through Sauron s Ruling Ring, to Saruman s pale imitation of Sauron, and finally to Gollum s sad struggle for mere subsistence. The hobbit Ringbearers—”ilbo, Frodo, and Sam—form a coda to the Ring s diminishment, deflecting the attempted ricorso or return to the start of the ring-shaped cycle, and bringing about the Ring s destruction. Words and language are at the very heart of Tolkien s legendarium, and as Tolkien s fellow Inkling Owen ”arfield puts it in History in English Words, language reveals the evolution of consciousness . Flieger explains in Splintered Light that ”arfield s theory of the ancient semantic unity of literal and metaphoric uses of words, of the interdependence of myth and Mythlore 35.2, Spring/Summer 2017  81 Janet ”rennan Croft language xxi , was an immense influence on Tolkien s thoughts about the evolution of language and underpin the development of both language and racial history in his legendarium. Names are a particularly powerful class of words, and naming is, in Middle-earth, a correspondingly powerful linguistic act. To give ourselves a basic framework to examine the relation of evil and naming as a specific use of language in “rda, let s first explore Frye s linguistic model. FRYE’S MODEL Northrop Frye s classification of story types in Anatomy of Criticism [AC] has frequently been used in Tolkien scholarship.1 Frye organizes literary forms in a cycle myth, romance, high memetic, low mimetic, and ironic, returning to myth again, based primarily on the types of characters in the story, their relation to us as readers, and their power of action, which may be greater than ours, less, or roughly the same . In The Great Code: The Bible and Literature [GC], Frye borrows a schema from Giambattista Vico that closely parallels this cycle of literary forms, and applies it to how language evolves . This sequence neatly echoes what ”arfield called the vast, age-long metamorphosis from the kind of outlook which we loosely describe as mythological to the kind we may describe equally loosely as intellectual thought . The terms Frye uses for the phases of language development are metaphoric, metonymic, and demotic a fourth term, ricorso, marks a return to the beginning. In brief, metaphoric language is mythic and poetic metonymic is allegorical and analogical demotic is descriptive and scientific we will examine these terms in more detail below, and then apply them to Tolkien s legendarium. In the metaphoric phase, subject and object are linked by a common power or energy and there is little distinction between them there is potential magic in any use of words GC . This is the phase of spells, boasts, oaths, and name magic [a]ll words in this phase of language are concrete . This identity of word and thing, word and will, may be expressed most simply as this is that . Let these things ”e, said Ilúvatar, and the word of creation, Eä, and the name of the World that Is are one and the same Silmarillion [Silm.] . ”arfield observed that the farther back language as a whole is traced, the more poetical and animated do its sources appear, until at last it seems to dissolve into a kind of mist of myth - . [E]verything is potentially identical with everything else AC . The world is performed by language, See Hirsch, Burdge and Burke, Shippey, and my own War and the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien. Additionally, Paul Fussell makes extensive use of this classification scheme in The Great War and Modern Memory. 1 82  Mythlore 130, Spring/Summer 2017 The Name of the Ring or, There and ”ack “gain as Ernst Cassirer put it language is the creator of phenomena Flieger, The Mind, the Tongue, and the Tale . In the metonymic phase, abstraction becomes possible as subject and object are becoming more consistently separated GC . This is put for that language becomes a verbal imitation of a reality beyond itself rather than a generator of reality. It becomes prose, typified by dialectic and logic and analogy if this, then that. “s ”arfield might characterize this phase, man was not yet felt, either physically or psychically, to be isolated from his surroundings in the way that he is today . Words can work spells of building and of razing, of disguise and of release ”arootes . Names can be perfomative, like the names ”ilbo gives himself in his riddling game with Smaug web-cutter, ”arrel-rider, clue-finder, Luckwearer what he does, rather than what he is Flieger, Mind . We would not be far off in thinking of the demotic phase of language as a product of the Renaissance, Reformation, and scientific revolution GC , at least in so far as it becomes culturally dominant over the other forms—as the term demotic from the Greek δῆμος, people