A Reader of Else

Today we covered chapters VI – The King of the Golden Hall, VII – Helm’s Deep and VIII – The Road to Isengard. These were fun, pacy chapters, and ones that prompted particular levels of book/film comparison, given that there’s a whoooole lot of difference here in the order and nature of events in the story. But I’m going to save that bit for last, because I’m a tease (and/or it sort of relies on some points I want to make first).

Instead, I’m going to start of with something that absolutely slapped me in the face reading these three chapters: much in the same way as he’s wildly unsubtle with using stars in talking about the elves, and all the elven descriptions, Tolkien is going absolutely ham with gold and silver in all the sections about Rohan. It’s everywhere. Yes, Théoden’s hall has gold in it, and a gilded throne, and that makes sense for a king. But it’s also the light cutting through the darkness there. And the corn in the fields. And the hair of the men and the women, and particularly Éowyn. It’s the sun in the clouds. It’s the armour in the armory. And it is accompanied by silver, in the girdle and the sword and the horse and the river and the rain and the water and the sky and-… well, you get the picture. It’s the link up between the materiality of the Men of Rohan and the natural world that makes this interesting for me. Were it just their belongings, were it just the arms and armour, their displays of personal wealth, I would feel it was just about creating an image of this rich, kingly hall and the high men who inhabit it. But when it shifts out, to the hair of enough of the people that their enemies call them strawheads, and to the world in which they live, it feels like it becomes… more. Tolkien is trying to show us an essence of a place and a people all together, bound up as one.

Which is particularly interesting for this people. Where a lot of places the story has gone have been peopled by those who have lived there for millennia – elves and ents and so on – the history of Rohan is a little more prosaic. We are told they go back 500 years in this place, having been gifted the land by the King of Gondor, for services in war by their founder Eorl. Which pissed off the men of Dunland who I take it were there beforehand, and continues to piss them off. Border and land disputes are so… real… in contrast to the walking trees and a line of kings that extends through thousands of years. Sixteen kings is… it’s still a lot but it’s so comprehensible.

So it’s interesting that he’s tying them, descriptively, all up with their land. Normally when he does this it’s “time immemorial” things, not human scale.

Part of me thinks it might be because he loves Rohan best. Well, no, that’s a lie, I think he loves the elves best. But aside from his sad sad besties, the love I can feel in these chapters for the subject shines out in a way I haven’t really seen with any other location so far. There’s a deep fondness and familiarity in the natural world, especially in the Shire, but not so for the people. Whereas there’s a constant glow to everything and everyone of Rohan. Everything feels like it’s being captured in perfect moments, the light catching in the spears so they seem aflame because we see them at exactly the right time. Sunlight emerging from cloud to light up the silver of the rivers. Particularly The King of the Golden Hall is a golden hour photo in chapter form.

I mean, it makes sense, given his area of scholarship and all. Which leads to the weird contrast of the realism of Rohan – the mythic quality. Even as it makes a lot more temporal and logistical sense than a number of places in the story, Tolkien throws us off linguistically. The dialogue in this section is, predominantly, in a more formal, more archaic register than a lot of what we’ve seen, even compared to the elves. Like when Gandalf narrated the fight with the Balrog, there’s a lot of unusual syntax, some unexpected word choices. And while the formality makes sense in a royal court, in the moment of reading it’s a disjoint.

Rohan is a weird place, pulled out of legends like Beowulf, and simultaneously out of a history Tolkien knew intimately. The prosaic lies alongside the stuff of legends and moments of deeply dramatic poetry, their focus on death and battle, all to create this extremely distinctive place. And it’s great. It’s often very beautiful. But as someone who is less all aboard the Rohan train (they’re fine, but they’re not my best bois), it’s just a little odd to sit with, too.

And all that comes together in Éowyn, though we see her but briefly. She is described thus (bolding mine):

Grave and thoughtful was her glance, as she looked on the king with cool pity in her eyes. Very fair was her face, and her long hair was like a river of gold. Slender and tall she was in her white robe girt with silver; but strong she seemed and stern as steel, a daughter of kings.

And then after Théoden sets her to lead the people in his absence:

Alone Éowyn stood before the doors of the house at the stair’s head; the sword was set upright before her, and her hands were laid upon the hilt. She was clad now in mail and shone like silver in the sun.

And finally, as the riders leave Edoras:

Far over the plain Éowyn saw the glitter of their spears, as she stood still, alone before the doors of the silent house.

Beautiful, martial, stern and strong, gilded and silvered, and last seen standing sadly before a portent of doom. I mean, that’s Rohan in a nutshell, right?

Also, while I’m not about to accuse Tolkien of feminism (because I too have seen quite how long it’s been since there was a woman on page), I do think she is given a pretty decent hand here. She’s not written off or trivialised, and there’s no moment when the decision to have the people entrusted to her in the absence of Théoden and Éomer is anything other than natural. Since we’ve left the Shire (because the women in the Shire did not get a good showing), there have been exceedingly few women on page, but the ones we get are… I mean, I love them all. They’re distinct between them, some of them definitely outshine their husbands, and none of them are weak or any of the other stereotypes of misogyny. Tolkien just seems mostly to forget women are a thing you might see about the place at all… which checks out for an academic when he was there, I suppose. I don’t want to give him too much credit on this point, but there’s a little.

The story then moves away from Edoras and off to battle, which ultimately leads the forces to Helm’s Deep. Unlike me, Tolkien is very good at skipping over things and covering a lot of ground quickly when he wants to, and it’s amazing how little space the battle here takes up. It’s a very skimmy chapter, hopping from moment to moment, and especially so within the battle itself. The whole thing is viewed in short, disjointed sections, each tending to focus on two or three characters for one or two actions, before shifting away to the next pair. Does Tolkien just hate choreography? It doesn’t really appear here in any great amount – where I might expect it, the narrative tends to zoom out instead, or do a little dialogue – and thinking back to previous chapters (like the death of Boromir), it didn’t feel particularly prominent there either. The only point at which I remember him doing so is Gandalf narrating his fight with the Balrog… and that has a whole different quality through both the narration from Gandalf and the general mythic vibe overlaid over the whole thing. As someone who doesn’t enjoy reading fight scenes¹, I’m here for it, but it’s another point of difference with a lot of the fantasy that comes downstream of his work.

What we get instead, in absolute spades, is character work and dramatic tension.

There’s a lot of Gimli and Legolas in here, which I enjoyed (interesting that this is what stuck out to me, but for Ed the prominent thing was Aragorn and Éomer), but I actually find some of the more minor characters more appealing. Particularly, I enjoyed Háma, who has two really bad days. He messes up as a door keeper, he messes up as an errand boy, gets a bit of sass from his king, an awkward conversation with a guard, and then an untimely death in battle. And I love that we get this mini narrative of him, through our time in Rohan. Much more than I would love in depth blow-by-blow of a fight.

