Revenge and Moral Judgement in Tolkien

Revenge and Moral Judgement in Tolkien BRIAN ROSEBURY M ost of us have inconsistent attitudes to revenge, though we sometimes pretend otherwise. Asked in the abstract to evaluate revenge as a human activity, most of us would condemn it, and few of us would be as comfortable as Aristotle in saying that people “expect to return evil for evil—and if they cannot, feel that they have lost their liberty” (Aristotle V, v (1132b), 183). We do not, at any rate, expect to see revenge endorsed in respectable literary narratives, whatever the movies may get up to. When Odysseus, after regaining power in Ithaca, hangs his disloyal maidservants, and tortures to death the treacherous goatherd Melanthius, modern readers are shocked and repelled by this aspect of the “eucatastrophe”—and not merely because the vengeance seems disproportionate, especially in the case of the maids. Yet many of us can imagine situations in which we would hesitate to condemn personal revenge, if it seemed just and proportionate—the killing of a sadistic concentration camp guard, for example, by a victim or a victim’s survivor. And in the face of sufficiently dreadful crimes, the most liberal of us can suddenly see the point of vengeful wishes. After the deliberate shelling of civilian areas of Srebrenica during the 1990s war in Bosnia, Larry Hollingsworth, a United Nations humanitarian observer, addressing the international press corps, said, “My first thought was for the commander who gave the order to attack. I hope he burns in the hottest corner of hell. My second thought was for the soldiers who loaded the breeches and fired the guns. I hope their sleep is forever punctuated by the screams of the children.”1 At a more banal level, many believe that if A punches B, or wounds her self-respect with an insult or some other humiliating act, it is natural for B to feel an urge to retaliate, and that A is hardly in a position to complain if she does so. In earlier times, moralists have disagreed over the value of such “natural” emotions, some deploring them as sinful, others seeing them as a necessary support, when moderated by reason, for the institutions of law and punishment. In the eighteenth century, Bishop Joseph Butler held that well-founded personal resentment was essentially the same, divinely-implanted, passion as indignation against wickedness, being at root “a fellow-feeling, which each person has in behalf of the whole species, as well as of himself.” While he carefully distinguished such resentment from “the dreadful vices of malice and revenge,” he was uncomfortably aware of the ease with which the one could “run into” the other: unless “subservient . . . to the Common Good,” resentment would, he warned, Copyright © West Virginia University Press 1 Brian Rosebury lead to “endless rage and confusion” (126-133). More recently, a number of writers have attempted, with varying degrees of plausibility and coherence, to overcome contemporary liberal inhibitions and rehabilitate revenge as an indispensable component of criminal justice.2 II How did Tolkien come to terms with this complex theme? He had a special reason to be aware of the moral and narrative challenges it presented. His Christian faith commanded and celebrated forgiveness, and forgiveness is powerfully expressed at some key moments in his work, notably in Frodo’s “Let us forgive him!” spoken of the departed Gollum on the slopes of Mount Doom (RK, VI, iv, 225). Forgiveness and vengefulness, though individuals at particular times may oscillate between them, are as principles morally and psychologically incompatible. But Tolkien also had a professional interest in legends from the pre-Christian North which take for granted the legitimacy, or at any rate centrality, of vengeance as a motive; and the cultures he presents in most of his work owe at least something to these models. He might criticise or renounce such pre-Christian values, but he could not suppose that they had no foundation in human emotions, or dismiss them as wholly incompatible with virtue.3 Tolkien was not essentially a theorist—his ideas are “in solution” (to quote Christopher Tolkien)4 in his imagined world—but he was a serious thinker, and some attempt can be made to analyse the thinking that shaped his narratives. We know that he reflected anxiously about some moral dilemmas generated by his invention, such as the autonomy of Orcs and the legitimacy of killing them.5 Comments in his letters on responsibility for the harms of war show that he took into account the possibility of vengeful responses to aggression, and was willing to ascribe a lesser (though still significant) degree of guilt to those who so responded. The aggressors are primarily to blame for the evil deeds that proceed from their own original violation of justice and the passions that their own wickedness must naturally (by their standards) have been expected to arouse. They at any rate have no right to demand that their victims when assaulted should not demand an eye for an eye or a tooth for a tooth. (Letters 243). We should expect him, then, to recognise the need for both moral judgement, and literary tact, in presenting episodes in which revenge occurs or is contemplated. I will try to show how Tolkien fulfils this need. We should perhaps start with a reasonably clear definition of revenge. 2 Revenge and Moral Judgement in Tolkien A philosopher might define it as follows: A deliberate injurious act or course of action against another person, motivated by resentment of an injurious act or acts performed by that other person against the revenger, or against some other person or persons whose injury the revenger resents. This is a deliberately broad definition, and there is quite a repertoire of more specific and limiting definitions and connotations available. Some writers, for example, controversially claim that only excessive retaliation, or only cold-blooded retaliation, should count as revenge. Others try to find a terminology that separates a good kind of revenge, which can be assimilated to legal punishment, from a bad kind. I shall ignore these attempted restrictions.6 The words “revenge”, “vengeance”, and “vendetta” all derived from Latin vindicare, have a common history in which can be discerned the connected ideas of: (i) expressing (an intention, a threat); (ii) declaring a claim; and so specifically (iii) making a demand (for restitution) against an offender; and finally (iv) inflicting harm on the offender, either as kind of restitution in itself (the suffering of the offender being a repayment to oneself for one’s own suffering), or as a punishment for