implies, it has always been used at a basic, concrete, everyday level. Subject and object are clearly separated words become primarily descriptive of an objective natural order . There is a distinction between things that appear and that which makes things appear Flieger, Splintered . [“]strology has changed to astronomy alchemy to chemistry ”arfield , and man comes to see himself purely as a solid object situated among solid objects , and is conscious of himself [as an] observer . “ verbal structure is set up beside what it describes, and is called true if it seems to provide a satisfactory correspondence to it. […] [“] true verbal structure is one that is like what it describes GC . This phase, then, is descriptive the thing evokes the word , and the word has no power to be anything but a word . We can see examples of the process of the diminishment of the power of language in Treebeard s long and metonymic story-name for his home a-lalla-lalla-rumba-kamanda-lind-or-burúmë reduced to Pippin s short, classificatory suggestion of hill, or the fading progression from Laurelinórenan to Lóthlorien to Lórien indicating the land s regressively receding relationship to Time and Change Flieger, Mind . Ricorso, finally, is a return to the beginning, a restarting of the cycle. Frye uses Einstein s famous theory as a marker that points in this direction with the new realization that matter [is] an illusion of energy, we begin to lose that clear separation of subject and object essential to the demotic phase and find science leading us back to the mythical and to the necessity of metaphor for true understanding GC - . ”arfield notes a parallel trend in literature and art where terms like romantic, enthusiastic, extravagant, used in the “ge of Reason to Mythlore 35.2, Spring/Summer 2017  83 Janet ”rennan Croft disparage that which was outside of the realm of reason , started being used with an undertone of reluctant approval and eventually were outright embraced by the Romantic and Gothic movements , with the imaginative sensibility fully rehabilitated as creative in the full religious sense of the word . “ concept from Tolkien s On Fairy-Stories can provide a bit of needed nuance here. Tolkien refers to Recovery as an essential function of the fairy-story, as the regaining of a clear view of objects as things apart from ourselves. Yet he is not referring here to using language in a demotic sense to scientifically describe things that are totally separate from our own bodies and inner life, but to draw us back to deeper, metaphorical meanings at the heart of these things, where language once again creates phenomena—to see the metaphorical Pegasus ennobling the everyday horse, the Trees of the Sun and Moon inherent in everyday trees. The ricorso, the re-turning from demotic to metaphoric language, will open your hoard and let all the locked things fly away like cage-birds, […] and you will be warned that all you had or knew was dangerous and potent, not really effectively chained, free and wild OFS . MORGOTH AND METAPHOR How does “rda become Morgoth s Ring? Through an act of naming. Shortly after the Valar entered into the newly-created Eä, Morgoth, who was then still known as Melkor, announced to them This shall be my own kingdom and I name it unto myself! Silm. - . Thwarted by his desire to imitate Ilúvatar and […] claim the ultimate prerogative of Eru, which is the capacity to create Head , Melkor turns instead to a desire to possess and ultimately destroy the matter of Eä. He began with the desire of Light, but when he could not possess it for himself alone, he descended through fire and wrath into a great burning, down into Darkness Silm. . “s Tolkien further explains in the unpublished Note on motives, [t]o gain domination over “rda, Morgoth had to let most of his power pass into the physical constituents of the Earth , emphasis in original . Gergely Nagy interprets this by saying that Morgoth desire[ed] to produce [his] own meaning, not just interpretations of Ilúvatar s, though this is an impossibility in order to attempt this, he must become involved corporeally, and intend to affect the bodies of others , emphasis in original . This linguistic act of naming is extraordinarily metaphoric, for as Morgoth names “rda to himself, it becomes both a physical extension of his own power, and inseparably a part of himself. Note how pure and unadorned the act is—no spells, no complicated formulae, simply I name it unto myself. Melkor says it is his, and so it is. Later in the essay, Tolkien explains that Morgoth 84  Mythlore 130, Spring/Summer 2017 The Name of the Ring or, There and ”ack “gain attempted to identify himself with [“rda] MR in order to control the physical