1. The Tower of Cirith Ungol
In this chapter, Sam crosses the border into Mordor, where Frodo already lies captive in a tower. They remain in the land of shadows until the war of the Ring is over, two chapters later. From Cirith Ungol to Mount Doom—a span of three chapters—the story concerns itself with Frodo’s and Sam’s trials as they journey toward the “furnace.” The chapters flow together, just as everything flows together for the stumbling protagonist. This indistinctness is a property of Mordor, the very centre toward which the entire tale has been striving; it is both one thing and the other.
One would probably have expected nothing but torment, darkness, and despair in Mordor—an ever-deeper descent into the dark under the constant dread of the Eye. Yet Mordor is not so one-sided while the Ring-bearer wanders through the land. There are literary reasons for this: King Elessar has triumphed in the battle of the Pelennor Fields and is now riding toward the gates of Mordor, and in connection with this the sky lightens a little. But there are also symbolic reasons for this otherwise unexpected ambivalence in Mordor, where the environment and the experience would naturally be expected to be as one-sided as in Lothlórien—and perhaps they were; probably they were so while the Bearer dwelt with Galadriel—but now that he is in Mordor an ambivalent dynamic arises that surprises us somewhat.
Frodo will not merely stagger across the wasteland of Gorgoroth until Sam is forced to carry him up the slopes of Mount Doom to the great finale; we shall also witness unexpected symbolic expressions and transformations, both in the Bearer himself and in the Ring as symbol.
But first we must turn our gaze toward Sam, who takes the step across into Mordor at the beginning of the chapter. This step prompts a very brief digression on the name of this land. Surely no one has failed to notice that the word “Mordor” resembles “murder,” which in turn is akin to “mother.” We see similar associations in Swedish: “Mordor,” “mord” (murder), “mor” (mother). These resemblances are partly coincidental, but it is not impossible that an author writing intuitively arrived at this name for associative reasons. After all, we hold that the core of the tale is the Terrible Mother—the one who strives to murder her children (compare, for example, Kali). In this context the name Mordor feels entirely apt.
Before Sam has crossed the border and while he is still making his way back through the cleft of Cirith Ungol, he puts on the Ring—roughly at the same place he did the last time, and for the same reason: the orcs are coming. Almost as a matter of routine (which is natural, it is a repetition), the tale tells us that his hearing grows sharper but his sight dimmer. Yet it also relates that the Eye is searching more fiercely than ever.
Then he walks toward the fortress of Cirith Ungol—and “thus crosses the border into Mordor.” At that moment he takes off the Ring. The narrative is somewhat vague about the motive, but hints that it is because Sam’s sight is better without it. At the same time, one cannot help reflecting on the advantages of being invisible when infiltrating a hostile stronghold. In Mordor neither Frodo nor Sam ever wears the Ring, not until they reach the fire of Mount Doom. Even more unexpected is the fact that the Eye is practically absent while they are in Sauron’s land. No Ring, no Eye; no one making himself invisible, no one being seen. This strong and central dynamic of the tale largely ceases in Mordor itself.
Why does the Eye seek Sam when he is sitting in the cleft of Cirith Ungol, but not when he steps onto the ridge that forms the border into Mordor? One way of looking at the matter is that the Eye represents consciousness (as eyes in general do symbolically), which in turn implies discernment and what Jung calls logos. But when Frodo and Sam enter Mordor proper, this distinction ceases. They step into a domain that functions differently from the world outside. That is why it is so feared—here the rules that otherwise apply no longer hold. The land may be dangerous with all its hordes of orcs and evil men, Nazgûl and whatever else there may be; yet the danger does not consist in swords and spears—those Gandalf, Aragorn, Legolas, Gimli, Boromir, Théoden, and others can deal with; it is a practical question of numbers, tactics, and heroism. No, the danger of Mordor lies in something else, namely the nightmare or the original dissolution—the very thing the symbol of the uroboros (among others) expresses: the serpent that bites its own tail.
The Eye, as we have seen, is fixing, discerning, revealing, whereas the uroboros is the opposite of all that. It is not steel but nothingness, the void from which the Ringwraiths are sent forth; it is Mordor from within, while the Eye is Mordor from without. Consequently, the Eye is not a danger inside Mordor; instead—without the slightest foreshadowing or even hint in the tale—there appears the burning wheel. Thus we have four powerful symbols pertaining to Mordor: the Ring, the Eye, the burning wheel, and uroboros. Each forms a circle, or a ring. (For those who do not recall every detail of the story, we may clarify that while the Ring, the Eye, and the burning wheel are explicit, the uroboros—as we shall return to—is our understanding of Mordor.)
