The first post in this little series got a lot more attention than I had expected, so I’ll start this one with a word of explanation: I’m not a Tolkien scholar (or any other sort of scholar). I don’t know very much more than the bare facts about J.R.R Tolkien’s life, and not only have I never read his letters or essays, and I don’t know his books beyond The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings (there’s a good reason, I think, why he never published The Silmarillion and the rest in his lifetime.) But I’ve been reading and re-reading The Lord of the Rings since I was about ten, and these posts are just a record of some idle thoughts that occur to me as I go through it again now that I’m about fifty.
By the time we reach the second half of The Fellowship of the Ring we have already walked a long way in the hobbits’ furry footsteps. Book One was packed with incidents, characters and details, and rose at the end to a gripping climactic chase, so Book Two feels almost like a sequel. It begins peacefully, with Frodo waking up at Rivendell, where he will spend the next two chapters, reunited with Bilbo and Gandalf, recovering from his adventures and planning for the adventures to come.
Somewhere between Bree and the Ford of Bruinen we left the landscapes of Deep England behind; Rivendell feels more like North Wales, or Scotland, or perhaps Switzerland, where Tolkien had done some hiking. It puts Frodo in a mood for hiking too.
“I feel ready for anything,” answered Frodo. “But most of all I should like to go walking today and explore the valley. I should like to get into those pine-woods up there.” He pointed far away up the side of Rivendell to the north.
“You may have a chance later,” said Gandalf. “But we cannot make any plans yet. There is much to hear and decide today.”
And boy, he’s not joking! The Council of Elrond is a hefty chapter, dense with information. It ought to be a hard slog, but it’s elegantly arranged - the slabs of history and current affairs are broken up by plenty of little character details, and contain useful hints about what’s going on in some of the lands the story will soon take us through. We discover that the mysterious Strider is actually Aragorn, heir to the throne of Gondor, slightly to the annoyance of Boromir, whose family has been keeping it warm for him down the generations. We even learn some more details about the mysterious Tom Bombadil - like all the best people and places in Middle earth he has a bunch of other names too:
“Iarwain Ben Adar we called him, oldest and fatherless. But many another name he has since been given by other folk: Forn by the Dwarves, Orald by Northern men, and other names beside.”
It’s almost the last we’ll hear of Bombadil, yet he seems to me somehow very important to the atmosphere of Middle-earth, and I can’t quite put my finger on why - perhaps because he hints at some deep, pagan aspect of the land that is older and stranger even than Elves, Dwarves and Wizards.
The scale of the story and the odds stacked against our heroes expand massively at this point. We learn not just of the Dark Lord’s growing power, but that top wizard Saruman has gone rogue and is building his own army of orcs and trying to grab the Ring for himself. Gandalf's meeting with Saruman and subsequent captivity on the Pinnacle of Orthanc happened while Frodo was still in the Shire, and a writer who believed in Showing not Telling would have stuck it in among the early chapters, but to do that would be to break one of the book’s rules. In the later volumes we’ll occasionally see things from other points of view, but almost everything that happens in The Fellowship of the Ring happens to, or is witnessed by, one of the hobbits. Since none of them were with Gandalf at Isengard, we have to wait until they can hear his story in his own words.
So it’s decided that the Ring must be taken to Mordor and the Fellowship sets forth. I think it’s fair to say that Boromir, Gimli, and Legolas are not much more than names at this point - their characters come into focus later. At this point the beautiful map which folds out from the inside back cover of my copy of the book starts to become indispensable. I'm sure you could follow the story without consulting the map, but consulting the map is fun, and adds a great deal. All those rivers and mountains are part of the texture of the story, even the ones the travellers never have to ford or climb.
The journey begins much like the trek from Bree to Rivendell: a long walking expedition through abandoned country. Elves lived here once, ‘but they sought the havens long ago’, leaving only holly trees and tumbled stones behind. Once again, our heroes are watched and pursued: the Ringwraiths haven't yet recovered from their defeat at the ford, but some of the birds are Sauron’s spies; wolves attack, and one night an ominous shadow passes over the stars, ‘...moving fast ... and not with the wind.’ When the party tries to cross the Misty Mountains even the weather turns out to be working for the Enemy. There is only one other way through the mountains, so they head for the Mines of Moria.
