Devilry of Saruman - LOTR: An Author's Journey, Bk 3 Ch 7

Hello and welcome to MythMakers. MythMakers is the podcast for fantasy fans and fantasy creatives brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy. My name is Julia Golding. I'm an author but I also adore Lord of the Rings and I have been reading my way through Lord of the Rings taking an author's look at what's going on and we have reached in two towers, chapter seven which is the one called Helm's Deep. Now what is going on in this chapter? Well there falls into two parts. The first is the journey to Helm's Deep and then the second most involved part is the battle and one of the questions I want to focus on here is the question that any author faces is how do you write something as complicated as a battle with action going on in lots of faces on the battlefield and we're going to be looking at Tolkien's use of metaphor and similarly as a way of capturing that particular battle. So the first section we're on our way to Helm's Deep. Note here that there's an interesting point of view that Tolkien used to start with. He actually has a combined point of view, the host that are joined together to reach Helm's Deep and the way it's written is for shadowing some of the things Tolkien does particularly in the battle of Pellano Fields and that is it's very close to the poetry that he will later use to recount the battle which is done as if it is written by a bard of Rohan. What do I mean by this? Well just have a look at the second paragraph right at the beginning of this chapter. He uses the tradition of a literative verse here and it's sort of just bubbling away underneath the sentence structure. You'll hear it if I start reading. So he writes the host Rohdan need to drove them fearing to come too late they rode with all the speed they could pausing seldom, swift and enduring with the steeds of Rohan but there were many leagues to go. You could slightly rearrange those words and put them into the verse form and it'd be very close to the kind of poetry that we later see. So you've got speed, swift, steeds all those sort of s sounds and you've got those sort of short sentences, the host Rohdan need drove them. Those are the kind of patterns that I echoed in the poetry of the Pellano Fields section. Anyway here it's written as prose but you can't help but hear it when you're reading it in your if you are able to read so that you can stand up the words. It's very evident and of course if you listen to the audio versions it will pop out of how it is spoken and you'll see what I mean. The first little gloss that you might be interested in which is an unusual word. I don't remember anywhere else in Lord the Rings and that's the word Biffelwack which means a camp without tents. It does seem a word that is quite modern not used to seeing it in middle earth but actually when I dug into this it's actually a Swiss German word which then went into French so it's got this sort of done that journey. So there's a passage here just after the section break about shadows and this is a very interesting passage because shadows in Tolkien's world are usually either the sign of the bad or the sign of the ambivalent so we've got both of those here. So we've got a sort of darkness coming from the east, a heaviness and a darkness from the east. We've got something similar coming from the wizard's veil which is associated with Saruman but then Gandalf who knows what's going on in deeper ways than anybody else. He asks what he can see in the shadows and Legolas gives a poetic description of these figures he can see in the shadows. It is as if the twilight under endless trees were flowing downwards from the hills. So that's a hint of the allies of the Ents who are the horns, H-U-O-R-N-S and is evident from the way they are described by tree bids that they are not always on the side of mankind or elf kind. So they're also in this shadowy shades of gray area and it also is a way of connecting this part of the story of course with the Mary and Pippin part of the story. So we're getting a hint of what's going on there but we don't know. Then that is one of the techniques all this use is you delay the gratification, you raise the question but you hold onto the answer so people read on. So we can imagine that there's something going on with tree bid and the Ents and the horns over in the wizard's veil but we don't know what at this stage. The journey on the way to Helm's there is some beautiful bits of natural description and one of the things that I wanted to highlight here is part of Tolkien's style and some of the things that make him a particularly fine writer is by saying let's stop and admire the clouds with him. He gets many occasions when he's talking about sunrise's sunsets but what he does is he always makes them different so I think he has noticed he has stood in his garden at Northmore Road he has stood on the top of one of the buildings when he was on fire watched during the Second World War where when he's walking with his friends before the time of writing that and he's noticed the difference. So if you want to write good descriptions of nature make sure not when you're sitting at your computer or writing with a pen when you're out and about that you are actually noting down exactly