Author: stephencwinter

“These Hobbits Will Sit on the Edge of Ruin and Discuss the Pleasures of the Table.” Merry and Pippin Amidst the Wreck of Isengard.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 726-729

This week we return from Théoden’s wonder at his first sight of Ents at Helm’s Deep to Merry and Pippin amidst the wreck of Isengard. Not that I think that they mind our neglect, as they are resting after their first good meal since they were captured by orcs over a week before. Treebeard had given them drafts of a drink that not only sustained them but even made them grow, but there is nothing like proper food and drink to achieve contentment and nothing like a hobbit to enjoy it properly.

“These hobbits will sit on the edge of ruin and discuss the pleasures of the table, or the small doings of their fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers, and remoter cousins to the ninth degree, if you encourage them with undue patience.” So says Gandalf to Théoden after Merry has begun to discourse on the history of pipe-smoking in the Shire, and we know this to be true, not just because Gandalf says it but because we remember how Merry and Pippin sat down on the edge of Fangorn to eat a piece of lembas as Éomer’s company did battle with the orcs just a few yards away and how, when Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli found signs of this meal they commented that this was proof that hobbits had been there. Who else would choose such a spot for a meal?

Gandalf does not say it here but this is why he loves the Shire and his visited it so often over many years. There is a sense in which the whole Shire has been sitting on the edge of the ruin of Eriador as it has been since the fall of the Kingdom of Arnor and its successor, Arthedain, at the hands of the Witch-king of Angmar for many years and has quite simply ignored the fact, being entirely absorbed with its own affairs, the pleasures of the table and the small doings of its families. How different this has been from Gondor, for example, with its endless anxiety about the world beyond its borders, although perhaps in Lossarnach and in their lord, Forlong the Fat, there is something of a hobbit spirit.

Gandalf has needed the Shire for many reasons. In part he has needed it as a place of rest amidst his long and weary travels. But he has also needed it as a place of play, a place where he has learned to play. Sam Gamgee wanted Frodo to include a verse about Gandalf’s fireworks in the lament that he had composed about Gandalf in Lothlórien and that is what Gandalf had meant to him and to most of the people of the Shire. There is a sense that as Gandalf incarnated his Olorin spirit in Middle-earth as one of the Istari sent by the Valar to contend with Sauron, it was the Shire, and its “small doings” that shaped that incarnation in a very particular way. Saruman never understood this, laughed at it, and suspected it too. His own incarnation lay within the walls of what he thought was an impregnable fortress, a place where he could plot the conquest of Rohan and even dream of becoming the Lord of the Rings and master of Middle-earth.

That it was Gandalf who triumphed in the War of the Ring that ended the Third Age of Arda, and not Saruman, was in no small measure because of his love of the Shire. This was not just because, by a set of strange circumstances, the Ring came to the Shire, and then from the Shire to Mount Doom, but also because Merry and Pippin came to Fangorn Forest. It was Gandalf himself who told Frodo how he had chosen Bilbo for the Quest of the Lonely Mountain, a story recounted in Lost Tales, telling Thorin Oakenshield that “a foresight is on me.” This foresight, this world changing intuition, was formed within Gandalf’s soul by hours at hobbit tables on the edge of ruin while he smoked his pipe and listened to tales of the small doings of his hosts. It was from these doings that Sauron and Saruman fell.

“Tales By The Fireside.” Théoden Touches The Perilous Realm.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 716,717

“Is it so long since you have listened to tales by the fireside?”

So Gandalf asks of Théoden as the King tries to make some sense of what he has just seen as Ents emerge from the magical forest that has come from Fangorn to Helm’s Deep.

I promised last week that we would remain in this reflection on the Perilous Realm that J.R.R Tolkien spent a lifetime pondering and, in the creation of his legendarium, making something that has allowed millions of readers to touch and taste it too.