I suppose there were plenty of novels before this one where characters have adventures in caves and mines. With its vast halls, legendary riches, and huge stone doors, Moria feels like a relative of King Solomon’s Mines in H Rider Haggard’s adventure story (whose explorers are also accompanied by a mysterious stranger who turns out to be a returning king). And of course the dwarves of legend have been knocking out magical metalwork projects in underground kingdoms since long before anyone was writing their stories down. But Tolkien’s mines are on an even grander scale than Rider Haggard’s, and the sequence he sets there is built along the lines of a classic adventure yarn. First a tentacular horror that lives in the lake outside the western doors slams them shut behind our heroes, ensuring they have no way back. Then, as the party sets off through the dark, odd tappings are heard, as if nameless things far down below are signalling. While the tension slowly builds, we learn a little more about the history of Moria, and how grand and beautiful it looked when it was full of Dwarves, before they woke some horror in the depths which led to its abandonment. (The Dwarf words Gimli mentions seem to be an odd match with the given names of the Dwarf characters - Thorin and Balin don’t sound as if they come from the same language as Khazad-dûm, Barazinbar, Bundushathûr and Zirak-zigil. Maybe those are noms-de-guerre and their real names are in ‘the secret dwarf-tongue that they teach to none’? Maybe it gets explained in the Appendices and I’ve forgotten. I dunno.)
Eventually the Fellowship discover that trusty old stand-by of explorers-in-peril stories, the blood-stained journal of the previous expedition. Surrounded by bones and rusting armour, the journal doesn’t quite end with the word ‘Aaaargh!', but it very nearly does. No sooner have our heroes read what befell these earlier adventurers than it starts befalling them too. Orcs and trolls attack, and the party begins a desperate flight towards the exit. We'll meet loads more orcs later, so there'll be time to study them in more detail then. This lot mainly serve as a warm-up act for Moria's resident Balrog, which is what I think gamers call the Level Boss. (Computer games of course owe much to Dungeons & Dragons, and Dungeons & Dragons owed enough to The Lord of the Rings to trigger legal action, so the influence of Moria has spread far beyond Middle-earth.)
What is a Balrog? I’ve read The Lord of the Rings umpteen times, and I still don’t really know. It’s Durin’s Bane, ‘flame of Udûn’, the thing that woke up and drove the Dwarves from Moria long ago. Is it doing the Dark Lord’s bidding, or is this a freelance Flame of Udûn? It isn’t very talkative, so there is no way of telling. I don’t even know what it looks like - illustrations like John Howe's (below) always make it look more solid than it's described in the text, where it's a giant, man-shaped cloud of darkness, with wings, a sword, and a whip. It’s hard to picture, but, like one of H.P.Lovecraft’s monstrosities, that only makes it scarier. Its wings don’t seem to help it much when Gandalf smashes the bridge it’s standing on and it plunges into the depths. Its whip comes in jolly useful, though, because it uses it to drag the wizard down with it.
Killing off Gandalf at this point is a startling move, but also a smart one (so smart that George Lucas borrowed it for Star Wars). Without their wizard, the Fellowship will have to rely on their own wits and abilities. But first, after the tension and action of Moria, there comes a moment of peace, maintaining the rhythm that was established in Book One. The survivors flee through a few final halls and out into the sunshine in Dwimmerdale, where the landscape is beautifully described, as usual:
Less than a mile away, and a little below them… lay a mere. It was long and oval, shaped like a great spear-head thrust deep into the northern glen; but its southern end was beyond the shadows under the sunlit sky. Yet its waters were dark: a deep blue like clear evening seen from a lamp-lit room. Its face was still and unruffled. About it lay a smooth sward, shelving down on all sides to its bare unbroken rim.
Honestly, there must be a hundred landscape passages I could have quoted from this section. In some ways, The Lord of the Rings is about landscape, and the story is just a device for moving us around various bits of it. This particular bit is the Mirrormere, ‘deep Kheled-zâram’ (I’m quoting a lot of these dwarvish names for a reason: I’ve finally found the ^ key on my computer). Here the Fellowship can rest, tend to their cuts and bruises, and mourn Gandalf. Ahead lies the Elven kingdom of Lothlórien. But this is a long post already, so I guess the elves had better wait till next time. Like The Lord of the Rings itself, this project seems to be growing in the telling.
 |
| The gate of Moria, by Alan Lee |
Somewhere between Bree and the Ford of Bruinen we left the landscapes of Deep England behind; Rivendell feels more like North Wales, or Scotland, or perhaps Switzerland, where Tolkien had done some hiking. It puts Frodo in a mood for hiking too.
“I feel ready for anything,” answered Frodo. “But most of all I should like to go walking today and explore the valley. I should like to get into those pine-woods up there.” He pointed far away up the side of Rivendell to the north.
