The Great Tolkien Reread: The Council of Elrond, Part 1

Publicity still for Lego Rivendell

'You have done well to come,' said Elrond. 'You will hear today all that you need in order to understand the purposes of the Enemy. There is naught that you can do, other than to resist, with hope or without it. But you do not stand alone. You will learn that your trouble is but part of the trouble of all the western world. The Ring! What shall we do with the Ring, the least of rings, the trifle that Sauron fancies? That is the doom that we must deem.'

In today's chapter, we encounter perhaps the most fantastical turn of plot in the whole of The Lord of the Rings: a group of powerful people gather together for a meeting on an important topic; speak for hours without pause for rest or refreshment; give long, detailed presentations with only minimal interruption; and come to a mostly unanimous conclusion about the scope of the problem and the steps they will undertake to solve it. And all before breaking for lunch. It's a long chapter, and we will divide our discussion of it into two parts: first about the past, and second about the future.

The first, and much longer part of "The Council of Elrond" is dedicated to each of the attendees giving their own bit of personal history or received knowledge about the Ring and Sauron's attempts to recover it. In other words, it is mostly exposition, and it's a testament to Tolkien's skill as a crafter of invented mythology and history that these passages work as well as they do. Elrond's history of the Ring, from its crafting, to the fall of Eregion, to the forging of the Last Alliance between elves and men, to the death of Isildur, has the same epic scope and irresistible narrative flow that will later work so well in The Silmarillion (unsurprisingly, since those stories had already been written in some form when The Lord of the Rings was begun). But I am also partial to Glóin recounting the trash-talking between Dáin, the king under the mountain, and the messenger of Sauron when the latter demands the Ring ("the least of rings", as he claims and as Elrond mockingly repeats) or news of Bilbo—"'Consider well, but not too long,' said [the messenger]. 'The time of my thought is my own to spend,' answered Dáin. 'For the present,' said he, and rode into the darkness"—and Boromir's combination of belligerence and befuddlement at having walked into what, to him, is a situation straight out legend.

The story I want to talk about, however, is Gandalf's tale of his imprisonment at the hands of Saruman. This revelation both explains Gandalf's absence throughout Book One (which enabled the story of that book, and thus Frodo's transformation over the course of that journey, to occur) and sets up one of the major villains of the rest of the novel. It also contains one of the most interesting—and potentially troubling—exchanges in all of The Lord of the Rings.

I looked then and saw that [Saruman's] robes, which had seemed white, were not so, but were woven of all colors, and if he moved they shimmered and changed hue so that the eye was bewildered.

'I liked white better,' I said.

'White!' he sneered. 'It serves as a beginning. White cloth may be dyed. The white page can be overwritten; and the white light can be broken.'

'In which case it is no longer white,' said I. 'And he that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.'

I have a vivid memory of reading The Lord of the Rings as a teenager, on my second or third go-around with it, coming to this passage, and stopping dead. Rereading it again and again to see if I could come to a conclusion about its meaning. "He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom". How do we feel about that, gang? Because I, personally, am pretty conflicted.

At the most basic level, there's a kind of storybook logic to Gandalf's pronouncement—don't kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. In the context of Middle Earth, in which there is a dwindling number of powerful objects and craftworks that nobody knows how to recreate, there's a certain logic in simply letting them be. This, however, is not exactly what Gandalf and Saruman are talking about. The choice of the broken white light feels extremely pointed. Isaac Newton's use of prisms to refract a white beam of light into the full spectrum of color is, arguably, the starting pistol for the Enlightenment and the scientific—and, later, industrial—revolutions. Saruman will continue to be associated with industry and its evils for the rest of the novel, first through the deforestation of Isengard and the breeding of the Uruk-Hai, and later through his destruction of the Shire. The idea of breaking something as elemental as light to look at its components also recalls the atomic bomb, which Tolkien likened the Ring to in his introduction to the novel.

