Not Asleep, Dead - LOTR: An Author's Journey, Bk 4 Ch 10

Hello and welcome to Myth Makers. Myth Makers is the podcast for fantasy fans and fantasy creatives brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy. My name is Julia Golding and today we have reached the end of The Two Towers. We have reached chapter 10, The Choices of Master Samwise. So it's been a long journey through the very darkest parts of the borders of Mordor. And finally, Sam gets a chapter all to himself. So we will continue to read The Lord of the Rings, looking at it from the point of view of the choices an author is making. And this is certainly a whole chapter about choices. So when I was thinking about this chapter and rereading it, it struck me how this is possibly the most emotional and the most dramatic chapter in the whole of The Lord of the Rings. is even more riven with grief and emotion than even the battle scenes and so on. You'll see what I mean when the space that is given in it to grief is very important to the punch that it leaves you with. You're left reeling in the same way that Sam is left reeling as they take his master into Mordor. So let's look at how it starts. It's clear that on the first time of reading, we aren't to know that Frodo survived. The way that Tolkien sets this up, he's holding back the information that Frodo has survived by using things like referring to Frodo's body, the spider, the spider-like creature, is seen wrapping up the body and half dragging that body away. So Frodo is objectified in the sense that, yeah, it could be a dead body. We're thinking about Also note here that Tolkien is always playing on the edge that this isn't purely a spider. It's a spider-like creature. It's a monster. And I've been rereading this week his interesting essay on the monster and the critics. That's his famous essay about Beowulf. And I think there's an interesting lessons to be learnt about the way... he thought about monsters in that famous work and how he's thinking about Shelob. And one thing he makes clear in that essay is that monsters in Beowulf aren't there just as silly sideshows from the main business of the tales of kings and queens. of that part of the world. They are there as important revelations of the character. They're the test, the necessary test. Just as the arrival of the Green Knight in Sir Gawain in the Green Knight, his primary function is as a test of the moral character of Sir Gawain. Now, what do we see? when Sam faces Shelob, and in fact we should call him Samwise because the title makes the point that he has reached this heroic stature, we see that he is so bone-deep loyal that he doesn't even have to think about how he's going to react. Sam did not wait to wonder what was to be done, or whether he was brave or loyal or filled with rage. He just reacts. He's the opposite. If you're looking for a literary parallel, he is the opposite of Hamlet. He just goes for it and acts. And the way his defence is described, we're sort of given this frame where he's described as a small beast taking on a larger one. That sort of is standing back a bit from this image. this conflict. And it's described that he is like a creature defending a fallen mate. This gives that sense of the closeness between Frodo and Sam is such that it's almost like a married bond. They're certainly linked together, aren't they? They're that close that they are each other's best mates in that sense. What I love about this description of the spider fight or the she-log fight is how the prose is used to dramatise it. It is like you don't need a film when you can hear or hear in your head the sentences describing what's going on. So note, for example, the lugubriousness of this sentence is, As it sort of, as Sam gets Shelob's attention. Disturbed, as if out of some gloating dream by his small yell, she turned slowly the dreadful malice of her glance upon him. Now, if you break that down, there's like seven sections in that sentence. It is mimicking the slowness, the revving up. If you think of the famous gunfights in the Westerns, you don't just immediately go to the guns, pop, pop. You don't just immediately go to the guns, pop, pop. You do the hand reaching down to the holster, the slow build-up. This is the kind of fights that Tolkien would have seen in the cinema at the time. So he's using that same idea of the slow build-up. But then what is delightful is we then get the rapid change of pace as the two combatants come into contact. The fight begins and the pace changes. the shining sword bit upon her foot and shore away a claw. We're moving from those lugubrious sentences to something much more monosyllabic. So we get now a little nod to the tradition of stories, because two chapters ago we were talking about the tradition of stories. And we get here the sentence, which is obviously from a frame standing back from the fight. So the later narrator, the framing of this being told later by the hobbits thinking back. But Shelob was not as dragons are, no softer spot. You're not going to find that gap in her body like Smaug did. When Bilbo spotted there was a missing patch, which of course then was used for the Black Arrow. But this, of course, also turns to stories outside of the world of Middle-earth, because famously Fafnir, that dragon of, you know, that famous series of stories, he had a bear patch and so does the dragon