Pity’s Clarity and Tolkien’s Vision for the Life of All

Gollum by Denis Medri

Pity is the most prominent guide within J.R.R. Tolkien’s stories of Sauron’s slow defeat. It keeps the hearts of Sauron’s greatest enemies on target to accomplish the defeat of his one ring’s tyrannical power, and this pity extends to even the most miserable lives that have been pressed into the service of Sauron. Gandalf famously commends and counsels pity toward Gollum. More ultimately, however, Gandalf reveals that his own heart is guided by a pity that includes every life that Sauron has enslaved. After Gandalf tells Denethor that he should not think only about the realm of Gondor but also of “other men and other lives, and time still to be,” Gandalf concludes: “And for me, I pity even Sauron's slaves.” The only reasonable reading of this passage is that even the creatures reduced to orcs and wraiths come within the scope of Gandalf’s love for every kind of life.

Specifically, this all-embracing pity is the inner source that Gandalf points to for whatever wisdom he possesses. This kind of love is what has brought Gandalf to the place of ultimate responsibility among the five Maiar (lesser angelic creatures) who were sent into the crushed and warped world for the guidance of the elves and men that still withstood the evils of Melkor’s successor Sauron. Most readers are familiar with the often-quoted lines between Gandalf and Frodo when the new ring bearer cries out in frustration over Gollum: “What a pity that Bilbo did not stab that vile creature, when he had a chance!” Gandalf famously replies:

Pity? It was Pity that stayed his hand. Pity, and Mercy: not to strike without need. And he has been well rewarded, Frodo. Be sure that he took so little hurt from the evil, and escaped in the end, because he began his ownership of the Ring so. With Pity.

It is much further into the narrative that we learn from Gandalf that he is, most profoundly, guided by a pity that includes even the lives now twisted into orcs and wraiths. This should not surprise us as it is simply equivalent to the pity for which Gandalf commends Bilbo in his first encounter with Gollum. Orcs are broken and twisted elves just as wraiths are broken and twisted men and as Gollum is a broken and twisted hobbit. When Tolkien describes one of the final stages in the fall of Middle Earth (as Númenor sank beneath the ocean), he says that the Old Straight Road became inaccessible to all but the Elves as the hitherto flat world of Arda was bent or twisted into a globe. After this fall, only the Elves could sail the old path, but this meant that their ships must travers the heavens and depart entirely from the collapsed realm of Middle Earth. Not only the creatures of Middle Earth but the entire world itself is characterized by a bending and a collapse that leaves everything incapable for a time of the goodness of its inner nature—incapable of living in keeping with its own life. Everything is turned in upon itself in a fruitless circle of endless but self-referential striving, like a ship sailing around the circling seas forever in search of a lost world that might still be connected to the heavens.

Sent into such a foundered world, Gandalf is guided in his labors there by a pity that causes him to force nothing upon anyone and to conclude that he cannot take the ring of power even when it is given to him freely and when he seeks only to hide it from its maker. When Denethor realizes what Gandalf has done in sending the one ring into Mordor with two hobbits and that this was done in contrast to the temptation that Denethor’s son Boromir faced of taking the ring and using it to destroy its maker, Denethor chastises Gandalf and says that a middle way should have been taken instead. Denethor believes that he could have hidden the ring deep within Gondor’s most secure city where Sauron would not be able to regain the source of his greatest strength but would instead be forced to throw his forces fruitlessly against its vast walls. Gandalf concedes that there is a kind of wisdom in Denethor’s plan, but says that it would leave the rest of the world, outside of Gondor’s last city, to suffer as Sauron’s slaves. Instead of looking to minimize risks and to find the most strategic opportunity for withholding the final victory from Sauron, Gandalf watches the natural course of all the living things touched by the ring, and he boldly encourages their best inclinations with endless patience and trust.