matter of the world. Melkor incarnated himself as Morgoth permanently —and thus incarnated himself as part of the physical world, becoming identical with it through a metaphorically powerful speech act. This is that, as Frye describes the action of metaphoric language. Tolkien continues Thus, outside the ”lessed Realm, all matter was likely to have a Melkor ingredient , and those who had bodies […] had as it were a tendency, small or great, towards Melkor they were none of them wholly free of him in their incarnate form […]. […] in this way Melkor lost or exchanged, or transmuted the greater part of his original angelic powers, of mind and spirit, while gaining a terrible grip upon the physical world. […] Morgoth s vast power was disseminated. MR , emphasis in original While this is material perhaps never meant for publication, it is supported by the more polished stories included in The Silmarillion. This identification with matter is why Morgoth must be combatted physically, and why his power can never be completely eradicated while the matter of “rda exists. “s Morgoth states in The Children of Húrin, The shadow of my purpose lies upon “rda . The drawback of this identification with matter, however, is profound as Christopher Tolkien explains in the Introduction to The Children of Húrin, [”]eing incarnate, Morgoth was afraid. My father wrote of him “s he grew in malice, and sent forth from himself the evil that he conceived in lies and creatures of wickedness, his power passed into them and was dispersed, and he himself became ever more earth-bound, unwilling to issue forth from his dark strongholds. Narn I Chîn Húrin: The Tale of the Children of Húrin [CoH] the quotation is from Silm. Thus, even though he is a Vala, he can be physically challenged and defeated wounded and made permanently lame by Fingolfin s final blow, or enspelled and made senseless by Lúthien s song CoH . His hands can be burned black, and his iron crown become a weary weight Silm. . Morgoth s own name history has a metaphoric component. His original name, Melkor, means He Who “rises in Might, but Tolkien describes Melkor as having forfeited the right to his original name Silm. . He was renamed by Fëanor, the most powerful of the Noldorian Elves, after Melkor and Ungoliant destroyed the Two Trees of Valinor and stole the Silmarils, three jewels created by Fëanor which contained light from the trees. “t the moment the theft was known, Mythlore 35.2, Spring/Summer 2017  85 Janet ”rennan Croft Fëanor rose, and lifting up his hand before Manwë [the chief of the Valar] he cursed Melkor, naming him Morgoth, the ”lack Foe of the World and by that name only was he known to the Eldar ever after. Silm. The Noldorian elves, at a time when language still holds its metaphoric power, use naming to redefine Melkor in relation to themselves and to “rda Croft, Naming . His exile through the Door of Night and beyond the Walls of the World Silm. can itself be read as a metaphor for the way the power of metaphoric language and naming wanes in “rda removed from his physical connection to and identification with the material world, his metaphoric, this is that power loses its immediacy and is replaced by the metonymic. SAURON AND METONYM Sauron s Ring, in contrast to Morgoth s, represents a concentration of power into an object separate from, and significantly, separable from, its creator. In the metonymic phase, word becomes increasingly separate from concept, though still linked This is put for that thus, One Ring to rule them all rather than I name it unto myself. The Ring can be lost, taken, or stolen it can be separated from its creator in a way that Morgoth s Ring cannot. Its power does not depend on its creator, though its power is at its greatest when he wields it, and in fact he is wedded to a physical reality if he is to be able to use its power Kisor . He cannot even be sure exactly where it is until Frodo puts it on almost in his direct line of sight The Dark Lord was suddenly aware of him, and his Eye piercing all shadows looked across the plain to the door that he had made The Lord of the Rings [LotR] VI. . . How is Sauron s Ring made? He creates an object and empowers it through an act of naming, letting much but not all of his power pass into it. The Ring verse, the spell intoned when the Ring is given its power and engraved on the object itself, treats the words One Ring as a proper name, states the purpose for which it was made, and names it the master of all the other rings. Out of the ”lack Years came the words that the Smiths of Eregion heard, and knew that they had been betrayed LotR II. . Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky, Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone, Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die, One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie. One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie. LotR frontispiece 86  Mythlore 130, Spring/Summer 2017 The Name of the Ring or, There and ”ack “gain The linguistic phase of this spell is metonymic it logically rather than poetically states its argument. Frye points out that verbal magic in this phase aris[es] from a sense of an energy common to words and things, though embodied and controlled in words we can see that the Ring verse depends on a quasi-magic inherent in sequence or linear ordering GC . The Rings to be ruled are precisely itemized, in the ancient and metaphoric lore-verse form, and what the One Ring will do in ruling them is clearly described in more active and modern iambic pentameter.2 Note that this concentration of power into an object means there is not a Sauron-element in all matter, not even his orcs. The orcs have the freedom to contemplate a life separate from their master What d you say?—if we get a chance, you and me ll slip off and set up somewhere on our own with a few trusty lads, somewhere where there s good loot nice and handy, and no big bosses says Gorbag to Shagrat LotR IV. . . ”ut because Sauron inherited the corruption of “rda MR , he already had Morgoth s base to build on, that bit of Morgoth in all matter MR . “s Tolkien elaborated in his notes, Sauron s motive for seeking power is on a lower level than the metaphoric Morgoth represented sheer nihilism, hatred of anything outside himself but Sauron did not object to the existence of the world, so long as he could do what he liked with it MR . His desire was for domination, not annihilation. The metonymic separation of object and subject is evident here as well Sauron wants subjects, other beings under his control, and in order to dominate them, they must be separate from him. In this, Tolkien suggests, Sauron was wiser than Melkor-Morgoth MR . Melkor s power was in a way impotent it was strongest in the physical beginnings of the World but his only notion of dealing with [other wills and intelligences] was by physical force and his only desire was their destruction. Implied here is the fact that while all matter held a Melkor ingredient it also therefore had to include what we might call an Eru element, in that the Valar and the inhabitants of “rda could find something even in matter corrupted by Melkor or Sauron to heal or make beautiful. “nd even where that was not possible, the matter itself still existed. Melkor could never entirely win neither could he ever be entirely defeated. Metaphoric magic works both ways Melkor put his power into matter, and matter had power over him destroying all matter would mean destroying himself. THIS is, indeed, THAT. My thanks to Corey Olson for pointing out the two very distinct verse-forms in the Ring rhyme when this paper was read at MidMoot 3. Wodzak and Holtz Wodzak note that very few incantations, other than the doggerel of Tom ”ombadil, seem to be uttered in any of the stories , listing instead the many spells that seem to be cast by a powerful character s eyes, but this is certainly one of the most obvious linguistic spells. 2 Mythlore 35.2, Spring/Summer 2017  87 Janet ”rennan Croft Sauron, as Tolkien points out, never reached this stage of nihilistic madness MR , in large part through holding himself apart, in metonymic fashion, from what he sought to dominate. While this was wiser in a way, Tolkien does reiterate that he was evil, and therefore stupid . Separation of his power into a physically embodied outside object, as we have seen, meant that it was separate from him and therefore separable, parallel to what he sought to dominate. ”ut through the metonymic link, through this is put for that, the destruction of the Ring still meant the destruction of his power as Nagy observes, in a way the Ring functions as Sauron s body , and his ability to manifest physically, as well as the means of destroying him, are bound up in the metonymic object he has created as separate from himself. Naming patterns associated with Sauron also exhibit characteristics of the metonymic phase. In keeping with the growing but not complete separation of subject and object, Men and Hobbits in particular exhibit a pattern of nameavoidance when referring to Sauron Croft, Naming , instead calling him The Dark Lord or The Enemy. These evasions hark back to the metaphoric phase, in which the name and the thing named are in essence equivalent, and using the true name summons the named being— this is that but in using an avoidance name, a this is put for that, the user metonymically relies on a separation of