In his essay On Fairy-Stories Tolkien tells us that a fairy story is not one that is about an elf or a fairy but is about “the nature of Faërie: the Perilous Realm itself, and the air that blows in that country.” He goes on to say that Faërie is essentially indescribable, that it has “many ingredients, but analysis will not necessarily discover the secret of the whole.” Indeed analysis will effectively kill the thing that it seeks to describe. Perhaps it always does, reducing the thing that it has observed to its many parts and so failing to see the whole that it first experienced. Tolkien tells us that Faërie “may perhaps most nearly be translated by Magic- but it is magic of a peculiar mood and power, at the furthest pole from the vulgar devices of the laborious, scientific magician.”

“The vulgar devices of the laborious, scientific magician.” Have we not here been introduced to the Dark Lord himself, hidden in his fastness of Barad-dûr and his most enthusiastic imitator, Saruman? And isn’t the Ring a perfect example of such a device? Saruman was one who lived long in the Undying Land and knew its beauty and yet became seduced by a desire for power, becoming increasingly frustrated by the long, slow history of beauty that, as Gimli describes so well in speaking of the Caves of Aglarond can only be worked with, “with cautious skill, tap by tap- a small chip of rock and no more, perhaps, in a whole anxious day”. Gimli’s description of the work of a true artist in the presence of beauty is light years away from the work of those “laborious, scientific magicians” Sauron and Saruman, who are endlessly frustrated by the slowness of things to be shaped by their will and who become contemptuous of those who are not willing to work as they do. Essentially they become contemptuous of Ilúvatar and the long slow pace of the music of the Ainur that is the story of Creation itself.

Sauron and Saruman live in the same world as Fangorn and Lothlórien, those expressions within Tolkien’s sub-creation of the Perilous Realm, and yet have no understanding of them or of their magic. Their vulgarity is only capable of reducing the magic of these places to their own that is laborious and scientific. But Sauron’s vulgar creation of the Ring is always a temptation to those who have worked long and patiently with the beauty of Middle-earth. When Galadriel is tempted to take the Ring that Frodo freely offers to her she imagines herself as a Dark Queen crying out that “all shall love me and despair!”

It is a misunderstanding of the true nature of evil to imagine Galadriel at this moment as something horrible as Peter Jackson does in the film version of The Lord of the Rings. What the Ring would have given to Galadriel would have been the opportunity to become endlessly and repetitively a terrible beauty that could be seen, desired but never enjoyed. The whole world would be in the thrall of an erotic desire that would endlessly grow in intensity but could never be satisfied. Gimli expresses this when he speaks of “the danger of light and joy”. Legolas rightly praises Gimli for staying faithful to his companions and for giving up the desire that has been awakened within him but Gimli is not comforted by his words.

So perhaps it is safer to keep an experience of beauty within tales by the fireside. As we hear such tales the longing that Gimli knows may perhaps be tasted, may even be a delicious pleasure for a brief moment, but the story will come to an end and it will be time to sleep. Unless, of course, there may be a path that might lead us to an enjoyment of this pleasure; one that never cloys,as the hymn writer puts it.

“The Songs Have Come Down Among Us Out of Strange Places.” Théoden Thinks About The Nature of Fairy-stories.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp.716,717

I promised last week that we would return from the doors of Isengard and their unexpectedly merry wardens in order to return to a conversation in the Deeping-coomb between Théoden and Gandalf.

The conversation takes place when Théoden’s company are about to begin their journey, with some reluctance, to Isengard. Legolas has seen eyes amidst the strange wood that has come from Fangorn such as he has never seen before and then three strange shapes come forward from the trees.

“As tall as trolls they were, twelve feet or more in height; their strong bodies, stout as young trees, seemed to be clad with raiment or with hide of close-fitting grey and brown. Their limbs were long, and their hands had many fingers; their hair was stiff, and their beards grey-green as moss.”

Tolkien describes Ents here as if we had never met them before although we spent some time among them in the company of Merry and Pippin. But now we see them through different eyes. We see them with wonder through the eyes of Legolas and with fear through the eyes of Gimli and the Riders of Rohan.

Gandalf speaks to Théoden. “They are the shepherds of the trees,” he says to him. “Is it so long since you listened to tales by the fireside? There are children in your land who, out of the twisted threads of story, could pick out the answer to your question. You have seen Ents, O King, Ents out of Fangorn Forest, which in your name you call the Entwood. Did you think that the name was given only in idle fancy?”

