Book IV, Chapter 7: Journey to the Cross-roads & Chapter 8: The Stairs of Cirith Ungol
This was a stretch wherein I read a couple of the editions of The Two Towers from my shelves. For Chapter 7, it was the volume from Betsy’s boxed set purchased freshman year, so she could have a set too -- the cover is a lovely but ill-chosen painting, John Howe’s depiction of The Witch-King at Barad-dur. We have of course not come to Barad-dur at all in this book, and I can’t help but think that the publisher chose it as feeling “epic” without any consideration that depicting, say, the Witch-king leading his army out of Minas Morgul would have been just as good and much more appropriate. Anyway, I held off until that scene of the Witch-king, myself, since it’s the most meaningful I can make that cover. :-) I had intended to read that copy for both chapters, but I made an interesting discovery with my Second American Edition copy of TTT -- not all the leaves have been opened (see an example of this here: https://www.antiquers.com/attachments/zz-jpg.108423/), which means that no one, even when the book was first purchased, read this copy all the way through. Remarkable, eh? Anyway, the unopened leaves make an appearance in the final two chapters of the book, which I’d intended to read in that edition, so I moved it up to Chapter 8. This is incredibly tedious, why am I narrating it for you, who would read any of this in the first place? Anyway, they’re the last copies of TTT I needed to get into the mix. On with the actual text, which is I presume the only reason to read a post.
At first glance, Chapter 7 doesn’t seem to offer us much -- there’s no particular conflict, no new characters, and the anxieties are just the long-running ones we’re accustomed to, mostly involving hoping nobody sees them and getting irritated that Gollum has disappeared again. But I think there’s actually a lot going on under the surface here that impacts us as readers. Part of it is the very thing I was just talking about -- the long-running background anxieties. For us to be prepped for the much more thrilling events at the end of this Book, I think it’s important for us to understand the desperation of the hobbits -- the fear of being seen pushing them to accept Gollum’s path through a horrifying tunnel, and the irritation with Gollum’s disappearances slowly building until we get the last painful break between Sam and Gollum that sets in motion what was almost certainly inevitable. I also think that the painstaking depiction of Ithilien here is important -- most of the “evil places” they’ve seen so far are just wastelands, the boglands of the Dead Marshes, the arid desert of the land near the Black Gate. But this is clearly a rich and verdant land that is falling into shadow -- the animals have been driven out, the air is getting heavy, and there’s a sense of unease that’s almost physical permeating the countryside. I think it’s not too big a stretch for us to think of the Shire -- surely Frodo and Sam, when they pause for a breath, would do so. Tolkien wants to remind us that the touch of evil corrupts the good -- that it’s not as simple as knowing that the ugly places are bad places, but rather, that, to quote a proverb people should probably remember all of, “a bad apple spoils the barrel”. Even empty, it’s not possible for Ithilien to remain as it was, under the influence of Sauron’s cruel domineering will.
The timing that Tolkien has laid out for the various journeys in the book allows for Frodo and Sam to be present at this awful issuing of the Morgul-army -- behind them, the rest of the Company are well into the events of Book V, and have provoked Sauron into hasty action. Tolkien definitely establishes the scene well, and it’s nice to see how subtle but clearly different the Frodo/Ringwraith dynamic is now. The Witch-king pauses, halting an army of, what, thousands? Tens of thousands? And he gives his attention to the Ring, which could easily have broken Frodo, a few hundred miles ago. But the narrator tells us that Frodo’s will cannot be commanded that way any longer -- even as his arm starts to comply with the command, his will refuses it. I do wonder what would have happened in that moment -- a Frodo wearing the Ring whose will remained strong enough to resist a Nazgul might well have done some terrible and powerful things there in the Morgul Vale. We’re doubly lucky, then -- lucky that Galadriel had equipped Frodo with both a cloak and a phial of light, and lucky that, as the narrator tells us, the Witch-king of Angmar is now “in haste. Already the hour had struck, and at his great Master’s bidding he must march with war into the West.” Aragorn and Gandalf have successfully pulled off the diverting of Sauron’s attention -- we’ll come back to them in a bit to see how -- and the effect is to clear just enough of the pass of Cirith Ungol to allow the Ringbearer through.
There’s a sweet interlude here, of course, where Sam and Frodo talk on a meta-level about stories, how they work, whether or not they’re in one, and if so, who the hero is. I like their exchanges, in particular the point at which Frodo notes that in a really good story, the people in it don’t know how it will end, and that you as the reader/listener don’t want them to. Tolkien’s leaning hard on the idea that you don’t know if you’re in a story where these two will survive and triumph, and of course that’s important to what comes next. It’s one thing to feel the sadness of Samwise at the end of TTT even while knowing how the story will end -- it’s another to at least try to forget that, and to feel the pull of a story in which you don’t know if the folk involved are doomed. After all, Sam’s mention of Beren is a pretty interesting one here -- Beren does storm Thangorodrim, of course (not without help, particularly from his wife, Luthien), but he nearly dies getting the Silmaril, which is then ripped from his body by Carcharoth, who bites off his whole hand that holds the gem, and Beren will ultimately die in fighting the creature and securing the Silmaril. It’s not the most cheerful of stories -- although few Elvish legends end in undimmed joy. They’re a melancholy folk -- maybe functional immortality makes that inevitable? Anyway, I do like how Tolkien is not so subtly telling us that we really need to read the Silmarillion, here -- thumbing his nose at his publisher a little bit -- by noting that the tale they’re in is really a part of one of the “great tales” that has never yet ended. Well, you do need to read it, folks -- Beren and Luthien live through multiple fairy tales and a Viking saga or two, and Beren dies twice before he’s as old as Aragorn is right now. But the point of all this, anyway, is to get them talking -- about whether Frodo or Sam is the hero of the story, and then Sam jokingly asks whether or not Gollum thinks he’s the hero. Tolkien’s use of irony is pretty solid here, I think -- the foreshadowing of Sam’s heroism will be paid off so immediately that we’re likely to forget all about the foreshadowing regarding Gollum, who will of course in the end be the only kind of hero he could possibly have been.
