Men in Middle-earth

• 1. Introduction

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  Men in Middle-earth began as kings. Nine of them were given Rings of Power. Sauron used those rings to turn each man into a Ringwraith, his most powerful servant. That transformation reveals what Tolkien thought the race of Men was most vulnerable to. Their mortality separates them from the immortal Elves who taught them. Their desire to overcome that mortality is what the Dark Lord reliably exploits. What does it mean to be human in a world full of races who never die? And when the last battle is won and the last Elf has sailed west, who will inherit the world?

• 2. The Second People

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  The Elves, who awoke long before Men, called them the 'afterborn.' In the Elven tongue Quenya, they were the Atani: the Second People. Both races first awoke in the East of Middle-earth and spread across the continent, developing different cultures and ethnicities. Unlike the Elves, Men were mortal. When they died, their souls departed to a realm unknown even to the Valar, the godlike powers who shaped the world.

  The Ent Treebeard captured the standing of Men among the free peoples in a list-poem, naming them 'Man the mortal, master of horses,' last on the list. Hobbits were absent from his poem because he did not know them. On meeting the Hobbits Merry and Pippin, he worked their people into the poem at once. The Tolkien scholar Paul H. Kocher notes that this list echoes the medieval concept of the Great Chain of Being. It places the speaking peoples above beasts, birds, and reptiles, with Men and their peers created separately from those lower orders. Hobbits, though absent from Treebeard's original poem, were not a separate race at all: they were a branch of the lineage of Men.

• 3. A Divided World

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  Sandra Ballif Straubhaar notes in The J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia that Faramir, son of the Steward of Gondor, delivers an 'arrogant' speech. It classifies Men into three groups: the High Men of the West, the Middle Men of the Twilight, and the Wild Men of the Darkness. Straubhaar notes that Faramir later has cause to repent this speech, and that his taxonomy is probably not to be taken at face value.

  Those on the side of the free peoples in The Lord of the Rings are the Dunedain, descendants of Men who fought alongside the Elves against the first Dark Lord, Morgoth. From the Dunedain descend the Rangers, the soldiers of Gondor, and their allies the Rohirrim. Each group has a real-world analogue. The Rohirrim, with their wooden mead-halls and their culture built around horsemanship, correspond to the Anglo-Saxons and the Goths. Gondor, with its stone cities and its literature and music, recalls the Byzantine Empire and, in other features, Ancient Egypt. The people of Bree, farming the land and living in houses of wood, earth, and stone, suggest medieval England.

  The main adversaries in The Lord of the Rings are the Haradrim and the Easterlings. Tolkien describes the Haradrim as 'swart,' meaning dark-skinned; they used war-elephants and raided by sea. Tolkien describes the Easterlings as 'slant-eyed.' They lived in Rhun, the vast eastern region of Middle-earth, and served in the armies of Morgoth and Sauron. They rode horses or war-wagons, which earned them the name 'wain-riders.' The Variags of Khand were a smaller group who appeared as vassals of Mordor in the Battle of the Pelennor Fields. Their name derives from the Old Norse word Variagi, meaning the Varangians, Germanic warriors who served as mercenaries. The Haradrim's counterpart in Tolkien's cultural design is not a medieval one but an ancient one: the enemies of Rome.

• 4. The Range of Men

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  The Tolkien scholar Deborah C. Rogers places the Hobbits and the Men of The Lord of the Rings at opposite ends of a literary spectrum. Hobbits are what Rogers calls the 'clods' of the story: low, earthbound, fond of beer and comfort, reluctant to go on adventures. They fit what the literary critic Northrop Frye called the lower literary modes, including various forms of humour. Men are not all of a piece.

  Rogers names the worst of them: Bill Ferny, the petty villain; Grima Wormtongue, described as 'loathsome'; Barliman Butterbur of Bree, the 'slow-thinking' publican. At the lowest point stands Denethor, Steward of Gondor, whom Rogers calls 'that portrait of damnation.' Higher up the scale come Theoden, King of the Rohirrim, brought back to himself after Wormtongue's corruption; the 'gentle warrior' Faramir; and his brother Boromir, the hero-villain. Rogers places Aragorn at the top.

  Aragorn first appears in Bree as a weatherbeaten Ranger of the North named Strider. He is the opposite of the Hobbits in every way: tall, not provincial, unbothered by the discomforts of the wild. Gradually the reader discovers he is heir to the throne of Gondor and engaged to the Elf-woman Arwen. Equipped with a named magical sword, he fits what Frye called the 'High Mimetic' or 'Romantic' literary mode. He regains his throne, marries Arwen, and enjoys a long, peaceful, and happy reign. Michael N. Stanton, writing in The J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia, notes that Hobbits were 'a distinctive form of human beings' whose speech contains 'vestigial elements' hinting that they originated in the North of Middle-earth.

• 5. The Weight of the Ring

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  Paul H. Kocher writes that each set of Rings of Power reflected the nature of the race that would wear them. For Men, those rings 'stimulated and implemented their ambition for power.' The Dwarves resisted Sauron's domination; the Elves hid their rings from him. With Men, Sauron's plan worked perfectly. Kocher states that Tolkien considered personal free will the 'distinguishing mark' of individuality, the most precious gift any being could hold. Sauron is evil precisely because he seeks to dominate the wills of others. The wise, like the Wizard Gandalf and the Elf-queen Galadriel, therefore avoid putting pressure on anyone.