in Beowulf, that it takes two to kill the dragon in Beowulf. So there is a link to these older stories, which, of course, Tolkien loved. And fittingly, in this moment where they're talking about older stories, he evokes the hero tales. So we've got the hero tales of Beren and Turin mentioned there. At this point, before you've reached the appendices, you might be slightly confused who these people were. You have to have a very good memory to recall that Beren and Luthien was mentioned by... Aragorn way back. I can't remember if Turin has been mentioned yet, possibly not. But anyway, we've got the idea that we are being linked to these heroes from the past, which of course put Sam's in that lineage. It's that debate that's been going on for the last couple of chapters, the place of Frodo and Sam in that line of heroes. Just because they're of shorter stature doesn't mean they don't line up with these great heroes of the past. Do read that section for the fight choreography. It's got some wonderful changes of pace where it accelerates. It's well described so that you can actually picture what's going on. And you've got things like, too soon. No, she's thinking it's over. Too soon, for Sam stood upon his feet. So he's getting up. And then we get this wonderful point about evil undoing itself. So Shelob, with the driving force of her own cruel will and strength greater than any warrior's hand, thrust herself upon a bitter spike. So this is the theme of Lord of the Rings in many ways, that evil will undo itself. And sort of similar thoughts happen later at the end of the tale, when it's the ignorance of the motives of the good that is the undoing of Sauron, their hubristic point. One little point I noticed on this read-through is that for some of this fight, we seem to be in Shelob's head. Which is really, I don't know that that happens very often in, occasionally actually, no, I'm thinking about it. Occasionally we do sort of see when the evil characters realise that they have missed a trick or overlooked something important. But here with Shelob, it's particularly important because her isolation is stressed. and her isolation is broached by the blade, but it's also in a way broached by the narrator imagining how she is perceiving this attack on her body. So it's a nice little point that we're getting inside the spider in a way that she would not approve of at all, which emphasizes what's going on in this battle. So now we've got Sam in his chapter, hearing the helpful voices that Frodo heard previously as he tried to get out of the lair. It comes at the moment when you're facing death. And it's put like this, as if some remote voice had spoken. In the film version, they imagine this as Galadriel. That's possible, isn't it? They're recalling her advice. But there does seem like a prayer-like aspect here, some sort of good powers beyond even Galadriel. Because the... The names he calls on are Elbareskil, Soniel. But anyway, there is the good powers in this voice is present, which direct him to the file of Galadriel. And we get this moment where he is a channel for an elven song that he doesn't even know. The companion to The Lord of the Rings notes that this is in Sindarin, whereas the song that Frodo writes, earlier referred to, apparently is in Quenya. So I've sure Tolkien had his reasons. But that's really not the point of it, is it? It is, the point is that he is using his memory of the goodness of the elves and the beauty of their music and their songs to make him stand on his feet and face this horror. And so we get the line, And with that he staggered his feet and was Samwise the Hobbit, Hamfast's son again. That's page 339. So when the voices appear to the good characters, it doesn't possess them and take them away from themselves like the ring does. helps them get back on their feet and be more themselves. That is what the light, the file, the memory of the elves do for the good characters. It's interesting here as well that we see the light from the perspective of the spider. It's described as a dreadful infection of light that spread from eye to eye. It's... The evil cannot bear to be in the presence of the light. That's quite Miltonic, the fall of the angels. They can no longer bear the light of heaven. There's that sense here that evil can't stand in the presence of light. and we get this slowing down of the pace completely as she retreats. She began to crawl claw by claw towards an opening in the dark cliff behind. You can see her reversing, squeezing in. That was visualised well in the film, if you remember that section. But I think it was also realised very well in Howard Shaw's score for this battle with the sort of the retreat at the end of that a very sort of noisy piece of music but it has a wonderful retreat that i think is picking up on this sentence in fact so we get a line break and the interesting use of this little section is telling us what we're not going to know It imagines what might happen to Shelob, but then admits this tale does not tell. And that would figure in this idea that the hobbits are putting this together on their return. They don't know what happened to Shelob. There may be rumours that she lingers on, but there are areas that this tale will not be able to cover, which gives that sense that the world expands beyond the edges of the novel, part of this wonderful world building