I'm rereading The Lord of the Rings for the eleventy-first time, and blogging my thoughts about it. You lucky people...
So Gollum has led Sam and Frodo to the Black Gate of Mordor, and they've found it shut. They turn south, and their weary journey continues - they have no food except the Elvish Lembas they brought from Lorien, which is getting a bit samey. The landscape is still dreary and ruinous, and now that they are so close to Sauron's stronghold the Ring on its chain round Frodo's neck is getting heavier and heavier - his growing weariness and Sam's concern for him are constant themes in these chapters.
But as always in The Lord of the Rings, after an ordeal there comes respite, a rest, and usually a meal. It seems unlikely that the hobbits will find anywhere to rest so close to Mordor's borders, yet they do: the wooded countryside of Ithilien, which has only recently fallen under the Enemy's control, has not yet been ruined; not only are there rabbits there, Sam's cooking fire attracts a party of soldiers from Gondor. Operating deep behind enemy lines, they seem a bit like a commando unit, or the SAS in the Western Desert. (Tolkien always insisted that his story was worked out long before the Second World War and should not be seen as an allegory for it, and I'm sure that's true, but novels inevitably pick up details and atmosphere from the era they're written in.) There's possibly a bit of The Last of the Mohicans echoing around here, too, but of course there is an older model for brave bands of bowmen planning ambushes in woodland settings and 'passing like grey and green shadows under the old trees'. When the hobbits are taken to the Gondorians' secret base in a cave behind a waterfall it feels for a moment almost as if they're being entertained by the outlaws of Sherwood Forest. In the Robin Hood role is Faramir, younger brother of Boromir and a far more attractive character - he turns down his chance to snatch the Ring, easily passing the test his brother failed. When Gollum comes poking round the secret cave Faramir's bowmen are poised to shoot him, but Frodo once again elects to spare him.
An interesting detail that stuck out: before they eat, Faramir and his men turn and face the west for a moment of silence...
'So we always do,' he said as they sat down: 'we look towards Númenor that was, and beyond to Elvenhome that is, and to that which is beyond Elvenhome and will ever be. Have you no such custom at meat?'
The hobbits haven't, and nor as far I recall does anyone else in The Lord of the Rings. There are no churches, no temples, none of the different races seem to have gods (although they all revere their own legendary heroes) there are no signs of religious observance at all. It's an absence that distinguishes The Lord of the Rings from most other made-up-world fantasy sagas, whose authors are usually happy to make up gods and religions for them too. For Tolkien, of course, faith was a serious matter (the most serious matter) so I presume he didn't want to belittle it. I went and did some actual research (for the first time in this blog series) and found a letter in which he says,
The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision. That is why I have not put in, or have cut out, practically all references to anything like 'religion', to cults or practices, in the imaginary world. For the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism.
More on this interesting subject if I think of anything to say about it...
As well as introducing Faramir, these chapters lay some of the groundwork for the big battle that's coming in The Return of the King, and also provide a much needed bit of hope and calm in the middle of Book Two, which would otherwise be pretty unrelievedly grim. When the hobbits and Gollum go on their way, the grimness closes in again almost at once; they are on the creepy road that leads past Minas Morgul, the City of the Ringwraiths.
A while ago I wrote a listicle about my favourite dystopias in which I included The Lord of the Rings, on the grounds that Mordor is the first literary dystopia I ever encountered. It's interesting to think that, while Tolkien was finishing his manuscript in Oxford, George Orwell was busy on Jura writing 1984. Neither book could have influenced the other, but it's that thing again of novels picking up the flavour of their times. Tolkien may not have intended to write about Hitler and Stalin, and he may have been so caught up in his private mythology as to not give them a conscious thought while he was writing, but he wrote about them anyway, or at least something of the spirit of the 20th Century dictatorships crept into Mordor.
Like Orwell's Airstrip One, the Land of Shadows is a surveillance state, and much of its nightmare atmosphere comes from the constant sense of being watched. The top section of the tower of Minas Morgul 'revolved slowly, first one way and then another, a huge ghostly head leering into the night.' 'Not rest here,' Gollum warns the hobbits, 'Eyes can see us.' When the chief Ringwraith rides out at the head of an army his army he senses the Ring, and 'This way and that turned the dark head... sweeping the shadows with its unseen eyes'. Even when he has ridden away, Sam says, 'There's something still alive in that place, something with eyes, or a seeing mind...'
