Something Hot Out of the Pot - LOTR: An Author's Journey, Bk 4 Ch 4

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 and today we are returning to our series on The Lord of the Rings, reading our way through. I call this a side card because it's a bit separate from what I do when I'm talking to other authors for example. Anyway, we have reached in the two towers book 4, chapter 4 of Herbs and Stude Rabbit. Now it is one of those titles where most of you will immediately know exactly what's going on in this chapter because it's one of those stand out chapters. It's one of my favourites, even though in some ways some important things happen but it's not the big chapter, like the Palenos Fields or Mount Doom, but there's something absolutely delightful about this chapter and I have divided it up into four. So the first part is where Frodo and Sam and Gollum are leaving behind the attempt to go through the Black Gates and they have a journey out of that ruined landscape through Athelian. Then they stop for a while and they have a sort of time of refreshment and the aforesaid Herbs and Stude Rabbit, their feast. Then they meet Pharameer and the Med of Gondor and then it ends with the skirmish and the arrival of the Olifort who already was mentioned in the previous chapter in that little song that Sam introduced so the ground was laid then it gets the payoff in this chapter. I would say the thing about this particular episode is it blends both a deeply poetic register that Tolkien has but also it brings in his comic one and you'll see that in the interactions between Sam and Gollum in particular and thinking about what you may have been taught when you were doing Shakespeare plays, they have the idea of the comic relief, you have the high drama and then you have the comedy sections. That is the kind of thing that Tolkien is bringing in here that while there is this high drama, we have this time of relief, a break from all of that from the unrelenting awfulness of the Black Gates. So let's start with the decision to carry on the journey that twists away from the Black Gates to enter this land of Athelian and that journey twist is also a plot twist. Tolkien in his letters and we'll come to those a bit later is in this case a writer who does like discovery writing, he doesn't know what's going to happen either and you get the sense that he reached the gates, he was thinking he was approaching the end of the book and in some way his story instincts and his logic were saying if they get through now and go straight to Mount is been to it too easy. I can't do that, that doesn't make sense in this world. The Dark Lord will have defended himself better, there's got to be something else. So in a way he's diverting himself whilst he works out what the rest of his plot is going to be. And as we set out on this road it is Gollum who is now acting as the guide and he is also the one who gives us a full taste, literally a full taste of what Athelian is going to be like and he talks about how it's a place of clean water and he also talks about his appetite, how hungry and famished he is, as a sort of drug addict figure which is what Gollum is in a way. He is full of these sort of desperate desires for things, here his desire is mainly for food but we have been going through the brackish water of the dead marshes and now we've got this image ahead of us is like an oasis in a sense, we're going towards clean water. As they walk away I just wanted to mention that they talk about the red eye that they feel is watching them. I don't think this is meant to be the eye but it's an eye on top of the watch tower at the gates and it feels like it's looking for them searching for them and I think the image here that is perhaps more relevant is the idea of how it was at the time of trying to go across something like the I don't know the iron curtain countries that kind of thing where you felt invigilated and you couldn't get through, no matter how many attempts and tries you make it felt that you couldn't pass from one place to another so it's that sense of big brother watching you you're under the the invigilation though of course it links back to the great eye on top of Baradur. There is some discussion here about distances and how far Golem wants to go and how far the hobbits are able to manage. One thing I've just point out here is the way that Tolkien's fantasy feels real is that he keeps grounding it in our physical capacities. What it really feels like to do a very very long walk, a route march in their case and it and the fact that they can only go so many leagues before they have to stop makes and that counting off of how far is exactly the kind of experience anyone who's done a long walk or no you'll keep checking how many miles have we done how many and so that's why I think it adds to the feeling of very similitude. Now we get to the refreshment phase because the nightmare landscape of the Moranon the Black Gates area is fading and vegetation returns and we're given this rather poignant sentence about how the hearts of the hobbits rose again a little in spite of weariness. The air was fresh and fragrant and it reminded them of the