the name from the essence—hoping that using the avoidance-name will not summon the being referred to. 3 THE DEMOTIC: SARUMAN AND GOLLUM Demotic speech is descriptive and scientific. Its essence lies in how close it hews to reality and truth— the thing evokes the word GC . “ central concern is [t]he problem of illusion and reality , the tension between metaphorical speech elements or thought patterns and objective reality for Like Melkor, Sauron had an original name which was changed when he turned to evil: Mairon, meaning Admirable. However, this name change is not treated as an essential part of his story anywhere in the Silmarillion or History of Middle-earth, appearing only in the notes collected in Words, Phrases, and Passages in Various Tongues in The Lord of the Rings (183, 201), though there is the statement by Aragorn in The Two Towers that Sauron does not use his right name, nor permit it to be spelt or spoken LotR III.1.416). Like Voldemort in the Harry Potter books, Sauron metaphorically denies his prior name and existence, burying it under his new name—though it could be argued that Voldemort does this at a more metonymic level, as his new name is merely an anagrammatic gloss on his birth name (Croft, Naming 158). Still, name-avoidance by those who refer to Sauron is treated as far more important to the tale than his name change, particularly when we take into consideration Gergely Nagy s observation that Ilúvatar, Morgoth, Sauron and the rest of them are mainly narrated through others —the fictional authors, translators, [and] compilers who tell the tales (120) and decide what they think is essential to pass on to the audience. 3 88  Mythlore 130, Spring/Summer 2017 The Name of the Ring or, There and ”ack “gain example, the shorthand metaphor sunset stands in for the accident of our perspective on the position of the sun relative to the rotation of the earth, a more scientific and objective way of looking at it.4 Saruman s speech habits particularly embody a failure to negotiate this gap between illusion and demotic reality. Ensnared by his obsession with a being of metonymic power, in a Girardian case of imitative desire 5 he tries to replicate Sauron s success in putting this for that. ”ut demotic language, the political language of compromise and calculation, as Tom Shippey calls it , has no magic in it. Tolkien made it clear that Saruman s voice was not hypnotic but persuasive, that his use of rhetoric was an attempt to [corrupt] the reasoning powers and that he could be countered by free will and reason Letters - , emphasis in original see also Ruud . In the chapter The Voice of Saruman, the wizard s attempt to persuade Théoden to his position fails utterly because his assertions do not match reality his lies revealed, his voice becomes shrill and cold, he sneers and mocks, and finally crawl[s] away LotR III. . - . Saruman also reveals a parallel between Frye s demotic phase of language and ironic phase of story while in origin a semi-divine character who should be at home in myth, and embodied in a physical form that should at least place him at the romance level, his inability to deal appropriately with the demotic and its built-in preference for true words makes him inferior in power or intelligence, at least to his own conception of himself, and thus places him firmly at the ironic level AC . Saruman claims the title of Ring-maker, in imitation of Sauron and out of his jealousy over Gandalf s possession of Narya Unfinished Tales - , though Gandalf sees a ring on Saruman s finger LotR II. . , we do not learn its name or its powers, find out how or when it was forged, or see it in action. It seems powerless. The Ring of Isengard itself, impressive though it may be, is a tiny thing in comparison to Morgoth s Ring of “rda or even the ring of mountains surrounding Mordor. He fails even at selfnaming he may call himself Saruman Ring-maker, Saruman of Many Colours! LotR II. . , but no one else ever does Croft, Naming because the names have little relation to the truth, and in the end he does not even understand the truth of the nick-name Sharkey given to him by his band of ruffians LotR V. . - . His desire for power is petty, driven by resentment As Clyde S. Kilby points out, both C.S. Lewis and Dorothy L. Sayers remarked that it is as difficult for the scientist as the poet to escape metaphoric concepts in his thought , echoing Frye s comments on Einstein. Even the most dedicated student of celestial mechanics is unlikely to say the earth rotated in such a way that a direct line of sight to the sun from a particular point on the planet s surface was blocked by the curvature of its horizon. 