Oct. 15, 2026
Where Will Wants Not, a Way Opens - LOTR: An Author's Journey, Bk 5 Ch 3
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Castro Key Takeaways
- J.R.R. Tolkien meticulously crafts the atmospheric details and background nomenclature in 'The Muster of Rohan' to give Middle-earth a tangible, lived-in weight reminiscent of Old English and Norse history.
- The chapter uses Merry's perspective to highlight the psychological toll and immensity of war, contrasting grand heroic movements with a hobbit's longing for home and the comfort of the Shire.
- Tolkien masterfully weaves themes of anticipation and the psychological shadows of war, drawing heavily from his own firsthand experiences during the First and Second World Wars.
- Théoden's heroic speeches and refusal to hide in the mountains serve a dual authorial purpose: they signal his doomed fate while debating the moral necessity of fighting against overwhelming odds.
- The inclusion of subtle historical layers, such as the Pukul-men, demonstrates Tolkien's organic writing style where background lore and world-building naturally expand without rigid forward planning.
We are going on an adventure! Love The Lord of the Rings? Why not read along with us as we consider the books from the writer's point of view! Taking it chapter by chapter, novelist Julia Golding will reveal new details that you might not have noticed and techniques that will only go to increase your pleasure in future re-readings of our favourite novel. Julia also brings her expert knowledge of life in Oxford and English culture to explain some points that might have passed you by.
00:00 Introduction: Welcome to Mythmakers and The Muster of Rohan
01:37 Atmospheric World-Building: Twilight on the Waterfalls
04:34 Merry's Perspective: The Weight of Middle-earth
07:03 Theoden and Merry: A Father-Son Bond
08:49 Theoden's Heroic Speech: Spending My Last Strength
13:03 The Pukel-men and Layers of History
17:47 Paths of the Dead: Aragorn's Fate and Eowyn's Grief
21:59 The Arrow Arrives: Gondor's Call for Aid
23:41 The Day with No Sunrise: War Encroaches
25:45 Merry Left Behind: The Shame of Staying Home
26:08 Eowyn Arms Merry: A Secret Plot Begins
29:23 Dernhelm Appears: Where Will Wants Not, A Way Opens
30:18 Riding Toward Shadow: Hope Wanes in Every Heart
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Frequently Asked Questions
What happens in Book 5, Chapter 3 of The Lord of the Rings?
Chapter 3, titled 'The Muster of Rohan,' follows King Théoden, Merry, and the riders of Rohan as they gather their forces at Dunharrow to ride to the aid of Minas Tirith.
Why is Merry's perspective important in 'The Muster of Rohan'?
Merry provides a grounded, outsider perspective that contrasts the grand, intimidating scale of the mountainous landscape with his hobbit sensibilities, emphasizing both the isolation of war and the human cost of the conflict.
How do real-world historical events influence Tolkien's writing in this chapter?
Tolkien's experiences living through the World Wars inform the chapter's heavy themes of anticipation, military blackouts, and the difficult moral choice of whether to actively fight or retreat behind safe borders.
What are the Pukul-men in The Lord of the Rings?
The Pukul-men are crude, tubby stone figures carved by an older, displaced people of the mountains around Dunharrow, adding a layer of mournfulness and deep history to the setting.
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Hello and welcome to Myth Makers.
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Myth Makers is the podcast for fantasy fans and fantasy creatives brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy.
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My name is Julia Golding and today we are going to enjoy, I hope, another of our author's journey through the Lord of the Rings.
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And I've been taking a slow reading approach to this fantastic novel and looking at it from the point of view of what the author's choice may have been as Tolkien was writing.
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I do this on the strength of the fact that that's what I do as my day job as an author.
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So hoping that I can see a couple of the things he's deciding to do.
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We have reached chapter three in the beginning of The Return of the King.
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That's book five, if you think of it in that way.
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And this chapter is called The Muster of Rohan.
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I would say that Tolkien's choice of names for his chapters are always pretty self-explanatory.
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He's not trying to hide anything from you because indeed, this is a chapter where Rohan is mustered.
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So there we go.
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And that is the overarching organizing principle.
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We stay with Theoden, Merry and the riders as they sweep across Rohan, gathering the troops together so that they can ride to the aid of Minas Tirith.
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It actually starts with a relatively unusual start, I think, for a chapter of Tolkien, in that it starts with a kind of recap of,
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And not with a character, but with a sort of situational statement.
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So just looking at that, it says, "'Now all roads were running together to the east "'to meet the coming of war and the onset of shadow.
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"'And even as Pippin stood at the great gate of the city "'and saw the prince of Dol Amrof ride in with his banners, "'the king of Rohan came down out of the hills.'"
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We can't read things these days without seeing it in screen terms, but you can almost imagine the screen link cutting from Pippin to Théoden.
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Tolkien too would have gone to the cinema, so no doubt he had that language underpinning what he was deciding as well.
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What we then get is really, I think, a couple of paragraphs which you may not have ever paused over.
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But this time in my slow reading, I have.
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And I was thinking as I was reading them that this is why I love Tolkien.
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Tolkien is an author who really cares about the little details of his world.
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And it's not just the history and the layers of backstory that we all know he has done.
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It's that he really cares about these little corners.
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So what do we have here?
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We have them riding out of the hills.
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And we get this image of the Rohan riders with their pointed shadows in front of them as the sun sets.
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So we also know what direction they're riding in if the shadows are in front of them.
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And they come round a huge bare shoulder of rock.
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And he mentions the soft sighing trees.
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And then there's this line, twilight lay upon the waterfalls.
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Wonderfully atmospheric, but can't we just find ourselves there?
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Isn't it that these are the doorways into other worlds, these little passages that
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He goes on to spend quite a lot of time discussing the Rohan world or describing it with the names and the rivers.
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And all the nomenclature or the choice of names do point us to a sort of Old English or sometimes Norse world.
