Nicole DuPlessis Bridging Orality and Literacy in The Lord of the Rings: the “Wise but Unlearned” among the Cultures of Middle Earth In The Two Towers, Aragorn describes the people of Rohan as “wise but unlearned,” an unlettered, non-literate culture nevertheless possessed of its own wisdom, valued for its own sake. By contrast, the highly literate, indeed archival, culture of Gondor possesses large stores of written wisdom, though some of this is lost to all but a few of Gondor’s inhabitants. As individuals living in a contemporary, predominately literate society, we are used to accepting literacy as an unqualified good. However, many contemporary theorists have attributed this attitude to a Western, literate bias, particularly when literacy is “set against” orality. Objections to literacy originate with the cultural awareness of print as a source of personal and cultural change, as seen by Plato’s Phaedrus, in which Socrates presents literacy as a tool that will “create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories” (Plato). Several theorists stress the continuity of oral tradition and/or orality, and prefer to think of orality in terms of a continuum with “primary orality,” which Walter Ong defines as the orality of people who have had no contact with literacy (6) and full literacy being on opposite ends of a spectrum that contains infinite “levels.” 1 In his creation of multiple “levels” of orality and literacy in Middle Earth, Tolkien offers readers the possibility of a broader conception of the relation between spoken and written language, and of the intersections between orality and literacy that exist within cultures that are or seem to be “primarily literate,” as in the case of Gondor. 1 See, for example, Shirley Brice Heath, “Protean Shapes in Literacy Events: Ever-Shifting Oral and Literate Traditions” in Spoken and Written Language. Ed. Deborah Tannen. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1982.