the failure or impossibility of restitution. With (iv) we arrive at revenge as defined above: the earlier elements may or may not be present. There is also the unrelated word “feud”, denoting a “lasting state of enmity” (OED), in which acts of revenge and vengeful attitudes are likely to occur. In modern English, “feud” has taken on a comparatively light-hearted flavour, suggestive of rival football clubs or ice-cream companies, though this can easily be counteracted by inserting the word “blood” before it. Tolkien significantly uses it in the most bourgeois of contexts in the final chapter of The Return of the King, when Lobelia Sackville-Baggins leaves her remaining money to Frodo for charitable uses: “so that feud was ended” (RK, VI, ix, 301). Despite these many nuances, I propose to stick with my broad definition of “revenge”; and in spite of its breadth, we can see at once that many acts of responsive violence exemplified in Tolkien’s fiction actually lie outside it. Exacting revenge should not be confused, for example, with retaliating in order to incapacitate or deter, which is not (or at least, need not be) motivated by resentment. When the Warden of the Houses 3 Brian Rosebury of Healing laments the injuries of war and hints at a criticism of the Gondorian élite, Éowyn replies that, “It takes but one foe to breed a war, not two, Master Warden . . . And those who have not swords can still die upon them” (RK, V, v, 236). This implies, not a defence of revenge, but what moral philosophers call a “consequentialist” or utilitarian argument: the total quantity of human suffering would have been just as great, or greater, if Gondor and Rohan had opted for non-resistance. It is a classic anti-pacifist argument, omitting only the implicit claim (which the reader can take for granted) that there is a chance of reducing total suffering if the aggressor can be defeated and future aggressors deterred. By adding her second sentence, Éowyn also quietly repudiates the conception of warfare as a kind of game, or consensual social practice.7 It is as if she were to say to the Warden, “If you pedantically insist that a “war” by definition requires two consenting parties, let me point out to you that a “massacre” does not.” When she goes on to insist that it is not always evil to die in battle, Éowyn again makes no mention of vengeance—rather (we infer from the context) her motivation is a matter of honour and an obligation of service to her people, coupled with the indifference to survival caused by her unhappy love for Aragorn. Similarly, the well-known speech by Gandalf defending Bilbo’s mercy to Gollum (FR, I, ii, 68-69, recalled at TT, IV, I, 221) is not, except very obliquely, a repudiation of revenge. Gandalf uses or implies no fewer than five different arguments. I quote here from the later, recollected version in The Two Towers: What a pity Bilbo did not stab the vile creature, when he had a chance! Pity? It was Pity that stayed his hand. Pity, and Mercy: not to strike without need. I do not feel any pity for Gollum. He deserves death. Deserves death! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some die that deserve life. Can you give that to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in the name of justice, fearing for your own safety. Even the wise cannot see all ends. Arguments 1 and 2 are related to Pity, and I will postpone these until section V for reasons that will become clear there. In argument 3, Gandalf defines Mercy as “not to strike without need” [italics added], rather than as a modification of Justice. Like Éowyn, he invokes a consequentialist morality: we may kill an enemy only when the end at which we aim by doing so is a vital one, and when we cannot achieve that end in any other way. Retribution “in the name of justice,” in the spirit of the lex talionis (“an eye for an eye”),8 and as implied by Frodo’s assertion that Gollum “deserves death”—is discountenanced. By the end of The Lord of 4 Revenge and Moral Judgement in Tolkien the Rings, Frodo himself is maintaining this position in keeping to the necessary minimum violence against Saruman and his “ruffians”: “his chief part had been to prevent the hobbits in their wrath at their losses from slaying those of their enemies who threw down their weapons” (RK, VI, viii, 295-296). That Saruman himself invokes petty versions of the lex talionis—“‘one thief deserves another . . . one ill turn deserves another’” (RK, VI, vi 262, viii 298) only drives the point home. The next two arguments criticize and refine this consequentialism. In argument 4, Gandalf impugns the motive of “fearing for your own safety.”9 (Note that Gandalf does not even suggest that Frodo might be motivated by vengefulness.) To kill with the aim of removing any future threat to oneself is to fail in altruism, a version of consequentialism which requires the agent not to prioritise his own welfare, but to take risks with it in order to help others. In argument 5, Gandalf limits consequentialism in a different way. Since “even the wise cannot see all ends,” only the most clear and immediate need can provide justification for so serious an act as killing. To justify killing by its assumed ultimate consequences is to invest too much trust in one’s own foresight. The ultimate consequences lie, rather, in the hands of Providence: the duty of individuals is to act with goodwill and virtue in the light of such definite knowledge as they have, and trust that the overall pattern of events will come out right. Tom Shippey calls this the “ideological core” of The Lord of the Rings (317). III Where, then, does Tolkien deal unmistakably with revenge? There are a number of examples, some clear, some marginal. Roughly speaking, I will begin with the wholly negative presentations of vengeful acts and motives, and then consider those cases in which a greater degree of sympathy seems to be implied. 