Middle-earth Journeys
Tolkien Studies
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March 4, TA 3019
4 March 2006 11:19:18THEODEN AND GANDALF SET OUT FROM HELM'S DEEP FOR ISENGARD
Theoden decides to accompany Gandalf to Isengard for a last parley with Saruman; the wizard has done him great harm and he wishes to see how Gandalf will treat with him in the aftermath of Helm's Deep. Theoden chooses Eomer and 20 men to go with him, and Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli go with Gandalf The ride offers a short respite from battle, and a chance to mourn the dead. Among these is Hama, Theoden's Captain of the Guard, and the King pauses to cast the first earth on his grave. On the way the travelers actually ride through the forest of the Huorns, which fascinates Legolas. He and Gimli engage in an animated discussion of the merits of Fangorn Forest as compared with the Caves of Aglarond under Helm's Deep, and make their famous bargain to travel together after the Ring War to visit these places. As they leave the wood behind, the riders see their first Ents, a foretaste of what they will find at Isengard. At this point, only Gandalf understands what has happened there.
All along the rest of the road to Isengard, the party sees the unrelieved desolation that Saruman has made of a place once beautiful--all that was green and good has fallen to the creation of his battle engines. But during the night hours, Nature begins to take her own back. Theoden's camp beside the ruin of the Isen River lies on the path the Huorns will take back to Fangorn, and their moving shadows and whispered voices pass on either side of the riders in the darkness. The fear that Tolkien's moving wood engenders makes its counterpart in Shakespeare's Macbeth seem quite tame indeed.
FRODO REACHES THE SLAG MOUNDS ON THE EDGE OF THE DESOLATION OF THE MORANNON
Frodo, Sam, and Gollum finally reach the end of the wearying, frightening march across the Dead Marshes, and enter the edges of Sauron's lands. Tolkien describes them with devastating clarity:
Quote:
Frodo looked round in horror. Dreadful as the Dead Marshes had been, and the arid moors of the Noman-lands, more loathsome far was the country that the crawling day now slowly unveiled to his shrinking eyes. Even to the Mere of Dead Faces some haggard phantom of green spring would come; but here neither spring nor summer would ever come again. Here nothing lived, not even the leprous growths that feed on rotteness. The gasping pools were choked with ash and crawling muds, sickly white and grey, as if the mountains had vomited the filth of their entrails upon the lands about. High mounds of crushed and powdered rock, great cones of earth fire -blasted and poison-stained, stood like an obscene graveyard in endless rows, slowly revealed in the reluctant light. They had come to the desolation that lay before Mordor: the lasting monument to the dark labour of its slaves that should endure when all their purposes were made void; a land defiled, diseased beyond all healing--unless the Great Sea should enter in and wash it with oblivion. "I feel sick," said Sam.
So does the reader. Into this hell go two little hobbits, tasked with averting the victory of Sauron, which they know will make all of Middle Earth look like this.
Images © "Mist on the Road to Isengard" & "The Black Gate" by Alan Lee.