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In the case of Starkhorn, which is the dominating mountain in this stretch, it seems as though perhaps memories of his trip to the Alps is present because it sounds very much like a kind of Mont Blanc of a mountain with bare sides and sort of perpetual snow.
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And Mary is our point of view.
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Poor old Mary from his rolling shires where the hills are never that dominant.
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He talks or he's thinking about it as being it was a skyless world.
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Now, as I read this, I thought, gosh, that really does chime with my own experience of being in the Alps.
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That feeling of you can't see the sky as you're because the steep sides are relatively close.
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The sky's far, far above.
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You'd have to really lay on your back to see it.
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And it's not just what he sees that Tolkien tells us.
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There's this fabulous line here on page 64, if you want to check, about Mary.
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And this is all about sound.
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But let me read it to you.
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He sat for a moment, half dreaming, listening to the noise of water.
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The whisper of dark trees, the crack of stone, and the vast waiting silence that brooded behind all sound.
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In some ways, this is the most Tolkienian of all paragraphs, particularly for what happens next.
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So we're very convinced about the vastness of Middle Earth after reading that.
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But it goes on.
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He loved mountains.
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That's Mary.
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Or he had loved the thought of them, marching on the edge of stories brought from far away.
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But now he was borne down by the insupportable weight of Middle Earth.
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Those mountains weighing on him.
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He longed to shut out the immensity in a quiet room by a fire.
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So I hope you've noticed, I've been pointing this out as we go along.
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It happens a lot with Sam, but here it is happening with Mary, happens with all the Hobbits, that here is Middle Earth, it's vastness, the heroes, but there is the Shire, there is home, there is where you go back to.
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In a way, it's a world we go back to when we shut the book, if we're lucky enough.
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It's that returning home feeling.
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And that combination...
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is, I think, in some ways the secret source, as much as one can say there is a secret source, behind Lord of the Rings.
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So we get a lot of Merry and the King in this chapter.
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And I sometimes wonder if Tolkien is imagining himself riding among his old English heroes, you know, riding in Beowulf's entourage or something like that,
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because he mentions how Merry is trying to understand the slow, sonorous speech, love a bit of alliteration, of Rohan.
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And he's also, of course, fleshing out, cementing that relationship between Therden and Merry, which is going to pay off in the battlefield scene that is to come.
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And that night, as they camp, we get a little moment of Merry.
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He's very lonely in this chapter, Merry.
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Everybody else has gone off and they've gone off together.
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Pippin had Gandalf.
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Legolas, Aragorn and Gimli are together.
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Even Frodo has Sam.
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Though at the moment, in terms of the story, they too are parted.
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Not that Merry was to know.
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But as he's thinking through his friend, Merry suddenly thinks of Frodo and Sam and says, I'm forgetting them.
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And this is a nudge to the reader to remember what is happening here, that really all of this business is happening around a much more important mission that's going on in Mordor.
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So it's both a memory, it's like putting us there with Merry and how he's reacting.
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So that's character stuff.
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But it's also a reminder of the stakes.
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Never let us forget the stakes.
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Otherwise, the tension in the story fizzles out.
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This is a story about people in the Rohan context, about everybody else wanting other people to stay home.
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So we've had that thing about Thairden telling Erwin she can't go.
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And now we've got Eamir telling Theoden that really he should stay behind and put his feet up.
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And this is where we get one of those heroic speeches.
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I did love the casting of Bernard Hill as Theoden in the film.
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And I sort of hear him in my head as I'm reading this myself.
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If the war is lost, what good will it be my hiding in the hills?
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And if it is won, what grief will it be, even if I fall, spending my last strength?
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Wonderfully heroic words, as you would expect of a king who's risen from his dotage to find this last flourish of strength.
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But it's also, from an author's point of view, a
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A signal from Tolkien that this chap is doomed.
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There's several of those.
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He is planting the seed that Therden, he ain't coming back.
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It's the equivalent of the red shirt in Star Trek.
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Or if ever you say in a film, someone says, oh, that's going to be easy, you know, they're probably going to be the first one for the chop.
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Tolkien is more subtle, but this is a moment where he's laying the ground for us to think this character is really under threat.
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So when he does eventually die, it is not an unexpected sudden shock.
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That's not the kind of death it is.
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It's one that is foretold and seems right.
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It is a cost of war.
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So that's what's going on there.
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It fits the heroic nature of this piece, where songs are being sung from the future, are being transported back and sung.
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So we have a sense that all these people are becoming heroes.
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But also, as I was reading it this time, I was thinking that what about the historical moment when this is being written?
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Quite a lot of this, as you will know, is written during the war or just after the war.
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It's that period in history.
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And there was a choice in about 1942, that kind of time, for...
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Britain before the Americans joined to say, we can't do this.
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We're going to stay at home, stop fighting, fight them on the beaches, but keep people away, but not actually try and defeat Nazi Germany.
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And Theoden is putting the argument for why you should get involved.
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Because it's right to do so, because staying behind is worse.
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What is the point?
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It will be grief if you just give up and stay behind.
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So I think that does have a relevance to any situation of struggle or war.
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And why the deaths of soldiers, unfortunately...
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awful as they are, are also sometimes if you're fighting for a really important cause, why they are necessary.
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And that would be the kind of Tolkien view of the awful thing that is war.
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Avoid it at all costs.
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But a soldier's lot, which he experienced in the First World War, is to stand up and fight for what you think is right.
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As Theoden rides among his men, you get this inversion, Theoden King.
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And Merry picks it up later, as we'll see.
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Theoden King.
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Rather than saying King Theoden, King Theoden, there is that kind of poetic register to this.
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And it also suggests the inversion that might be made in the Rohan language.
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So I just wanted to point that out there.
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It sort of marks them out in their culture of how they treat their royalty.
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And we do get, in terms of this, what I would call a drum roll moment.
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Tolkien does do this.
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He's like drawing a line saying, pay attention, reader.