As for the dramatic tension, once the battle is over (saved by Erkenbrand with his blingy red shield and his black horn and his impeccable timing), Gandalf turns back up, along with a lot of extremely spooky feeling trees. Very familiar spooky trees… Tolkien does not tell us how events in Isengard have gone, but drops hints instead. Which works extra well when most of the characters are wondering about it same as we are. But before we get to any kind of resolution, there’s a lot of equally spooky landscape to get through, and bodies of fallen comrades to find, whose spirits (appropriately buried under a cairn by the river) will be apparently guarding the spot forever. Bit grim. Throughout, information is given out only piece by piece, slowly revealing the events that have been going on while Helm’s Deep was being fought over. Much of it is, I think, guessable or assumable for a first time reader, but there’s just that little tiny bit of doubt carrying things through, and I think it really works. We want to know that Merry and Pippin are alright, that the Ents survived their last march to Isengard, and Tolkien keeps making us wait.

Mainly, he forestalls this with a rousing resumption of everyone’s favourite drama queen riddle bitch act from Gandalf. When asked about the trees suddenly moving up to the fortress by Théoden, he says he had nothing to do with it, it’s not wizardry, but instead, it’s something else:

Ere iron was found or tree was hewn,
When young was mountain under moon;
Ere ring was made, or wrought was woe,
It walked the forests long ago.

Big help, Gandalf. But if Théoden wants answers, he has to come to Isengard it seems.

I’m sure there are people who find this frustrating. But personally I find Gandalf’s particular brand of obfuscatory bullshit hilarious and compelling. On the surface level, it is just incredibly fun, especially in contrast to later wizard figures in fiction and their preponderence of exposition bombs. But at a deeper level, it contrasts very well with the moments in which he does give answers, or advice, or anything straightforward or declarative. The riddle-bitchery serves as a great baseline from which variation into any sort of seriousness carries extra weight, so when Gandalf needs to push a particular piece of information or plot direction, it feels like it matters.

But it is also just very funny to me.

Similarly funny to me is the delightful scene we get of Legolas and Gimli being enthusiastic/horrified respectively about their mutual special interests. The newly-appeared forest is creepy and oppressive and Legolas is fascinated by it. He wants to go investigate, like, immediately. Gimli is not a fan of trees and extra not a fan when there are eyes. But he is a fan of the caves they’ve got under Helm’s Deep (and forgives Legolas his trepidation about them). Which, alongside this exchange just being quite funny, gives us something much more substantial. We see the world of Middle Earth told through many eyes throughout the story – hobbit, men, elves and wizards all have something to say about how the world looks to them. But Gimli is, predominantly, our only dwarf, and we have very rarely had his perspective on the world, and doubly so on what is good and beautiful. But here, Tolkien changes that. In my copy, there’s around a full page of dense description in which Gimli effectively sings a paean to the wonders of these particular caves. And it’s gorgeous. I like his nature writing generally – for me, it’s one of his great strengths – but he does tend to focus on the same, limited number of things as a part of that. It’s fine, he’s very good at it, but this joy in caverns is a bit of a departure, and stands out all the more for that, even as it’s at the same standard as the rest:

And plink! a silver drop falls, and the round wrinkles in the glass make all the towers bend and waver like weeds and corals in a grotto of the sea.

Gorgeous.

It is nice to be reminded that there is just as much equivalence as difference between the different cultures of middle earth, and Gimli and Legolas, wildly opposed as they are in many ways, can come together like this to be equally enthusiastic and engaging about the things they care about in the world.

Even outside of this particular back and forth, there are some banger lines of nature description in this section. I’ve said it before, in a number of previous chapters, but I’m going to keep saying it because, even though I’m used to it, a lot of them still really do hit and hit hard. It’s one of the things that is keeping me really engaged in the book, and I’m not going to let that drop just from familiarity. Particularly prominent in this section is how he likes to use water similes for the grass and grasslands (as well as for the Men of Rohan in battle, actually), and the repetition is really embedding this view of the rippling sea of green across the plains. Alongside the frequent uses of the gold/silver and calling things “glittering”, the chapters keep circling around an image of sunlight on water, adding even more to the warm cast I get over the whole thing. It’s just… lovely.

Right, I’ve held out long enough, time for some comparisons.

We’ll start with Théoden, specifically his character and character arc. In the book, we meet him under sway of Grima Wormtongue (and maybe Saruman?). It’s not enormously clear, because Tolkien rarely is about magic. But once that is dispelled, he stands up, listens to good counsel and makes good, kingly decisions for the safekeeping of his realm (even if he’s a bit keen on the “dying in battle” part of it all). Like most of the characters we meet on the side of good, he does what is needed of him to the best of his ability, he makes rational, decent decisions, and helps everything move in the direction it ought to go. Very few characters in these books are incompetent, or make poor decisions, and the outliers are marked out by the plot as notable. And while this means that Théoden is less frustrating than his filmic counterpart… I actually found myself missing that, in some ways.

His filmic counterpart is flattened into approximately one big character theme (as most of them are), which boils down to this insult he throws at himself in a chapter yet to come: “a lesser son of great sires”. Film-Théoden is extremely caught up in the idea that he is unworthy of the great men who came before him. And this drives him to pride, and to bad decisions, all of which bend towards a yearning for worth, even (and especially) if that comes in the form of death in battle. In his pride, he disagrees with counsel, leading them to Helm’s Deep and to needing rescue by Gandalf and Éomer. When we discussed this, Ed is dissatisfied with these changes, because they bend much of Théoden’s development in service to Aragorn’s character arc. But I like them, because they humanise him, in contrast to all the inhumanly competent people with whom the book is peopled. Of all the many people we meet through the course of the story, there ought to be one who is difficult. On the right side, yes, but not aiming quite where needed. Because… people. I believe it better for a Théoden driven by comprehensible, if self-destructive, motivations.

His changed arc obviously also goes hand in hand in the film with wildly changed events. I am aware of Bret Deveraux’s whole series about Tolkien and Helm’s Deep, which goes into more detail than I am willing or able to provide on the accuracy of troop movement and behaviour and whatnot. But even I am able to see that the book just… makes a lot more sense than the decisions in the film, even taking into account the different motivations of Théoden. Jackson is clearly aiming to keep the number of named characters we need to keep track of to a minimum (which makes sense! there’s loads in the book and the films need to tighten things up to fit their limited time), and he has his own read on the story he wants to prioritise (Aragorn’s journey to kingship)… and yeah he likes a big cool visual if he can get it. The changes in storyline do seem to serve this², for the most part. But they come at the cost of plausibility of some of the decisions from an in-world perspective, and of Éomer and Aragorn bro time, which is replaced predominantly with Théoden dooming and Aragorn counselling not-doom time. Which is a different vibe.

