Book III, Chapter 7: Helm’s Deep & Chapter 8: The Road to Isengard
I have taken the last several days away from posting about my journey -- I’ve tried to use my social media platforms, such as they are, to steer attention in useful directions, since what’s happening right now in the United States is important. It needs to not just be another hashtag and a changed profile pic for a weekend, but to lead to lasting reforms that will end the assault by our law enforcement systems on people of color. My sense right now is that there is momentum in that direction, and I find that heartening. If this talk is bothering you, because you come to my reading of Tolkien to get away from the news, well, friend, you should probably keep on scrolling. Art is political, Tolkien’s no exception, and there is no way for me to give an honest reading about this book that is so concerned with honor and duty and standing for the good even when hope is lost that avoids talking about what’s wrong in my country at least occasionally. So, buckle up.
The situation in these two chapters is a crucial turning point in the life of the people of Rohan -- Theoden is beloved by his people, but let’s face it, he’s been asleep at the switch. He’s bought in to the propaganda whispered in his ear by Grima “Wormtongue” that it’s not possible for someone as feeble as he is to meaningfully resist the growing power of Saruman, who’s been amping up a whole band of bad guys somehow (we never really learn how he created the Uruk-hai, at least not in these chapters and I think never in the novel, definitively). Rohan’s fighters have been outmatched, then, at the fords of the Isen, and as one rider shouts to the King’s contingent as they approach, “there is no hope ahead”. That rider feels ashamed of himself once he sees the King, but Theoden assures him that he gets it, but that things have changed since yesterday: “A west wind has shaken the boughs.” It’s not that hard to draw some parallels here, is it? Plenty of people like me haven’t spoken up enough or done enough in the face of a problem we figured we didn’t know how to solve. We’ve watched helplessly -- or rather, not actually helplessly, but we were conditioned to feel helpless about it -- as local police departments (many of which have long served as enemies of justice, alas, for minorities in their communities: we all know a couple of famous examples from the civil rights era but there are plenty of non-famous examples too) became equipped with all sorts of new equipment and new tactics in the post-9/11 era, a militarizing of local law enforcement that only exacerbated the kinds of problems policing is supposed to help defuse. And though it’s been easy to feel hopeless, there’s a sense right now that a wind is shaking the boughs.
Now, any allegorical read of Tolkien will fail -- he said so himself. But the power of fantasy is in the ways it asks us to re-examine our lives and our assumptions. Some of you won’t be all that keen on my analogizing police officers to the Uruk-hai, and all I can tell you is I’ve seen a lot of footage of police and protesters in the last few days and I have rarely been proud of the conduct of the nation’s police. Before anybody tells me how hard or dangerous their jobs are, landscapers and garbage collectors die on the job more often than cops, and the fact that the jobs of police are hard is maybe why we train them extensively and pay the salaries and benefits we do. It’s also their job, you know, to do this -- no one forced them to do it. If you heard about a high school teacher sleeping with one of his students, I’m sure you’d be completely unimpressed by his argument that it’s hard to resist attractive 18 year olds when they hit on you. That’s part of his job. Well, it’s the job of police to make communities safer and they’re failing at that right now in a lot of communities. Not my small town, at least not right now, and I’m grateful for that. But that’s my point here -- I’m not calling all cops orcs. I’m saying that one of the lessons I’m drawing from The Lord of the Rings is that complacently allowing malevolence to develop body armor and advanced weaponry is bound to backfire, and malevolence has been on display from too many American police for too long now, and especially in the last few days. This is not the “Tolkien hot take” any of you expected four weeks ago -- hell, it’s not the hot take I expected either, folks. I largely take that as a shameful thing, though, that I’ve been reluctant to speak about these issues: I don’t want to give every chapter a “police brutality” reading any more than I wanted to give them a “pandemic” reading, but they’re both going to show up here, and if you don’t like it, you know how to not read something. Crap, where was I? Helm’s Deep, right. There will be engagement with the text here, I do promise you that.
What we love about Helm’s Deep is, truthfully, what we love in any classic sports film. The good guys are in bad shape from the beginning. They’re missing at least a couple of key players -- Theodred (whom we never actually meet) is dead, and Gandalf leaves abruptly and really without explanation (exactly the sort of thing that bothered Aragorn a couple chapters ago, but I guess he’s ready to let it slide). Their aging coach, Theoden, isn’t sure he’s got what it takes. But they’ve got a couple of new players and some strategy they think just might work, and watching them pull it off after being down late in the 4th quarter is pretty satisfying. It is, truth be told, less vivid on the page than in Jackson’s film -- for a number of reasons, he needs Helm’s Deep to carry more narrative weight than Tolkien does in the novel, and he’s got the opportunity in the films to show us the battle differently than Tolkien really can in words alone. It’s a good little segment here in The Two Towers, still, and in some ways it gives me a lift to read it.
