Book VI, Chapter 2: The Land of Shadow & Chapter 3: Mount Doom
One of the things I’ve gotten to notice in this slow, close read of The Lord of the Rings -- which, yes, has lasted forever, most of the Company who was with me for the first posts are now long gone, but not you, dear reader -- is how intricately some of the elements in the story fit together. Gollum’s fatedness is affirmed again and again, even now, after his treachery. I mean, why did Frodo have to wait an hour for orc-armor in Cirith Ungol, only to ditch it out here in the sloping foothills of the Ephel Duath after only a page or two? The armor didn’t do him any good! Ah, but as we learn a few pages later, Gollum picks up the armor and puts it on -- this serves the dual function of throwing off the scent for trackers trying to hunt down Frodo and Sam, and ensures that Gollum survives a bowshot that might otherwise have killed him and prevented his being there at the very end. I don’t know that Tolkien wants to sell us on determinism, per se -- I hope not, at least. I read it more as his conviction that even the evil arrayed against us has a way of creating opportunities for the good: maybe the same impulse that seems to have brought feuding bands of orcs together around the hobbits, producing lethal arguments that provide opportunities for escape?
I like also the ways in which he can play now on our knowledge of the events of Book V -- the wind pushing back the clouds and shadow after the Witch-king’s death, for instance, and the chance it gives Sam to look up into the night sky and see a single star. “The beauty of it smote his heart,” as the narrator tells us, and kindles some hope again in him. I found this really identifiable -- I took up backyard stargazing in earnest after the 2016 election, and found that looking up into the impossible distances of the night sky was really comforting in a way I find hard to articulate. The narrator tells us that “the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty forever beyond its reach.” I think that’s part of it, for me -- the comfort that these moments are indeed passing, and that there is much beyond any of us at work in the universe (whether we read that purely materially, or metaphysically). I think we can’t let those moments call us to inaction, of course -- “why do anything since all this life is just a passing shadow” would be an awful message to derive here -- but I think Tolkien avoids that pretty easily. Sam has this thought in the middle of a wilderness he is walking into, probably to his death, out of a desire to fight that Shadow and end it. He’s taking all the action he can. Under the circumstances, his willingness to give himself a little hope and consolation is a good thing, I think.
Now, if you’ve been reading all my posts, you know that I have been complaining since Book IV, Chapter 1, that nobody apparently ever gave Frodo any kind of instruction about getting into Mordor. So perhaps your attention was grabbed, as mine was, by a brief conversation in Chapter 2 wherein Frodo mentions to Sam that he was shown a map of Mordor once in Rivendell. This might seem at first to be a counterargument to my feeling that Elrond and Gandalf dropped the ball here, but frankly I think it just makes things worse. We could MAYBE have sustained the argument that little is known about Mordor, which explains the absence of any instructions for Frodo about how to get in. But they had a map. Maybe it wasn’t a great map, but still, you’d think they’d have made a copy (they were in Rivendell for WEEKS, y’all) and tucked it into Frodo’s pack. Maybe with arrows pointing at good access points? Frankly, Frodo seems to have been told very little even at the time, and no provision at all was made for him getting across Gorgoroth. Thank goodness for hobbit pluck (and a lot of good fortune).
As referenced in my last post, hobbits seem to benefit from orc-squabbles, and this sure is another example, isn’t it? Sam and Frodo get dragooned into marching with a band of orcs whose eyesight is apparently so poor that they don’t notice how terribly un-orc-like these two figures are by the side of the road. And then, just as Sam fears they will be discovered, they run into the dumbest orc fight yet -- literally an inability to follow simple traffic rules or else a serious case of road rage -- and manage to scramble to freedom while orcs actually draw blades and try to kill each other over the question of who gets to go down the road first to fight as cannon fodder in Sauron’s ruinous war. Wild. Their enemy confounds himself at basically every turn, in fact, since shortly after this escape, they are forced to tramp down an open road towards Orodruin, but Sauron’s gotten skittish, and “even in the fastness of his own realm he sought the secrecy of night, fearing the winds of the world that had turned against him, tearing aside his veils,” and thus he provides the empty road and the cover necessary for the Ringbearer to expend his last strength in reaching the Sammath Naur.