1. Enemies The supreme representatives of evil, the fallen angels Melkor and Sauron, sometimes perform actions that could be construed as vengeful. Typically, they conceive a special hatred for individuals or groups whom they perceive to have obstructed their designs. Melkor hates the Eldar “because in them he saw the reason for the arising of the Valar, and his own downfall” (S 66); his elaborate persecution of Húrin and his children goes beyond the necessities of war; Sauron views Elendil and his heirs with special enmity (RK, Appendix A, 317). Yet revenge remains an ancillary and not a primary motive in their cases. The evil qualities of Melkor and Sauron are often enumerated (see, e.g. S 31-32), with pride, cruelty and the desire to dominate other wills at the head of the list, but venge5 Brian Rosebury fulness is rarely emphasised. There are a number of reasons for this. Vengeance cannot be a primary motive for Melkor, since this would imply that his wrongful actions arose initially, at least in part, from his having himself been wronged. But Melkor had not been originally wronged: rather, his rebellion against Eru and the Ainur was itself the origin of evil, and his enmity towards the other Valar and towards the Children of Ilúvatar is founded on his self-willed estrangement from them, leading him not so much to vengeance as to fear, hatred, and envy. Later, in the episode of “the Unrest of the Noldor” (S 67-72) he is humiliated by a proud Fëanor and meditates future revenge, but this rebuff is itself the consequence of jealousies and suspicions that Melkor has fomented and of Melkor’s desire to steal the Silmarils. Moreover, the very concept of revenge is of something that has a reason, and therefore can in principle be completed: if a course of revenge is motivated by resentment of a given injury, then there must be some quantity of retaliatory harm, even if it is a thousand times greater than the original injury, that is sufficient to satisfy that motive. But the malice of Melkor and Sauron is limitless, capable of terminating only when all independent wills are annihilated: only incidentally does it take specifically motivated forms. In the light, or rather darkness, of the nihilistic evil of Melkor and Sauron, revenge appears almost reasonable, belonging as it does to the world of intelligible purposes and loyalties. We are even told that “Orcs will often pursue foes for many leagues into the plain if they have a fallen captain to avenge” (FR, II, vi, 351).10 Although Orcs are, of course, the aggressors in the first place, this suggests a certain esprit de corps which lifts them above outright egotism. (Compare the judgement made in “Valaquenta,” that Sauron was initially less evil than Melkor in that he served another rather than himself (S 32).) Gollum’s vengefulness towards “Baggins,” and later towards Sam, is subordinate to his desire for the Ring, but it does operate independently, as when he unwisely wastes energy in spitting and gloating (throwing back the “sneak” accusation) in his attack on Sam outside Shelob’s lair (TT, IV, ix, 335). Like Sauron’s tactical errors motivated by cruelty and moral blindness, this is a key moment at which evil undoes itself. Though we are reminded by the murder of Déagol that Gollum initiated his own misfortunes, his resentments do arise from specific, if largely unfair, grievances. In this respect, Gollum’s first attempt at reciprocity, the riddle-game, is important. Mutual obedience to the rules of a game, or to law in general, is an example of “good reciprocity”: the “bad reciprocity” of revenge is often the consequence when good reciprocity breaks down. By showing comprehension of the riddle-game rule, and hoping to eat Bilbo legitimately in virtue of them (H, V, 121) Gollum demonstrates that he, no less 6 Revenge and Moral Judgement in Tolkien than Bilbo, is a rational and morally capable creature, and it is just this quality that makes possible the massive yet still consistent development of his personality in The Lord of the Rings. The obsessive character of his resentment-based self-justifications for his crimes, both retrospective (the murder of Déagol) and prospective (the betrayal of Frodo and Sam to Shelob), shows that he remains sufficiently morally capable to be aware of the need to legitimise his actions to himself—not merely, like Sauron’s emissaries, to others. In the revised riddle-game episode, Tolkien displays literary tact in avoiding outright breach of the rules by either party: it is essential that both should emerge without finally renouncing (at least the theory of) reciprocity. Gollum, who has the shadow of a case since Bilbo’s final question “had not been a genuine riddle according to the ancient laws” (H, V, 127) avails himself of this excuse in his own mind, plays for time, and Bilbo runs off, realizing Gollum intends to murder him anyway. Tolkien also, of course, avoids the question of whether Bilbo would really have submitted to be eaten had he lost the game. No reader could seriously believe, or wish, that he would, but we are reassured of Bilbo’s virtue by the fact that he clearly thinks he ought to submit. 2. Friends It may initially seem surprising that there are conspicuous references to revenge in the comparatively light-hearted world of The Hobbit. When Bilbo tells Smaug that “We came over hill and under hill, by wave and wind, for Revenge” (H, V, 282), Smaug, as if to reprove him for using this heroic concept so complacently, instantly drops his amiably bantering manner (“Bless me! Had you never thought of the catch?”) in favour of a kind of Old Testament grandeur (“Girion Lord of Dale is dead, and I have eaten his people like a wolf among sheep, and where are his son’s sons that dare approach me?”). What he says is in effect that he has wiped out all his strongest enemies, and no one is left capable of taking revenge. This claim will rebound on him shortly afterwards, when he is killed in his imprudent attack on Lake-Town by one of Girion’s descendants. The moral hinted at is that revenge can be just or can be the instrument of humbling immoral pride. But it is no more than a hint, for this may be a misleading example. Bilbo’s speech about Revenge is improvised as part of his verbal contest with Smaug: he is, as it were, pretending to inhabit the heroic world in which such motives are really decisive. Apart from a little cursing of Smaug, there is actually little sign in the Dwarves’ earlier conversation that they are motivated by revenge against the dragon, as distinct from the desire to recover their lost wealth: there is no mention of revenge in their song at Bag-End, for example.11 And Smaug does not fall victim to an express act of revenge: Bard kills the dragon for utilitarian reasons, to save Lake-town and its people from worse harm. 7 Brian Rosebury A more unsettling example is provided by Beorn, who captures a Warg and a goblin, coerces them into providing information (the narrative avoids specifying how this is done), and then kills them. “What did you do with the goblin and the Warg?” asked Bilbo suddenly. “Come and see!” said Beorn, and they followed him round the house. A goblin’s head was stuck outside the gate and a warg-skin was nailed to a tree just beyond. Beorn was a fierce enemy. But now he was their friend, and Gandalf thought it wise to tell him their whole story and the reason of their journey, so that