Minas Morgul

“Yet Now They Were Silent, and No Footsteps Rang on Their Wide Pavements, nor Voice Was Heard in Their Halls…” Pippin Journeys Through Minas Tirith, Falling into Decay.

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The Return of The King by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991) pp. 733-736

One of the important things that a good reader of The Lord of the Rings will ask is whose eyes are we looking at this part of the story through? Sometimes a scene will be described in epic heroic language and we can imagine that we are listening to a bard in a royal mead hall, but usually we see the scene through the eyes of a hobbit, either Frodo or one of the three companions who set out from the Shire with him, and then we remember that Tolkien tells the story as one that he discovered in the Red Book of West March and which was an account of the adventures of Bilbo and then of Frodo and his friends, written by Bilbo, then Frodo and completed by Sam with the aid of Merry and Pippin.

In the last post on this blog we heard Gandalf’s prophetic words to the guards at the gates of Minas Tirith and now we journey up the seven levels of the city in the company of Gandalf and Pippin and soon realise that it is not Gandalf’s eyes through which we see the city but Pippin’s.

“Pippin gazed in growing wonder at the great stone city, vaster and more splendid than anything that he had dreamed of; greater and stronger than Isengard, and far more beautiful.”

Minas Tirith is the great achievement of the descendants of Númenor in Middle-earth, built by the followers of Elendil at the end of the Second Age as they escaped from the wreck of their homeland and established new kingdoms in Gondor and Arnor. Minas Tirith was first known as Minas Anor, the city of the Sun, which faced Minas Ithil, the city of the Moon, with Osgiliath, the city of starlight, the first capital of Gondor, that grew on the banks of the Anduin and whose bridges were a link between the sun and the moon and the two sides of the great river.

In the year 2002 in the Third Age, the Nazgûl captured Minas Ithil, renaming it Minas Morgul, the city of Black Magic, and Minas Anor was renamed becoming the City of the Guard, Minas Tirith, and so it remained until the War of the Ring in 3019, over a thousand years later.

Defence is a wearisome affair, especially when your whole identity is shaped by defying an enemy who are servants of darkness and of death. Was it because of this that, as the long years went by, the defenders of Minas Tirith slowly became enamoured of death themselves? Pippin sees a city that “lacks half the men that could have dwelt at ease there”. Year by year the city has fallen into decline and has become depopulated. As Pippin gazes upon the great houses of the city he sees many that are silent where “no footsteps rang on their wide pavements, nor voice was heard in their halls, nor any face looked out from door or empty window”.

Later, when Legolas and Gimli entered the city, after a Battle of the Pelennor Fields, Legolas made a similar observation to Pippin’s, remarking that “the houses are dead, and there is too little here that grows and is glad”. (ĹOTR p.854)

The defenders of Minas Tirith have long defied their enemies with great courage but they have lost the ability to be glad. They admire martial skills and so Boromir the warrior was their great hero, but nothing grows in the gardens of the city and too few children play there. Gandalf declared that the “end of the Gondor that you have known” had come, and it is likely that the gloom that had become the habitual state of mind of the defenders was merely deepened as they heard his words. But Gandalf was giving a message of hope and of renewal. Can Denethor, their lord, hear such a message, or does he even want to hear it? Is it possible that we can become so attached to our state of mind, even to our despair, that we do not wish to hear of hope when it is spoken to us, preferring the unhappiness that we have become used to, and even fearing a hope that will disturb, even sweep away, the existence in a grey half light to which we have become used? So Gandalf prepares for his meeting with the Steward of Gondor.

“I Am Too Late. All is Lost”. Frodo’s Struggle With Despair Outside Minas Morgul.

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

The overwhelming force that is the army of Minas Morgul has passed down the valley on its way to assault th6e city of Minas Tirith and Frodo is left alone in the shadows at the beginning of the long climb to Cirith Ungol with Sam and Gollum.

Suddenly, despite his escape from the Lord of the Nazgûl, Frodo is overcome by despair.