It really is an expense, of course -- the conversation with Sam where he strips off his orc-gear is really heavy emotionally. Sam gets emotional about the loss of his cooking pans, etc., and I’m sympathetic -- it’s hard not to imbue objects with that kind of emotional attachment, especially given all that Sam’s had to live through, and carry them through. And then the agony, given how dearly Sam loves Frodo, of hearing Frodo admit that he cannot really remember even a sweet meal they shared together only a week or two ago. That all is lost to him, even the memories of trees and flowers, the light of the moon and the stars. “I am naked in the dark, Sam, and there is no veil between me and the wheel of fire.” How heart-breaking for Sam -- I think it’s clear to him that Frodo will never recover, and in a sense of course he never does, even despite the eucatastrophe that’s coming. What a burden to bear. No wonder it nearly breaks Sam psychologically, since on the next page he has yet another Tolkien echo, and one Jackson wasn’t brave enough to attempt -- a Smeagol/Gollum conversation in which Sam argues with his own voice over whether determination or despair is the right response to the grief he’s laboring under. It’s a genuine struggle for Sam, but he comes out the victor: “His will was set, and only death would break it.” It takes that kind of will to do what he does next -- to carry Frodo, although Sam is working on close to zero food and absolutely no water, and then to crawl beside him up to the Cracks of Doom, which luckily are accessible via a road, since there’s no “Sammath Naur, next right” road sign and, again, nobody told Frodo anything about what he was supposed to do when he got here. As a reader, I feel their weariness here, and the weight of the Ring becomes intolerable to me also -- when Frodo pleads with Sam to help him, and Sam has to wrest his hands away from the Ring to prevent a disastrous failure, there’s a weird desperation in my heart too. And then after Gollum jumps at them and Frodo stares him down with incredible power, I feel the awfulness of that last statement to Sam -- he looks at his friend as if from a great distance, and says farewell. He is walking to his death. Whatever we might say about Frodo’s failure at the last -- and I’m about to say it -- we have to also give him this moment. He leaves behind everything, even the person he loves most in the world (in my opinion), to save the world, though not for himself. There’s a power there that none of the novel’s other heroes, not even Gandalf or Aragorn, can achieve.
And now we’re finally here at the Sammath Naur -- the Cracks of Doom -- for the final confrontation over the Ring before its utter destruction. Ted Nasmith does a fine job of illustrating the climactic moment. http://tolkiengateway.net/w/images/0/06/Ted_Nasmith_-_At_the_Cracks_of_Doom.jpg Gollum survives for this moment, of course, because Samwise has one final outburst of pity and mercy for the creature, just minutes ago, after Frodo took leave of them both. As Gandalf wisely predicted back in the study at Bag End, these acts of mercy have opened a pathway for Gollum to serve a valuable purpose. I mentioned that moment of triumph in the last paragraph for Frodo because I think it’s important that we preserve that memory. Of all who came in close contact with the Ring, he’s the only person who had the resolve to take it to this place. But in the end he fails also, and that’s important. The desire for dominion is addictive -- one that is not easily cured. And so here, mere steps from the completion of his quest, he cannot go through with it, and he puts the Ring on. It takes Gollum, leaping forward in a blind fury and literally biting the Ring (along with a finger) off of Frodo’s hand to thwart whatever would have happened next. This is such an important moment that I want to unpack it in several paragraphs, and I guess you’re along for that ride (thank you again, I cannot imagine how there’s still a readership for these posts).
First of all, as a reader, I cannot emphasize enough how glad I am that this happens to Sauron. There’s emotional complexity here for Frodo and Sam and Gollum, but I just want to keep my gaze on Sauron right now, because in this moment the Ring is suddenly revealed, inches from the flames of Orodruin and Sauron’s utter destruction. If Frodo had just dropped the Ring in, Sauron would have died instantly, and he’s done far too much harm for that to be satisfying. But since Frodo puts it on, for just a few minutes we get to enjoy Sauron’s sheer, scrambling, pants-soiling terror -- you can imagine him bellowing at the Nazgul in a voice that runs right up into a shriek that they have to come back damn it come back come back right damn now holy hell he’s in the mountain it’s in the mountain come back come back. Sauron has, for thousands of years, ensured that innocent life is twisted and destroyed, and I don’t feel badly at all knowing that he went into oblivion petrified out of his crumbling, grasping mind.