that Tolkien is the master of. But we also, of course, get the ominous hint here that evil persists. You think it's all over, but it's not. It hangs on. So Frodo is left wearing this web which is like a sort of shroud on him, or bonds or ropes, which Sam cuts away. And this whole section is almost unbearable to read if you allow it to inhabit you and you allow yourself to not say, oh, it's okay, Frodo's fine. If you actually imagine what it's like to be Sam there with this utter loss. His grief is so raw. And we get this cry of him, this despair. And I think it possibly is the lowest moment in the tale. There's no artful elegy like Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas. Well, actually, Gimli doesn't, does he? But Aragorn and Legolas compose for Boromir. And the sadness of it, which underlines this, is this moment where Sam is saying, wake up. Think of the number of times wake up has been the beginning of a day for them. And now it's the waking up that will not happen as far as Sam is concerned. And then we get this moment, which is like that whole thing about the Chekhov gun. If you show something at one, it has to sort of happen at some point in the book. And in this case, it is the vision that Sam saw in the mirror where he saw Frodo lying under a cliff. But it's a distortion. So what he saw originally was true. But now his memory of it and what he's seeing in front of him, he distorts his memory. He overwrites his memory, in fact, because he says, not asleep, dead. He will say later he should have stuck with his first thought, but he has decided that hope is lost at this point. And it's written as, night came into his heart and he knew no more. Tolkien wanted this sort of moments of Sam sort of spending long time next to Frodo in order to make his chronology work. But it still is important for that feeling that he's not rushing on. This moment of grief is really being allowed to breathe. How quickly do deaths normally happen in fantasy? Maybe we move on too quickly. Life, you don't move on so quickly. So I think this is a good example to all of us who include deaths of beloved characters, feigned or not, is to allow that grief to breathe so we really feel it with him. Now, there's a big part of this chapter dedicated to Sam's debate with himself. And it's not a two-sided debate like Gollum. He doesn't have a split personality. He is a unitary self, but he still is in the more innocent sense of that word, in two minds about what he should do. So he's talking to himself and addressing Frodo as well, because he's got no one else left around him. And he comes to the realisation that he has to go on. And this is when he starts crying, which I think is such a blow to the heart of the reader. I can certainly remember reading this for the first time and finding this almost unbearable to read. And it's the poignancy here of him addressing Frodo, like apologizing for taking the sword. And this, I'm going to come back and be with you. I've got this job to do, but I'm going to come back and be with you. And he takes the file, the light and the sword. He doesn't at this point take the ring. He hasn't quite yet worked out that's also part of what he needs to do. Because we get another line break. These line breaks, this is a chapter which is the art of the line break. There's sections, there's like cuts in a scene. Because we then get him saying, not yet. Though I seem to have made up my mind in the previous... bit. I still can't leave. We can feel the reluctance to leaving these section breaks. And part of it, so there's, it gives space to Sam's emotional journey. But there's also the part where the reader is saying, hang on, Sam, you can't go. What about the ring? You know, so there's the the sort of reader unable to help him through this thought process, which engages us in this. We feel as though we're watching him fumble his way through this crisis. So the lesson I'm taking from this is don't rush such a massive moment. Really don't rush. Because we now get to the heart of it. He has, why is he leaving? So initially, his thought may have been, I'm going to go after Gollum. And he comes to the realization that vengeance is not worth leaving Frodo. And that makes him debate with himself if he should take the ring. And he tests it against memories of what he's heard and the advice that he's heard. And so he's testing against the voices of the Elrons and the Gandalfs. But in the end, it comes down to Sam himself deciding with plain Hobbit logic, which is also usefully a recap of the stakes and the plot. So he says, no, it's sit here till they come and kill me over master's body and gets it, it being the ring, or take it and go. And there's another line break. It's almost like, what would you do, reader? Sam is in that moment of thought. We are being really involved in it. by giving us that breather at that point. Think of the various ways that the ring has passed from holder to holder. So it starts off on Sauron's finger and is cut off in battle. Then it is taken from Isildur by Hedon. well, him being killed in an orc attack and falling into the river, found by Deagle and taken by force by Smeagol Gollum, found by chance... So that's a sort of neutral moment, but kept by Bilbo. He selflessly, after much struggle, passes it on to Frodo. Frodo selflessly offers to take it to Mordor. And then we get the next