A Fool's Hope
Hobbits rush in where heroes fear to tread

In J. R. R. Tolkien’s grand epic of Middle-earth, beginning with The Hobbit and continuing through the The Lord of the Rings, a tale unfolds which at first appears firmly rooted in the heroic. There is even a classic hero—the royal child Aragorn, raised in ignorance until maturity, when he takes up a sword of legend to restore his fallen kingdom—following the pattern established in myth as far back as Moses and Oedipus. But while Aragorn is definitely a protagonist, he is not the hero on which the story turns. It is the hobbits who carry the saga of Middle-earth, and they are not heroes but fools.

What are these hobbits, these fool-heroes who surround and uplift their “betters”? Small, plump, plain-spoken, and fond of comfort—particularly good food and drink—hobbits are rustic creatures. They live either in burrows or long, low houses, grow their own food, and always go barefoot. Thus, hobbits represent people who live simply and in harmony with their land. Their shadow side, unsurprisingly, is a deep-rooted conservative streak—a suspicion of anything and anyone outside their narrow experience.

Bilbo in particular makes an odd protagonist. To begin with, he is not young but middle-aged, settled into a dull, comfortable routine. Unlike heroes who set out to seek their fortune, he initially rejects the idea and must be tricked into it by the cunning wizard Gandalf. Like the fairy-tale fool or Jack figure, Bilbo tumbles into his story, acted upon rather than controlling his actions, rushing off “without a hat, walking-stick, or any money.” He then spends most of the adventure that follows grumbling about hardships and privations, getting his dwarf companions in and out of trouble, and stumbling by pure accident upon the greatest treasure known to Middle-earth.

And yet it is Bilbo’s actions upon which the story turns, his crucial presence which ensures it success. It is no coincidence that he has been chosen “for the lucky number”—there are twelve dwarves, and Gandalf, their guide, makes thirteen—for all his successes are serendipitous and indirect.. He finds the mighty One Ring by putting his hand on it in the dark. He wins a riddle contest by sheer luck rather than skill, and discovers the Ring’s power of invisibility by yet another happy accident. When he does take deliberate action, it is to help another: while it is Bilbo who discovers the weak spot in the dragon Smaug’s armored hide, he does not bring the monster down himself, but sends the vital information to a heroic human archer.

The fool is a figure of reversal, of rules cast aside and the normal order of things turned inside-out. This is apparent in fairy tales where the hero is a fool: Jack’s sale of his cow for a handful of beans should have been a horrible swindle, but instead it makes his fortune. The boy with the Golden Goose succeeds in making the Kings’ daughter laugh, thus winning her hand, precisely because he had set out to do nothing of the sort. Shakespeare’s fools tell pointed truths that nobody else would dare speak in the kings’ presence. And the Holy Fools of many faiths disdain what others hold precious (money, reputation, comfort), preferring the intangible ecstasy of God. The Lord of the Rings turns hero-tale conventions on their head: instead of going to find a treasure, our fool-heroes set forth to get rid of one. The four hobbits—Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin—begin their anti-quest with their wise guide missing and with no clear idea of their destination. Of the four of them, only Frodo has any understanding of the danger they face.

Frodo Baggins is the closest of any hobbit to a traditional hero. Physically he is described as “taller than some and fairer than most.” He is also endowed with a good measure of wisdom, compassion, and courage, and when the choice is offered to him to continue his quest or surrender it to other hands, he chooses to go on:

At last with an effort he spoke, and wondered to hear his own words, as if some other will was using his small voice. “I will take the Ring,” he said, “though I do not know the way.”1

And yet this heroism in Frodo’s nature comes close to undoing him. It is perilous to forget who and what you are, and while a fool can play the hero, he or she must do it in the manner of a fool. Just as court jesters couldn’t act as serious counselors but had to veil their wisdom in humor, whenever a fool-hero tries to control events, the results are generally disastrous, Shakespeare’s Falstaff tries to make himself a king, and must be cast aside by Prince Hal. The German court jester Claus Narr accidentally strangles the goslings in his care by carrying them in his belt.2 And at the end of his long, terrible journey, Frodo claims the Ring for his own instead of throwing it into the fire. It is left to Gollum, Frodo’s ruined counter-part and shadow, to save the quest from complete failure. Unlike the trickster, who actively plots and lays elaborate traps, the fool functions best when carried by the story rather than the other way around.

Less traditionally heroic—and for that very reason, more successful—are Merry Brandybuck and Pippin Took. These two young hobbits often come off as the spoiled children of the Fellowship, constantly asking questions and begging to be included in everything. It is easy and understandable for the wise to feel annoyed by this, and to want to push the fool aside, but to do so is to deny the fool’s power—and that denial can be fatal. The powerful wizards and kings of Middle-earth can be very like the arrogant elder brothers in so many fairy tales, convinced that they alone know how to succeed. Like these elder brothers, they must often be saved from their wisdom by the fools.

