LotR -- Book 3 - Chapter 07 - Helm's Deep

[Fordim Hedgethistle]

This chapter begins and ends with moments in which we have images of darkness and shadows, light and wind. As the Rohirrim march toward Helm’s Deep they are pursued by the shadows of Mordor:

The rising sun was hazy, and behind it, following it slowly up the sky, there was a growing darkness, as of a great storm moving out of the East.

At the end of the battle, the Orcs are driven to their destruction in another very different kind of shadow:

The White Rider was upon them, and the terror of his coming filled the enemy with madness. The wild men fell on their faces before him. The Orcs reeled and screamed and cast aside both sword and spear. Like a black smoke driven by a mounting wind they fled. Wailing they passed under the waiting shadow of the trees; and from that shadow none ever came again.

I like the point made by davem that this Battle is but a transitory moment of light and victory in an ongoing war, but I’m not so sure that the chapter is as dour as he makes it out to be. Yes, this is not the Big Victory in the War, and yes there is no final or absolute victory over evil, but these images, I think, give a hint of a deeper transformation that is being wrought in the nature of the world. At the beginning of the chapter we have the “growing darkness” of a coming storm “moving out of the East.” The shadow of Mordor is such that it makes the sun “hazy” and even threatens to overwhelm it as it follows the sun up the sky, like a predator. But at the end of the chapter this imagery is both recalled and reversed. Recalled in that the Orcs are driven into and destroyed by “the waiting shadow of the trees” – and just in case we missed it, Tolkien repeats the image in the next clause: “and from that shadow none ever came again.”

So we have the Shadow of Mordor at the beginning of the chapter, threatening to overwhelm the sun and take possession of the sky, but by the end of the chapter the shadows we see are those of the trees. I think that this is looking ahead to a time when, after the War, the Shadow is gone, but there remain still shadows in the world. That is, the dominating presence of Sauron (Evil) will be destroyed, along with the danger that this shadow presents to the sky and the sun (divine or eternal things that are over the earth?), but naturally there will remain “shadowy” things in the world, like the huorns, that are not Evil, but dangerous, even perilous. The shadows they cast do not threaten the sky or the sun, but those who walk into them in an Orc-like manner.

But this imagery of shadow and light is not just recalled at the end, but also reversed, I think. At the beginning of the chapter the Shadow is being spread from the East by the wind of Mordor (the storm); at the end of the chapter, it is the “mounting wind” of the White Rider that drives the Orcs “like a black smoke” into the shadows of the trees. I find this fascinating – Tolkien could have so easily had the imagery around Gandalf and the trees be all about light and life and greenery (the radiance of the White Rider drove the Orcs into the verdant green of the trees; and from that dark green none ever came again?). But he chose not to do it this way; in effect, he decided that rather than setting up an absolute binary opposition of good and evil through the relatively simple and even expected dark and light imagery, he would work through the relation is a more complex way. The forces of good are still light (White Rider, the sun) but they operate to some extent in the same manner as the forces of evil (like a wind, with and through war). The other point of comparison is that both good and evil are associated with darkness and shadows: it’s just that while Sauron wants His Shadow to dominate the world, Gandalf is willing to work with the shadowy forces of the natural world: to accept them for what they are and to respect them. Sauron wants his Shadow to destroy the light; Gandalf is a figure of light who is happy to accommodate the shadows. . .because they are part of the world.

One last thing that occurs to me in response to Lalwende’s point about Aragorn and Anduril. Lal asks:

Does Anduril really glow with white fire? Does the blade contain the divinity of Light? Is it a metaphor for the speed and agility with which Aragorn wields the sword? Or is it a metaphor for the beauty and precision apparent from the craft involved in making the blade?

The idea of the “white fire” as a metaphor got me to thinking. It seems to me that the whole question of magic in Middle-earth can be understood metaphorically. Metaphor is a weird kind of thing – it is a way of saying something that is patently untrue (even false) but getting away with it because there is an appeal to the ‘real’ truth of the statement. For example, when someone says that their life is “a sea of troubles” their statement is clearly not true in two ways: they are not really on the ocean, and how can there be a sea made of “troubles” in the first place? But because the speaker is using a metaphor there is no falsehood or impossibility, because we all understand what the speaker ‘really’ means.

But in Middle-earth this line between the false or impossible statement and the real meaning falls apart: in a way, metaphor is not compatible with magic – when Tolkien says “the trees whispered their secrets to one another” it really happens. If I said this in the ‘real’ world it would be a metaphor, but in Middle-earth it is literally true. That’s why I think that Lal’s question is both an extraordinarily good one, but also misleading, insofar as this is another instance in which something that would be metaphorical in our world is not in Middle-earth. I would suggest that the answer to each of Lal’s questions is the same: yes, yes, yes and yes. This is a world of magic in which swords glow with a divine light, but it is also a story told to people who live in the primary world, so this glow becomes a metaphor for a variety of other things.

I’m not sure this is making sense. . . Inside the story, there is no metaphor around or about the blade’s glow: it really is glowing. But when we read it, in a world where there are no glowing swords, the only way to bring it into our own experience is to make it into a metaphor for something. This really is different from a text that is about a world that has no magic: for example, there are lots of accounts of Medieval battles in which soldiers’ swords were said to “smoke” with the blood of their enemies – such statements are necessarily metaphorical both inside the text and outside of it. Not so with Middle-earth: the magic of that world can only be experienced by us, in our non-magical reality, in a distant and secondary way – metaphor becomes a poor substitute for the magical reality we are reading about.