1. Many Meetings
This is the first chapter of the second book and marks a conclusion in Frodo’s adventure to bring the Ring to Rivendell. (The Lord of the Rings trilogy consists of six “books,” typically published in three volumes.) The adventure began with the separation from the dead-end of the hobbit-hole, leading to the hobbits being pursued by Black Riders; they made their way through the Old Forest and were nearly suffocated by the old tree; Tom Bombadil initiated them in the Barrow-downs, followed by Bree and the good grown men, the confrontation at Weathertop, and the subsequent flight to the Ford. This series of events forms a symbolically cohesive narrative that Tolkien wrote almost entirely on intuition, culminating with the protective elves – or indeed the Good Mother – in Rivendell.
In this chapter, set in the bosom of the elves, the story begins to settle for the author; he allows characters like Elrond and Gandalf to explain what has happened, what is occurring, and what will roughly take place. We will return to Tolkien’s intuitive writing when we reach the Ents in Fangorn, and we will see that the saga follows unexpected twists. But from the Shire, through the Old Forest, the Barrow-downs, Bree, the Ford, to Rivendell, the story describes Frodo’s individuation process from a symbolic perspective.
Frodo himself assumes that he will hand over the Ring to the elves and return home, somewhat melancholic that his adventure did not have the same boyish and successful character as Bilbo’s. His own adventure was far grimmer – perhaps more mature – and he gained no treasures either. From the perspective we have chosen in the introduction to this section, it is, in a sense, consistent that the adventure concludes with Rivendell. “There and back again,” as Bilbo called his adventure. But it turns out that Frodo must go much further than Rivendell – much, much further – and his journey, unlike Bilbo’s, becomes nightmarish, almost unbearable. Bilbo did not prepare for his journey, he was not particularly wise during it, he was never initiated, and he did not slay the dragon. He remained, in a sense, a child, rich with the Great Mother’s treasures. Frodo, on the other hand, is wise, mature, and ready for the task, even though he himself does not believe it for a moment. Therefore, his adventure is of an entirely different nature than Bilbo’s.
Frodo wakes up after the dramatic events at the Ford with Gandalf at his side. It is as if Gandalf visited Frodo in the Shire, activated his calling, then disappeared from the picture while the hobbit went through all the adventures, and now reappears when Frodo has reached his goal. He is, in any case, very fatherly as he sits by Frodo’s bed. Frodo remarks that he reminds him of Aragorn. This is an interesting observation, as both represent the good masculinity.
Another noteworthy detail is that Gandalf, when speaking of the Black Riders, says they wear their cloaks to give form to their “nothingness.” This word is used only three times in the saga, as far as we can tell: here, when Gandalf commands the Ringwraith in Minas Tirith to return to the nothingness that awaits him, and in connection with a description of Mordor. The nothingness pertains to what was touched upon in the previous section, namely the non-existence of the unconscious, the dissolution into massa confusa, where not even “nature’s light” glimmers. We have seen that this is the great threat, which the Ringwraiths represent. They seek, so to speak, to drag Frodo down into this darkness, to take him “back to Mordor,” to nothingness. The conscious light he represents must be extinguished, which would be the great catastrophe the saga largely revolves around. Jung says:
“… emptiness is a great feminine secret. It is something absolutely alien to man; the chasm, the unplumbed depths, the yin.”[1]
Gandalf further explains that the Ringwraiths live in “both worlds,” and that the elves do as well. They exist in both the physical world and the dreamworld. While the elves’ dreamworld is paradisiacal, the Ringwraiths’ is, of course, nightmarish. The elves and the Ringwraiths are evidently opposites, like light and good spirits versus dark and evil spirits. We previously observed how the crawling Black Rider was replaced by the elves in the Shire, and we saw at the Ford how the Black Riders were replaced by the elves in Rivendell. Frodo has never encountered the elves as a group without first confronting the Ringwraiths. It is a psychological truth that one must confront one’s shadow to find “the treasure hard to attain.”
Frodo is utterly surprised when he learns from Gandalf that Aragorn “is one of the people of the old Kings.” “I thought he was just a Ranger,” he says. “Just a Ranger!” Gandalf exclaims. He does not reveal it now, but this “remnant in the North of the noble people, the Men of the West,” has for many years guarded the Shire, watching over it so that evil does not enter. Aragorn is, in other words, the Mother’s guardian, belonging to Rivendell and the elves, while he protects the Shire, this oasis of innocent, naïve, and unconscious symbiosis with the Good Mother. (While he carries a broken blade in his sheath.)
Rivendell is indeed like a maternal paradise. Bilbo, who now resides here, describes Rivendell as “the perfect house, whether you like food, sleep, good stories, or song” - in other words, if you are a child. “All the while, the sound of running and falling water was heard, and the evening was filled with a faint fragrance from trees and flowers.”
