The Return of the King by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991) pp. 812-815

At the end of chapter 4 of The Return of the King, we hear the sound of the horns of the Riders of Rohan at the broken gates of Minas Tirith. Now in chapter 5 we are taken back to the great ride of the Rohirrim that brings them to that point. And we meet the inhabitants of the Drúadan Forest for almost the only time in the story. And they play a crucial role in bringing the Riders to the battle, just in time. For the road to Minas Tirith is held against them by a host from Mordor big enough to weaken them to such a degree that they will be of little help when they finally come to the Pelennor Fields.

And suddenly the people of the Drúadan Forest come to their aid. Their chieftain, Ghân-buri-Ghân, comes to Théoden with an offer to guide them along paths through the forest that will enable them to bypass the Mordor force completely. Théoden accepts the offer and so the Rohirrim are able to avoid an unnecessary conflict and are ready for the battle that matters above all others.

When I first met Ghân-buri-Ghân over fifty years ago now in my first reading of The Lord of the Rings I confess that I was as impatient with him as is Éomer in the council that is described in this chapter. I too wanted to get to the gates of Minas Tirith as quickly as possible and I too found this strange misshapen creature little more than an irritation along the way. I found the speech of Ghân-buri-Ghân annoyingly primitive, not realising that he was trying to express his thought in a speech that he rarely used and had never mastered. We might want to ask why there was not a single member of the Rohirrim that had ever bothered to master the speech of the Wild Men? We might suspect that there were none among them who had ever thought it to be worth their effort. And what of that name that I have just used, Wild Men? We can be sure that it is not the name that Ghân-buri-Ghân and his people used to speak of themselves. It reminds us of those old Westerns in which First Nation Americans would refer to themselves as the Red Men, even as they referred to those invaders of their lands as the White Men. It was never what either people used in order to refer to themselves but by using this term both parties could speak to each other without spending the whole time just defining terms.

We can say that there has been a much greater effort to understand and appreciate the wisdom of the indigenous peoples of the world in the years since Tolkien died, and to realise that this wisdom has much to teach the rest of us. Famously, on a visit to the United States, Pope John Paul II explicitly expressed this appreciation, saying in an address in Yellowknife in 1984 that “Christ, in the members of his body, is himself Indian”. In another draft of The Lord of the Rings Tolkien had Ghân-buri-Ghân attend the coronation of Aragorn in Minas Tirith. Eventually he decided not to use this version of the story. Instead, the heralds of the King Elessar declare that “The Forest of Drúadan he gives to Ghân-buri-Ghân and to his folk, to be their own for ever; and hereafter let no man enter it without their leave.” Aragorn made the same declaration regarding the Hobbits and the Shire.

These were wise and just declarations, but what if a successor of the King Elessar were to have taken a further step? What if it were to become a part of the education of his successors to spend time among the people of the Forest of Drúadan, or the Shire for that matter before coming to the crown? What if Faramir’s vision of the place of Gondor in the world, that it should be “beautiful as a queen among other queens: not a mistress of many slaves, nay, not even a kind mistress of wiling slaves” were to be fulfilled in part through such a process of education? What if we were to invest in such education in our own times instead of a technical education that seems doomed to reduce every single one of us to the status of slaves under the lordship of the machine?

We can only dream of such a thing. What we know, as we leave the Forest of Drúadan and Ghân-buri-Ghân behind in our dash to arrive at the Pelennor Fields in time that if it were not for the woodcraft of the Wild Men the Rohirrim might never have reached the battle at all, or at least to have reached it in such diminished numbers that they could have accomplished very little. This is another action by the small peoples of the world that is vital in the defeat of the powers of darkness.