While we remain in Mordor with Frodo and Sam, we shall examine more closely these three variations of the ring-symbol that we have not previously explored. The Ring itself is of course a powerful symbol, and it is in Mordor—if not before—that we shall finally see what kind of archetypal energy Frodo has been carrying. In the Shire the Ring was a convenient way to disappear from troubles, whether to avoid an annoying woman on the road or a painful farewell to house, home, and friends. We have seen how the Ring, in the world of the Good Mother, represented a trivial regression, whereas the same avoidance became catastrophic in the adult world; and we have seen how anyone who employs regression to infantile irresponsibility and omnipotence as a method of evading evil or obtaining the good they feel entitled to will sooner or later suffer a collapse of character and adult development. The Ring is the shackle of the individuation process, which the tale strives to break.
One might think this concerns complexes—the popular mother-complex: the dragon the hero must overcome to win the treasure, and so forth. That is by no means trivial, yet this numinous tale goes beyond the usual themes of the chivalric romance; it concerns the Mother archetype itself, the primordial energy that forms the core of the complex. The story passes the devouring tree, the tentacles of the stagnant lake, even the monstrous spider. It does not end with the overcoming of these ensnaring horrors. It continues into Mordor, into the heart of darkness—if the expression is permitted. Here it is no longer a question of personal complexes in the form of monsters one overcomes in one way or another, but of experiences that do not necessarily belong to the ego’s conceptual world—that is, archetypes. That is why the Eye (relative consciousness) slips out of the picture and is replaced by the burning wheel in a uroboric environment; yet all these images, each in its own way, express the circle.
The Eye that Exposes the Hidden
The Eye as symbol thus represents consciousness, light, and seeing; conversely, “consciousness is the eye of all things.”[1] Yet how can the Eye—which in our tale is unquestionably something unconscious (that is, a psychic entity over which the protagonist has no influence)—at the same time represent consciousness? We are dealing with a consciousness separated from the ego. The symbol is mythologically familiar: God’s all-seeing, never-resting gaze, the all-seeing eyes of Argos, the dragon at the North Pole “that never sleeps and sees everything,”[2] and so on.
The alchemists repeatedly returned—as we touched upon early, in connection with the fox in the Shire who pondered the sleeping hobbits—to “nature’s light.” (We shall have occasion to revisit this phenomenon during Frodo’s and Sam’s journey through Mordor.) This light was held never to sleep and was likened to the lidless eyes of fish that gleam and glitter in the darkness of the deep. The eyes are an image of consciousness within the unconscious, observing the ego from within.
The Eye of God—or, from our perspective, the inner Eye—is “all-seeing, searches the hearts of men … a reflection of one’s insight into the total reality of one’s own being,” writes Jung.[3] To be seen is to be forced to see oneself. The Eye becomes the light that reveals the truth about us: it lays bare the soul—not merely the persona, the more or less trivial image of ourselves we wish to present; nor only what we have hidden from others and, as far as possible, from ourselves, but the whole, including that which we did not know belonged to us. The Eye thus becomes something exceedingly unpleasant; something penetrating against which we have no defence. It is not a question of surveillance so much as the realisation that an autonomous consciousness within us is exposing the entire personality. It sees more of us than we ourselves see, yet through its reflecting consciousness the whole matter dawns on us. In the tale this experience has been painful for Frodo, but the unveiling of the personality can also, on a “high” rather than “low” level, be a rebirth, as we shall see.
Because the Eye at this first stage can represent an experience the ego cannot bear, the symbol appears in mythology as something dangerous, something one fears and flees. (Its opposite also exists, as in the Eye of Horus, in line with the above.) The beautiful moon-goddess Selene is related to the now-familiar Hecate; “like her,” says Jung, “Luna is the ‘all-seeing,’ and ‘all-knowing’ eye. Like Hecate she sends madness, epilepsy, and other sicknesses.”[4]
Seeing in its negative form is a light that shines too brightly. We have reason not to be seen, and not to see; both establish—whether we wish it or not—a kind of accountability for something we may not want to acknowledge as ours, a kind of guilt for the person we reveal ourselves to be.
Most people recognise the feeling of having done something immoral followed by the intense wish that no one saw. If no one saw what one did, who one proved to be, one can continue with one’s functioning persona or identity as though nothing had happened. But if someone did see, the personality is altered in the encounter with that objective mirror, as it were. Now one is forced to confront one’s own seemingly wretched and alien personality. In this tale, however, it is not a question of “the others,” but of the one thing within us: the horrifying realisation that the Eye inside us sees everything. What does one do with this exposing insight?
