These are merely specific examples where the stories parallel one another in setting, character, and plot to demonstrate the similarities in their formation as myth. The unifying theme that one could walk away with is the burden that Frodo and the Doctor’s wife share. The burden of the One Ring and the burden of sight weigh heavily on these two noble creatures. The ring that Sauron is determined to reclaim, that he has “bent all his will and his thoughts towards reclaiming”, is the object that causes the fall of Boromir, Saruman, and very nearly Frodo himself. Gandalf describes this “One Ring” as having bent so many to its will and serving evil. Gandalf tells Frodo this ring will eventually cause a permanent darkness to fall over Middle-Earth. This literal darkness begins by falling over Minas Tirith in the battle of the Pellenor Fields. Blindness however is a darker novel altogether, despite the blindness prosaically being described as a “milky-white sea.” The characters descend into the darkest, evilest place imaginable, not because of a mystical ring of power forged in eons gone by, due to their own lack of sight. The characters are reasonably civil towards one another even under the worst of circumstances. The Girl with the dark glasses feeds the boy with the squint any food she can spare. The Doctor serves as spokesman to the military for the group. When the miscreants steal the food, the first man to go blind’s wife, (as they are referred to) gives her body in trade for food for the rest of them. The Thief however, much like Boromir, fails to live up to the challenge, groping at the beautiful Girl with the dark glasses feebly in the darkness. The Thief meets an untimely end at the hands of the military because of his lack of restraint. During their internment and after their escape the characters encounter the blind masses, who have descended into what seems like The Hell of Dante’s L’inferno. The “damned” clamber about feebly searching for food, water, and any place that has not been made filthy by those who have defecated and died anywhere and everywhere. The burden of the One Ring lies with Frodo as a literal object that he must destroy to save his soul and all those of Middle-Earth, while the Doctor’s Wife endures the metaphorical object of sight, without which the thin veneer of society is stripped away to reveal the level of pure degradation normally masked only because we are bound by sight. If by the definition of myth we explain a curious phenomenon, was it because of the evil of humans that they were stricken by the white blindness, or were they stricken blind in order to rid them of their wickedness like Noah’s flood?
          The overwhelming sense from reading Saramago’s Blindness is different than The Lord of the Rings, Blindness seems like a tale told in one breath, where one punishing event follows another, leaving the reader begging for mercy. The story has moments of beauty: the description of two people holding hands in the dark, or the Girl with the Dark Glasses professing her love for the Old Man with the eye-patch. When the blindness is finally lifted there is relief, but not of an evil being wiped out. The Lord of the Rings gives moments of respite from the darkness Frodo and Sam endure, to show the grandeur of Middle Earth and in order to show that after the destruction of the One Ring, the world will shift into the Third Age. And the hobbits return to a home that has forever been changed by the war, overrun by bandits and thugs. When the white blindness passes for the unnamed, they will be able to relate to others in new ways. Where were they when struck blind? How did they survive the chaos? Where did they live? Who did they collaborate with while stricken blind? These unifying events could provide a structure to their myth-less society.
          As with Shakespeare’s tragedies, a witness is found among the ruins of the flawed hero’s carcasses to pass on the story. The Doctor’s Wife now is both hero and witness to the story. The epidemic, sparing no one, caused a unifying event for reference, which forms the structure of a myth that will be passed on to those not born yet. And this according to Campbell is the genesis of the rituals and symbols that bind our societies together. Middle-Earth however depicts the dawn of a new age, but one without magic, and ruled by men instead of elves and hobbits. In its own melancholy way the Lord of the Rings is predicting the very world that began Blindness. It seems that while Saramago’s other books dissect some aspect of the relationship between text and history, or text and reality, Blindness, perhaps Saramago’s finest novel to date, stands apart from his other works in its form and function. Typically we are woven and hypnotized into a complex tapestry of history and literature, or we follow in the footsteps of one of his bumbling copy editors or clerks. Blindness however releases the floodgates and doesn’t let anyone up for air until the last chapter.