That all being said – and I cannot stress enough, I know how different the book and film are moment by moment in these events – I think, broadly, they both actually hit pretty similarly for me on an emotional level. I put the book down and felt the feelings I feel when I watch the film, and I don’t think just out of familiarity. There are parts of the story earlier where events are closer but feelings farther apart. So for all that Jackson has mucked around with things here… I don’t really hold it against him all that much. And it’s interesting that it can be so different and yet feel the same. I think precisely because of Théoden and his love of doom, and his dwelling on the imminent change of the world. It’s something Tolkien can weave in more subtly throughout the text, but sometimes Jackson needs a hammer to bring into the film. The hammer just happens to fall where, in the book, a lot of the seeded resonances come to the surface.

Some of the differences are also just functional ones of the medium. Tolkien can take aside for a second to say of, for instance, the orcs who ran into the newly present forest outside Helm’s Deep: “wailing they passed under the waiting shadow of the trees; and from that shadow none ever came again”. It is almost unremarkable in prose to shift temporal gears like this, dropping out of narration to give the reader the long view. In film though? Awkward as hell. In the same way, Tolkien’s easy flow through the battle scene where he skips between encounters and skims across the wider drama of the action would be much harder to effect in a medium that ties you more firmly into the now. I’m sure not impossible, but harder. And so Helm’s Deep must expand to fill a huge portion of the film, where in the book it’s a really quite short chapter. It’s a thing I like about books, that they can do this, the dilation and contraction of time and perspective at need, and without real difficulty. And I dislike when books feel the need to be filmic about their approach, and linger in the blow-by-blow of things that don’t need it.

So, I like both the film and book equally on this section. They both have things they’ve chosen to do, and do them in quite different ways. But both absolutely smash the button inside me marked “feelings”. And that’s what I want, most of the time. Tolkien continues to give it to me. He finds it in the natural world, in the sorrow of the people who know that time will pass, that change will come regardless of what they may do, and the determination of those who resist in evil times. All of those are very present in this section, and in this place and people for which Tolkien clearly has an immense fondness. It is hard not to be at least a little bit affected by that, as you read. I certainly was.

I was tempted to not explain the speed herons of this episode’s title, but I think it’s actually quite funny, so before I go have a window into my (not great) sense of humour.

Tolkien reintroduces the Ents in this section, showing them anew through the (wondering) eyes of the Men of Rohan. And in so doing, they get redescribed for us. On the whole, I think this is actually a clearer description than the first time around about the particulars of their appearance. But specifically, it also gives us a description of how they move:

walking like wading herons in their gait, but not in their speed; for their legs in their long paces beat quicker than the heron’s wings

Which is incredibly vivid! I know how herons walk, with their weird articulated stilts-for-legs, I can very easily visualise it for the lanky arboreal bois, and then… speed it up a bit. I noted this bit while reading to discuss because I thought it was great. And then we got there, with Ed flagging it as an absolute clanger. He’s allowed to be wrong sometimes. I am simultaneously charmed and deeply amused by the mental image of the Ents as speed herons, and so I leave you with that for your imaginations³, and for the title.

Next up, finishing out this half of The Two Towers with IX – Flotsam and Jetsam, X – The Voice of Saruman and XI – The Palantir.

1. I don’t enjoy fight scenes and sex scenes for pretty similar reasons, in fact. But both can be good when the writer does something with them, usually making them about emotions or themes more than they are about the moment by moment position and interaction of bodies. ↩︎
2. And gave untold teens their sexual awakening with the Aragorn door-opening scene. ↩︎
3. I tried to figure out how to speed up the gif so you didn’t even need to imagine, but my technology skills fell at the first hurdle on that one. ↩︎

Only two chapters today, IV – Treebeard and V – The White Rider, but still plenty to mull over (harum barum), so we shouldn’t be hasty.

Joking aside, while Chapter IV at least is pretty sizeable, for me at least, these weren’t particularly substantial parts of the text. They are mostly enjoyable ones – Merry and Pippin wander into Fangorn, meet Treebeard, then go off with him to the Entmoot and the decision to go to war, and then Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli follow them into the woods, only to be met by a rather chatty Gandalf willing to give some explanations – but that enjoyment tended more to be experiential for me, rather than one of digging into deeper things. Sometimes it’s just nice to tramp about in a wood for a bit, you know?

It helps that, for Chapter IV, the text follows the perspective of Merry and Pippin again. They managed to bring a surprisingly light tone to a fairly awful chapter about their kidnap, so it’s not a shock they do so again to a much less dark one. But they do. They reach accord with Treebeard fairly quickly, and he then takes them with him, first to his home, and then to a meeting he calls of the Ents, in response to the hobbits’ tidings about goings on in the outside world. But alongside the generally light, what ho chaps type vibe that Merry and Pippin have tended to bring with them, Treebeard himself is mildly comedic. The slow, ponderous talking, the insertions of harooms and barooms, and tumbling phrases in Ent-syntaxed-Elven¹, the relationship he has with time, and with the people he considers young (which includes even Saruman). But for all that (sorry, film comparison incoming), he is not the same comedic figure Jackson makes him. There’s a lightness here, but it is not laugh out loud funny, just a diversion away from the full realities of the current situation, and one that (foreshadowing klaxon, of which there are plenty in these two chapters) simply will not last.

Treebeard is also weirdly… ambiguous, in his book description. Not the sentient tree, exactly, that the film renders him, but something oddly difficult to grasp. I’ll admit, the most obvious way I took the physical description we get (where we see his toes, the skin of his arms contrasted to his craggy maybe-body-or-maybe-clothing), is something akin to the sort of old fashioned cartoons where the body gets detail, and the arms and legs are simple, monochrome and unplaceable as to their substance and covering. I’m envisioning a tree trunk with those appendages tacked on. It’s not Tolkien’s best descriptive work, and it leans frankly towards the silly if I think on it too long. Outside of appearance, the ambiguity remains, but is much more clearly directed. We are, ultimately, told that Treebeard is the oldest living thing that yet walks under the sun on Middle Earth. So he predates wizards, he predates elves and their kin strife… but wait a second, haven’t we already heard of someone else being eldest? What does this status of Treebeard mean for Tom Bombadil? I have no idea! Several options present themselves. But whatever he is, however he relates to the other quasi mythical beings, Treebeard is old as fuck, and himself complicates exactly what his nature is by comparing first to elves, then to men, before concluding he is like neither and both, or perhaps simply the best of both.

But outside of his words, what comes through very clearly for me is how much Tolkien wants us to see him, and the Ents as a whole, as nature embodied. Their actions are often described in terms of natural forces, and their surprising strength as the strength of trees to break rock… just maybe not on a tree timescale. Their interests are bounded by their forest, and many of them are even becoming more tree-like over time. Where this becomes particularly evident is in the explicit parallels being drawn between Fangorn (and the Ents) and Lothlórien (and the elves).