5 See Head. 4 Mythlore 35.2, Spring/Summer 2017  89 Janet ”rennan Croft and revenge alone in the end— mischief […] in a small mean way only LotR VI. . . Gollum, too, exhibits this confusion in naming that places him in a problematic relationship with demotic speech in addition to the obvious Gollum/Sméagol doubling of name and personality, does his catch-phrase my precious refer to himself or the Ring? “s Douglas “. “nderson explains, In the first edition of The Hobbit , Gollum used the phrase my precious to refer only to himself. In the second edition , in which Gollum s role was significantly altered […], the phrase might be taken to refer to the ring, as is often the case in The Lord of the Rings Tolkien, Annotated Hobbit V. n . This ambiguity makes sense at a metaphoric or metonymic level, underscoring how intertwined Gollum and the Ring have become over the centuries. ”ut when Gollum loses the Ring to ”ilbo, it becomes entirely separate from him, and his subsequent use of my precious refers nearly exclusively to the Ring, the thing evoking the word. Yet calling it his Precious never makes it truly his. Gollum is evil at its most trifling level hardly even really evil, simply scrabbling for survival by any means with no concern for morality. Consumed by his desire for the Ring, he does not possess the ability to think at a metonymic level that would allow him to even conceive of using the Ring to control others. The Ring, while precious to him personally, is more importantly a device he can use to turn himself invisible, to make himself uncontrollable by being unwitnessed and unnamed. Gollum is forced into the demotic, into a clear separation of subject and object, by his loss, but he longs to return to the identification of himself with his precious Ring. This is how a ricorso might begin—with a hunger for the return to a unity between object and subject. “t Gollum s level, with his power, this could never result in much more than a return to his former lifestyle, except perhaps with the addition of fish every day, three times a day, fresh from the sea and trivial revenge on Sam LotR IV. . . RICORSO AVERTED: THREE HOBBITS AND THE RING “n interesting characteristic shared by Gollum and Saruman is that they are survivors of an earlier metaphoric or metonymic age. When we turn to the hobbits, however, we find a race that is native to the demotic age, and about as solidly grounded in reality as their hairy feet on the earth can make them. “nd yet in our three hobbit heroes, ”ilbo, Frodo, and Sam, we can see a yearning for an age of poetry and magic and elves—a yearning for the language of the metaphoric phase. ”ilbo makes no attempt to name or really understand the Ring the Ring is firmly separate from him. “s with Gollum, he may have a great desire to possess the Ring and keep it secret, but it is a device to use for his own 90  Mythlore 130, Spring/Summer 2017 The Name of the Ring or, There and ”ack “gain convenience on adventures in his younger days, or to escape unwanted guests on his return to the Shire. There is no metaphor or metonym or merging of person and object in ”ilbo s possession of the Ring. “s far as Frodo and Sam, Gandalf basically names the Ring for them the word and its referent are so disconnected that the wizard must devise tests to see if this is indeed the Ring. His method is thoroughly demotic though research in the archives at Minas Tirith and experimentation with the fire in ”ag End, the proper word can finally be used to refer to the thing at hand The Ring evokes its name. Reading the Ring spell aloud, in this phase, does nothing but make the hearers uneasy while a shadow may seem to cross the sun and the elves stop their ears in Rivendell, the spell has no further power LotR II. . . “nd no words are necessary for ”ilbo, Frodo, Sam, or Gollum to activate the powers of the Ring the power is in the object, not in the words. In spite of the uses both Frodo and Sam make of the Ring within the confines of Mordor, where it is at its strongest, it remains firmly separate from them nearly to the end and they are not tempted to merge with it. It is on the slopes of Mount Doom that the categories begin to slip. Frodo reveals that there is no veil between me and the wheel of fire, using a metaphorical phrase the Ring now appears even before his waking eyes LotR VI. . , becoming more and more a part of him and he more and more a part of it. When Sam and Frodo are attacked by Gollum, there is a suggestion of ambiguity in who exactly orders the creature Down, down! […] Down, you creeping thing, and out of my path! —the voice, to Sam, seems to come out of the wheel of fire positioned in front of his vision of Frodo, and the words would be equally appropriate coming from Frodo or the Ring, or