uplands of the north far thing far away. The hobbits are always bringing things back to what is like and unlike the shire so here we have the north farming. There is a useful gloss if you're looking for it for the actual vegetation you can look it up online of course. The companion to the Lord of the Rings tells you what everything is as well and so does anyone who does gardening they can tell you. Cornel is dogwood now I've got dogwood in my garden dogwood is great in winter because it stems are usually red or yellow a strong color so they make good sort of structural plants. Ling is a word for heather broom that's a kind of vegetation you'll see on moorlands that kind of place it's got fins green leaves with usually masses of yellow flowers and blossom. End the sentence the passage goes on to say it seemed good to be reprieved to walk in a land that had only been for a few years under the dominion of the dark lord and was not yet fallen wholly into decay. Lots of qualifications in there so yes we are reprieved as well as the characters themselves but it's clear that it's not yet fallen wholly that it seems as though the path for this place unless they succeed in their quest is it will fall wholly into decay and I think this I see in this Tolkien's hatred dislike of the industrialization of areas that he knew where he grew up that had begun to fall into decay with the industrial damage that was happening the suburbanization of Birmingham for example and so it was like like what happened at seahull where he came from and so there is a morning of loss landscape here but of course his message is about hope of restoration which is the the biggest story here. So we've had Gollum's appetite sort of triggered as he thinks about Ethylian and now it sounds turn he is desperate for something hot out of the pot. He also gets hungry up to this point they've been sort of just hanging on and there is something about relaxing where he he feels as though yeah I could eat something now and what this what this sort of makes me think about when I'm writing is how not to always completely stress out your characters you have to also let go let them have these times as well just in order to make it bearable to read them I don't know if you read a book where it's or watched a film where it always seems event after event after event and you never take a breath like a very intense it feels like a very intense computer game. Tolkien's much cleverer here because he's giving us a rhythm of tension then relaxing it and back comes Sam's appetite and way they're walking is through another of these ruins in the landscape of Middle Earth which we've seen a number of times on this journey and what the ruins in the landscape gives us a sense of the length of time in this world and also the depth he knows the cultures that have built these roads how they've fallen into decay and we keep meeting them again and again we get it I suppose it's a bit like if you go to Egypt and you see the great relics of the past there is that sense of the greatness was in the past and we are now in a lesser poorer and half destroyed present an Athelian is a landscape that's on this seesaw point where it could go either way into complete destruction or perhaps maybe hopefully there is some way out of it for Athelian so I've mentioned that this is an example of Tolkien at his most poetic it is a certain outpouring of his love of flora i plants trees bushes flowers and he knows his stuff he's a king gardener he had a very big garden at his house in Northmore Road and during the war he was tending it to grow fruit and veg but he loved gardening in a way Sam is one of the characters most like him sharing that passion and he has this poetic vein that he really strikes when he gets with Thelian it's not as high for Lutin and otherworldly I say lorian is it's something which it feels rooted and familiar he talks about Athelian as a fair country of climbing woods and swift falling streams I love their cadence on that you climb up with the woods and you fall with the streams and they reach a point where they stand and look out upon what's left of Athelian this is a very Tolkienian technique I've pointed it out in several times as we've gone through this he will stand his characters on a high point and they will look out and it sketches out the terrain like a map for the reader it's something I've actually started adopting in my own writing I love it as a technique and this lookout point you get an outpouring of names in fact we are overwhelmed with the names of trees and bushes it's after the sensory privation of the dust heaps in front of the black gates we are suddenly deluged in green like marvell's green thought in a green shape it's suddenly in the middle of this amazing landscape of hope and green and shoots and spring and it does remind me of what the same kind of release and the feeling of hope that it appears in the line in the which in the wardrobe when spring returns to Narnia less obvious less less clearly triggered by in that case it's the return of Athel here but still we've got that sense of hope that spring always brings and he has this phrase which is one of my