Whoever uses the Ring in the tale knows that he is doing something immoral, or at the very least blameworthy; he knows that he is fleeing from something he ought to confront. The Ring, concealment, flight, the Eye, and so forth, are therefore linked to the shadow; yet in our tale, which treats universal rather than merely personal themes, it ultimately concerns the collective shadow, the impersonal darkness within us, which in the story is represented by evil.
Frodo first sees the Eye in Galadriel’s mirror, as we discussed in the chapter of the same name. He sees it arise out of nothingness, just as the alchemists’ fish-eyes emerge in the dark. It represents Frodo’s insight into the archetypal darkness of his own being. Significantly, this happens after he has witnessed the battle between Gandalf and the Balrog on the Bridge of Khazad-dûm. We remarked that the scene represents Frodo’s insight into the universal opposites, the archetypal struggle between good and evil; yet we also noted that Frodo himself did not participate—he merely observed. The struggle does not yet (consciously) belong to him. In the next moment, however, he confronts evil in the mirror—that is, in himself. After this terrifying insight he turns his gaze toward Galadriel, and then he sees her ring, Nenya, which (according to the tale) only one who has seen the Eye can see. In other words, only the one who has seen the lowest can also see the highest. “No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell,” says Jung.[5]
Since the hobbits in the mother-bound opening of the tale hide from the adult world—both by living in Her holes and by ducking out of sight whenever the Big Folk appear—habits that the Ring merely intensifies, we must conclude that concealment lies at the very heart of the “hobbit symbol.” The tale itself emphasises that the Ring which conceals must in turn be concealed; and we have noted that the name of the protagonist should resemble "bag", according to Tolkien, which could be understood as "someone carrying something hidden."
Seeing, exposure, and the like represent consciousness of the shadow; hiding, by contrast, represents unconsciousness of one’s own personality and the avoidance of guilt. The hobbits wish to remain hidden, unconscious, whereas the tale strives toward consciousness—a drive that meets resistance from the withdrawing, regressive forces of the unconscious. The opposite of this “hiding” symbolism, which hinders or even annihilates development, is (at this stage) the emergence or birth of “the true self,” to which we shall return below. With the help of the Ring one can avoid being born a second time, avoid that pain and uncertainty; being born in the body is a trauma, and being born anew in spirit encounters corresponding resistance and, like physical birth, requires necessity for it to occur.
Through this “symbol of hiding“ the Eye appears as the Enemy. The Eye sees the invisible hobbit who seeks to conceal himself—even from himself—from the true self. The pain is caused not only by the fact that the Eye sees everything, but that in the Eye’s seeing Frodo sees himself. The Eye thus represents Frodo’s experience of what Jung calls “confrontation with the unconscious.”[6] That confrontation leads to Mordor, and once there, when the matter is settled, the Eye slips away as a symbol; for now Frodo, or the ego, sees for himself and no longer needs the mirror of the unconscious—he has himself become an eye in the darkness.
The Flaming Frodo
We return to Sam. On the very border of Mordor he looks upon the fortress of Cirith Ungol. The tower they had seen earlier proves to be the highest point of the stronghold. He hears orcs fighting within the walls, sneaks forward—“a very frightened little hobbit”—and, Sting in hand, hurries through the gate only to run into an invisible barrier. On either side he notices statues, each with three vulture heads. We recall from earlier commentary that vultures represent the Terrible Mother. With the aid of Galadriel’s phial, the light of the Good Mother, he passes through the barrier.
Since Sam had heard the orcs speak of carrying Frodo to the topmost chamber, he climbs the stairs. The course of events is dramatic, but we shall pass over the details here. At last he sits, as far as he knows, on the uppermost level without having found Frodo. Despair closes round him together with the darkness. Unable to go further, he regresses and begins mumbling old nursery rhymes from the Shire. His strength returns, and he sings an improvised song of flowers, birds, and stars. Even if he himself perishes in the darkness now, the song declares, that world endures. He thinks he hears an answer; it is Frodo. An orc comes to silence the noise and unwittingly leads Sam to the very highest chamber where Frodo is held captive. Sam overcomes the orc and finds Frodo naked and in bad shape.