“Frodo stirred. And suddenly his heart went out to Faramir. ‘The storm has burst at last,’ he thought. ‘This great array of spears and swords is going to Osgiliath. Will Faramir get across in time? He guessed it, but did he know the hour? And who can now hold the fords when the King of the Nine Riders is come? And other armies will come. I am too late. All is lost. I tarried on the way. All is lost. Even if my errand is performed, no one will ever know. There will be no one I can tell. It will be in vain.’ Overcome with weakness he wept. And still the host of Morgul crossed the bridge.”

“And still the host of Mordor crossed the bridge”. Alan Lee depicts the scene that Frodo saw as the Witch King leads his army to war.

Perhaps the choreography that I spoke of in my last post on The Two Towers has had its effect, albeit one that was unintended. The shock and awe was all intended to drain morale from the defenders of Minas Tirith but it is Frodo who is lying on the ground, all hope gone and no strength left to continue his journey. We can imagine that repeated phrase, “all is lost”, resounding over and over again within him, gaining an ever tightening grasp upon his heart. And there is still the terrible climb up the stairs of Cirith Ungol yet to be attempted; a task that will require all the strength that he possesses.

At a moment like this when all seems lost something has to pierce the darkness and for Frodo this something is one of exquisite simplicity. We must assume that Frodo must have fallen into a swoon, overwhelmed by the horror of what he has witnessed, or at least to have appeared to have done so, because it is Sam’s voice that breaks through to him.

“Wake up, Mr. Frodo! Wake up!”

And in those simple words, just for the briefest of moments, Frodo is transported back to the Shire and breakfast is about to be served. Of course the moment cannot last and the awful reality must return but when it does Frodo has strength to resist it. He knows that it is likely that all is in vain, that Gondor will fall before the power that has come against it but it is almost as if this no longer matters. “That what he had to do, he had to do, if he could, and that whether Faramir or Aragorn or Elrond or Galadriel or Gandalf or anyone else ever knew about it was beside the purpose.”

The early fathers of the Christian Church taught that an essential foundation of the spiritual life was a renunciation of despair and this is true. For Frodo this renunciation is expressed in the words “what he had to do, he had to do”. And it is worth emphasising here also, that for Frodo, and for many others also, the spiritual life is not some state of endless bliss but a bloody minded refusal to give in, a determination to go on putting one foot in front of the other. Tolkien puts this wonderfully as he concludes this passage by saying of Frodo that “he prepared to take the upward road”.

Frodo does renounce despair at this point in the story and there is a sense in which he will have to repeat that renunciation over and over again before the end of his journey and when his mind can no longer do so his body will have to do it and when his body can no longer do so Sam will have to carry him and renounce despair for him. But just before the renunciation that we have described here there is that moment of pure grace when another reality than the one he must return to breaks in from outside through Sam’s voice and simple words. This moment of grace will not always be repeated but it comes here, just Frodo has to take the upward road, and it is enough, though barely. Frodo will make the journey to Orodruin.

“Maybe It Was the Ring That Called to The Wraith-lord, and For a Moment He Was Troubled.” A Contest of Powers Within the Morgul Vale.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991) pp. 730-734.

Travelling through Scotland and having forgotten my usual edition of The Two Towers I am grateful to my sister in law, Elinor Farquharson and her husband, Geoffrey, of Edinburgh, for the loan of their single volume edition of The Lord of the Rings.

The short time that the companions spend at the Cross-roads is one of poignant tension between hope and despair, between light and darkness, and Tolkien immediately draws our attention to this at the beginning of the chapter entitled, The Stairs of Cirith Ungol, as Frodo turns his back reluctantly on the West and his face towards the East and to darkness. Gollum leads Frodo and Sam towards the tower of Minas Morgul and up the first steps of a path that crawls upwards “into the blackness above”.

Frodo is exhausted, feeling the great burden of the Ring for the first time since he entered Ithilien, but perhaps there is another power at work. “Weariness and more than weariness oppressed him; it seemed as if a heavy spell was laid on his mind and body.”