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And here it starts with so.
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So the king of the mark came back victorious out of the west to Dunharrow.
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It's as if he's conducting us to say, look at that.
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Imagine this king.
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And we also get here the good news from a reader's point of view and also from the plot of the story's point of view that Gandalf has again shortened time.
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He's gone ahead and sent messages out so that the muster is already taking place.
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This is also very useful for pacing.
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Don't hang around in the boring bits of your story.
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Get through them.
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And Gandalf has helped us do that in this case.
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Another interesting little point that connects to the Second World War here is that Tolkien's thought went to a blackout.
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The Nazgul had been overflying, even perching on top of Edoras, as we remember.
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And so they are the equivalent of the air force in this war, airborne menace.
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And so a blackout has been instigated.
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which is a thought that, of course, be very prevalent in the minds of anyone living through both the First and the Second World War.
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There was a kind of blackout in the First World War as well, but we are very familiar with the one in the Second World War, which Tolkien would have had to make sure his family respected in order not to attract or not to let planes overhead know where they were.
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And this is the context in which this big muster is happening.
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All these horsemen, which look like thousands and thousands to Mary, all these horsemen are gathering.
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And Mary, we're still with Mary's point of view here, because they then go up this windy road up to, in Dunharrow, up to the field where they're going.
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these sort of senior people are camping.
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Actually, this is somewhere where I found the Peter Jackson film quite helpful because I'd always slightly struggled to imagine this, but his film sets this out quite nicely.
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So you've got the big encampment below, and then you've got this windy road up, and then you've got a sort of penthouse upper floor where the characters are camping.
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So just to point out here another little very Tolkienian touch, which is the Pukulmen.
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Now, these are described as sort of more sort of tubby, crude figures, sort of sitting cross-legged on the corners, gesturing to an older people.
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It actually is paving the way for us to meet Gamburigan later, which is rather nice.
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So you don't sort of think of that here, but that's what's happening.
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I don't know if as an author, Tolkien knew he was going to do that.
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But it planted that seed, which then produced that element of that surprising sort of meeting yet another kind of people in Middle-earth.
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The reason I'm thinking maybe he didn't know he was going to do that is because we know he doesn't plan ahead very much.
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He lets things surprise him.
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Anyway, so the Pukulmen step out of the shadows of history and...
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And what are they doing here?
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They are filling this scene with pity and mournfulness.
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Mary is affected by them in a way the Rohan people are not.
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Gesturing to an older people who have been displaced.
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There is a way of looking at the Numenoreans and the Rohan people as colonists.
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Or perhaps more appropriately, they are like the waves of people, the Anglo-Saxons and others, coming in across Europe and displacing the older Celts and the Britons.
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That's probably what Tolkien was thinking of.
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But you find traces of the older Celts.
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Culture's left behind and there are many places of old stonework and double lines of stones which are reminiscent of this place.
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The doubler lines of stones here are like the signpost into the Drimmelborg where Aragorn has ridden off into the paths of the dead.
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And in this chapter, Erwin and Eirme are both pretty desperate, pretty depressed about Aragorn's chances.
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That's the role they're playing.
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Erwin has clearly been upset.
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Merry thinks she's been weeping.
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And she says of Aragorn, he has passed into the shadows from which none have returned.
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She basically thinks he's dead.
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Eirme agrees he has lost.
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Our hope dwindles.
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So on that cheery note, Mary goes to his tent and he feels, of course, he's lonely.
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He's just heard that his best friends are probably ridden off to die.
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He doesn't understand the language and people are passing to and fro and he doesn't know what's going on.
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He's never taken part in a muster before, of course.
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And I like the way that the sort of tall men passing him are like the mountains behind.
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All of this mountains men are all just not poor old Mary's world.
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He's left to puzzle things out.
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So it's getting a bit gloomy, this chapter.
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There is quite a gloom that settles over these early chapters, like the fact that it's getting darker.
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But there's a twist, which is, in the midst of these gloomy thoughts, he suddenly remembered that he was very hungry.
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You can rely on a hobbit to always return you to the fact that he needs to get his rations.
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So like Pippin up in Minas Tirith, who breaks through all the sort of pomp and circumstance by saying, where do you get a good meal around here?
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Merry is also thinking of what he has to eat.
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And again, like Pippin, there's this sort of parallel track, which I'm sure looking at it as an author, Tolkien's totally doing this on purpose.
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There was Pippin made to wait on Denethor.
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Here is Merry saying.
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who is waiting on Theoden.
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But the difference here is this time Theoden looks around and notices him and asks him to sit down.
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And here we get the, so obviously it's a very different kind of king to Denethor.
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And here we get a little chance of,
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Rather than Merry telling the story, Therden tells the story and explains some of those details which were present during the Paths of the Dead chapter, the last chapter, and sort of confirming some of the stories that Aragorn and Legolas discuss, which is about the skeleton at the door, whether it's Belongstobaldos, son of Brego,
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And Théoden sort of confirms that thesis.
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And Erwin says this unusual word for Middle-earth.
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She says that Aragorn is fae.
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That's a word for faerie, but it means here strange, like a strange mood.
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She said he was like one called by the dead.
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But here Théoden is much wiser.
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He says, again hinting that
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Maybe he isn't coming back from this war.
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He says he doesn't think he personally will see him again.
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But he goes on to say that Aragorn is a kingly man of high destiny.
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And he goes on to give this extra little story, which we haven't heard, about the mysterious Dorward who declared to Baldor that the way is shut down.
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and that a particular time needs to come when the way will be opened.
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This message is actually given in the film version.
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I think Legolas says it.
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So it sort of does make it into the film version.
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But we get a difference here between the kind of king that Aragorn is and the kind of king that Aragorn is.
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Aragorn says he wouldn't dare it.
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He wouldn't risk it.
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So he doesn't have the same high destiny that Aragorn does.
