Of the tribulations of evil and of its geography
The main focus of chapter two is backstory. It serves as a lynchpin between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings proper. Because the reader may be new to the story, or may need refreshment, we learn the full story of the ring and of its tribulations. How it was created, who possessed it, how it was conquered by Isildur, and lost shortly after, how it was found by Déagol, stolen by Smeagol, and how the ring corrupted him, made him into Gollum, and from there, how Bilbo found it, and then gave it to Frodo.
This chapter is, in a sense, a narrative necessity. But by doing this recap, it also serves a thematic purpose: it gives, in a few thousand words, the history of the one ring, the list of the tribulations of the ultimate tool of evil in the world of Middle Earth.
And through this, we learn that evil also has a geography: it was in Mirkwood, from where it was expelled, and then it moved South, in the land of Mordor, where it now hates the West. From there it gathers strength, it attracts everything that is twisted and corrupt, and it grows, slowly, slowly, until its time comes, to overflow Mordor to spread across the rest of the land.
Evil has a history, but it seems clear that this history is not linear: it’s not always active in the same way. It goes through cycles of intense activity followed by long stretches of relative quiet.
And it’s at this point in the book that I found a piece of dialogue that has been with me since the beginning of the war. Gandalf explains to Frodo:
“Always after a defeat and a respite, the Shadow takes another shape and grows again.’
‘I wish it need not have happened in my time,’ said Frodo.
‘So do I,’ said Gandalf, ‘and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
People abroad have asked us regularly, every time there is a new phase in the war: are you going to evacuate? Are you going to fly to the US? Or to France?
I find the question pretty strange. And the answer of Gandalf rings every time: it is not for us to decide if we live through such times. All we decide is what we do. In my case: I’ll be a witness. I’m too old to have been able to enroll. I’m a civilian, in one of the main cities of the country. I’m a civilian and a writer: I’ll keep doing what I know how to do. I’ll write.
Let’s go back to the questions of the tribulations of evil: evil moves, and has a history, and it seems crucial for the heroes to know about it. So that they can locate it, identify it and fight against it.
This also helps them to keep in mind that the shadow (as Gandalf calls it) is not new. It’s not something that came out of nowhere. It’s an old force that just finds new clothes, because it wasn’t dealt with completely in its previous iteration.
And how much do we know this, here, in the Middle East, when so many of the wars we fight today are new iterations of previous wars.
To take the current front in Gaza: October 7 is the result of almost twenty years of the shadow growing again, and again, after many respites.
And sometimes the shadow comes from further than one expects. We can connect, for example, parts of the current situation of the Middle East with World War II. Not in an ad hilterum reduction, but because there is a clear, documented connection. After World War II, many nazi officers fled Europe and found refuge in the Middle East, where some converted to Islam, and became military advisors to their new countries.
The story between Nazism and Radical Islam is well documented, and it starts with no less than the grand mufti of Jerusalem, one of the fathers of the Palestinian national movement, who helped organize the Bosnian division. Hatred of Jews acted as a common interest.
Hitler is still admired in our region of the world by many people, and it’s very common to find copies of Mein Kampf in Arabic, in Turkish or in Farsi.
In the same way, there is a genealogy of radical Islam that must be studied to understand the forces against which we are fighting. I heard recently a prominent French journalist, a « specialist » of the middle East, explain that it was absurd to speak of a connection between hamas and Iran, since one was Sunni and the other was Shi’ite. With experts of this caliber, no wonder French officials have been multiplying absurd declarations since the beginning of the war.
A couple of days after this powerful analysis, we learned of the elimination of Saeed Izadi, the head of the Palestinian division in the Iranian Quds Force. One of his roles? Funding and arming hamas in preparation for October 7.
Knowing the enemy is necessary: knowing its manifestations, its history, its location. This is the first step, the one that Frodo and Gandalf spend seventeen years preparing for. Then the quest can start; only then can the path to victory start unfolding.