“You may have a chance later,” said Gandalf. “But we cannot make any plans yet. There is much to hear and decide today.”
And boy, he’s not joking! The Council of Elrond is a hefty chapter, dense with information. It ought to be a hard slog, but it’s elegantly arranged - the slabs of history and current affairs are broken up by plenty of little character details, and contain useful hints about what’s going on in some of the lands the story will soon take us through. We discover that the mysterious Strider is actually Aragorn, heir to the throne of Gondor, slightly to the annoyance of Boromir, whose family has been keeping it warm for him down the generations. We even learn some more details about the mysterious Tom Bombadil - like all the best people and places in Middle earth he has a bunch of other names too:
“Iarwain Ben Adar we called him, oldest and fatherless. But many another name he has since been given by other folk: Forn by the Dwarves, Orald by Northern men, and other names beside.”
It’s almost the last we’ll hear of Bombadil, yet he seems to me somehow very important to the atmosphere of Middle-earth, and I can’t quite put my finger on why - perhaps because he hints at some deep, pagan aspect of the land that is older and stranger even than Elves, Dwarves and Wizards.
The scale of the story and the odds stacked against our heroes expand massively at this point. We learn not just of the Dark Lord’s growing power, but that top wizard Saruman has gone rogue and is building his own army of orcs and trying to grab the Ring for himself. Gandalf's meeting with Saruman and subsequent captivity on the Pinnacle of Orthanc happened while Frodo was still in the Shire, and a writer who believed in Showing not Telling would have stuck it in among the early chapters, but to do that would be to break one of the book’s rules. In the later volumes we’ll occasionally see things from other points of view, but almost everything that happens in The Fellowship of the Ring happens to, or is witnessed by, one of the hobbits. Since none of them were with Gandalf at Isengard, we have to wait until they can hear his story in his own words.
So it’s decided that the Ring must be taken to Mordor and the Fellowship sets forth. I think it’s fair to say that Boromir, Gimli, and Legolas are not much more than names at this point - their characters come into focus later. At this point the beautiful map which folds out from the inside back cover of my copy of the book starts to become indispensable. I'm sure you could follow the story without consulting the map, but consulting the map is fun, and adds a great deal. All those rivers and mountains are part of the texture of the story, even the ones the travellers never have to ford or climb.
The journey begins much like the trek from Bree to Rivendell: a long walking expedition through abandoned country. Elves lived here once, ‘but they sought the havens long ago’, leaving only holly trees and tumbled stones behind. Once again, our heroes are watched and pursued: the Ringwraiths haven't yet recovered from their defeat at the ford, but some of the birds are Sauron’s spies; wolves attack, and one night an ominous shadow passes over the stars, ‘...moving fast ... and not with the wind.’ When the party tries to cross the Misty Mountains even the weather turns out to be working for the Enemy. There is only one other way through the mountains, so they head for the Mines of Moria.
I suppose there were plenty of novels before this one where characters have adventures in caves and mines. With its vast halls, legendary riches, and huge stone doors, Moria feels like a relative of King Solomon’s Mines in H Rider Haggard’s adventure story (whose explorers are also accompanied by a mysterious stranger who turns out to be a returning king). And of course the dwarves of legend have been knocking out magical metalwork projects in underground kingdoms since long before anyone was writing their stories down. But Tolkien’s mines are on an even grander scale than Rider Haggard’s, and the sequence he sets there is built along the lines of a classic adventure yarn. First a tentacular horror that lives in the lake outside the western doors slams them shut behind our heroes, ensuring they have no way back. Then, as the party sets off through the dark, odd tappings are heard, as if nameless things far down below are signalling. While the tension slowly builds, we learn a little more about the history of Moria, and how grand and beautiful it looked when it was full of Dwarves, before they woke some horror in the depths which led to its abandonment. (The Dwarf words Gimli mentions seem to be an odd match with the given names of the Dwarf characters - Thorin and Balin don’t sound as if they come from the same language as Khazad-dûm, Barazinbar, Bundushathûr and Zirak-zigil. Maybe those are noms-de-guerre and their real names are in ‘the secret dwarf-tongue that they teach to none’? Maybe it gets explained in the Appendices and I’ve forgotten. I dunno.)