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Okay, so we move from this family grouping to the arrival of a messenger from Minas Tirith.
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His name is Hirgon.
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He doesn't appear in any of the films.
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He's usually missed out of adaptations.
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So again, you can claim him for yourself as a reader.
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And he's bringing an arrow.
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This arrow idea, actually, you can find echoed or inspiration for it may have come from William Morris's The House of the Wolfings, where it's used as a sort of messenger in a similar way.
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But it's a perfectly good idea, isn't it?
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To put in at this point, arrow being a symbol of war.
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And Heogorn has quite a lot to say.
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He's sort of more than just a messenger.
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He's thinking about the situation and he's saying persuasively, for it is before the walls of Minas Tirith that the doom of our time will be decided.
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He's actually pushing on an open door.
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Ferdinand has already decided to go.
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Theoden says no longer is he going to follow the counsels of prudence.
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He knows that he might be attacked from behind.
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And if you want to dig into what happens behind in Rohan, that's quite fun to see the story that we don't see told because there is stuff that happens and the ents are very helpful.
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And there's also a little warning here, as Theoden says he's about to set off.
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He's warning Merry that he might not go with him.
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And of course,
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We're thinking, wow, this is our point of view.
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We want to go with him.
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Mary wants to go with him.
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And so there's a sense of, oh, no, Mary's going to be left behind as that unwanted baggage, which he's been trying to resist all the way through the beginning of Return of the King.
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When Merry wakes up the next morning, it's the day with no sunrise, which is another connection taking us across the books.
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You get that with Frodo and Sam.
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You get that with Pippin.
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You get that with Legolas, Aragorn and Gimli.
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So it's a good way of keeping all those storylines together.
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And Hirgon is who explains it.
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He says, it comes from the east.
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War has already begun.
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Yeah.
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So this darkness is a sort of way of imagining the war encroaching, groping out to swallow up.
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One of the things which I think we don't think enough about when we're writing lots of people writing battles is that sense of the shadows of war beforehand.
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Someone who's lived through a war like Tolkien knows that a lot of the war is spent anticipating.
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And he's brilliant at that creation of that mood and that's,
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We often are too tidy, too, you know, march into battle, fight a battle.
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That's the end of it.
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He's really good at setting these things up so that we feel as though, I think it's Pippin who says, waiting on the edge of battle.
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And that's what he's brilliant at.
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So that's a lesson to take away with you if you're writing about war.
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And we get a significant line break here.
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It's not a scene change.
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It's just like a pause.
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That's the function of this line break.
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It's a big breath.
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So the reader and the characters take in this idea of the war's already begun.
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And then Theoden has another of his pronouncement.
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So we come to it in the end, the great battle of our time, which many things shall pass away.
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That idea of things passing away is a constant note struck by Tolkien.
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He doesn't think things are going to get better.
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He's the opposite of the idea of the American dream.
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He is the one saying we're fighting the long defeat.
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He is a melancholic writer, as much as we love him.
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That's the note underneath.
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But it does mean that he no longer feels he needs to hide.
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So he's going to speed up and go by the fastest ways.
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And here he tells Merry, sorry, you shall stay and serve the Lady Erwin, which of course Merry does in a different way.
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And poor old Merry is so ashamed to stay behind.
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He's not sure what he should be doing in this battle either, but he just knows he has to be there.
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And Theoden says, I'll take you as far as Edoras and then I'm leaving you.
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And at this point, Erwin comes to Merry and says that Aragorn gave her one request, which is that she should arm him.
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And so she gives him, amongst other things, a shield with a white horse, which becomes his sort of stays with him all the way through.
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A symbol of that house, of course.
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And she wishes him to bear them to good fortune.
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And second time of reading, we can see loud and clear that she's plotting.
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But even perhaps on the first time of reading, we might begin to be a bit suspicious.
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What is she up to?
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As they ride out towards Edoras, there is a sort of sense of the civilians left behind.
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Doom hung over them, but they faced it silently.
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Again, what I was saying about this idea of setting up this battle by telling us what the civilians are feeling, how it felt to be left behind.
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And Erwin is left.
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We don't see her.
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Watch carefully, folks.
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We know that Theoden's had a sad, grievous parting from her.
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And then lo and behold, there's one person in the riders that Mary glimpses and who he notices.
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And he thinks that there goes one who goes in search of death.
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Do we suspect on first time of reading?
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So hard to remember what I thought at 10 or 11.
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Possibly not.
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But why pick out this person?
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Well, second time of reading, you think, oh, there she is.
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There she is hiding amongst the riders.
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There is a pleasure in the second reading, isn't there, where you sort of see how things are set up, which perhaps you didn't notice before.
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And that's one of them.
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What happens next is told in a snatch of verse that's sung in the future, which is sung now.
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It is a wonderful verse.
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And if you don't believe me, I would say, please, please go and listen to the BBC version, the audio version of this done in the 80s, where it's sung in the 80s.
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brilliantly and you think yes yes yes that is what this is doing it's a literative verse of a sort and it's very moving very much part of the culture and also tells us what's going on do go and listen to that if you've never heard it
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Then we get the departure of Therden and Merry is doing his best to argue for his place.
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But Therden is quite clear.
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He says, I received you for your safekeeping.
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He just sees himself as a caretaker.
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He's not understood Merry's character.
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He feels paternally protective.
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And he ends, he cuts him off by saying, I will say no more.
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He's a stern man.
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He's made up his mind.
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We don't have to wait long.
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There is a choice here.
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You could have ended the chapter there, but that's not what Tolkien decides to do.
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It may be because there are so many open threads that this isn't one he wanted to break on.
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He wanted to end on a different note, which we'll see in a second.
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This young man in search of death comes up saying, where will wants not, a way opens.
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A version of where there's a will, there's a way.
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such goodwill should not be denied.
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And there is a sort of hint here that Erwin is expecting Mary to recognize her.
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But Mary perhaps doesn't know Menfolk very well.