what it really looks like so let's admire his clouds it's described like this a somber canopy with great billowing edges flecked with dazzling light so no lazy generalisation here about you know clouds like cauliflower's that kind of stuff he has seen it noted it and put it down but it also of course has the ominous aspect to it which fits with the mood that he's trying to create what they see in the distance is a mountain called three here which is from Old English we're in a world where Rohan language is predominates and that's Old English which means three cornered it's a three-peat mountain and coming towards them we get the drama and he's given quite a bit of space in the narrative of a single horseman coming towards them it's sort of in the it's like some sort of epic filmic moment as he comes towards them across this plane with the sun setting behind him and so on this moment i think is was transferred in the film to arrogant if you remember they've added in a whole kind of little extra adventure for arrogant perhaps they felt there wasn't enough happening to him where he falls off a cliff and then he gets rescued by the horse and then he rides towards Helm's deep and those wide shots with arrogant on his horse which is why they want to do that to sort of locate the place and give it the epic scale is actually given to this single survivor of a battle at the forward survival anyway there is a brief account of what happened at the forward survival and if you want to read the larger version of this just look in the unfinished tales where the strategy behind the leaders of Rohan is actually explored in much fuller form we're also told that part of the Rohan culture of fighting isn't just cavalry charges it's described here that they used a shield wall a shield wall is literally shields held in a wall so the front people hold the shields in front the next row behind put the shields over the top to protect their heads and the person in front of them and this is something which is associated with the Anglo-Saxon tactics for fighting so they're not always on horses they are sometimes on foot as would have been an Anglo-Saxon fighter someone like King Alfred so one of the interesting things at this point is the hopelessness that is felt by Rohan it feels battered it feels like it's losing and we know that much of this was written in the forties when perhaps talking himself was feeling something very similar about the mood about the wall in England at the time but in that darkness the presence of the king acts as a sort of light a return of hope and the king in this case is said and the of course he's also with the greater king aragorn as well whose return does similar things to ministerous and to gondol we also get hidden heroes in this chapter there is clearly lots more behind this than Tolkien puts into the book which is why the unfinished tale has quite a large section which never made it into this part and the person who sort of specifies this really or represents this is Erkenbrand Erkenbrand if you've only watched the films you won't know who on earth Erkenbrand is his name is from old English and possibly it is from Erken which is like Arkenstone remember the the Hobbit stone means precious and brand means flame and the notes say that Tolkien briefly considered it as a name for aragorn that of course it wouldn't fit with aragorn's origins if they went for an old English name but you can see why it would be attractive precious flame and this Erkenbrand gets a lot of time being discussed in his absence but yet only really appears on stage as it were very briefly so he's one of those hidden heroes the person coming with this message from the defeat at the uh Fords of Eisen is called Seal now Seal isn't really a name it's a social rank and it means a Freeman someone who isn't one of nobility but it's used as though it could be a name which I imagine lots of people have just read straight past but it's actually more saying he's just an ordinary soldier this message from Seal precipitates Gandalf suddenly taking off again this is where if you've watched the film you'll think he says something dramatic about on the third day you know look for me at sunrise done of that is here he doesn't give a timeline he just says you go to Helmsteep I've got other things to do and off he dashes and his departure is one of those lovely poetic moments that we're getting in these chapters in fact reading these closely have made me realise just how much poetry there is hidden underneath the prose here so here it is even as they looked he was gone a flash of silver in the sunset a wind over the grass a shadow that fled and passed from sight you have to now turn to the unfinished tales if you want to find out exactly what he does because we learn from that that he goes to Eisengaard and spends 20 minutes there we get a sort of version of this later from Mary and Pippin but there's a sort of longer form version of it in the unfinished tales so Gandalf going is a bit of a shock to everybody and we get a moment here where Tolkien is dipping into I think his knowledge of Shakespeare because we get something very familiar from plays like Henry V where you get the voices of the ordinary soldiers discussing the doings of the great ones and in this case