I'm re-reading The Lord of the Rings. Tremble before the hotness of my takes...
Q: How cool are the Riders of Rohan? A: Extremely cool. They combine the outfits and culture of the Anglo Saxons with the expert horsemanship and healthy outdoor lifestyles of the Sioux or the Apache. They were always my favourites when I was young, and now that I'm very much no longer young the only problem I can see with them is that they make the Gondor crowd in The Return of the the King look a bit dull by comparison. But we haven't reached The Return of the King yet: we're still on Book One of The Two Towers, and if you're still reading this, thank you so much!
We left Merry and Pippin marching off to war with the Ents, so now it's time for the narrative to loop back to Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli, who have just met a strange old man in another part of the forest. The strange old man turns out to be Gandalf, who has much important news to impart - so much, and so important, that it's several pages before Legolas says, 'Hang on, you got killed by a Balrog in the previous book…” (This may not be an actual quote). Gandalf explains how he didn't get killed by a Balrog in the previous book, describing a Wizard vs Balrog dust-up which roams from the bowels of the Earth (where, 'Far, far below the deepest delvings of the Dwarves, the world is gnawed by nameless things') to the heights of the mountains, and ends up with the battered but victorious spellslinger being airlifted by eagle to Lóthlorien for some R&R. He also explains a neat bit of plot stuff: Sauron has found out about the Ring and its travels, but naturally assumes it's being taken to Minas Tirith so it can be used against him - 'That we should wish to cast him down and have no one in his place is not a thought which occurs to his mind.' So the Dark Lord has been jumped into starting his war a bit sooner than he'd planned, and is drawing troops away from guarding his borders to fight it, the results of which we'll see in the next volume.
For the time being, Aragorn and co. are more concerned with Saruman, who is sending 10,000 orcs to conquer Rohan. He's also managed to nobble Rohan's King Théoden by supplying him with a treacherous adviser who has been whispering counsels of despair to him for years. Luckily Gandalf is able to sort him out and send Wormtongue packing - I don't read Théoden's recovery as a spell being broken, more as a portrait of someone recovering from a deep and debilitating depression, but it's sped up, as it has to be, because everything is happening very quickly now. Rohan's non-combatants are packed off to safety under Théoden's niece Éowyn (who is pretty much the only mortal woman in the entire book, but we don't see much of her in this volume so we'll come back to her in a future post). Then the King and his riders head out to meet Saruman's forces, and end up besieged at Helm's Deep in the first of the big battles of The Lord of the Rings. It's been a long time coming, and it doesn't disappoint. The writing is incredibly cinematic:
Branched lightning smote down upon the eastward hills. For a staring moment the watchers on the walls saw all the space between them and the Dike lit with white light: it was boiling and crawling with black shapes, some squat and broad, some tall and grim, with high helms and sable shields. Hundreds and hundreds more were pouring over the Dike and through the breach. The dark tide flowed up to the walls from cliff to cliff. Thunder rolled in the valley. Rain lashed down.
All through the night the battle rages, with Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas acting as our eyes and ears in different parts of it. The odds are impossible, but morning brings unexpected reinforcements in the shape of a) Gandalf with a thousand men from Westfold and b) a large forest which arrives outside the beleaguered stronghold and basically eats the orcs, or does something equally terminal to them - 'from that shadow none ever came again'. This is supposedly Tolkien's attempt to correct what he saw as Shakespeare's cop-out in Macbeth when the prophecy about Birnham Wood coming to Dunsinane is fulfilled by a bunch of spear-carriers wandering onstage clutching bits of shrubbery. Shakespeare doubtless knew what he was doing, but I must admit Tolkien's version is more fun.
But then something interesting happens. The victors of Helm's Deep head off to Saruman's lair at Isengard. They find that it has been attacked and largely destroyed by Treebeard and his Ents, who have diverted the river through Saruman's underground factories like Heracles cleaning out the Augean Stables. Having a well-earned rest in the rubble are Merry and Pippin, who tell them what's been happening - and despite the Battle of Helm's deep being such stirring, widescreen stuff, this eyewitness account is better.
'An angry Ent is terrifying. Their fingers, and their toes, just freeze onto rock; and they tear it up like bread-crust. It was like watching the work of great tree-roots in a hundred years, all packed into a few moments. They pushed, pulled, tore, shook, and hammered; and clang-bang, crash-crack, in five minutes they had these huge gates just lying in ruin; and some were already beginning to eat into the walls, like rabbits in a sand-pit.'
This is hobbit power in action: the genius of The Lord of the Rings is that it weaves these vast, dramatic scenes out of myth and legend and then shows them to us through the eyes of people who come from a society a lot like ours, treat most things lightly, and basically just want a nice sit down and some dinner.
