📖👀 Chapter 2 (📔Book VI): The Land of Shadow

[Rivendell_librarian]

A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Did Tolkien know his Eliot because these lines from The Journey of the Magi are very appropriate for what happens in this bleak chapter. Having escaped the Tower of Cirith Ungol, Sam and Frodo head north in a narrow valley of trench between the Morgai ridge and the Ephel Duath. The direct route to Mount Doom was thought to be too dangerous. The armour is too heavy for Frodo who has to abandon it. In fact, Frodo can only move slowly with the weight of the Ring slowing him down.

The movement of the clouds above them give an indication that the tide is turning against Mordor. Sam sees a white star and its beauty gives him hope in the forsaken land. There is very little water around and so one wonders how the armies of Mordor (men and orcs) survive. Is water brought in tanks along with the food from the south of Mordor: that would be a tremendous task. It could be that the military camps and orc holds they see contain or are close to springs such that Sam and Frodo don't find them. An alternative would be a system of culverts and#or open channels bringing water from the south: again a tremendous undertaking.

Their presence was alerted to by the Watchers and near an orc hold they come across a tracker-orc armed with bow and arrow and a fighting-orc who also had spear as well as bow and arrow. They are looking for them. The orcs argue about the bad news of the Pelennor defeat. We also discover that a Nazgul has taken charge of the Tower of Cirith Ungol. The tracker-orc lopes off, the soldier-orc leaps after him but the tracker-orc puts an arrow in his eye. Sam and Frodo also learn from their conversation that Gollum is following them.

They eventually come to the old castle of Durthang where there is a spring from which Sam fills their water bottle, While he leaves Frodo alone, Gollum heads towards Frodo but fortunately Sam is back to see Gollum off. They decide to risk the path east along the southern edge of Udun but are found by an orc troop from Durthang seemingly going to the north gate. Given the timing how does Sauron know that the Middle Earth Expeditionary Force will head to the north gate rather than the Morgul Vale? Did he use the palantir? In the gloom Sam and Frodo fall in with the orcs though Frodo especially finds it hard to keep up. Fortunately, at the point where various paths meet other bands of soldiers meet and in the confusion Sam and Frodo slip away from the road into open land. Frodo is forgetting what the Shire looks like and is instead seeing visions of a ring of fire.

 

[TrackerOrc]

Obviously one of my favourite chapters; seeing good old Tracker Orc in action almost brings a tear to your eye, though there are a couple of points I've wondered about.

Is Gamgee just the most relentlessy violent little hobbit you can imagine? Just a glimpse of poor old wretched Gollum and 'he longed to get his hands on its neck'. Violent and rude to boot, as he knows quite well that PowGollum is a person and not a thing.

And the whole being caught up with the Orc troop thing never sat well with me. We've seen just how exhausted Frodo is simply walking next to Gamgee, yet he manages to set off 'at brisk trot' for 'some miles'? This has never really worked for me - maybe it was Tolkien piling on the suspense but it falls too far on the wrong side of unbelievable for my taste.

 

[grendel]

A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

"It is wisdom to recognize necessity, when all other courses have been weighed, though as folly it may appear to those who cling to false hope. Well, let folly be our cloak, a veil before the eyes of the Enemy! For he is very wise, and weighs all things to a nicety in the scales of his malice."

Thus spake Gandalf at the Council of Elrond, and it immediately came to mind when you mentioned folly. My goodness, that Tolkien could write! That phrase "scales of his malice" is sheer bloody poetry!

 

[Rivendell_librarian]

"It is wisdom to recognize necessity, when all other courses have been weighed, though as folly it may appear to those who cling to false hope. Well, let folly be our cloak, a veil before the eyes of the Enemy! For he is very wise, and weighs all things to a nicety in the scales of his malice."

Thus spake Gandalf at the Council of Elrond, and it immediately came to mind when you mentioned folly. My goodness, that Tolkien could write! That phrase "scales of his malice" is sheer bloody poetry!

Yes some nice alliteration as well with scale and malice, and this is a great example of how Tolkien makes connections across the story.

 

[Rivendell_librarian]

Obviously one of my favourite chapters; seeing good old Tracker Orc in action almost brings a tear to your eye, though there are a couple of points I've wondered about.

Is Gamgee just the most relentlessy violent little hobbit you can imagine? Just a glimpse of poor old wretched Gollum and 'he longed to get his hands on its neck'. Violent and rude to boot, as he knows quite well that PowGollum is a person and not a thing.