it's an unnamed guard speaking to Hammer who your remember is one of the main movers back at Meduseld the man on the door and the guard is fearful but Hammer defends Gandalf Greyhame and he says I will wait until I see Gandalf again he's not judging the outcome like the other guard is but it's that little moment where you see into the host we were talking about the host being like a collective we have now focused on some of the feelings going on in one part of that okay so now we are reaching Helm Steep we get quite a long description involved description of Helm Steep and that's important I think for the seriousness with which Tolkien takes the whole idea of battle plans and strategy because if we've laid it out to us we can then follow the various moves that later follow as the waves of the attack happen it's like a military survey with little poetic flashes in it for example within the survey you get the idea of there being crow haunted cliffs which obviously if you were purely military you wouldn't include this is one of the chapters where they Tolkien is trying to calculate distances and there is apparently a contradiction between what the map shows and what Tolkien is working on in terms of his own calculation as to how far how many leagues there are the distance in Tolkien's calculation isn't as big as the distance on the map so sometimes there are little discrepancies but anyway you get the sense that the the important point because obviously we're in a fictional world the important point is the remaining forces under Erkenbrand have been scattered and so they don't know how many there's going to be and who's going to make it back to the base Helm Steep we do get an odd sentence here which always will strike a modern reader as being a bit bizarre which is Aragorn and Legolas went now with Emma in the van Emma is presumably still with Gimli behind him van is short for vanguard slightly unfortunate I think might have been better having the whole word there and as they are approaching Helm Steep we get a look over the shoulder to what's going on behind and here we get one of those moments of the terrible beauty of war that Tolkien excels in he talks about the enemy torches being like red flowers and Thierden says they are burning as they come ric caught and tree and those of you who know the films well will recognise this as being transferred to air wind in the film but here it's actually Thierden who says it and so they are retreating knowing that the land behind them is being well subjected to a scorched earth policy so we get a second enjoyable little cameo here of another character who comes to represent the ordinary soldier this is why we got Henry the fifth in our mind in this chapter and that is gambling the elderly fighter and he is the one who tells it straight is manning the outer defenses and he's saying we haven't got enough people and those that we do have are too old or too young but he says it like this most of them as the fighters have seen too many winters as i have or too few as my son's son hat here again this is a line which Peter Jackson's team moved over to somebody else and it's lovely to have it back in the mouth of an ordinary Rohan soldier because he's still defending even though he knows that it's pretty hopeless he is still defending and they go on begging up Erkenbrand in this discussion in a way Erkenbrand is one of the dogs that doesn't bark in this story i feel that with all this time giving Erkenbrand he perhaps at some point Tolkien thought he was going to be a bigger character it feels as though he should be he does appear as we'll see but he's uh i it's sort of odd that he doesn't really have more of a role but anyway what is clear though is the defiance of gambling who says to Theroden and his followers that he is going to defend if they come to bargain for our goods at Helmsgate they will pay a high price so that sort of turning into a haggle sort of black humor of the situation that he's picking up there so we've been spending a lot of time in this chapter in the host in the minds of Rohan people the king the ordinary soldier and it's time to check in on our heroes and Tolkien does that by going to Legolas and Gimli discussing the merits of the fortification which they find themselves we also get a reminder of their cultures because there is mention of the the bow and the axe and that bow and axe combo is now going to be one of the main things referred to during the battle that follows so it's set up nicely here we probably don't need reminding but it just underlines how they both would proceed in a battle so the question here for an author who's about to fight a battle at night how do you control the narrative and what Tolkien is showing here is a masterclass in how to describe it in waves in stages so you'll see through the metaphors I'm going to pick out and sometimes it's as similarly how he does that anyway so we get the enemy is at hand so this is a tidying up of all the reports coming in from all the different sources it's given as a unison report this is though it's amalgamated in HQ so the enemy is at hand they said we lose every arrow that we had and filled the dike with orcs but it will not halt them long already they are scaling the bank at many points thick as marching