And on to the Two Towers. Boromir gets a nice send-off to make up for his role as the weak link in the Fellowship, and the fox oops hobbit chase is on.
A couple of minor things before I launch into a major digression. You may know the story that the publishers decided that LOTR was too long to publish in one piece, and so they broke it into three and titled “Books” 3 and 4 “The Two Towers.” I have never been entirely comfortable with that title.
Let’s face it, Minas Tirith is a better match for Minas Morgul, whereas the tower central to Book 3 – the Tower of Orthanc – is not. And it’s really not an “action” title. The Two Towers: sounds more like a travelogue, doesn’t it? Above all,that’s not what the progression of the story is about, both in Book 3 and Book 4.
I would suggest that you think of Books 3 and 4 as Into the Shadow. Yes, I know that’s too depressing for the title of this middle part of the trilogy – but it does give this part of LOTR the importance it deserves. Slowly, then far more swiftly, we move entirely away from the world of the rest of Middle Earth and into the world of Shadow. We begin (all right, begin the second Chapter) with morning over the plains of Rohan, where live the People of the Morning; and then we move deeper and deeper into a world where Saruman is trying to create a mini-Mordor. Back to Frodo and Sam in Book 4, and we move into the borderlands (but without people) of Mordor for a brief time, then away along the borderlands to where Gondor still has influence, but we are reminded at every step of the encroachment of the Shadow, and then the sky gets darker and darker and we meet and bypass a last reminder of Gondor, Minas Morgul nee Ithil, now wholly “corrupted”, and then we go into a dark tunnel and we break through and suddenly we are in Mordor proper, and we have just enough time to notice that this is a land with people in it, living in endless Shadow so deep as to be called night but in which they live as if in our world of daytime. And then, we stop, before we have begun looking around more, because at this point we have finished going Into the Shadow.
The other minor thing about this first Chapter of Book 3 is that, as far as I can tell, it’s about the only point where we are inside the mind of Aragorn. It may be that it serves to transition us to thinking of him not as Strider but rather as a “high” person. I don’t care; what bothers me a little is that we have to search through quite a bit of the Appendices before we see Aragorn’s back story (something that the movie attempted to compensate for).
So, we feel Aragorn in action, a leader already but alone as he crashes through the trees, and then we see with him as the sergeant gently comforting one of his men, as that man tries to cling to some hope that his life has meaning, and dies. And then we move out of Aragorn’s mind again, and he moves from the role of “substitute leader for Gandalf” and into the role of leader in his own right, and from then on, we see him as if we were his subordinates. A leader who can speak to each follower in his own language, who can both command and sympathize. A leader who has been there and done that. A leader for a world that is never quite at peace – “for after the death of Sauron, other troubles were not slow to breed.”
The difficulty I have, I suspect, is caused by the fact that Strider popped into Tolkien’s mind in his first draft at just about the point that Frodo reached Bree, and then Tolkien had to retrofit Aragorn into the story – and in that story there really was no point of real temptation of Aragorn by the Ring that wouldn’t detract from the story’s main arc.
And yet, I’d like to see a bit more of that deeper Aragorn. There is Aragorn, standing across from the Towers of the Teeth, having led everyone to death before they can ever see the dawning of a new Age. And he turns to Gandalf, and says, “So, this is it, old friend, isn’t it?” and smiles, and then he shouts “Arwen!”, not out of anguish but out of happy memories, and turns back to the hopeless battle. Or back to Hurin, the earliest of his great ancestors, shouting, as he swung his sword against Morgoth’s hordes in a hopeless midnight fight, “Aure enteluve!” – “Day shall come again!”
The rest of what I can say here about Aragorn is pure speculation. We know that Tolkien viewed him as the only Man who had overcome the temptations of Morgoth and Sauron in this world – almost, but not really, a Christ figure who had lived a life without sin. It is possible that Aragorn, at this last moment where he shows fundamental doubt about what to do, is showing us just how he makes decisions, how he avoids temptation. And it is possible that Aragorn does this by asking himself, as I suggested in the last piece, what will I do to help fulfil the meaning of my life? Not, what will get me Arwen, or what will get me the kingship, but how can I act in a manner worthy of a great kingship, of Arwen’s love, of my high understanding of the needs of all people? And also, of course, to feel with ultrasensitive skin the unworldly winds of Fate buffeting him from all sides but always reorienting him towards his destiny.
