These are some idle lockdown musings based on a re-read of The Lord of the Rings. Don't @ me.
When I read The Lord of the Rings as a child it came from the library, and there would always be an annoying wait before I could find the next volume. Nowadays, I can go straight from The Fellowship of the Ring into The Two Towers, and the change of pace is remarkable. The Fellowship… started off at a slow ramble, but The Two Towers sets off at a run. The opening sentence is 'Aragorn sped on up the hill.' and the opening chapter is shorter than any in The Fellowship... More importantly, for the first time none of the central characters are hobbits. Frodo and Sam have headed off to Mordor and won’t be heard of again until Book Two, while Merry and Pippin have been nabbed by the orcs. Pausing only to give a suitable send-off to Boromir, who has redeemed himself for his attempt to grab the Ring at the end of the previous book by getting himself pin-cushioned with orc arrows, Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas set off to try and rescue Merry and Pippin.
The landscape has changed again. It now feels more like Iceland: treeless barren hills giving way to fertile but equally treeless grassy plains. Tolkien apparently never went to Iceland, but of course he knew the sagas inside out, and I think a lot of Middle-earth is his imaginative response to that landscape. When I went travelling there a few years ago it all felt strangely familiar. One day we drove over a ridge and found ourselves looking across the arid deserts of Mordor to where a huge volcano hunched on the horizon: a day or two later we arrived on the grassy plains of Rohan and sure enough there were horses everywhere.
Rohan is where Aragorn and co. end up, and there they start finding clues - the reader still doesn’t know for sure if Merry and Pippin are still alive, but the discoveries of some dead orcs at one point, a fallen Elven brooch at another, set up little mysteries which will be solved in chapter three, where the story flashes back a few days and we find out what has been happening to the captive hobbits.
This is a technique which The Lord of the Rings uses increasingly from here on. Most writers (especially today, when we're raised on film and TV) tend to jump happily to and fro between different events happening simultaneously. It’s a handy way to add some variety and ramp up tension. But Tolkien takes a different approach, describing Aragorn’s search for the hobbits for two chapters before going back to explain what’s happened to them, allowing the events in Rohan to fill the whole of Book One of The Two Towers, then rewinding to the starting point and relating what Frodo and Sam have been up to in the same period.
So it turns out that Merry and Pippin been nabbed not just by one lot of orcs, but three. One band have come from Moria, looking for revenge, another has been sent from Mordor, and a third, the Uruk-hai, are servants of Saruman in Isengard. It’s an uneasy alliance which soon starts to fall apart, and it gives us our first proper look at orcs.
There’s no point pretending there isn’t an ugly element of racist caricature in Tolkien’s depiction of the orcs. ‘Swart skinned’ with ‘slanting eyes’ - they make for uncomfortable reading. I don't think it's exactly deliberate - 'I'm very anti that sort of thing' he said when people suggested Sauron's armies were meant to represent the Germans, and there's no reason to assume he meant them to represent anyone else either. But he was writing in the '30s and '40s, and drawing partly on a tradition of Victorian and Edwardian colonial adventure yarns, so when he reaches into the props box labelled 'hostile barbarians' I'm afraid he finds it heavily stocked with scimitars and 'huge hide shield(s)'.
But if you can look past their outward appearance, the orcs actually seem as English as the hobbits, just in a very different way. Growling, cursing, and bullying, they are clearly as common as muck. Sam Gamgee is from the working classes too, and he’s the real hero of the story, but he’s from the rural working classes, which makes all the difference. The orcs reflect Tolkien's intense response to nature and the natural world, and his belief that to be divorced from that world and hemmed into factories and cities is spiritually damaging. Maybe his orcs are distant cousins of H.G. Wells’s Morlocks, an industrial caste who have evolved into nocturnal, cave-dwelling cannibals. To complete their degradation, they have been pressed into military service: they’re grumbling, foul-mouthed foot soldiers, and the Mordor contingent are clearly in the service of a very modern totalitarian state. (“That’s an interesting remark,” says one, sounding like a Gestapo informant or Soviet commissar. “I may have to report it.”)