Secondly, I have to say, Sam’s mercy in sparing Gollum is ultimately an act of kindness to himself and to Frodo as much as it was to Gollum. Envision this scene, after all, if Sam had dispatched Gollum with one swipe of Sting’s blade. When Frodo puts on the Ring, and the Nazgul are sweeping back to assail him, only a few outcomes are possible, and Sam understands them all -- Frodo weak enough that the Nazgul seize the Ring from him as they tried to do at Weathertop and the Fords of Bruinen, dooming Frodo and all of Middle-earth to the slow torture of the years. Frodo strong enough that his will commands the Nazgul to serve him, overthrows Sauron and imposes on Mordor and Middle-earth his own dominion, with a more smiling face, maybe, at first, but ultimately corrupting until Frodo becomes a Dark Lord in his own right, and the world suffers under his rule also. Or else the last chance -- Sam scrambling forwards with his last strength, driving his legs underneath him to hit Frodo (if he can guess where, in those few moments, the invisible hobbit may have gone) and drive his body, bearing the Ring, off the precipice and down into the flames below. Even if Sam could have done this and saved himself, we know he would not have allowed it -- that in making this choice, he would make it for the both of them, and in the flight of that final plummet he would have held his master in one last tearful embrace, to the end. I don’t know, myself, whether Samwise Gamgee loved Frodo Baggins too much to do that, or too much not to do it. But his love would have been the final governing choice -- the last hope of Middle-earth. And that would have been a way to end the story -- maybe even a powerful one, a story we would return to again and again because we need sad endings also. But the young reader in my heart is grateful that Sam never had to make that choice.
Lastly, we have Gollum -- what a life he lived, invisible for almost all of it, and yet so crucial to the course of life in Middle-earth. Had Deagol not lost the Ring to a skulking Smeagol, who knows where it would have gone and what would have come of it? But instead it fell into hands that wanted to take it into the darkness, and so the Ring went, lost for centuries beneath the Misty Mountains. Had he and the Ring not been beneath the Misty Mountains, Bilbo Baggins would never have escaped the goblin hordes -- the unlucky 13 dwarves would have languished in Thranduil’s prison, Smaug would have remained entrenched at Erebor, and when Sauron started to stretch forth his power, there would have been no easy alliances to make between Elves and Dwarves. And of course there are the countless ways Gollum made Frodo’s arrival at Orodruin possible -- navigating the Dead Marshes, finding a way through Ithilien and up to the stairway of Cirith Ungol that only Gollum knew to share with them, it seems. Gollum is no hero, in the end, and yet the quest might well have foundered without him -- it is his lust for the Ring and his gluttonous delight in having found it that sends him over the brink and into the fire, and for that we have to be grateful in some measure, even as we acknowledge how unfortunate those impulses were. Back at the study in Bag End (yes, AGAIN), when Frodo first heard of the Cracks of Doom, Gandalf told him he would have to cast the Ring into Orodruin, if he truly wished to destroy it: Frodo replied, “I do really wish to destroy it! . . . Or, well, to have it destroyed.” Of course in the moment this is merely hobbit humility and prudence, Frodo’s feeling that the Ring should be destroyed but that surely more capable hands than his should see it done. But it’s hard for me not to see it as foreshadowing too -- that Frodo would genuinely wish to destroy it, but that ultimately he would have to see it destroyed by another’s hands. As Frodo says afterwards on the quivering slopes of Mount Doom, “But for him, Sam, I could not have destroyed the Ring. . . . So let us forgive him.” Indeed.
Barad-dur, which until now we have only heard mentioned ominously but never really seen, comes crashing down in a splendidly detailed paragraph that provides the sights and sounds greeting Sam and Frodo as they exit the Sammath Naur. Frodo and Sam start to talk about the end of the world -- this is a sweet moment, but it’s one that they will revisit in just a page or two, and this post is already incredibly long, so I’ll leave it until then. Next time, my post will take us to The Field of Cormallen, and from there to Minas Tirith where we can observe the interactions of The Steward And The King, in Book VI, Chapters 4 & 5.