favourite ethylion the garden of gondor now desolate kept still a disheveled dryad loveliness so the words that he talks about the trees the resinous conifers and others these are Mediterranean flora as opposed to Oxfordshire flora he apparently I don't think he went but he did have the botanical gardens near his college so he knew for well what these trees were and would have read about it as well and he does evoke them very well and he's enjoying himself hugely that word dryad well the shovel let's do the shovel first the shovel is a lovely sense of its untidy this is an untidy spring gardens are untidy but this is particularly because it's partly wrecked dryad now dryad obviously appeals to a Greek mythology and it is a word that seems to be imported from most of outside the middle earth context unless you connect it back to the Naird we met earlier who is Goldbury the spirit of the river so perhaps it is allowed it certainly conveys a lot to me the idea of the trees having a presence and this spell that he weaves with this long long passage it is I do go back and read it there is no other passage like this where lots and lots of names of bushes trees and so on are listed and it goes on and on it's it's a whole page over a page where he really wants you to know each of these individual presences in the landscape and I think we're a lot of the time here we're in a kind of Sam point of view because here's the one who knows what these things are called and when he doesn't know a name it's him it's his lack of knowledge that's referred to and so we get suddenly Sam laughed for hearts ease not for jest so we're getting it's a lovely pick me up this chapter if you're feeling down this is one of the ones to go to it really does have that sense of deep joy we're the borough phrase from CS Lewis we're surprised by joy in this particular chapter but if you're going to do this and have your release and your refreshment you don't want to completely lose all your attention people will start to put the book down and know how Tolkien carries on just reminding us that there is the enemy nearby and Sam for example comes across the remains of what looks like a slaughter where climates and other sort of climbing plants are growing over it hiding it but it didn't happen that long ago so we got the idea of Sam's tact not telling anyone else what he saw but he sort of diverts them up the hill but also if that's happened it could happen again so they're not safe it's an illusion of safety because of the beauty of the landscape but they are not safe and then we come into the most comical part of this which is Sam's optimism that maybe they'll still make it back to time they had a good cook meal and Sam here does what he I think is the price where he does it the most when he's talking to Golem he spends a lot of the time and when he talks of Frodo kind of mimicking Golem's web speaking he's picking up on the language and his way of coping with this unwanted extra on the journey is to sort of have a kind of banter but it's a banter with edge so for example he says I begs I begs on my beg and he does it again later so he's tuned in I think that's what it is he's tuned into Golem's web thinking and he easily slips into it so as Golem goes off to do some hunting for them we have this very poignant moment where Sam just looks at Frodo and sees his no warness and he makes a very he talking describes him having complex emotions there but he has a simple way of summing it up a declaration of I love him this isn't obviously cupid love this is comrade love but with a spiritual element to it because of the nobility and the sacrifice that Frodo is showing he is really a scapegoat using that sort of biblical image he's a scapegoat carrying the weight of the sins of the world you know in the ring for everybody into mortal and one of the ways I understand Sam's relationship to him is that he's a bit like a disciple of the master that kind of love intensely loyal brotherly love so then we have the section where the cone is the rabbits are cooked rabbits by the way possibly aren't native to the UK but I guess if Tolkien did know that that they arrived in medieval periods he is quite far south so he could argue actually he would have been native to this part of the sort of Mediterranean latitude that he's reached anyway we have an insight here to Hobbit culture that this is really a clash of cultures it's Gollum's culture versus the Hobbits they don't appreciate each other's experience tastes all that kind of stuff we get to learn here that Hobbits cook before they learn their letters and then there's that little aside that they don't often get to their letters you can you can feel Tolkien chuckling away as he votes that but we also hear get details of what Sam has been carrying in that enormous pack of his his pronged fork his little pans that he looks after and turns really carefully not a great big huge frying pan like they have in the film it's been very heavy to carry that for miles but he has what Tolkien would have known from his kit bag in the first world war were like the army russian pans that's what's going on here the small pans fit inside each