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He's taken in and asks for
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the rider's name.
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And she says her name is Dernhelm.
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Dern means secret, secret helmet.
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So there we go.
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Something fishy going on around this character.
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And the last part of this chapter sort of focuses out from Mary's predicament back out to the wider stakes.
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You get the rumours of the war going on behind.
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And it ends on a sober note.
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All the lands were grey and still, and ever the shadow deepened before them, and hope waned in every heart.
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It's a very similar tone to the sort of shadowy end from the previous chapter, though with even less hope.
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So the setup here is you've got to put everybody down so they don't expect to win.
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So that when they do, there is a wonderful eucatastrophe, a sort of success snatch from the jaws of defeat.
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So these are the chapters laying that groundwork so that we can think they really are
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They're pretty doomed, aren't they, these characters?
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We already know there's some warning bells sounding about Théoden.
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And so we're left with Merry and his mysterious rider and Théoden all charging towards a shadowy battle, which it doesn't look as though they can win, with threats behind them.
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So that's the Muster of Rohan chapter.
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It takes place pretty much in semi-darkness, a lot of it.
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Again, very different from the film, which, of course, you can't make darkness happen like that.
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That was much brighter in the film.
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So it's good to go back and reset all of that by reading the book slowly and seeing what they are doing.
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And where do we go in the next chapter?
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Whose
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We're going to find ourselves at the Siege of Gondor.
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So do come back and join me as we go back to Pippin and find out what's happening in Minas Tirith.
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Anyway, thank you very much for listening.
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Thanks for listening to Myth Makers Podcast.
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Brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy.
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1
00:00:05.383 --> 00:00:07.343
Hello and welcome to Myth Makers.
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Myth Makers is the podcast for fantasy fans and fantasy creatives brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy.
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My name is Julia Golding and today we are going to enjoy, I hope, another of our author's journey through the Lord of the Rings.
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And I've been taking a slow reading approach to this fantastic novel and looking at it from the point of view of what the author's choice may have been as Tolkien was writing.
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I do this on the strength of the fact that that's what I do as my day job as an author.
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So hoping that I can see a couple of the things he's deciding to do.
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We have reached chapter three in the beginning of The Return of the King.
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That's book five, if you think of it in that way.
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And this chapter is called The Muster of Rohan.
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I would say that Tolkien's choice of names for his chapters are always pretty self-explanatory.
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He's not trying to hide anything from you because indeed, this is a chapter where Rohan is mustered.
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So there we go.
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And that is the overarching organizing principle.
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We stay with Theoden, Merry and the riders as they sweep across Rohan, gathering the troops together so that they can ride to the aid of Minas Tirith.
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It actually starts with a relatively unusual start, I think, for a chapter of Tolkien, in that it starts with a kind of recap of,
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And not with a character, but with a sort of situational statement.
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So just looking at that, it says, "'Now all roads were running together to the east "'to meet the coming of war and the onset of shadow.
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"'And even as Pippin stood at the great gate of the city "'and saw the prince of Dol Amrof ride in with his banners, "'the king of Rohan came down out of the hills.'"
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We can't read things these days without seeing it in screen terms, but you can almost imagine the screen link cutting from Pippin to Théoden.
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Tolkien too would have gone to the cinema, so no doubt he had that language underpinning what he was deciding as well.
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What we then get is really, I think, a couple of paragraphs which you may not have ever paused over.
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But this time in my slow reading, I have.
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And I was thinking as I was reading them that this is why I love Tolkien.
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Tolkien is an author who really cares about the little details of his world.
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And it's not just the history and the layers of backstory that we all know he has done.
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It's that he really cares about these little corners.
27
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So what do we have here?
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We have them riding out of the hills.
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And we get this image of the Rohan riders with their pointed shadows in front of them as the sun sets.
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So we also know what direction they're riding in if the shadows are in front of them.
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And they come round a huge bare shoulder of rock.
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And he mentions the soft sighing trees.
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And then there's this line, twilight lay upon the waterfalls.
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Wonderfully atmospheric, but can't we just find ourselves there?
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Isn't it that these are the doorways into other worlds, these little passages that
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He goes on to spend quite a lot of time discussing the Rohan world or describing it with the names and the rivers.
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And all the nomenclature or the choice of names do point us to a sort of Old English or sometimes Norse world.
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In the case of Starkhorn, which is the dominating mountain in this stretch, it seems as though perhaps memories of his trip to the Alps is present because it sounds very much like a kind of Mont Blanc of a mountain with bare sides and sort of perpetual snow.
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And Mary is our point of view.
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Poor old Mary from his rolling shires where the hills are never that dominant.
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He talks or he's thinking about it as being it was a skyless world.
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Now, as I read this, I thought, gosh, that really does chime with my own experience of being in the Alps.
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That feeling of you can't see the sky as you're because the steep sides are relatively close.
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The sky's far, far above.
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You'd have to really lay on your back to see it.
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And it's not just what he sees that Tolkien tells us.
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There's this fabulous line here on page 64, if you want to check, about Mary.
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And this is all about sound.
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But let me read it to you.
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He sat for a moment, half dreaming, listening to the noise of water.
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The whisper of dark trees, the crack of stone, and the vast waiting silence that brooded behind all sound.
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In some ways, this is the most Tolkienian of all paragraphs, particularly for what happens next.
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So we're very convinced about the vastness of Middle Earth after reading that.
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But it goes on.
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He loved mountains.
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That's Mary.
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Or he had loved the thought of them, marching on the edge of stories brought from far away.
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But now he was borne down by the insupportable weight of Middle Earth.
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Those mountains weighing on him.
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He longed to shut out the immensity in a quiet room by a fire.
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So I hope you've noticed, I've been pointing this out as we go along.
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It happens a lot with Sam, but here it is happening with Mary, happens with all the Hobbits, that here is Middle Earth, it's vastness, the heroes, but there is the Shire, there is home, there is where you go back to.