The scene in the tower room is highly significant. After they had spoken softly and showed each other tenderness, Frodo rises to move about and get his body working again. He is still completely naked as he paces back and forth. When else have we encountered naked persons in the tale? The first time was when the hobbits emerged from the burial mound and ran naked on the grass—that is, after the initiation in the Barrow-downs. The second was when Gandalf, having defeated the Balrog atop the mountain after climbing up from its underworld, lay naked on the rock—again after an initiation. Nakedness thus appears only after an initiation. Yet in the tower the symbol is intensified in an unexpected way. While Frodo walks naked in the chamber, “…it looked to Sam as if he was clothed in flame: his naked skin was scarlet in the light of the lamp above.”
When Frodo is naked, stripped of clothing, his true self appears, and it is fire; it is fire now as a consequence of his second death and resurrection. We must not forget that the naked Frodo at the very top of the tower is the first we see of him since the spider monster paralysed him (that is, killed him). What initiates the awakening is Sam’s song, his love, what Jung calls eros. The image may be likened to the prince who awakens Sleeping Beauty with a kiss. (The motif of someone being roused from “the dead” by love/eros recurs in fairy tales, as in Snow White as well.)
It is worth comparing this Frodo with the wise old man Gandalf. Both awaken to life naked, high up, and both are linked to fire. They have dwelt in the underworld yet ascend to heaven, to the domain of spirit; and spirit too has a fiery aspect, and vice versa.[7]
Frodo’s true self is symbolised by fire, and the soul is also frequently represented by fire (warm and life-giving).[8] The flames over his naked skin may further suggest that he is being baptised (initiated) in fire. (Compare Matthew 3:11: “[Christ] shall baptise you with fire.”) In his commentary on the Visions of Zosimos, Jung speaks of the lapis or philosophers’ stone as “the inner man” that the alchemists sought to liberate.[9] “In this sense,” he writes, “the Aurora consurgens says that through baptism by fire ‘man, who before was dead, is made a living soul.’”
Yet there are several aspects to the naked, flaming Frodo. It may be noted that the hero as archetypal image is often in one way or another a creature of fire, because the hero represents libido, psychic energy, which in turn is figuratively synonymous with fire.[10] Just as Gandalf emerged as his true self after his initiation in Moria, as the White, and just as Aragorn unfurls his banner when he arrives in Gondor borne upon the wind, as King Elessar, so Frodo appears here in his true self, represented by fire. He is the tale’s consciousness, that which drives the action forward to its endpoint, and hence the libido of the personality—in this context, the flame of the soul.
Since we have had reason to draw parallels with Christ, it is worth pointing out that he was “White Christ,” “King of kings,” and fire,[11] attributes that correspond respectively to Gandalf, Aragorn, and Frodo. This archetypal image has thus quietly entered and coloured all three of the tale’s foremost heroes at the moment their true nature manifests. This does not, of course, mean that they are Christ-figures in any traditional or religious sense, but that they manifest their true, unique self as Jesus did (more or less involuntarily, as a consequence of necessity rather than ambition: confrontation with the Balrog, the Dead, and the spider monster respectively). Edward Edinger writes: “Seen symbolically, Christ’s life will be a paradigm to be understood in the context of one’s own unique reality…”[12] In this regard the Christ symbol is to be understood not as something metaphysical or religious, but as archetypal (a universal symbol and human experience). On the question of imitatio Christi, Jung says:
“Are we to understand the ‘imitation of Christ’ in the sense that we should copy his life and, if I may use the expression, ape his stigmata; or in the deeper sense that we are to live our own proper lives as truly as he lived his in its individual uniqueness? It is no easy matter to live a life that is modelled on Christ’s, but it is unspeakably harder to live one’s own life as truly as Christ lived his.”[13]
This may perhaps be a digression, yet we believe that this understanding of the Christ symbol in our tale explains why each hero’s transformation into his true self takes on traits of Jesus’ attributes; with the (perhaps ostensibly) Christian imagery that has found its way into this equally decidedly non-metaphysical, archetypal narrative.
Finally, Frodo’s fire underlines his kinship with Sauron and Mount Doom, but we must postpone that discussion, as well as the purifying and decisive character of the fire symbol.
We return to the course of events. Frodo tells Sam that the Enemy has taken the Ring. Sam reveals that he has it but hesitates to hand it over, for it is such a burden and Frodo is in such poor condition. They ought to take turns carrying it, Sam suggests. This enrages Frodo, and Sam surrenders the Ring. Afterwards both feel miserable over the sudden darkness that overtook the scene.