other one of the writing exercises I often use with young people and I'm sort of doing creative writing in a school or whatever is to say what does this person have that is special to them what's in their bag if they're on a journey what's in their bedroom with this about them at home is these things which are a clue to their characters what is the most important thing to them and Sam's pans and his pronged forks mean the shire his brought the shire all the way his aspiration to cook the homie's skill that he's good at and we're in a very Sam is really enjoying himself in this section because he has finally got a chance to exercise his you know his best his best skill he knows what he's doing here and he's in command of himself and he's commanding golem too the whole thing you know he's trying to get golem to be his sous chef doesn't work out there obviously golem is right to fear the danger of fire as we will rapidly find out but Sam is determined on this course and he says each to his own fashion and frankly golem goes off in a very amusing sock some of these lines are lifted straight into the film and they work very well in the film because they produce a laugh I've just been at a orchestral performance of the three Lord of the Rings films where they play an orchestra and they've got the films playing this entire scene which is much shortened but got some key lines reliably makes an audience laugh even if they've already seen it you know 10 times 20 times before and we get the potato lines within that I won't stress you out by doing a poor Sam impression here and Sam's offer to golem it's there's generosity in this chapter so this is golem at his best in some sense there he is leading them into a trap so it's not that good but golem provides the rabbits and Sam reciprocates by saying I will cook you fish and chips there's a sense of it could have been moment it could have gone in that direction talking talks about how there is a pivotal point it happened I think in the last chapter which where golem could have chosen another path and he doesn't he's not irredeemable he had a choice and in a way this is another moment where the surrounded by olive trees there is an olive branch being extended but it doesn't take because there is no meeting place for between them you know golem doesn't want any cooked fish thanks so much and that means that Sam says oh you're hopeless so they both sort of retreat back into their entrenched positions so Frodo's been asleep during all of this and we get a lovely moment where they get to eat the feast in the film it always annoys me they don't get to eat the feast they ask they always after all that cooking gets thrown away anyway that's for pacing issues but it seemed a feast is the description here of course it does because they've been living on hard tack even if it is lembas for days Sam's description of golem here is interesting because he's the one who calls golem stinker and smegel slinker and that is interesting because in fact smegel has turned into slinker now there is a later on there's the sneaking thing that comes up but he is complicit now the nicer side of smegel is complicit with the plot that the sort of tougher golem side it has cooked up so Sam is right he's you know he is a slinker he is a sneak even if he did at one stage have more of a loyalty to Frodo which has puzzled and then poiled Sam Sam you forgot to put out the cooking fire it turns out to be a euked astrofe in it is a happy accident because it means that they meet farmy and his men and they don't walk straight into the ambush that's about to happen but we get this we don't know that yet we get the whistle which we don't know who it is it reminds me a bit of the bells on the road earlier on right back in the shower where they don't know if it's going to be a black rider actually not in the shower it's on the bridge on the way to Rivendale sorry they don't know who's going to come around the corner the whistle seems not like the sound one of the sort of sour on supporters would make so perhaps we aren't expecting that it to be some bad guys coming around the corner but we have heard there are signs that the auks are abroad in this wood so we've had the attack on when the fellowship broke up so we know that auks might appear at any moment and then you get the irony that when the four men walk into the glade that they refer to the hobbits as the konis atherrabbits they've been caught in the trap there is mutual astonishment on both sides i think this recalls in the woodland setting them carrying bows and arrows dressed in colors of the forest it recalls the sort of ballads of robin hood and his men and the way they fight is very similar to the sort of classical medieval not classical the medieval ballads of robin hood and his men so we're in our robin hood phase of this story and we've switched away here notice moving from sam to because whereas in the earlier bit with the cooking and the landscape sam had the privileged better knowledge proto here is now relevant because it's him thinking that they remind him of Boromir so he's the one who's on track and the tension between the standoff with the hobbit sunny