and last hobbit in the chain because Sam decides to take it for selfless reasons as well. I think it's noteworthy that the last person Sam appeals to is the lady, as if the lady could hear me. It's a very familiar kind of prayer. Of course, the lady in Tolkien's Catholicism is Mary, and that underlines how Galadriel in many ways represents that kind of figure of purity and goodness, and light, of course. And we get this final, it feels like a final moment. It's a beautifully composed composition of, where Sam assumes the burden of the ring and then stands with this weight. And the light that has been burning very brightly with his courage at this point now has a soft radiance of the evening star in summer. We're moving into an elegiac mode. Tolkien goes, he has wonderful gear changes, the way he's able to move through these phases. And it ends with Sam going from that soft evening light to stumbling into the dark because he is in despair. The line break again. Notice the line breaks. It's because poor old Sam is plagued with doubt. And at that moment where he's second-guessing himself, there's this scattering impressions of the arrival of the enemy. Tramping feet and shouts behind. It's also like, oh, what do I hear now? What do I hear over there? Really different from the more structured paragraphs we've just been having. And in that flurry, that is the moment when he first puts on the ring. It's reaching for it in a panic. But this is really interesting because we don't very often get a moment inside the ring, do we? It's not put on that much, which also is another good strategy. Don't overuse your biggest, most important artifact. Another line break. And then we get the world changed. And a single moment of time was filled with an hour of thought. And there's this description about how the whole world around him feels hazy. And he feels he's like a small black solid rock. Of course, Sam is like Peter the Rock, isn't he? And the ring was like an orb of hot gold. So the black rock, the hot gold, wonderful contrast. And it goes on to say that Sam felt so visible. That picks up the idea of the invigilation in Mordor and the eye. There's a wonderful passage that follows immediately after this of the orcs passing, how they feel almost ghost-like, because we've been told before that when you put on the ring, you're sort of in this shadow wraith world in part, and you're in this shadow wraith world. So the real world feels like wraiths to you because you've crossed a kind of barrier to be invisible. And so you get a beautiful description of that there. Well, it's not beautiful in the sense of, they don't look nice, but I mean in the sense of evoking it really well, of the flare of the torches and the orcs converging. And then we've got a very good authorial strategy. How can Sam, who needs to know what's being said, how can he understand? Well, a bit like being inside the TARDIS allows you to understand all alien languages. Here, there is a reflection that perhaps the ring is allowing Sam to understand because it's nearer its source, it's getting more powerful. So therefore, it allows him to understand orc talk. Now, there's a problem with orc speech in a way because the way it is translated with the gans and the lubbers and things like that It's like the bandit yob speech of Tolkien's day. It would have sounded absolutely awesome, of course, in black speech. So you have to allow that this is being, the way I'm thinking about it is the ring is translating it for Sam. And that's the kind of language Sam would use for a bad guy. So if you were translating it for yourself, you might be reaching for some kind of Guy Richie gang speak with lots of effing and blinding or something. But Sam's world is more of this. I imagine Tolkien would have loved to have written it out in black speech. So you have to look past that slightly, I suppose it feels more like the Hobbit goblin speech, look past that and give it a bit more of an edge. They still say interesting things. Sam, his reaction to them was, is because he sees them gathering around Frodo's body. I like all this, that we've been building up to all his choices. Actually, when it comes to it, it's another instinct that saves him. He flung the quest and all his decision away and runs back. And he's saying, no, no, no way. I can't be their ring bearer. not without Mr. Frodo. And he's saying, there's not going to be any song about me because no one will hear about this. That's sort of carrying on this idea of the tale telling. That's quite hard to say. So I like this about him is he spent all this time deciding, but actually his choice is made by going with his heart. This is a huge struggle. This whole chapter for Sam is a huge struggle. His weariness was growing, but his will hardened all the more. Again, you can imagine this is drawn out of the bitter experience of fighting in the First World War. You have to just grit your teeth and carry on. The Shagrat-Gorbat conversation, which he overhears... is a classic strategy for an author. If you want to hear a lot of plot, sort of background, give it as a conversation to somebody else to overhear. In this case, the ring is allowing him to access to something he wouldn't otherwise be able to hear with his normal Hobbit ears. And what I like about this is there is a, there is care taken by Tolkien to humanised is the wrong word, but