You are not making a very Splendid Figure

A few weeks back, I wrote about Boromir being my favourite character from Lord of the Rings, and I mentioned that I was curious (and slightly concerned) to learn how my students would receive him, how they would deal with his attempt to take the Ring from Frodo and with his subsequent death.

A friend of mine asked me why I was concerned that students would not be able to see past Boromir’s betrayal to accept his noble death as an atonement. It was a good question from a young lady who is the same age currently as the students I teach. She has grown up on stories of Tolkien and so understands how the professor thinks and how his faith has informed his storytelling.

But in that conversation with her, I realised that I had a test study right in front of me: How have my current students reacted to Thorin Oakenshield? We discussed Thorin’s behaviour towards Bilbo in the final chapters in class but as time was short, we did not get too deep into the question of whether or not Thorin’s apology to Bilbo is sufficient for the reader to forgive him for trying to throw Bilbo to his death a mere chapter earlier.

And so I gave students a chance to write about this on their final exam, asking them to explore Thorin’s character and behaviour knowing that the dwarf dies in the end.

Now, obviously the cases of Boromir and Thorin are not identical but there are striking similarities For one, Bilbo’s relationship with Thorin throughout the book is rocky as Thorin doubts Bilbo’s usefulness and ability to see the quest through; Boromir, likewise, doubts the wisdom of giving Frodo the Ring and the hobbit’s ability to see the quest through to the end.

Because of this attitude of Thorin’s throughout the book, I found that many students did not like the dwarf much at all. There is obviously a difference in tone between the two books that plays a role here: Bilbo is the focal character of a children’s story, so the tale depicts his growth against Thorin’s doubt. Thorin and Co. seem rather more helpless than they probably are in reality, but this is to emphasise Bilbo as the hero. In Lord of the Rings, Boromir is a great captain of men and well-respected by all, especially Aragorn. He is clearly very competent and has little need for an enterprising halfling to save him from monsters at every turn.

Both Thorin and Boromir fall into madness, and this madness causes them to physically attack central heroes in their respective stories. In both cases, though, Tolkien makes it clear that it is the madness that has taken control of Thorin and Boromir that ultimately causes their actions—and yet in both cases that madness is not merely an outside force that imposes itself like a virus but rather an inner weakness that grows out of proportion. It is a single personality trait that comes to dominate the whole person.

And then both characters die almost immediately following their falls into madness, but they both die only after—and as a  result of—recovering from the madness. But (and I am getting to student responses in a moment) there is a key difference in their deaths, two key differences really. Firstly, Boromir dies to protect Merry and Pippin from capture; Thorin dies by joining the Battle of Five Armies as a king should, rather than sitting in his mountain and letting others fight for him. Secondly, Thorin gets to reconcile with Bilbo; Boromir does not, though he does confess what he did to Aragorn before dying.

This, then, is where I see the key difference in how students might react to these two characters: Thorin and Bilbo are reconciled; Boromir and Frodo are not.

So, what did my students think of Thorin overall? Well, as I said above, many of them simply did not find Thorin that likeable to begin with, being a rather grumpy dwarf much of the time and refusing to give Bilbo his due, even long after Bilbo has proven himself. But what was curious is that most of these same students were willing to forgive Thorin his violence against Bilbo because it was a kind of madness that had taken hold of the dwarf that caused him to act thus. They could see that Thorin’s actions were not the actions of a man in control of himself but of a desperate character who has lost sight of what is really important. 

Our modern student is actually quite understanding and forgiving of anything that smacks of mental illness.

For many of the students, Thorin’s joining the battle and ultimate reconciliation with Bilbo was key to “forgiving” him his behaviour in the previous chapters. And that largely confirms my fears that students might not be willing to forgive Boromir, at least not until Frodo meets Faramir and expresses his own abiding friendship and respect for Boromir, despite how they parted.

An additional thought that showed up in a number of student responses is that while they can think of Thorin as a king deserving respect, it was still necessary for him to die. But that necessity is not a necessity of judgement in the sense of punishment—i.e. it’s not a matter of the death penalty for attempted murder. Rather, they conceived of his death as a literary necessity, and that just warms my English-teacher heart. Their explanations for this were varied, but many students perceived Thorin’s death as a way to create a new beginning for the dwarves, less bound to the sins of the past and to the dragon. Others, felt that his death was purgative, a kind of atonement for the sins of the dwarves—a very Christian reading indeed!

Now, there were a handful of students who felt that Thorin fully deserved death and that they did not think his reconciliation with Bilbo did enough to rehabilitate the character. And every one of those students—of which there were only half a dozen out of a hundred students—said that it was the depiction of Thorin in the Peter Jackson film that hardened their hearts against the character. Jackson’s Thorin is a more gritty and visceral character, who is possessed of “dragon-sickness” far longer and more violently than in the book.

They recognised that Jackson attempted a rehabilitation of Thorin by giving him a big, final battle with Azog the Defiler, but they were unconvinced. Thorin of the movies has a lot more to atone for than the Thorin of the book, it seems. And I think that is right, just as the Thorin of the 1977 animated feature did not seem nearly so possessed by the treasure, and so his refusal to share seems silly and arbitrary, so Jackson’s visual escalation of Thorin’s sickness makes it that much more difficult to be reconciled to him ourselves as viewers.

Here Tolkien strikes the safe and happy medium: his Thorin is just mad enough for us to grow to dislike him, but he is not mad long enough (only half a chapter) for that dislike to fully take root. His reconciliation with Bilbo is also given more gravitas when we learn that Thorin has been hanging onto life just long enough to see Bilbo one more time. In Jackson’s film, Bilbo just happens to be the nearest person to Thorin when the dwarf collapses on the battlefield. It is hard to imagine Jackson’s Thorin holding on for hours to speak with Bilbo.

So, in the end, does this really tell me anything about how students will react to Boromir? Perhaps, but the reasons why most students seemed willing to acknowledge Thorin’s general goodness and respect his character are reasons that are largely absent in the Boromir-Frodo relationship. 

There are, of course, a number of places in Two Towers and Return of the King that offer very positive or positively-balanced thoughts on Boromir, so student reactions to the character could change over time when they see that Boromir’s behaviour towards Frodo has not, ultimately, coloured him in the minds of the others.