I was just listening to Chris Pipkin’s podcast from last summer, in which he talked about Owen Barfield’s theory of Poetic Diction with Prof. Verlyn Flieger.

Barfield’s idea, as I’ve talked about before, is that in the early days of language, many concepts (as we conceive them) were combined in a single word. We don’t have direct access to the earliest days, but we can see some of it in ancient Greece. For example, Hestia the goddess and “hestia” (εστία) the hearth weren’t two different things; they were a single thought. Since then, as we have needed to speak more specifically and more abstractly, we’ve fractured those ur-concepts into lots of precise words. That’s a positive development: we can make things and do things and think things the ancients could never conceive of. But we’ve lost something along the way.

Prof. Flieger tells us in Splintered Light was that Tolkien took this idea and ran with it. All of Arda is just such a splintering of the thought of Eru. The Ainur split into Valar and Maiar. The Elves split into Calaquendi and Moriquendi, and then into a dozen subdivisions. Humans likewise. Even hobbits split into Stoors and Harfoots and Fallohides.

Barfield’s book is called Poetic Diction because, as he sees it, gluing all those shattered pieces back together is the poet’s job. Sometimes the assembly is a reconstruction of the ancient thought. Other times it’s something new. This happens with characters in Tolkien all the time: pivotal characters are frequently of mixed ancestry, putting the variously split pieces back together again. Elrond is the extreme case in the First Age. His grandson Eldarion is the culmination in the Fourth.

So. Do we know anyone else who’s dedicated himself to putting the splinters of reality back together, better than before? Why yes, we do! Sauron dedicated himself to putting it all back together again. His mission at the beginning of the Second Age began “with fair motives: the reorganising and rehabilitation of the ruin of Middle-earth” (Letter 131). There are lots of ways to reassemble the splinters of original truth, some more poetic, others more effective. As I’ve previously noted, Sauron chose “hierarchy” as his organizing principle, and nearly conquered the world with it.

This is as close as I’ve ever come to sympathy for the devil. From this point of view, Sauron was working from almost the same motives as Celeborn and Galadriel, trying to reassemble something out of the messy shards of reality around him.

Of course, his plan for organizing things didn’t end well. He chose a method designed for effectiveness, not poetry. Efficient dictatorship, not poetic diction. Sauron was not just organizing the physical world, after all. “Morgoth dispersed his power into the very matter of Arda…” as Tolkien says in Morgoth’s Ring, so as Sauron reassembled and organized things, he simultaneously was re-consolidating Morgoth’s evil. You can’t do one without the other. And that might be the most succinct argument for Tolkien’s odd fusion of Catholicism and anarchism I’ve ever heard.

Stephen Winter has another insightful essay, this time about the palantir, which he thinks about next to smartphones (as we all must, now). He uses the generic term “device” instead of “smartphone”, as is common.

The word “device” is fascinating in this context. It appears 20 times in LotR, 12 referring to insignia and 8 referring to some sort of art or craft.¹ The word is evenly split between the good guys and the bad guys, depending on how you count Fëanor.

When Gandalf talks about the palantir he could be foretelling the smartphone: “Perilous to us all are the devices of an art deeper than we possess ourselves.” (LR 3.11.099) To Stephen’s question whether our palantiri are more mysterious than we think, the answer is an emphatic “yes”. The constant stories of surveillance both by their makers, for purely pecuniary reasons, and by others who can be much more nefarious, make it undeniable that these things are perilous.

But then there’s Eomer’s observation that “Our enemy’s devices oft serve us in his despite.” (LR 5.04.026) In this context I can’t help thinking of the Arab Spring, or the flash protests against the attempt to ban Muslims from entering the United States. Both were organized over cell-phone networks. Perhaps it is a stretch to think of oppressive governments and the lords of Silicon Valley as a single Enemy, but their roads often seem to lie together for many hundreds of miles.

Note

A few years ago, Ashley at The Nef Chronicles wrote a post in which she tried to work out who the legal owner of the One Ring might be. She was at the time a law student. She concluded that nobody owns it.

Yesterday, Daniel Stride took up the challenge and revealed himself as a legal bloodhound: https://phuulishfellow.wordpress.com/2023/09/17/of-golf-balls-and-war-spoils-the-one-ring-and-property-law-squabbles/ He concludes that it’s complicated, but there are four possibilities. The strongest one is one I never would have guessed. (Clickbait.)

The only weakness I can find is that Stride applies New Zealand law. While there is substantial videographic evidence that many of the events in question took place in New Zealand, the veracity of those records can be challenged. Instead, we have to consider that Sauron, the original owner, is not human, but has a quasi-divine status. Therefore ownership of the Ring is subject to Divine Law.

For the most relevant explication of Divine Law I am indebted to Tom Holt⁶ He quotes Erda, Mother Earth herself, saying “Human law has no bearing on property that is or has been owned or held by a God.” “God” in this context, explicitly includes characters like Sauron. She continues,”under divine law, right of inheritance is subordinate to right of conquest.” (p. 200] Lest there be any confusion, Alberich the Nibelung clarifies, “if I take something away from you it becomes mine, and if they take something away from me it becomes theirs.” (p.201)

With this precedent in mind, many of the ambiguities clear up nicely. After numerous transfers by violence and trickery, Frodo is the true owner. If any further confirmation were needed, we may note that Sam said the Ring was Sauron’s [LR 4.05.132], and Sam may be assumed to be incorrect.