There’s a slight tinge of melancholy to Helm’s Deep too, though, which Tolkien did not intend. I’ve spoken before on a couple of occasions about my unease with Tolkien’s orc imagery, which too often lingers on physical features of orcs that are reminiscent of racist imagery deployed against African-Americans. Those moments are not pervasive but they’re certainly not easy to ignore, and they resurface here at times in the battle. Add to that the men from Dunland who fight for Saruman -- they cry out in their ancient tongue against the people of Rohan, whom they call "the robbers from the North” since they came and took the land, long ago. It isn’t hard at all to read them as indigenous peoples, and the people of Rohan as white colonizers, if you really want to. Now, I don’t think that’s the most helpful way to read this battle, personally -- this isn’t about Tolkien taking sides against indigeneity, to me. I doubt he had any take at all on whether it was ethical for Eorl the Young to take Rohan from the Dunlendings, and regardless of whether he did, it’s not the thing he’s pursuing in this moment in The Lord of the Rings. It’s his white privilege being a little too blind to the indigenous experience to realize it’s too potent to be tapped as a simple backstory. For me, as someone aware of these lenses for reading, it’s a tricky thing to navigate this chapter -- to ask myself what the events of the battle mean, since I’m someone who’s sympathetic in real life to minorities who are depicted in unfair ways. Orcs and Dunlendings, though, aren’t real, and aren’t even really intended to stand in for the real. So what I think I want to say here, really, is that this is just a reminder of how important it is for us to read more than one kind of story. There’s wonderful fantasy being written by people who DO want to engage with issues like race and colonialism, and if you haven’t read some, you should -- and I should read more than I do! Helm’s Deep isn’t an especially problematic story on its own, to me -- it’s just that it has the potential to be really damaging if it’s the only telling we get of struggles like this one. And there’s a part of me that really wishes Tolkien had been more willing to explore the complexity of something like the genuine grievances of the Dunlendings.
The narrative for Tolkien is generally one that hearkens back to a lost golden age, and that’s true here also. Theoden says “The world changes, and all that once was strong now proves unsure.” That’s a powerful narrative, but I have to say, it’s one that’s harder to believe in here in the real world, myself -- I don’t really feel like there’s a lot of lost strength, when I look at the changing world. Not on the grand scale. The story that I would tell about my own corner of the world is that the world is changing, and those things that were once weak are becoming strong -- I can see it all over the world’s social media as young people find their voices, personally. But I don’t think Tolkien’s story is in argument with that narrative -- that arc is here too (though less so in these particular chapters) as the Hobbits find their voice and their strength over the course of the novel. I also think there’s a lot that Theoden’s missing in that dark moment, when he laments the loss of the old strength -- since he ultimately charges out of the Hornburg to find unlikely and unexpected allies gathered to his side. Gandalf, the old “Stormcrow”, has returned at the perfect moment, with the lost Erkenbrand and his men alongside him -- and the Huorns, who as far as I can tell had never been driven into battle on Rohan’s behalf like this, are here now at the Ents’ bidding. Theoden could have given up, of course -- Grima’s words whispering in his heart surely were tugging him that way. But his decision to press on despite his lost hope yielded an outcome he couldn’t have dreamed, because he had more friends than he knew. I think that’s a very common message in Tolkien’s writing, and it’s a heartening one for us here in 2020.
Heartening also -- and prevalent throughout the novel also -- is Tolkien’s preoccupation with friendship in all its guises. In these two chapters we find so many wonderful pairings -- Aragorn and Eomer forge a new friendship drawing swords together to protect the Hornburg gate, and then Gimli definitively rearranges his relationship to Eomer from testy to warm as a result of saving their lives in the immediate aftermath. There’s a lot of cheerful competitiveness between Gimli and Legolas in keeping track of their body count -- it’s strange, no doubt, but it’s an example of whistling past the graveyard I think -- and then a much more easy conversation between them about caves and forests on the road to Isengard, in which we can see a lot about both how different these two are and yet how willing they are to bend for each other. Lastly, we get to catch up to Merry and Pippin, who have this wonderfully relaxed partnership in excess, having devoured a ton of food and wine at the Isengard gate -- this moment, bloated with food and smoking/napping happily, is probably where the two of them are most like the movie depictions of them. And then of course, moving beyond pairings, we can see the reunion of the better part of the Fellowship, as the Three Hunters give Merry and Pippin some quips about having chased them across Rohan, and the hobbits can give as well as they get. I find all this fixation on friendship in an otherwise bloody set of pages helpful because I think Tolkien ties it into his themes really effectively. How does a person keep going even after they’ve lost hope? Reaching out to friends -- whether in playful or serious tones, whether they’re just like you or really different from you -- surely is part of the game plan. I don’t know if I ever want to know the feeling of fighting at Helm’s Deep, but I am sure that I want to have the kinds of friendships that Gimli and Legolas or Merry and Pippin have. Having those friendships, and leaning on them a little, has been key to the last few days.
Key also to the last few days, though, has been my conviction that I need to help advocate for the changes that will prevent this awful present from being the future I leave to those who come after me. I’m not attaching any Tolkien art to this post today so that I can draw attention to a link instead -- this is a group I mentioned in a comment on a post a couple of days ago, but I think it’s important to give them a higher profile link here. These protests need to lead to outcomes that will meaningfully address the problem of police brutality, and there’s some great research-based policy ideas coming out of Campaign Zero. If you want to help make tomorrow better -- even if you lack hope that we can really make this difference -- why not join me and others in advocating for change? https://www.joincampaignzero.org/
Okay, well, I’m not saying this is the last of my protest-fueled reads of Tolkien, but I don’t know if I’ll address it this directly again. I hope my words were useful to you on some level -- it was helpful to me to write them. Tomorrow, I’ll move farther into the flooded Isengard to examine what’s here among the Flotsam and Jetsam in Book III, Chapter 9.