This is one of the moments in The Lord of the Rings when Tolkien speaks of the themes that he explored in his essay, On Fairy-Stories. As we noted last week this reflection takes place only in scenes involving the Rohirrim. Aragorn and Éomer speak of this when they first meet on the plains of Rohan and now Théoden and Gandalf speak of it together. They speak of “tales by the fireside”, stories told to children. I remember the pleasure of telling stories to my children when they were young. I remember how we would enter the worlds that these tales would evoke as real places. It was one of my favourite moments of the day when all my troubles would be forgotten for a little while. I did not want these moments to end and my wife would have to remind me that the children needed to sleep!

In his essay Tolkien tries to answer the question, “What is a fairy-story?” and as he skilfully dismantle dismantles various attempts to answer the question, offered by scholars or in anthologies of stories such as the collection published by Andrew and Leonora Lang, he draws us ever deeper, and disturbingly, into a realm that he describes as Perilous. He illustrates his point with reference to Walter Scott’s fine poem, Thomas the Rhymer. In it, Thomas, who himself is a poet, meets a beautiful lady who at first he addresses as “The Queen of Heaven”. She replies that this name does not belong to her and that “I am but the queen of fair Elfland, that am hither come to visit thee”. The Queen of Elfland takes Thomas with her to the Perilous Land and he spends seven years there in her company. She describes the road that they will travel together as being neither “the path of Righteousness”, nor “the path of Wickedness” but “the road to fair Elfland”.

Tolkien describes this realm as “wide and deep and high and filled with many things: all manner of beasts and birds are found there; scoreless shoreless seas and stars uncounted; beauty that is an enchantment, and an ever-present peril; both joy and sorrow as sharp as swords.” In Tolkien’s own tale it is Lothlórien that is most Perilous. Faramir understands this well and in his meeting with Frodo and Sam says, “If Men have dealings with the Mistress of Magic who dwells in the Golden Wood, then they may look for strange things to follow. For it is perilous for mortal men to walk out of the world of this Sun, and few of old came thence unchanged, ’tis said”.

This is the world of which Théoden and Gandalf now speak and one that I will return to with you next week if you will. At least to think about it if not to go there in truth, for as I have been writing this piece I have been filled with longing to take “the road to fair Elfland” myself.

“Welcome, My Lords, to Isengard!” The Doorwardens of Isengard Greet Théoden as He Comes to The Fortress of Saruman.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 716-729

The pages that follow Gimli’s beautiful description of the Caves of Aglarond comprise a long slow journey into the unknown. One might think that Théoden and his company might ride with a light heart after their great victory over the hosts of Isengard but we have already seen the much vaunted plainness of manner of the men of Rohan when Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli first met them upon the grassy plains while hunting Merry and Pippin as the Uruk-hai were taking them to Isengard. An occasion when Éomer’s men simply dismissed the strangeness of the three companions as an expression of their wildness. And now, as they encounter the strangeness of the forest that has moved from Fangorn to Helm’s Deep the company who accompany their king descend into an unhappy and, occasionally, frightened, silence.

At one point Théoden and Gandalf speak together about the nature of stories that are told only to children and we will return to this in more detail next week reflecting in particular on Tolkien’s famous lecture on Fairy Tales but now I will only note that, while Théoden’s sense of wonder is gradually awakened during the ride to Isengard, he does not share this experience with his men. At last as they approach the outer fortifications of Isengard the growing sense of grim bleakness accompanied by menace seems complete.

This mood begins to shift subtly and gradually as they perceive that “the power of Saruman was overthrown”. The doors of Isengard “lay hurled and twisted on the ground. And all about, stone, cracked and splintered into countless jagged shards, was scattered far and wide, or piled into ruinous heaps.”

The riders gaze upon the ruin of Isengard in uncomprehending silence but then become aware that within its midst there are two small grey-clad figures lying upon the rubble at their ease and that beside them there are “bottles, bowls and platters… as if they had just eaten well, and now rested from their labour.” One of the figures seems to be asleep while the other “leaned back against a broken rock and sent from his mouth long wisps and little rings of thin blue smoke.”