One might have expected that Frodo, purified by fire and so forth, would be able to rise above such a reaction. Yet the black streak the conflict reveals is part of his wholeness as “bearer.” Jung returns repeatedly to this circumstance: “Without a shadow even the self is not real. It always has two aspects, a bright and a dark…”[14] In the emotional situation in which they find themselves, Frodo’s darkness is expressed affectively. When he is finally back home in the peaceful and serene Shire, the darkness within him continues to haunt him, but as recurrent pain and melancholy. While Jung, as previously noted, was deeply influenced by Eastern wisdom (especially Taoism) because he believed it mirrored the psychology of the unconscious so well, he had little sympathy for the Eastern ideal of enlightenment. He simply did not believe in freedom from darkness or liberation from pain, but in consciousness of suffering; to be, in the terms of our context, a conscious bearer of the darkness—just as Frodo, in the scene described, becomes conscious of, and filled with guilt over, the fact that his shadow gained the upper hand and wounded his dearest friend.
Sam wipes away his tears (apropos an earlier discussion we have had) and goes to fetch clothes for Frodo. He eventually returns with orc-rags and a helmet bearing the Red Eye. Frodo dresses as an orc, the Red Eye on his forehead. Just as he approached a synthesis with the Enemy through the flames, he now clothes himself in the Enemy’s garb. He enters Mordor, one might say, in the guise of his own shadow, implicitly acknowledging that this too is part of him. It is significant that Sam, by contrast, does not don orc-clothes—something Frodo questions. Sam replies that he cannot leave his own clothes behind because the Enemy might find them. A rather strange explanation; within minutes they will be walking through a landscape with a thousand conceivable hiding places for a bundle. Symbolically, however, it is entirely consistent. It is Frodo who undergoes all these transformations, not Sam. As Frodo says after the conflict over the Ring in the tower chamber: “This is my burden.” He is enveloped by flames, he carries the Ring, he puts on the garments of the shadow, and so on. That is not Sam’s fate.
So they descend the tower to the barrier and the watching vultures. With Galadriel’s light and an Elvish invocation they pass through. The vulture heads emit a wail answered by a Nazgûl, and the gate collapses behind the hobbits. The Nazgûl (as though to reinforce still further the link to carrion-eaters as representatives of the Terrible Mother) alights on the battlements of the fortress while the hobbits hurry into the realm of shadows.
In this commentary we have discussed the Eye, hiding versus the emergence of the true self, Frodo’s flames, the soul, even Christ. While doing so, a few remarks have been inserted about representatives of the Terrible Mother, prompted by the vultures. In this context the concrete symbols of the Terrible Mother feel almost out of place. She who has been so central throughout the entire adventure is given an almost perfunctory role at Cirith Ungol, on the very threshold of Mordor. This is neither coincidence within the structure of the tale nor a compositional error on our part. The reason is that symbols which were central and ever more sharply defined while Frodo journeyed from the Shire to Mordor acquire, as we have hinted, a new and more dissolving character once he is actually inside the land of shadows. Though a tower and a volcano do indeed exist on the far side of the mountains, everything flows together—as we said at the outset—and we enter a domain where there are no longer Black Riders or Eye, no more serpentine or devouring monsters. Frodo has passed beyond all that. The spider monster was essentially the finale with regard to the Terrible Mother as, shall we say, concretised symbol or entity. Frodo was carried paralysed toward Shelob’s lair and was on the point of succumbing to the experience, but Sam saved him temporarily with sword and light; thereafter Frodo was borne up into a tower, where Sam finally redeemed him with love. Frodo’s descensus ad inferos followed by the ascent and the giving of new life constituted a second initiation and transformation.
Footnotes
[1] Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, par. 117, fn.
[2] Jung, ”On the Nature of the Psyche”, CW 8, par. 394.
[3] Jung, ”Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies”, CW 10, par. 639. (Emphasis added.)
[4] Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, par. 24.
[5] Jung, Aion, par. 78.
[6] Jung, chapter VI in Memories, Dreams, Reflections: ”Confrontation with the Unconscious”.
[7] Jung, ”The Phenomenology of the Spirit in Fairy Tales”, CW 9i, par. 409. See also James Hillman, "Rudiments", Alchemical Psychology, Uniform Edition, vol. 5, 3rd ed. (Thompson, Conn.: Spring Publications, 2026), s. 50f.
[8] Jung, ”Basic Postulates of Analytical Psychology”, CW 8, par. 665.
[9] Jung, ”Visions of Zosimos”, CW 13, par. 126.
[10] Jung, Symbols of Transformation, par. 274, fn.
[11] Ibid., par. 245.
[12] Edinger, Ego and Archetype, p. 135.
[13] Jung, ”Psychotherapists and the Clergy”, CW 11, par. 522.
[14] Jung, ”Flying Saucers”, CW 10, par. 339.