back to back and the men surrounding them is similar in a way to the encounter that arrogant legolas and gimli have with the riders of Rohan it's a surprise which where is this going to go and i thought it was worth quoting the letter here because Tolkien didn't know exactly which way this was going to go we know this passage was written on the 6th of May 1944 because Tolkien wrote his son Christopher a new character has come on the scene i am sure i did not invent him i did not even want him though i like him and there he was but there he came walking into the woods of Athelian pharameer the brother of Boromir so we get here because we know what the letters are going on about at this point the author surprising himself surprising us and surprising his characters so that sense of how is this going to unfold is both an element of tension in the story plot but attention for the writer it's quite fun to reach these moments i think where does the plot go in fact it's for me i love those moments when i'm writing in a non if i'm writing a book like i am at the moment which hasn't had a synopsis sent off to an editor or something beforehand and i really don't know where it's going to go it's this wonderful moment where you just walk out and think what's going to happen this is what's happening here maybe that's why i like it so much because i feel the freedom of the author here saying what can i do with this character who is he what's he going to be how's he going to line up on my scale of good good guys and bad guys and the shades of gray in between Frodo here doesn't deny that golem is with them unlike the film version where the Frodo there lies he's asked for pity for the wretched gangrel creature that they have fallen in with on the journey and Frodo also tells the truth he gives a neat summary of how they came to be here the fact that they came out of him ledris he mentions who the companions were and he mentions Boramir but of course is immediately a lot of those details are cause of reasons to believe Frodo because he knows things that faramir also knows but he faramir at this stage is in possession of more information about Boramir so faramir shows he is most decisive and cautious he has this phrase which sounds like a an old saw a kind of an old saying wise man trust not to chance meeting on the road in this land what's interesting here it's that idea of by what people do you shall know them and Frodo here does what Mary and Pipin both instinctively do when put in not quite similar situations he says if I could be of any help we would help you fight at this point is that bravery of a small person and this illicit from faramir in the response the halflings are courteous folk whatever else they be so his you know judgment is not yet been given in their case but you can see that he is warming to both Frodo and Sam and now we enter the last section of this chapter which is the skirmish it's quite a short section but it has an interesting preface which which is that Frodo and Sam are left under guard they have two guards mablung and damrod and here we get talking adding yet more worldbuilding because they lapse into their own language which is similar to Elvish and Frodo quickly finds out that they are the dunadine of the south we know that arrogant is a ranger from the north these are the rangers of a thillian and there's a so we are connected to the north and south kingdom of the past very pleasant little detail little easter egg for those of us who have you know dived into the law and in fact these two tell us a lot about the history in this short section they tell us how harrid where the south rons come from has turned on gondor it's quite a fascinating sort of post-colonial story between the arrival of the men of westerness and how they are accepted by the corsets of umbar and all of that if you want to look at both the silmarillion but particularly the unfinished tales have quite a lot about this so it's an interesting story that and they go on to say to the hobbits that they know they're unlikely in the bigger picture to lose the battle against sarron they can't imagine how they would survive but they're not going to give up easily that's a sort of fighting spirit that gondor is in at this present time and they've come here to teach them another lesson they're not going to just surrender the words of a thillian without a fight so we have there were hobbits on the edge of the skirmish rather than in the thick of battle and it's quite effectively done that it's heard in a distance and sound has some very down to earth uh comparison of it being like a load of blacksmiths going hammer and tongs and then suddenly they are the battle comes to them and we move into sam's point of view and it's a fabulous piece of observation this is sam's first view of a battle of men against men and he did not like it much down to earth not having it don't like it and we get the one of the finest passages in Tolkien which are given to sam here it's transposed in the extended edition of the film to pharomia it does suit pharomia but it's actually a sam thought and i'm just turning to it it's page 269 if you've got the three volume