Eyes are everywhere: eyes in the sky, eyes in the myriad dark windows of Sauron's towers and fortresses. Sauron himself, of course, is just an eye; all we see of him is the burning red eye which stares at Frodo out of Galadriel's mirror or at Pippin from the Palantír, like Big Brother staring out of Winston Smith's telescreen. Mordor seen from a distance or in dreams and visions often features a distant point of red flame which may be the fires of Mount Doom but also suggests Sauron's ever-vigilant eye. The statue the hobbits pass in Ithilien has had its head replaced by a boulder on which is painted a crude face with a single red eye. When they finally climb past Minas Morgul up the stairs of Cirith Ungol (which as a young reader I pictured as giant stairs, imagining Sam and Frodo scrambling laboriously up risers taller than themselves) they find the pass guarded by a watchtower where 'a red light burned, or else the red light in the land beyond was shining through a hole.' The orcs who man it (or orc it, I suppose) are as wary of their leaders as any NKVD thug:
'They don't tell us all they know, do they? Not by half. But they can make mistakes, even the Top Ones can.'
'Sh, Gorbag! ... They may, but they've got eyes and ears everywhere ... '
and a little later:
'The messages go through quicker than anything could fly, as a rule. I don't enquire how it's done. Safest not to! Grr! Those Nazgûl give me the creeps. And they skin the body off you soon as look at you, and leave you all cold in the dark on the other side. But He likes 'em, they're His favourites nowadays, so it's no use grumbling. I tell you, it's no game serving down in the city.'
If this is how the Dark Lord makes his own people feel, what hope is there for poor hobbitses? And we're not even in Mordor yet; first there is Shelob's Lair to contend with. This is the climax of The Two Towers, the trap into which Gollum has been leading Frodo all along, although he does have a rather moving moment when his conscience seems to trouble him before he leads the hobbits inside -
For a fleeting moment, could one of the sleepers have seen him, they would have thought that they beheld an old weary hobbit, shrunken by the years that had carried him far beyond his time, beyond friends and kin, and the fields and streams of his youth, an old starved pitiable thing.
The stinky tunnel into which he leads Sam and Frodo is pitch dark and festooned with thick webs, so there's no way you'd catch me going down it. I've been an arachnaphobe for longer than I can remember. Literally the only acceptable types of spider as far as I'm concerned are a) very teensy-weensy money spiders and b) the Spiders from Mars. If the Pass of Cirith Ungol was guarded by a bunch of ordinary sized house spiders I'd probably have to skip this bit. Luckily for me (and unluckily for the hobbits, I suppose) Shelob is a giant spider, and for some reason once a spider gets bigger than a two-door saloon it doesn't trigger my phobia in the same way - I think what makes them so scary is their their habit of appearing suddenly from behind bits of furniture or running across the ceiling, and the unsettling thought that they might crawl on me. A giant spider is just another icky monster, albeit one I might have to watch through my fingers if it's in a movie and the effects are any good. Look, I can even post an illustration of Shelob without getting the heebie-jeebies (Googles Shelob illustrations) Hmm no maybe not: here's a nice cat instead.
Say what you like about Shelob, at least you can hear her coming. There is a 'gurgling, bubbling noise, and a long venemous hiss' before the hobbits see her 'two great clusters of many-windowed eyes ... filled with purpose and with hideous delight, gloating over their prey trapped beyond all hope of escape.'
Well maybe not all hope. If you've bothered reading this far I'm assuming you know The Lord of the Rings at least as well as I do so I won't be spoiling it if I mention how Frodo gets stung, wrapped up in webs, and carried off by the local orc garrison. Or how Sam rescues the Ring, puts it on so he can evade and then follow the orcs, and how in the final devastating cliffhanger -
The great doors slammed to. Boom. The bars of iron fell into place inside. Clang. The gate was shut. Sam hurled himself against the bolted brazen plates and fell senseless to the ground. He was out in the darkness. Frodo was alive but taken by the Enemy.
Crikey.
So Gollum has led Sam and Frodo to the Black Gate of Mordor, and they've found it shut. They turn south, and their weary journey continues - they have no food except the Elvish Lembas they brought from Lorien, which is getting a bit samey. The landscape is still dreary and ruinous, and now that they are so close to Sauron's stronghold the Ring on its chain round Frodo's neck is getting heavier and heavier - his growing weariness and Sam's concern for him are constant themes in these chapters.
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| First sight of Ithilien, by Ted Nasmith |
An interesting detail that stuck out: before they eat, Faramir and his men turn and face the west for a moment of silence...
'So we always do,' he said as they sat down: 'we look towards Númenor that was, and beyond to Elvenhome that is, and to that which is beyond Elvenhome and will ever be. Have you no such custom at meat?'