they could get the most help he could offer. (H, VII, 182) While the exposure may be done partly to deter others, we know enough of Beorn’s ferocious temper to be sure that this killing of creatures at his mercy is in part an act of revenge against intruders and despoilers of his territory. It is not plausible to suppose that Beorn is acting in impersonal obedience to some larger strategy: as presented in The Hobbit, he makes his own rules and keeps himself to himself. The half-apologetic comment that “Beorn was a fierce enemy. But now he was their friend” ensures that this revenge is not endorsed by the narrative. Fierceness is a morally neutral quality: Beorn, lacking patience and magnanimity, is a dangerous weapon, and all Gandalf ’s diplomacy is needed to ensure he is pointed in the right direction. Is there also here a sense that certain creatures are intrinsically evil and so may not merit forgiveness or mercy? This is a very rare case of an orc (or goblin) being captured by good characters. There are no such occurrences in the more serious world of The Lord of the Rings: even the merciless obliteration of Saruman’s orcs by the Huorns occurs in the context of a battle. What would happen to a stray orc that wandered into an encampment of Elves? Would they kill it (even though it would be at their mercy) or attempt to “cure” it? Since the first answer is morally objectionable and the second would raise difficult questions extraneous to the needs of the narrative, Tolkien ensures that that we do not hear of such cases. At least as fierce as Beorn is Helm Hammerhand, “a grim man of great strength”(RK, Appendix A, 346). His brisk revenge against his pushy rival Freca is, at best, the ruthless destruction of a would-be usurper: it is preceded by an exchange of personal insults, initiated by Helm himself, in the manner (though toned down) of Icelandic sagas. It retains a certain dignity only because he fights Freca man to man, and, as, Tom Shippey notes, leaves the law-governed space of the king’s house to do so, acknowledging the potential conflict between personal revenge and 8 Revenge and Moral Judgement in Tolkien public order. In Helm’s behavior Tolkien here depicts an archaic valuesystem that he personally repudiated but, as Shippey again points out, could not credibly exclude from the pre-Christian world of his invention: his literary tact relegated it to an Appendix, ensuring that it did not disturb “the major thrust of his story” (277-279). Nevertheless, Beorn and Helm are part of the story and are not evil characters. If they existed in the real world, someone like Tolkien might express a judgement on them as follows: they act as a redoubtable person might act, had he not been vouchsafed the special moral insight of Christianity, its message of forgiveness, mercy and self-sacrifice. Their actions cannot be approved, but they can be respected. In the world of Tolkien’s invention, what stands in for Christianity (in broad terms) is the evangelium of the Valar to the Eldar, initiated by Oromë (S 49-50) and consummated in Aman. It is communicated among Men primarily to the Númenóreans and their heirs. Beorn and Helm, and for that matter most of the Dwarves, have at most received imperfect echoes of that evangelium. They have something of the status of virtuous pagans. When, in contrast, the Númenoreans themselves fall into pagan attitudes, their lapses are especially culpable. Gandalf ’s reproach to Denethor for acting like “the heathen kings” in his suicide is well-known (RK, v vii, 129) Equally revealing, and particularly relevant here, is Isildur’s disastrous decision to keep the Ring, with the justifying words, “This will I have as weregild for my father, and my brother” (FR, II, ii, 256, and cf. S 295). “Weregild” (man-gold, the value of a man) is a fine paid by an offender for an injury, especially a murder: originating in Germanic custom, it is a legal substitute for direct revenge. Gandalf uses just the same rhetorical formula, with even more dramatic effect, in his confrontation with the Messenger of Mordor at the Black Gate: “These we will take!” said Gandalf suddenly. . . . Before his upraised hand the foul Messenger recoiled, and Gandalf coming seized and took from him the tokens: coat, cloak and sword. “These we will take in memory of our friend,” he cried. “But as for your terms, we reject them utterly. . . .” (RK, V, x, 167) Whether or not the echo of Isildur’s formula is intentional, there is a huge gulf in moral sentiment between “this will I have as weregild” and “these we will take in memory.” Both imply indignation towards an antagonist, but while Isildur’s accompanying act is justified as retribution against a defeated antagonist, Gandalf ’s speech affirms an intrinsic (social, aesthetic and agapistic) value which momentarily renders the antagonism irrelevant. For the High Elves, who have benefited from the counsel and teach9 Brian Rosebury ing of the Valar in Aman, there may seem to be little excuse for vengeful deeds. If the primal sin of Fëanor is his possessiveness towards the Silmarils, it is quickly compounded by his determination to revenge himself on Melkor for his father’s murder, pursuing him to Middle-earth against the express command of the Valar, and even more so by the Kinslaying he initiates at Alqualondë. The moral issues here are complex, since Melkor’s own killing of Finwë is motivated by revenge for Fëanor’s insults, which in turn reflect Fëanor’s realization of Melkor’s designs on the Silmarils. Yet the pursuit of Melkor is, if you like, a human response: not to make it would require Fëanor to have either superhuman forbearance, or faith in the ultimate punishment of Melkor by Eru; and one can understand his view when he denounces the Valar as Melkor’s kin, and for their failure to protect their realm from him (S 82). What marks out his course as a kind of criminality is the excess to which Fëanor’s vengeance leads him: his intemperance, contempt for the Valar and for the Teleri, and indifference to “utilitarian” considerations for himself and for others (as when, “consumed by the flame of his own wrath”, he pursues the host of Morgoth until he is surrounded and slain; and when he binds his sons to renew the war he knows to be ultimately hopeless (S 107).) The consequent revenges among the Eldar in Middle-earth, though accomplished by individual decisions, have the appearance of a tragic fate by which the participants are bound, as in the house of Atreus. The doom pronounced by Mandos (or his herald) as the Noldor depart contains a strikingly retributive phrase: “for blood ye shall render blood” (S 88). This suggests the lex