Of course we have just met Merry and Pippin once again taking their ease as soldiers will after battle with whatever is available to them. We last saw the young hobbits with Treebeard on the night before the Ents’ assault upon Saruman when he was wondering if they were all going to their doom, whether it might be “the last march of the Ents”. And now the battle is done and victory won and all the tension is released.

And not just for Merry and Pippin. Soon all the company who are with Théoden and Gandalf are laughing too. It is as if the young hobbits have gently escorted the Riders from their shared experience of gathering gloom and mute incomprehension into something quite different and much more pleasant.

I can think of few better examples of bathos, that swift descent, sometimes of the sublime to the ridiculous, sometimes of the uncanny to the familiar, sometimes of the terrifying to the safe, than this. From the ending of the battle at Helm’s Deep to the encounter with the hobbits there are some twenty pages in my edition of The Lord of the Rings and throughout those pages the mood is as I have described it above. At no point does Tolkien relent in his creation of this feeling of anxious, fearful incomprehension. Not until the bubble is burst by two young hobbits. And who better within all Tolkien’s legendarium to take us into a world that is less fearful and gentler than hobbits.

Except for the Riders of Rohan hobbits also belong to the world of folktales and fairy stories. But unlike the dwimmer-craftiness of wizards (Gandalf included) or the terrifying silent presence of the Huorns of Fangorn hobbits are not to be thought a threat. Most of the time, indeed, they are anxious not to appear such. This lack of apparent threat does of course lead to the downfall of the greatest tyrants of this age. Tyrants always seem to fall to those who they have underestimated. But now the young hobbits do as they are most at their ease in doing. They gently help a group of men descend from a state of heightened anxiety and foreboding to a gentler place. While infuriating the friends who lay down all their dreams and ambitions even their lives in pursuing them across Rohan. But that we will return to on another occasion.

On Pilgrimage on The Camino del Norte.

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I have been walking with the Camino del Norte, one of the ancient pilgrim routes that go to Santiago da Compostela in northern Spain for the past week. I have been doing so in the company of my wife, Laura, her sister and brother in law. We began in Biarritz in south western France last Tuesday morning and have now arrived in Guernica at the heart of the Spanish Basque Country.

My feet have become very badly blistered and Laura (who is a doctor) tells me that there will be no more walking for me this year. I feel humbled by this and realise how I regard my body as a servant that should obey me in my every wish. Am I going to learn a new relationship with it? A partnership perhaps?

I found a pilgrim’s credo by Murray Bodo before I left and I have been repeating it often along the way. I will end by sharing it.

I am not in control. I am not in a hurry. I walk in faith and hope. I greet everyone I meet with peace. I bring back only what God gives me.

“I Have Never Heard You Speak Like This Before.” Gimli Speaks to Legolas of The Glittering Caves of Aglarond.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 708-715

I once had the privilege of visiting Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece, The Last Supper, in the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan. Most visitors are only allowed to remain for fifteen minutes before they have to leave and so I could not spend the time that I would have liked in its presence. And while I was there I learned that the master would sometimes spend an entire day just looking at what he was creating before making a choice of what he should do next.

Gimli would have understood him. Or at least I might say that it would have been the Gimli who had been in the presence of Galadriel in Lothlórien. Indeed as Gimli speaks to Legolas of what he has seen in the caves at Helm’s Deep he uses but one simile in his description. He speaks of how light glows through marble “translucent as the living hands of Galadriel.” For Gimli her beauty alone in all his life’s experience is sufficient to liken and enhance the wonder that he has just seen.

Gimli and Legolas have just been through a terrible battle and when Gimli first emerges from the caves in company with Éomer and Gamling and their men their first thoughts are to take pleasure in the fact that they are both still alive making light of this as soldiers often do. Then it is time for rest and Gimli makes no mention of the experience that will eventually give him his life’s work until he and Legolas are on their way in Théoden’s company to parley with Saruman in Isengard. Their journey begins their having to pass through the wood of Huorns who surround them and while Gimli is afraid Legolas is filled with wonder and announces to his friend that when the war is over he wishes to visit the remote dales of Fangorn in which the Huorns live.