  Kocher states that the leading Man in The Lord of the Rings is Aragorn. Critics often overlooked him in favour of Frodo as protagonist. Aragorn is one of exactly two Men in the Fellowship of the Ring; the other is Boromir, elder son of the Steward of Gondor. Both intend one day to rule Gondor. Boromir means to fight, save his city with any help available, and inherit the Stewardship. Aragorn knows he is in the line of kings but is unknown in Gondor. At the Council of Elrond, Aragorn presents the broken shards of his ancestor Elendil's sword. He asks Boromir whether he wants the House of Elendil to return. Boromir replies evasively that he would welcome the sword. When the One Ring is shown at the Council, Boromir at once thinks of using it himself. Elrond explains how dangerous it is; Boromir reluctantly sets the idea aside.

  At Parth Galen, the temptation returns. Boromir tries to seize the Ring from Frodo. Frodo uses the Ring to escape. Orcs attack, and Boromir repents, dying to protect the Hobbits. Aragorn gave Boromir an honourable boat-funeral. The two Men in the Fellowship had shown in opposite ways what Kocher meant. The Ring targeted free will, and free will was the only defense.

• 6. Mortality's Promise

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  The appendix titled 'The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen' is where mortality takes its sharpest personal form in The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien himself stated that death and the human desire to escape it was the work's core theme. In the appendix, the immortal Elf Arwen chooses to become mortal so that she can marry the Man Aragorn. An earlier intermarriage had the same weight. In the First Age, in the land of Beleriand, their ancestors Luthien and Beren faced the same divide between Elven immortality and human mortality. The result of that earlier union was that Aragorn's line became exceptionally long-lived among Men. As the royal family of Gondor intermarried with others over generations, that extended lifespan spread outward through the entire race.

  Sauron, as Morgoth's former servant, exploited the same desire less honestly. He tempted the Men of Numenor to attack Valinor, falsely claiming that Men could gain immortality simply by being there. The island of Numenor was destroyed: drowned beneath the ocean in what Tolkien describes as an Atlantis-like catastrophe. The world was made round. Valinor was removed from it entirely, unreachable now except by the Elves. Sauron's body was destroyed, but his spirit survived to become the new Dark Lord of Middle-earth. The faithful Men who refused to join the attack followed their leader Elendil. They sailed to Middle-earth and founded the kingdoms of Arnor in the North and Gondor in the South. They remained known as the Dunedain, meaning 'Men of the West.' Arnor eventually fragmented and declined until its kings were reduced to wandering as Rangers. But they carried their memory of Numenor, called Westernesse, through every generation down to Aragorn.

• 7. A Moral Geography

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  David Ibata, writing in The Chicago Tribune, asserted that the protagonists of The Lord of the Rings have fair skin. Many are blond-haired and blue-eyed as well. Having the 'good guys' white and their opponents of other races, Ibata argued, is uncomfortably close to racism. The scholar Margaret Sinex states that Tolkien's construction of the Easterlings and Southrons draws on centuries of Christian tradition. He used them, she argues, as an 'imaginary Saracen.' Zakarya Anwar judges that while Tolkien himself was anti-racist, his fantasy writings can certainly be taken the wrong way.

  The scholar John Magoun sees something more structural in the arrangement. He describes the result as a 'fully expressed moral geography.' Good Men are arranged in the West, evil Men in the East. Gondor is virtuous by being in the West, but troubled by its southern location. Mordor in the Southeast is hellish. Harad in the extreme South, in Magoun's words, 'regresses into hot savagery.' Film-maker Andrew Stewart, writing in CounterPunch, agrees with Magoun's reading. The geography, Stewart says, deliberately pits the good Men of the West against the evil Men and Orcs of the East.

  Peter Jackson's film trilogy gave the Haradrim long red robes and turbans as they rode their elephants into battle. The film companion book, The Lord of the Rings: Creatures, describes them as 'exotic outlanders' inspired by '12th century Saracen warriors.' Jackson's Easterling soldiers are covered in armour, with only their 'coal-black eyes' visible through their helmets' eye-slits. Ibata commented that they look Asian, their headgear recalling both Samurai helmets and conical 'Coolie' hats. The theologian Fleming Rutledge states that the leader of the Druedain, Ghan-buri-Ghan, is treated in the story as a noble savage. Others note that Tolkien was strongly anti-racist in his actual life. Ibata described the Haradrim in the film as looking like 'North African or Middle Eastern tribesmen.' That phrase, from a mainstream newspaper, captures why the debate over Tolkien's racial imagination has not been resolved.

• 8. An Inherited World

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  Tolkien scholar Marjorie Burns described the pervasive feeling of decline in a single observation. She wrote that this is 'a mythology where even the gods can die,' leaving readers aware 'that everything comes to an end.' Even after Sauron falls, the Elves fade as well. That sense of inevitable loss runs beneath the victories at the story's end. The Elves are sailing for the Uttermost West, never to return. The Ents are childless. Dwarves, Hobbits, and all the rest are dwindling. Only Men remain, inheriting a world that every other race is quietly vacating.

  The Tolkien scholar Paul H. Kocher identifies one conversation that captures this shift with particular precision. Legolas and Gimli are close friends despite being an Elf and a Dwarf. On their first visit to Minas Tirith, they see the marks of decay around them. Gimli says that Men's works always 'fail of their promise.' Legolas replies that even so, 'seldom do they fail of their seed,' meaning Men keep reproducing even as their buildings crumble. Gimli presses: everything Men do comes to 'naught in the end but might-have-beens.' Legolas can only answer: 'To that the Elves know not the answer.' Kocher calls this exchange a 'sad little fugue,' at odds with the generally hopeful tone of the rest of the book.

  Tolkien intended Middle-earth to represent the real Earth at some distant epoch in the past. He apparently planned to create a mythology for England, combining medieval myths, hints from old poems, and nearly-forgotten names to build his world. But the design required him to tear it all down at the end. The Elves leave for the Uttermost West. The other races dwindle into dim memory. Tolkien wrote that the design required 'leaving nothing, once again, but dim memories.' Men are what is left when those memories fade.