Eventually the Fellowship discover that trusty old stand-by of explorers-in-peril stories, the blood-stained journal of the previous expedition. Surrounded by bones and rusting armour, the journal doesn’t quite end with the word ‘Aaaargh!', but it very nearly does. No sooner have our heroes read what befell these earlier adventurers than it starts befalling them too. Orcs and trolls attack, and the party begins a desperate flight towards the exit. We'll meet loads more orcs later, so there'll be time to study them in more detail then. This lot mainly serve as a warm-up act for Moria's resident Balrog, which is what I think gamers call the Level Boss. (Computer games of course owe much to Dungeons & Dragons, and Dungeons & Dragons owed enough to The Lord of the Rings to trigger legal action, so the influence of Moria has spread far beyond Middle-earth.)
What is a Balrog? I’ve read The Lord of the Rings umpteen times, and I still don’t really know. It’s Durin’s Bane, ‘flame of Udûn’, the thing that woke up and drove the Dwarves from Moria long ago. Is it doing the Dark Lord’s bidding, or is this a freelance Flame of Udûn? It isn’t very talkative, so there is no way of telling. I don’t even know what it looks like - illustrations like John Howe's (below) always make it look more solid than it's described in the text, where it's a giant, man-shaped cloud of darkness, with wings, a sword, and a whip. It’s hard to picture, but, like one of H.P.Lovecraft’s monstrosities, that only makes it scarier. Its wings don’t seem to help it much when Gandalf smashes the bridge it’s standing on and it plunges into the depths. Its whip comes in jolly useful, though, because it uses it to drag the wizard down with it.
 |
| Gandalf vs Balrog, by John Howe |
Less than a mile away, and a little below them… lay a mere. It was long and oval, shaped like a great spear-head thrust deep into the northern glen; but its southern end was beyond the shadows under the sunlit sky. Yet its waters were dark: a deep blue like clear evening seen from a lamp-lit room. Its face was still and unruffled. About it lay a smooth sward, shelving down on all sides to its bare unbroken rim.
Honestly, there must be a hundred landscape passages I could have quoted from this section. In some ways, The Lord of the Rings is about landscape, and the story is just a device for moving us around various bits of it. This particular bit is the Mirrormere, ‘deep Kheled-zâram’ (I’m quoting a lot of these dwarvish names for a reason: I’ve finally found the ^ key on my computer). Here the Fellowship can rest, tend to their cuts and bruises, and mourn Gandalf. Ahead lies the Elven kingdom of Lothlórien. But this is a long post already, so I guess the elves had better wait till next time. Like The Lord of the Rings itself, this project seems to be growing in the telling.
Comments
This in large part a result of drawing on the myth cycle he created in The Silmarillion, though a past hinted at is more intriguing than one laid out in exhaustive detail. For this reason I am not a huge fan of the Silmarillion and bailed early on The History of Middle Earth. But I will put in a shout for The Children of Hurin, which in Christopher Tolkien's reconstruction works as a properly structured novel, with some wonderfully well written passages.
And if you have not already done so there is no excuse for not reading Tolkien's short fictions, which are joyous.
When I read it as a child and on later readings I never really conjured up visions of the characters (although I did draw a comic page for my art college portfolio of the eagles and the orcs bit) but I did always conjure up the landscape of the journey.
That's because where I grew up in Scotland I regularly traveled these types of paths lacing the local hills, cliffs, gorges and gullies, small hedged fields and big dense old forests and open moorland hilltops around me in the early sixties before industrial scale farming.
There were standing stones, iron age burial mounds, massive hilltop Pictish forts and smaller Roman fortifications, ruined castle, rig and furrow terraces and an old main road to Edinburgh now a woodland trail passing our front door.
All within playing distance of us primary school children which in those days could easily be three to five miles cross country and the same back for supper. You should see how far we dragged our sledges to get to the more lethal slopes in winter.
I've been back since and of course everything that was big then is now smaller. The roads are incredibly narrow.
But what Tolkien instilled, or at least planted, in me was how to look and imagine at a landscape. I'm now in the habit when in a high place to try and clothe the view - or at least unpick it - at different points in its history. Such as before the car and paved roads, before field boundaries were grubbed up, before the forestry commission and mass plantings, before the railway, before drains and the enclosures, before the sheep and the clearances, back to roman times and to iron age woodlands and then back to stone age.
I know enough of ecology, archaeology, engineering and history to clothe these imaginings. Not in a strictly factual way, probably fantasy, but enough to shift any complacency in looking at a view.
That is the big thing that begun with the Hobbit and the Lord of the rings. Even now in old age when I go hiking along old wooded hilly trails with the dog I'm tempted into thinking I'm with the Hobbits on one of their journeys. I'll never grow up I'm pleased to admit.