to give orcs their own culture. So we've got Shagrat, who is the, I suppose, the more law-abiding one. And we've got Bob Gorbag, who's the one who dares to criticise. He daringly says to Shagrat, they can make mistakes, even the top ones can. So he's thinking more mutinous thoughts. Yeah. And he calls the Nazgul his favourites. And there's this rather, not nice for ordinary people, but there's the dream of what the Ork good life would be. He says, we could go and set ourselves up, you know, with no bosses and live off the loot with some faithful men, boys. So lads, I think he uses that term. So you can see how Orks needs are simple, but one of the things they don't like is being under the thumb. Chagra is, I think, more of the politician of the two. He talks about the Nazgul being uneasy. This possibly, there is some debate here about when exactly, what the Nazgul are reacting to. Because, of course, the moment in the valley is actually a few days ago now. It could just be a bureaucratic delay because we also hear that when the watchers were worried, the sort of the guard, the magical guard on the passage They couldn't get Lugbors, that's Sauron in the Dark Tower, to pay attention. So the strategy that Aragorn later uses is actually foreshadowed here, that if you show Sauron a shiny object somewhere else, sending people off to battle, he doesn't pay attention to what's going on under his nose, which is a fatal flaw. The conversation between the Orcs also gives us insight into what happened to Gollum, if we haven't already pieced it together. They use the word sneak for him, which gives yet more idea here that the ring is translating this into a language that Sam understands, because of course sneak is his word. And they go on to speculate there is a large warrior on the loose, an elf, which means that we know there's poor old little Sam crouched down listening to this. And he laughs darkly at this point because here's the cavalry if any cavalry is coming. On this sort of echoes across the book, the orcs' orders about how to treat the prisoner are... a mirror of what Saruman told his Uruk-hai, that they're not to be spoiled, that anything they have on them needs to go to Sauron. So they know they're looking for the ring or something, but they know they're looking for something important, but they're not to take it for themselves. Then we get the sucker punch for Sam. which is also for the reader on first time going through this for us too, that this fellow isn't dead, says Shagrat. Gorbag doesn't know this. So Gorbag is sort of showing us that Sam wasn't foolish to think that Frodo was dead because everybody expects him to be dead just looking at him. But the orcs who guard the passage and who know Shelob's ways know that he's actually knocked out because she likes to eat living meat. And Sam, of course, berates himself and tells himself that his heart knew it. But he's made the wrong choice. For all the choices, he feels he's made the wrong choice. And we get a very dramatic end to The Two Towers. The great doors slammed too. Boom. The bars of iron fell into place inside. Clang. The gate was shut. Sam hurled himself against the bolted brazen plates and fell senseless to the ground. He was out in the darkness. Frodo was alive but taken by the enemy. He was alive. fantastic, dramatic end. Of course, you're going to come back for the third volume with that. It's, I'm trying to think of other times when I felt that about a fantasy piece, maybe at the end of The Empire Strikes Back when Han Solo is frozen. It's that thing where to be continued, but the early readers had to wait for the following year before they found out what thinking about how Tolkien as an author writes his book, he writes himself, he paints himself into a corner. Because in a letter from November 1944, remember where we are in the war at this point, the tide is turning, but it wasn't clear how the war was going to come to an end. He writes, I have got the hero into such a fix that not even an author will be able to extricate him without labour and difficulty. I love the idea that there is jeopardy too for Tolkien in this. He's thinking, okay, I've got Frodo here up in a tower surrounded by orcs and I've got Sam outside with the ring. He presumably knew that he wanted the quest to succeed How was he going to get himself out of that? And if you write like that, it's actually quite a fun place to reach. I sometimes write books like this because what you do is you comb through all the details that might prove the chink in the armour for your bad guys. And the one that has been mentioned in this chapter and Sam didn't take was the mithril coat. So that mithril coat that links back, of course, to the hobbit and the dwarves in this tale that is about tales is going to be that chink in the orc's armour, ironically. So do join us again when we begin Return of the King. And I will do a sort of wrap up of what I've learned reading my way through the two towers as a sort of coda to this particular part of my series. But I'm looking forward to seeing how Frodo does escape as we start on the return of the king next. Thank you very much for listening. Thanks for listening to MythMakers Podcast. Brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy. Visit OxfordCentreForFantasy.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 favourite podcasts worldwide.