The Great Darkness

“So We Come To It in The End… The Great Battle of Our Time, in Which Many Things Shall Pass Away.” A Great Cloud Comes From Mordor That Simplifies The Mind of Théoden.

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The Return of the King by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991) pp. 783-784

When Merry is awakened at dawn after the coming of the Herald of Gondor he wonders why he has been called by the King in the middle of the night.

“Flinging on some clothes, Merry looked outside. The world was darkling. The very air seemed brown, and all things about were black and grey and shadowless; there was a great stillness. No shape of cloud could be seen, unless it were far away westward, where the furthest groping fingers of the great gloom still crawled onwards, and a little light leaked through them. Overhead there hung a heavy roof, sombre and featureless, and light seemed to failing than growing.”

The coming of the cloud from Mordor is one of the most terrible images of The Lord of the Rings, symbolising as Sauron intended it to do, his absolute intention to rule over all things. For while the cloud has a practical purpose in that it provides a cover for the orcs who will make up the main body of Sauron’s army, and who dislike, even hate the brightness of the sun, it also displays the Dark Lord’s totalising intent, his desire to “bring them all, and in the darkness bind them”. He wishes to rule over all things, even the weather of the world.

The date is the 10th of March, “The Dawnless Day”, the day upon which the host of Minas Morgul sets forth to war in Gondor led by the Lord of the Nazgûl, the Witch-King of Angmar. It is the first day of Pippin’s brief service of the Steward of Gondor, a day upon which he is arrayed in the livery of the White Tower. It is the day upon which Merry is told by Théoden that he will not be riding with the Rohirrim to Minas Tirith, but that he is to remain in Rohan; but it is the day upon which Eowyn arrays him for battle. It is one of the darkest days of the whole story.

But it is a day that brings a great simplicity to the mind and heart of Théoden. For when Hirgon had asked him to bring all his strength to Minas Tirith and to come as swiftly as he can he had replied with caution, knowing that his rear needed defence against attack and that his advance guard needed to proceed with care. These are all the usual and necessary precautions that any general must take in order to reduce as much, if possible, any unnecessary losses, and to take thought for the security of what lies behind him as well as what lies before. But one set of circumstances takes away all reason for caution and that is the circumstance in which all choice is taken away except for the choice to throw everything away in one last desperate action. We call it the moment in which we have nothing left to lose, and Théoden knows that this moment has come.

“So we have come to it in the end,” he said: “the great battle of our time, in which many things will pass away. But at least there is no longer any need for hiding. We will ride the straight way and the open road and with all our speed.”

Théoden has come to that moment that is the “condition of complete simplicity”, as T.S Eliot named it in his Four Quartets. It is the moment that is expressed in Christian thought by the cross, the moment when everything has to be given away, even life itself. As Eliot himself continued in his poem, it is a condition that “costs not less than everything.” Théoden knows that he has come to that moment, the moment in which darkness seems to have triumphed completely, and so he gives everything of himself and of his people.

But even at this moment of the most terrible simplicity there is something deeper at work that almost no-one is able to see in this darkness. For it is on this day on which Frodo comes with Gollum and Sam to the Crossroads and begins his own intentional journey into the dark. It is there that he sees the statue of the fallen king, defaced by the obscene graffiti of the orcs, and sees it crowned with a circlet of wildflowers, and it is at that moment that the sun dips beneath the darkness from Mordor and illuminates the scene that Frodo can see. And as he gazes upon this beauty he cries out, “They cannot conquer forever!”

Perhaps he is the only one to experience such a moment of illumination even as the sun disappears, but what he sees, if only for a moment, is what Eliot goes onto say after speaking of the terrible condition of “complete simplicity”.

And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well

“Why Did Celeborn Warn Us Against Your Forest?” Treebeard Tells the Hobbits Something of The Story of Forests and Ents.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 607-611

Carefully but firmly holding Merry and Pippin in the crooks of his arms Treebeard makes his way through the Forest of Fangorn. The hobbits have had plenty of experience of being carried in the past few days but the last one was by orcs, “seized like a sack” and crushed into their necks. Their arms were gripped like iron with orcs’ fingernails biting into their flesh. This is very different, soon Merry and Pippin begin to feel “safe and comfortable”, hobbit curiosity gets the better of Pippin and there is something he wants to know.

“Please, Treebeard,” he said, “could I ask you about something? Why did Celeborn warn us against your forest? He told us not to risk getting entangled in it.”

It is a theme that runs through The Lord of the Rings that its free peoples have become divided from one another so that there is a sense of hiddeness and wariness about each land in which strangers are treated with suspicion. So normal has this become that when Gandalf, who has worked harder than any to break down barriers between peoples, is confronted with the words pedo mellon a minna on the western doors of Moria he assumes that a secret password is required of him. In fact all he needs to do is to say the word, friend, mellon, and the doors open. This is a fact that I note was completely ignored in the recent Amazon dramatisation, The Rings of Power. We live in suspicious times once more and, like Gandalf, assume that doors will be closed against us. Even the stories that we tell tend to be of suspicion and wariness rather than friendship and openness.