At this Gimli speaks at last.

“There are columns of white and saffron and dawn-rose, Legolas, fluted and twisted into dream-like forms; they spring up from from many-coloured floors to meet the glistening pendants of the roof: wings, ropes, curtains fine as frozen clouds; spears, banners, pinnacles of suspended palaces! Still lakes mirror them: a glimmering world looks up from dark pools covered with clear glass; cities such as the mind of Durin could scarce have imagined in his sleep, stretch on through avenues and pillared courts, on into the dark recesses where no light can come.”

Legolas is deeply moved by Gimli’s words. “I have never heard you speak like this before,” he tells him. And he promises his friend that if they come safely through the perils that lie ahead that he will go with Gimli to see the caves. As long as Gimli is willing to go with him into the depths of Fangorn.

There are those who have pondered the Grail myth that had such a hold upon the medieval European imagination and which seems to be speaking to us once more in this time who discern that there are two distinct experiences of the Holy Grail in the hero’s journey. The first that often comes in the first part of life awakens longing but does not transform. The second comes later in life when the hero has been through much suffering and sorrow and is now ready to see the Grail in a way that transforms them. We do not know what experiences Gimli might have had of truth, beauty and goodness in his early years although surely his capacity to perceive the transcendent beauty of the caves must have been formed in part by such early experiences. But we do know that when he arrived in Lothlórien he had just been through Moria, through Khazad-dûm, that had held such meaning for him as for all dwarves, and had found it to be a place of darkness. It was Galadriel’s welcome that reawakened love within him and which prepared him for the caves. Now he is able to see their beauty and, as Galadriel foretold, not wish to possess and exploit them but to work with them as an artist might work with stone, finding within it the form that always dwelt there.

Is it merely coincidence that Tolkien gave what is possibly the most beautiful speech in The Lord of the Rings to a Dwarf, one of the most problematic of all his sub-creations? I would argue not. At their worst dwarves display some of the meanest characteristics of the human soul, only capable of looking at anything with a view to profit from it. Moria was destroyed because of the awakening of the Balrog through greedy delving after mithril. The Caves of Aglarond will not be treated in this fashion. Gimli and his people will tend them as Leonardo da Vinci tended his masterpiece. Perhaps in this manner they point a way to us to be truly human.

“The Land Had Changed.” Fangorn Forest Comes to Helm’s Deep. The Revenge of the Trees.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 705-707

It was Gandalf who understood what was happening first. As the host of Rohan rode from Edoras to Helm’s Deep he saw a “darkness brooding about the feet of the Misty Mountains” and asked Legolas to describe what he could see.

“I can see a darkness. There are shapes moving in it, great shapes far away upon the banks of the river; but what they are I cannot tell. It is not mist or cloud that defeats my eyes: there is a veiling shadow that some power lays upon the land, and it marches slowly down stream. It is as if the twilight under endless trees were flowing downwards from the hills.”

At first Gandalf mistook one form of darkness for another, seeing them all as one kind and that kind the darkness of Mordor but as he pondered more he began to realise what he was seeing and so rode towards Isengard. There he asked Treebeard for the help of his Huorns and with them rode back to Helm’s Deep.

Later on Merry spoke of the Huorns to other members of the Fellowship.

“I think they are Ents that have become almost like trees” he said… “There is great power in them, and they seem to be able to wrap themselves in shadow: it is difficult to see them moving. But they do. They can move very quickly if they are angry. You stand still looking at the weather maybe, or listening to the rustling of the wind, and then suddenly you find that you are in the middle of a wood with great groping trees all around you.”

And it is these trees, or perhaps we should call them Ent-trees, that Legolas described to Gandalf and that are now in the Deeping-coomb, the valley below the Hornburg. The hosts of Isengard stand at bay before foes on every side. Théoden and his riders drive them towards the Huorns who block their retreat and Erkenbrand and a thousand men upon foot march towards them, the remnants of a once defeated army that had stood at bay at the Fords of the Isen now victorious once more as they drive their foes before them. And Gandalf rides down upon them revealed for a moment in power and his enemies fall upon their faces in terror. For if there is one thing that orcs understand, perhaps the only thing, it is power. Just an hour before they had been a proud army serving a mighty wizard and about to storm a fortress that had never fallen when defended. Now they are surrounded by power on every side. At last they flee into the mysterious forest and are never seen again.

