Huorns

“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.