Gandalf only acts of his own accord when there are no other options and, even then, he remains as restrained and veiled as possible. For Gandalf, the key actors in Middle Earth are three hobbits who will carry the ring to the edge of the fiery pit in Mount Doom. And even there, no one of them is capable, in the final moment, of casting the ring away to its destruction. Instead, just as Gandalf always suspected, Sméagol has a final part to play and tragically accomplishes the one ring’s destruction as a twisted outcome of his own desire for it. Gandalf trusts the aggregate of all of the lives involved without expecting any one hero to accomplish the salvation of the world on their own. The one ring is destroyed by a strange interweaving of lives (Frodo’s mercy toward Sméagol, Sam’s faithfulness to Frodo, and even Sméagol’s love for Frodo) with the ring’s own evil and unsustainably-twisted design to gain control of others for the sake of individual possession. In a sense, the ring destroys itself by doing what Sauron created the ring to do. Sauron brings about his own downfall. He could never foresee that the ring would destroy itself because he never imagined that three small lives could be so faithfully tied together as those of Frodo, Sam, and Gollum. He could not understand the bonds of life that allowed these three hobbits to carry the ring, through intense suffering, back to the place of the ring’s own terrible formation. In contrast to Sauron, Gandalf watched for the turnings and inclinations of all lives, even those who seemed least capable, and Gandalf saw that pity for Sméagol on the part of Bilbo might mark a turning point in the history of that age that could lead to the final destruction of Sauron’s ring of power.

Tolkien’s fallen world is one in which even angels sent into it as wizards can only just barely make out the pathway forward by attending faithfully to the life of every creature surrounding them regardless of their glory or prowess. These lives, great and small, are all sacred and worthy of pity even in their most horribly distorted forms. This is a world in which no glory or wisdom can prevent terrible loss and suffering and death. However, it is also a world in which every life is still involved in something shared that extends beyond this world’s collapsed horizons. While no dramatic salvation from death is possible even when the one ring is destroyed, we nonetheless see hints of how even the most distorted and broken of relationships are indicative of a higher reality and a greater story. Each life in Tolkien’s distant and mythic past is rooted within a music that, despite three attempts, remains unmarred by the Discord of Melkor. When the Witch-king of Angmar is confronted directly by Gandalf, he is told to depart into the abyss of nothing prepared for him and his master. However, shortly thereafter, when the wraith king is killed by Éowyn, we hear from the narrator that his voice would never again be heard within that age of this world. Perhaps for Tolkien, the disappearance of a wraith into nothingness does not necessarily mean the disappearance of the human voice whose source is found outside of any one age in this fallen world.

Trying to piece together any systematic metaphysics or theology from Tolkein’s stories would, of course, be a mistake. However, in the moral structures that Tolkein does present, one truth is clear. When we must navigate a world of twisted, incomplete, and confused efforts, pity is our most reliable guide. Gandalf—who says that all other lives must be kept in view and who says “I pity even Sauron's slaves”—sees himself in both Saruman and Denethor who are both reduced almost to the condition of Sauron’s slaves before each of their terrible ends. In a sense, Gandalf can be said to have learned to pity himself. He knew and accepted his own limitations, and he lovingly allowed for both the capacities and limitations of others to play their parts. In this way, even within a dark and fallen world that is increasingly given over to mortality, life was able to triumph and continue amid suffering and death. As so the way was paved for death itself to be one day overthrown by death. The date of the one ring’s destruction is March 25, a date that Tolkien, as a devout Catholic, would have known and loved as the Feast of the Annunciation. This is the date when Mary said yes to God and thereby provided God with a way to enter into our death so that God might “trample down death by death” as the old Paschal hymn proclaims. By carrying the ring to Mount Doom, Frodo, Sam, and Sméagol made possible—through their faithful sufferings together—the ring’s own self-destruction. The ring’s destruction opened up the Fourth Age or the "Age of Men" that would pave the way for Mary’s most glorious of all fallen creaturely lives so that God’s own life might be fully united to our life even to the point of being with us within the realm of death itself.