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Hmm…my cogitations seem over simplifying? Oops, not quite what I was after – and here I was congratulating myself on rendering such a confusing idea into an actual post that made some sort of sense.
Firefoot and Essex, I see what you mean about the reductionism of “making” LotR into either a circle or a line, but my point is actually that it seems to be both at the same time. Like Estelyn, I very much like the idea of the spring. The other image that came to mind as I was writing the original post was that of W.B.Yeats’ gyres, particularly in that the spiralling action of LotR does seem to move ‘outward’ into ever expanding circles. In the little plot summa I gave above, there is an expansion in each repetition of the pattern. This expansion is, first, temporal – that is, the cycles take place over the course of days, then of weeks, then of months, and finally years – with Frodo’s trip to the Undying lands, these cycles reach even into the Eternal. But the expansion is also, I think, thematic somehow: as Frodo’s ‘awareness’ or conscience or morality or whatever grows throughout his journey, so too does his journey.
All of this seems to me to reinforce the idea that LotR is perhaps more complicated than even the spring (or the brilliant brick-laying analogy!) do it credit. The Road and the Ring are not attempts on my part to explain the whole work, but structural/organisational motifs/devices that Tolkien has used to organise his story. Every story has ‘shape’ – the western story of “our” own culture/civilisation is very much linear (history moves ‘forward’, cultures ‘advance’, generations ‘succeed’ one another), and this is very different from more traditional stories of historical movement (Native Americans, for instance, very much imagine history as circular, with each generation re-placing the former).
So, given the fact that Roads and Rings, linearity and circularity, are so insistently (and consistently) mixed in Middle-Earth, the stories of the characters become very complex. Boromir88 has said that “the Aragorn at the end is very different from the Aragorn at the beginning” – he is therefore ‘circular’ in a sense. Well, I’m not sure I can go along with that simplification. Aragorn does follow a circular Road from houseless wanderer to King – thus completing the historically circular pattern of his people. But his own personal journey is, I think, very much in a straight line. The conditions of his life may change, but I don’t see much by way of personal development or alteration/realisation. When he meets the hobbits in Bree, for example, he announces from the outset “I am Aragorn son of Arathorn. If by my life or death I can serve you, I will!” – this is, I would suggest, very much the kind of man he is for the duration of his life. Frodo, on the other hand, undergoes a profound and complete alteration (under the influence of the Ring) and thus his journey is entirely circular (he ends up where he began: Frodo leaves Aragorn in Minas Tirith – at the end of their shared Road – and goes back to his round hobbit hole) but this is repetition with a difference (he is not the same person). In the end, Frodo leaves Middle-Earth and takes the “straight Road” into the west.
So the journeys of both Frodo and Aragorn are circular and linear; but each of them follows their own Roads for the sake of their own Rings. So (deep breath) what does this all mean?? Are Roads and Rings somehow compatible in LotR (I’m not happy with that one, frankly, since the Fellowship has to follow their Road to destroy the Ring)? This is well beyond simple questions of good and evil – what do Roads represent as compared to Rings (and vice versa), and how can these help our understanding of the characters’ individual journeys, as well as the history of the War of the Ring?
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