All the way through this passage we are aware of many powers at work, sometimes it would seem in contest with one another. The Lord of Minas Morgul, the Witch King of Angmar, Lord of the Nazgûl, is a master of dark magic and he has wreathed the very air about his fastness with spells that rob any who might dare to venture towards it of the will and strength to continue their journey. Tolkien is not explicit about this but when he says that “it seemed as if a heavy spell was laid on his mind and body” there are dark powers at work here.

Perhaps if this were an ordinary day in the foul history of Minas Morgul it would not have been long before Frodo and Sam were discovered. But this is no ordinary day. It is the day upon which Sauron, filled with fear that one of his foes has taken possession of the Ring, sends forth an army to take possession of Minas Tirith, the greatest fortress of his enemies.

“So great an army had never issued from that vale since the days of Isildur’s might.”

And this great army and all the carefully choreographed terror that goes before it and which surrounds it achieves precisely an end for which it was never intended. So great is the energy of the powers both of Minas Morgul and of Barad-dûr that is poured into the departure of the army, an energy whose intention is to terrify the army of Gondor and to rob it of what courage remains to it, that for a brief moment the powers of the Morgul fortress are unaware of what is taking place beneath their very noses. The Ring of Power is passing the armies of Mordor borne by one whose intention it is to destroy it if he can.

And the Ring-bearer is almost caught. The Nazgûl Lord, the king who almost stabbed Frodo to the heart in the dell below Weathertop, pauses for a moment. “He was troubled, sensing some other power within his valley.”

He begins to reach out towards that power just as he did below Weathertop but unlike on that occasion when Frodo felt compelled to put on the Ring this time he is able to resist. He has a strength now that he did not possess before. Eventually this strength will tempt him to take possession of the Ring but now he knows that he does not yet have the power “to face the Morgul-king- not yet”.

That “not-yet” tells us that one day soon he will try to use the Ring, to become its lord, but now it works in Frodo’s favour.

And there is one more power at work. Frodo becomes aware that his hand is moving, unbidden, at least by him, towards the Ring, but as it does so it finds the star-glass of Galadriel, in which the light of the Silmaril, borne by Eärendil into the undying lands and set as a star in the heavens by Elbereth herself. His hand folds about it and the Witch King ceases from his search and moves on.

At this moment the power of the star glass is enough but what if the Witch King had given his entire attention to his search for the power that briefly he is aware is present in his valley? Would Frodo, even aided by the glass, even aided by the Ring, have had the strength to resist? But this test never takes place. It is an exquisite irony that so much has been put into the choreography of the departure of the army of Minas Morgul that the Witch King is distracted, just enough, from finding the very thing that has the power to destroy his lord.

“Luck Served You There; but You Seized Your Chance With Both Hands One Might Say.” Some more thoughts on the empty Morgul Vale that Frodo and Sam will walk through.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 908-909

In my last post we thought about the chain of events that lead to the strange fact that the road from Ithilien into Mordor is empty at just the very moment in which Frodo and Sam need to walk down it. Instead of companies of orcs and other allies of Mordor constantly travelling up and down it, the road in the Morgul Vale is left free for two hobbits and their guide to walk along it unhindered.

The quotation that I have chosen for this piece does not come from the passage that I am thinking about here but from the chapter entitled Flotsam and Jetsam when Merry and Pippin tell the story of their adventures to Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli amidst the wreck of Isengard after it has been destroyed by the Ents. Pippin tells his companions how, by ,means of a fallen orc blade, he was able to cut the rope that his wrists had been bound by . Gimli responds to this approvingly.

“The cutting of the bands on your wrists, that was smart work!” said Gimli. “Luck served you there; but you seized your luck with both hands, one might say.”

In his study on the thought of J.R.R Tolkien, Tom Shippey considers the role of luck within The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R Tolkien, Author of The Century, Harper Collins 2001, pp. 143-147). Shippey tackles the assertion of some of Tolkien’s critics that his story is full of “biased fortune” and so cannot be taken seriously. In speaking of Gollum’s fall into the fires of Mount Doom that destroys the Ring, Shippey argues that “it is clearly not just an accident” but the direct, if unintended consequence, of many conscious choices. The word that Shippey chooses for this is the Old English word, wyrd, a word that both Shippey and Tolkien knew because both of them held the same chair at Oxford University in Philology, the study of language. Modern readers of English will, of course, immediately recognise the similarity between this Old English word and the modern word, weird. They might also note, with some sadness, the way in which a language that once had the capacity to express human experience with great subtlety has turned the words that were able to do this into banalities.

