Book III, Chapter 3: The Uruk-hai
One of the things I’ve enjoyed most on my journey so far is rediscovering Merry and Pippin -- or really I should say, confirming the memory I’ve held for a long time now that they’re more complex and meaningful characters in the novel than Jackson really has room to develop in the films. (Jackson also has a trademark sense of humor that Merry and Pippin are really made for -- before I get any hate around this, to be clear, I do love Dominic and Billy in these roles, and I get the same joy out of their antics that y’all do: I just think their characters are better served by the novel, myself.) This chapter is therefore tailor-made for me, since it is the first of a couple of chapters in the novel that really let Peregrin “Pippin” Took shine as the hero he is meant to be. And, of course, in Pippin fashion, it begins with his own self-deprecation and self-doubt -- waking up groggily on the back of a loping Orc, and saying to himself, “What good have I been? Just a nuisance: a passenger, a piece of luggage.” Pippin’s so down on himself he even questions whether he should hope to be rescued, since really Strider (as he still calls him -- a sweet touch, to me) and the rest of them ought to be focused on more important things. We as readers, of course, know how important he and Merry are to their companions, but Pippin begins in self-doubt.
What he then accomplishes -- without much help from Merry, poor soul, who’s badly injured and out of it for most of the chapter -- is nearly as remarkable as the chase of the Three Hunters, given the circumstances Pippin is working under. Let’s observe the pieces here of what this plucky little hobbit manages to achieve. He keeps his head during a frankly terrifying quarrel between different Orc bands that ends in mayhem and homicide (orcicide?), and manages to seize the opportunity not only to cut his bonds but then to carefully rebind them tightly enough to avoid suspicion but loosely enough to be undone when the time is right. As he later stumbles, drunk on some horrifying goblin-liquor, down the path they make through the grass of Rohan, he is able to keep his head well enough to recognize that Aragorn would be unable to track him in this stampede of footprints, and then to find the right opportunity to dash into the open and leave behind the one token he could manage to drop. There’s a really lovely mirror effect here -- Pippin drops the brooch while thinking to himself that there’s no way anyone will find it, or him, in time to save him, and later the Three Hunters will find the brooch while thinking to themselves that there’s no way they’ll catch up to the hobbits in time to save them. And yet both their efforts, taken seemingly in vain and without hope, but done out of a refusal to give up, help to achieve the reunion they think of as impossible. Tolkien likes this sort of story -- and I do too.
We’re not done with the brilliance of Pippin, though: when, in the confusion of the attack by the Rohirrim, he and Merry are searched by Grishnakh, Pippin is able to almost immediately realize that Grishnakh is seeking the One Ring, and he turns this entirely to his advantage, deceiving Grishnakh in carefully phrased mumblings that persuade him to take truly risky action. This at first seems like it backfires, but in truth it’s hard to figure out how they would have effected an escape without capture or death if Grishnakh hadn’t dragged them into the forest. And I have to say, the last thing Pippin does that impresses me is really subtle -- even though he’s saved Merry’s life (and his own in the bargain), he’s not pushy about it at all. He doesn’t seem to expect any particular praise for it, and when Merry insists on taking the lead into Fangorn, on the strength of his having nerded out about maps at Rivendell, there’s not a hint of reluctance on Pippin’s part to yield his role as leader. This kind of pluck -- daring, even cunning, but paired with a refreshing lack of self-regard -- is absolutely typical of both Meriadoc Brandybuck and Peregrin Took, and I’m really looking forward to the roles they both will play in the events about to unfold. Elrond, it turns out, knew what he was doing in sending them along -- though whether he knew it all along (and cunningly engineered their acceptance into the Fellowship much as he engineered Frodo’s role as Ringbearer at the council) or simply got lucky, I honestly can’t tell. I’m growing more sympathetic to the “Elrond knew all along” line of argument, but I don’t know if the text really supports it.
The rest of this chapter is taken up with Orc squabbles, for the most part -- I do understand Tolkien’s desire to use these dialogues to explore the conflicting allegiances at work here, but I’ll admit that I find Orc argument pretty tedious, and certainly the occasional choices of words that add a racial tinge to these depictions add to my discomfort. I appreciate that the Orcs aren’t just mindless killing machines -- that they have, at a minimum, some intelligence and ambition, and that they’ve got a certain amount of freedom to make choices -- although I do wonder if Tolkien thought them through as well as he should have. I fear there’s a mistake here along the lines of the most recent Star Wars films, which humanize stormtroopers for us as being at least partially, if not largely, conscripted child soldiers, only to then treat them as faceless cannon fodder when the movie needs a big combat sequence again. If Orcs have wills of their own -- including sufficient freedom to decide whom they will serve, at least between Sauron and Saruman -- then could they have chosen to serve a better master? To make a more ethical choice? I do get it -- this is fantasy, and fantasy generally needs bad guys. The evil forces opposed in fantasy aren’t meant, normally, to serve as plausible depictions of the “bad guys” we see in real life -- they’re representing things that are at least a little more elemental than that, and they make it possible to explore ideas in different ways. There still feels to me like a lost opportunity here -- an opportunity Tolkien will, notably, NOT miss in the character of Gollum/Smeagol -- and I wish it hadn’t gone missing in the novel as a whole (I’m not complaining that these particular Orcs aren’t redeemed, in other words).
Anyway, our time with the Orcs is over (for now) -- Pippin and Merry are darting into Fangorn Forest, depicted here really beautifully by Donato Giancola: http://tolkiengateway.net/w/images/3/39/Donato_Giancola_-_Merry_and_Pippin_in_Fangorn_Forest.jpg If you like this, he’s got a whole book full of really beautiful paintings of scenes from Middle-earth. So, into the forest go our friends, and tomorrow we’ll have the chance to see how it goes when they meet Treebeard in Book III, Chapter 4.