talionis, yet it is a prophecy and not a sentence, since the Noldor must still act, within the inevitably tragic situation they have created. (The only definite sentence pronounced by the Valar is to “fence Valinor against” [88] those who leave.) The meaning then must be this: that in injuring and then renouncing the lawful peace of Valinor, the Noldor are entering the world of violent conflict, in which they can expect suffering and death; having spilt the blood of others, they will have no grounds to complain when this happens, least of all if it is the survivors of their own victims who afflict them. IV It is time to pull the analysis together. It seems that though revenge, in Tolkien’s moral universe, is always wrong, there are gradations of judgement on particular acts of revenge, ranging from outright condemnation to what one might call non-approving respect. At one extreme are the revenges of Melkor; to represent the other, we might use the example of Gwindor of Nargothrond, who, enraged by the cruel hacking to pieces before his eyes of his already blinded brother by the heralds of Angband, leads a tactically disastrous unauthorised sally at the Nirnaeth Arnoediad 10 Revenge and Moral Judgement in Tolkien (S 191). Though this act cannot be approved, few readers will withhold respect from it. The literary effectiveness of the incident comes from a double psychological plausibility: Morgoth understands the psychology of revenge well enough to exploit it in this ruthless way; and we participate in it sufficiently to prevent us from distancing ourselves from Gwindor’s response. Among the many representations of revenge in Tolkien, there seem to be three main criteria which tend to allow respect for acts of vengeance, or to modify condemnation of them. Since these are not stated explicitly, we must to a large extent infer them from our own reactions to the fiction: uncovering them, therefore, tells us something about the structure of our own intuitions regarding revenge,12 as well as about Tolkien’s invention. They are (1) being in general a person of goodwill; (2) having grounds proportionate to the revenge; and (3) having deliberated, wherever this is possible, long and responsibly before acting. As an example of (1) and (2), we can respect Sam’s enraged attack on Snaga at the tower of Cirith Ungol, but not Shagrat’s on Gorbag, since the former is a peaceful person acting exceptionally, in response to Snaga’s gratuitous cruelty to Frodo, while the latter is innately cruel. Under (1), Wormtongue’s revenge on Saruman at Bag End would not qualify for respect, but Wormtongue does benefit from (2), his cruel and degrading treatment by Saruman since the fall of Isengard having been vividly communicated: hence our sense that he is, by this point, as much a victim as a persecutor. His action is a classic case of “sudden loss of self-control” following, in this case, sustained and ultimately unbearable provocation—a mitigating feature in English law and in many other jurisdictions, though he did have the option of abandoning Saruman some months earlier. The cliché “something snapped” is even used (RK, VI, viii, 300). Gwindor, another sudden loser of self-control, qualifies on (1) and (2), and if he does not qualify on (3) it is only because the unbearable provocation is so immediate. To lighten the tone, a comic version of (2) may be mentioned: we are told that Frodo, Sam and Pippin, on leaving Bag End, “left the washing up for Lobelia” (FR, I, iii, 78): a trivial revenge not disproportionate to Frodo’s grounds for grievance against her. In some ways the most interesting criterion is (3), of which there are two striking examples. The Ents’ assault on Isengard has an element of vengeance, most passionately expressed after the burning of Beechbone (TT, III, ix, 173) but present from the beginning of their march: “it is the orc-work, the wanton hewing . . . that has so angered us; and the treachery of a neighbour, who should have helped us” (TT, III, iv, 89). Vengeance is not the prime motive—we are carefully told that the Ents never become “roused” unless their lives and trees are in great danger. And crucially, they decide to act only after three days’ deliberation. The 11 Brian Rosebury fact that, at the end of their slow deliberation, they become deafeningly “roused” quite quickly is important, since it marks the distinction between their sober reflection prior to the decision to take revenge, and the continuous brooding on revenge typical of corrupted minds such as Melkor’s or Gollum’s.13 An even clearer example is provided by the Dwarves’ revenge against the Orcs following the murder of Thrór. Then Nár turned [Thror’s] head and saw branded on the brow in Dwarf-runes so that he could read it the name AZOG. That name was branded in the hearts of all the Dwarves afterwards. . . . Weeping, Nár fled down the Silverlode; but he looked back once and saw that Orcs had come from the gate and were hacking up the body and flinging the pieces to the black crows. Such was the tale that Nár brought back to Thráin; and when he had wept and torn his beard he fell silent. Seven days he sat and said no word. Then he stood up and said: “This cannot be borne!” That was the beginning of the War of the Dwarves and the Orcs, which was long and deadly, and fought for the most part in deep places beneath the earth. . . . Both sides were pitiless, and there was death and cruel deeds by dark and by light. (RK, Appendix A, 354-355) To mark the moral dignity of Dwarves in comparison to Orcs, more is needed than that the Orcs should have committed the first outrage: the Dwarves must also have a sober attitude to revenge. The seven days’ delay before Thrain decides the outrage “cannot be borne” shows that exacting vengeance is not a mere reflex for the Dwarves: so grave a decision must arise out of a deep and prostrating grief. But it is revenge, not just a utilitarian decision to deal with a dangerous enemy. V “Hate brings forth hate,” according to the “Akallabêth” (S 274). Much of the previous discussion may have given the impression that Tolkien’s writings are a study of rational decision-making, and it might be objected that fiction, in contrast to philosophy, deals with emotions rather than reason. Actually, I believe Tolkien was a rational writer, to whom the concurrence and co-operation of reason with the right kind of emotion was important.14 He shows Sam Gamgee able to resist the temptation to use the Ring in Mordor thanks to (first, and mostly) “his love for his master” but also (secondly) “his plain hobbit-sense” (RK, VI, i, 177). “The Council of Elrond” and “The Last Debate” show long and