Book V, Chapter 9: The Last Debate
This chapter involves some significant conversation, but we don’t really get much to illustrate (or any particularly new characters), so I decided it was as good a time as any to dip into the last of my battered old Ballantine editions, which you can see pictured here. It’s also a good moment for them since, for most of my life, I believed that this cover depicted the walls of Minas Tirith -- I think I just internalized that as a kid. I even mistook a little architectural detail, very high up on the wall, as the tiny form of Pippin Took looking out from the battlements. Probably this was because I was so taken with Pippin in Gondor -- as I’ve said, one of my favorite stretches of the novel -- but I also have to say that it’s not Tolkien’s best illustration work (yes, this is the old man himself) and that Ballantine has further hampered things by how it crops the image. Did you spot it right away? I know for me it wasn’t until very recently that I recognized, very very dimly in the bottom left corner of the front cover, a little orange smudge that I realized is in fact lava erupting from a mountain, which makes that Orodruin, and this the wall of Barad-dur, Sauron’s tower. I don’t know why you’d sketch the tower without putting anything identifiably Sauron anywhere in view, and I don’t know why you’d crop the image so that Mount Doom is nearly pushed off the edge (I have since found the original image and it’s a bit clearer -- though still not enough for my taste -- where you are). Anyway, here we are outside the walls of Minas Tirith and so I thought we could get a glimpse of what James’s boyhood brain thought that might look like. Now, on with some commentary.
It’s undeniably amusing to listen to Legolas and Gimli, already chatting like an old married couple despite being best friends for about three months tops, wander around Minas Tirith like house flippers -- “oh, you’d keep the crown moulding? I feel like it needs a much more Bohemian loft feeling, you know, lots of exposed brick?”. There’s some more substantive conversation between them, though, that I think must reflect Tolkien’s feelings during and after the Second World War, as humanity and its frailty had been so clearly displayed. Gimli initiates it, of course, being the more blunt of the two: “It is ever so with the things that Men begin,” he says, “there is a frost in Spring, or a blight in Summer, and they fail of their promise.” But Legolas replies, “Yet seldom do they fail of their seed. And that will lie in the dust and rot to spring up again in time and places unlooked-for. The deeds of Men will outlast us, Gimli.” Gimli reckons that, even so, they’ll come to nothing ultimately but “might-have-beens” and Legolas can hardly quarrel about it. It’s an interesting question Tolkien raises -- are humans up to the task of living ethically and seeing good purposes through to the end? It’s a question our society clearly still faces. Tolkien has his whole world set up to examine the question -- to compare and contrast Elves and Dwarves and Hobbits and “Men” as he calls them like he’s a high school sophomore writing an essay. But even he can’t really reach a conclusion. We admire Aragorn, but will he succeed where his mighty ancestors failed? If so, why? I don’t think the novel makes an answer plain, though of course we will learn more about him as a king in the pages that follow.
Legolas and Gimli fill in the hobbits on events that we have seen partially narrated to us already (and have guessed much of the rest, I think) -- I’d have told Tolkien he could save the page count, but he does at least do some good character work with Legolas and the fulfillment of Galadriel’s prophecy concerning him. He’s heard the crying of those seagulls and he won’t now forget the sea. The kind of wild thing is that Legolas sang about seagulls all the way back in Book III, Chapter 1, in his lines honoring Boromir as they gave his body to the Anduin -- I guess they were then, to him, mythical birds he had heard tell of but never met? It’s a testament to Tolkien’s skill as a writer that now on two occasions he has invested with meaning and magic those winged, yelping beach-rats: clearly he had never been a child at the seaside, bereft of a hot dog thanks to the thieving beak of some voracious and aggressive gull. I guess in flight they do manage a kind of beauty. Clearly they did a number on the unfortunate Legolas, who has literally JUST met his life partner and they’ve already made a bunch of travel plans together -- this is a really inconvenient time to have picked up an unquenchable desire for the afterlife, poor fellow.
The chapter’s titular debate is largely composed of monologues by characters we already know and love, and by characters I mostly mean Gandalf, who is awesome but also never in centuries of existence has grown tired of the sound of his own voice. (Alas, Gandalf, it’s my own flaw also, obviously, as I sit here writing a post almost as long as the chapter I’m describing -- I feel you.) Anyway, it’s been at least ten chapters since the last “what are men to do in such times” conversation, so Gandalf manages to go there on his own without even really being asked -- but I love that he does, since he rings the changes in yet another slightly new way. This conversation is never really over, after all. Gandalf says to those assembled, “it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.” This is of course very close to his advice to Frodo about deciding what to do with the time that is given us, but Gandalf has learned a thing or two since the study at Bag End, and he’s ready to give better and more detailed advice than that. He urges that they focus on the immediate challenge by using the metaphor of a garden -- ah, wouldn’t Samwise Gamgee have loved to be here to hear it? -- and the idea that their work is less about growing good things themselves, and more about leaving clean soil for those who will follow them to grow in. I like that generational element -- and I like his note that they cannot fix (and, implicitly I think, shouldn’t therefore worry about) circumstances like the weather of the future. They can do something about this ground, though, even if it’s tough work, ripping up stumps and plowing up the clay. The last few weeks have felt like that, haven’t they, at least at times? Like we won’t be able to make everything about the world to come better (including its weather, God forgive us all), but maybe we can make it a better place to grow in. I hope we will.
Despite having just won a real victory, and one worthy of a song or two, this is no triumphant meeting, of course. Gandalf’s ultimate advice is that Mordor has barely extended a tenth of its strength and that there’s no way to achieve victory through arms -- all they can do is hope for the success of Frodo’s quest (which, as far as us book readers know, is stuck in neutral high up at Cirith Ungol with Frodo a prisoner and Sam flummoxed to the point of paralysis). For that reason, he advises a hasty strike, doomed to failure if they actually make contact with the enemy, for the sole purpose of distracting Sauron at what may well be a critical juncture. Gandalf advises that they have only “small hope” for their own survival, but encourages all present that even if it’s true, as he suspects, that it is their duty to die bringing about the new age, this is better than to perish knowing “as we die that no new age shall be”. This is a beautiful sentiment but also the worst halftime pep talk in history. No wonder Gandalf’s getting a bad reputation with the locals. :-) Anyway, luckily for Gandalf, the most important pair of ears here belong not to people like Imrahil or Eomer (who, though favorably disposed to the old wizard, might well have blanched at the thought of a suicide mission) but to Aragorn. Aragorn seems to have gotten over his irritation with Gandalf from Book III -- I think in part because at this point Gandalf isn’t keeping any secrets from him any longer (and if anything it’s been Aragorn calling audibles, like his use of the palantir to challenge Sauron) -- and immediately pledges himself to this task. Once that’s done, the pieces come together pretty easily -- Imrahil isn’t going to abandon his new liege-lord and Eomer is star-struck by Aragorn, and basically everybody else here has long been in the Aragorn fan club. It would have been interesting, honestly, to have at least one reluctant voice -- there would have been an actual debate here, which there really isn’t -- and in my head maybe Forlong’s heir (whoever that is) might well have chimed in with some alternative plan. Even though the dominoes all make sense as they fall, this is still kind of incredible -- if they had all perished at the Black Gate, even if Frodo and Sam had survived, it’s not clear to me how much chaos would have resulted in most of Middle-earth, but it would have been substantial and I’m pretty sure they all know it. They’re heroes, though. This is what heroes do -- at least in Gondor, I think.
In my next post, we’ll see that army set forth, and watch as The Black Gate Opens in the final chapter of Book V. See you then.