Now the big digression – Tolkien and names and languages –before we move into Rohan with its language.
It has always seemed to me that in Tolkien there are really just two “foreign” languages: proto-English, and Elvish. Proto-English is taking the names of the European past – Norse like the Dwarves’ names from the Eddas, Frankish like the well-off hobbits’ names, Saxon like the names in Rohan and the names of the poorer hobbits – haemfast, stick-at-home. And there’s a bit of Gaelic vowel simplification in the spelling and pronunciation of Elvish (Nah – ooh – grim, not Naw – grim) – although where he got the idea of the Germanic rolled ‘r’ as being appropriate for Morrrdorrr or Gondorrr I really do not know. But Elvish itself is as if he took all the music of all the languages he knew and distilled it into one simple combination of sounds. If anything, it sounds like ancient Greek triplets, Faramir, Lorien – lindos, beautiful.
And let’s not forget a little Chaucer – “As light as leaf on lind” becomes Nimrodel, “... As light/As leaf on linden tree.” What we don’t see is that much Latin – flammifer, flame-bearer, in Bilbo’s song at Rivendell is the only one that sticks out for me, and that sounds more like French to me.
In fact, if we look at the genesis of LOTR through his son’s republication of his notes and fragments, we see the Elvish names evolve from a more jagged, cruder version to a softer, less caricaturable one: Kor to Numenor, Gnomes to Elves. And, having established root syllables, he could now string them together: Ithilien, Moon-Land, Minas Anor, Sun-Tower.
Back to the other names. I believe that names like Drogo and Fredegar are a sly academic joke. According to the history that I have read, when the Roman Empire collapsed in France and along the Rhine, the Franks –more or less the nearest Goths who had been building up a civilization along the frontiers there – moved in and coopted the Roman bureaucracy. However, the Franks had a real problem with inheritance. Instead of primogeniture, they tried to split up the property among all of the sons. And so, every time the head Frank died, there was this prolonged set of wars as his heirs duked it out, until one of them came out on top.
Enter the mayors.
You see, every Frankish king had a head of household, a mayor – effectively, a head of the bureaucracy, such as it was – who was doing the actual running of things. And the mayors saw their chance in the confusion and the welter of child-kings and started taking over. Slowly, they became kings in fact and then kings in name – and they ended this nonsense of splitting the kingdom equally among the children.
And who were these fussy bureaucratic types who took over while the Frankish warrior kings faded out? Why, Pippin. Drogo. Maybe Fredegar. All those upper-crust squire types who ruled around Hobbiton were jumped-up bureaucrats, playing at nobility and giving themselves airs. And to clinch the joke, look at their last names! Baggins, as in “bag it all.” Pimple. Proudfoot. Yes, sir, these hobbits have a real aristocracy there.
By the way, there’s a good biography of Rufus, who succeeded William the Conqueror, that shows a bit of the origin of some of the other English names of power. The king’s house was a big one, divided into compartments, each with its official, essentially gifted the office through patronage. Chancellor –he was the one in charge of the chancel. Chamberlain – in charge of the king’s bedroom. I’m not sure, but I think the steward was a stew-ward, guarding the king’s stews – his kitchens, his wine and beer cellar. Tolkien may have been making an academic joke about aristocracy, but the justification is there in English history. The Stuarts – Scottish brewmasters coming to rule what was becoming the most powerful nation in the world.
And now we turn to Rohan, which everyone recognizes is drawn mostly from the Saxons that Tolkien clearly loved. Where is the horn that is blowing? You can tell by the Eo sounds, and by the meter of the verse, similar perhaps to the Lay of Beornheoth that Tolkien translated. Eorl. Thane. Weregild. Moot.
And yet, I admit to not being entirely comfortable with lumping the Angles in with the Saxons here. I keep getting the sense that the Angles were different. They came a bit earlier, perhaps. There is less sense here of constant war, of imposed serfdom on the native Gaelic inhabitants (the Romans seem to have been too few to oppress the inhabitants to the same extent).There is a flavor, even from the beginning, of slightly greater egalitarianism.
