11. A Knife in the Dark
The chapter begins with three black riders arriving at the home of the hobbits’ friend Fatty Bolger in Buckland, the region from which the hobbit fellowship set out when they left the Shire and entered the Old Forest. The riders stand still, like “shadows of stone,” as a rooster crows. In other words, the masculine aspect of the black riders is foregrounded in the Shire. Great commotion ensues – Buckland’s residents raise the alarm, and so forth – causing the black riders to depart. We recognize this from other scenes: the black riders can only operate as long as they remain undisturbed. It is as though they cannot exist except as the pursuing shadows of the hobbits – and now of Aragorn. They must not be exposed. Like our psychological shadow, they are (as the Ring) a secret that must not become public knowledge.
Frodo and his friends have not slept in their room because Aragorn feared that the riders – who have spies in Bree and surely know which room is theirs – might break in during the night. Instead, they have arranged the beds to make it appear as though the hobbits are sleeping under the covers. When they check the room in the morning, they see that the riders have indeed been there. They entered through the windows. The beds have been upended, the bedding “slashed to pieces,” and even the carpet is “torn to shreds.” Here, in the civilized Bree, the riders represent rage and chaos, and the image of “tearing to pieces” evokes the “mutilated god” Dionysus and his maenads – the women who worshipped the wine god and, in ecstatic frenzy, tore animals apart, as well as any men who carelessly approached their nocturnal rituals.
If we return to Frodo’s homeland and consider its lush hills, the tranquility that pervades the region, and the order that characterizes their way of life, we understand that darkness has been repressed. If we wonder where the passions, chaos, and ecstasy have gone, we now have the answer: the black riders embody all of this. But, as we have touched on before and will revisit, the riders manifest these aspects in this particular context – in the orderly, rather cozy Bree, where no one raises their voice in anger. The black riders behaved differently when the elves’ song reached them in the Shire, and differently still when the hobbits finally encounter them at Weathertop. The shadow manifests in relation to the prevailing attitude and situation, as its manifestation is a reaction to the disposition of consciousness.
Led by Aragorn, the hobbits leave Bree and journey eastward. It is a strenuous trek, as they avoid the road, but after a few days, they catch sight of Weathertop. It is somewhat of a mountain, three hundred meters high, with a flat summit. (They see fires on the summit that flicker on and off as they gaze toward it during the night.) Once, a great watchtower stood on this height, but now only a wide ring of stone remains. Significantly, Aragorn is drawn to this place, even though he says the riders “are likely to head for Weathertop.” His rationale for this seemingly irrational endeavor is that there is a slim chance Gandalf is waiting for them there.
This is an example of how elements belonging to the same symbol are drawn to one another. Weathertop and the watchtower that once stood there are strongly linked to Aragorn’s ancestor Elendil, who kept his palantír in the tower (a foreshadowing of Aragorn’s own use of a palantír).[1] At Weathertop’s summit lies “a ring of toppled stones, like a kind of crown on the old hill’s brow.” The ring of stones around Weathertop’s summit explicitly symbolizes an ancient crown, just as Elendil was a king and Aragorn will become one. Thus, Aragorn belongs to Weathertop and cannot simply pass by this landmark – he is, as it were, drawn to it, despite suspecting that the Ringwraiths will go there too, especially when the Ring, through Aragorn’s actions, is brought to the mountain’s summit. We will also see that the Ringwraiths wears crowns, further illustrating that they are Aragorn’s shadow in this episode.
When Aragorn has led the hobbits to the summit of Weathertop, they discover traces of fire and a cryptic message from Gandalf. (We have already noted that fire is one of Gandalf’s primary attributes.) Aragorn interprets it to mean that Gandalf was here three days ago. (Note the recurrence of the number three.) With a symbolic perspective, one gets the sense that Gandalf and Aragorn have orchestrated what is about to unfold, much as Tom Bombadil, from a similar angle, was behind the events at the Barrow-downs. According to the tale, Gandalf appears to have fought a battle with the black riders using his fires, but one might entertain the idea that his fires were rather a signal to Aragorn to bring the hobbits to Weathertop, as it is intended for them to confront the black riders, just as it was intended for them to fall into the clutches of the barrow-wights. (We will see similar pattern regarding Moria.)
At the summit, they also spot the enemy below on the road. Aragorn explains that the wraiths belong to another world and do not see what humans see; however, they can see through other creatures (such as the horses they ride). We have not yet touched on this, but the reason they ride horses is twofold: these animals represent “instincts” (such as passion, desire, and other things the hobbits wish to disown), and the black horses are a symbol of death. This “base” and “primitive” quality that the riders represent is illustrated in two of the three instances when the hobbits see the riders in the Shire – they crawl forward, tracking them by scent, displaying a distinctly animalistic behavior as physical beings, which again evokes Dionysus’s followers who seemed to have raged in the hobbits’ room at the inn.