com12 Revenge and Moral Judgement in Tolkien plex processes of information-gathering, assessment, argument and decision, yet in both cases the participants are moved by profound emotions of loyalty, devotion and courage to which their reasoning gives point and direction. Where emotion leads to the abandonment of reason, as in the cases of Fëanor or Ar-Pharazôn, the results are generally calamitous. There are, moreover, good emotions and bad ones. Melkor and Sauron are characterised by bad emotions, inimical to reason. They are not rational monsters, like Sherlock Holmes’s mathematics-professor adversary, Moriarty. Moriarty, motivated purely by reason and self-interest, enjoys the intellectual challenge of his conflict with Holmes, so that his final decision to revenge himself on Holmes at the Reichenbach Falls is a little out of character.15 Melkor and Sauron are driven by fierce emotions—pride, fear, humiliation, anger, cruelty—and at crucial moments are led by them into error and despair. In contrast, the good emotions of the benign characters serve them well, though in ways that they cannot directly predict. In the Fellowship of the Ring version of his speech about Bilbo’s mercy, Gandalf ’s first two arguments turn on Pity: “It was Pity that stayed his hand. . . . 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.” (FR, I ii, 69) Argument 1, implied, is that Pity is an intrinsically good emotion. Argument 2, partly explicit, is that if you begin a dangerous course of action with a good emotion, your chances of maintaining psychological health through to the end are greater.16 The two arguments are independent of one another because the second appeals to Bilbo’s long-term self-interest, while the first turns precisely upon the claim that self-interest was not in Bilbo’s mind when he spared Gollum; nevertheless, part of the force of the speech is that a good emotion is ultimately consonant with reason. The progression from argument 1 to argument 2 prepares the ground for argument 5, discussed earlier—that we should do what seems right in each separate situation, and trust to Providence for the longer term. In most of Tolkien’s characters we find either a consistent emotional life, good or bad, varied only by an occasional “temptation,” or a clear progression towards greater maturity on the one hand (Bilbo, Frodo) or towards degeneration and despair on the other (Boromir, Denethor). It is, in general, pretty obvious how our moral judgements are supposed to be applied. There are, however, some characters whose emotions evoke more complex, even conflicting, sympathies. The pathos of Gollum’s internal struggle during his journey with Frodo is an obvious example, and for many readers the fact that The Lord of the Rings can rise to such moral 13 Brian Rosebury and psychological complexity is one of the most decisive proofs of the work’s greatness. But there are also a number of figures from the earlier legends in whom we find the psychological origins of wrongful, especially vengeful, acts sympathetically explored. I will end by discussing two: Eöl and Túrin. In the case of Eöl, the Dark Elf, a bad outcome is virtually guaranteed by his gloomy and reclusive, but not innately evil, personal character, in combination with the tragic working-out of the doom of Mandos. Indeed Eöl provides a direct link between the crimes of the Noldor and their final major defeat, the overthrow of Gondolin, since it is his son Maeglin who is Gondolin’s betrayer. As a Telerin Elf who did not journey to Aman, his resentment of the Noldor is based on his belief that they instigated the return of Morgoth to Middle-earth, on the Kinslaying, and on territorial defensiveness, all exacerbated by Curufin’s contemptuous refusal to acknowledge him as kin to the Noldor through marriage. All in all, then, he does have grounds for resentment. As he says to Turgon, and then to Maeglin, “No right have you or any of your kin in this land to seize realms or to set bounds. . . . This is the land of the Teleri, to which you bring war and all unquiet. . . . Come, Maeglin, son of Eöl! Your father commands you. Leave the house of his enemies and the slayers of his kin, or be accursed!” (S 137) Eöl’s manner is high-handed (a natural response of his self-respect, one might feel, to his vulnerable and humiliating position as a captive at Turgon’s court, for all that Turgon himself tries to welcome him), and we cannot of course be supposed to excuse his attempt to kill Maeglin, which leads to Aredhel’s death. (Note incidentally that this is not a case of sudden loss of self-control but of meditated revenge: Eöl pauses in silence for a long time before hurling the javelin at Maeglin.) Nor can Maeglin be entirely blamed for his desertion to the side of the Noldor, led by his mother. Nevertheless, when Turgon has Eöl cast to his death over a precipice, and Maeglin stands by in silence, many readers’ sympathies will swing back to Eöl, in spite of the fact that his execution is an act of justice by a well-intentioned ruler, while his own act was one of disproportionate vengeance, the more irrational for being directed at a comparatively innocent victim. (And it is more than vengeance against the Noldor: it is also an expression of a possessive father’s love, like Denethor’s attempted burning of Faramir.) Túrin’s is a different case—a fact displayed with special clarity in the recently published The Children of Húrin, with its Bildungsroman-like unity. For while Eöl’s character is introduced to us fully formed, and is essen14 Revenge and Moral Judgement in Tolkien tially simple, with Túrin we are presented both with an already complex inherited nature, and with a process of character development, which tempts us to a painful hope that he may somehow escape calamity. It might be thought that Túrin’s bad outcomes are even more predetermined than Eöl’s, since Morgoth has cursed Húrin’s children, correctly predicts that they will “die without hope, cursing both life and death” (CH 64), and actively intervenes against them, especially through the agency of Glaurung the dragon. But in reading the narrative it is difficult to take seriously the idea of Morgoth as a master-manipulator of events. Few of Túrin’s fatal decisions are, in fact, forced upon him. He acts as he does because of the kind of person he is, and that is, in turn, at least as much a consequence of what happens to him as of his innate temperament. (Morgoth is, of course, the direct or indirect cause of most of what happens to Túrin, but that does not make Túrin his puppet: rather, he improvises around Túrin’s own actions.) Túrin has three primary misfortunes. First, like