The Angles settled on the great southeastern bulge of England, and they keep recurring in history. Alfred the Great shook the Saxons into greatness, well beyond their start as yet another set of proto-Vikings –but the Fens of Anglia keep showing up as a place where dissident ideas hid out, where Hereward the Wake ran William the Conqueror ragged. During the Wars of the Roses, Ely on the Fens was the gatepost to the ferment of ideas in the Low Countries. During the English Civil War, Cromwell roused the whole area in support of “the least he has as much to say as the greatest he,” and what C.V. Wedgwood called “the idea that every man had a right to find his own way to salvation by hard, unaided wrestlings of the soul.” Charles II then split this dangerous English Army out across the globe to the Americas, and yet it may have provided crucial support to Whig Shaftesbury in the Glorious Revolution that cemented forever the loss of monarchical control. And the Puritans, a surprising percentage from around that area, formed the basis of the religious ferment in the American Northeast in the early 19th century, not to mention the initial impetus for the Revolutionary War.
Why does this matter? We have wondered why Tolkien seems to glorify the idea of the destined king, like Aragorn. In the Saxon side, the Oxford side, where Tolkien gravitated, that is indeed a long tradition. In the Anglian side, the Cambridge side, at the same time, there was less monarchy in its past and more scientific ferment – Watson and Crick. It seems of a piece – Tolkien’s distrust of Anglian Americans, his love of the heroic Saxons, his feeling at home at Oxford. Tolkien is never so simple as to worship kings blindly. Rather, he is trying to convey a sense that kings are appropriate when they are “high kings.” And yet, he is slightly predisposed to a more positive view of “responsible” monarchy, because he worships Saxons. Not Angles.
And so, we can feel viscerally Tolkien’s love of the Rohirrim in a way that we cannot feel his love of, say, Gondor or the hobbits, in his love of their cadences, their language, their code of honor, shared by men and women alike (yes, there are warrior women in Saxon history, not merely the long-ago Gaelic Boudicca, cf. Bernard Cornwell’s latest series; and if Lady Godiva was anything, she was Saxon, cf. Dorothy Dunnett’s King Hereafter). The horses seem a bit more Norman; but I understand that the idea of the fighting saddle may have been introduced from France right at the start of Saxon domination. In any case, there’s no real joke in the names, as there is for the hobbits. It’s all in the names; it’s all Saxon proto- (i.e., the beginnings of) English.
One final thought about names; I suspect the English are a bit more comfortable with the Orcs’ names (Shagrat, Gorbag) than Americans are. To American reviewer Edmund Wilson (Ooh , Those Awful Orcs!) it may have seemed of a piece with “Persian” fantasy, in which the evil Muslims face off against noble Christian knights, and Shagrat no doubt seemed a bit like Sargon of Akkad or the Shahs and Ahriman in the Book of Kings. But, thanks to Austin Powers, we now know what “shag” really means,don’t we? Rat-screwer. Garbage bag. It’s still a bit of an in-joke by the English.
In fact, if you look carefully, Tolkien does a bit of role reversal in his few bits of Dwarvish. Baruk Khazad! Khazad-dum. Remember the Khazars of the mysterious Orient? Tolkien is making Dwarvish sound like “Persians.” This isn’t the Crusades. It isn’t The Arabian Nights. It isn’t even Calormene in C.S. Lewis’ parallel Narnia fantasies. There are good Persians out there, Persians with far more culture than the hobbits.
I will add one more thought that struck me just now, as I prepared this piece for publication. Remember the funeral song of Boromir? Asking the North Wind, the West Wind, and the Wind from the South about Boromir’s actions? In my area, the North Wind is the wind of winter. The West Wind is the wind of spring and autumn. The South Wind is the wind of summer.
What would the North Wind say of what it saw of me, all the winters of my life? How would it sum them up? What would the West Wind say of my springtimes? What would the South Wind say of the blazing heat of my summer days? What would the West Wind say as the promise of each spring fades in the fading days of autumn? O Western Wind, when wilt thou blow/That the small rain down may rain/Christ, that my love were in my arms,/and I in my bed again (anon)
What would the winds say of your lives? Write a poem if you dare.
And on to the plains of Rohan, and the first Orc nightmare.
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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