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[malsperanza]

Aragorn as Withheld Hero

Me: My Withheld Heroes list deliberately includes both high and pop-culture and genre heroes, and books of differing degrees of quality, seriousness, and intent. It would be unfair to all the books to suggest that the ambitions of all are the same with respect to exerting transformative power on the reader. But I also will make a case for distinguishing mythic and nonrealist characters from "mere genre." I think there is a clear difference between the seriousness of Batman and Aragorn, although both are written in apparently similar mythic formulas: Neither aims to be human or convincing in the typical novelistic sense. One's suspenders of disbelief are called upon to be more than usually elastic. I think Aragorn is only adolescent if one expects him to speak and behave like a real person. (Achilles sulking in his tent looks pretty adolescent too, from that perspective.) But Aragorn, like Achilles (and even like Batman) is only half-human (literally!): he stands between the human and the divine/heroic, and in the course of LOTR he traverses that span, moving from mostly-human (Strider the Ranger, who likes a decent mug of beer, wears stained clothes, bites his fingernails, falls in love, and has personal doubts) to mostly-mythic: Aragorn the King, complete with Homeric epithets: Justice-Bringer, Healer, Tree-Finder, Wielder of the Sword that Was Broken and Is Forged Anew, Consort of a goddess (yes, I know, Arwen isn't technically a goddess but consider ("Peace, ho! the moon sleeps with Endymion
And would not be awaked. ")

Black Dog marks the territory (if I may so put it) thus: In a work of great literature, "solving the mystery of the hero is by no means the key to complete erotic possession of the text; by contrast, grasping the hero's mystery seems to open up a sense of even greater mystery, of intractable moral and existential knots in the world depicted by the work as a whole -- figuring out what makes these characters tick is part of figuring out why the work as a whole resists erotic closure and leaves us with a sense of awe and anxiety."

I think that we can still apply this standard to a book of smaller ambitions. May we assume for the sake of argument that Rowling as an artist is not the peer of Homer and Shakespeare? Yet solving the mystery of Harry's heroism, uncovering (some of) his human and heroic secrets, grasping a part of his mystery--this is exactly what we are trying to do. And we are doing it in order to uncover an "even greater mystery, of intractable moral and existential knots in the world depicted by the work as a whole." I propose that the urge of fanficcers to introduce a powerful erotic element or scenario into the HP world arises from this perception that through eros one may penetrate or grasp the mystery at the core of the hero. (Wah! erotic metaphors chase me around the block with baseball bats!) In other words, the reader is in erotic thrall to the text, and senses it, and recapitulates it in a more literal way in the fanfic, in order to attempt to possess the unattainable text.

I am fonder of Aragorn than either the Magpie or the Dog. If Frodo is the moral center of LOTR, Aragorn is its heroic center. Tolkien was writing a myth, striking a balance (as Beowulf and Homer do) between the novel of personalities & events and the poem of ideas. Perhaps his greatest achievement was to invent a new form for doing so: a text that looks like a novel but is in most other respects an Edda, a mythic creation poem, explaining the origins of the human race and describing the downfall of the golden age. Its antecedents are not Malory or the Roman de la rose so much as the ancient myth corpora: the Greek canon, the Native American corpus, the Norse myth cycles. The only other book that I can think of that does this is Joyce's Finnegans Wake. Both novels recapitulate the cycle of mythic golden age, twilight, fall, and rise of the age of men in acts of monumental creative effort.

Considered in this context, Aragorn is not a romantic hero in the Heathcliff or King Arthur sense, and ought not be judged by that model. His role in the book is not parallel to Frodo's.

If one tries to compare Frodo's quest and role with Aragorn's, Aragorn will always look like the lesser hero, because he is faced with no human moral dilemma to equal Frodo's, and so is not fully tested. His tests are mythic ones, impersonal and generic. E.g., for him the decision to die uselessly as a feint to distract Sauron is not a difficult decision; it has none of the anguish of Frodo's decision. This isn't because he's a cheaper character or a paper cutout; it's because by the time that event occurs, he has passed from the human world to the world of archetypes (passed, literally, by entering the Underworld, "dying," and coming out the other side).