The elves are characterized by the preservation of their own world – preservation itself is “an elvish motif,” according to Tolkien.[2] They live in a timelessness marked by permanence. They are nostalgic, backward-looking. According to Jung, this form of conservatism and fear of change is tied to the mother complex.[3] Because the mother archetype is so central, the saga is characterized by a resistance to development. Machines, for example, are something evil in the saga’s world. The elves’ paradisiacal mother-bond is now threatened by the shadow from Mordor. But as previously noted, they do not mobilize; instead, they begin to leave the land for another paradise across the sea (which is, of course, an explicit mother image). Because they are so dominated by the Good Mother, there is no impulse to fight. Time seems to stand still in Rivendell, Bilbo says, and it is hard not to fall asleep. We apologize for our repetitions, but we feel it is important to show that the symbols we discuss are not random cherries we pick to make a point; they form the core of the story.
The saga does not elaborate on this, but there is a love story in the narrative, between Aragorn and Elrond’s daughter Arwen. Therefore, it is somewhat curious that while Arwen is present at the great feast in Frodo’s honor (!), Aragorn is not; a circumstance Frodo notices. “No one knew where he was or why he had not been at the feast,” it is said. Aragorn later mentions, in passing, that he had an “urgent meeting.” It sounds like a poor excuse. We suspect that Aragorn and Arwen cannot be together in a public context, due to the saga’s still-dominant one-sidedness (note, for example, that Elrond lacks a wife). Rivendell as a symbol would have a different dynamic if an explicit image of the union of opposites were openly displayed. For this reason, likely due to an intuitive impulse in the author, Aragorn must be removed from the scene.
But later, Frodo briefly sees Aragorn and Arwen together with Elrond in a private context, as a foreshadowing of what is to come. (This is not a public scene and thus not disruptive to Rivendell’s symbolic content.) Aragorn is dressed in an elven mail with a star on his chest. We may note that Arwen’s “surname” is Undómiel, meaning Evening Star. The star motif recurs for Aragorn. The star is above all a symbol of the soul and its destiny, while the starry sky represents the enduring order (which is why elves are always associated with the night sky). No figure in the saga has such a predestined fate as Aragorn. He will play a central role in the battle against the forces of darkness, emerge victorious, be crowned king, become “the mightiest man in the world”; and he will marry Arwen, thus becoming the first figure in the saga to establish an intimate relationship with the opposite sex. All this rests on Aragorn’s shoulders (which, again, makes it curious that he is so unequivocally willing to die for Frodo, from a rational or literal perspective), and this is what the star symbolizes.
Frodo and his friends go to the “Hall of Fire,” another hint at the potential union of opposites, with the water babbling outside the room with the crackling fire. Bilbo wants to see his old ring but seems to transform into something sinister when Frodo shows it to him. Bilbo becomes unhappy and remorseful. He says: “I am sorry: sorry you have come in for this burden; sorry about everything. Don’t adventures ever have an end? I suppose not. Someone else always has to carry on the story.” We have previously emphasized that Frodo inherited the Ring from Bilbo and noted that Bilbo, in a sense, failed in his adventure and left the matter unresolved. It is precisely because of this failure that Frodo is forced to make a new attempt. Jung said that the heaviest burden a child has to bear is the unlived life of its parents. We have written about this in a couple of other texts and will not repeat it here, but in brief, Jung returns to this very dynamic, that what the parents failed to realize in their life becomes a psychological inheritance the child must confront. “[The child] will be forced into fulfilling all the things the parents repressed.”[4] Bilbo now realizes, in his old age, that he bears the guilt for Frodo having to confront the dragon he himself avoided.
They remain in the Hall of Fire while Sam falls asleep, and Frodo experiences “dream-visions” from listening to the music. The enchantment grows stronger, and “it felt as if an endless flood of silver and gold washed over him, too manifold to discern its pattern … and it overwhelmed him and drowned him. Swiftly, he was drawn down by its shimmering weight into the deep-sea realm of sleep.”
We recognize these images from other “motherly environments” – flood, drowning, sea. But it is noteworthy that Frodo, as it were, drowns in the company of the elves in Elrond’s home (Imladris in elvish, meaning “deep dale of the cleft”). As with the Terrible Mother, who tried to drown Frodo in the Old Forest, there is a risk of drowning with the Good Mother. While this was a natural state in the Shire of unconsciousness, Frodo has now become conscious of the complex/archetype and cannot allow this regression. He realizes that he cannot stay in Rivendell; he would likely become something of a pointless spirit among others. He must awaken, rise, and continue his adventure, in accordance with his calling.
Footnotes
[1] Jung, "Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype, CW 9i, par. 183.
[2] Tolkien, Letters, p. 152.
[3] Jung, Symbols of Transformation, par. 414.
[4] Carl Gustav Jung, “Analytical Psychology and Education,” in The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, vol. 17: The Development of Personality, ed. and trans. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954), par. 154.