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In a way, it's a world we go back to when we shut the book, if we're lucky enough.
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It's that returning home feeling.
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And that combination...
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is, I think, in some ways the secret source, as much as one can say there is a secret source, behind Lord of the Rings.
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So we get a lot of Merry and the King in this chapter.
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And I sometimes wonder if Tolkien is imagining himself riding among his old English heroes, you know, riding in Beowulf's entourage or something like that,
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because he mentions how Merry is trying to understand the slow, sonorous speech, love a bit of alliteration, of Rohan.
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And he's also, of course, fleshing out, cementing that relationship between Therden and Merry, which is going to pay off in the battlefield scene that is to come.
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And that night, as they camp, we get a little moment of Merry.
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He's very lonely in this chapter, Merry.
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Everybody else has gone off and they've gone off together.
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Pippin had Gandalf.
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Legolas, Aragorn and Gimli are together.
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Even Frodo has Sam.
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Though at the moment, in terms of the story, they too are parted.
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Not that Merry was to know.
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But as he's thinking through his friend, Merry suddenly thinks of Frodo and Sam and says, I'm forgetting them.
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And this is a nudge to the reader to remember what is happening here, that really all of this business is happening around a much more important mission that's going on in Mordor.
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So it's both a memory, it's like putting us there with Merry and how he's reacting.
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So that's character stuff.
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But it's also a reminder of the stakes.
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Never let us forget the stakes.
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Otherwise, the tension in the story fizzles out.
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This is a story about people in the Rohan context, about everybody else wanting other people to stay home.
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So we've had that thing about Thairden telling Erwin she can't go.
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And now we've got Eamir telling Theoden that really he should stay behind and put his feet up.
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And this is where we get one of those heroic speeches.
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I did love the casting of Bernard Hill as Theoden in the film.
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And I sort of hear him in my head as I'm reading this myself.
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If the war is lost, what good will it be my hiding in the hills?
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And if it is won, what grief will it be, even if I fall, spending my last strength?
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Wonderfully heroic words, as you would expect of a king who's risen from his dotage to find this last flourish of strength.
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But it's also, from an author's point of view, a
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A signal from Tolkien that this chap is doomed.
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There's several of those.
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He is planting the seed that Therden, he ain't coming back.
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It's the equivalent of the red shirt in Star Trek.
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Or if ever you say in a film, someone says, oh, that's going to be easy, you know, they're probably going to be the first one for the chop.
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Tolkien is more subtle, but this is a moment where he's laying the ground for us to think this character is really under threat.
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So when he does eventually die, it is not an unexpected sudden shock.
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That's not the kind of death it is.
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It's one that is foretold and seems right.
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It is a cost of war.
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So that's what's going on there.
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It fits the heroic nature of this piece, where songs are being sung from the future, are being transported back and sung.
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So we have a sense that all these people are becoming heroes.
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But also, as I was reading it this time, I was thinking that what about the historical moment when this is being written?
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Quite a lot of this, as you will know, is written during the war or just after the war.
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It's that period in history.
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And there was a choice in about 1942, that kind of time, for...
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Britain before the Americans joined to say, we can't do this.
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We're going to stay at home, stop fighting, fight them on the beaches, but keep people away, but not actually try and defeat Nazi Germany.
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And Theoden is putting the argument for why you should get involved.
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Because it's right to do so, because staying behind is worse.
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What is the point?
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It will be grief if you just give up and stay behind.
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So I think that does have a relevance to any situation of struggle or war.
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And why the deaths of soldiers, unfortunately...
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awful as they are, are also sometimes if you're fighting for a really important cause, why they are necessary.
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And that would be the kind of Tolkien view of the awful thing that is war.
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Avoid it at all costs.
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But a soldier's lot, which he experienced in the First World War, is to stand up and fight for what you think is right.
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As Theoden rides among his men, you get this inversion, Theoden King.
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And Merry picks it up later, as we'll see.
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Theoden King.
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Rather than saying King Theoden, King Theoden, there is that kind of poetic register to this.
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And it also suggests the inversion that might be made in the Rohan language.
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So I just wanted to point that out there.
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It sort of marks them out in their culture of how they treat their royalty.
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And we do get, in terms of this, what I would call a drum roll moment.
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Tolkien does do this.
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He's like drawing a line saying, pay attention, reader.
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And here it starts with so.
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So the king of the mark came back victorious out of the west to Dunharrow.
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It's as if he's conducting us to say, look at that.
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Imagine this king.
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And we also get here the good news from a reader's point of view and also from the plot of the story's point of view that Gandalf has again shortened time.
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He's gone ahead and sent messages out so that the muster is already taking place.
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This is also very useful for pacing.
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Don't hang around in the boring bits of your story.
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Get through them.
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And Gandalf has helped us do that in this case.
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Another interesting little point that connects to the Second World War here is that Tolkien's thought went to a blackout.
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The Nazgul had been overflying, even perching on top of Edoras, as we remember.
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And so they are the equivalent of the air force in this war, airborne menace.
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And so a blackout has been instigated.
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which is a thought that, of course, be very prevalent in the minds of anyone living through both the First and the Second World War.
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There was a kind of blackout in the First World War as well, but we are very familiar with the one in the Second World War, which Tolkien would have had to make sure his family respected in order not to attract or not to let planes overhead know where they were.
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And this is the context in which this big muster is happening.
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All these horsemen, which look like thousands and thousands to Mary, all these horsemen are gathering.
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And Mary, we're still with Mary's point of view here, because they then go up this windy road up to, in Dunharrow, up to the field where they're going.
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these sort of senior people are camping.
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Actually, this is somewhere where I found the Peter Jackson film quite helpful because I'd always slightly struggled to imagine this, but his film sets this out quite nicely.
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So you've got the big encampment below, and then you've got this windy road up, and then you've got a sort of penthouse upper floor where the characters are camping.