The two areas mirror each other quite closely. Both are woodland, obviously, but both are closed off in some regard, believed by outsiders to be dangerous places which are hard to enter and harder to leave. Indeed, Celeborn warns the Fellowship of the dangers of Fangorn, and Treebeard throws that warning right back as applicabel to Lothlórien, just as Boromir feared to enter there. But it goes deeper. Lothlórien was a place outside of time, where the power of Nenya holds back the forces of time and change from this last, perfect place of Elfdom. As they enter Fangorn, Merry and Pippin remark upon the stifling atmosphere there, too, comparing it to a storage room of an old Brandybuck, preserved unchanged for hundreds of years, in spite of custom and the natural way of things. The atmosphere of unchanged and unchanging Fangorn is oppressive, because change is inevitable. Both magical forests we have thus far encountered are closed off from the world, closed off from time, and this is against the natural order of things.

But this comparison is important because it presents a key difference between the two. The problem of Tolkien’s elves² is this resistance to the inevitable change of the long defeat. Time marches on and does eventually conquer them, but they are backwards looking – Treebeard remarks on their singing songs of times that will never return – and where they are able, they resist change brought, naturally, by time. Fangorn seems stagnant, but the Ents do not, when called upon, resist these changes. They lament what is lost (more on that in a second), but remain, for the most part, settled in the present. And even when they go to war, fearing it to be their last march and their doom, they think on the fact that change may, even as it erases everything they hold close, bring them back to the Entwives. The forest may burn, but from the ashes grow new saplings. Even in the ultimate destruction, there remains hope of something in the future.

Which brings us to one of the weirdest things in this section – the Entwives. Lost long ago, they were the partners of the nature-focussed Ents, whose bent turned more to cultivated things, to mastery of nature rather than shephering and existence within. A split of the cultivated vs the wild. Now where have we heard that before…

Yep, it’s the Tom Bombadil/Goldberry cultivated/wild duality I talked about back in Episode 3. Except this time it’s reversed, and I have some Thoughts on the Gender of it all. See, when we met Tom, who seemed to me to stand for the natural world, tamed, his mastery of it is presented as pretty natural and straightforward. He commands things when they need commanding, and uses this to save the hobbits from various dangers. His mastery is a Good, and also pretty powerful and serious, even when nothing else about him is serious. Meanwhile, the Ents, the men, stand for nature untamed, and are the perspective we see (mirroring Goldberry), and they tell us about the Entwives. And their narration of them, and their mastery over things cultivated, seems to imply nothing more than “bossy, nagging wife”. Like so:

The Entwives ordered them to grow according to their wishes, and bear leaf and fruit to their liking; for the Entwives desired order, and plenty, and peace (by which they meant that things should remain where they had set them).

It’s giving old married couple domestic. It’s giving “the ol’ ball and chain”. There’s no malice in it, but that slightly dismissive parenthetical does give “bedrock of unquestioned misogyny” when held in contrast to the previous weird magical being who likes cultivated things. Of course, because we only get the Entwives in narration from an Ent, we see only half of the picture, but I sincerely doubt having an omniscient third person section of Ent/wife interaction would change that… and even if it did well, we don’t. We have the text we have, and I’m side-eyeing it a little bit.

The other thing we get from the weird aside that is the Entwife section is a song composed by the Elves but remembered by the Ents about the hunt for them, which ends with:

Ent: When Winter comes, the winter wild that hill and wood shall slay;
When trees shall fall and starless night devour the sunless day;
When wind is in the deadly East, then in the bitter rain
I’ll look for thee, and call to thee; I’ll come to thee again
Entwife: When Winter comes, and singing ends; when darkness falls at last;
When broken is the barren bough, and light and labour past;
I’ll look for thee, and wait for thee, until we meet again:
Together we will take the road beneath the bitter rain!
Both: Together we will take the road that leads into the West,
And far away will find a land where both our hearts may rest.

So I read this as implying that Ents and Entwives could/would sail off to Valinor, which closes the loop on the mirroring between Fangorn and Lothlórien in a fascinating way, given the generally tightly constrained types of people who are permitted to enter Valinor. Ed, however, pointed out that the song is one composed by Elves, and suggested that maybe this is the only “land where [they] can live together and both be content” that the Elves could envision for the Ent/wives, because Elves are a bit single-minded that way. It’s not important, in the grand scheme of things, but I quite like both readings, in very different ways.

Before I get too bogged down in it, moving away from the Entwives, who are really something of a diversion from most of what’s going on here. Merry and Pippin may not seem to be all that active in their participation in this chapter, generally being carried about places and listening to conversations, but the news they bring to Treebeard (which includes the startlingly accurate description of Gandalf as having “fallen out of the story”, more on that later) has precipitated change that was already brewing but not ready to boil over. The threat posed by the Enemy to the wood, to the trees for whom the Ents care, is now sufficiently proximate that the Ents decide that it is time to rouse themselves, and to march to war. The whole chapter points this way – Tolkien isn’t interested in the kind of narrative tension that would keep this secret – and contains little foreshadows of what they will do there, using a lot of broken dams, smote rocks and flooding water metaphors. The tension he is interested in, however, is both the fate the Ents themselves will meet there, and their attitude towards it. Like so many other points in the story, the key here is that the Ents choose to resist. Because Treebeard, when speaking to the Hobbits, makes it clear he thinks the end of the Ents is a very real possibility of this action:

‘Of course, it is likely enough, my friends,’ he said slowly, ‘likely enough that we are going to our doom: the last march of the Ents. But if we stayed at home and did nothing, doom would find us anyway, sooner or later. That thought has long been growing in our hearts; and that is why we are marching now. It was not a hasty resolve. Now at least the last march of the Ents may be worth a song.’

Resistance matters. Tolkien is very interested in how people face up to impossible odds or horrible situations, more than in whether they are able to overcome them. The choice of the Ents here to make a stand of it, to choose to act even though they may die, epitomises both that, and their difference from the Elves. Change is inevitable, and their action is not to resist it, but to do what is right while marching ever on into whatever future it brings.

This, the swinging of the story’s pendulum from present action to a determined future, is one half of the “turning of the tide”. The other comes, in much like fashion, in Chapter V – The White Rider.

By contrast to the above, this is one of the rare times Tolkien does want to spin out tension by keeping information from the reader. But as Ed has read this book more times than he can count, and I have done so a couple of times and seen the films approximately a bajillion, there is absolutely no tension here. Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli track into the forest looking for the hobbits, as Gimli frets about the threat of the white wizard he saw in the night. Eventually, an old man figure emerges from the trees (whom Gimli would like to shoot on sight, being by far the most discomfited by their current surroundings), who reveals himself to be Gandalf. And not just any Gandalf, but a Gandalf who comes bearing Exposition. Yes it’s another talky chapter.