Treebeard speaks of this as he ponders Celeborn’s own land, the Golden Wood, turning over Elven words as one might allow a fine wine to linger upon the tongue before swallowing it. Lothlórien too is a dangerous place, “and not for anyone just to enter in”. We might note that when Gandalf took Gollum prisoner it was to the realm of Thranduil that he took him and not Lothlórien. The secretness of that land needed to be preserved.

It is darkness that has divided the peoples of Middle-earth, darkness not as a welcome pause between periods of daylight in which rest can be taken and moonlight and starlight enjoyed for their own sake but as a thing of threat in which enemies might be hiding ready to do harm. Treebeard speaks of “the Great Darkness”, presumably referring to the time that followed the destruction of the Trees of Light in Valinor by Morgoth in the First Age, a time in which darkness did not merely mean an absence of light but had a quality of its own, the kind of hopelessness to which Dante refers in the motto that stands above the Gates of Hell in his Divine Comedy. It is this kind of darkness that entered parts of the realm of Fangorn just as it did in parts of The Old Forest near the Shire. Treebeard speaks of some trees in the forest especially in the valleys under the mountains that are “sound as a bell, and bad right through.”

The Ents have watched over the forest since time immemorial and they have tried to teach the trees about light, opening their hearts to it, softening those hearts. And they have tried to keep unwary folk away from danger. And it must surely be a fruit of their work that at the end of The Lord of the Rings Legolas takes Gimli upon a voyage of discovery through Fangorn that is a source of delight and wonder and not one of danger and threat. It is not just because of Sauron’s fall that the darkness has been lifted, the time for that has been much too brief, it is because through the work of the Ents that the forest is full of light. But perhaps Legolas and Gimli had the services of an Ent to guide them through the forest. We are not told. A guide such as Treebeard could take a guest into secret places safely, unfolding them to those who wish to take time to enjoy them. This would be a different way of getting to know a forest than to take a truck along a highway that has been driven through its heart like a sword thrust.

Old Man Willow. O Hobbits, Take Care Where You Sleep!

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The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R Tolkien (HarperCollins 1991) pp 108-116

The hobbits have to make their way through the Old Forest in order to rejoin the East-West road through Eriador. Their intention is to throw the Black Riders off their scent and so to arrive safely in Bree. There, or at least so they hope, they will meet up with Gandalf and so journey on to Rivendell together.

Well, that is their intention anyway, but first they have to get through a forest that clearly regards them with dislike or worse. “They all got an uncomfortable feeling that they were being watched with disapproval, deepening to dislike and even enmity”.

The Old Forest was all that was left in Eriador of the great primeval forest of the Elder Days. When Merry and Pippin meet Treebeard in the forest of Fangorn later in the story he tells them that “there was all one wood once upon a time from here [Fangorn] to the Mountains of Lune”.

“I do not doubt,”says Treebeard, “that there is some shadow of the Great Darkness lying there still away north”, and it is the Darkness, the time of the dominion of Morgoth, in the First Age of the World, of whom Sauron was merely a lieutenant that led even a part of the natural world to fall under its dominion.

We should not blame the hobbits too much for their unwariness. Life until now has taught them so little of the dangers of the world. But they should not have fallen asleep with their backs to the trunk of Old Man Willow, the heart of the hostility of the Forest. Falling asleep in the wild can either be an opening into wonder or danger. I read just the other day of an explorer of the wild who fell asleep on a warm summer day in the woods and awoke to find a female Roe Deer gazing at him just a few inches from his face. Their encounter lasted only a few seconds before the deer ran off into the undergrowth but it left him with a sense of peace and wonder that stays with him to this day. I once climbed down with a companion into a gorge a little below the Victoria Falls on the Zambezi river. This was in the days before it was possible to navigate the gorges in inflatable craft and so we had this place to ourselves. At the bottom of the gorge he wandered off to look around and I fell asleep in the stifling heat of the afternoon with my back to a rock. I awoke to find myself surrounded by a troop of baboons who were eyeing me with great curiosity. I stayed quite still and looked back at them. What would have happened next I do not know for my companion returned, startled the troop and they ran away. Like the explorer and the deer my brief connection with wild things has never left me.

To be awoken by a gentle deer is one thing. It is a little more uncertain to be awoken by a troop of baboons and I sometimes wonder what was going to happen next if my companion had not returned. But Old Man Willow wishes nothing but harm for the hobbits. He tries to drown Frodo in the Withywindle river and to entrap Merry and Pippin within himself. Only Sam seems to be alert to his malice. The first time in The Lord of the Rings in which he is ahead of the others. But the great adventure seems to be at an end on the very first day beyond the borders of the Shire until a song of utter carefree joy alerts Frodo and Sam to the rescue that is about to come to them.

So do take care where you fall asleep. You may avoid danger that way. But there again you may avoid wonder too. To be open to wonder it seems that you have to be open to danger as well. At least that is what the hobbits discover. They fall into danger but wonder is bounding down the path towards them.