When Treebeard described Saruman as having a mind of “metal and wheels” who “does not care for living things” he was not merely expressing a difference in taste between himself and the wizard but something much more fundamental. When Saruman emptied Isengard of its defenders in order to conquer Rohan he had no idea of the threat that lay on his doorstep and the reason for this was that he did not care for living things. There are two senses of meaning in the word care that Treebeard used. One is the sense of care as responsibility and it is certainly true that Saruman has no sense of responsibility for living things. But the other sense is that he simply did not think about them very much at all. He assumed that his technology was more potent and effective than any living creature that he had encountered with the exception maybe of Sauron himself and in this he utterly underestimated the forest and its power.

It is one of the greatest feats of Tolkien’s imagination to have thought about how a forest might behave if it were to be able to perform its essential actions not as a plant but as an animal. And what might happen if the growing resentment that a forest might feel about its abuse and mistreatment by others suddenly spilled over. This forest has been abused by a wizard and by orcs for a long time and now, roused by two young hobbits, it takes revenge upon its enemies. Tolkien concentrates the revenge of the living world into a brief period of time. We know that our living planet may move much more slowly than this but if we choose to behave like orcs or fallen wizards in our relationship with life itself our planet will defend itself against us and will eventually win albeit after a conflict with terrible losses. Maybe one day we, like the hosts of Isengard, will be cowering before its latent power.

“His Horse Was White as Snow, Golden Was His Shield, and His Spear Was Long.” Théoden Rides to Victory at The Battle of Helm’s Deep.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 691-707

I remember sitting beside my wife as we watched the scene in Peter Jackson’s film of The Two Towers when Théoden and Aragorn lead the cavalry charge from the fortress of the Hornburg over the causeway and into the armies of Isengard. She had not been with when I saw it first at a morning screening at my local multiplex so we were sitting together watching it on a DVD in our front room. Laura is the most peaceable of people but as I looked across at her I could see tears in her eyes. Peter Jackson had done his work well, I thought. He had succeeded in portraying the beauty of the heroic act.

What conveys the beauty, I believe, is the unbearable moment in which the hero lays down his life for the sake of life. I ended last week’s reflection by quoting Faramir on this. “I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.” It is that which the hero seeks to defend that gives beauty to the sacrifice and brings tears to the eyes of those who watch. The author of the Old English poem, The Dream of the Rood, tells the story of the death of Christ upon the cross in such heroic language. Christ climbs upon the rood, grasping the wood of the cross as a young warrior in order by his death to defeat death itself. In so doing the poet dignifies the hero’s death, a theme that everyone in the cultures of northern Europe would have understood, in a new way. The hero’s death becomes a sacrifice for life in the face of death, for light in the face of darkness and for love in the face of hatred.

Tolkien never states this explicitly although he knew well all the resonances that I have touched upon but as Théoden leads Aragorn and the knights of his household in the last desperate charge at daybreak as the echoing sound of Helm’s horn resounds about him the beauty of the sacrificial deed shines forth and tears come to my wife’s eyes.

The language of the story needs to express this beauty as does the story’s shape. And so in his telling of the story of The Battle of Helm’s Deep Tolkien gives us a beleaguered force falling back before a host of enemies filled with “reckless hate”. At the last Théoden turns to Aragorn as he frets within the Hornburg questioning the wisdom of Gandalf’s counsel that he should lead his host there and says to him:

“I will not end here, taken like an old badger in a trap. Snowmane and Hasufel and the horses of my guard are in the inner court. When dawn comes, I will bid men sound Helm’s horn, and I will ride forth. Will you ride with me then, son of Arathorn? Maybe we shall cleave a road, or make such an end as will be worth a song-if any be left to sing of us hereafter.”

And as the dawn breaks and the doors of the Hornburg are shattered by an explosion the horn of Helm sounds and Théoden and his knights ride out sweeping all before them.