The hobbits haven't, and nor as far I recall does anyone else in The Lord of the Rings. There are no churches, no temples, none of the different races seem to have gods (although they all revere their own legendary heroes) there are no signs of religious observance at all. It's an absence that distinguishes The Lord of the Rings from most other made-up-world fantasy sagas, whose authors are usually happy to make up gods and religions for them too. For Tolkien, of course, faith was a serious matter (the most serious matter) so I presume he didn't want to belittle it. I went and did some actual research (for the first time in this blog series) and found a letter in which he says,
The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision. That is why I have not put in, or have cut out, practically all references to anything like 'religion', to cults or practices, in the imaginary world. For the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism.
More on this interesting subject if I think of anything to say about it...
As well as introducing Faramir, these chapters lay some of the groundwork for the big battle that's coming in The Return of the King, and also provide a much needed bit of hope and calm in the middle of Book Two, which would otherwise be pretty unrelievedly grim. When the hobbits and Gollum go on their way, the grimness closes in again almost at once; they are on the creepy road that leads past Minas Morgul, the City of the Ringwraiths.
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| An Alan Lee illustration of Minas Morgul |
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| Big Brother is watching you in Michael Radford's 1984 film of 1984 |
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| Big Barad-dûr is watching you... JRRT's own design |
Eyes are everywhere: eyes in the sky, eyes in the myriad dark windows of Sauron's towers and fortresses. Sauron himself, of course, is just an eye; all we see of him is the burning red eye which stares at Frodo out of Galadriel's mirror or at Pippin from the Palantír, like Big Brother staring out of Winston Smith's telescreen. Mordor seen from a distance or in dreams and visions often features a distant point of red flame which may be the fires of Mount Doom but also suggests Sauron's ever-vigilant eye. The statue the hobbits pass in Ithilien has had its head replaced by a boulder on which is painted a crude face with a single red eye. When they finally climb past Minas Morgul up the stairs of Cirith Ungol (which as a young reader I pictured as giant stairs, imagining Sam and Frodo scrambling laboriously up risers taller than themselves) they find the pass guarded by a watchtower where 'a red light burned, or else the red light in the land beyond was shining through a hole.' The orcs who man it (or orc it, I suppose) are as wary of their leaders as any NKVD thug:
'They don't tell us all they know, do they? Not by half. But they can make mistakes, even the Top Ones can.'
'Sh, Gorbag! ... They may, but they've got eyes and ears everywhere ... '
and a little later:
'The messages go through quicker than anything could fly, as a rule. I don't enquire how it's done. Safest not to! Grr! Those Nazgûl give me the creeps. And they skin the body off you soon as look at you, and leave you all cold in the dark on the other side. But He likes 'em, they're His favourites nowadays, so it's no use grumbling. I tell you, it's no game serving down in the city.'
If this is how the Dark Lord makes his own people feel, what hope is there for poor hobbitses? And we're not even in Mordor yet; first there is Shelob's Lair to contend with. This is the climax of The Two Towers, the trap into which Gollum has been leading Frodo all along, although he does have a rather moving moment when his conscience seems to trouble him before he leads the hobbits inside -
For a fleeting moment, could one of the sleepers have seen him, they would have thought that they beheld an old weary hobbit, shrunken by the years that had carried him far beyond his time, beyond friends and kin, and the fields and streams of his youth, an old starved pitiable thing.
The stinky tunnel into which he leads Sam and Frodo is pitch dark and festooned with thick webs, so there's no way you'd catch me going down it. I've been an arachnaphobe for longer than I can remember. Literally the only acceptable types of spider as far as I'm concerned are a) very teensy-weensy money spiders and b) the Spiders from Mars. If the Pass of Cirith Ungol was guarded by a bunch of ordinary sized house spiders I'd probably have to skip this bit. Luckily for me (and unluckily for the hobbits, I suppose) Shelob is a giant spider, and for some reason once a spider gets bigger than a two-door saloon it doesn't trigger my phobia in the same way - I think what makes them so scary is their their habit of appearing suddenly from behind bits of furniture or running across the ceiling, and the unsettling thought that they might crawl on me. A giant spider is just another icky monster, albeit one I might have to watch through my fingers if it's in a movie and the effects are any good. Look, I can even post an illustration of Shelob without getting the heebie-jeebies (Googles Shelob illustrations) Hmm no maybe not: here's a nice cat instead.
 |
| A nice cat. (Photo by Sarah McIntyre) |
Well maybe not all hope. If you've bothered reading this far I'm assuming you know The Lord of the Rings at least as well as I do so I won't be spoiling it if I mention how Frodo gets stung, wrapped up in webs, and carried off by the local orc garrison. Or how Sam rescues the Ring, puts it on so he can evade and then follow the orcs, and how in the final devastating cliffhanger -
The great doors slammed to. Boom. The bars of iron fell into place inside. Clang. The gate was shut. Sam hurled himself against the bolted brazen plates and fell senseless to the ground. He was out in the darkness. Frodo was alive but taken by the Enemy.
Crikey.
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