In the midst of all the wreckage, Saruman is hiding in his tower of Orthanc. We haven't actually met him yet, except in Gandalf's report to the Council of Elrond. (It's interesting how off-stage Tolkien's villains are - Sauron never appears in person at all, and Saruman, despite driving all the action of The Two Towers so far, only puts in an appearance on page 183. Defeated and humiliated, he is stripped of his wizarding license by Gandalf, and that seems to be the end of him. But Merry and Pippin have discovered barrels of pipeweed from the Shire among the loot from Isengard, and speculate about what connection Saruman can have with their homeland. Tolkien is always scrupulous about foreshadowing.
Book One of The Two Towers began at a run, introduced a huge number of characters and incidents, and ends at full gallop with Gandalf and Pippin setting off for Minas Tirith on Shadowfax the Wonderhorse. Book Two, by contrast, begins with only two characters, and they can barely move at all - Frodo and Sam are picking their way towards Mordor through bleak and difficult terrain. They are being followed by Gollum, another villain who has operated almost entirely off-stage so far, but now finally makes his big entrance, creeping down a sheer cliff face 'like a nasty spider on a wall'. Bram Stoker's Dracula pulls off a similar move, which reminds me that back at the beginning of the story Gandalf said the woodmen of Mirkwood thought Gollum was 'a ghost that drank blood. It climbed trees to find nests; it crept into holes to find the young;it slipped through windows to find cradles.' Yes, in addition to his many other character flaws, Gollum eats babies. Yet somehow Tolkien renders him, if not sympathetic, then at least pitiable. Snivelling and grizzling and missing his Precious, fawning over Frodo, holding long conversations with the suppressed hobbity side of his personality, he's a brilliant, grotesque creation.
Sam rightly thinks Gollum is dangerous and would be better off dead, but Frodo decides to show him mercy. The whole story will hinge on that decision, but it doesn't feel like a big moment. We're more concerned with whether Gollum can be trusted as he leads the hobbits on across the Dead Marshes towards the Land of Shadow. This section almost feels like a bleak reprise of the cheery strolling-through-the-Shire passages at the start of The Fellowship of the Ring, but the food and the company are not so good and the landscapes are horrible - dreary ridges and ravines, fetid, stinking bogs, wastelands scarred by war or industry. As a younger reader I found these scenes incredibly oppressive, this long journey through a dead country - and the oppressiveness is heightened by the knowledge that there is worse to come, for ahead, like a black wall on the horizon, rise the mountain walls of Mordor...
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| The Uffington White Horse, c/o Wikipedia |
We left Merry and Pippin marching off to war with the Ents, so now it's time for the narrative to loop back to Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli, who have just met a strange old man in another part of the forest. The strange old man turns out to be Gandalf, who has much important news to impart - so much, and so important, that it's several pages before Legolas says, 'Hang on, you got killed by a Balrog in the previous book…” (This may not be an actual quote). Gandalf explains how he didn't get killed by a Balrog in the previous book, describing a Wizard vs Balrog dust-up which roams from the bowels of the Earth (where, 'Far, far below the deepest delvings of the Dwarves, the world is gnawed by nameless things') to the heights of the mountains, and ends up with the battered but victorious spellslinger being airlifted by eagle to Lóthlorien for some R&R. He also explains a neat bit of plot stuff: Sauron has found out about the Ring and its travels, but naturally assumes it's being taken to Minas Tirith so it can be used against him - 'That we should wish to cast him down and have no one in his place is not a thought which occurs to his mind.' So the Dark Lord has been jumped into starting his war a bit sooner than he'd planned, and is drawing troops away from guarding his borders to fight it, the results of which we'll see in the next volume.
For the time being, Aragorn and co. are more concerned with Saruman, who is sending 10,000 orcs to conquer Rohan. He's also managed to nobble Rohan's King Théoden by supplying him with a treacherous adviser who has been whispering counsels of despair to him for years. Luckily Gandalf is able to sort him out and send Wormtongue packing - I don't read Théoden's recovery as a spell being broken, more as a portrait of someone recovering from a deep and debilitating depression, but it's sped up, as it has to be, because everything is happening very quickly now. Rohan's non-combatants are packed off to safety under Théoden's niece Éowyn (who is pretty much the only mortal woman in the entire book, but we don't see much of her in this volume so we'll come back to her in a future post). Then the King and his riders head out to meet Saruman's forces, and end up besieged at Helm's Deep in the first of the big battles of The Lord of the Rings. It's been a long time coming, and it doesn't disappoint. The writing is incredibly cinematic:
Branched lightning smote down upon the eastward hills. For a staring moment the watchers on the walls saw all the space between them and the Dike lit with white light: it was boiling and crawling with black shapes, some squat and broad, some tall and grim, with high helms and sable shields. Hundreds and hundreds more were pouring over the Dike and through the breach. The dark tide flowed up to the walls from cliff to cliff. Thunder rolled in the valley. Rain lashed down.