But! This is a talky chapter with a couple of key differences (also honestly most of the talky chapters are great anyway, it’s just the last one that didn’t work for me).

First up, Gandalf, with a little prodding, speaks more plainly here than he has done… pretty much at any other point in the story. Some of his statements may not be totally obvious to a first time reader, but he shifts into pretty consistent declaratives, stating facts and actions that absolutely will come to pass. As his dialogue goes on, this gives the chapter a very weighty feel, laden with certainty about the events to come, and more importantly, about people as they are. He is pretty free with a bunch of key points about himself, his power, the relative power of other players, and how that will work out – the three hunters have among them no weapon that can harm him, he says. Given that Aragorn carries Andúril, reforged from a sword that harmed Sauron, this is pretty strong statement. He also declares himself “more dangerous than anything you will ever meet, unless you are brought alive before the seat of the Dark Lord”. He is absolutely unequivocal here about what he is, now he’s been sent back. As these statements build up, so too does the realisation that the stakes are just that high.

However, he has to complicate things a little, being Gandalf. He says “I am Gandalf, Gandalf the White, but Black is mightier still”, followed by a short section in which he looks eastward, before muttering to himself, glad that the ring has passed out of reach of their temptation for it. Is this a declaration that Sauron is stronger than he is (which he has already made plain) followed by a yearning for a weapon to fight back against that? Or is this a suggestion that a version of Gandalf, a Black iteration bearing the Ring, would be mightier than the one that stands before us now? Unclear. And both readings, as in many cases in the book, are interesting. I like the latter, myself, for the echo it gives of Galadriel’s temptation and resistance.

But as well as offering deep pronouncements about the nature of things, Gandalf’s dialogue points also forward. Treebeard already has told us that wizards are interested in the future (just as we know Elves are in the past, and I am inclined to think Ents are in the present), and Gandalf only reinforces that point. He sets them on their path to Edoras, as well as noting the path the Ents themselves are taking to war, and to rediscovery of their own strength. But before he is allowed to stride off into Rohan, the hunters ask one last thing of him – what happened under Moria?

And this, in my opinion, gives us one of the best moments in both books so far, wherein he narrates the fight with the Balrog. Pippin earlier described Gandalf as having fallen out of the tale: here, he does so twice over. Firstly, linguistically, the dialogue in this whole section takes a sudden shift into the archaic. We’ve got suddenly a load of thees and thous, and the syntax shifts into that of a mythic narrative. As it should – this tale is bigger, more epic, more dramatic than anything that has happened in the story so far. It operates on a wholly different scale, even. The relatively straightforward language we’ve been used to simply cannot accommodate it. What then results is some of Tolkien’s best prose work, including bangers like:

Thither I came at last, to the uttermost foundations of stone.

Or:

We fought far under living earth, where time is not counted. Ever he clutched me, and ever I hewed him, till at last he fled into dark tunnels.

Or, with bonus alliteration fun:

Far, far below the deepest delvings of the Dwarves, the world is gnawed by nameless things. Even Sauron knows them not.

Or:

There upon Celebdil was a lonely window in the snow, and before it lay a narrow space, a dizzy eyrie above the mists of the world.

Or probably my favourite:

I threw down my enemy, and he fell from the high place and broke the mountain-side where he smote it in his ruin.

It’s all just gorgeous. It’s no wonder so many of these lines made it into the film unedited – they are all brilliant. And it feels instantly out of step with the dialogue before it, and is stylistically left behind as soon as Gandalf finishes this tale. It functions as acceptance that what happened to him there is from a different story altogether, on a different scale, and that needs to be marked.

Secondly, there’s the rather more literal version. As Gandalf himself says:

Then darkness took me, and I strayed out of thought and time, and I wandered far on roads that I will not tell

Shortly followed by:

There I lay staring upward, while the stars wheeled over, and each day was as long as a life-age of the earth.

For a little while, following the Balrog’s defeat, he existed outside of the story, and of the world, altogether. Indeed, he has been “sent back”, because he is needed still within this story, even as he had passed beyond it. And this brief/long existence outside of the narrative has returned to him the macro view of events whose absence he bemoaned in Fellowship. He knows now what’s to come, what must be done, and is in a position to make those bold, declarative statements because he has the absolute knowledge upon which they must be based. But the price for that knowledge is a loss of the smaller scale, the things he has to rely on Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli to return to him – names, people, places. There is an interesting illustrative contrast for this: when Aragorn understands why Boromir has died, what he has done, he keeps it to himself to preserve his dead comrade’s honour. What Boromir did in defending Merry and Pippin was penance enough. However, when the story is narrated to Gandalf, he has no such qualms – he discerns the gap immediately and declares what is missing. The niceties of human interaction have now been lost to him. There was a cost.

But! So many of the lines that result from newly en-knowledged Gandalf give me the absolute shivers… so in my opinion the trade is well worth it. Sorry Boromir, but you are less critical than lines like:

A thing is about to happen which has not happened since the Elder Days: the Ents are going to wake up and find that they are strong.

It’s just banger, ok?

The other benefit of that external knowledge comes in further illustration of the plans of both Sauron and Saruman. Gandalf reiterates that Sauron is incapable of seeing anyone’s motives if they are not what he himself would do – he would use the Ring, and so he assumes it travels to a place that will do likewise. Saruman in Isengard is both exactly one such – he seeks the Ring, and, as Gandalf says, cannot pit himself against Sauron to usurp him without it – but is caught in exactly the same trap of understanding. He fears the Ring will fall to Rohan, to be wielded against him. And so, we now know, two enemies exist, and both have turned to pre-emptive war, because they deem the risk of the Ring being used against them too great. This, too, is the turning of the tide. We know what the shape of the story is to be for some while, and the narrative gaze again snaps away from a close present to a wider future.

And so, the hunters ride to Edoras, and ultimately to battle.

So far, I’ve been pretty positive about this section, but I must finish on a couple of sour notes. The first is merely aesthetic: I am in general a Tolkien poetry enjoyer but the ones in this section are simply not it. Some are just odd, unlyrical, unshapely things, and others (like the portentous missive from Galadriel that reads like lightest doggerel) are just wildly out of tone with their contents and context. In the grand scheme of things, it’s not putting me off, but I was disappointed.