Aragorn further explains that the riders are weakened by the noonday sun and fear fire. Both the sun in the sky and fire represent consciousness, while the riders, of course, represent the darker contents of the unconscious. The darkness of night is dangerous, for it is unknown what lurks about, while the light of the sun is safe because we can see what is there and confirm it poses no threat – we are conscious of our situation when the sun is high. In any case, Aragorn says the riders are drawn to the Ring. This is a clear expression of our earlier observation in this section, that aspects of the same symbol, including opposites, naturally gravitate toward each other.
But Aragorn and the hobbits have no choice but to camp for the night. The hobbits ask Aragorn to tell them something “from ancient times.” He sings a song about Tinúviel and Beren, a tale of love between an immortal elf princess and a mortal human hero, which above all expresses longing. We have already established that Aragorn, as a wanderer, symbolizes longing for the mother (or, in the story, Arwen, an elf princess Aragorn loves; or, in Jungian terms, his anima). In passing, we can note that Tinúviel is associated with much silver, moon, and stars – symbols in the tale for the idealized feminine – and that Beren loses his hand in battle, an example of sacrifice through mutilation, a theme we will inevitably return to.
The moon rises, and the song falls silent. Then something “crawling” (as opposed to walking) comes up the hill, and “shadows” appear on the ridge, as if to underscore what we have assumed these beings symbolize. The black riders approach with hissing, venom-laden breath, and cold. These serpentine descriptions link them again to primitive instincts but also to the Terrible Mother. Terror grips the hobbits, who have spent their lives repressing these qualities. With cold in his bones, Frodo struggles against the impulse to put on the Ring, “he longed to give in,” to vanish into the Great Mother’s embrace; the encounter with the masculine shadow is too much for him. He succumbs – and enters the world of the Ringwraiths. They appear as old men clad in gray – a counterpart to Gandalf the Grey, in other words. But while Gandalf, with his fire and inspiration, represents consciousness, life, and energy, these wraiths, with their cold and “haggard” hands, represent unconsciousness, emptiness, and death – the domains of the Terrible Mother, underscored by the fact that their helmets are silver.
But Frodo does not flee; instead, he draws the blade given to him by Tom Bombadil when he passed the trials of the initiation rite. Two of the three approaching wraiths halt when Frodo brandishes this symbol of mature masculinity, but the third, taller than the others, advances and stabs him in the left shoulder with his knife. To avoid giving this penetration an overly masculine character, it is noted that “it was as if an arrow of poisoned ice” struck him. The bow is a feminine weapon, a crescent-shaped ranged weapon, and poison has a distinctly feminine quality, as does paralyzing ice, which belongs to the Terrible Mother (as seen in the Snow Queen in Narnia). Only after Frodo is wounded does Aragorn arrive, brandishing torches. What was he waiting for? For what must happen to occur? The Ringwraiths retreat, presumably because they have accomplished their task.
But what does this mean? One might have thought the Ringwraiths were after the Ring, intending to take it and ride back to Mordor, perhaps killing the hobbit if it made things easier. But that does not seem to have been their plan at all. Instead, their apparent intent was to poison Frodo, paralyzing him – to give him a dose of the Terrible Mother, so to speak, and then withdraw after completing their task, leaving their victim to succumb to their venomous presence. Their behavior is feminine; they do not act like ancient warriors or kings who kill and plunder but rather as if they have no real capacity for violence when it comes down to it. They seem content to poison and then leave the scene, while their victim – still in possession of the Ring, notably – succumbs to their venomous actions.
Frodo now lies weak, cold, and unable to move his left arm; a fever and stiffness that will only worsen as he slowly slips into the valley of shadows.
The place he lies on is a high hill with an ancient ruin and a history stretching back to time immemorial. The tale constantly reminds us of antiquity – important places are always ancient. This can be understood as a reference to archetypes, which are as old as humanity itself. They have always existed and will continue to exist as long as humanity does. The tale’s content is timeless – it is not about an individual’s personal psychology but about humanity’s collective psychological experience, which repeats endlessly. In the tale’s terminology, one might speak of the archetype of the Shire (the mother), the archetype of the Barrow-downs (initiation), the archetype of Weathertop (the shadow), and so on. An archetype is never personal; it is not individual but collective, part of the universal human psyche.
