Flax flowers, tall and green crowned with sky-blue petals bend beneath the water falling on them, stooped double, dripping and dreary under a summer sky shrouded in grey. Am I made for such a world where the beauty bows to necessity, where death is such a threat that the glorious sun must be cloaked, life furled?
I wish I had made these observations while on a walk, but I was driving. My car was pulling out of my driveway to carry me to the paces just outside of where babies die. The heart of me resisted, catching its hands on trees and fence-posts, loathe to leave them behind. A few yards down is a rose garden, and in my mind I shrank…
Are elves diminutive or tall? Those legendary immortals, acquainted with nature and delight, cut off from our world by size, by magic, or by choice? Tolkien wrote about elves, despising the modern conception of them as petal-sized fairies, who evade human capture and notice by their slightness. The author’s idea was of a people maybe even taller than men, living in the depths of the forests or across the leagues of the sea. They were powerful and wise, joyful – and sorrowful. For Tolkien’s elves could see over the roses. They witnessed mortality and evil and the changing world, and it was a grief to them.
Mankind was in a different sort of captivity: not hemmed by fragrant visions of living loveliness. Their world was the broken, mortal one, saturated with sorrow. Battlements built high: temptation, pain, guilt, fear – guarded their even seeing something else. And then they saw the stars. Ever beautiful and untouched, glittering points in the sky spoke of a joy and purpose beyond the grueling existence through which men plodded. Faramir tells that men burdened by mortality built high towers and communed with the stars.
They may have been wrong, seeking something forbidden, discontent with their created lot. In the Shire lived a different sort of mortal. They knew fear and death, so they celebrated peace and long life (and birthdays). Life was too short to simply hoard; they gave away. In the rural country of the Hobbits there was danger of becoming fat and complacent, gradually surrendering more and more of the fullness of life granted to mortals. But most didn’t. They enjoyed things: friends and family, stories, food and drink, walking, gardening.
Outside the Shire, the Hobbits proved that it was they who had built their country, and not that the simple life of relative ease had birthed their contentment. Hobbits don’t have courage in tight spots because it is hiding deep inside them; their courage is something exercised every day. It takes enormous strength to feast when you know the world is dark, to hope when it has been so long since anything happened to encourage you. Complacency is not hope. And Samwise Gamgee was not complacent.
He carried with him the willingness to seize good times. His eyes grow large with wonder at the hidden elvish cities he visits. They’re in a gardenous land filled with herbs and wild game just his size, so he stews some rabbit. And when his quest seems hopeless, he sits on the top stair of an enemy tower and sings about the stars: those beacons of hope anchoring him to a reality he belongs to. He can’t access it now, but it is no less sure or beautiful because it is far away.
Above all shadows rides the Sun
And Stars for ever dwell:
I will not say the Day is done,
Nor bid the Stars farewell.
So in the hobbits we have the same spirit as the elves seeing over their flower-hedge, but in reverse. The elves looked out and what they saw brought grief in – something they would not shrink from, but took and blended with their joy. And the hobbits looked out and what they saw brought hope, but they took it and blended it with their weariness.
To God be all glory.
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