The Old English word that Gimli might have used when he spoke of Pippin’s luck might well have been wyrd. It would have meant something that had happened, something over which Pippin had no control, such as the sudden and unexpected availability of a sharp blade that Pippin was able to use and to change his fortunes. The same thing might be said about Bilbo’s finding of the Ring. The same thing could be certainly be said of the sudden emptying of the roads into Mordor. In every one of these cases luck, or wyrd, serves those who are able to take advantage of these happenings. But Pippin, Bilbo and then Frodo and Sam, each have to take seize their luck, to take advantage of it.

Frodo had to leave the relative security of the refuge of Henneth Annûn and put his trust in a treacherous guide who would eventually betray him. In walking down the Morgul Vale and then climbing the stair to Cirith Ungol he made his way directly into Shelob’s Lair and was poisoned by her. He only entered Mordor on the backs of orcs and his journey thereafter to Orodruin was one of unrelenting agony as the Ring that he bore slowly but inevitably wore down his resistance to its malignant power. By the time he reached the Cracks of Doom he had no strength left to resist it. At the end he needed an enemy to enable him to fulfil his mission and this enemy did so by biting off his finger. If after all this Gimli were to say to him that he seized his luck with both hands then Frodo might well reply that Gimli had a poor idea of luck. Frodo would be right but then so too would be Gimli. This luck truly opened the way to the mountain and it took the Ring into the Fire. But in seizing it Frodo had to pay a terrible price. He could never find peace again in Middle-earth.

“A Waiting Silence Broods Above the Nameless Land.” All is Prepared for Frodo to Enter Mordor.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 908-909

It was at the end of their sojourn in Lothlórien that the Fellowship was addressed by Galadriel on the matter of the journey that they were about to resume.

“Sleep in peace! Do not trouble your hearts overmuch with thought of the road tonight. Maybe the paths that you each shall tread are already laid before your feet, though you do not see them.”

Some of the Fellowship seem to do as Galadriel bids them. We hear little report of anxious thought on the part of Merry and Pippin although they both regard the journey to Mordor as folly and wish to go to Minas Tirith. And apart from declaring their intention to go with Frodo to the end neither Legolas or Gimli say anything of their preference for the road ahead. Sam, of course, will go with Frodo wherever he goes but shrewdly guesses that Frodo will cross the Anduin to fulfil the mission that was given him by the Council in Rivendell. “He knows he’s got to find the Cracks of Doom, if he can. But he’s afraid.” Boromir wants Frodo to come to Minas Tirith, at least that is what he has long said to himself until at last he is confronted by the truth within his heart that he desires to possess the Ring itself. And Aragorn is torn between his desire to go to the city that he believes to be his destiny while knowing that since the fall of Gandalf in Moria he has to guide Frodo the best he can.

The events that befall them all at Parth Galen throw all their plans into disarray. Boromir’s treachery and the attack by the orcs of Isengard sends Frodo across the river to the Emyn Muil fleeing from Boromir and he is only just caught by Sam before he does so. Merry and Pippin are taken prisoner by the orcs and are carried across the plains of Rohan before escaping into Fangorn Forest just in time to meet Treebeard the Ent. Aragorn realises that he can do little more for Frodo and decides to follow the orcs and their prisoners and Legolas and Gimli go with him. Boromir falls trying to defend Merry and Pippin and seeking to right his own wrong. And, of course, there is one other character who does not so much think but is driven by desire for the Ring and that is Gollum and he follows Frodo. Soon, much against both of their wills they will become companions upon the journey.

