The Nightmare World of Tolkien

[Macalaure]

On gruesome killings:

And they hewed off Gelmir's hands and feet, and his head last, within sight of the Elves, and left him.
...
Then Gothmog hewed him with his black axe, and a white flame sprang up from the helm of Fingon as it was cloven. Thus fell the High King of the Noldor; and they beat him into the dust with their maces, and his banner, blue and silver, they trod into the mire of his blood.

Both are not from the LotR, but especially the second one I find horrible and painful, in a positive way, to read. Yet Tolkien knows when not to be explicit, take Gorlim:

Then he put him cruelly to death.

...and no more details are needed.


Back to the LotR, I enqueue in the "what you don't know is scarier than what you know"-column. Take the Paths of the Dead, for example. The horror is absolutely unseizable and only when we have already left the Paths, the dead appear. Or take the silent watchers of Cirith Ungol. Tolkien describes them in detail, but is this what makes them scary? Not to me. (that's why the two of Minas Morgul were extremely unscary in the RotK-movie) They were scary because

For a moment Sam caught a glitter in the black stones of their eyes, the very malice of which made him quail;

It's that something inside the statues that scares me, that of which we know almost nothing, except that it's evil.


Another one:

They will come to you in the wild, in some dark place where there is no help. Do you wish them to find you? They are terrible!

For chapters we presumed just that. Now, instead of telling us about them what he knows, Strider just confirms us of what we feared. (And if Strider calls them terrible, they must truly be) And as if that wasn't enough:

You fear them, but you do not fear them enough, yet.

And if there is one Gothic place in Middle-earth, it must be Minas Morgul. The corpse light (blowing like a noisome exhalation of decay, noisome light that blows?... whoa), the white flowers (Luminous these were too, beautiful and yet horrible of shape, like the demented forms of an uneasy dream; ). You start to freeze reading the first two pages of the Stairs of Cirith Ungol.


What my point is? Um, none really. I somehow got carried away about this and it took me more than an hour to write this.
Great topic, Lal!