They’re also quite funny - there’s a grotesque humour about the orcs that makes their scenes very lively, and quite different to anything else in The Lord of the Rings. Squabbles break out as they drag Merry and Pippin toward Isengard, and they’ve already killed off quite a few of their own comrades before the Riders of Rohan turn up to finish the job. In the confusion, the hobbits sneak off into Fangorn forest, of which we have heard dark rumours - from the hints dropped in earlier chapters it sounds as dangerous as Mirkwood or the Old Forest.
It is and it isn’t, of course. It is the home of Treebeard and the ents, who are one of the most inventive elements in The Lord of the Rings. The rest of the book is a bravura repurposing of things we’ve seen before - elves, dwarves, wizards, wraiths, and goblins are all familiar from other stories - but ents are just ents. As Treebeard wanders through the forest hooming and hooing the trees seem to reply. The forest is waking up, and you sense that it’s never been entirely asleep, and that Tolkien has a deep imaginative connection to trees and to the idea of trees as alive, watching, dreaming, thinking their deep, slow, tree-y thoughts. Once again we are back to nature versus modernity: Saruman has ‘a mind of metal and wheels’ says Treebeard disapprovingly. The orcs in their mass-produced armour and iron-shod shoes have lost their connection to nature and it has made them monstrous: the ents are nature, trees given the power of speech by the Elves long ago, and inclined to turn tree-ish again until the arrival of Merry and Pippin rouses them, 'like the falling of small stones that starts an avalanche in the mountains.'
I love the ents. I love how slightly dangerous they feel and how that makes Treebeard’s kindness to the lost hobbits somehow more meaningful. I like the comedy of their slow ways, the conversation at the Entmoot where they take all morning discussing a few minor details before getting down to business. The Huorns - Ents who have become particularly tree-ish and 'stand here and there in the wood... watching endlessly over the trees' are particularly spooky. I love the thrill of the forest waking up, starting to grow angry, shaking off its torpor, the trees rustling to life and marching on Isengard, and Merry's later account of the Huorns on their way to war:
'There is great power in them, and they seem able to wrap themselves in shadow: it is difficult to see them moving. But they do. They can move very quickly, if they are angry. You stand still looking at the weather, maybe, or listening to the rustling of the wind, and then suddenly you find that you are in the middle of a wood with great groping trees all around you. They still have voices, and can speak with the Ents ... but they have become queer and wild. Dangerous. I should be terrified of meeting them, if there were no true Ents about to look after them.'
This deep, recurring theme in The Lord of the Rings - that industrial society corrupts and it's better for people to live barefoot in forests and fields and tend their little bits of garden - probably seemed quaintly old-fashioned when the book was published in 1954. But when paperback editions of this profoundly conservative novel reached the barefoot flower-children of 1960s America, something strange began to happen. The hippies saw in Middle-earth a powerful metaphor for their own back-to-nature rebellion, and it inspired t-shirts, button badges ('Frodo Lives! Tolkien is Hobbit Forming!') and a whole swathe of ditzy musical tributes. (I'm sure there's a good play to be made of Tolkien tetchily fielding rambling late-night phone calls from his dope-addled younger fans.) The Lord of the Rings had become one of the foundational myths of the counterculture, and it's still being held up as an improving ecological parable by the green movement to this day.
 |
| A 1976 Athena poster designed by Jimmy Cauty (who was only 17 when he drew it.) |
The landscape has changed again. It now feels more like Iceland: treeless barren hills giving way to fertile but equally treeless grassy plains. Tolkien apparently never went to Iceland, but of course he knew the sagas inside out, and I think a lot of Middle-earth is his imaginative response to that landscape. When I went travelling there a few years ago it all felt strangely familiar. One day we drove over a ridge and found ourselves looking across the arid deserts of Mordor to where a huge volcano hunched on the horizon: a day or two later we arrived on the grassy plains of Rohan and sure enough there were horses everywhere.
Rohan is where Aragorn and co. end up, and there they start finding clues - the reader still doesn’t know for sure if Merry and Pippin are still alive, but the discoveries of some dead orcs at one point, a fallen Elven brooch at another, set up little mysteries which will be solved in chapter three, where the story flashes back a few days and we find out what has been happening to the captive hobbits.