Also, he is the leader of the race that stays behind, not the one that disappears. Frodo, even without the Ring, is a hobbit, and all hobbits have already departed from Middle-earth at the time of our reading--a fact we are always aware of in reading LOTR.

If Aragorn were essentially an action hero, I would perhaps accept BD's characterization of him as "a genre character pretending to be a literary character -- his kingliness is mostly adolescent windiness pretending to profundity; [...] it's not really human, or convincing, or significant." Sadly, this is how he appears in the movies. There, every event Tolkien had carefully hidden from view us is shown--specifically all the big action scenes: Aragorn as sword-wielding warrior at Helm's Deep, and when he leads the Dead into battle against the Corsairs. Even on the Pelennor Fields we see him only briefly, greeting Eomer, whereas we get long scenes of Eowyn, Gandalf, and others fighting. Further, in the movies, every scene that shows us Aragorn's real heroic nature is suppressed--most importantly his confrontation mind to mind with Sauron through the Palantir of Orthanc--which he wins. (Kindly note that Aragorn is the *one* person in LOTR who challenges and beats Sauron. He succeeds where Frodo fails. And Gandalf doesn't even dare take the risk. Aragorn is a hugely powerful figure, though it's not all that visible.) So let's ignore the poor old movies.

Aragorn is not an archetype of the warrior--not at all. To be sure, he is a skilled warrior at need--none better--but his power and purpose are in judgment: He is the archetype of the good King, wise judge, bringer of justice and peace to the world. He reasserts the order of things. It is important not to undervalue him, for he is--almost literally--the equal in power and Sight to Sauron. He alone is able to confront Sauron, even without the Ring. Throughout the trilogy we see him most often weighing and measuring choices, leading by thought and intelligence, wisdom and lore, experience and moral authority. It is those qualities that allow him to command the army of the Dead, look into the stone of Orthanc and challenge Evil, heal the injured. It is also the reason why he is one of the very few characters whose happy ending includes requited love. (Sam, Faramir, and Eowyn are the others, and their loves are much more prosaic, human, not epic.)

Magpie and I have, I think, agreed before about the way the narrative of LOTR moves gradually and steadily away from novel toward lay or epic poem. The whole final part of ROTK is written in a nearly biblical style, with many paragraphs beginning with "And," and everyone speaking in rhythmic, formal cadences. We see this most clearly in Frodo and Aragorn, both of whom become *less* accessible, *less* known to us, the more we read. As for Aragorn, the other characters even remark on the change, as he shifts from Strider the Ranger to someone "high and puissant" (as Faramir calls him), increasingly mythic, archetypal, and poetic. In Frodo we see and feel the change personally, because he was, from the beginning, our pov guy, our surrogate, and gradually we lose him, and get Sam instead. (This shift always annoys me a little.) And in the end, we lose both Aragorn and Frodo--the latter goes to the Gray Havens, leaving us behind; the former disappears into mythic prehistory, as the last of the Numenoreans after whom come the first rulers of the age of men.

As such, Aragorn does indeed play the role of he who closes the story. Black Dog describes this as "like seeing a finished jigsaw puzzle; one has a mild sense of closure but not of transcendent accomplishment." And yet the transcendent accomplishment is there, for the story of the "downfall of the Lord of the Rings and the return of the King" is Aragorn's story and ends with Aragorn's crowning. That is the closing point of the arc of the 3-volume narrative, and it is Aragorn's role to complete it. In so doing, he brings about the close of the mythic age. He is, therefore, the perfecter of the story, the one who triumphs--and perfection is always a bit distancing and unsympathetic, even unsatisfying emotionally. (Perhaps this is what I mean by withheld--we are told of Aragorn's happy ending, but we don't get to see it. We are denied the chance to see him in bed with Arwen, because, well, it would probably be a lot of rays of light and angelic choirs and things.) The closure, far from being mild, is if anything so complete that it formally stops the tale, shuts down our emotional engagement, and moves the story once and for all away from the novel of personal relationships into the distant and unattainable realm of myth.