It is, obviously, unsurprising to find Tolkien staking a position against industrialization, a theme that will recur throughout the novel, culminating in its shocking final chapters. And it is possible to read "breaking a thing apart to find out what it is" as a metaphor for extraction, for taking apart something beautiful or long-lived in order to extract the value from its components. In The Lord of the Rings, this sort of extractivism is mostly expressed through the felling of trees (and trees, in Tolkien's cosmology, are emblematic of the divine; their destruction an act of ultimate evil). But we also see the fear of it when Legolas worries that the dwarfs, if loosed on the glittering caves beneath Helm's Deep, would rip out all their gems, while Gimli assures him that they would approach the caves as reverent, cautious caretakers.

It feels to me, however, that Gandalf's proclamation—so decisive, so categorical—is expressing something much deeper than a distrust of rampant industrialization or resource extraction. Taking a thing apart to find it what it is made of and how it works is, after all, sometimes necessary. It is the foundation of much of science—we would not have modern medicine, for example, without scientists who dissected dead bodies, often over the objection of moral and religious authorities. It is, I would argue, foundational to the pursuit of knowledge. It is that pursuit that Gandalf—and perhaps through him, Tolkien—seems to be setting himself against when he speaks to Saruman. Knowledge, of the power of the Ring and of Sauron's own power, is what has driven him from the path of wisdom, and to a path that tells him, on the one hand, that it is useless to resist Sauron, and on the other hand, that it would be good to become like him.

A new Power is rising. Against it the old allies and policies will not avail us at all. There is no hope left in Elves or dying Númenor. This then is one choice before you, before us. We may join with that Power. It would be wise, Gandalf. There is hope that way. Its victory is at hand; and there will be rich reward for those that aided it. As the Power grows, its proved friends will also grow; and the Wise, such as you and I, may with patience come at last to direct its course, to control it. We can bide our time, we can keep our thoughts in our hearts, deploring maybe evils done by the way, but approving the high and ultimate purpose: Knowledge, Rule, Order

What sort of knowledge is there in Middle Earth? There is lore, the knowledge of old stories and old languages, that allows Gandalf to read documents long hidden in the library of Minas Tirith and uncover information that not even Denethor is aware of. There is craft, often practiced by the elves to make their beautiful things, their ships and rings and even their rope; a practice that is at least semi-magical, an imbuement of objects with the intention and virtue of their maker. And there is mastery, over objects left behind from an earlier, greater age, such as Aragorn's ability to bend the palantír to his will. But nobody is making new palantírs, and nobody—or rather, nobody good, and nobody whose works can be turned to good—is pursuing new knowledge, new ways of understanding the world. 

Saruman's pursuit of knowledge, which he holds out as an inducement for his plan to ally himself (temporarily, he claims) with Sauron, is not merely an indication of evil or cowardice. As Gandalf tells us, in the line that has troubled me for nearly thirty years, it is a sign that he has left the path of wisdom. Later in the novel we will see Saruman brought low, not simply because his forces have been defeated, but because the people who were once his equals or inferiors will come to look on him with pity and contempt. The pursuit of knowledge, we will be made to understand, has turned him into a fool.

To be clear, none of this should be news. The stasis in Middle Earth's technology tree is as baked into this world as the song of Eru and the discordant notes added to it by Melkor. It is present everywhere in the story, if only through the absence of things that we might take for granted—consider, for example, the hobbits turning north or east in their journey to Rivendell, but never with the aid of a compass. What's startling in this exchange between Gandalf and Saruman is how baldly, how nakedly, it states its terms. It's a moment that can't help but establish that a gulf exists between us and this story (and perhaps, between us and that story's author). And maybe that's a good thing. The Lord of the Rings is one of my favorite novels, but it has a definite point of view that I can't always agree with. It's useful to be reminded of that.

Next time: Our discussion of "The Council of Elrond" continues on June 2nd. How do you solve a problem like the One Ring?

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