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So just to point out here another little very Tolkienian touch, which is the Pukulmen.
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Now, these are described as sort of more sort of tubby, crude figures, sort of sitting cross-legged on the corners, gesturing to an older people.
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It actually is paving the way for us to meet Gamburigan later, which is rather nice.
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So you don't sort of think of that here, but that's what's happening.
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I don't know if as an author, Tolkien knew he was going to do that.
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But it planted that seed, which then produced that element of that surprising sort of meeting yet another kind of people in Middle-earth.
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The reason I'm thinking maybe he didn't know he was going to do that is because we know he doesn't plan ahead very much.
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He lets things surprise him.
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Anyway, so the Pukulmen step out of the shadows of history and...
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And what are they doing here?
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They are filling this scene with pity and mournfulness.
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Mary is affected by them in a way the Rohan people are not.
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Gesturing to an older people who have been displaced.
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There is a way of looking at the Numenoreans and the Rohan people as colonists.
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Or perhaps more appropriately, they are like the waves of people, the Anglo-Saxons and others, coming in across Europe and displacing the older Celts and the Britons.
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That's probably what Tolkien was thinking of.
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But you find traces of the older Celts.
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Culture's left behind and there are many places of old stonework and double lines of stones which are reminiscent of this place.
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The doubler lines of stones here are like the signpost into the Drimmelborg where Aragorn has ridden off into the paths of the dead.
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And in this chapter, Erwin and Eirme are both pretty desperate, pretty depressed about Aragorn's chances.
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That's the role they're playing.
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Erwin has clearly been upset.
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Merry thinks she's been weeping.
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And she says of Aragorn, he has passed into the shadows from which none have returned.
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She basically thinks he's dead.
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Eirme agrees he has lost.
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Our hope dwindles.
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So on that cheery note, Mary goes to his tent and he feels, of course, he's lonely.
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He's just heard that his best friends are probably ridden off to die.
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He doesn't understand the language and people are passing to and fro and he doesn't know what's going on.
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He's never taken part in a muster before, of course.
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And I like the way that the sort of tall men passing him are like the mountains behind.
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All of this mountains men are all just not poor old Mary's world.
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He's left to puzzle things out.
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So it's getting a bit gloomy, this chapter.
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There is quite a gloom that settles over these early chapters, like the fact that it's getting darker.
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But there's a twist, which is, in the midst of these gloomy thoughts, he suddenly remembered that he was very hungry.
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You can rely on a hobbit to always return you to the fact that he needs to get his rations.
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So like Pippin up in Minas Tirith, who breaks through all the sort of pomp and circumstance by saying, where do you get a good meal around here?
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Merry is also thinking of what he has to eat.
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And again, like Pippin, there's this sort of parallel track, which I'm sure looking at it as an author, Tolkien's totally doing this on purpose.
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There was Pippin made to wait on Denethor.
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Here is Merry saying.
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who is waiting on Theoden.
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But the difference here is this time Theoden looks around and notices him and asks him to sit down.
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And here we get the, so obviously it's a very different kind of king to Denethor.
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And here we get a little chance of,
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Rather than Merry telling the story, Therden tells the story and explains some of those details which were present during the Paths of the Dead chapter, the last chapter, and sort of confirming some of the stories that Aragorn and Legolas discuss, which is about the skeleton at the door, whether it's Belongstobaldos, son of Brego,
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And Théoden sort of confirms that thesis.
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And Erwin says this unusual word for Middle-earth.
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She says that Aragorn is fae.
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That's a word for faerie, but it means here strange, like a strange mood.
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She said he was like one called by the dead.
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But here Théoden is much wiser.
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He says, again hinting that
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Maybe he isn't coming back from this war.
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He says he doesn't think he personally will see him again.
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But he goes on to say that Aragorn is a kingly man of high destiny.
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And he goes on to give this extra little story, which we haven't heard, about the mysterious Dorward who declared to Baldor that the way is shut down.
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and that a particular time needs to come when the way will be opened.
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This message is actually given in the film version.
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I think Legolas says it.
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So it sort of does make it into the film version.
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But we get a difference here between the kind of king that Aragorn is and the kind of king that Aragorn is.
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Aragorn says he wouldn't dare it.
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He wouldn't risk it.
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So he doesn't have the same high destiny that Aragorn does.
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Okay, so we move from this family grouping to the arrival of a messenger from Minas Tirith.
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His name is Hirgon.
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He doesn't appear in any of the films.
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He's usually missed out of adaptations.
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So again, you can claim him for yourself as a reader.
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And he's bringing an arrow.
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This arrow idea, actually, you can find echoed or inspiration for it may have come from William Morris's The House of the Wolfings, where it's used as a sort of messenger in a similar way.
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But it's a perfectly good idea, isn't it?
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To put in at this point, arrow being a symbol of war.
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And Heogorn has quite a lot to say.
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He's sort of more than just a messenger.
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He's thinking about the situation and he's saying persuasively, for it is before the walls of Minas Tirith that the doom of our time will be decided.
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He's actually pushing on an open door.
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Ferdinand has already decided to go.
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Theoden says no longer is he going to follow the counsels of prudence.
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He knows that he might be attacked from behind.
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And if you want to dig into what happens behind in Rohan, that's quite fun to see the story that we don't see told because there is stuff that happens and the ents are very helpful.
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And there's also a little warning here, as Theoden says he's about to set off.
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He's warning Merry that he might not go with him.
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And of course,
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We're thinking, wow, this is our point of view.
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We want to go with him.
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Mary wants to go with him.
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And so there's a sense of, oh, no, Mary's going to be left behind as that unwanted baggage, which he's been trying to resist all the way through the beginning of Return of the King.
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When Merry wakes up the next morning, it's the day with no sunrise, which is another connection taking us across the books.
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You get that with Frodo and Sam.
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You get that with Pippin.
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You get that with Legolas, Aragorn and Gimli.
