Sycophancy in Middle Earth

Source: Used with permission of Jean-Paul Leonard

Advisor to King Theóden of Rohan and the wizard Saruman’s henchman, Grima Wormtongue exemplifies the destructive effects of sycophancy. Tolkien’s very name for this wheedling creature highlights his repulsiveness: Grima in Old English and Icelandic means “mask,” “helmet,” or “spectre,” thus emphasizing the hypocritical nature of sycophants. Wormtongue speaks for itself: as sinuous as the slithering creature whose name he shares, Theóden’s insidious advisor sews division with every word he hisses. His insinuations have poisoned the mind of Theóden, now a shadow of himself. Rohan, once the great kingdom of the Horse-lords, has been reduced to an ineffectual state presided over by a puppet monarch. Like Dickens’s Uriah Heep, who covets his employer’s daughter, Wormtongue desires Eowyn, the king’s niece.

When the wizard Gandalf, accompanied by Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas, seek an audience with the king to elicit Rohan’s help in fighting Sauron’s evil forces, they find themselves before a wizened Theóden, highly skeptical of his claims concerning the Dark Lord. As soon as Theóden expresses his misgivings about Gandalf’s claims, Wormtongue, affecting to be protective of the king, sharpens the attack on the wizard and accuses him of being in league with Galadriel, co-leader of Lothlórian, one of the elven kingdoms. Incensed by Wormtongue’s slanders, Gandalf sheds his tattered traveling cloak, stands erect, and coldly denounces the servant: “The wise speak only of what they know, Gríma son of Gálmód. A witless worm have you become. Therefore be silent, and keep your forked tongue behind your teeth. I have not passed through fire and death to bandy crooked words with a serving-man till the lightning falls.”[1] The hall resounds with a roll of thunder and grows suddenly dark as Gandalf raises his staff, standing tall before the Lord of the Mark, and urging him to hearken to him. Freed from the sycophant’s deceptions, Wormtongue’s “leechcraft,” Theóden now stands erect, returned to his former self, and ready to take up arms against the enemy.

Tolkien's depiction is notable for its focus on the effects of sycophancy. Wormtongue is not only loathsome in himself – slithering and creeping – but he produces a degeneration in his target. Slime slimes its object. Theodin is enfeebled to the point of childishness and isolated from contact with all others. His transformation – once freed by Gandolf’s magic – is a measure of the power of sycophancy. So poisonous are the effects of sycophancy in Middle Earth, it takes a wizard to banish them.

Few of us will ever encounter as venomous a combination of slander and sycophancy as Wormtongue, a fantasy figure. Nor, alas, are malevolent toadies dispatched so completely in life as in The Lord of the Rings. They persist, and they pose a continual challenge to the workings of any hierarchical society.