Reflections by Diana Wynne Jones Page A

and Mordor is not destroyed. So, in a pattern which is now familiar, there is a coda to this huge movement. By now these codas are definitely forming an “afterward” and looking to the future. In this one, Faramir and Éowyn find healing and love, and the other protagonists debate, in a way that echoes the Council of Elrond, and like that Council, resolve on an act of aggression: they will attack Mordor as a diversion for Frodo. So are we to suppose that this whole movement has been a huge diversion?
    Only then does Tolkien take up the story of Frodo and Sam. This is what might be called the slow movement, drear and negative and full of tribulation. Although it is odd that the positive side of the action is compounded of killing and politics, and the negative of love, endurance, and courage, this is how it seems to be. Tolkien insists that the first is valueless without the second. Odd, as I said, particularly as the slight Christian tinge given to Minas Tirith definitely reflects on Frodo, who is now displaying what one thinks of as the humbler Christian virtues; and because the careful plotting of this movement, to make it in most ways the antithesis of the preceding one, keeps bringing, to my mind at least, Clough’s poem “Say not the struggle nought availeth.” The force of that poem is that, even if you are not succeeding in your own locality, someone somewhere else is .
    Anyway, as one side enters glorious Minas Tirith, Frodo and Sam creep into Mordor, its antithesis; and with them Gollum, a sort of anti-Hobbit. This ignoble trio are the only ones likely to succeed. And they fail. Make no mistake, despite their courage, and their wholly admirable affection for one another, and Frodo’s near transfiguration, their action is indeed negative. At the last minute, Frodo refuses to throw the Ring into the Cracks of Doom and puts it on instead. Their almost accidental success is due to a negative action both Hobbits performed in the past. Frodo, not lovingly, spared Gollum’s life. Sam, not understanding Gollum’s loneliness in the marshes, threatened him and turned his incipient friendship to hatred. So Gollum bites off Frodo’s finger and falls with it and the Ring into the Cracks of Doom.
    Now what are we to make of this? I have of course put it far more baldly than Tolkien does, but it is there for everyone to read. I think the explanation is suggested in the very long coda to the entire story which takes up nearly half the last volume. Most writers would have been content to stop with the destruction of Mordor, or at least after the shorter coda of rejoicing and the celebrating of Nine-Fingered Frodo that follows the fall of Mordor. But Tolkien, characteristically, has a whole further movement, which now definitely is “and afterward . . .”
    Before we try to make sense of it, let me draw your attention to another aspect of Tolkien’s narrative skill: his constant care to have each stage of his story viewed or experienced by one or other of his central characters. He had to split them apart to do it, but it is a great strength of the narrative, and one not often shared by his imitators. Each major event has a firm viewpoint and solid substance. Things are visualized, and because Hobbits are present, eating and drinking gets done. The overall effect is to show that huge events are composed of small ones, and as was signaled at the beginning, that ordinary people can get forced to make history—forced by history itself. By this stage of the narrative, however, the idea is being proposed in a different form: even the smallest and most ignoble act can have untold effect. And thank goodness for Gollum.
    Well, yes. But remember that Gollum only did for Frodo what the Dead did for Aragorn. And indeed much of this coda of codas is concerned with shrinking the scale again, back to the Shire, where the now battle-hardened Hobbits make their bit of personal history by dislodging