The steady pattern of a story’s plot is to go downhill at three speeds: fast, faster, and even faster. Then, the climax hits and (if it’s a comedy) the thing suddenly shoots upwards, fast enough to make you dizzy. In other words: OK, worse, worse, worst, worst, good. When it comes to tension and drama, this pattern is tops. The goal is simple: to ratchet up the tension notch by notch, to wind the reader up into knots, then, like Alexander of old, cut those same knots to bits with the climax. As I said, it’s a solid plan, and so when we look at The Lord of the Rings, indubitably one of the greatest works of narrative art ever written, we should expect to see this pattern followed religiously, right? Well, we do and we don’t, and it’s that second part that’s important here. This pattern is an oversimplification, and in the deviation from it lies our subject.

The Fellowship of the Ring undoubtedly contains much to heighten tension and strum on the reader’s nerves. The Black Riders and the terror which attends even their name, the reveal of the Ring’s danger, Weathertop, Moria, and the shadow which drags a member of the Fellowship into the depths; I could list more, but the point is made. Yet in the midst of this, three stretches of intense peace stand out: Bombadil’s house, Rivendell, and Lothlorien. The peace in Hobbiton might qualify, but that’s easily dismissed because it’s at the beginning, where we expect some tranquility to be placed for the specific purpose of being disrupted.

The stay in Rivendell, of the three, makes the easiest senses. Rivendell is the place of exposition, and Rivendell brings it own escalation in the Council’s story. In Rivendell, too, while the party may be resting and recuperating, the specter of their upcoming journey east is ever on the reader’s mind; after the Council, it is on the character’s hearts as well. Rivendell may be a relief from the direct pressure of the story, but it has a new sort of pressure to place.

Lothlorien and Bombadil’s house, however, fit less well into the perpetual-freefall model outlined above. These are times of peace in the story, and by all rights they should be a problem. They should hurt the necessary build-up of tension. Yet Tolkien chose to include them, and so the question we will ask is, “What purposes do these incidents serve and how?”

Analysis

Not all plots have such blatant tension-release segments, but we shouldn’t view Tolkien’s choice here as truly unusual (except in excellence of execution). If we were to visualize plot as a graph- pages on the x axis, tension on the y-, no plot is actually a straight escalation or even a steady exponential curve. No, tension rises by drips, drabs, and jumps; tension drops, too, in moments between rises. The tension-over-pages graph is a wavy line pointing upwards. In some stories, the tension-release moments are gentler than others, but essentially all stories past a certain length have them.

The question remains: “What purpose? How?”

The presence of a moment (or time) of relief serves many purposes. First, it serves the eminently practical purpose of keeping the reader from burning out. In some genres or with certain levels of intensity, this isn’t that big of a problem. A story that keeps a relatively low level of tension throughout is less in danger. The story that plunges its reader through unending horrors and deals with the darkest sins of man…. Some people just flat out won’t read that. These moments of relief help restore those readers who are game for the misery but don’t have the stomach for it to be unending. It helps convince them, too, that you, the author, are hurting the characters for a reason. It keeps the story from reading as mere torture-for-torture’s-sake for the characters. This reason, while worth considering, should not be overweening; artistic integrity must overcome it.

Second, it communicates to the reader why the character’s persist (and helps the characters remember it too). In many stories, the action starts, the suffering ramps up, and the plot is off, but because of the need to start the story, readers don’t really know the status quo which preceded it except as a theory. It’s not real to the reader because they haven’t seen it, and so the passion the characters have towards what they lost is a little more remote. With certain motives, the problem is more remote; most of us intuitively understand love for a parent lost or the fear of a sibling threatened. Even if the precise relationship is not one we know, we can analogize from our own experience.

The character’s motive, though, isn’t always so universal-flavor. More, while we’re relying on the universal-flavor, it makes the motive a little more bland than otherwise. We’re not rooting for the protagonist to recover his relationship with his wife, we’re rooting for a husband to reconcile with a wife. The persons are denatured, and because we’ve never really seen the relationship, we don’t care about it quite as much, don’t quite understand it. Every relationship in real life, though, is a little different than all its analogies, and it can be the same in fiction. We can attach the reader not merely to the universal ideal of home or family or anger but to his particular home, family, or anger.

We could, of course, rely on the character’s own testimony on what was lost, and in some cases this is the most effective path. Certainly it’s a path that will be present in most stories. We have another possibility, though: we could show it directly. However, by showing what is desired, we must be aware that we are at least momentarily releasing tension, producing a moment of relative peace. This may be for some stories and desires an event in the present of the story, as with Lothlorien, Rivendell, and Bombadil showing the home which the hobbit’s long for (each in a different way). It may also be via a flashback- an event which, while not interrupting the tension-rise when plotted chronologically, occupies a place in the story-as-written that does loosen the tension. Thus, these moments of peace can explain to the heart, not just the mind, why the characters are willing to suffer as they are.

Third, these upswings allow the downswings to be more vicious and impactful. Consider how each of those upswings in The Fellowship of the Ring ended. The hobbits’ time at Bombadil’s house includes an ominous dream, a realization of the true terror of what they’ve embarked upon, and dread of the upcoming Barrow Downs. Rivendell establishes quite solidly the immense stakes- and simultaneously reminds us of what, particularly will be lost if they fail: home. Lothlorien brings us Frodo and Sam with Galadriel’s mirror, where they see hints of what is to come in the Shire and are menaced even at the heart of elven power by Sauron’s gaze.

In each case, the impact of the suffering and horror which comes after this moment of relief is magnified by the contrast and by the reminder of what is threatened. See, teaching the reader more closely what the real stakes of the story are, this may for a moment dull the story’s tension, but when the moment passes, the pain returns, and now it is sharper, more understood. It all comes flooding back, and the tension jumps a notch or three higher. Not only is the protagonist endangered, but the reader understands intimately what that danger is, how terrible its eventuation will be unless stopped.

Fourth and fifth, these upswings have a double role in reflecting reality as it is. The fourth is that real life isn’t just a steady stream of mounting tension. In real life, as in fiction, stress and problems pile up in fits and starts, and intermixed (for those with eyes to see)¹ with times of peace or relief, times when we look and see what truly matters, times of prayer or of heavenly encouragement such as we all need.

The fifth is the basis of this, and it’s what Samwise Gamgee recognized on the threshold of Mordor: “For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach” (Book 6, Chapter 2). The simple truth is that goodness is forever the victory over evil; however the tides of evil and suffering rise, the end of them is the death of their own making. God’s goodness and life alone will persist to the end. These moments of peace point to that ultimate preeminence; they declare to the characters and the reader the truth of the world, that above and below and in the very midst of terror and evil, God’s goodness still reigns.

And shall we not take strength from that as well? For stories have a power to lift us up out of the smog of this world and of our own travails, to give us sight of the beauty of God; they have also the power, in setting us back down amidst the world’s grime, to keep our eyes fixed on that beauty, to keep it in our memory and our hearts. Such to me is the beauty of that moment in Mordor, of the fallen statue in Ithilien, of Lothlorien and Rivendell and Bombadil. Such is the beauty I seek to declare in my own work. I hope you too see that beauty and are by it blessed.

God bless.

Footnotes

1 – And isn’t this a delicious idea: a character who receives a moment of peace but cannot or refuses to see it. Tragic, but intriguing.