This is a technique which The Lord of the Rings uses increasingly from here on. Most writers (especially today, when we're raised on film and TV) tend to jump happily to and fro between different events happening simultaneously. It’s a handy way to add some variety and ramp up tension. But Tolkien takes a different approach, describing Aragorn’s search for the hobbits for two chapters before going back to explain what’s happened to them, allowing the events in Rohan to fill the whole of Book One of The Two Towers, then rewinding to the starting point and relating what Frodo and Sam have been up to in the same period.
So it turns out that Merry and Pippin been nabbed not just by one lot of orcs, but three. One band have come from Moria, looking for revenge, another has been sent from Mordor, and a third, the Uruk-hai, are servants of Saruman in Isengard. It’s an uneasy alliance which soon starts to fall apart, and it gives us our first proper look at orcs.
 |
| Orcs on the march, by John Howe. |
But if you can look past their outward appearance, the orcs actually seem as English as the hobbits, just in a very different way. Growling, cursing, and bullying, they are clearly as common as muck. Sam Gamgee is from the working classes too, and he’s the real hero of the story, but he’s from the rural working classes, which makes all the difference. The orcs reflect Tolkien's intense response to nature and the natural world, and his belief that to be divorced from that world and hemmed into factories and cities is spiritually damaging. Maybe his orcs are distant cousins of H.G. Wells’s Morlocks, an industrial caste who have evolved into nocturnal, cave-dwelling cannibals. To complete their degradation, they have been pressed into military service: they’re grumbling, foul-mouthed foot soldiers, and the Mordor contingent are clearly in the service of a very modern totalitarian state. (“That’s an interesting remark,” says one, sounding like a Gestapo informant or Soviet commissar. “I may have to report it.”)
They’re also quite funny - there’s a grotesque humour about the orcs that makes their scenes very lively, and quite different to anything else in The Lord of the Rings. Squabbles break out as they drag Merry and Pippin toward Isengard, and they’ve already killed off quite a few of their own comrades before the Riders of Rohan turn up to finish the job. In the confusion, the hobbits sneak off into Fangorn forest, of which we have heard dark rumours - from the hints dropped in earlier chapters it sounds as dangerous as Mirkwood or the Old Forest.
 |
| A Greenwich Park huorn, by Sarah McIntyre |
I love the ents. I love how slightly dangerous they feel and how that makes Treebeard’s kindness to the lost hobbits somehow more meaningful. I like the comedy of their slow ways, the conversation at the Entmoot where they take all morning discussing a few minor details before getting down to business. The Huorns - Ents who have become particularly tree-ish and 'stand here and there in the wood... watching endlessly over the trees' are particularly spooky. I love the thrill of the forest waking up, starting to grow angry, shaking off its torpor, the trees rustling to life and marching on Isengard, and Merry's later account of the Huorns on their way to war:
'There is great power in them, and they seem able to wrap themselves in shadow: it is difficult to see them moving. But they do. They can move very quickly, if they are angry. You stand still looking at the weather, maybe, or listening to the rustling of the wind, and then suddenly you find that you are in the middle of a wood with great groping trees all around you. They still have voices, and can speak with the Ents ... but they have become queer and wild. Dangerous. I should be terrified of meeting them, if there were no true Ents about to look after them.'
This deep, recurring theme in The Lord of the Rings - that industrial society corrupts and it's better for people to live barefoot in forests and fields and tend their little bits of garden - probably seemed quaintly old-fashioned when the book was published in 1954. But when paperback editions of this profoundly conservative novel reached the barefoot flower-children of 1960s America, something strange began to happen. The hippies saw in Middle-earth a powerful metaphor for their own back-to-nature rebellion, and it inspired t-shirts, button badges ('Frodo Lives! Tolkien is Hobbit Forming!') and a whole swathe of ditzy musical tributes. (I'm sure there's a good play to be made of Tolkien tetchily fielding rambling late-night phone calls from his dope-addled younger fans.) The Lord of the Rings had become one of the foundational myths of the counterculture, and it's still being held up as an improving ecological parable by the green movement to this day.
In the next exciting blogisode: Edoras, Helm's Deep, and the rewilding of Isengard.
Comments