Chapter 11: A Knife in the Dark
There’s no denying that my attention in this recap is drawn to the end of the chapter -- to Weathertop, home of the ruined watchtower of Amon Sul, which is the focus of basically the entire journey in the chapter and which serves as backdrop to a brief but awful encounter between Frodo and the Witch-King of Angmar. Jef Murray’s painting here is a nice illustration -- http://www.jefmurray.com/gallery/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/12_02_485_Amon_sul_enh_800.jpg -- I don’t know Murray, who seems to have passed away a few years ago, but this is a nice take on the rolling terrain that surrounds Weathertop closely. Anyway, I’d like to get there, but I want to take a moment or two on some other subjects first.
As was alluded to in the comments on my Chapter 10 post -- the subject of race and Tolkien was raised very thoughtfully by Patrick Hutchins and I responded as well as I could -- there’s a lousy moment early in Chapter 11 here, and I want to acknowledge it rather than sweep it under the rug. Tolkien, for all his good qualities (and he’s got more than a few), had some lousy qualities too, and one of them is having never really examined his assumptions regarding race -- or, if he examined them, he never confronted them as directly as he should have in print. His books do not read, to me, as fatally racist -- this isn’t a Lovecraft situation, in other words -- but there’s no way to deny that he allows the racial assumptions of his audience to guide his depictions of suspicious characters. In the case of his departure from Bree, it’s a passing reference to the “sallow face with sly, slanting eyes” of the “southerner” hiding in Bill Ferny’s house, who has almost certainly aided the Nazgul in their search and is maybe responsible for at least much of the mischief that took place at the Prancing Pony overnight. There’s really no excuse for it and we don’t need to make one -- Tolkien could have done better, and I wish he had, since it’s like biting into a lemon (or worse) every time I hit one of these, which fortunately has not been often.
I love the harmony that develops between Strider and the hobbits almost immediately -- hapless as they sometimes were without him, they seem to be spurred into resolve by his leadership, and he in turn seems to trust them more with each step. When he asks them how much they can carry, after the loss of their ponies, it’s Pippin and Sam who speak up right away -- good signs, I think, that it’s our resident joker and the guy who was most suspicious of Strider last night who answer the call most immediately. Over the course of the journey to Weathertop, sure, he has to slap their hands occasionally -- disrupting talk of Mordor on more than one occasion, and tweaking Pippin’s nose just a little when he complains about short cuts by laughingly pointing out that with Strider, a short cut will actually get you where you mean to go -- but he also includes them in conversation the whole way about what he intends to do and why. He’s showing them a lot more respect than he has to -- it’s frankly very interesting to me that, when he takes Frodo and Merry up to the heights of Weathertop and finds the strange stone, he shows it to them and asks “what do you think of these marks?” Sure, maybe it’s just Strider testing the hobbits to see how keenly they can observe, but I don’t think so -- I think he is genuinely considering how to interpret what he’s seeing, and would like to hear other opinions. Later, when they realize the potential danger they might be in, he responds to Sam’s suggestion of flight by genuinely engaging with it: he admits that he has the same instinct but then walks through the explanation of why there isn’t much of an alternative to standing their ground. He blames their being spotted on his own foolishness rather than seeing it as the hobbits’ fault. Strider is showing them a very humble, self-effacing brand of leadership -- confident, of course, at times, when he’s proud of his skill, but certainly not in a self-centered way -- and it seems to bring the best out of them. My memory was that they’d grumped a lot more about the pains of travel but their complaints are really very few and pretty reasonable.
I know I groused about Tolkien’s poetry before, but it does bring out some lovely stories -- I can’t say that I think the poetry that Strider chants is wonderful, technically speaking, but the tale he tells is a magical one. Luthien Tinuviel is one of Tolkien’s finest creations -- if you haven’t read The Silmarillion, I’ve got to say, she is a tough, brave, powerful elf who puts everybody in The Lord of the Rings to shame with both her daring and her success. This is a lady who went toe-to-toe with Sauron, tossed him aside, and then worked her magic on Morgoth, Sauron’s boss (effectively), to save the mortal man she loved. There’s all sorts of resonance here if you know the story of Aragorn and Arwen (from the films, of course -- it’s better documented in the Appendices in ROTK than it is integrated into the narrative of LOTR itself), since Luthien was the first elf to choose mortality for love of a human. I do love that moment, too, where Merry wants some ancient elven lore, and when Strider doesn’t supply it, suddenly Sam bursts into song about Gil-galad. It’s great to see a dimension developed in Sam other than dogged loyalty, and his passion for the Elves, which had seemed like childish enthusiasm in Chapter 2, is starting to come across as a deeper, more well-informed admiration for them as a people.
The confrontation with five Black Riders is more rushed than I remember it, and here’s another way Jackson’s films had clouded my memory -- I’d half-remembered that they fought the Nazgul on the top of the hill and started to wonder during the chapter what could possibly motivate them to head up there. It turns out, of course, that nothing does, and that the encounter takes place in this little dell on the northern side of Weathertop. The speed of the “battle” is important since it explains how it unfolds -- Merry and Pippin, despite being brave fellows (Merry certainly showed it back in Bree), find themselves cowed by magical means instantly, and Sam doesn’t fare much better. Strider doesn’t realize that Frodo had slipped into the realm of the Ring until it’s too late -- he surges over to defend the hobbits, but by then Frodo has already revealed himself as Ringbearer to the Nazgul, attempted to slash the apparent leader, the Witch-King of Angmar, by the foot, and found himself pierced by an evil blade. Despite his best efforts, it’ll be hard for him not to think of this as a failure, but he’s got to shake it off and get Frodo to safety. That’ll be tomorrow’s task, in our Flight to the Ford for Chapter 12.