some merger of both VI. . - . Compare this to the scene where Sméagol is initially tamed in Sam s vision then, while Frodo may seem equally tall and stern, there is no wheel of fire and it is clearly and only Frodo speaking, directing Gollum to swear by the Precious, a thing separate from both of them IV. . . “t the Cracks of Doom, when Frodo makes his decision to claim the Ring for his own, he puts it on his finger, physically erasing the separation of subject and object. The Ring is mine! LotR VI. . he declares, recasting the doubtful words he spoke at Rivendell— I will take the Ring, though I do not know the way II. . —into a form of prophecy. ”ut is he not as much the Ring s? There is an echo here of Melkor s act naming Eä unto himself and disseminating his power into matter similarly, Frodo and the Ring are merging into one thing. Gollum severs the connection, returning Frodo abruptly to the individual and the real, a wounded hobbit nearly destroyed by the breaking of his connection with the Ring, fallen upon his knees at the chasm s edge LotR VI. . . Frodo has returned finally to a demotic, clearly demarcated Mythlore 35.2, Spring/Summer 2017  91 Janet ”rennan Croft relationship with the object. Precious, precious, precious! Gollum cries out— but does he mean himself or the Ring as he topples into the fire , reunited both physically and metaphorically? Without the Ring, Frodo is himself again, his burden gone LotR VI. . , and Sam, the most hobbitish of hobbits, in firm practicality leads him from the conflagration and sighs over the imaginary future telling of their tale, in which Nine-fingered Frodo is as clearly separate from the Ring of Doom as ”eren One-hand is from the Great Jewel VI. . —they are objects in adventures, not metaphors. Sam, while appreciating the metaphors of the great tales, remains demotic, and these heroes losses of their bodily integrity, of finger and hand and their associated powers of making and doing, to metaphorically powerful objects means nothing symbolic to him. Frodo, without the Ring s power to make a ricorso so potentially dangerous, sails into the metaphor of the West with ”ilbo. CONCLUSION ”ut is this the end? It may be the end of the Ring as a metaphor and object both, but Morgoth s essence still makes all matter apt to evil, stained, and corrupted. Frye points out that [I]t is the primary function of literature, more particularly of poetry, to keep re-creating the first or metaphorical phase of language during the domination of the later phases, to keep presenting it to us as a mode of language that we must never be allowed to underestimate, much less lose sight of. GC Metaphor can be dangerous in this way, a vast power for good or evil yet, as ”arfield makes clear in Poetic Diction, it is in and by words that we feel and express a sense of separation and […] it will be through the creative power of words that we can return Flieger, Splintered . The Morgoth ingredient that makes all of “rda Morgoth s Ring, then, is a danger ever present in language itself and the temptation of an unwary ricorso to the magical, metaphoric stage— balanced, however, in The Lord of the Rings by the ability of the Hobbits to yearn for and love the metaphoric level of language while keeping their demotic feet firmly on the ground. 92  Mythlore 130, Spring/Summer 2017 The Name of the Ring or, There and ”ack “gain WORKS CITED ”arfield, Owen. History in English Words. . New edition, Faber and Faber, . ”arootes, ”.S.W. He Chanted a Song of Wizardry Words with Power in MiddleEarth. 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Words, Phrases and Passages in Various Tongues in The Lord of the Rings, edited by Christopher Gilson, Parma Eldalamberon # . Tolkien Trust, . Wodzak, Michael “. and Victoria Holtz Wodzak. Visibílium 2mnium Et Invisibílium Looking Out, On, and In Tolkien s World. Tolkien Studies, vol. XI, , pp. - . ABOUT THE AUTHOR J ANET B RENNAN C ROFT is Head of “ccess Services at Rutgers University libraries. She is the author of War in the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien winner of the Mythopoeic Society “ward for Inklings Studies , has published articles on Tolkien and other topics in a variety of journals, and is editor or co-editor of several collections of essays, including Tolkien on Film: Essays on Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings , Tolkien in the New Century: Essays in Honor of Tom Shippey , Perilous and Fair: Women in the Work and Life of J.R.R. Tolkien , and Baptism of Fire: The Birth of the British Fantastic in World War I . https //rutgers.academia.edu/JanetCroft Illustration © 94 6 by Patrick Wynne, first published in Mythlore 46.  Mythlore 130, Spring/Summer 2017