The second, however, is rather more serious, despite taking up dramatically less page space. In Chapter IV, we get two pronouncements about the nature of the orcs, and both of them are, frankly, rancid. The first wonders on if the Uruk-hai (being different from the Mordor orcs previously encountered) are “ruined Men”, which carries a whole bunch of hierarchical assumptions in it, or whether they are “blended Orc and Man”. The latter… carries the implication that such a blend is intrinsically wrong, and that in doing so, none of the inherent potential goodness of Men is retained, only the evil of the Orc. Which is just blood quantum, when you get down to it. It’s only a couple of lines and isn’t dug into further, but it speaks volumes about the underlying assumptions necessary for the orcs to operate as they do in the story. It is followed, some pages later, by the seemingly offhand remark that the Trolls are “counterfeit” versions of the Ents, just as the Orcs are of the Elves. Which again, contains huge implications for what the Orcs are, and how they relate to the rest of the races of Middle Earth. When you put these two alongside Chapter III, where we get the Orcs speaking amongst themselves, and the way their speech can be read is mirroring working class British dialects? Yeah.

This is, in total, two sentences, but whose weight is such that it pulls down the whole of the chapter with it. Two sentences, but a whole swathe of worldbuilding fundamentals about what Orcs are, problems in their entire design that Tolkien never does solve. How can they be, as depicted, thinking, independent people capable of bargain and discourse, while also so inherently evil that they are never treated as equal combatants in a war amongst people? It is not, with the setup Tolkien gives himself, reconcilable. They are dehumanised and humanised, back and forth, at the necessity of the plot, leaving only the awful implications of their construction for us to deal with. As ever, I have no conclusion on this, just observation of the grossness of it all.

On the whole, then, these are mostly experience and exposition chapters. They show us a new portion of Middle Earth, a new people, and prepare us with the knowledge of who they are before we follow them onwards back into the plot. And they fill in the gaps of what’s been happening around the story we see, and in the background, as well as bringing some more overarching understanding of the world, for good and for very much ill. But, by the end, all signs have swung forward, leaving behind the past we’ve been resolving and the present we’ve been experiencing, in preparation for the war that is brewing on multiple fronts.

Next time VI – The King of the Golden Hall, VII – Helm’s Deep and VIII – The Road to Isengard. I have continued to follow the other Tolkien reread projects as well, and I suspect this post marks the last time Ed and I will be furthest ahead in the texts, as at current rate, Jared Pechaček will overtake us. Jared, how are you doing this so quickly???

1. Which you do need to check an appendix to understand, because Tolkien gonna Tolkien, but is imo quite a cool linguistic thing to put in when you know what it’s doing. ↩︎
2. Ok, one of them. The kin strife is also pretty bad. ↩︎

After a little yuletide gap of mulling things over (or loafing about eating cheese, delete as appropriate), Ed and I have come back to our The Lord of the Rings reread, picking up now with The Two Towers.

In the time since we’ve started, I have seen a whole heap of additional people doing their own rereads, and it’s been so fun reading along with everyone else, getting not just Ed’s perspective but a whole host of them. This is especially true because there are so many different approaches. Abigail Nussbaum (start here), Nick Hubble (start here) and Jared Pechaček (paywalled on his Patreon but well worth the spend to access) particularly are all giving me angles on the text I wasn’t considering before, and their own relationships with the text before the reread, which add their own flavour. Nick’s feelings about the orcs as a child and now particularly stick out to me, or Jared’s dislike of the films, and particularly the casting choice of Viggo Mortensen. The latter especially because it is a very against-the-grain take – most of the people I know who love the books have pretty fond feelings (albeit with gripes) for Jackson’s attempt at it, so it’s really refreshing to see someone analysis the different portrayals of Aragorn on page and screen and go “actually no”. Whether it’s just the anniversary of the first film’s release or the US publication of the books, or just something in the water, I’m loving having all of these different pieces to keep reading and contrasting with my own experiences¹.

However, before the risk of excessive meta² creeps in, back to the book.

Our first section of The Two Towers gives us³ the chapters I – The Departure of Boromir, II – The Riders of Rohan and III – The Uruk-hai. All three are very different pieces, taking us from moving treatment of the dead, through hunting across grasslands, a long info-dump discussion between warriors and a cut back to the doings of the orcs being hunted, and are rich in themes and angles to pick at, so I alas beg your forgiveness that this is going to be another long one⁴. I think what there is to cover is really worth the time though – things that hark back to the first book, forward to what’s coming, and out into the legacy of Tolkien’s work into later literature.

The first thing that strikes me about the start of The Two Towers though is once again the difference in structure between the films and the books. I knew this was coming – Fellowship ends not where its film does, and I can do some basic deduction – but what felt more noticeable was how this different structure shows different ways of building both payoff and opening in a narrative. In the film, Jackson uses the death of Boromir as a dramatic end point – it’s a big scene that closes off the first part of the story with something that feels like a type of conclusion. Meanwhile, that conclusion in the book comes from the forced resolution of the unmade decision from the previous several chapters of what route and in what manner the Fellowship is going to take from that point onwards. The story ends in turmoil, with the threads splitting apart, and uncertainty about exactly what will come, who will go where, but with a closure on the thing we’ve been building to for some time. And so, opening the book of The Two Towers, the drama of Boromir’s death has been saved, and his heroic action against the orcs is never seen on page – instead, it’s opening with Aragorn resuming his doubts about his leadership and choices, and then an extremely visual set of scenes of Boromir, dying, amidst the many corpses of his fallen foes.

It is, as a chapter, intensely beautiful and sad, even as it is short. There are several lingering moments on frozen scenes, and a sense of stasis as the three remaining members of the Fellowship must decide what to do not only with their journey onward, but with their fallen comrade.

Boromir, ultimately, gets the trappings of a hero’s death. Tolkien has him die with reassurance from Aragorn that he has not failed, he has conquered, and that Minas Tirith shall not fall. He is loaded into a boat with his weapons and the weapons of the enemies he felled, sent out to the Falls of Rauros so “that no evil creature dishonours his bones”, with lamenting song from his surviving comrades, and the third person narrative letting us know that long into the future a story of his boat making its way out into “the Great Sea at night under the stars” lives on. But we – and Aragorn – know that he tried to take the Ring from Frodo. This is the failure he lays at his own feet in his final moments, for which he claims his death as payment. This is the failure that Aragorn does not share with Legolas and Gimli. Why? My first reading of this is the straightforward one – yes, he erred, he was weak and tempted, but in fighting the orcs and dying in his bravery, he has redeemed himself and Aragorn grants him forgiveness. The hero’s death and burial are the narrative showing us that he has earnt his redemption.

But Ed had a different angle on this, and one I think plays well with other moments in the story so far. Death is not the required payment for transgression. Instead, Boromir has yes, been weak and tempted, but then he has resisted, and it is that resistance that is the heroic act for which he earns his lordly send-off. And he makes a fair point. Resistance is such a key theme across the narrative, and not just resistance to the Ring itself, but fighting back when there is no hope, when only death awaits, but doing the impossible task anyway because it is good and right to do so, however great or small the task or person, so it makes sense that it would come out here. I don’t have a conclusion about whether Ed or I is right in this, or perhaps both, but I like once more that the narrative has the depth and space to support both readings.

