It’s time to remember that from now on, not only the story but the viewpoint is split into multiple parts. And here, we have the first of several Chapters in which time overlaps between the Books. Tolkien does cliffhangers less than many other authors with an action tale to tell, but there’s a sort of “indirect” cliffhanger. By the end of this Chapter, we have chased the hobbits as they seem to get further and further away, and then we find – what? Clearly, they are alive, and, mercifully, not still in the power of the Orcs. And yet they have vanished into a blank spot in the map – something called Fangorn Forest.
Strictly speaking, that’s not really a cliffhanger; that’s so we read the next Chapter without feeling like we know how it’s going to come out already. That’s an honest use of overlapping time. We’ll see it again. It’s like waves in a tide, each taking us further along in this part of the story. Book 3 is like this; Book 5 is like this. And that’s part of a greater structure in which Book 4 reaches on past Book 3, and then Book 5 reaches past Book 4, and then Book 6 reaches past Book 5 to the very end.
There are pluses and minuses to this approach. The movie opts for a very tight back-and-forth between Frodo/Sam and the Rohan/Gondor parts, and that’s fine – if you’re going to do three movies. If you do six – well, a truly great set of movies would realize Tolkien is just as much about character as action, if not more, and stick with Tolkien’s viewpoints.
So this is our introduction to Rohan. And before we move onto the set pieces at the Rohirrim dwellings and forts, we are reminded that these are herdsmen as much as farmers, and the land, like the land of herdsmen, is mostly empty. These are the eastern lands where horses reign. But even when we get to the west, south of Orthanc, there are miles of country with few or no people there. And yet we clearly see this as a country of men.
Moreover, this is not a country of “high” men. Hence the ability of a “wise counselor” to prey on a king. These are simpler virtues – honor, truth-saying, keeping one’s word. Book learning clearly makes the Rohirrim as uneasy as it does some hobbits. So does “magic” – hence the wariness of Elves.
By the way, Tolkien has a specific meaning when he says People of the Morning. These are like the Three Houses of Men that first rejected Morgoth, fled across the lands to where the Elves were battling Morgoth in the West of Middle Earth, and got embroiled in the war. They have very much the same simple code of honor and strengths and weaknesses.
And they have something more – the Saxon sense of poetry, the Saxon sense of battle honor. If I can remember Tolkien’s translation of a fragment of The Battle of Maldon: “Will shall be the sterner, heart the bolder, spirit the greater as our strength lessens.” Tolkien’s made-up poetry has the same cadence (“Where is the horn that was blowing?”), and its sense of battle honor, of continuing to stand and fight until you can’t any more, even if it seems hopeless. But there’s no shield wall; just cavalry.
And so, Man, Dwarf, and Elf meet this land (all right, Aragorn’s been here before), and the land itself does not seem alien. But the people do: both Dwarf and Elf immediately get rubbed the wrong way. These are old races, and they are not at all insular or afraid of book learning or sophistication (again, don’t get suckered into a comparison of Elves and Dwarves; remember the sophisticated Dwarven chamber music in the very first chapter of the Hobbit); whereas clearly the Rohirrim are. And yet, we sense a certain “connection” between Dwarves and Rohirrim that isn’t there between Elves and Rohirrim. They prefer “plain speaking.” When Gimli proposes a grim bet to Eomer, Eomer does not say “sorcerers and netweavers”; he recognizes that he may have offended Gimli’s “honor.” In fact, Gimli and Eomer are behaving a little like medieval knights in medieval romances, concerned with slights to “my lady’s [Galadriel’s]honor.” We will see this again with Eomer and Eowyn.
Enough about Rohan. Now let’s consider the next Chapter, which is, fundamentally, about Orcs.
Ooh, Those Staff Sergeant Orcs!
So we retrace the same journey, but this time through hobbit eyes, and prisoner eyes, all the way into Fangorn. We see the functioning, if you can call it that, of Orc society. We see that, as we should have expected, Orcs aren’t monolithic, or complete slaves to one Lord. And, of course, Tolkien plays it relatively fairly: the hobbits don’t suddenly get a miraculous infusion of strength that allows them to cut their way out, and their attempts to manipulate the Orcs don’t magically result in “these aren’t the droids you’re looking for.” The final escape is unlikely, yes, but definitely not impossible, even in a non-magical world.
So let’s get back to the Orcs. This is the main Chapter in which we really see Orcs for an extended period (even the beginning of Book 6 doesn’t have the scope or length of time that this Chapter does). And here I have to say up front that I think that Tolkien’s treatment of Orcs doesn’t really work.