In this context, Aragorn represents the Good Father and leads the hobbits to the highest point they have reached thus far. As an isolated mountain, the place symbolizes the center of the earth (not literally, of course) and proximity to the Father. The “crown” is both implicitly and explicitly present as a symbol; it crowns the place and testifies to the grandeur and honor of past generations of men. This situation follows the hobbits’ initiation into the world of gorwn men. As this psychological content is integrated, its shadow is constellated. In this situation, the shadow takes on a new quality, as it becomes clear that it now serves the Terrible Mother. We have already seen that, after the initiation, the shadow indifferently paralyzed Merry and emotionally tore things apart. With Aragorn’s arrival, they have acquired a destructive feminine quality we have not seen before.
While the Good Father leads the hobbits upward toward the heavens, the black riders come crawling as from the underworld as night falls. They are described with adjectives evoking creepy snakes, with venomous breath and the cold of death. (Though actual snakes do not appear in the tale, the serpent symbol recurs.) To illustrate the contrast, we can recall that the black riders spoke with the hobbit Ham and were physically close to Frodo – but in the Shire, they lacked these feminine qualities. The symbol deepens as new qualities come to the fore. At Weathertop, the riders are emissaries of the Terrible Mother; they bring cold, paralysis, and death.
These feminine qualities in the shadow are thus a consequence of the integration of masculinity and the resulting situation on the masculine height. The one-sidedness of the mountaintop, Aragorn, the ruin, and the fact that everyone in the company is male is compensated by the shadow taking on a dangerous, feminine content. It is, so to speak, an autonomous attempt at balance. The more one-sided consciousness becomes, the more frightening its inner opposite grows.
That these are shadows, in a Jungian sense, is reflected in the fact that the men at the top are five in number, and the black riders are also five in number. (Aragorn tells Sam that he does not understand why there were only five riders, not nine, but the number is thus psychologically consistent.) In the encounter with the terrifying shadow, Frodo’s impulse to put on the Ring and disappear into the Mother’s world becomes irresistible. But while in the Good Mother’s Shire he would only have “disappeared” into her bosom and escaped all (therein mundane) problems, at the ancient Weathertop with Ringwraiths he sinks straight down into the Terrible Mother’s underworld.
That invisibility, death, and the underworld are connected is evident from the fact that the name of the underworld and its ruler in Greek mythology, Hades, roughly means “invisible,” while the realm of the dead in Norse mythology, and the name of the goddess who rules there, Hel, means “concealed.” The danger of frequently using the Ring lies not least in the fact that each time it brings one into contact with the realm of the dead, and the more often it is used, the more the realm of the dead is incorporated. This is what has happened to the Ringwraiths; they are now no more than shadows in the realm of the dead, taking form through clothing and senses through animals. But they belong to the bleak, cold, and dark underworld.
While Frodo, through the Ring, also finds himself there, he is as if struck by an icy, poisoned arrow, the effect of which is fever, chills, weakness, and paralysis. The Ring, after the initiation at the Barrow-downs and with Aragorn at Weathertop, is no longer a possible escape to the Good Mother’s undemanding protection but a nightmarish dissolution of consciousness into the Terrible Mother’s (or the collective unconscious’s) underworld. Jung writes the following about the mother archetype, which is relevant in this context but also more generally for our consideration:
”On the negative side the mother archetype may connote anything secret, hidden, dark; the abyss, the world of the dead, anything that devours, seduces, and poisons, that is terrifying and inescapable like fate. ... These are three essential aspects of the mother: her cherishing and nourishing goodness, her orgiastic emotionality, and her Stygian depths.”[2]
The blade that pierces Frodo breaks, and a small piece of the tip remains in his body. When Aragorn later picks up the Morgul-knife, the blade turns to smoke. With this castration the Ringwraiths have dedicated him to the Terrible Mother. Castration is the ultimate sacrifice to her, just as Attis castrated himself under the tree, a ritual his priests later repeated in honor of Cybele, the ancient nature goddess worshipped in orgiastic rites.[3] (We are reminded of the Dionysian outburst at the civilized inn.) Frodo is now slowly fading into the darkness. The Ring – this bond to the Great Mother – has proven to be profoundly dangerous, a terrifying threat to consciousness and individuality. Was this the merciless, almost unbearable insight the Father meant for Frodo to gain at Weathertop, on the ancient height of old kings?
Footnotes
[1] This information is not included in The Lord of the Rings, but it is relevant for understanding the symbolism of Weathertop as expressed in the tale.
[2] Carl Gustav Jung, “Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype,” in The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, trans. R. F. C. Hull, 2nd ed., vol. 9, part 1 of The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Bollingen Series 20 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), par. 158. With "Stygian depths," Jung refers to the river Styx, i.e., the underworld.
[3] James George Frazer, Den gyllene grenen: studier i magi och religion, trans. Karin Stolpe (Stockholm: Natur och Kultur, 1990). p. 412, 415. [The Golden Bough.]