All through the night the battle rages, with Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas acting as our eyes and ears in different parts of it. The odds are impossible, but morning brings unexpected reinforcements in the shape of a) Gandalf with a thousand men from Westfold and b) a large forest which arrives outside the beleaguered stronghold and basically eats the orcs, or does something equally terminal to them - 'from that shadow none ever came again'. This is supposedly Tolkien's attempt to correct what he saw as Shakespeare's cop-out in Macbeth when the prophecy about Birnham Wood coming to Dunsinane is fulfilled by a bunch of spear-carriers wandering onstage clutching bits of shrubbery. Shakespeare doubtless knew what he was doing, but I must admit Tolkien's version is more fun.
But then something interesting happens. The victors of Helm's Deep head off to Saruman's lair at Isengard. They find that it has been attacked and largely destroyed by Treebeard and his Ents, who have diverted the river through Saruman's underground factories like Heracles cleaning out the Augean Stables. Having a well-earned rest in the rubble are Merry and Pippin, who tell them what's been happening - and despite the Battle of Helm's deep being such stirring, widescreen stuff, this eyewitness account is better.
'An angry Ent is terrifying. Their fingers, and their toes, just freeze onto rock; and they tear it up like bread-crust. It was like watching the work of great tree-roots in a hundred years, all packed into a few moments. They pushed, pulled, tore, shook, and hammered; and clang-bang, crash-crack, in five minutes they had these huge gates just lying in ruin; and some were already beginning to eat into the walls, like rabbits in a sand-pit.'
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| Ents at Isengard by Ian Miller - the first illustrator I ever met In Real Life. |
In the midst of all the wreckage, Saruman is hiding in his tower of Orthanc. We haven't actually met him yet, except in Gandalf's report to the Council of Elrond. (It's interesting how off-stage Tolkien's villains are - Sauron never appears in person at all, and Saruman, despite driving all the action of The Two Towers so far, only puts in an appearance on page 183. Defeated and humiliated, he is stripped of his wizarding license by Gandalf, and that seems to be the end of him. But Merry and Pippin have discovered barrels of pipeweed from the Shire among the loot from Isengard, and speculate about what connection Saruman can have with their homeland. Tolkien is always scrupulous about foreshadowing.
Book One of The Two Towers began at a run, introduced a huge number of characters and incidents, and ends at full gallop with Gandalf and Pippin setting off for Minas Tirith on Shadowfax the Wonderhorse. Book Two, by contrast, begins with only two characters, and they can barely move at all - Frodo and Sam are picking their way towards Mordor through bleak and difficult terrain. They are being followed by Gollum, another villain who has operated almost entirely off-stage so far, but now finally makes his big entrance, creeping down a sheer cliff face 'like a nasty spider on a wall'. Bram Stoker's Dracula pulls off a similar move, which reminds me that back at the beginning of the story Gandalf said the woodmen of Mirkwood thought Gollum was 'a ghost that drank blood. It climbed trees to find nests; it crept into holes to find the young;it slipped through windows to find cradles.' Yes, in addition to his many other character flaws, Gollum eats babies. Yet somehow Tolkien renders him, if not sympathetic, then at least pitiable. Snivelling and grizzling and missing his Precious, fawning over Frodo, holding long conversations with the suppressed hobbity side of his personality, he's a brilliant, grotesque creation.
Sam rightly thinks Gollum is dangerous and would be better off dead, but Frodo decides to show him mercy. The whole story will hinge on that decision, but it doesn't feel like a big moment. We're more concerned with whether Gollum can be trusted as he leads the hobbits on across the Dead Marshes towards the Land of Shadow. This section almost feels like a bleak reprise of the cheery strolling-through-the-Shire passages at the start of The Fellowship of the Ring, but the food and the company are not so good and the landscapes are horrible - dreary ridges and ravines, fetid, stinking bogs, wastelands scarred by war or industry. As a younger reader I found these scenes incredibly oppressive, this long journey through a dead country - and the oppressiveness is heightened by the knowledge that there is worse to come, for ahead, like a black wall on the horizon, rise the mountain walls of Mordor...
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| The Black Gate, by Alan Lee |
Comments
One thing that strikes me about Tolkien's ents is that they are tree-ish but in more subtle ways - at least compared to how the films portrayed them. In general I'm more familiar with the films than the books, so I'm always surprised when Tolkien describes them more as tree-like people rather than people-like trees. I don't necessarily dislike the way the films portrayed them, but I do think that I prefer the books' ents - they are more detailed, more interesting, and more real.