Book VI, Chapter 1: The Tower of Cirith Ungol
This sequence really kicks off Book VI with a bang -- there’s so much happening in and around this Tower. One of the things I really stopped to pay attention to on this read-through was the origin of the tower of Cirith Ungol -- it’s a defense tower built by Gondor, on the eastern face of the Ephel Duath facing into Mordor, since at one time this is how far into Mordor they’d established themselves. This Alan Lee painting provides a good depiction: http://tolkiengateway.net/w/images/6/66/Alan_Lee_-_Cirith_Ungol.jpg What’s puzzling to me, then, is the presence of The Watchers -- why are they here? On the one hand, they could be a presence just from the old Gondor days -- good guys need alarm bells as much as bad guys do, and The Watchers don’t seem to do much other than to create a sense of a barrier across the open gate, and then make a sound if the threshold is crossed. But on the other hand, they could be a Sauron renovation -- they certainly seem cowed by Galadriel’s Phial, which so far has had that effect on evil things in particular, and their visages are monstrous in ways that seem connected to Sauron in Tolkien’s work, in general. But it’s puzzling, isn’t it? If they’re a Sauron addition, how could they be integrally tied into the gate’s arch? They seem to be carved out of the same stone, and there’s no moment where either Sam or Frodo notice that they’re out of place, etc., which you’d think would be an easy way to indicate that they’re not of the same age and provenance as the rest of the fortification. But if they’re original Gondorian work, why do they respond the way they do to the magic of Lorien?
This is the chapter, too, where we get the strongest sense of the Ring’s pull on Sam -- it’s funny, but the narrator never gives us this kind of interior view of Frodo’s struggle with the Ring, that I can remember. Frodo’s burden is only spoken by him, and usually haltingly and with great reluctance, whereas we just get to look inside Samwise’s mind: that’s interesting. I know that there’s a tendency for us to smile at Sam’s temptation here -- in a “haha, sweet Sam, offer him ultimate power and what does he want to do with it? Make a beautiful garden, ah, what a kind boi” -- but honestly I think the sequence is much darker than that. It’s a reminder that even our best impulses can be brought to ruin: here we are at Cirith Ungol, a defensive structure built to contain Sauron that is now twisted to his purposes and thwarting those who oppose him. Sam’s fantasy isn’t merely of gardening -- it is of himself as a powerful hero to whom armies flock, whose strength is sufficient to destroy his enemy. Only then does Gorgoroth blossom into flower. This is the kind of temptation Gandalf felt back at the study in Bag End -- will I ever stop tying back to that conversation? Not at all! -- and it’s the kind of temptation too many good folks feel. The lure of dominion over others is dangerous, Tolkien tells us. Even in the gentlest hands, it invites us to take steps that would poison us from within, and all the good we sought to do. Far better to destroy that kind of structure entirely -- to break the gate of Cirith Ungol, to cast the Ring into the fire.
We do get some orc talk again here, but it’s a little more substantive than last time around, and so I found it more interesting and less tedious than before. I will note, too, that as much as I have been frustrated by Tolkien’s lazy racial coding of a number of Sauron’s forces and allied troops (as I have tried to note at least occasionally along the way), I am consistently pleased, at least, that Tolkien doesn’t use some kind of demeaning racial dialect for the orcs. There’s some classism here, I think -- orcs talk a lot more like the cast of Eastenders than Aragorn or Gandalf do, and I don’t think that’s an accident. I don’t want to give him unreserved praise, certainly. But in this era, it would have been easy for him to borrow from pidgin or creole phrases used by oppressed minorities as a way of signaling something about orcs, and I am relieved that this doesn’t occur at all, that I can think of. I like also the way that this scene echoes the scenes with the Uruk-hai -- yet another Tolkien echo -- in which trapped/captive hobbits survive thanks to the fact that Sauron’s accidentally created weird divided allegiances among his orcs by allowing some of them to feel bound to a lieutenant (Saruman for the Uruk-hai, back in TTT -- the Witch-King for Gorbag and his Morgul forces here in ROTK) enough to engage in in-fighting. It’s kind of cool, also, to see Shagrat running away with the items we know will be presented at the Morannon -- we have to imagine all the steps that took place in-between. The bureaucracy of Mordor. Fascinating.
Sam saves Frodo in classic Tolkien fashion -- accidentally, by means of a sweet song about the stars -- and poor Frodo has really been through the wringer. It’s a wonderful twist to see him despairing to Sam about the loss of “everything” only to have Sam fish out the Ring -- and then a particularly troubling second twist to have him respond as the snarling, vindictive addict that Frodo is becoming. I do wish, to return to a subject I raised earlier in the post, that the narrator told us a little more about Frodo’s experience. We do, though, get to look through his eyes as Sam is transformed into sort of an orc-Gollum-creature holding the Ring, and maybe that shows us enough.
One of the more resonant moments in this chapter, for me, is right at the end of their time in the tower, when Frodo insists on Sam having some food and water. He says, “The whole thing is quite hopeless, so it’s no good worrying about tomorrow. It probably won’t come.” Both Frodo and Sam draw this weird strength from the abject impossibility of their situation -- they understand that failure is inevitable, and somehow that moves them to cast fears and worries aside (and ultimately triumph -- spoiler alert). I think there’s a message in this from Tolkien: that devotion to the things we believe in is maybe most important when it’s clear that those things will be overcome. That it’s not until we feel truly defeated that we can release ourselves from the caution that has trapped us, and live as the people we want to be. I’m not sure how far he meant for this analogy to go, or what he thought it signified in a world where wizards do not send us with magical jewelry to distant volcanoes (not yet, anyway). But I think there’s a lot of power in it, personally. I wonder if, on some level, the surge in protest and coordinated action this last month has been a product of the deep despair felt during a pandemic, watching as yet more lives are claimed by malicious police violence in a cycle that seems endless? Is it possible that the hopelessness of that moment freed many people to simply stand and speak? I certainly don’t want to credit the oppressors for this moment -- any more than I want to say “thank goodness Sauron was so evil, it helped Frodo defeat him” -- but I think it’s possible that there’s a kernel of some truth in here. It’s worth thinking about.
Frodo and Sam just keep passing from one danger into another, and will for the rest of their journey -- here they barely triumph over the Watchers before a shrieking Nazgul swoops down to the tower, only narrowly missing contact with them that would have proved fatal, I feel sure. Ahead of us is the long walk through The Land of Shadow until we reach Mount Doom in what will be, I expect, a long post on Chapters 2 and 3 of Book VI. See you there.