I will leave my readers to ponder the paths that each of the characters will take after the chaos of the breaking of the Fellowship but we can assert that none of them quite expected that they were to follow the paths laid before them in quite the manner in which they did. As small stones that begin an avalanche Merry and Pippin awaken the anger of the Ents and bring about the fall of Isengard. Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli meet Gandalf in Fangorn, liberate Théoden, King of Rohan, from bondage, and he leads his people to victory over Saruman and then to the relief of the siege of Gondor at the Pelennor Fields.

And, perhaps most unplanned for and most unexpected, Sauron becomes convinced that one of his enemies possesses the Ring and will try to use it against him. He sees Pippin in the Palantir of Orthanc, something that was no-one’s plan, and assumes that this is the hobbit who bears the Ring and that he is a prisoner within that fortress. And then Aragorn chooses to reveal himself to Sauron in the Palantir as the heir of Isildur and wrests control of the stone that is rightfully his from Sauron.

We must assume that Sauron is deeply shaken by his encounter with Aragorn. Until this point he has used the palahtiri to dominate others, both Saruman, who he wins to his side, and Denethor, who he leads to despair, although never treachery. Now he is defeated in a battle of wills by the heir of the one who cut the Ring from his finger. He needs to move quickly and decisively and so he prepares an attack upon Minas Tirith from the stronghold of Minas Morgul to be commanded by his most deadly of captains, the Witch King of Angmar, the Lord in the Nazgûl. All his forces are withdrawn either into Minas Morgul or directed to the Black Gate (the Morannon) in the north of Mordor. As Faramir says, “My scouts and watchers have all returned, even some that have crept within sight of the Morannon. They all find a strange thing. The land is empty. Nothing is on the road, and no sound of foot, or horn, or bowstring is anywhere to be heard. A waiting silence broods above the Nameless Land.”

It is as if everything has been arranged with the exact purpose of allowing Frodo to walk into that land unhindered. We will think more about this next week. Now we know that Frodo has to take full advantage of the opportunity that has been given to him.

On Deadly Wounds and Their Healing. Aragorn Tries to Offer Frodo Some Relief After the Nazgûl Attack.

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The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991) pp. 190-94)

There are times in a reading of The Lord of the Rings in which it is necessary to know that we are reading is not the kind of history that is a listing of events but a mythology. Doubtless it would do all students of history good to recognise the quasi-mythological nature of every historical narrative but Tolkien was not attempting a historical narrative that we must then seek to demythologise. He consciously sought to create a mythology, a sub-creation that honoured God. And so it is here in this description of the attack upon the camp below Weathertop by the Nazgûl. Could they have seized the Ring, even slaying the hobbits and Aragorn too? We must assume that they could. That they expected that Frodo would gradually fall under the malign influence of the Morgul-blade, a fragment of which was left in his shoulder, is without doubt, but the very nature of Frodo’s resistance to their attack shows that what happened that night was a spiritual battle as much as a clash between two forces of warriors. If it had merely been the latter I fear that the brave adventure of the hobbits would have ended that night and the Ring taken to be restored to its maker.

As we saw last week Aragorn’s singing of The Lay of Leithian, the Tale of Beren and Lúthien, took the company into the spiritual milieu of the Elder Days and the songs of Lúthien that overcame Sauron and even Morgoth long ago. Aragorn invokes the same powers as did his ancestors and so the fragile circle of light that the Nazgûl invade is a different place to the simple camp that the travellers had earlier created.

So it is that even though, to his shame, Frodo is unable to resist the command of his foes to put on the Ring, he is able, even while wearing it, to invoke the name of Elbereth, the Queen of the Valar, the angelic beings charged by God to watch over the earth.

This was the name invoked by the company of Gildor Inglorien that drove away the Black Rider on that first encounter in the woods of the Shire .

“Snow-white! Snow-white! O Lady dear! O Queen beyond the Western Seas! O light to us who wander here amid the world of woven trees!”

