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Meditations on Middle-earth
Excerpt from
Rhythmic Patterning in The Lord of the Rings
By Ursula K. LeGuin
...
These reversals are not simple binary flips. The positive
causes or grows from the negative state, and the negative from
the positive. Each yang contains its yin, each yin contains its
yang. (I don't use the Chinese terms lightly; I believe they fit
with Tolkien's conception of how the world works.)
Directionality
is extremely
important all through the book. I believe there is no moment
when we don't know, literally, where north is, and in which
direction the protagonists are going. Two of the windrose points
have a pretty clear and consistent emotional value: east has bad
connotations, west is benign. North and south vary more,
depending on where we are in time and space; in general I think
north is a melancholy direction and south a dangerous one. In a
passage early in the chapter, one of the three great "vistas"
offers us the whole compass view, point by point: west, the Old
Forest and the invisible, beloved Shire; south, the Brandywine
River flowing "away out of the knowledge of the hobbits"; north,
a "featureless and shadowy distance"; and east, "a guess of blue
and a remote white glimmer . . . the high and distant mountains"
where their dangerous road will lead them.
The points of the Native American and the airplane compass-up
and down-are equally firmly established. Their connotations are
complex. Up is usually a bit more fortunate than down, hilltops
better than valleys; but the Barrow-downs-hills-are themselves
an unlucky place to be. The hilltop where they sleep under the
standing stone is a bad place, but there is a hollow on
it, as if to contain the badness. Under the barrow is the worst
place of all, but Frodo gets there by climbing up a hill. As
they wind their way downward, and northward, at the end of the
chapter, they are relieved to be leaving the uplands; but they
are going back to the danger of the Road.
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