The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [231]
It is this which accounts for the somewhat disconcerting way in which, at the point where Frodo and Sam begin their final approaches to Mordor, the book splits into two almost separate stories. For a long time, as the two of them set off in one direction and the remainder of the Company in another, it is not easy to hold the whole story together. We follow the immense drama which surrounds the capture of Merry and Pippin by the Ores, the siege of Helm's Deep, its rescue by Gandalf and the Riders of Rohan, the rescue of Merry and Pippin by Treebeard and his walking forest of Ents, followed by their flooding of Saruman's grim city of Isengard round its dark tower. But the full significance of all this is not really clear, until at last a central new story-line emerges to run in parallel with the closing stages of Frodo's Quest. When it does, we see it taking on a very familiar shape.
We are introduced to a kingdom in disarray, Gondor, with its capital Minas Tirith, ruled by a weak regent because its `true king' is absent, and therefore unable to withstand for much longer the attacks of the dark power emanating from Mordor. But in the shadows beyond the city walls, salvation is approaching, in the shape of Aragorn and his allies. We have already seen Aragorn in an increasingly heroic light, from his part in the siege of Helm's Deep. We now learn that this mysterious wanderer is in fact Gondor's true king. In the nick of time he throws off his disguise, emerging like Odysseus in royal majesty. He saves his city and redeems his kingdom. Aragorn's story then ends in his marriage to the beautiful Elvish Princess Arwen Evenstar.
In this sense, as the hero emerges from the twilight of disguise and obscured identity to his final glorious union with a heroine whose name indicates that she is all light, the book also contains elements of the seventh plot, Comedy. Yet the fact that Aragorn's own drama unfolds in a sense off centre-stage, and that it is not he but the much more limited, child-like Frodo who is the central figure of the book, leaves us at the end with the sense that there is still something lacking and that, for all its splendours, The Lord of the Rings is not a fully integrated, grown-up story.
What is interesting, in the context of our present concerns, is that a story which was originally conceived to entertain a child, and therefore had a rather child-like hero, should eventually have aroused in its author's unconscious all those deeper elements which are necessary to bring a story to the complete archetypal happy ending - showing a hero who has attained to complete maturity being united with his `Princess' and succeeding to a kingdom. But this required the emergence of a new hero, equipped to become fully a man, because the original hero could never really develop into anything more than a child. Which is why, at the end of the book, Frodo departs for the Isles of the Blest across the western sea, still in the company of Gandalf: the father he could never himself become.
Don Quixote
The examples we have so far looked at in this chapter all belong to the type of story we are likely to encounter in the earlier stages of life, where the hero or heroine are shown as pitted against dark forces centred outside them. Only later do we come more consistently to stories which