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So it's a good way of keeping all those storylines together.
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And Hirgon is who explains it.
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He says, it comes from the east.
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War has already begun.
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Yeah.
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So this darkness is a sort of way of imagining the war encroaching, groping out to swallow up.
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One of the things which I think we don't think enough about when we're writing lots of people writing battles is that sense of the shadows of war beforehand.
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Someone who's lived through a war like Tolkien knows that a lot of the war is spent anticipating.
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And he's brilliant at that creation of that mood and that's,
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We often are too tidy, too, you know, march into battle, fight a battle.
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That's the end of it.
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He's really good at setting these things up so that we feel as though, I think it's Pippin who says, waiting on the edge of battle.
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And that's what he's brilliant at.
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So that's a lesson to take away with you if you're writing about war.
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And we get a significant line break here.
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It's not a scene change.
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It's just like a pause.
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That's the function of this line break.
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It's a big breath.
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So the reader and the characters take in this idea of the war's already begun.
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And then Theoden has another of his pronouncement.
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So we come to it in the end, the great battle of our time, which many things shall pass away.
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That idea of things passing away is a constant note struck by Tolkien.
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He doesn't think things are going to get better.
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He's the opposite of the idea of the American dream.
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He is the one saying we're fighting the long defeat.
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He is a melancholic writer, as much as we love him.
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That's the note underneath.
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But it does mean that he no longer feels he needs to hide.
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So he's going to speed up and go by the fastest ways.
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And here he tells Merry, sorry, you shall stay and serve the Lady Erwin, which of course Merry does in a different way.
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And poor old Merry is so ashamed to stay behind.
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He's not sure what he should be doing in this battle either, but he just knows he has to be there.
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And Theoden says, I'll take you as far as Edoras and then I'm leaving you.
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And at this point, Erwin comes to Merry and says that Aragorn gave her one request, which is that she should arm him.
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And so she gives him, amongst other things, a shield with a white horse, which becomes his sort of stays with him all the way through.
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A symbol of that house, of course.
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And she wishes him to bear them to good fortune.
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And second time of reading, we can see loud and clear that she's plotting.
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But even perhaps on the first time of reading, we might begin to be a bit suspicious.
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What is she up to?
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As they ride out towards Edoras, there is a sort of sense of the civilians left behind.
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Doom hung over them, but they faced it silently.
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Again, what I was saying about this idea of setting up this battle by telling us what the civilians are feeling, how it felt to be left behind.
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And Erwin is left.
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We don't see her.
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Watch carefully, folks.
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We know that Theoden's had a sad, grievous parting from her.
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And then lo and behold, there's one person in the riders that Mary glimpses and who he notices.
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And he thinks that there goes one who goes in search of death.
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Do we suspect on first time of reading?
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So hard to remember what I thought at 10 or 11.
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Possibly not.
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But why pick out this person?
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Well, second time of reading, you think, oh, there she is.
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There she is hiding amongst the riders.
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There is a pleasure in the second reading, isn't there, where you sort of see how things are set up, which perhaps you didn't notice before.
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And that's one of them.
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What happens next is told in a snatch of verse that's sung in the future, which is sung now.
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It is a wonderful verse.
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And if you don't believe me, I would say, please, please go and listen to the BBC version, the audio version of this done in the 80s, where it's sung in the 80s.
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brilliantly and you think yes yes yes that is what this is doing it's a literative verse of a sort and it's very moving very much part of the culture and also tells us what's going on do go and listen to that if you've never heard it
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Then we get the departure of Therden and Merry is doing his best to argue for his place.
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But Therden is quite clear.
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He says, I received you for your safekeeping.
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He just sees himself as a caretaker.
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He's not understood Merry's character.
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He feels paternally protective.
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And he ends, he cuts him off by saying, I will say no more.
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He's a stern man.
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He's made up his mind.
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We don't have to wait long.
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There is a choice here.
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You could have ended the chapter there, but that's not what Tolkien decides to do.
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It may be because there are so many open threads that this isn't one he wanted to break on.
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He wanted to end on a different note, which we'll see in a second.
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This young man in search of death comes up saying, where will wants not, a way opens.
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A version of where there's a will, there's a way.
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such goodwill should not be denied.
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And there is a sort of hint here that Erwin is expecting Mary to recognize her.
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But Mary perhaps doesn't know Menfolk very well.
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He's taken in and asks for
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the rider's name.
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And she says her name is Dernhelm.
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Dern means secret, secret helmet.
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So there we go.
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Something fishy going on around this character.
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And the last part of this chapter sort of focuses out from Mary's predicament back out to the wider stakes.
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You get the rumours of the war going on behind.
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And it ends on a sober note.
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All the lands were grey and still, and ever the shadow deepened before them, and hope waned in every heart.
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It's a very similar tone to the sort of shadowy end from the previous chapter, though with even less hope.
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So the setup here is you've got to put everybody down so they don't expect to win.
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So that when they do, there is a wonderful eucatastrophe, a sort of success snatch from the jaws of defeat.
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So these are the chapters laying that groundwork so that we can think they really are
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They're pretty doomed, aren't they, these characters?
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We already know there's some warning bells sounding about Théoden.
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And so we're left with Merry and his mysterious rider and Théoden all charging towards a shadowy battle, which it doesn't look as though they can win, with threats behind them.
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So that's the Muster of Rohan chapter.
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It takes place pretty much in semi-darkness, a lot of it.
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Again, very different from the film, which, of course, you can't make darkness happen like that.
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That was much brighter in the film.
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So it's good to go back and reset all of that by reading the book slowly and seeing what they are doing.
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And where do we go in the next chapter?
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Whose
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We're going to find ourselves at the Siege of Gondor.
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So do come back and join me as we go back to Pippin and find out what's happening in Minas Tirith.
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Anyway, thank you very much for listening.
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Thanks for listening to Myth Makers Podcast.
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