Pippin steals a magical palantir (seeing stone) from Gandalf and looks into it—revealing himself to their enemy. But his action forestalls Gandalf from using the stone himself, which would have been disastrous where Pippin’s transgression is merely rash. Merry is left behind by Theoden, king of Rohan, when he marches into battle; also bidden to stay is the king’s niece Eowyn. A mysterious soldier takes pity on Merry, however, and offers to bring him along. The soldier turns out to be Eowyn herself, and it is she who takes down the terrible Lord of the Nazgul, who could not be slain by any man. But she could not succeed without the support of a fool, as Helen Luke points out in her essay on Eowyn:

The King of Despair now raised his great black mace to destroy Eowyn…He shattered her frail shield and broke her arm, but Merry the small earthbound hobbit, whose strength had been rejected by the heroic Theoden but recognized by Eowyn, saw with love the wonder the slender woman standing there in her beauty and courage, her sword gleaming in her hand, and he rose from his groveling terror to help her in her need. Plunging his own sword into the Nazgul’s leg, he enabled the woman with her last strength to drive her sword into the head under the crown, and the King of Despair in that age of the world dissolved into nothingness before Merry’s eyes. . . . 3

Eowyn is later healed of not only her physical wounds but the bitterness and despair which had been devouring her from within. People like Eowyn who accept the help of the fool will not only succeed but open themselves to transformation. Those like the Nazgul, however, who scorn the fool and consider themselves above him, will be destroyed.

A fool's strength lies in the very qualities that separate him from the conventional image of the heroic: humility
(humus—earth) and the willingness to support others rather than seeking power or glory directly. This is Frodo’s failing, and he pays for it, literally, in blood. But where Frodo fails, his companion Sam Gamgee succeeds.

Sam is the least heroic-seeming of all four hobbits. Comical and uneducated, he does not aspire above his role as Frodo’s servant, and he cheerfully admits that his head is not the best part of him. But without plodding, faithful Sam, Frodo never could have completed his journey. It is Sam who trots out foolish little songs and verses that make him laugh “in the midst of all his cares” and who carries Frodo when he is too weary to walk. When his master appears to be dead, Sam takes the Ring, and his fool’s nature is put to the test:

Already the Ring tempted him, gnawing at his will and reason. Wild fantasies arose in his mind; and he saw Samwise the Strong, Hero of the Age, striding with a flaming sword across the darkened land, and armies flocking to his call as he marched to the overthrow of Barad-Dûr. And then all the clouds rolled away, and the white sun shone, and at his command the vale of Gorgoroth became a garden of flowers and trees and brought forth fruit. He had only to put on the Ring and claim it for his own, and all this could be.

In that hour of trial it was the love of his master that helped most to hold him firm; but also deep down in him lived still unconquered his plain hobbit-sense: he knew in the core of his heart that he was not large enough to bear such a burden, even if such visions were not a mere cheat to betray him. The one small garden of a free gardener was all his need and due, not a garden swollen to a realm; his own hands to use, not the hands of others to command.4

It is with Sam, as well, that the story closes. Unlike heroic tales, which end with the protagonist’s triumphant return from darkness, The Lord of the Rings continues past victory, arching back down to the hobbit’s homeland where it began. The fool’s tale goes beyond victory over evil to the restoration of everything that was shattered in the struggle. Frodo, alas, does not have the strength for this crucial battle; in the end he must sail away to a place where he can be healed and made whole. This world is left to Sam (bequeathed to him in a beautiful farewell speech from Frodo), and the tale concludes with him coming home at last to his wife and daughter.

In creating a heroic quest that cannot be successfully completed by a hero, Tolkien holds up a mirror to our own nature. The Ring, which Helen Luke identifies as an Eros-killing lust for power will corrupt and take over any traditional hero who tries to wield it; only one who doesn’t crave power for its own sake, who is complete and comfortable in the role of the fool, can undo its dark power. Gandalf himself refers to the journey to destroy the Ring as “a fool’s hope”—meaning both that it was a desperate, uncertain quest, and that it was a hope place in the hands of a fool. Today, as we see wealth and power increasingly concentrated in the hands of a shrinking elite, Tolkien’s tale (through by no means an allegory) offers both a warning and a hope. Perhaps what is required now is an upsetting of the rules, a strong reconnection to the land, and a hero who isn’t too proud to serve, support, and strike from beneath. In this age of vaulting ambition and focus on ever-increasing speed and gain, it may well be that we need to be rescued by a fool.

1. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring (New York: Ballantine Books, Inc., 1965), p. 354.
2. Beatrice K. Otto, Fools Are Everywhere: The Court Jester Around the World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001) p. 4.
3. Helen M. Luke, Kaleidoscope: The Way of Woman and Other Essays (New York: Parabola Books, 1992) p. 39.
4. Tolkien, The Return of the King (New York: Ballantine Books, Inc., 1965) p. 216.

A Fool’s Hope was first published in PARABOLA magazine (Fall 2001). Used by permission. www.parabola.org

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