Quests in Middle-earth

• 1. Introduction

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  Quests in Middle-earth can take the form of the most absurd bargain imaginable. In The Silmarillion, a mortal man named Beren falls in love with the royal Elf Lúthien. Her father, Thingol, opposes the match. To get rid of Beren, Thingol names a seemingly impossible bride price. Beren must recover one of the Silmarils from the Iron Crown of the Dark Lord Morgoth himself. That is a death sentence disguised as a challenge. Yet across Tolkien's fiction, quests repeatedly take on this quality of the counterintuitive. The conventional quest romance sends a knight out to win glory or a prize. Tolkien, again and again, bent that formula in unexpected directions. Why he did so occupied scholars for decades after his death in 1973. What he encoded into the structures of his two most celebrated novels proved even more surprising.

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• 2. Two Quests, One Pattern

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  Paul Kocher, a scholar of literature, compared the narrative bones of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings side by side. He found that both novels begin at Bag End, home of Bilbo Baggins. Both send the protagonist eastward at the urging of the Wizard Gandalf. Both offer a haven at Rivendell, where the Half-Elf Elrond provides advice. Both feature an escape from underground danger: Goblin Town in The Hobbit, Moria in The Lord of the Rings. Both include a meeting with a second group of Elves, a crossing of desolate terrain, and a welcome from Men. Each builds toward a climactic battle and a journey's end at a mountain. In The Hobbit, that mountain is the Lonely Mountain; in The Lord of the Rings, it is Mount Doom. Each novel ends with a descendant of kings restored to his throne and the protagonists returning to a home in disarray.

  Randel Helms, another scholar of literature, finds an even simpler description of what the two novels share. He writes that both have 'the same story and the same theme': the account of a most unheroic hobbit who achieves heroic stature. Both also take the form Helms calls the 'there and back again' quest romance. Both unfold over exactly one year: The Hobbit from spring to spring, and The Lord of the Rings from autumn to autumn.

  For all that symmetry, Helms writes, 'the natures of the two quests and the reasons for beginning them are strikingly different.' Bilbo's quest is, in Helms's words, 'at first little more than a lark with venal motives.' Frodo's, by contrast, 'goes with the pain of a sad but noble decision.' The venal motives and the noble decision differ in ways that scholars would spend decades trying to name.

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• 3. A Quest in Reverse

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  Richard C. West, a Tolkien scholar, calls Frodo Baggins's mission the 'primary' quest of The Lord of the Rings. The critic David M. Miller agrees that it is the most important narrative device in the book. But Miller adds a complication: the mission is structured the wrong way round. In a conventional quest, the hero pursues a prize. Frodo carries the greatest prize imaginable and is hoping to destroy it.

  Miller points out that from Sauron's perspective, the story reads as a conventional quest. Sauron's nine Black Riders, in Miller's reading, replace the traditional 'errant knights seeking the holy of holies.' The Fellowship, by contrast, possesses the Ring but cannot use it even in its own defence. Miller finds in this arrangement multiple reversals stacked on top of each other. Scholars including Jared Lobdell, Lori M. Campbell, and Michael N. Stanton all reach the same conclusion. Stanton calls it an 'inverted quest'; Campbell writes that in this story 'Evil struggles to gain power; Good to relinquish it.'

  Tom Shippey, a Tolkien critic, calls the mission an 'anti-quest': a story of renunciation rather than gain. For Shippey, the logic of that story connects directly to what Tolkien had witnessed. Tolkien lived through two world wars. He saw the routine bombardment of civilians and the use of famine as a political weapon. He also witnessed concentration camps, genocide, and the development and use of chemical and nuclear weapons. Shippey argues that The Lord of the Rings poses one central question about that history. If the human capacity for that kind of evil could somehow be destroyed, even at a cost, would it be worth it?

  Mason Harris, writing in the journal Mythlore, captures the personal dimension of Frodo's position. Bilbo's curiosity overcomes what Harris calls his 'Hobbitish fear of the unknown.' Frodo, by contrast, wishes he had never seen the Ring at all. Yet the Ring's influence also makes him reluctant to fulfil the mission's true object: destroying it. Tolkien did not end The Lord of the Rings with the Ring's destruction. He added a second quest, set entirely within the Shire, as the penultimate chapter of the book.

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• 4. Shire and Ring

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  Brian Rosebury, a scholar of humanities, describes The Lord of the Rings as built from two very different elements. One is a slow, descriptive series of tableaux illustrating the world of Middle-earth. The other is the quest to destroy the One Ring, which unifies those scenes into a coherent whole. Together, they allow Tolkien to show readers a world worth saving, then threaten it, then resolve the threat. The destruction of the Ring provides what Rosebury calls a 'eucatastrophe': a sudden joyous turn that ends the work happily. In his view, the expansive descriptions and the Ring-based plot fit together exactly.

  The critic Bernhard Hirsch points to Tolkien's own statement in the foreword to The Fellowship of the Ring. The structure of the whole work, Tolkien said, was 'foreseen from the outset.' That structure pairs an outward journey for the Ring quest with a return journey for the Shire quest. Nicholas Birns draws on David Waito's argument about the penultimate chapter, 'The Scouring of the Shire.' Waito argues it carries the same moral weight as the Fellowship's main quest. The difference, in Birns's reading, is that it 'applies the morals to daily life.'

  Paul Kocher offers a precise observation about how Frodo conducts himself in the Shire. Having thrown aside his weapons and armour on Mount Doom, Frodo chooses to fight in the Shire 'only on the moral plane.' That choice is one of several deliberate patterns Tolkien built into the work at the level of the whole. A second set of patterns runs through the actual calendar dates of the story's pivotal events.

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• 5. The Hidden Calendar

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  Tom Shippey observes that when the Fellowship departs Rivendell, the date in the story is the 25th of December. When Frodo destroys the Ring and Sauron falls, the date is the 25th of March. In Anglo-Saxon tradition, the 25th of March was held to be the date of the Crucifixion. Tolkien embedded the arc of Christ's life within the surface structure of a fantasy quest. Shippey notes that almost no readers actually observe these dates.

  Verlyn Flieger, a Tolkien scholar, notices a second pattern woven into the same episode. Both Frodo and Aragorn receive their magic swords in Rivendell, before the quest begins. Flieger writes that this marks them as heroes in the epic tradition of Sigurd and Arthur. In the old epics, restoring a famous blade to a hero at his journey's start was a signal of his status. Tolkien reproduced this convention at exactly the same narrative moment and the same location. Frodo and Aragorn depart Rivendell as sworded heroes on Christmas Day, carrying echoes of Sigurd, Arthur, and Christ in a single departure scene.

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