ants but we have taught them not to carry torches so it's a joint report from the people right at the last exposed flank who are now retreated behind the walls and so we get here the first of the metaphors that come into this which is the idea of the enemy being so numerous that they're like a swarm of ants and the other way talking controls what we see is we see it by having the blackness there it kind of shuts down most sensory options and then he reveals like dramatically suddenly in flashes because he has a thunderstorm which he brings on that's the sort of you know the atmospheric even more pumped up by having thunder and lightning and rain but you get glimpses of the enemy not long surveys and he continues with the idea of them being like a massive invading insect insects because you've got a description of the space is the battlefield area boiling and crawling with black shapes so it's definitely this idea of a horrible horrible invasion of insects but then he switches it is one of the switches of a lexical switch he makes and he moves from talking about them as individual insects to talking about them like a great field of corn the idea of it being a whole a unitary like an awful harvest that has come to their door he he says this the men of the mark and may he's looked out as it seemed to them upon a great field of dark corn tossed by a tempest of war and every ear glinted with barbed light that ear there is the ear of corn and he's able by using this metaphor to move from a sort of invasion of ants that's going everywhere to suggest something which is actually more regimented more standing in rows literally and and following a single order it seems to it moderates from the confusion of a insect invasion to a field of corn which is still vast but it is also still and it gets the idea that they are poised waiting in this chapter the first moves in this battle are made by the enemy again in the film again dramatic license of course they can the first arrow is shot from an ill-disciplined member of the Rohan defenders nothing like that here the men of the mark are quiet they hold their fire until the moment when they are ready to reply when they're within range of the weapons and so after the initial attack from the enemy then at last an answer came a storm of arrows met them and a hail of stones so Rohan is much more disciplined in this version than in the film version so we've had insects we've had corn and then the imagery changes again it changes to the sea so we're working our way through sort of elemental forces and this is the most powerful this is the wave which literally a wave which is the most forceful and this is where he's talking is creating the idea of it being a really powerful enemy this this is the enemy they waved broke and fled back and then charged again broke and charged again at each time like the incoming sea they halted at a higher point if you just look at that sentence it's in towards the end of page 138 in my edition you can see that there is a mimetic quality about the sentence so the punctuation gets there's sort of short sub clauses and then a longer one like a sweeping in off of the waves going higher as you read it you're carried on the momentum so I read it again they waved broke and fled back so that's the retreat and then charged again broke and charged again and each time like the incoming sea they halted at a higher point so it sort of sweeps forward after describing the battle in terms of these great forces you have to focus on the actions of individuals to get any grasp of what's going on and the action here moves to arrogant and airmer who are fighting together there's a nice little simile about arrogant as he runs to deal with problem it talks about him running like fire it sounds a bit like the flame on a fuse to a bomb so it's that kind of idea that he's shooting along to have an explosive encounter with the orcs at the very gates of Helm's deep and we get the two swords unshived of course arrogance and duel but we also get airmer's sword which is called goose winner and that's another old English word which basically means battle friend so they're coming to deter the people using the battering ram or trying to attack the gates they are echoed by what's happening in the weather around them a keen wind was blowing from the north again arrogance from the north the clouds were torn and drifting and stars peaked out and above the hills of the coombside western moon road glimmering yellow in the storm rack so the the overwhelming clouds are breaking up and there's a sort of subtle echo of the little activity that's been going on at the gates there's a final bite in this attack though and airmer almost goes to meet his maker at this point because some orcs have been playing dead and they jump up and it's only the hidden presence of Gimli who is their backup though they didn't know it who prevents them killing airmer and he shouts Baruch Kazad Kazad Imenu it's not glossed here but apparently that means axes of the dwarves the dwarves are upon you so Kazad meaning dwarf Baruch presumably axes but it's quite nice that you get these little wall cries with no explanation whatsoever but they sound right don't they anyway he saves airmer and then that gives us a chance for a little banter