I’m overdue on this one, but it’s time for Round 3 of crafting a poem with my LOTR Tarot deck.
If you’d rather watch the making-of video with an audiovisual delivery of the poem (with some inspirational footage), you can click here to link to my TikTok. And if you’d rather just read the poem, feel free to scroll down.
This time I drew The Hierophant, represented by Elrond; The World, depicted by the Fellowship of the Ring; and the King of Rings, portrayed by Saruman gazing into the mystical and dangerous palantir.
As I hone this tarot-centric method of poetic inspiration, I find that researching quotations from Tolkien’s works that are relevant to each of the cards that I draw in a spread is incredibly helpful to the process. Often the featured characters themselves have some revelatory dialogue, if the themes and imagery of each card seem otherwise less catalytic.
The Elf Lord’s words at the Council of Elrond capture pretty succinctly the spirit of a party of mostly hobbits carrying the One Ring into Mordor: “Such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere.”¹
This concept informs the overall message of my poem, and if this first quote sounds familiar, you might be thinking of Galadriel’s line from the film adaptation of The Fellowship, “Even the smallest person can change the course of the future,” which was very likely inspired by these words of Elrond.
As for interpreting the tarot, The Hierophant is associated with wisdom, experience, and study as a keeper of knowledge: aptly, Elrond’s message foreshadows the other two cards in the spread, specifically mentioning “the world” and the distracted “eyes of the great.” (I was pretty ecstatic when I discovered how uncannily well that quote fit this spread.)
For The World/Fellowship card, I came across an exchange between the hobbits and Gildor, an elf featured briefly in The Fellowship novel, who aids Frodo and his halfling companions as they flee one of the Nazgûl on the road to Bree: speaking of false senses of security, he warns that “The wide world is all about you: you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot forever fence it out.”
Given the World card’s allusion to the bonds which connect us to everything, I thought this quotation an appropriate reminder of the rippling effects of great and possibly evil deeds that can still hit close to home, which ties in well with the King of Rings’ pursuit of wealth and ambition and the potential loss in the wake of seeking those results. I’m thinking specifically of Saruman’s scouring of the Shire toward the end of The Return of the King novel, and his ultimate loss to the “smaller hands” of the salt-of-the-earth Hobbitfolk.
Jumping back to The Hobbit novel, Bilbo weaves the idea of this loss and suffering into inevitable new beginnings, mentioning in the aftermath of the Battle of the Five Armies not only that, even in “Victory after all,” the conquest of war and riches still “seems a very gloomy business,” but also that, after the chaos and bloodshed, “So comes snow after fire, and even dragons have their ending!”²
The same spirit is captured in a very poignant deleted scene from the last of Peter Jackson’s Hobbit films (Battle of the Five Armies) where Bilbo, Bard, and Gandalf are taking in the carnage of the battle in Dale. When they seem ready to give up hope, Bilbo stops to plant a special acorn in the blood-soaked soil and says “That’s a promise. Under all that blood and dirt, there is a chance of new life. This may sound hopeless, it may sound foolish, but really what else can you do when faced with death, what can anyone do? You go on living.”³
Bearing in mind the words of Elrond, Gildor, and Bilbo, I set to work and and found myself with three 6-line stanzas and a final couplet. At an earlier point in the process I considered incorporating the numbers of the cards (five and twenty-one), but as the verse developed, fitting that mold became less important than doing justice to the words and the ideas themselves.
🖋️
Oftentimes, the course of deed
that moves the world’s turning wheels
is plot by hands with little need
for hoarded wealth or lordly zeal.
No greatness sought in prideful plans
can match the work of smaller hands.
Yet, while the tillage close to home
is hemmed by stone or noble hedge,
the wider world where others roam
is never far from acre’s edge.
Though hands may try to cage their doubt,
no fence can keep the whole world out.
If greater powers chase their gaze
and trample those beneath their feet
to set the wider world ablaze,
the wheels will turn on their conceit;
for under blood and ash and toil,
the smaller hands have tilled the soil,
And when the greedy shut their eyes,
the smallest from the earth shall rise.
🖋️
¹ (Elrond) J.R.R. Tolkien, The Ring Goes South, The Fellowship of the Ring
² (Bilbo) J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return Journey, The Hobbit
³ Jackson, P. (Director). (2014). The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies [Film]. New Line Cinema.
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