The other interesting thing about Boromir’s death and burial is a more meta one. Despite Tolkien’s own faith, and the sometimes-really-quite-Catholic things that sometimes crop up in the story, The Lord of the Rings is a book oddly devoid of overt religious practice. Mostly, this isn’t something that feels odd, moment by moment, but there are occasional points in the narrative when I feel the lack, and this is one of them. What does a hero’s death and burial, the protection of his corpse, the continuance of his legacy, mean in a world without a clear sense of afterlife belief to go with it? Especially when that treatment obviously echoes real-world cultures with similar practices but who did have spiritual and religious components to it. Everyone lauds Tolkien for his worldbuilding, but here, there is something of a gap.

I often find myself caring about religion and spirituality in SFF works⁵, so it nags at me particularly here, that absence. And it’s the problem with drawing inspiration from the real world – when you don’t capture all the fullness of reality’s depth, there are bound to be spots where the absence makes itself known, and all the more so because Tolkien is Tolkien, those Catholic things come through, and I am here thinking about redemption and forgiveness and so on. But, ultimately, it is a relatively small gap, and one that won’t come up all that often. It just weighs on me.

Not as much as Aragorn’s doubts weigh on him, though⁶.

The end of Fellowship is full of him delaying the inevitable decision, the one he cannot or does not want to make, about the direction of the group when geography forces them to split their path between Minas Tirith and the Ring’s journey to Mordor. While that has been taken out of his hands, a new decision comes in its place: to follow Frodo and Sam, or to go after the hopefully-still-alive Merry and Pippin, to rescue them from captivity. Here – and later in the story when deciding whether to pause for rest or not – we get a sense of Aragorn the leader, and he is one who is willing to take counsel, not just because of his doubts but because of the value of the person giving it (in both cases here, predominantly Gimli). He may be set on his course to become the king his destiny asks him to be, but in the process of getting there, he has plenty moments where he brings his fitness to lead into question. Contrast this with film-Aragorn whose moment-by-moment leadership is generally quietly confident and self-assured, but whose doubts are all reserved for the looming prospect of the throne of Gondor. Jackson has taken something that exists in the text, and simplified it into a single point, rather than an ongoing conversation Aragorn is having with himself, and his leadership.

Which is interesting because we get so much of him in this section as a rather good leader. Yes, there’s him taking counsel – and changing his decisions upon it – from his companions, but also him acting as peacemaker when they meet the Rohirrim, as the one with knowledge to prevent them risking the wrath of the forest, the one who can track their enemy, the one who can unveil himself at the right time, to engender awe in someone they meet and ensure they are treated with proper courtesy.

Because when they reach Rohan, we suddenly have an abundance of drama queen behaviour. Whether it’s Éomer having his horsemen do overkill circling round these three new people, or Gimli taking umbrage at discourteous reference to Galadriel, or Legolas hotheadedly defending Gimli, everyone is escalating, all the time. Even Aragorn – after making sure no one did any headchopping – gets in on the action. Flinging back his cloak to reveal his sword, he declares himself as the heir of Elendil, and imposes upon the perception of those around him an impression of himself in all his kingly might. Legolas – perhaps with an elf’s access to the unseen world – even sees a flame upon his brow like the crown of a king.

But Aragorn’s dramatic flourish does achieve things, where the others did not. Éomer’s behaviour changes dramatically, and things can start moving again. Ed had a particularly amusing line on this change, suggesting that the appearance of these three men, one of whom suddenly pulls out a sword that comes from legends a thousand years old and more, is like being an officer doing reconnaissance at Ypres, only to have Lancelot emerge from the trees for a quick chat. He’s right, too – the narrative makes plain that Éomer realises that he’s in a story, that events are unfolding now that are on a bigger scale than he had previously expected or understood, so his reaction changes accordingly.

What is also interesting about this is that Tolkien, through Éomer, has made pains to emphasise that Rohan is already in its own situation. War is afoot, and the people are withdrawn and scared. He highlights this by saying that where usually visitors would be met with more friendship and trust, the law now is to be less hospitable to them – guest friendship and guest right have effectively been suspended. In the context of the ancient world, and the cultures from which Tolkien is drawing, this is a big fucking deal. And yet, when faced then with this figure from a story, Éomer chooses to go against the law, to offer the sort of friendship, hospitality and trust which is the foundation of good behaviour within his more usual cultural behaviour⁷.

This, in turn, validates Aragorn’s description of the Men of the Mark, when asked about them earlier by his companions. He describes them thus:

‘I have been among them,’ answered Aragorn. ‘They are proud and wilful, but they are true-hearted, generous in thought and deed; bold but not cruel; wise but unlearned, writing no books but singing many songs, after the manner of the children of Men before Dark Years.’

Which brings me onto one of my big thoughts for this section: people and peoples, and how Tolkien crafts character in relationship to culture.

Throughout the story, he has painted pictures of the different groups of people who inhabit the world of Middle Earth. In doing so, he often does something like the above, characterising in broad strokes the whole of a culture, group or race, in a way that is mostly borne out by the text as we see more of them. This doesn’t mean there’s no space for individuals to behave otherwise, but that otherwise, at least in the text as I have read it so far, remains always in dialogue with the norm. The descriptive unit is at the macro level of culture, rather than the individual, for the most part. Bilbo is weird in relation to the norms of hobbits. This is present even in the people he seems to me to care the most about, the elves, who take it to another level with all their fairy shit.

In this section, Legolas gives us plenty of that – he seems to be able to fortify himself with just a deep breath of the green air of a grassy land, he does not sleep, he can see in greater detail than his comrades, all of which is a part of his elven nature. For Tolkien, the elves are a step apart from everyone else. Which provides an interesting dissonance with later portrayals, especially thinking about the idea of elves as unsleeping. This is a piece of D&D elf lore, right? It’s part of the difference in characters that comes when you choose your D&D race⁸. But in D&D, while elves are clearly different, they are also equal. It’s a game, and being a game it comes with some requirement of something like “fairness” – there has to be a balance or it’s just not fun to play. Tolkien, meanwhile, has no interest in this sort of balance. To quote Ed again, because he kept having bangers today, “Tolkien’s elves are literally better than you, but that doesn’t mean they’re better than you” – they operate on a wholly different scale of action, time and inherent abilities within the world than the mortal characters, with Galadriel engaged in some sort of battle of wills against Sauron himself while the hobbits are pootling about taking walks. But that doesn’t mean that the hobbits are incapable of action, incapable of taking choices which have similarly critical effect on the world. That’s kind of the whole point. Tolkien doesn’t need balance to make his point about the worth of the individual. I’m not sure that skill is present in a lot of later works that do level the playing field.