Here’s the dilemma I think Tolkien faced: he already had Orcs there as the sneering villains in a children’s book (The Hobbit), and he called them goblins (possibly a nod to a curious fantasy by George McDonald called Curdie and the Goblins). Up to now, he has succeeded by giving as little detail as possible about evil, and making it very internal, profound, and sensory. Now he must, in order to take the next step, make living in an “evil” society tangible and real-world. And he must flesh out the Orcs.
The way he chose to do it is to combine English rustic and Cockney slang with the kind of language that he very probably heard from English staff sergeants in WW I. In The Hobbit, the trolls say, “Blimey”. In LOTR, the Orcs say “Nar” and “Maggots”, “peaching sneak thief”. Their leaders are all about warlike esprit de corps, “We are the fighting Uruk-hai!” They are constantly fighting, with each other if not with anyone else, they “hate and despise” any leader, they are murderers and cannibals even when they “go off alone, like in the good old days”, and they have zero sense of family outside of their little army group. Those who have followed the use of child soldiers in the Cambodian genocide and the more recent Congo unrest may well find some similarities.
To any but the English, of course, the language Tolkien has them use still seems like a children’s comic book – hence Wilson’s review, “Ooh, Those Awful Orcs!” Except, of course, that Wilson had a lot of gall to pick on something first introduced well into The Two Towers as representative of the whole work. I guess when you’re desperate for something to support your thesis …
But even for the English, I would suspect, the Orcs just don’t completely work. In an odd way, they just aren’t evil enough, at least in the sense that Tolkien seems to be using evil. Sauron, Saruman, the Nazgul, even the spiders with Shelob and the Wargs with their chieftain either use “high” language or are somehow profound to the senses – a howl to freeze the spine, a hiss of menace. Not the Orcs. They just talk funny. And they also pull their punches. They don’t talk about ripping open your belly and scooping out your intestines, or castrating you, or dismembering you a limb at a time to feed breakfast, lunch, and dinner. They just talk about “feasting on manflesh.”
Their names follow the same lines, and have the same problems. Gorbag – blood-bag. Shagrat – ratscrewer. Not Captain Blood or Sonrapist. Punches are pulled. Comedy lingers.
If I had to guess, I would say that Tolkien just did not want to wallow in the kind of thinking that would make the Orcs really horrible – although I’m not at all convinced that he could have come up with any solution that would work. You really have to look hard at his letters in this case. In them, Tolkien makes it clear that after his experience in WW I, he is averse to viewing the Germans as cardboard villains, and very suspicious of a government that makes them seem so. Likewise, he makes it clear that LOTR is not an allegory for WW II or the Cold War, for much the same reason. And so, we can guess that his training and his dealings with the British military during WW I were likewise distasteful if not horrible by their proximity to the horrors of the trenches. And so, the language is, if anything, sometimes similar to that of British staff sergeants in WW I, and cleaned up. Because, maybe, going back fully to those days for extended periods of time would be just too painful.
Having said all this, however, we should remember that, wittingly or not, effectively or not, Tolkien is making a point here. The language of the Orcs is all too easily translated to the language of a military gone wrong – as in Cambodia and the Congo. It is hard, especially with the military defense of beloved Rohan on the horizon, not to see much of LOTR as somehow making war seem a matter of grand armies, strategy, and individual gallantry. When it comes to relating his LOTR combat to our world, Tolkien is saying that we are not as far from the Orcs – all of us – as we think.
Remember when Sam returns to the Shire, staying with the local constabulary? All he hears is “a lot of Orc-talk.” We laugh, knowing it is quickly disposed of. Maybe we shouldn’t. Tolkien may not have portrayed it effectively with his Orcs; but he knows what he’s talking about. He paid his dues in WW I.
And on we go, forward to the Ents.
Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings Like You’ve Never Heard It:
- The First of a Series of Ramblings About JRR Tolkien
- Part II. Pre-Psychology Writing, Poetry, and a New Hero
- Part III. Torture, Enlightenment
- Part IV. Weather, Mushrooms, Leaders
- Part V. In the Moment, Sam the Obscure
- Part VI. Folk Songs, Master, First, Fair
- Part VII. Hiking, Curses, Noble Language
- Part VIII. The Hiker’s Extrasensory Writing
- Part IX. Torture, Elves, Endings
- Part X. Your Highness
- Part XI. Business Meetings, Dwarves
- Part XII. Horns of Wild Memory
- Part XIII. Ecstasies of the Dwarves
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