And the whole being caught up with the Orc troop thing never sat well with me. We've seen just how exhausted Frodo is simply walking next to Gamgee, yet he manages to set off 'at brisk trot' for 'some miles'? This has never really worked for me - maybe it was Tolkien piling on the suspense but it falls too far on the wrong side of unbelievable for my taste.

Well you could argue that with Gamgee it might be bluster. If a suspect says "I could kill X" they often aren't the guilty party named at the end..

There are some deus ex machina bits in Tolkien. All the orcs killing each other to enable Sam to rescue Frodo yet we have seen how well organised and cooperative orcs can be in the siege of Minas Tirith and Helm's Deep. And these two sieges count against the idea that orcs are cowards given that if you attack a strong stone built castle it is the attackers who are at a disadvantage and will likely suffer greater casualties.

 

[Rivendell_librarian]

Another interesting feature of this chapter is the smaller breed of Orcs having to be whipped by the larger Uruks: has news of the defeat at the Pelennor Fields become well known?

 

[TrackerOrc]

Well you could argue that with Gamgee it might be bluster. If a suspect says "I could kill X" they often aren't the guilty party named at the end..

There are some deus ex machina bits in Tolkien. All the orcs killing each other to enable Sam to rescue Frodo yet we have seen how well organised and cooperative orcs can be in the siege of Minas Tirith and Helm's Deep. And these two sieges count against the idea that orcs are cowards given that if you attack a strong stone built castle it is the attackers who are at a disadvantage and will likely suffer greater casualties.

I honestly think the bloodthirsty little halfwit would kill powGollum in a blink of an eye if he thought he could get away with it, the nasty rude creature.

Orcs as cowards! Good lord what kind of twisted minds could believe that???

 

[Eljorahir]

The Tracker Orc does have a wonderful way with words. I'm particularly fond of:
"Nar!"
"Ar!", and
"Garn!"

 

[TrackerOrc]

He does have a poetry all his own, doesn't he!

 

[Squint-eyed Southerner]

Some notes on the structure of imagery in this chapter:

After passing through the "gates" -- Cirith Ungol and the Tower -- the heroes finally begin their descent (literally dropping) down into Mordor, where the heroic recedes and the demonic increases, taking images from the traditional qualities of Hell: lifeless sterility, unending hunger and thirst, groping in a "blind dark", inhabited by gibbering demons ("hating even their own kind"), and the symbols are those of the instruments of torture: the long piercing thorns become impalement on the stake, Frodo's wheel of fire becomes, like Lear's, breaking on the wheel.

It is here that the contrast with the two incidents of relief are so striking and pointed, both connected in some way with Galadiel, Sam's "Lady": the first answering his prayer for light and water (Galadiel being especially associated with water); the second Sam's vision of the star on the Morgai, cited by RL above:

The beauty of it smoke his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing; there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.

This is an example of what the critic Northrop Frye called the point of epiphany, when "the undisplaced apocalyptic world and the cyclical world of nature come into alignment". There are more than one such scene in the story, but this, to my mind at least, shows it in its purest form.

Of course, as always with Tolkien, every symbolic image has its demonic parody, the obvious one being Sam's Ring-vision at the crest of the Ephel Duath in the previous chapter, but there are others, such as Frodo's vision on Amon Hen, where he sees only images of the churning cycle of the "world below", the demonic counterpart of the white star being the All-seeing Eye of Sauron.

Lastly, Eowyn's 'Where the will wants not, a way opens' is parodied by the orc captain's 'Where there's a whip there's a will, my slugs'.

 

[Eljorahir]

The sights in the high spaces of the air reflect the happenings down below. Also, we finally hear the cry of a Nazgul bereft of its terror. Things are looking up (in more ways than one).

'There was battle far above in the high spaces of the air. The billowing clouds of Mordor were being driven back, their edges tattering as a wind out of the living world came up and swept the fumes and smokes towards the dark land of their home. Under the lifting skirts of the dreary canopy dim light leaked into Mordor like pale morning through the grimed window of a prison...the voice of a Nazgul; but this cry no longer held any terror for them: it was a cry of woe and dismay...The Lord of the Ringwraiths had met his doom..."Things are looking up, Mr. Frodo."'

(An exceptional passage, IMO.)