It is not death itself that is beautiful. A death can be a lonely, hopeless, even meaningless affair. But the setting of the sun at the end of a good day is beautiful even though it will end in darkness. At the Battle of the Pelennor Fields Éomer stands at bay before the host of his enemies. And as he stands by his banner he laughs at despair and cries out:

Out of doubt, out  of dark to the day's rising 
I came singing in the sun, sword unsheathing.
To hope's end I rode and to heart's breaking:
Now for wrath, now for ruin and a red nightfall!

For the Rohirrim there is such a thing as a good death and it is one when you have given your all and there is nothing left to give. This was Théoden’s death in the same battle and so he died at peace. At Helm’s Deep events were about to turn in a strange and entirely unexpected way. This is not the day in which Théoden will die but it is his willingness to die that is beautiful.

“And with that shout the king came. His horse was white as snow, golden was his shield, and his spear was long. At his right hand was Aragorn, Elendil’s heir, behind him rode the lords of the house of Eorl the Young. Light sprang in the sky. Night departed.”

“Forth Eorlingas!” Tolkien and The Restoration of The Heroic in Warfare.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 682-691

It is important at the outset of these thoughts on warfare in The Lord of the Rings to note that from the arraying of Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli in gear of warfare before the gates of Edoras to the final victory over the hosts of Isengard before Helm’s Deep there are only twenty-seven pages in the Harper Collins edition of The Two Towers. Compare that to the amount of time devoted to the battle in Peter Jackson’s film of the same name and even before we think about the battle at all we see that this Hollywood action movie treats warfare very differently to the way in which Tolkien does.

Tolkien’s personal experience of warfare was very different to that of the armies who fight in his great story. Harold MacMillan, who was the British Prime Minister in the late 1950s and early 1960s was a fellow officer to Tolkien at the Battle of the Somme in 1916 on whose first day the British army lost 60,000 men killed and wounded. MacMillan was himself one of the wounded and spent several hours hiding in a shell hole and reading Aeschylus in Greek to distract himself from the pain before before being found by British soldiers. In a letter of the time he wrote that “perhaps the most extraordinary thing about a modern battlefield is the desolation and emptiness of it all… One can look for miles and see no human being. But in those miles of country lurk (like moles or rats, it seems) thousands, even hundreds of thousands of men, planning against each other perpetually some new device of death. Never showing themselves, they launch at each other bullet, bomb, aerial torpedo, and shell.

It was a shell that hit and wounded MacMillan as he led an advance of his men towards the German lines. I quote these lines in a reflection upon Tolkien because they describe with dreadful eloquence the experience of warfare shared by soldiers of both sides in that dreadful conflict and contrast so starkly with the language that Tolkien uses to describe the ride of the Rohirrim to Helm’s Deep. Not that Tolkien ignores the horror of war. Théoden describes the hosts of Isengard as they advance “burning as they come, rick, cot and tree”. But he also writes of the beauty of a host of men about to ride out in defence of their homes and families.

“At the gate they found a great host of men, old and young, all ready in the saddle. More than a thousand were there mustered. Their spears were like a springing wood. Loudly and joyously they shouted as Théoden came forth.”

Tolkien profoundly understood the contrast between the desolate horror that MacMillan described and the heroic language that he used in his own descriptions of battle. Indeed he expressed that contrast in his distinction between the orcs of Mordor and Isengard and, for example, the Riders of Rohan. While the armies of Saruman and of Sauron use all the devices available to them of industrial warfare, the Rohirrim ride into battle carrying spear and sword; and Tolkien’s account is full of acts of individual heroism on the part of the defenders of Helm’s Deep while their enemies are faceless.

What Tolkien achieved in The Lord of the Rings was a restoration of humanity in the brutal and faceless experience of warfare that he knew and which MacMillan described. This means that he is a genuinely modern writer whose war literature can be included alongside A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway or Robert Graves Goodbye to All That. But whereas Hemingway and Graves seek, with great success, to express the experience that MacMillan describes, Tolkien does something quite different. He attempts a kind of redemption of the brutal experience of warfare by restoring the heroic to it. While he understood the experience that Wilfred Owen described in speaking of “these who die as cattle” he restores to those who die a human face and personal heroism.

