I would agree with Schlobin that passivity is probably the wrong word for both Gawain and Frodo, but nevertheless I think the idea of "passive resistance" is not entirely fallacious. The peculiar quality that Miller and Fyler have vaguely defined can perhaps be called critical reactivity, to be defined as the disposition to react forcefully only in situations of extreme danger, when someone's life is at stake. This seems to be a trait common to Gawain and the hobbits, and I have in mind in particular Frodo in the Burrows, when the courage normally dormant in hobbits awakens in him, and in Mount Doom, when he succumbs to the temptation, according to my personal interpretation, of faced with the thought of having no return and that his fate is sealed, just as Gawain ultimately accepts Lady Bertilak's sash thinking it would save his life.
You can be a hero without being willing to die, and this is precisely because from a Christian perspective death is not the end, precisely because there was Someone who was instead ready to make that sacrifice to save everyone. The mature Tolkien, unlike his youth, reflected at length on these mysteries, to conclude in favor of transcendence: not only does God place himself outside the world, but it is precisely for this reason that human existence and the very presence of human beings are possible: because of the divine presence in it, while immanence now is finally understood as a secondary and non-original moment of the Divinity.
Naturally, one naturally wonders when precisely Tolkien would have changed his opinion. Claudio Antonio Testi (Testi-Arduini 2009, pp. 34-35) identifies 1937 as a moment of transition in Tolkien from the conception of death exclusively as a gift, which, if not in its exclusivity, is not necessarily contrary to Catholicism, to the conception dominant of death as punishment and condemnation of sin. This is evident when in The Lost Road the Professor writes: "There is a shadow, but it is the shadow of the fear of death" (LR, p. 68, t.d.a.), a prologue to the subsequent definition of death as "doom of 'man” in The Drowning of Anadûnê (SD, p. 361, t.d.a.) and therefore to the ancient human tradition relating to death as a consequence of a Fall, reported by Andreth in the Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth (MR, pp. 345-49), as well as other similar statements by Tolkien in the Letters (No. 131, 212), in the Laws and Customs of the Eldar (MR, pp. 239-40) and in the 1968 BBC interview.
In reality, if we consider a recent article by John Garth (Garth 2017), we can instead find that the dating is slightly earlier, capable of being established with greater precision to December 1936, when Tolkien, in considering what in the days immediately following the 4 he had written in the blurb for The Hobbit requested of him by Allen and Unwin (i.e. that it was a story set between the time of Faërie, as he then called what would later become the First Era, and the present day), had the vision of Nûmenôr which would first inspire The Lost Road itself and then important aspects of The Lord of the Rings, as well as The Drowning of Anadûnê itself. Personally I would add that Tolkien in The Notion Club Papers later called the sinking of Atlantis “the dividing line” between myth and history (SD, p. 249).
But furthermore, in my opinion, it is very likely that Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which Tolkien was translating at that time, with his emphasis on the link between Gawain's eventual guilt and death, could have played an important role in this ride. If there is a work among those that inspired Tolkien to focus on the connection between death and sin with particular emphasis, it is Sir Gawain. The “shadow of the fear of death” in The Lost Road is precisely what causes Gawain to break his pact with Sir Bertilak. As Tolkien will state in a letter to Christopher in 1944, where he will explain that the greatness of the Eucatastrophe consists in offering a brief glimpse of the truth of the "Great World" beyond the "death chain" of material and mechanical cause-effect that binds human actions in this world (Letters, no. 89). Jonathan McIntosh rightly links this notion to Platonic ananke, the inescapable necessity that governs existence (McIntosh 2009, p. 266).
Yet the pact made with Sir Bertilak can also be interpreted as the pact between the star towards which the morning star points, the sun (Gawain), and vegetal nature (Green Knight), for which the former undertakes to resurrect every day (fictitious beheading of Gawain, because the sun doesn't actually die), nourishing human spiritual life (Lady Bertilak's kisses), so that the latter can be resurrected every year (decapitation of vegetation), nourishing animal life (the jokes of Sir Bertilak's hunt).
That the former may not keep the pact is an indication of the original character of the solar cycle, on which the vegetative one depends, but above all it reveals the asymmetry between spirit and nature. Therefore Gawain does not keep the pact precisely to keep it: the band violates the verticality to affirm it, and highlight the sin itself, a later reality or construct not only in light of the original pagan character of the work, which separates us from it, but also of its consequence/way out: death.
Already in 1941 Tolkien wrote to his son Michael:
Beyond this dark, very frustrated life of mine, I propose to you the only great thing to love on earth: the Holy Sacraments. [...] Here you will find adventure, glory, honor, faithfulness and the true path to all your love on this earth, and more than that: death. For the divine paradox that only the omen of death, which brings life to an end and demands surrender from everyone, can preserve and give reality and eternal duration to the relationships on this earth that you seek (love, fidelity, joy) and that every man desires in his heart.