version and sam goes on he wondered what the man's name was and where he came from and if he was really evil of heart or what lies or threats had led him on the long march from his home and if he would not really rather have stayed there in peace all in a flash of thought that was quickly driven from his mind that humanizing of the enemy ways against because when it's all switched seem the ruined elves though they do feel like the like targets that just sort of die without any sense of grief or loss for them and that you can be critical perhaps of that sense of not valuing all lives equally but this is where Tolkien pushes back having passed through two wars himself he's saying well what about the enemy and of course we know as well that there are shades of courage of cowardice amongst amongst men there's denathor there's gremia and so on so that you get a whole range of people he's not whilst it does feel quite black and white dark lord against you know the good forces still within the armies Tolkien's trying to give this level of complexity which i really appreciate the thought is any brief though because we're about to have the arrival of the olive font who was trailed in the previous chapter and now he literally charges towards us or maybe it's a she i'm not sure how one would tell and damrod one of the two guards is one of the he gives this exclamation may the valar turn him aside it's one of the very very few religious appeals in this book Tolkien took out as much as he could referred to religion but it's with the men in Athelian that we get a couple of really interesting ones that stay stay there so he's appealing to the valar to turn aside this charging olive font and Sam gets his heart's desire to see the olive font and so of course we follow him and Sam's thought follows the olive font we also get that this is a matter of lasting delight so as a hint here that Sam may actually survive this adventure but i thought i'd read it in full because it is a masterpiece of writing to his astonishment and terror and lasting delight Sam's sort of vast shape crash out of the trees and come careering down the slope bigger's a house much bigger than a house it looked him a grey clad moving hill bigger's a house that refers back to the little poem and the reality he has to change his ideas the poem got it wrong fear and wonder may be enlarged him in the hobbit's eyes but the movement of Harad was indeed a beast of vast bulk and the light of him does not walk now in middle earth his kin that lived still in that a days are but memories of his girth and majesty so we've got a bit of sort of editorial foot footnote there anyway now we get to the the charge when he came straight towards the watchers and then swerved aside in the nick of time passing only a few yards away rocking the ground beneath their feet his great legs like trees enormous cell like ears spread out long snout up raised like a huge serpent about to strike his small red eyes raging his upturned horn-like tusks were bound with bands of gold and dripped with blood his trappings of scarlet and gold flapped about him in wild tatters the ruin of what seemed a very wart hour lay upon his heaving back smashed in his furious pastures through the woods and higher upon his neck still desperately clung a tiny figure the body of a mighty warrior a giant among the swertings so here we've got reference to scale this passage you'll see was picked up by what Peter Jackson did in the planar field so you can see how the idea of the figure hanging off the ruined water he thought oh I use that in a to visualize how the olive once might be cut down on the great beast thundered blundering and blind wroth through pool and thicket arrows skipped and snapped humbly about the triple hide of his flanks men of both sides fled before him but many he overtook and crushed the ground soon he was lost of use still trumpeting and stamping far away what became of him Sam never heard whether he escaped to roam the wild for a time until he perished far from his home or was trapped in some deep pit or whether he raged on until he plunged in the great river and was swallowed up so there he goes charging off and it Sam's imagination were following and that sense of we're not going to know the answer to all the questions in this story which of course is great because it gives us a sense of the depth and the extent and the vistas of this world building very last tiny section here is once the olive or goes Sam has the nautilance to say don't wake me up if you leave whether or not this is just bravado or he really does feel at ease with the men at ease and after fall asleep and he also hasn't slept yet remember he was cooking but we end this chapter with him falling asleep and so that's where we will pause and we will come back in chapter five to the window on the west another of my favorite chapters where we really get to meet far from it and learn just what kind of man he is when he walked out of that forest thank you very much for listening thanks for listening to myth makers podcast brought to you by the Oxford Center for Fantasy visit Oxford Center 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