which Gimli does with airmer and then he carries on Gimli does with Legolas in their the game of how many they're managing to kill that thing that was carried over into the film but here it's used as a way of marking the passage of time in the battle so you get the human or the dwarf touch here to remind us that battles are about the individuals fighting them so as this battle progresses we're still in the enemy as the elemental force of the sea here but it's not going so well in some ways they are like a relentless storm battering but they're also losing lots of their own number and the image here is that of shingle in a storm so we've got a storm going on it's all very it's all fits together before the walls foot the dead and broken were powered like shingle in a storm ever higher rose the hideous mounds and still the enemy came on so they're still like the sea battering away at Helm's deep we get changing groupings in this battle which is part of keeping it fresh keeping the our interest so after having airmer and aracorn as a fighting pair we've now and Gimli and Legolas we now get an unexpected pairing of gambling and Gimli which is great fun because they go to head off an incursion amongst the horses and to mend a weakness in the walls which is under this culvert which some of the orcs have have crept through this wind of work if we hadn't already got an idea of what gambling is like earlier so the ground for this was set as they approach Helm's deep earlier in the chapter Helm's deep has now moved from being described as a a castle at Nistel it's now described as a island in the sea carrying on this extended metaphor of it being battered by seas and aracorn understandably as are many of the other fighters is weird by it all and he says this is a night as long as years and again thinking about the moment when this was written it does feel like some think that somebody might have said if they were on fire watch during World War II watching the rooftops of Oxford as Tolkien would have done to check no fires were or no bombs were being dropped to start fires but he also must have done night watches like this in World War I when he was much more in the front line of battle himself but it's a I think it's good to remember the the cost and the strain of war and that's what Tolkien never forgets and there's a pause here where gambling who is our old Rohan man fills in on some of the politics of the Dunlendings who are amongst the orcs who are attacking those of you who have watched the the film that came out about War of the Rahirim they involve the Dunlendings from earlier on in the history of Rohan but we do get here the only word of Dunlendings speech that's in Lord of the Rings and gambling says it it's the word for oil so if you want to make a really hard quiz on Lord of the Rings that you can use that one what's the only word of Dunlendings speech for which seems to be a term for abuse for the people of Rohan and gambling says that they are there the Dunlendings because that is an old hatred Saraman has inflamed just look at the history of modern warfare and you'll see that despots can use existing fractures in existing resentments and bring them back to the hot heat of fire again that's what Tolkien would have observed going on in Europe of course during Second World War and here it's used to give this sense of what's going on in the politics of this battle more reality really it's not just a hold of fantasy creatures there is also human agendas that have got mixed up in the mix and I think that always makes it feel a thicker more realistic world arrogance hope that the day will bring new hope does seem to be false because it's very rudely interrupted by an explosion probably not the first time you've heard that Saraman is noted for his use of what seems to be gunpowder bombs fire fireworks of that sort I suppose to the friendly fireworks at Gandalf stands for and it is called by Aragorn devilery of Saraman now devilery seems a bit of an odd word in a middle-earth world which doesn't really do the theology so much but there is also this idea that it's a form of translation so anyway we get the idea that it is demonic it is very dark arts to use this kind of weapon cowardly perhaps in because it's not a sort of one-on-one fight which is the way our heroes are fighting and the explosion is the last of the great sea images that we get in this battle and it's the very very high point over the wall and under the wall the last assault came sweeping like a dark wave upon a hill of sand so I've really been watching the the rise in power of one side by nature the other side descends and so from being an island in a rock how steep is now a sand castle very fragile surely it's going to fall and add to the excitement of this chapter she's full of action and full of set pieces of little skirmishes here and there we get Aragorn in peril but he shows his courage because he responds to his own personal danger to deciding to go and talk to the the enemy hold a parley he speaks first to Theoden who is held in reserve he's protected up in the tower and the king is determined to ride out and he says but I will not end it here taking like an old badger in a trap it's very much in the spirit of this is my final throw he's not actually like a