(Letters, n. 43)
On the other hand, it is significant that Christopher wanted to see his translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight published first after his father's death, together with Pearl and Sir Orfeo, reporting at the end a fourth translation, that of the incipit and explicit of another and shorter Middle English poem, preserved in the Vernon Manuscript at the Bodleian Library, by Tolkien entitled Gawain's Leave-Taking.
That Tolkien imagined it was Gawain speaking is significant, although his conjecture cannot be verified with certainty, since the lyrical ego of this poem addresses the theme of death and abandonment of this world. These would be Gawain's words as he left Sir Bertilak's court to head towards the Green Chapel:
Against my will I take my leave,
I cannot stay with you any longer.
What begins always has an end
And even friends, alas, separate.
As much as we can be loved,
Death will take us away from the world,
And when we are led to the grave
Against all odds we take our leave.
(SGPO, p. 149)
Tolkien's turning point can be classified as a Pauline turning point, similarly to what Gaetano Lettieri stated about Saint Paul, who speaks of "Paul's perspective, in which any nostalgia for a lost original perfection is totally missing, completely forgotten, or canceled when it is compared with the event of the cross and the resurrection of the Lord, which generate a new time and hope” (Lettieri 2002 in Psaki and Hindley 2002, p. 35). Of course, Tolkien does not totally forget the nostalgia for original perfection, but he glimpses the same Pauline revelation, so as to take on a perspective undoubtedly similar to that expressed through Ransom by C.S. Lewis of Perelandra: “Whatever you do, He will turn it for good. But it will not be the good He had in store for you if you had obeyed Him. That good is lost forever. The first King [Adam, ed.] and the first Mother [Eve, ed.] of our world did a forbidden thing, and from it He ultimately brought good. But what they did was not good, and we don't know what they lost. And for some no good ever came from it, nor will it ever come” (Perelandra, p. 151). The mature Tolkien finds himself halfway between these considerations and the Pauline "wonder at the God who replaces the Law with Grace, Israel with the entire ecumene, what God himself had chosen for His alliance (Romans 9, 11) , almost like His only creature, with the nothingness of the pagans” (Lettieri 2002 in Psaki and Hindley 2002, p. 36). As Lettieri comments immediately afterwards, and as it is my prerogative to maintain that Tolkien had also intuited in that December 1936, "this wonder suggests the absolute transcendence of Grace with respect to the entire creation. Creation, by contrast, remains enclosed within the limits of the vanity of creaturely autonomy, slave to the 'elements of the world'" (Lettieri 2002 in Psaki and Hindley 2002, ibid.).
Stefano Giuliano, in one of the best critical contributions on Tolkien offered by an Italian author, wrote:
Tolkien's novel offers a plurality of images and symbols connected to death. You could say that Frodo's journey is a journey towards, through and into death.
A path to death because Mordor is the Land of the Dead, a barren and desolate nightmare land, infested with ferocious creatures and ruled by a monstrous tyrant. A journey through death because it takes place by traveling through the typical scenarios of the afterlife, which belong to the mythological and religious tradition: the forest, the mound, the cave, and so on. A journey, finally, into death since, as Eliade would say, only the passing of the old individual allows us to achieve a renewed ontological status, that is, to obtain that condition without which the hero-protagonist could not compete with his saving mission.
Not only. To all this we can add that this process is also a journey beyond death, as the conclusion of the novel indicates, with the navigation towards the land of the immortals.
(Giuliano 2013, p. 127)
Giuliano is certainly right in pointing out these aspects, undoubtedly present, although perhaps he underestimates a fundamental aspect, namely what we can call the vanity of the symbol. The places and internal transformations of the characters described by him, in fact, may allude to death or its overcoming, but nevertheless they do no more than simply represent them. Tolkien's Catholicism, on which Giuliano does not particularly focus, instead shows us how for the author these questions had full relevance and importance effective and concrete (Tolkien would say incarnate). For us readers, just like for the protagonists, the real stakes, our lives, eternity, longevity, are given in a pre-existing condition that only the Ring (Evil in its entirety and not only in its modern incarnation), death, or a divine power may be a question. As we have seen, in fact, even Aman cannot confer the duration of the world on the lives of men, and eternity is something different from longevity. The story of The Lord of the Rings is therefore both much more tragic and much more hopeful.
We will see other aspects of the centrality of death (and resurrection) in Sir Gawain and consequently in Tolkien's work.
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