Gildor named Frodo, elf-friend, that night, and such names are not a trivial thing in Tolkien’s world but convey a reality. “More deadly to him was the name of Elbereth,” says Aragorn, speaking of Frodo’s resistance to the Morgul-king’s attack. And just as there is all the difference in the world between the casual naming of Jesus in everyday chatter and a cry to him in desperate need so too the naming of Elbereth by an elf-friend in need has great power, far more power than that of Frodo’s will to resist.

And so the Nazgûl withdraw for a season, ringless for the present but confident that soon Frodo will be a wraith like them and powerless to resist them any longer. But there is another power at work. Aragorn goes off in search of athelas. He knows this land and where he might find what he seeks. “It is a healing plant that the Men of the West brought to Middle-earth… It has great virtues, but over such a wound as this its healing powers may be small.”

Later in the story Aragorn will be revealed to his people through the acts of healing that he will accomplish through the use of this herb but for now he has not yet come into his own, his kingdom, and he can do little more than stay the effects of the Morgul-blade. But perhaps all that he can do as a healer is to assist the healing that another desires. Later Éowyn will be healed, not by Aragorn’s power, but by her willingness to embrace the future and to let the past be at rest. For his part Frodo will be healed by the “Gentle Purgatory” (as Tolkien put it in a letter on the subject) that he will eventually accept and undergo in the Undying Lands. For now Frodo must endure his wound while his foes wait for the opportunity to seize the Ring and so to triumph.

The Darkness Cannot Overcome the Light

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After leaving the crossroads with the memory of the sun dipping beneath the smokes of Mordor still fresh within them Frodo and Sam are brought face to face with the haunted tower of Minas Morgul. “All was dark about it, earth and sky, but it was lit with light.” This is the city of the Ringwraiths, the most terrible of all the servants of Sauron, who were once men seduced by the greatness of the Dark Lord and the rings of power given to them that are inexorably bound to the Ruling Ring. They above all have been brought by the Ring and bound in the darkness “In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.”

Time and again Tolkien uses the motifs of Light and Dark within his tale. In recent chapters we have seen the wonderful play of light upon the falls of Henneth Annûn casting rainbow patterns upon the refuge that lies hidden behind them and we have seen the light of the sun falling upon the garland of flowers winding about the fallen head of the king whose statue once stood at the crossroads. Once moonlight welled “through the marble walls of Minas Ithil long ago, Tower of the Moon, fair and radiant in the hollow of the hills”. But now Minas Ithil is become Minas Morgul and its light wavers and blows “like a noisome exhalation of decay, a corpse light, a light that illuminated nothing.”

When confronted by the horror that lies before them Frodo and Sam are almost overwhelmed. It is as if light and dark are principles of equal power that confront one another in an eternal conflict. Such is the reality that Sauron would have us believe in and when we thought about the Fall of Númenor a few weeks back https://stephencwinter.com/2015/08/25/faramir-remembers-numenor-that-was/ we saw how he sought to persuade its king of it. But Tolkien’s great myth is not of a universe in eternal conflict. A careful reading of The Lord of the Rings reveals a world in which light is the eternal principle that bursts through again and again despite all efforts to prevent it. And that is the point. Darkness in Tolkien’s world is but a temporary reality that requires huge effort to maintain and is always fragile and desperately vulnerable to the inbreaking of light. Indeed it is the very effort required to maintain the dark that will lead to the eventual undoing of its lord.

Myth is described as that which never happened and yet is always true. Tolkien’s great myth resonates gloriously with the truth that is declared every year at its darkest hour in the Feast of the Nativity, at Christmas: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it”. It resonates with the declaration that in the birth of the Christ child, as vulnerable as is the birth of any child, the illusion of the power of darkness is shattered. Tolkien described this as the True Myth, the one by which all mythology, indeed all reality, is to be understood so that all who embrace it will know an inbreaking of light, as hymn writer, William Cowper, campaigner against the Slave Trade, and one who struggled with depression all his life, put it, ”

Frodo and Sam, like Cowper in his darkest hours, will come almost to despair, but as we shall see as we journey with them into Mordor, the light cannot be overcome by dark. Hell must be harrowed because Hell is but a negligible thing so vulnerable to the invasion of light and so easily overcome by it.