The scene that follows is one of the proof-texts, of course, for Frodo/Sam shippers, and I am not here to stand in the way of anyone’s fun. I do of course think that anybody who knows anything about John Ronald Reuel Tolkien will know that he didn’t entertain for a minute the idea that Frodo and Sam could have been in love, let alone desire physical intimacy (not even his lovers, like Aragorn and Arwen, seem to desire such things). Luckily for us, though, Roland Barthes killed the Author in 1967 and now we’re all free to do whatever we want, without regard for authorial intent. The problem for me is that, while I don’t have any desire to persuade anybody of my reading, I just don’t think that Sam putting his arm around Frodo (or telling him to lay his head in his lap -- yes, yes, I hear the middle schoolers snickering) reads as romance to me, even suppressed romance. The two of them are engaged in a herculean task, and they have gone hundreds of miles together. Sam is deferential to Frodo both by custom -- his status as Frodo’s “servant” whatever that means in the Shire class structure -- and by personality, since Sam is self-effacing almost to a fault. He knows that his Master carries a burden that is nearly intolerable, and he feels pretty deeply the injustice that it falls to Frodo to bear these pains instead of to any of the heroic types they’ve met on their journey. So he’s committed, body and soul, to seeing Frodo’s errand succeed, and to protecting Frodo at every step of the way -- and in that context, it makes sense to me that he wraps an arm around him to act as a sort of Gollum defense mechanism, and that he offers even himself as a sort of pillow in this rough, stony landscape that doesn’t provide much in the way of physical comfort. If there’s anything even a little salacious about that impulse from Sam, the text doesn’t give it to us, as far as I can see -- again, because I think same-sex attraction is so far from Tolkien’s thoughts that he’s not even conscious of how potentially horny the moment is for Frodo and Sam, and therefore we don’t get even a description that rejects sexual attraction, let alone contemplates it. I certainly wouldn’t be offended by a reading of the moment that takes at least Sam as falling in love with Frodo, though, and if anybody wants to present their case for it, I think you should go wild in the comments.
The moment I find most moving here, anyway, is not between Frodo and Sam exactly. It is Gollum finding them asleep, wrapped together in that embrace of either friendship or romance, and his being moved by what he sees. I think this reinforces for me that, whatever Sam may or may not be feeling inside, what Gollum saw was friendship -- and that in reaching a hand out to Frodo’s knee, he’s not yearning for some long-lost romantic connection (I mean, shippers, go to town, but I’m not going there myself), but rather he’s envisioning, maybe for the first time in a long time, what it would mean to be connected to someone in friendship. In Frodo he sees someone strangely kind to him, someone who might understand the weights on his life and the strains he has endured over the centuries. As a creature whose only relationships have been negotiated ones for a long time -- agreements with Sauron (who he intends to double-cross) and Shelob (who he will indulge for now) and Faramir and even these hobbits -- I think he must be aware, if only briefly, of some forgotten place inside himself where that kind of relationship based on respect or even love is possible. The light in his eyes changes, and even though the Gollum within looks back up the pass at the tunnel to Shelob’s lair, it’s clear that his inner Smeagol is ascendant here. What if Frodo had woken up first, I wonder, and spoken a word of peace or welcome to the fragile creature before him? Was there enough light left in that withered old soul that some other outcome was possible? Maybe not, I think -- the power of the Ring was so overwhelming. And yet, with the support of friends, Bilbo and Frodo endured it -- I wonder if Smeagol could have managed to leave Gollum behind?
We can’t know, of course -- Sam wakes first and speaks to the Gollum he sees, reaching his clawed hands out at Frodo. I don’t want to blame Sam, who has been provoked plenty by Gollum, but I do think there’s a caution here -- as heroic as Sam is to us, Sam without Frodo’s guidance would have slain Gollum in the Emyn Muil, and have drowned (or come to worse fates) in the Marshes, weeks ago. I think Tolkien is intentional in showing us that even justifiable anger can wreak havoc in a person’s life -- which is not to say the novel argues in general for pity of all things evil as a principle. But I think it’s clear that the impulse towards mercy and forgiveness towards even traitors is one the novel is willing to defend. Sam regrets his harsh words, of course, but Gollum is all raw places, all wounds -- it’s not really possible to touch him with apologies, which only seem to inflame him further. A lost opportunity, then, although like I said, I’m not sure that even in the best of circumstances there was a chance for a redeemed Smeagol here.
In the end, he’s not redeemed, of course, and with gleaming eyes Gollum bids us forward, you and I -- into Shelob’s Lair and the penultimate chapter of The Two Towers, Book IV, Chapter 9.