LotR -- Book 3 - Chapter 02 - The Riders of Rohan

[Aiwendil]

It's been a somewhat crazy week for me, hence the lateness of my appearance. But I cannot let this chapter go by without a comment or two.

To me, this has always been the chapter that opens the book up, as it were - widening both the perspective and the subject matter. Up until now, we have been dealing with the Ring. We have followed the Ring from Bilbo to Frodo, from Bag End to Rivendell, from Rivendell to Rauros. Even the previous chapter was still in a sense dealing with the Ring - at least, it dealt very specifically with the aftermath of the breaking of the fellowship, which had everything to do with the Ring. Not so in this chapter. Of course, the Ring continues to be of primary importance. But this chapter itself does not deal with the Ring, nor with Frodo, at all.

I cannot, for the most part, remember my reactions the first time I read LotR (or rather, the first time my mother read it to me - I was rather young). But I recently succeeded in convincing my father to read it, and his reaction to Book III struck me at first as odd - then as completely natural. His reaction was a kind of impatience with the story (though not dislike) and a desire to return to Sam and Frodo. I found it odd at first because I happen to prefer Book III to Book IV, overall. But then I realized that it is, one might expect, the natural response. Something strange is going on; after spending four hundred pages with Frodo and the Ring we are suddenly thrust aside into a story concerning Saruman and Rohan.

Why did Tolkien do this? One answer is that, of course, the Merry/Pippin/Saruman/Rohan thread connects up with the Ring thread in a critical way. But of course it's only like that because Tolkien wrote it that way. He could, if he had wanted to, have continued with the story of Frodo and brought it to a conclusion by itself. Another answer is that Tolkien didn't have the rest of the story planned out in much detail and was more or less making things up as he went along. This is true to an extent. But we might put the question better: why is it that this division of the story works?

The answer, I think, has to do with Tolkien's idea of a believable or self-consistent world. I noted in the discussion of 'The Old Forest' that the Old Forest/Bombadil/Barrow-downs trilogy has little to do, directly, with the story of the Ring. But:

. . . it would be unrealistic for the Hobbits only to encounter upon their journey servants of Sauron, or people and things relating directly to the central plot. To give them a few unrelated adventures adds a lot to the realism of Middle-earth.

I think something similar, if much, much bigger, is going on in Book III. For the story of the Ring to be concerned exclusively with Frodo might be the more natural choice from a narrative point of view, but it would not be realistic. To put it another way: it is simply a feature of Middle-earth that Rohan is where it is and that Saruman is where he is; for real worlds do have features that do not conveniently arrange themselves for the simplicity of a narrative.

And it works! This chapter really does, I think, make Middle-earth seem real. A new vista, both of plot and of (fictional) space, has opened up. We begin now to enter a world of kingdoms, wars, and politics that was only hinted at before. We got a glimpse of it in I-2 and another in II-2. Now, at the moment when Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli confront Eomer, we actually enter it.

Edit: I wasn't going to comment, but I couldn't restrain myself. Forgive me.

Lalwende wrote:

I am speculating now, as Tolkien would surely not have known of Dark Matter?

And Davem:

Many things are 'known' subconsciously before scientists stick a label on them.

The existence of 'dark matter' is simply not something one can 'know' subconsciously or intuitively. It is not a matter of scientists simply 'sticking a label' on something. Nor, I'm afraid, is there much similarity between a wraith and dark matter in the real universe. 'Dark matter' is not itself a kind of matter. When astronomers look at the motion of galaxies they can see the gravitational effects of more matter than the observed stars account for. 'Dark matter' is a general term for any such matter - matter that, for whatever reason, can't be seen a long way off. We (and all the stuff we come into contact with every day) are in fact dark matter, since we emit very little radiation and could not be seen thousands of parsecs away.

Now, I don't think that invalidates any of the substance of your arguments. I just think that there's no reason to bring dark matter into them.