the rest of the Edain, he is a Man, in a world, dominated by the Eldar and their diabolic antagonists, which Men, by reason of their nature and history, cannot wholly understand. “Turambar” (“Master of Fate”) is an ironic name, since the power of Túrin’s will is continually thwarted by the imperfect knowledge inseparable from his identity and situation. Partly through Melkor’s deceptions and partly through his own mistakes, the adult Túrin often lacks full comprehension of the events in which he is caught up, and an undercurrent of epistemic insecurity and isolation is established in the account of his childhood. When Húrin returns from time to time from service on the borders of Hithlum, “his quick speech, full of strange words and jests and half-meanings, bewildered Túrin and made him uneasy” (39). Later, Túrin half-wakes in the night to sense his father and mother looking over him by candle-light, “but he could not see their faces” (48). These, or their equivalents, are, if you like, normal experiences of childhood, but their selection for the narrative, as significant or representative moments of inner loneliness, makes us look more sympathetically at the sometimes blundering or accident-prone solitary hero of the later chapters. Secondly, Túrin has certain qualities of temperament which will not make life easy for him. He was not merry, and spoke little. . . Túrin was slow to forget injustice and mockery; but the fire of his father was in him, and he could be sudden or fierce. Yet he was quick to pity, and the hurts and sadness of living things might move him to tears. (CH 39) As we have seen, the capacity for pity ranks high among the virtues for Tolkien, and there is no psychological improbability in its being com15 Brian Rosebury bined with great sensitivity to injustice and mockery: just the qualities likely to move a ‘sudden or fierce” person to rash acts of vengeance or proud self-assertion which might quickly be regretted. Examples of the latter include Túrin’s excessive punishment of Saeros for his gibe about the women of Hithlum (90); and his proud and ultimately disastrous selfestrangement from Doriath, founded in his mistaken fear that he could not receive justice from Thingol (90-91). Yet his hypersensitivity to injustice also leads Túrin, though not directly or intentionally responsible, to blame himself for the death of Khîm, and offer compensation and apology to Mîm: “pity long hardened welled in Túrin’s heart as water from rock” (132). Thirdly, Túrin is emotionally damaged in various ways. In the first place, because of his reserved temperament he is “less loved” than his slightly younger sister Urwen/Lalaith. Next, the beloved Urwen herself dies of the Evil Breath, the wind-borne pestilence from Angband. While Húrin mourns openly and his mother Morwen maintains a chilly silence, Túrin weeps “bitterly at night alone” (40). Next, he loses his father forever into Morgoth’s captivity. Next, he is separated from his mother, who sends him into dangerous exile rather than have him enslaved by the Easterlings: “But how will you find me, lost in the world?” said Túrin, and suddenly his heart failed him, and he wept openly. “If you wait, other things will find you first,” said Morwen . . . “I am sending you to King Thingol in Doriath. Would you not rather be a king’s guest than a thrall?” “I do not know,” said Túrin. “I do not know what a thrall is.” (CH 71-72) Túrin must be less than ten years old at this moment.17 Like many children in time of war, he is forced into a premature psychological independence for which he is scarcely equipped. Though the narrative says of his parting for Morwen, “This was the first of the sorrows of Túrin” (75), it is already the culmination of many. The rash, proud, excessive and violent actions of his later career seem less arbitrary in the light of them. As even some recent reviewers of The Children of Húrin grasped, Túrin is a profoundly morally ambivalent character.18 In Túrin’s tragedy, we see working together two factors that must always complicate moral judgement on human action: epistemic fallibility, and dissonant emotion. Most of us could make morally correct decisions if we both understood our situation fully and felt those emotions that are most consonant with reason. But for Túrin, neither of these conditions applies, for reasons which are at least partly—though not wholly—beyond his control. His incest 16 Revenge and Moral Judgement in Tolkien with his sister is unintentional, but like Oedipus and Kullervo, he would have avoided incest had he had fuller knowledge. He is partly responsible for his own lack of knowledge, to the extent that it is caused by his voluntary exile from Doriath, a side-effect of his hot temper and his pride. His vengeful killing of the unarmed Brandir, following an “Icelandic saga” exchange of insults in which Brandir’s are largely justified and his own largely unfair, is a crime to which he is driven by an emotional anguish which temporarily blocks the possibility of understanding the truth which is now ready to be revealed. “Níniel? Níniel?” [says Brandir]. “Nay, Niënor daughter of Húrin.” Then Túrin seized and shook him; for in those words he heard the feet of his doom overtaking him, but in horror and fury his heart would not receive them, as a beast hurt to death that will wound ere it dies all that are near it. (CH 251) It seems especially appropriate that Túrin’s death is accomplished with words that themselves express the emotional need for vengeance, as much as they express moral judgement. And from the blade rang a cold voice in answer: “Yes, I will drink your blood, that I may forget the blood of Beleg my master, and the blood of Brandir slain unjustly. I will slay you swiftly.”19 Then Túrin set the hilts upon the ground, and cast himself upon the point of Gurthang, and the black blade took his life. (CH 256) I hope in this paper to have shown that the treatment of revenge in Tolkien is complex and subtle. In meeting the challenge of presenting his readers with rational, and not wholly unsympathetic, agents engaged in and motivated by vengeance, Tolkien both maintains a credible moral framework, and does justice to the unsettling and unresolved role that revenge plays in our moral intuitions.20 NOTES 1 April 13, 1993, as quoted in The Observer, London, 8 December 1996 (J. Sweeney, review of J. W. Honig and N. Both, Srebrenica: Record of a War Crime (Harmondsworth, 1996). 2 Among the better examples are Barton and Hershenov. I examine these issues more fully in Rosebury 2008. 