But I must end where I began. Tolkien never sought to glorify war in his writings. This is perhaps best and most explicitly expressed by Faramir who is a warrior by necessity and not by choice and, of all the characters in The Lord of the Rings speaks most in Tolkien’s own voice.

“War must be, while we defend our lives against a destroyer who would devour all, but I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.”

“His Hand Met Hers and He Knew that She Trembled at The Touch”. The Beginning of the Story of Éowyn and Aragorn.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 677-683

It was at the doors of Meduseld that Aragorn first declared himself and his high lineage. Háma, the door warden had commanded that no weapon be brought into the hall and Aragorn had questioned whether Théoden had the authority to demand this of him.

“It is not clear to me that the will of Théoden, son of Thengel, even though he be lord of the Mark, should prevail over the will of Aragorn, son of Arathorn, Elendil’s heir of Gondor.”

Aragorn had already declared his lineage to Éomer when they first met on the plains of Rohan and doubtless when Éomer had made defence of his mission to intercept and destroy the company of orcs that were crossing the plains he had spoken of this but if he had then Wormtongue would have dismissed Éomer’s report as the deranged words of some vagabond wandering across Théoden’s lands. But Éowyn would have heard these words and would have seen the mighty warrior who had stood before her uncle in his hall as Gandalf had performed his act of healing and as she saw with her own eyes the transformation of a broken man into a king ready to lead his men to war.

Éowyn has had to live a secret life. Indeed, so secret has it been that when Théoden’s men ask that one from the House of Eorl should lead the people to the defences of Dunharrow he has no idea who they mean. She has been almost invisible to him simply being there to tend to his needs as he descended into decrepitude.

Later in the story as Éowyn lies in the Houses of Healing in Minas Tirith Gandalf will speak of that secret life. Éomer will show that he too was unaware of what lay within his sister’s heart, saying that it was because of Aragorn that she had given way to despair even though he knew that Aragorn bore no blame for this. But Gandalf corrected him.

“My friend… you had horses, and deeds of arms, and the free fields; but she, born in the body of a maid, had a spirit and courage at least the match of yours. Yet she was doomed to wait upon an old man, whom she loved as a father, and watch him falling into a mean dishonoured dotage; and her part seemed to her more ignoble than that of the staff he leaned on.”

Tolkien has received considerable criticism over the years about the apparent invisibility of women in his stories. Peter Jackson’s decision to make Arwen an active character in The Fellowship of the Ring giving her the part that is played by Glorfindel in the book is in many ways a response to this criticism. I remember my own surprise when Arwen appeared in the story as a warrior who would resist the Nazgûl but I quickly realised why Jackson would make this choice and accepted it. But the character of Éowyn is no response to criticism. She is Tolkien’s creation and Gandalf’s words show that Tolkien fully understood both the richness of her character and also the injustice of the way in which women had been treated through history in life and in story. In a warrior culture, which Rohan is, it is perhaps inevitable that women would be expected to be servants to men who would be those warriors. But Éowyn has undoubtedly learned skill in arms, perhaps because she was a member of the royal house, perhaps because it amused the teachers of the arts of war to teach this eager young princess. She may have been invisible to Théoden but not to others.

“She is fearless and high-hearted,” Háma says to Théoden when he asks that Éowyn should lead the people to Dunharrow. “All love her. Let her be as lord to the Eorlingas, while we are gone.”

Háma may have seen something of what Éowyn truly was but she herself felt the dishonour of her position; to be a mere serving girl in a house of little honour. So it was that when Aragorn appeared in her life he represented something that she longed for. Aragorn put it this way himself in speaking to Éomer.

“In me she loves only a shadow and a thought: a hope of glory and great deeds, and lands far from the fields of Rohan.”

Éowyn has been doomed to live a life in shadows until now but like her uncle she too will come to embrace life in all its joy and sorrow. But unlike Théoden, who was restored to himself in a single day, her journey to wholeness will first lead her to false hope in the form of the heir of Isildur and to despair when that hope is taken from her.