As we know, Tolkien resolved the problem of the dual nature of his tale--both adventure novel and epic poem--by giving us two distinct endings: the first one ends the hero tale with the crowning of Aragorn and the song sung by the harper on the Field of Cormallen, which transfers Frodo and Sam from real life to epic poetry. ("This is the ending," Frodo says, when he sees Arwen arrive in Minas Tirith.) The second one concludes the human (so to speak) tale that is the novel of Frodo and Sam's Excellent Adventure, venturing out in the world and coming home. This should clue us in to the fact that there are two epic heroes in LOTR, with two quests; intricately intertwined with one another.

So in my view, Aragorn must not be judged by the standards of a hero in a novel (Heathcliff, Lymond, Ned Beaumont, or even Hamlet), because his convincing realism is not at issue. He shed his human realism when he shed his Strider guise. Indeed, in the last glimpse we have of him he has shed his human qualities entirely and become a pure mythic image:

"With that they parted, and it was then the time of sunset; and when after a while they turned and looked back, they saw the King of the West sitting upon his horse with his knights about him; and the falling Sun shone upon them and made all their harness to gleam like red gold, and the white mantel of Aragorn was turned to a flame. Then Aragorn took the green stone and held it up, and there came a green fire from his hand."

Listen to the cadences--"and ... and ... and ..."--if that isn't an apotheosis, I don't know what is.

Aragorn is the last and greatest figure of myth; with him ends the mythic age, and with him history begins. So his Withheldness is an aspect of his otherworldliness--or of his dual role, straddling the two worlds. Frodo also has this dual position in the story, but it would be a mistake to compare the two, for they perform entirely different tasks and serve different ends. (Literally.)

Comments

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

I happily follow you from one post to the next. My feelings on Aragorn were mostly neutral on reading him. He just didn't grab me, and it's true I did basically have the same feelings about him as BD does. Though I'm always willing to give him a closer look! Now you're making me like the guy a lot more!

I do definitely think he is as important to LOTR as Frodo is. I may prefer the F/S books, but I know they need the balance of the other parts as well. There's a reason we have the ennoblement of the humble in the hobbits but also Aragorn as the perfect king. This post also brings up this idea of the witheld hero having a sort of duel nature. People note the difference between Aragorn and Strider as well as hobbit Frodo and Elvish Frodo. This makes me also think of one of my first fictional loves, Will Stanton from The Dark is Rising, who is both regular Will and Will The Old one. I can entirely see why the LOTR movies found Aragorn difficult if not impossible to portray onscreen. Frodo's elvishness is very personal whereas Aragorn almost just unveils himself when the time is right. (Will, too, is described as occasionally just not bothering to hide his true nature, and those moments are disconcerting to the people around him.)

Btw, I am also always annoyed by the shift from Frodo to Sam as well. Much as I like Sam, I would prefer to travel with the guy I came in with.:-)

When Aragorn takes on his kingly persona he is, I suppose, more of a conduit than a person. He serves his purpose. Excellent catch on the language, too, the "and...and...and." It's one of the weird and wonderful things about LOTR that this happens so naturally. You know, one other thing about the movie...I wonder if this is the reason why many people feel (and I would agree) that Aragorn at the end is just unable to fulfill the words of the title. In TTT he seems like a character in his element, a good leader. But it's harder for him to take on the mantle of mythic hero, and I don't think it's just because of the things that are left out. Frodo, imo, didn't have that problem. He made his transition pretty seemlessly, imo.

Re:

[malsperanza.livejournal.com]

It's *all* about the Aragorn-luv. *schnoogles Aragorn*

(Who am I kidding? *trips Aragorn behind the knee, knocks him into mossy bank of elanor, carnally assaults him*)

I think Jackson dropped the ball in ROTK--he could have done better by Aragorn, but was too busy getting details right in gigantic two-hour CGI Orcmosh. Also, seemed to want Legolamb to be Great Mythic Hero instead, dunno, possibly a blond thing.

Not that I didn't like the movies :D