17 Brian Rosebury 3 In the lectures and notes edited by Alan Bliss as Finn and Hengest, Tolkien takes for granted the legitimacy of revenge as a poetic theme, remarking for example on the superior (literary) effectiveness of the revenge if it overtakes its victim on the site of the original offence (35). Finn and Hengest is essentially a work of exposition—an attempt to recover, not to criticise, the mental world we can glimpse through the fragmentary texts—and we should not infer too much from its lack of the kind of searching moral reflection and critique that we can discern in Tolkien’s treatments of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” or “The Battle of Maldon.” However, there is a hint of distancing from the revenge ethic. Tolkien refers twice to “the duty of revenge,” but on one occasion (103) puts “duty” in inverted commas. On the second occasion (161) he does not do so, but here—in contrast to 103—the use is attributive: he is locating belief in such a duty in one character’s “reminder” to another, rather than endorsing that belief himself. 4 In J.R.R.T: a Film Portrait of J.R.R. Tolkien. 5 See, for example, Letters (187-196, 355); and Morgoth (408-444). 6 See Rosebury (2008) for a further discussion of these questions. 7 Eowyn’s position is of course consistent with Catholic “just war” theory, which requires that war be waged only in self-defence (or the defence of others unjustly attacked) and so rejects the pagan notion of warfare as an intrinsically virtuous activity. 8 Or in the spirit of Kant’s notorious claim that a society about to dissolve itself should take care to execute any remaining convicted murderer ‘‘so that everyone will duly receive what his actions are worth” (102). 9 The latter phrase does not appear in The Fellowship of the Ring passage. While this is probably an accident of composition (see War 96-97), its addition in The Two Towers episode is appropriate to the context, since Frodo is now in much more direct danger from Gollum’s malice. 10 This is also half-implied at in The Hobbit (VII, 182). 11 Though in the posthumously published “The Quest of Erebor,” Thorin is said to be “burdened with the duty of revenge upon Smaug that he had inherited. Dwarves take such duties very seriously” (UT, 322; Cf. also RK, Appendix A, 358). It is not that the Dwarves of The Hobbit are wholly indifferent to revenge: Thorin briefly voices a hope of vengeance against the Necromancer, which Gandalf dismisses as 18 Revenge and Moral Judgement in Tolkien (for practical reasons) “absurd” (H, I, 58). But the revenge motif is largely excluded from the main action. 12 I have to trust that by “our intuitions” I do not simply mean “my intuitions.” But literary criticism always involves making this assumption to some degree. 13 Armann Jakobsson convincingly suggests that a further reason for our ready approval of the Ents’ retaliation against Saruman arises from their symbolic role, as representing victimized nature: “the Ents are, in the beginning, entirely passive, as nature is sometimes imagined. That may be why their revenge cannot be seen as evil” (personal communication). 14 In his recognition of the necessary congruence of appropriate emotions with rational judgement, and of the way in which our particular choices ultimately form our character, Tolkien shows a certain debt to Aristotle (probably mediated through Catholic teaching). 15 Or at least, we do not elsewhere hear of Moriarty’s emotions. A completely consistent Moriarty would have done what Holmes himself does—fake his own death and leave the country for some years—and then rebuild his criminal empire under a new name. 16 It is just possible to read argument 2 as suggesting that Bilbo was divinely rewarded for his good deed, but this would imply a degree of detailed oversight and manipulation of events by Eru or the Valar that is rarely suggested elsewhere. 17 He leaves a few months before Nienor is born; but when Morwen is aware that she has conceived, Túrin is “only in his ninth year.” Since she does not send him away immediately, it is possible though unlikely that he passes his ninth birthday during the period of her delay. 18 Among potentially skeptical reviewers who noted, if grudgingly, the moral and psychological power of much of The Children of Húrin, one might mention particularly Philip Hensher, Daily Telegraph 28 April 2007, p. 27; Murrough O’Brien, ABC Magazine 15 April 2007; and Andrew O’Hehir, salon.com, 17 April 2007. The award for imperceptiveness, on the other hand, must go to Marta Salij, Detroit Free Press 18 April 2007: “Tolkien’s weakness for making his heroes so very, very good and his villains so very, very bad is particularly grating. Middle-earth is the place to go if you must have the morality of your fiction be black and white, and apparently the simplicity was worse early in its history.” 19 Brian Rosebury 19 Though the dialogue with the sword and the suicide itself are clearly suggested by the death of Kullervo in The Kalevala, this profoundly expressive speech by Gurthang differs markedly from that of Kullervo’s sword. The latter common-sensically, perhaps cynically, mocks Kullervo’s attempt to cast it as an agent of justice: “Why should I not eat what I like . . . ?/ I’ll eat even guiltless flesh / I’ll drink even blameless blood” (Lönnrot 495). 20 I am grateful to the following people for encouraging remarks, helpful suggestions and tactful criticism: Douglas Anderson, Michael Drout, Dimitra Fimi, Verlyn Flieger, Christopher Garbowski, Armann Jakobsson, and William Rosebury. WORKS CITED Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by J. A. K. Thomson and Hugh Tredennick. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976. Barton, Charles F. B. Getting Even: Revenge as a Form of Justice. Chicago and La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 1999. Butler, Joseph. “Upon Resentment” and “Upon Forgiveness of Injuries.” In Butler’s Sermons, ed. W. R. Matthews. London: George Bell and Sons, 1914. Hershenov, D. B. “Restitution and Revenge.” The Journal of Philosophy 96 (1999): 79-94. J.R.R.T: A Film Portrait of J.R.R. Tolkien. The Tolkien Partnership / Visual Corporation Ltd, 1992. Kant, Immanuel. The Metaphysical Elements of Justice. Translated by John Ladd. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1983. Lönnrot, Elias. The Kalevala. Translated by Keith Bosley. New York; Oxford University Press, 1989. Rosebury, Brian. “Private Revenge and its Relation to Punishment.” Utilitas, forthcoming 2008. Shippey, Tom. Roots and Branches: Selected Papers on Tolkien. Zollikofen, Switzerland: Walking Tree Publishers, 2007. Tolkien, J.R.R. Finn and Hengest: the Fragment and the Episode. Ed. Alan Bliss. London: HarperCollins, 2006. 20