But that’s a digression. Even for the people he likes, the ones he holds in highest regard, Tolkien thinks along generalising lines. He likes to be able to capture some idea of the essence of a group, and have that hold true. And so, this becomes particularly noticeable (and deeply uncomfortable) when we get to the peoples who fight on the side of the enemy.

Which brings us to the orcs, and chapter III – Uruk-hai.

In this chapter, time skips backwards a little and the narrative shows us the truth of the journey which Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli have been piecing together from signs and clues. In Pippin’s perspective, the two hobbits are captured by the orcs and taken on a hasty march, intending to deliver them to Saruman in Isengard. This is the first chapter in which the orcs speak, and are visible in any way other than as a looming threat, a shadow on the other side of a river, the bow behind and arrow, the hand on a sword, or other faceless operators in the dark. The have conversations, with both the hobbits and each other. And Tolkien’s tendencies to characterise at a group level hit a brick wall of “oh no, oh fucking no”.

Fundamentally, this whole chapter is an unsquared circle of the conflict between “this group, their language, their very being, is evil”, dehumanising them, drawing parallels to animals, to inanimate objects, writing them off as something which can be killed without remorse, and without the need to treat the dead as one would an enemy in normal times – the text highlights that the corpses of the fallen orcs have been despoiled by the Riders of Rohan, for instance. But at the same time, as we witness conversations between them, it becomes clear that they are not a monolith, and are people with wants, motivations, rationality, strengths and weaknesses. There is a division between the Uruk-hai and the Mordor orcs, which comes out predominantly in the quarrelling of their two leaders, Grishnákh and Uglúk. There’s factional rivalry, mockery, division of approach to problems. At one point, Pippin attempts to bargain with Grishnákh, exploiting that factional division. They are not a faceless monolith, even as Tolkien writes them off as such, declaring even their language as “full of hate and anger”.

This is underscored by the wildly racialised language in use in this section. The orcs are repeatedly referred to as “swart and slant eyed”, and their weapons are scimitars, and they refer to the Men of the Mark hunting them as “whiteskins”, emphasising the difference between them.

It’s uncomfortable, difficult reading, and the conflict of characterisation does not go away. There’s a hole in the story for one to read orcs in either direction, to assume they exist only as the enemy Tolkien shows us, or to take the implication from what is visible here that there exists a possibility for an orc at peace, something we are never shown, but which is never entirely disproven either. I haven’t really any conclusions on this, beyond what has often and already been said better on Tolkien, race and orcs. The problem just sits there in the text.

As well as/beside that, the thing this section really hit me with was an impression of a certain sort of English person and their view of the Germans in WW1 – a group only visible to that person as enemy combatants, and wildly propagandised as evil to those at home in England with stories of behaviours outside of the acceptable norm for “civilised” peoples, stabbing babies and murdering nuns and so on. But I know, from the perspective of being outside of that time, that the Germans were a people just like the English, and that war is war, that an enemy combatant can go home and still be a person. I want to read the gap in the text this way, to find in it the possibility of personhood that is overtly denied and rejected in the descriptions of the orcs.

Whatever approach one takes, it is, at least on an intellectual level, interesting that we get this insight into them that offers a possibility of more than what they’re written off as, when so many of the immediate generation of Tolkien follow-ups took up the literal description of their enemy as a mindless horde.

Unfortunately, I also did not get on with this chapter aesthetically. It is interesting to get Pippin as viewpoint character, and to see him being competent, making decisions and keeping his head in a dangerous situation. It’s a nice piece of character work that, along with his interaction with the elves the hobbits meet on their way out of the Shire, complexifies him beyond the useless piece of luggage he writes himself off as, and the comedy character he becomes in the simplified portrayal of the films. It is also slightly ironic that the language he (and Merry, briefly) use in this chapter when they do get to speak is very WW1 British officer, top ho, what what, bally good show chaps type stuff. They come across as two British chaps stiff-upper-lipping their way through a sticky situation, and that’s… odd, in the fantasy narrative.

But aside from this, a lot of what happens in the chapter is pretty repetitive. Disagreements between orcs, threats, running, repeat as needed, until the Riders of Rohan catch up with them. We did not, in our discussion, agree on this point, but aside from all the other problems on show in the text, I also just found this chapter… quite boring.

And so, a disappointing end to our first section of The Two Towers. On the whole, this was a quite mixed section – extremely tonally varied, covering a lot of ground (thematically and literally⁹) – and mixing dynamic sections of action with extended dialogue (JRRT clearly loves a chapter 2 exposition drop; this is the second time he’s done it) and brief segues into particularly beautiful descriptions of the changing landscape through which the story travels. The orc section is a problem, for its racism resurfacing from parts of the previous book, its generalisations, and for the unresolvable tension between dehumanisation and humanisation of these enemy fighters in how they are portrayed in the text. And, once again, this is a problem that I will have no good answer for as I continue to read. A disappointing end to our first session of the book.

Next up IV – Treebeard and V – The White Rider.

1. I am also slightly glad we’re currently ahead of them all in the text, because I’d either have to not read anyone’s posts until we caught up (sad) or be worried that their thoughts were influencing mine as I actually read the book. Given that Jared at least is rattling through at a heck of a pace, this is going to be a dilemma we’ll need to face, but not yet. ↩︎
2. My read on someone else’s reread of Tolkien would probably be a step too far. Probably. ↩︎
3. This is very tangential, but writing for ARB has inculcated an instinctive pause and check before using first person plurals when talking about works (thanks ARB editors, genuinely, you are right this does need to get used a lot less). However, now when I talk about Ed and I reading LotR, and use a genuine plural, my brain has a brief horror of it whenever it comes up. They succeeded too hard. ↩︎
4. It is possible we might have been better off doing this read a chapter at a time, given how much it turns out we have to say about it all. But we are where we are, and I’m sure I’d find a way to spin 3k words even out of a single chapter if left to do so. ↩︎
5. If we could have a moratorium on “it’s like the Greek gods but they are literally there, no you actually meet them, in the world” as an approach without any reflection on what this would mean for the social and cultural practice of religion in the world, I would be a happy person indeed. ↩︎
6. I am the master of the seamless segue. ↩︎
7. Which Ed has as a version of Éomer as Antigone. Which I rather like. ↩︎
8. I assume this is still true in most recent D&D but unlike Ed I don’t read RPG manuals for fun. ↩︎
9. I did do the tragic thing of working out how far Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas had travelled and then boggled at it. I was quite pleased when Éomer boggled too a few paragraphs later. I didn’t get into it here, but there is also a whole other piece in this chapter about the ridiculous stamina of these three hunters, and what it says about them as people and what Tolkien wants to take from their behaviour in respect to their position compared to the more “normal” people in the world. ↩︎