kind of almost suicidal bid and Aragorn first of all before we reach that point we'll go and see what words will do and he goes and talks to the people beyond the gates this particular scene is very well done in the BBC audio version of it from the 80s if you want to hear a dramatic rendering of it and he says the words you do not know your peril which seems at this point like a form of bluster because Aragorn doesn't really have anything to back up this threat with but it also turns out to be prophetic because as he is saying that other forces are mustering behind the enemy to cut them off and he ends up that the great sea of enemies becomes surrounded by a three pronged assault so we have Therden riding out as he promised he would do we've got the arrival of the horns who we saw right in the distance early on in this chapter we don't know at this point but they've been summoned by Gandalf and they've cut off the retreat and the only other way out finally finally Erkenbrand we spent a lot of time anticipating he and his people have been rounded up by Gandalf and they cut off that retreat and it is truly a majestic moment when they all come out together so I'll just read a little bit of that helm helm the riders shouted helm is a risen and comes back to war helm for Therden king and with that shout the king came his horse was white as snow golden was his shield and his spear was long at his right hand was arrogant and lendils air behind him rode the lords of the house of the old the young light sprang in the sky night departed so great drama out they sweep and the enemy who want to flee are brought face to face with something which is just quarter a nameless wood forests and woods are the things which scared our ancestors this is and of course it seems to be there by wizardry it suddenly appeared but the darkness under the wood is understood to be a threat and so that they are forced to go into what is a primeval terror and they don't want to go of course so the enemy is now back to how it started but much weaker they've gone back to being like insects the enemy is now packed like swarming flies so do you remember they were invading like ants they're now swarming flies and they've changed from the scale of being elementally strong like the sea to being tiny little creatures who can be swatted I suppose and then we get Erkenbrand and his men on foot arriving no it's not a cavalry charge so forget the film this is people coming on arriving on foot no doubt with their shield wall intact and with them is a rider plaid in white with the rising sum behind him so Gandalf making a dramatic entrance with the light behind him and here we get talking really indulging in wonderful rhetoric of battle he uses a strategy here called anaphora which means a repetition so here we get it I'll read that bit and you'll see what I mean listen for the word down down through the breach of the dike charge the king's company down from the hills the leaped Erkenbrand lord of westfold down leaped shadow facts like a deer that runs shorefooted in the mountains so they're coming at the enemy from all sides so you would have thought that maybe we end replies but no talking has to get one more similarly to dispel to get rid of this enemy and it's a similarly where they're compared to being like a black smoke they've become insubstantial and the last thing we hear about them is wailing they passed under the waiting shadow of the trees and from that shadow none ever came again end of chapter so how to write a battle control your imagery see how talking move through different groups from insects to elemental to ears or corn to the sea elemental forces and then retreats back again to it being flies and finally smoke keep the element humanizing element going by checking in with your main characters but also with the soldiers and also lay out the battlefield when you're in a building like that or a sort of castle complex make sure you can the reader can follow where the different encounters are happening so that you don't lose track of a vast battle because you can see where the key assaults are happening I do think it feels like a chapter written by someone who's been to war and I think that gives it added now poignancy but also reality so that is the first of the big set piece battles in the two towers and the next chapter will see us on our way to ison guard to find out what's been happening there thank you for listening thanks for listening to myth makers podcast brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy visit Oxford Centre for Fantasy.org to join in the fun find out about our online courses in person stays in Oxford plus visit our shop for great gifts tell a friend and subscribe wherever you find your favorite podcasts worldwide this episode is brought to you by progressive insurance do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash progressive makes it easy just drop in some details about yourself and see if you're eligible to save money when you bundle your home and auto policies the process only takes minutes and it could mean hundreds more in your pocket visit progressive dot com after this episode to see if you could save progressive casualty insurance company and affiliates potential savings will vary not available in all states